Films that spring to mind for thinking about the current grim conjuncture:
Fritz Lang's films for the crowd in the grip of fear, and how it becomes more ugly and more frightening in its righteousness than whatever it felt afraid of.
Battle of Algiers - obviously. A film which for years my students couldn't quite see the point of but which now connects all to tellingly to the present, not least because of the Pentagon's use of it as some sort of training film.
And, for progressive political pedagogy:
Varda's The Gleaners and I - which embraces fragments of resistance yet is systemic in its sweep and suggests, through the motif of bricolage and recycling, how we might assemble something from the wreckage of old hopes.
And (an old favourite) Crime de Monsieur Lange: again, an ideal film for current times in that it shows how fragments of hope taken from memory, love, local solidarities and the creative imagination can be assembled to produce a broader oppositional project.
Or (more pessimistically, but as a warning), Rules of the Game as a film that shows what is left when there is no progressive project and the world is torn chaotically between fascist regression and sterile repetition.
Martin O'Shaughnessy (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
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