Radical Cinema 1967, Part Two
Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (The Chinese) first came to my eyes in a book, Film: Encounter. A large format book shaped like a movie screen, the numerous black and white stills from a variety of mostly European films, with spare bits of text throughout, illustrate in frozen form ideas from cinema. One shot from La Chinoise I remember from the book, which I checked out from my university library several times, shows Juliet Berto (playing the working class member of the film's small left wing study group) wearing a Vietnamese peasant hat and eating with chopsticks, while two model fighter planes dangle on wires before her. Like many images in the book, it's an arresting image that suggests many things while also existing out of context from the film itself.
Because I didn't know what the film was about, I imagined mainly that this was an image created by a director capable of striking deep chords. I immediately thought, Vietnam War, without having the sense that the movie was made in 1967 and was the kind of political film not possible in Hollywood, perhaps even now. What American studio or group of producers would now finance a movie critical of a war in progress? None of them would. Establishment minds (those with power and without it) don't want to ponder deeply the chaos and destruction they support and finance.
Godard, though, was making a film thirteen years after Dien Bien Phu and the military withdrawal from what was then French Indochina. He was also illustrating the belligerent actions of a foreign nation, the United States, within the context of a film about Marxism-Leninism, Mao, the French Left and the Gaullist government. The presence and use of toy rifles, machine guns, and a bazooka by the students in their rented Paris apartment during the summer of '67, suggests the motif of children playing at conflict. They study The Little Red Book by Mao; hundreds of copies of the book line the apartment's walls, bookshelves, and sometimes are heaped on tables, dusted by Yvonne (Berto), the farm girl from Grenoble (Juliet Berto's actual hometown). She's a nervous person, always moving her hands to her face, twiddling her hair, acting the part of someone who must always be doing something, in lieu of sitting still and thinking; thus, her purpose, apparently, is worker, for she acts like the group's maid.
The others in the group are Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an abrasive young man of sudden mood changes and physical and vocal eruptions; Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky--Godard's second wife), a soft-voiced and determined fanatic who carries out a botched attempted assassination; Henri (Michel Semeniako), who breaks from the group when they embrace the "necessity" of terror; Kirilov (Lex de Bruijn), who loses his marbles, committing suicide.
They study Mao's revolution, determining that they need to create one of their own. Their fervor reflects the social unrest that would break out in France the following year. Their youth combines heightened intellect with foolhardiness. They makes things out to be more simple than they really are, yet they perceive something intolerable growing in French society.
Godard remarked once in an interview that in France it's fine to show full frontal nudity in a film, but the censors are wary and repressive toward political films that express views contrary to the status quo. He said this in the 1960s--whether it's true or not now, I don't know. His second feature film, Le Petit Soldat, dealing with a French assassin on a mission he abandons, to kill some enemy agent during the French-Algerian War, was held back from release for two years.
La Chinoise, a film steeped in politics, passed the censors. The film's youthful and at times silly protagonists may have helped the movie get through. The impracticality of their scheme, to start a Communist revolution in France, considering the tininess of their cell and its lack of influence on the outer world, has no chance of success. It exists as an idea, an attack on existing structures that create warfare, profit from chaos and destruction, allowing these conditions to prevail as the mass of citizenry go along with the destroyers, like those then bombing Vietnam, because the rulers provide something called freedom, and products and services, with an abundance of propaganda in news and entertainment media.
What to replace this system with? I don't know, but the still image I first saw from this film, of Juliet Berto acting the part of a Vietnamese peasant, flanked by war machines, said to me, even then in the 1980s, that there's something seriously fucked up about capitalism. The worst of the Left commit and condone mass murder. The worst of the Right commit and condone mass murder. Caught in the middle of these forces, a woman, a farmer, a Vietnamese peasant, a child playing in the rubble generated by explosions, people squeezed into desperation by warring powers, governments annihilating humans and civilizations, organizations run by lobbyists, think tanks, politicians, well-dressed men and women acting the parts of decent human beings while they turn the dreams of others into dust.
