Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film

As with many aspects of European cultural life, film was galvanized and transformed by the revolutionary fervor of 1968. This groundbreaking study provides a full account of the era’s cinematic crises, innovations, and provocations, as well as the social and aesthetic contexts in which they appeared. The author mounts a genuinely fresh analysis of a contested period in which everything from the avant-garde experiments of Godard, Pasolini, Schroeter, and Fassbinder to the low cinematic genres of horror, pornography, and the Western reflected the cultural upheaval of youth in revolt-a cinema for the barricades.