Paris, May 1968.(First Person)(Personal account)

As I LAY ASLEEP in Italy ... Though not exactly Italy, but Herefordshire. David Wordsworth (a remote descendant of the poet) and I had decided to do some walking in the English countryside, and we agreed on the Golden Valley, partly because he also wanted to visit his mother and little (half) sister. His father had been an officer in the British army in India who had shot through when David was very young; he had had no contact with him since. There was a regular reviewer in the Guardian and elsewhere called Christopher Wordsworth whom David once said he thought was some kind of cousin. It emerged that it was in fact his father, and later on they got together and were on good terms, sometimes going fishing together.

So after visiting his mother, we got on the road to the Golden Valley. It was very beautiful countryside, lush, in the full bloom of spring. The valley itself was fascinating because along it had once run a railway, which by now with rails removed looked like a wide green road. Most of the farmers whose land bordered onto it had illegally incorporated it into their grazing land, so it was intersected by fences and populated by sheep, but still from a distance had the aspect of a road.

We walked for several days, camping overnight (it was late April and the nights were still pretty cold), and eating and drinking at a pub when one presented itself. Some of the time we left the paths entirely and wandered across hills, never quite getting lost; a few times we made camp and cooked. Far from the picture of the old stories of country walking, there were few rustics in sight and the local produce usually came prepackaged for supermarkets everywhere. On occasion it was possible to find something worthwhile--at a local butcher there was spring lamb, which was delicious even if crudely cooked.

I had been unable to resist taking a small radio, and the news from France got me more and more interested. I had been reading Le Monde fairly regularly and knew that there was a certain amount of discontent amongst the intellectuals, and of course the climate of thought was changing all over Europe. The French Situationists were an interesting group, a kind of anarchists but unlike the fusty old English anarchists they were saying new things. Then there were the Dutch kabouters, with their proposals for white bicycles (available to everyone for picking up and leaving at will), white wives (similarly), and white policemen (uniformed social workers carrying supplies of contraceptives to be handed out on demand). They were amusing--and there was a great deal of humour in the ferment. These were the beginnings of the revolutionary year of 1968 which echoed around the world (but not, I think in Australia--well behind the revolutionary times)--across Europe, in North America (where it mainly took the form of the anti-Vietnam War movement), and in Mexico.

And there was I, huddled in a sleeping bag in the Golden Valley listening to the reports of the rumblings in Paris, which partly centred around the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the directorship of the Cinematheque. Langlois was a large, shambling man, none too clean, who had built up the Cinematheque collection of films over years, running it virtually as a one-man show. It was sometimes said that he even stored cans of film in the bath. The Cinematheque was really the school of the Nouvelle Vague cinema, which numbered among its famous names Truffaut, Godard and the like. They were also linked to the enormously influential journal Cahiers du Cinema, originally edited by the great communist film critic Andre Bazin. (Many years later when my daughter was studying film at Sydney University she discovered a book of his pieces in English translation amongst the books in the garage. She was being forced to read the rubbish of Jacques Derrida, and realised that a good bit of what he was saying was plagiarised from Bazin. Naturally she did not mention this in her essay--she would only have been marked down.)

The Cinematheque recycled old films, especially American film noir and westerns, continually; most of the many film addicts in Paris got their basic education there. Not many of them spoke English well enough to fully understand the dialogue--it is probable that the whole auteur theory developed from this fact, with consequent emphasis being laid on visual elements, the mise en scene of the director, rather than the acting and screenplay.

Langlois was considered to be some kind of national treasure by the film industry, and especially by critic and directors. A clumsy move to remove him (there was reason to think that his amateurism was indeed allowing much precious film stock to deteriorate) raised a storm which got plenty of media attention. The timing was particularly bad since it happened in the run-up to the Cannes film festival, when everyone was talking about cinema. The directors, critics, actors and everybody who was anybody in the French film industry began to protest at Cannes, the protest rapidly escalated, and such was the uproar and chaos that the festival was cancelled This was the beginning of "les evenements".