Producing revolutionary history on film: Henri Lefebvre's urban space and Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris, 1871)

This article is about the political, conceptual, and filmic staging of revolutionary history as a consistently energizing force invoking past, present, and future, with a focus on how such a process plays out within urban space in response to recent history and my chosen filmic case study. It begins by setting up the theoretical context by way of Henri Lefebvre's pioneering work, starting with his particular account of modernity's philosophical tensions, before drawing on more recent scholarship on the potential revolutionary reappropriation of the city and responding to global events of the last five years. The article then goes on to examine in detail La Commune (Paris, 1871), a collaborative, nearly six-hour film directed by Peter Watkins in 2000, which deals with the historical and ongoing relevance of an important yet often shrouded urban uprising and brief experiment in revolutionary democracy spanning March-May 1871 known as the Commune de Paris or "Paris Commune". This film's remarkable sound-images are analysed as playing out across a mix of historical frames concurrently material, mythic, theatrical, and multiply reflexive in their presentation of space and time.