How does a dance of figures end? If political cinema, as I have argued, is the name of a set of films that improvise their way through the nonrelation between cinema and politics by way of figures, then there is no reason to believe this set would be somehow limited in advance. Insofar as the nonrelation is never solved once and for all but persists as a condition of every new political film, the number of singular instances of political cinema is potentially infinite.

If not an end, a periodization, then, conjured by a multiplicity of films. But the meaning of these two terms (periodization and multiplicity) and the nature of the relation that binds them (periodization through multiplicity) are far from obvious. One temptation would be to read these films as a series of fragmentary expressions of a supposed essence of the long ’68. In this case, the act of periodization takes place outside of cinema per se. The multiplicity of films, juxtaposed to one another like tesserae of a mosaic, becomes one partial representation among many others of the spirit of the sequence. This is, in many ways, the trope of the so-called cinema of ’68, which presupposes that the set of ideological signifiers floating in the social, cultural, and political milieu of the time were captured and thematized by its contemporary cinema. According to this trope, what films return to the spectator of yesterday and today is a reified image of the long ’68 as a historical sequence defined by unity and internal coherence: clear-cut chronological boundaries, linear historical trajectories, transparent politics, a lasting but exclusively cultural influence—and, to explain it all, frameworks that are vague enough to be mistaken for exhaustive, like the ever-present Oedipal archetype, or the myth of innocence lost that connects, in one fell swoop, the good student protests of ’68 to the evil excesses of ’77 and then the rise of terrorism.

Narratives like these are by no means unique to the Italian context. As Kristin Ross observes in her pathbreaking account of the French May, these narratives aim to nullify the evental character of what took place as well as the complexity of the sequence as a whole, which, she argues, can hardly be reduced to the punctiform occurrence of the student protests in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and must be understood instead within the context of French colonialism in Algeria and the country’s history of worker struggles. Indeed, Ross explicitly indicates the worker and the colonial militant as two crucial “figures” for understanding the French May and its “pre-history.” Ross’s concept of the figure is far more general than the one presented in this book, and it embraces a spectrum that extends from “historical actors” to “objects of fictional and theoretical representation.”1 Yet the fundamental gesture of Ross’s figures resonates with that of the figures traced in these pages—namely, a diagnosis of ’68 as a time of crisis. The introduction of the worker and the colonial militant as figures in the historiographic landscape of the French May has the effect of unsettling the received wisdom about that historical moment as dominated by the figure of the student—a wisdom, Ross explains, peddled for decades by sociologists and student leaders who managed to shape the discourse around le Mai and its significance with relentless revisionism. As a result, “the official story that has been encoded, celebrated publicly in any number of mass media spectacles of commemoration, and handed down to us today, is one of family or generational drama, stripped of any violence, asperity, or overt political dimensions—a benign transformation of customs and lifestyles that necessarily accompanied France’s modernization from an authoritarian bourgeois state to a new, liberal, financier bourgeoisie.”2

This “benign transformation” is a far cry from ’68 as “a time of crisis and transition,” and herein lies the point: tension-figures make crisis visible; they reveal the holes and hollow spaces of history beneath the veneer of coherence and inevitability of ex post facto historical narratives. In the case of the French May, the reintroduction of the worker and the colonial militant onto the stage forces the student to end his monologue and start dancing with them. In fact, the figures singled out by Ross are not found only in the streets or in the minds of revolutionaries and reactionaries but also at the movie theater. Tout va bien (Groupe Dziga Vertov, 1972) and The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), to cite but two obvious examples, invent their own respective versions of the figure of the worker and the colonial militant, thinking in cinematic form the alliance of intellectuals, students, and workers in the anticapitalist struggle (in the case of Tout va bien); the return of the repressed of French colonial violence in the guise of a militarization of the police in the motherland (in The Battle of Algiers); and the emergence of an internationalist dimension of the struggle for liberation (in both). One wonders what other figures would be unearthed by an inquiry into French cinema similar to the one undertaken in this book. (Indeed, thinking beyond national borders, what would a figural history of political cinema look like on a global scale? How would it redraw boundaries between different national cinemas and genres? What lessons about cinema and politics would it teach us?)

