Product Review

In 1967, Chris Marker and Mario Marret (under the aegis of SLON) produced À BIENTÔT J'ESPÈRE, which documented a strike and factory occupation the first in France since 1936 by textile workers at the Rhodiaceta textile plant in Besançon, the goals of which prefigured many of the demands that would come to define May 1968. Many of the Rhodiaceta workers who had collaborated with Marker and Marret on the film were unhappy with the final production. In response, Marker and other SLON filmmakers reorganized their efforts to begin training workers to collaboratively produce their own films under the name "The Medvedkin Group", after the Russian filmmaker Marker would later memorialize in THE LAST BOLSHEVIK. CLASS OF STRUGGLE is their first production. Picking up in Besançon a year after the events depicted in À BIENTÔT J'ESPÈRE, the film focuses on agitation by workers at the Yema Watch Factory, particularly the efforts of one recently radicalized worker, Suzanne Zedet.