a dedication to the notion of freedom
November 13th, 2008 at 4:03 pm (poetics, politics)
From Zizek’s Organs without Bodies:
“During the shooting of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago in a Madrid suburb in 1964, a crowd of Spanish statists had to sing the ‘Internationale’ in a scene involving a mass demonstration. The movie team was astonished to discover that they all knew the song and were singing it with such a passion that the Francoist police intervened, thinking that they were dealing with a real political manifestation. Even more, when, late in the evening (the scene was to take place in darkness), people living in the nearby houses heard the echoes of the song, they opened up bottles and started to dance in the street, wrongly presuming that Franco had died and the Socialists had taken power. This book is dedicated to those magic moments of illusory freedom (which, in a way, were precisely not simply illusory) and to the hopes thwarted by the return to ‘normal’ reality.”