The french magazine Panic was a key stage for my film education, and one to which I still go back now. It was a bimonthly magazine that only ran 5 issues, all of which contain great articles. From the beginning, it was daunting but also exciting: in the 1st issue, an interview of Olivier Assayas in which he discusses the need to fundamentally rethink the established standards of film criticism (a few points which I remember vividly: there has been as much time elapsed between us and the Nouvelle Vague as between the Nouvelle Vague and silent cinema, from which the film grammar we inherit was established; his belief that the most interesting writing about cinema is that written by filmmakers).
Only recently was I able to approach, with more contextual information, the articles of one of the contributors. The articles were impassioned, rigorous, daunting, fiercely political, full of references, only 1/20th of which I understood (now, only about 1/10th). The writer was of course Nicole Brenez.
One of the articles, A Propos de Nice or the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphet, has been reprinted at Rouge, but another one, The Treatment of the Lumpenproletariat by Avant-Garde Cinema, has as far as I know not. I will post on it more completely when I get back home (where my magazine is), but for the moment let me post one of the videos she recommended, which I've been watching often over the last few weeks: Afrika Shox.
(I don't yet know how to embed a youtube video)
It could be part of her urban pamphlet article as well, since its project corresponds almost exactly to what she describes:
It "shows how social injustice is inscribed within flesh itself, on walls, within the very fabric of urban organisation, in the concrete occupation of space [...]. It describes injustice’s physical dimension, reconstitutes its symbolic function, demonstrates its violence".
Maybe more on this videos in days to come.
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