The insistence of struggles - images, uprisings, counter-revolutions

Why record a demonstration against a an authoritarian regime, and why do it sometimes at the risk of one's life? become the images and sounds of these struggles once they circulate on online platforms, when they are not deleted by governments who see it as a danger against the arbitrariness of their power? What can cinema do? faced with this visual and sound material which does not belong to him, which at the same time resists and inspires him, if he wishes to constitute a filmed archive of the revolts of our present? The videos made by the protagonists of the uprisings Arabs of the year 2011 form the starting point and compose the material first of this book. They bear witness to a contemporary history tormented, but they also engage, in a dynamic way, a future of these uprisings, regardless of the counter-revolutionary actions of the States or the audiovisual propaganda strategies which come to cover their powers of protest. It is not just a matter of calling for a new resistance which would find in animated images a privileged vector to represent an angry people. It is also about considering how These persist over time and contribute to an insistence of struggles one of whose qualities is precisely to appear where we don't expect them. This second edition is accompanied by a preface by the American critic Jim Hoberman. It also presents an unpublished foreword which returns to this notion of insistence in the light of images of burning news – from Ukraine to Palestine via Sudan – where the desire for freedom collides with forces that are increasingly hostile to it.