1968: The year that rocked the world
by Stewart Home
[ bookreviews ]
“It was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll; it was also the year of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Prague Spring, the Chicago convention, the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the anti-war movement, the student rebellion that paralysed France, civil rights, the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, and the birth of the women’s movement.” Back cover blurb to Kurlansky’s book.
Why 1968? Well, 1968 is recalled by many as the most revolutionary year in the second half of the 20th century. Likewise, calling someone ‘a 68er’ is fabulous shorthand for the ‘right’ (or should that be ‘left’) sort of person: it can sum up their politics, the way they look, even their taste in music. ‘A 68er’ provides a serviceable description of my Finnish publisher, Hannu Paloviita of Like Books. When I first meet him in 1995, he had long hair, a leather jacket, jeans and wore motorcycle boots. Hannu created a major Finnish publishing house from scratch by issuing comics, film books, translations of Anglo-American pop cultural novels and anything else that interested him. Within minutes of our first meeting we got into a serious discussion about terrorism and urban guerrilla groups that lasted all night. I explained why I was against terrorism and viewed it as vanguardist and reactionary, a lot of booze flowed before we reached an understanding, and when it came we had smiles and handshakes all around. So once I got back to London and told friends about my experiences in Finland, using the term ‘a 68er’ enabled me to convey my impression of my publisher with a sound bite.
Treating a single year as better, worse or more significant than those around it is tricky. Mark Kurlansky understands this, writing in the final chapter: “In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.” That said, while Kurlansky is writing popular history, his coverage of political events carry as much weight as what he has to say about youth culture. The Time of Your Life DVD greetings cards by way of contrast, are much more obviously a product of our “postmodern media driven world”. The particular giftcard DVD under review is intended as a present for people born in 1968, but it is possible to acquire giftcards for the 60-year period between 1930 and 1989. The source of film material used on the giftcards changes over the decades covered, but for the Sixties, it is British cinema newsreels. The 1968 giftcard announces on the front that the period under review was the ‘Year Of The Monkey’ and exhibits absolutely no self-consciousness about its historical status, or lack thereof.
Kurlansky is a journalist, and a good one, meaning that his book is easy to read and he is reasonably accurate when it comes to the facts he reports. Interpretation, of course, is a different matter. Kurlansky is a liberal, so he’s interested in revolutionary movements, but his views and perspectives fall far short of a revolutionary praxis. Tellingly, the following passage from his summing up mentions neither the occupations movement in Paris (which he covers), nor the extraordinary waves of strikes in Jamaica that year (which are omitted from his book): “The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia. Despite the thousands dead in Vietnam, the million starved in Biafra, the crushing of idealism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the massacre in Mexico, the clubbings and brutalization of dissenters all over the world, the murder of the two Americans who offered the world hope, to many it was a year of great possibilities and is missed... The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced. There were too many of them, and if they were given no other opportunity, they would stand in the street and shout them. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.”
Kurlansky’s historical model emerges from conventional dualistic American Cold War perspectives, with the result that his focus is on America and the Soviet bloc; his assumption being that the disintegration of the Soviet Union began in its peripheral satellite states, specifically Poland and Czechoslovakia. If, however, one adheres to the more accurate line that the Bolshevik revolution was a capitalist and not a communist revolution, that the Bolsheviks were the ‘agents’ who brought about the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital in Russia, then their usurpation towards the end of the 20th century was merely a ‘palace revolution’ from within a still-dominant bourgeois class; a relatively minor upheaval with origins that are not as rooted in the periphery of the Soviet empire as Kurlansky believes, and which can be traced further back than 1968. Despite an apparent inability to grasp that Bolshevism was the Russian road to capitalist industrialisation, Kurlansky allows his gaze to shift beyond the principle theatres of the ‘Cold War’ and provides reasonable coverage of both the occupation movement in France, and the vicious suppression of the student movement in Mexico (in part so that the Olympic games might pass smoothly and without the gaze of the world being drawn to some of the more unsavoury aspects of that particular capitalist state).
The Time Of Your Life 1968 DVD makes no attempt to place the items it presents in any kind of historical perspective, and this is both its strength and its weakness. Like the other DVDs in this series covering the Sixties, it is broken down into sections: News At Home; Around The World; Sport; People In The News; Spotlight On Royalty; and Fun, Fads & Fashion. In this instance, these are all featurettes made in 1968 with voiced-over narration that appears to have been left unchanged from that time. On this DVD, 1968 is presented (albeit unconsciously) as a baroquely complex moment that is not yet resolved into a comprehensible history, a moment whose movement indissolubly contains facts and values and whose full meaning does not yet appear. The first section begins by showing samples of the new decimal currency which became British legal tender in 1971. Next there is coverage of the construction of the new Victoria Line on the London underground system, and a look at how this affected the road junction at Oxford and Regent Streets. The third item is truly extraordinary footage of the Anti-Vietnam War Demonstration kicking off in Trafalgar Square and then turning into a riot when it reached the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. The Old Bill are shown viciously beating up demonstrators they’ve hauled out of the crowd, with multitudes of cowardly cops swarming around single, isolated protestors, while the soundtrack surreally blames the violence on its victims and commends the police for their restraint. This is followed by coverage of a successful heart transplant, then an emergency drill to test how the authorities would cope with a plane hitting the tallest building in London, and finally a piece about plans to build the Channel Tunnel.
