Europe Endless: Event One
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Europe Endless — a trilogy.
Three films. Three days. Eight years in the making. Three generations of the left. A project about friendship, cinema, travel, television, books, and the concept of culture as political mobilisation. About what Europe was, what it lost, and what it will/could/might still become.
Christopher Roth, 2025
Produced by Colin MacCabe and Adam Bartos
The Derek Jarman Lab
EVENT ONE
Europe Endless (EE01): The Spectre of Eurocommunism, 87 minutes
Synopsis
A portrait of Colin MacCabe, critic, Eurocommunist, Godard disciple, and the political and cultural project of the European left in the 1970s and 80s. Shot on the Irish border, in Italy, in Tuscany. About Antonio Gramsci, donkey races, marble, and the idea that you need 80% of the people — to change politics.
Director's Statement
On the Irish border, shortly after Brexit: Two old friends meeting between the Republic and the North: the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe and the academic film producer Colin MacCabe — with an Irish passport. Colin didn't really want to be in the film. Then the film became about him.
What makes Colin interesting: he was sacked from Cambridge in the early 1980s for being a post-structuralist — a word he'd never heard before. He was an ex-Maoist. A Eurocommunist. The film found footage of a philosophical congress Colin organised in 1986. Raymond Williams was there. Jacques Derrida was there. Stuart Hall. Cultural Studies, they call it. In the film Colin's old friend Paul Gilroy talks about it. Jean-Luc Godard inspired Colin to go into filmmaking. Or as it was called then: to do cinema.
Colin lives half of the year in Italy, his son exports marble from Carrara to Ireland. The communists in Tuscany organised donkey races. Colin was a good rider. Colin's hero is Antonio Gramsci, who died in prison under Mussolini. Gramsci said you don't need to convince 30% or 50% of the people. You need 80%. By changing the culture of a country. Colin has been trying to do that ever since.
Italy. Ireland. Television. Cultural Studies. Eurocommunism. Aldo Moro. Enrico Berlinguer. James Joyce. Jean-Luc Godard. Better Films Better World.
Talk
Paul Gilroy is a cultural theorist, author of The Black Atlantic, and one of the most important thinkers. On race, culture, and diaspora. He appears in EE1 and EE2. Akshi Singh is a psychoanalyst and writer from Rajasthan working in England on postcolonial theory and the legacies of the Left. She appears in EE1.
Colin MacCabe, Paul Gilroy, and Akshi Singh will be present in person.
Moderated by Francis Gooding, Head of Research at the Derek Jarman Lab, writer for the London Review of Books and The Wire, and author of Black Light: Myth and Meaning in Modern Painting.
Contact name: Matthew Barrington
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