With a Lower-case h

Juan Pando Barrero. Pyramid of Sandbags Covering the Telefónica Building, 1938. Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute, Madrid, Ministry of Culture and Sport 
Gökşin Sipahioğlu. Police in Paris, Boulevard Saint-Michel, 10 May 1968. Sipa Press

Cinema has spent a century or more informing about happiness and, in the sense of shaping, modelling imaginaries and desires. This film series assembles twelve feature-length, medium-length and short films that bear witness to a form of little-known happiness — public happiness — and is set forth in connection with the documentary exhibition under the same title, comprising a diptych devoted to the citizen ideal and social utopia.

“Happiness is a new idea in Europe”, Louis de Saint-Just declared in 1794 to conclude his speech in support of the redistribution of national wealth by decree. This break with tradition was not the sentiment in itself, the urbane privilege of the few and an uncertain reward later down the line for the many. It was about anybody being able to feel it, about the right to happiness for all. The history of this happiness passes by in flashes and is written with a lower-case h, for it is led by anonymous people who are absent from textbooks. Each time the order of domination is interrupted it appears. Someone leaves a family home in Marseilles, a thatched cottage in Tolpuddle, another prefab house without running water in Harlan County to take care of matters of common interest, and it appears. Public happiness is nothing other than the fulfilment associated with living politically, assembling with others, organising, acting together and discovering oneself by opening out and anticipating a desired world, one that is based even on modest and trivial claims, exceeding them entirely.          

The ways of showing this happiness possess the same unpredictability as politics. La Marseillaise by Jean Renoir (1938), a piece of fiction which unfolds to the backdrop of the years of the French Revolution, feels like a newsreel, while Thomas Harlan’s 1975 documentary Torre Bela, set in the Carnation Revolution, fashions its own character and even a leader. The most emotive film ever shot by a cluster of workers, Lettre à mon ami Pol Cèbe by Michel Desrois (1970), is pure experimental cinema. Operai, contadini, by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (2001), the only wholly fictional work in the series, and not based on “real events”, comprises various people reciting chapters from a novel in the middle of a forest. Countless images that do not coincide with images expected of a revolution. A couple of palaces are taken, granted, but bringing about a revolution is also about a peasant’s fingers — too swollen for the keys — ultimately playing the piano; separating him from his usual instrument, the hoe, and bringing those fingers into contact with keys for which they were never intended. It could last a moment or a lifetime.