Godard 1970
Le Vent d'Est (The East Wind) refers to revolution, to Marxism, to Mao. In 1970, two years after the French societal upheaval of May 1968, the Dziga Vertov Group, headed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, made this anti-Western, a film shot in the French countryside, dealing with unions, strikes, philosophical musings about leftist politics. The role of language in shaping perception.
The film proved to be more than I could absorb in one sitting, Godard's ideas spoken to the viewer by unseen voices, by characters that aren't characters as we see them in their real selves but also dressed up in nineteenth century costumes.
A cavalry officer (the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte, so memorable in For a Few Dollars More and Le Cercle Rouge), a factory owner's daughter (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard's second wife), and fifteen or so other performers and crew acting out scenarios made doubly artificial by the narration, such as when we're told that the officer is not an officer, the horse is not a horse, this is not the American frontier of Western legend. Hollywood creates constructs projected to the rest of the world, making for a tremendous impact on the cinema-going experiences of millions of non-Americans.
Godard's view of this cultural mass of movies from America seems to be that they're a dictation of what reality is, coming from the Hollywood studio system, backed by Wall Street wealth, thus, capitalism's dreams. The film encourages and suggests the coming of a pushing back from "the East," overwhelming the "wind from the west."
In 1970, with America's war in Southeast Asia demonstrating its desperate strategies in the bombing of Cambodia, this easterly wind must've seemed, to Godard and other French intellectuals still riding the past crested wave of 1968, a strong, permanent change. The West, though, and its money and resources, its endless desire to conquer and control, have prevailed shakily, while the People's Republic of China, after the death of Mao, eventually became a strange blend of communism and capitalism, their East Wind consisting of the avalanche of products sold to the West.
What Godard saw, though, in 1970 with this film, was the bankrupt nature of imperialism. He demonstrates this with a riveting and painful scene wherein the cavalry officer (Volonte, a professional actor unlike many of the film's other performers, thus, someone with a great deal of on screen gravity) holds Anne Wiazemsky in a choke hold, releasing his positioning of his forearm against her throat, and then tightening it again, over and over while she gets splashed with blood (red paint, obviously, but still a striking effect). The "blood" hitting her red hair and also his knuckles at one point equates to a simple binary form of stylized violence; an idea of bloodshed, of power stomping on a helpless victim, as the U.S. Cavalry did to Native Americans, as imperialists of all times and countless nations have done and do. She can't breathe, now she can breathe (but she's in his power), she can't breathe, now she can breathe (but only in response to his will), et cetera.
Right now, the United States and the United Kingdom are doing to Venezuela what Godard depicted in that one difficult to watch scene between Volonte and Wiazemsky.
Since Godard has presented political ideas in his films throughout his career and his ideological thrust is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, his work isn't prone to becoming dated. The people's political struggle of 1968 as dealt with in his film Le Gai Savoir finds common ground with the current Yellow Vest protest movement in France today. In Band of Outsiders from 1964, Godard's two somewhat comic protagonists kill time in one scene reading parts of newspaper stories out loud, one of them giving an account of terrible violence in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis, a full thirty years before the infamous genocide in that central African country.
The East Wind, like every other Godard film I've seen, for all its confusing moments coming after having seen it just once, plants itself squarely in 1970, in the Vietnam War era, in post-1968, in a period when Hollywood had fragmented from its previous position of centralized power, giving way to television. It's 1970 in the film, yet, it's also right now, making it not propaganda. Consider all the World War Two era Hollywood movies and short subjects dealing fully or in part with the war effort--how dated those films are to watch now. Not so with Godard's films, and for that reason alone among others, Le Vent d'Est is worth examining. Of all places, I watched it on Amazon Prime, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, the type of person helping throw the red paint.
Vic Neptune
Le Vent d'Est (The East Wind) refers to revolution, to Marxism, to Mao. In 1970, two years after the French societal upheaval of May 1968, the Dziga Vertov Group, headed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, made this anti-Western, a film shot in the French countryside, dealing with unions, strikes, philosophical musings about leftist politics. The role of language in shaping perception.
The film proved to be more than I could absorb in one sitting, Godard's ideas spoken to the viewer by unseen voices, by characters that aren't characters as we see them in their real selves but also dressed up in nineteenth century costumes.
A cavalry officer (the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte, so memorable in For a Few Dollars More and Le Cercle Rouge), a factory owner's daughter (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard's second wife), and fifteen or so other performers and crew acting out scenarios made doubly artificial by the narration, such as when we're told that the officer is not an officer, the horse is not a horse, this is not the American frontier of Western legend. Hollywood creates constructs projected to the rest of the world, making for a tremendous impact on the cinema-going experiences of millions of non-Americans.
Godard's view of this cultural mass of movies from America seems to be that they're a dictation of what reality is, coming from the Hollywood studio system, backed by Wall Street wealth, thus, capitalism's dreams. The film encourages and suggests the coming of a pushing back from "the East," overwhelming the "wind from the west."
In 1970, with America's war in Southeast Asia demonstrating its desperate strategies in the bombing of Cambodia, this easterly wind must've seemed, to Godard and other French intellectuals still riding the past crested wave of 1968, a strong, permanent change. The West, though, and its money and resources, its endless desire to conquer and control, have prevailed shakily, while the People's Republic of China, after the death of Mao, eventually became a strange blend of communism and capitalism, their East Wind consisting of the avalanche of products sold to the West.
What Godard saw, though, in 1970 with this film, was the bankrupt nature of imperialism. He demonstrates this with a riveting and painful scene wherein the cavalry officer (Volonte, a professional actor unlike many of the film's other performers, thus, someone with a great deal of on screen gravity) holds Anne Wiazemsky in a choke hold, releasing his positioning of his forearm against her throat, and then tightening it again, over and over while she gets splashed with blood (red paint, obviously, but still a striking effect). The "blood" hitting her red hair and also his knuckles at one point equates to a simple binary form of stylized violence; an idea of bloodshed, of power stomping on a helpless victim, as the U.S. Cavalry did to Native Americans, as imperialists of all times and countless nations have done and do. She can't breathe, now she can breathe (but she's in his power), she can't breathe, now she can breathe (but only in response to his will), et cetera.
Right now, the United States and the United Kingdom are doing to Venezuela what Godard depicted in that one difficult to watch scene between Volonte and Wiazemsky.
Since Godard has presented political ideas in his films throughout his career and his ideological thrust is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, his work isn't prone to becoming dated. The people's political struggle of 1968 as dealt with in his film Le Gai Savoir finds common ground with the current Yellow Vest protest movement in France today. In Band of Outsiders from 1964, Godard's two somewhat comic protagonists kill time in one scene reading parts of newspaper stories out loud, one of them giving an account of terrible violence in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis, a full thirty years before the infamous genocide in that central African country.
The East Wind, like every other Godard film I've seen, for all its confusing moments coming after having seen it just once, plants itself squarely in 1970, in the Vietnam War era, in post-1968, in a period when Hollywood had fragmented from its previous position of centralized power, giving way to television. It's 1970 in the film, yet, it's also right now, making it not propaganda. Consider all the World War Two era Hollywood movies and short subjects dealing fully or in part with the war effort--how dated those films are to watch now. Not so with Godard's films, and for that reason alone among others, Le Vent d'Est is worth examining. Of all places, I watched it on Amazon Prime, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, the type of person helping throw the red paint.
Vic Neptune
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