Sustained over a period of hours, this impassioned hubbub conveys tremendous immediacy. (In The Universal Clock, a Canadian documentary on Watkins that Anthology is also showing, the filmmaker can be seen pacing, pointing, and even jumping for emphasis as he conducts the unfolding action.) La Commune is meant to evoke the unfamiliar sensation of revolutionary euphoria, of living—and dying—in a sacred time. Watkins's cast members researched their characters as much as they learned their lines; their performances are less a matter of acting than role-playing. In their 1962 "Theses on the Paris Commune," the French Situationists noted that those who examine history from "the omniscient viewpoint of God [or] the classical novelist . . . can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed. . . . They forget that for those who really lived it, the fulfillment was already there." And so it is here. Focused on process and profoundly anachronistic, La Commune was unfashionably intended to change the lives of its participants.

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Like Culloden, La Commune is in good measure an action film that builds inexorably to a powerful climax. This syncretic work of left-wing modernism—suggesting not only Brecht and Vertov but Soviet mass spectacle and didactic Godard—is at once immediate and self-reflexive. Watkins restages history in its own ruins, uses the media as a frame, and even so, manages to imbue his narrative with amazing presence. No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action.