Thursday 26 June 2014
Marin Karmitz | France, 1972 | 89 mins | French with English subtitles
“We have taken the right to speak, to take action. Rights that you bosses have denied us. Our law is justice for the people. It’s a knife to your throat.”
Coup pour Coup (Blow for Blow) is the compelling story of a strike of women workers in a textile factory in France. Meticulously detailing the various humiliations and oppressive dimensions of the women’s working lives, the film goes on to show the workers organise, rise up and struggle for something resembling victory.
Marin Karmitz’s exhilarating film is a classic of early 1970s revolutionary French cinema. At a time when the events of May and June 1968 were being denigrated as vapid, narcissistic and – above all – finished, Coup pour Coup asserted itself as a non-negotiable reminder that, so long as the combined perversities of capitalism and patriarchy continued to try to crush ordinary people’s lives, there would always be resistance, rebellion and the the threat of actual revolution.
Like Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien (another factory strike film, released the same year), Coup pour Coup blends a documentary aesthetic with scripted dialogue, employing actual workers to play their real-life roles, while casting actors as the managers and the bosses.