But figures do not limit themselves to unsettling traditional periodizations; they establish their own. The figures of Italian political cinema think the long ’68 in their own way. As experiments of legibility of a given historical moment, they redefine continuities and displace cesurae, opening up the possibility of new periodizations. In this sense, more than the cinema of ’68, it would be appropriate to talk about the ’68 of cinema. Whereas the former term designates a chronologically and thematically defined set of films that would express the essence of ’68, the latter indicates how cinema is able to generate a unique thought of ’68 as a time of crisis dramatized through figures. This ’68 of cinema is different, for instance, from the ’68 of political philosophy and militancy. The two engage similar problems and impasses, and there is no dearth of parallels and even echoes between them, but they give form to the historical sequence as a time of crisis in their own separate ways. This is not a concession to the rhetoric of the many ’68s, which often involves a more or less surreptitious (and moralizing) hierarchization—between a violent ’68 and nonviolent one, constructive and destructive, influential and forgotten. On the contrary, the emphasis should be on the structuring gap between cinema and politics, and on the different ways in which the same time of crisis has been thought and periodized by the two.

For its part, one of the ways in which politics has periodized the Italian ’68 is as the slow, decade-long unfolding of a number of minor collective manifestations of antagonism and revolt interrupted every now and then by pauses and retreats, but always ready to pick up pace again: “Taken individually, many of those events and processes don’t remotely rise to the level of a political myth or a narrative of epic temporality; taken together, however, they constitute the blurry articulation of a historical time of crisis and construction alike.”3 It is the trope of il maggio strisciante (the creeping May), designed to evoke a contrast to the perceived punctiform occurrence of the French May.4 The creeping May is one of the names of the historical sequence of the Italian ’68 as seen from the standpoint of politics; only politics can think and make legible the lulls and lunges of collective action, and verify their respective viability for a revolutionary strategy. This syncopated diachronic movement of the Italian ’68 produced by politics is the correlate of a synchronic dispersion of political agency. With the fading of the hegemonic political subject of modernity—the factory worker—a number of alternative forms of political subjectivity proliferated in the interstices of this “historical time of crisis and construction.” The creeping May, then, is the historical conjuncture where the “carnival of subjectivities” we evoked at the beginning of this book makes its appearance.

The ’68 of cinema, instead, is not inching toward any particular destination, revolutionary or otherwise; nor does it aim to verify the consistency and resilience of any given political subjectivity across cycles of struggle. Cinema, as we have seen, experiments with figures, and these figures, taken together, engage in their own gesture of periodization. They return to us the image of a time of crisis, but seen from the perspective of cinema. The result is a dance of figures, a tentative exploration of historical possibilities, dramatized in the form of the “as if” and reimagined anew with each film. This dance extends beyond the putative chronological boundaries of the sequence, revealing holes and hollow spaces of history that remained unthought to politics.

It is precisely in this gap, this nonrelation between a carnival of subjectivities and a dance of figures, that a deeper understanding of the historical sequence of the long ’68 can arise. When seen from different angles, what is returned to us is the parallax effect of ’68 as a time permeated by rifts and ruptures. Indeed, if one can speak at all of an essence of ’68 as a historical sequence, this essence can only be understood as crisis. One can interpret the two common revisionisms of ’68 mentioned earlier precisely as attempts to mend the torn fabric of history of the sequence itself: on the one hand, the rhetoric of the many ’68, which de facto renounces to think ’68 as a complex sequence of interconnected events; on the other, the reliance on a univocal narrative that obliterates historical fault lines altogether. The nonrelation between cinema and politics gives us the possibility to think the two together—the unity of a sequence and the discontinuities of a time of crisis. This means that we can name that time and affirm that something did indeed take place then. Something was thought, and cinema and politics can revive the complexity of that thought for us.

At stake is the possibility of restoring the presentness of the past as evental possibility. As Cesare Casarino puts it, referring to the Italian ’68, “Some of us search for, stake a claim on, and elect as our own past that bygone moment when what we desire now was first anticipated and deferred, when what we now want as our future might have taken place but never did.”5 Choosing one’s own past is an act of subjective courage. It means deciding that something took place in that past, and that what took place transformed us and the world around us. However, it also means confronting through cinema’s figures the possibilities that at one point existed during a time of crisis, and that may not have been seized, or even fully perceived. The parallax view of politics and cinema returns to us the Italian ’68 as such a redoubled past: a critical time of events and experiments that still cuts through our present.