Reviews 1 — Ken McMullen

1871 (1990)

A lavish period film about the rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. McMullen’s highly regarded film intriguingly illuminates a rarely depicted period of French history.

Emphasising the theatrics of the time, with the stage as a character in a film-within-a-film, the story centres on a beautiful actress-prostitute-revolutionary, torn between her love for her Irish lover and her financial arrangement with an English spy. An epic drama set in Paris between 1867-1871. Napoleon III’s reign ended when the III Republic was announced on 4 September 1870, the day after news of ths surrender to the Prussians reached Paris. More than six months later, the communne was proclaimed on 22 March 1871 following the defence of the guns of montmartre on the 18 March. The commune rose and fell, claiming some 30,000 lives in just under a month. To emphasise the theatrics of the time, McMullen uses the stage as a character, with revolutionary actors and political patrons as vehicles between sets.

“McMullen’s painterly treatment of the Paris Commune recounts the events of those heady days – from the assassination of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, through the Franco-Prussian War, to the crushing of the communards – in a theatrical manner. The film was selected for the Un Certain Regard section of the 1990 Cannes festival.”

— Institute of Contemporary Art, London

Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, is the subject of Ken McMullen’s portrait of an age in which the world itself has become spectacle. Its players, real and imagined, world historical and anonymous, are brought together through the Theatre du Ramborde, which becomes a setting for the revolutionary action of 1871 itself. And all the while the famous thesis of the Eighteenth Brumaire casts its shadow across the lives and events we encounter: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Ken McMullen’s 1871 is a visual tour de force, bringing to life an unforgettable world of love, death, war and revolution.

A bloody romance – Severine, the young and beautiful star of the theatre is the toast of Paris. Tantalising her audience with her heroic musical spectacular she counts among her admirers an Irish activist, O’Brien, and a British spy, Lord Grafton. All three are swept up in the tragic events of the France-Prussian war, the siege of Paris and the heroic days of the Commune. Doomed by the violence of their passions, they are destined to become victims of the turbulent and explosive history of their times.

McMullen's highly regarded film intriguingly illuminates a rarely depicted period of French history.