El último viaje de los Baby Boom. Vida y muerte del espacio público en el cine de los años 60-70.

Abstract

The generation of those born at the end of the Second World War reached their youth carried by the inertia of the technocratic optimism developed by the previous generation. In a context of economic bonanza, the younger generation rebelled against the system, creating a new sensibility that would spawn different countercultural responses. Within these attempts to change society, cities witnessed a recodification of public spaces. Urban space, discredited by the echoes of the ‘death of the street’ promoted by Le Corbusier, was reactivated as a stage for protest and action. However, this revival of public space was rapidly suffocated by the disenchantment of the youth. Once the impossibility to transform the system had been confirmed, a search for new territories started, which cinema interpreted following two strategies: on the one hand, through the production of definitely inhospitable and devastated urban spaces; on the other, by retreating to the individual sphere, which reflected on new modes of habitation. Small communities, communes, and the return to a controlled rural life would be responses which, far from building public realm, would ultimately provide the system with the argument it was looking for in order to destroy and reconfigure the public domain. The films of the late 1960s and early 1970s show the ultimate defeat of a desire which, in the end, was attached to an iconography of destruction, abandonment, and emptiness.