Social Movements: clichés and educational networks in the movie Burn!

Abstract

Through images and sounds, establishing a dialogue with the struggles for political independence in nineteenth-century America, the movie Burn! (directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy, 1969) helps us understand the importance of educational networks in building social movements throughout history. The idea of a creative repetition between the nineteenth-century and current movements helps us discuss how the clichés appear in the film and are present in our networks, and how to perceive such movements. Overcoming such clichés seems to be a good tactic for recreating, in the present, so many ways of understanding history and building social movements nowadays. We draw on the ideas of theorists such as Certeau (1994), Deleuze (2005), Castells (2013) etc.