Dara Birnbaum | Every TV needs a revolution

Dara Birnbaum

Every TV needs a revolution

Gent, Belgium: Imschoot Uitgevers/ For IC, 1992

112 pp., 20.9 × 14.7 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

In May of 1968, a student revolt that began in a suburb of Paris soon escalated into seven weeks of civil unrest throughout France, punctuated by demonstrations, strikes, and the occupation of factories and universities. 

The student population had almost tripled in the preceding decade, from 175,000 to more than half a million. As with elsewhere in the world, 'youth culture' was becoming a formidable force, yet French society remained autocratic, hierarchical, and tradition-bound.

Students initially protested against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism, traditionalism, and the ten year rule of Charles de Gaulle. The president had ascended to power via extra-constitutional means and maintained it via state control of television and radio. 

Heavy-handed tactics by the police against the student protestors led France's trade union confederations to call for sympathy strikes. With more ten million workers striking (a fifth of the population), the country's economy ground to a halt. de Gaull fled to Berlin, amid fears of outright civil war. 

May 1968, as it came to be known, was a watershed moment, with an enormous impact on French society. Alain Geismar, a student leaders at the time, said the movement had succeeded "as a social revolution, not as a political one".

Filmmakers who have recreated the riots include François Truffaut (Baisers volés, 1968), Jean-Luc Godard (Tout Va Bien, 1972), Diane Kurys (Cocktail Molotov, 1980), Louis Malle (May Fools, 1990), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Dreamers, 2003), Roman Coppola (CQ, 2001) and Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch, 2021)

Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine that the May '68 revolts were the inspiration for "Street Fighting Man", despite it being recorded in April and May of that year: 

"Yeah, it was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet ... It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions ... I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government in France; de Gaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive. And the French riot police were amazing."

Dara Birnbaum produced a work in 1990 called Cannon: Taking to the Street, in which amateur footage of a Take Back the Night march held at Princeton University in April, 1987 is reframed through the lens of the Paris uprising. 

Two years later - and almost a quarter-century after the events of May 1968 - she produced this bookwork, which applies her video celebrated editing techniques to the printed page.  

Images of anonymous street posters and graffiti from the uprisings are cropped, rotated, inverted, re-sized and re-sequenced as commentary on the public space of television and mass media.

In addition to the (already scarce) softcover trade edition, there were forty deluxe grey linen hardcover copies produced, each signed and dated in black marker.