Film Distribution and 1968: Radical Aspirations

“Taken together, the essays in 1968 and Global Cinema and Celluloid Revolt make a decisive shift away from reading discrete film texts, opting instead to analyze the networks through which these texts moved and, in the process, tracking not only how they were received but also who was able to access them (and how). In so doing, these texts offer a forceful foregrounding of moving images’ circulation, asserting—in some essays more explicitly than others—that the logistics and politics of distribution are key to tracking the very nature of ‘the public’ and its representations, which were being disputed onscreen and offscreen under the capacious historical banner of 1968.”

In this double book review for Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture Hoetger examines the entangled politics of memory and film distribution in 1968.