The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 19-25
Solzhenitsyn’s Children… Are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris (1979)
Directed by Michael Rubbo
This curious and candid documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada chronicles the disillusionment of the Parisian gauche following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, which for the first time brought to a wider audience the horrors of Soviet “Communism.” Along with the Paris correspondent of a Quebecoise newspaper, the filmmaker goes on a political tour of the different blends of coffeshop revolutionary currents animating the French capital. The two journalists explore the moral dilemma of the left as expounded by their leading intellectuals, or alleged such, trying to understand a phenomenon rather alien to Anglo-Saxon audiences, that of so-called Eurocommunism. Graced by a light yet not superficial tone, this charming documentary represents a glimpse into an epochal split that involved the whole of the continental left and triggered its extinction. In historical terms it talks to a very recent past, though some of the problems posed seem today of the Jurassic kind. Among the most annoying sights on display is that of a young Bernard–Henri Lévy promising that had the Communist Party won the elections he would have renounced to his French citizenship. Coincidentally, the fashionable philosopher threatened to do just the same again this year in case of a victory of the leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the upcoming elections. Plus ça change… Giovanni Vimercati (April 23, 5pm; April 28, 10pm at the Spectacle)