-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.