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Thursday, 3 May – 7pm
Session 1
Second session: Friday, 18 May – 7pm
First session presented by David Cortés Santamarta, curator
Second session presented by Gérard FromangerGérard Fromanger and Jean-Luc Godard
Film-tract nº 1968 (1968)
France, DA, colour, silent, 3’Anonymous
Cinétracts (Film-Tracts), 1968
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 76’The political pamphlet Cinétractez, handed out in May 1968, describes the cinétract in the following terms: “What is a cinétract?: 2’44” (that is, a 30-metre-long reel of 16mm film at 24 frames per second) of silent film on a political and social theme, or any other, aimed to trigger discussion and action. Through these cinétracts we attempt to explain our thoughts and reactions. Why? To: Oppose-Propose-Surprise-Inform-Question-Affirm-Convince-Shout-Laugh-Denounce-Teach. But with what? A wall, a camera, lamplight on a wall. Documents, photographs, newspapers, drawings, posters, books, etc. A marker pen, tape, glue, a tape measure, a timer”. This new format places the stress on both the will for political intervention, driven by the urgency of revolution, and an invitation, in the wordplay in the title, in a creative appropriation of this approach to film.
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Friday, 4 May – 7pm
Session 2
Second session: Monday, 21 May – 7pm
Chris Marker and Mario Marret
À bientôt, j'espère (Be Seing You), 1967
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 43’The Besançon Medvedkin Group
La Charnière (The Hinge), 1968
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 12’
Classe de lutte (The Class of Struggle), 1968
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 40’“Comrades, silence is your worst enemy!” was how film-maker Mario Marret addressed workers on the day he arrived at the Rhodiaceta textile factory in Besançon, the location of a strike that would act as a forerunner to those which came shortly afterwards, in May ’68. The documentary by Marker and Marret portrays the workers’ reflections on their work and day-to-day existence. Without images, La Charnière is an unalloyed soundtrack recording the discussion between the film-makers and workers after the premiere of À bientôt, j’espère, a debate which would give rise to the collective experience of the Medvedkin Groups, who took their name as an homage to Soviet film-maker Aleksandr Medvedkin. Classe de lutte is the first film by the said groups and symbolises a definitive step from a “militant film about workers’ conditions to a militant workers’ film” (Benoliel).
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Monday, 7 May – 7pm
Session 3
Second session: Thursday, 17 May – 7pm
The Besançon Medvedkin Group
Serie Nouvelle société No. 5 - 7 (New Society Series No. 5–7), 1969–1970
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 30’
Rhodia 4 x 8, 1969
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 4’The Sochaux Medvedkin Group
Sochaux, 11 juin 68 (Sochaux, 11 June ’68), 1970
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 19’Jean-Pierre Thiébaud / The Besançon Medvedkin Group
Le Traîneau-échelle (The Sled-Ladder), 1971
France, DA, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 8’Michel Desrois / The Besançon Medvedkin Group
Lettre à mon ami Pol Cèbe (A Letter to My Friend Pol Cèbe), 1970
France, DA, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 17’The alliance between workers and film-makers that cemented in the Medvedkin Groups resulted in an ensemble of films which broke out beyond the conventional parameters of the concept of militant cinema. In generically and ironically alluding to the “new society”, promised at the time by the French Prime Minister, the series Nouvelle Société comprises different conflicts in French factories. In Rhodia 4 x 8, a song by the French militant singer-songwriter Colette Magny accompanies sequences showing the repetitive and gruelling shifts worked on the assembly line. Sochaux, 11 juin 68, meanwhile, recalls one of the most brutal episodes of government repression from May ’68, whereas Le Traîneau-échelle composes a unique visual poem, juxtaposing images of hope with others documenting the horrors of history. One continuous shot-sequence, filmed from the inside of a car, structures Lettre à mon ami Pol Cèbe, whereby the fixed view of the road runs in parallel with the dialogue of three passengers, members of the Medvedkin Groups, who reflect on the potential of militant cinema.
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Thursday, 10 May – 7pm
Session 4
Second session: Friday, 25 May – 7pm
The Sochaux Medvedkin Group
Les trois-quarts de la vie (Three-Quarters of a Lifetime), 1971
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 18’The Sochaux Medvedkin Group
Week-end à Sochaux (Weekend in Shochaux), 1971
France, DA, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 53’After 1969, the Sochaux Medvedkin Group would continue with the militant workers’ film project that had germinated in Besançon. In the words of Bruno Muel, the collective worked to “show the cultural prohibitions that must be defeated, that which we could call the usurpation of knowledge, to obtain the means to fight equally against those who think everyone should remain in their place”. Workers from the Peugeot factory in Sochaux, along with advocates of the previous group like Pol Cèbe and Muel, made the films Les trois-quarts de la vie and Week-end à Sochaux to expose the assembly-line working conditions and the engulfing existence of daily work. They refer to “three-quarters of a lifetime”, the title of the first medium-length film, with registers and resources that include an unprecedented, irreverent and satirical theatrical take as close to the popular commedia dell´arte as performance, and explored in greater depth in Week-end à Sochaux.