The Around The World section of the DVD starts with the Vietnam War, which is followed by coverage of the assassination of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Next there is coverage of the occupations movement in Paris, which is bizarrely explained as having its origins in Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations; rather than economic restructuring, the overcrowded conditions suffered by students, and in particular discontent at the University of Nanterre (just outside Paris) which coalesced around Danny Cohn-Bendit and the March 22nd Movement. Once again, the narrated soundtrack surreally and unconvincingly blames cop violence on its victims. There is little information on the occupation of public buildings and factories by workers and students. From May in Paris we move on to the assassination of the American Democratic (ie bourgeois) politician Robert Kennedy, then the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Like Kurlansky’s book, this section of the DVD ends on an upbeat note with the first manned flight to the moon. The Apollo 8 mission covered here only orbited the moon; it wasn’t until the next year that (wo)man actually set foot on the earth’s lunar satellite. The Sports section covers the Grand National, the European Cup, Wimbledon and British athletes returning from the Olympic Games in Mexico. The People In The News segment starts with the model Twiggy making a trip to Germany, which is certainly groovy. This is followed by featurettes on a Royal Film Performance of Romeo and Juliet, the American pianist Liberace visiting London’s Carnaby Street to buy clothes, and the Variety British Show Business Awards at the Savoy Hotel. Finally, an Ozzie Clark and Alice Pollock fashion show at the Revolution Club includes a brief snippet of pop musician John Lennon and his partner, the conceptual artist Yoko Ono, looking very bored; although the event is fun to watch, it would have been pleasant to see more of the clothes and the models.
Spotlight On Royalty is, as one would expect, the most tedious section of the DVD. It covers a visual biography of Lord Mountbatten being previewed at the Imperial War Museum, the Royal Family at ‘home’, the investiture of the Prince of Wales into the ridiculous Order of the Garter, and that year’s South American royal tour by the Queen and Prince Philip. Watching such rubbish merely confirms the obvious: the British royal family are inbred parasites who should have been stripped of their titles and their wealth years ago. Fun, Fads & Fashions begins by covering inflatable furniture, moves on to electronic massage as a slimming aid, then the Collier Chariot experimental small car, and heats up with more fashion coverage. The 1968 collection of bright, multicoloured women’s wear from the Nina Ricci fashion house which is cat-walked by glamorous models in the Versailles Palace, contrasts sharply with the revolutionary activities on the streets of Paris shown earlier in the DVD. Next the American pop artist Ray Lichtenstein is run quickly past us, and we move breezily onto widespread interest in comics. This is followed by a sun dish developed by Fiona Warren which is demonstrated on Brighton Beach. From there, the action moves west along the English south coast to Littlehampton, with more women in swimsuits, but this time they are testing transparent sun tents. For foot fetishists, there is a feature on a fashion show for shoes at the Savoy Hotel in London. Next comes robot home help, followed by more on labour saving ‘innovations’ with a featurette about the introduction of the mini-bar into rooms at the London Airport Hotel. Ealing College of Art students are shown designing a futuristic house, before the DVD ends on a humorous note with a ‘Pate Party’ where bald men go to test out male wigs. The bonus features on the DVD consist of Petula Clark singing Downtown, an American TV advertisement for Jell-O featuring the pop group 5th Dimension, and the movie trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If you don’t know much about 1968, Kurlansky’s book and The Time Of Your Life DVD about the year provide one starting point, and to a limited degree each corrects the faults of the other. As far as pop history goes, Kurlansky’s book is as good as it gets from mainstream publishers; and its faults, such as its bourgeois perspective, are on the whole faults found throughout the genre. The Time Of Your Life 1968 is something else again, its charm being in part its fantastic incoherence, but it is also well worth viewing for the stunning footage of Grosvenor Square and Paris. It’s also a timely reminder of how things looked back then; to take just one example, Oxford Street appears far grimier and less glamorous than my memories of it from the year I turned six (on reflection I realise that what I mainly recall is being in the toy sections of department stores, rather than on the street itself). It’s also curious to see how bourgeois minds imagined the future we are now living through, and The Time Of Your Life DVDs provide us with that. If nothing else, Kurlansky’s book and this DVD will make a good birthday present for anyone you know who turns either 40 or 60 in 2008; but you don’t need to wait that long, they’d work as well as a gift this year as two down the line. So get yourself along to the next Anti-War demo, when you’ll hopefully get the chance to loot these two potentially inspirational items from a central London store of your choice. And who knows, maybe you’ll even find yourself appearing on some future DVD about revolutionary activity in the year 2006 - with, I trust, a scarf obscuring your face!