Vic Neptune
Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (The Chinese) first came to my eyes in a book, Film: Encounter. A large format book shaped like a movie screen, the numerous black and white stills from a variety of mostly European films, with spare bits of text throughout, illustrate in frozen form ideas from cinema. One shot from La Chinoise I remember from the book, which I checked out from my university library several times, shows Juliet Berto (playing the working class member of the film's small left wing study group) wearing a Vietnamese peasant hat and eating with chopsticks, while two model fighter planes dangle on wires before her. Like many images in the book, it's an arresting image that suggests many things while also existing out of context from the film itself.
Because I didn't know what the film was about, I imagined mainly that this was an image created by a director capable of striking deep chords. I immediately thought, Vietnam War, without having the sense that the movie was made in 1967 and was the kind of political film not possible in Hollywood, perhaps even now. What American studio or group of producers would now finance a movie critical of a war in progress? None of them would. Establishment minds (those with power and without it) don't want to ponder deeply the chaos and destruction they support and finance.
Godard, though, was making a film thirteen years after Dien Bien Phu and the military withdrawal from what was then French Indochina. He was also illustrating the belligerent actions of a foreign nation, the United States, within the context of a film about Marxism-Leninism, Mao, the French Left and the Gaullist government. The presence and use of toy rifles, machine guns, and a bazooka by the students in their rented Paris apartment during the summer of '67, suggests the motif of children playing at conflict. They study The Little Red Book by Mao; hundreds of copies of the book line the apartment's walls, bookshelves, and sometimes are heaped on tables, dusted by Yvonne (Berto), the farm girl from Grenoble (Juliet Berto's actual hometown). She's a nervous person, always moving her hands to her face, twiddling her hair, acting the part of someone who must always be doing something, in lieu of sitting still and thinking; thus, her purpose, apparently, is worker, for she acts like the group's maid.
The others in the group are Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an abrasive young man of sudden mood changes and physical and vocal eruptions; Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky--Godard's second wife), a soft-voiced and determined fanatic who carries out a botched attempted assassination; Henri (Michel Semeniako), who breaks from the group when they embrace the "necessity" of terror; Kirilov (Lex de Bruijn), who loses his marbles, committing suicide.
They study Mao's revolution, determining that they need to create one of their own. Their fervor reflects the social unrest that would break out in France the following year. Their youth combines heightened intellect with foolhardiness. They makes things out to be more simple than they really are, yet they perceive something intolerable growing in French society.
Godard remarked once in an interview that in France it's fine to show full frontal nudity in a film, but the censors are wary and repressive toward political films that express views contrary to the status quo. He said this in the 1960s--whether it's true or not now, I don't know. His second feature film, Le Petit Soldat, dealing with a French assassin on a mission he abandons, to kill some enemy agent during the French-Algerian War, was held back from release for two years.
La Chinoise, a film steeped in politics, passed the censors. The film's youthful and at times silly protagonists may have helped the movie get through. The impracticality of their scheme, to start a Communist revolution in France, considering the tininess of their cell and its lack of influence on the outer world, has no chance of success. It exists as an idea, an attack on existing structures that create warfare, profit from chaos and destruction, allowing these conditions to prevail as the mass of citizenry go along with the destroyers, like those then bombing Vietnam, because the rulers provide something called freedom, and products and services, with an abundance of propaganda in news and entertainment media.
What to replace this system with? I don't know, but the still image I first saw from this film, of Juliet Berto acting the part of a Vietnamese peasant, flanked by war machines, said to me, even then in the 1980s, that there's something seriously fucked up about capitalism. The worst of the Left commit and condone mass murder. The worst of the Right commit and condone mass murder. Caught in the middle of these forces, a woman, a farmer, a Vietnamese peasant, a child playing in the rubble generated by explosions, people squeezed into desperation by warring powers, governments annihilating humans and civilizations, organizations run by lobbyists, think tanks, politicians, well-dressed men and women acting the parts of decent human beings while they turn the dreams of others into dust.
Vic Neptune
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