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Friday, 11 May – 7pm
Session 5
Second session: Monday, 28 May – 7pm
Bruno Muel / Grupo Medvedkin de Sochaux
Avec le sang des autres (With the Blood of Others), 1974
France, DA, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 52’Avec le sang des autres corroborates the break-up of the Medvedkin Groups’ collective experience. Conceived as a common initiative, it was ultimately Bruno Muel who filmed this damning documentary about workplace exploitation at the Peugeot factory in Sochaux, the largest factory in France. The humour and provocative side of the Medvedkin Group’s preceding work is notably lacking here; the assembly line and life’s reduction to a workforce, admin time and time-clock dehumanisation are recorded in an insufferable whole: “In the filming, the workers insisted on both the correct length of the shots — enough to see the progress of the assembly line and to get a feel for the unrelenting noise — and on the importance of filming the workers’ hands,” writes Muel.
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Monday, 14 May – 7pm
Session 6
Second session: Thursday, 24 May – 7pm
Second session presented by Sylvain George
Jean-Marie Straub
Europa 2005 / 27 octobre (cinétract) (Europe 2005/27 October [Film Tract]), 2006
France, DA, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 11’
Joachim Gatti, 2009
France, DA, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 1’30’’Sylvain George
N'entre pas sans violence dans la nuit (Do Not Go Gentle in the Night), 2005
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 20’.
Ils nous tueront tous (They Will Kill Us All), 2009
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 10’.
Les Nuées (My Black Mama's Face), 2012
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 8’.
Joli mai (celui qui a tué moins de cent fois, qu'il me jette la première pierre) (Beautiful May [let he who has killed fewer than a hundred times cast the first stone]), 2017
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 10’.
Un peu de feu que vole (sa geste en mille éclats) (A Little Fire that Flies [A Gesture in a Thousand Pieces]), 2017
France, DA, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 11 min.The short films by Jean-Marie Straub and Sylvain George demonstrate the continuities and ruptures between the May ’68 cinétracts and the present. The Film-makers’ blatant use of the term is not only a way to designate a set format; it also denotes the affirmation of the historical and political links established with that legacy. Their counter-informative approach stems from the cinétracts made in 1968, in regard to their immediate adherence to contemporary events — the banlieues riots in Paris, political repression, the sans-papiers’ fight for their rights, the refugee camp in Calais and the Nuit debout movement — and their opposition to the dominant language in the media.
![Sylvain George. Un peu de feu que vole (sa geste en mille éclats) (A Little Fire that Flies [A Gesture in a Thousand Pieces]), Film, 2017](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/06_sgeorge-peq.jpg "Sylvain George. Un peu de feu que vole (sa geste en mille éclats) (A Little Fire that Flies [A Gesture in a Thousand Pieces]), Film, 2017")
Held on 03, 04, 07, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 28 may 2018
In May 1968, the defiance of power, mobilised through demonstrations, by reclaiming the streets, new forms of DIY organisation, the occupation of factories and universities and a prolonged general strike was driven primarily by the subversive power from the horizontal gathering of identities and spheres kept apart by society; from collectively speaking out and questioning any form of representation, whether it be political, cultural, or through the media or trade unions.
This collective and anonymous dimension, a pivotal part of the events that transpired, was reflected in cinétracts, cinema “tracts”, or film pamphlets, and the films of the Medvedkin Groups, made by workers and film-makers (producers and technicians) alike. These practices, the fulcrum of this series, built the sturdiest expressions of film-making which contested at once the traditional notion of authorship and the standard devices of film production. These practices appear to reveal that which the philosopher Jacques Rancière has articulated on the very principle of radical democracy and politics: “The recognition of anybody’s power”.
The aforementioned cinétracts are short films with a running time of between two to five minutes, filmed under a policy of anonymity by a number of professional directors, among them Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker – responsible for the initiative — and amateur film-makers. Moreover, these works can be seen as the film equivalent to the illustrious May ‘68 posters and graffiti: simple resources and craftsmanship with a fitting visual impact for the purposes of counter-information.
The collective experience of the Medvedkin Groups — named in homage to Soviet film-maker Aleksandr Medvedkin (1900—1989), the creator of the “film-train” in the 1930s — prompted the workers to make militant films. Certain professionals, including Chris Marker, Mario Marret and Bruno Muel, organised workshops in Besançon and Sochaux, and loaned cameras and film-making materials out with the intention of sharing their specialist technical knowledge with the workers, who in turn appropriated the image to create their own representation of the living and working conditions they experienced. This alliance thus gave rise, between 1967 and 1974, to a string of films which exceeded, in content and formal invention, the conventional parameters defining cinéma militant.
In addition to putting forward an approach to the anonymous and collective practices which surfaced around May ‘68, the series sets out to constitute a way of examining the event on the eve of its 50th anniversary. Consequently, along with the cinétracts of ’68, more recent tracts by Straub and Sylvain George will be screened, thus reflecting the ruptures and continuities between that legacy and the present in an insurgent audiovisual genre.
In collaboration with
Curatorship
David Cortés Santamarta
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.