Vladimir et Rosa
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made several films together in the late 1960s and early 1970s using the name Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet 1920s experimental film director. Today I read a long interview from 1970 with the two filmmakers published on the Seven Stories Press website. Just eight days before the Kent State massacre, in which four students protesting Nixon and Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia were murdered by the National Guard, Gorin predicted that American college students would soon face the fire given out by their own government, as French students had been experiencing, especially during the mass protest events of May and June 1968.
The tone of the interview suggests a pair of engaged French intellectuals embarked upon the thankless job of using cinema as a tool for new expressions, subordinated to a political intent never giving way to the lucrative temptation of commercialism.
Vladimir et Rosa (1971) derives its title from the names Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, the latter a leftist Polish-German revolutionary assassinated in 1919 by right wing Freikorps members. The film deals with the concepts of theory and practice. The act of writing about revolution, for example, is theory, while leading a street demonstration is practice. When one gets noticed by the wrong people, danger intensifies.
Godard and Gorin themselves humorously play Vladimir and Rosa, acting out scenarios while engaged in funny and loud banter, Vladimir stuttering, Rosa's voice amplified by a Nagra tape recorder speaker. In this scene the two walk back and forth on a rose colored tennis court while two men and two women hit balls back and forth. Tennis, a bourgeois game enjoyed at such prestigious events as the Wimbledon contests, acts as a perfect backdrop in which the discontent of 1960s Leftists is symbolically played out.
The main narrative deals with the trial of the Chicago Eight, and then the Chicago Seven after Bobby Seale was removed from that trial. Each of the Eight are played by French actors and actresses in the film, two of them familiar from Godard's previous work, Juliet Berto (who was in Two or Three Things I Know About Her and La Chinoise) and Anne Wiazemsky (from La Chinoise and Le Vent d'Est, also Godard's second wife). The trial, depicted in a theatrical way, has the jurors, all anonymous middle-aged French people, standing and watching impassively. Judge Himmler (Ernest Menzer) has no control over his temper, spends his time writing notes on pictures of magazine nudes, at one point, put on the stand, reverting to his role as judge, tells the defense lawyer his objection is overruled.
The film's comedy illuminates the absurdities and cruelties of the actual Chicago Eight trial, when, for instance, the real life Judge Hoffman, having remarked that he's no relation to the defendant Abbie Hoffman, was countered by the latter, "Oh Dad, Dad, why have you forsaken me?"
Bobby Seale, Bobby X in the film, was for a time shackled to his courtroom chair, his wrists chain-connected to his ankles. That this actually happened to a Black man in a Chicago courtroom in the late 1960s should tell us, at the least, about how fearful and corrupt the American legal system was and still is. The Eight were put on trial because of the riots occurring in connection with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. To placate popular viewpoints, eight cops who'd acted with extreme violence during the riots were also put on trial to "balance" the equation. This equation of vicious authority figures acting on behalf of a brutal and racist justice system with those protesting that system demonstrates the cracked mentalities at work, thus justifying in many ways the thrust of this film.
Godard's and Gorin's freeform style, using setbacks as strengths, as for instance their use of cuts to black screens with narration over what initially had been footage shot by CBS, illustrates their point about corporate profit-driven news media holding control over the images they use in a propagandistic manner. As Godard and Gorin say in the interview I read today, movies are movies, reality is reality. They do not pretend that Vladimir et Rosa, even though it deals directly, if satirically, with the Chicago Eight trial, is meant to represent reality. Consequently, it's a fusion of documentary and fiction, and Godard has said, too, that documentaries are fiction.
It took many years for me to be able to see any of Godard's experimental film work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I read about it in books and articles. I didn't anticipate liking this stage of his work, but the examples I've seen so far are consistently fascinating, fresh, and original, just like all of his other work.
Vic Neptune
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made several films together in the late 1960s and early 1970s using the name Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet 1920s experimental film director. Today I read a long interview from 1970 with the two filmmakers published on the Seven Stories Press website. Just eight days before the Kent State massacre, in which four students protesting Nixon and Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia were murdered by the National Guard, Gorin predicted that American college students would soon face the fire given out by their own government, as French students had been experiencing, especially during the mass protest events of May and June 1968.
The tone of the interview suggests a pair of engaged French intellectuals embarked upon the thankless job of using cinema as a tool for new expressions, subordinated to a political intent never giving way to the lucrative temptation of commercialism.
Vladimir et Rosa (1971) derives its title from the names Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, the latter a leftist Polish-German revolutionary assassinated in 1919 by right wing Freikorps members. The film deals with the concepts of theory and practice. The act of writing about revolution, for example, is theory, while leading a street demonstration is practice. When one gets noticed by the wrong people, danger intensifies.
Godard and Gorin themselves humorously play Vladimir and Rosa, acting out scenarios while engaged in funny and loud banter, Vladimir stuttering, Rosa's voice amplified by a Nagra tape recorder speaker. In this scene the two walk back and forth on a rose colored tennis court while two men and two women hit balls back and forth. Tennis, a bourgeois game enjoyed at such prestigious events as the Wimbledon contests, acts as a perfect backdrop in which the discontent of 1960s Leftists is symbolically played out.
The main narrative deals with the trial of the Chicago Eight, and then the Chicago Seven after Bobby Seale was removed from that trial. Each of the Eight are played by French actors and actresses in the film, two of them familiar from Godard's previous work, Juliet Berto (who was in Two or Three Things I Know About Her and La Chinoise) and Anne Wiazemsky (from La Chinoise and Le Vent d'Est, also Godard's second wife). The trial, depicted in a theatrical way, has the jurors, all anonymous middle-aged French people, standing and watching impassively. Judge Himmler (Ernest Menzer) has no control over his temper, spends his time writing notes on pictures of magazine nudes, at one point, put on the stand, reverting to his role as judge, tells the defense lawyer his objection is overruled.
The film's comedy illuminates the absurdities and cruelties of the actual Chicago Eight trial, when, for instance, the real life Judge Hoffman, having remarked that he's no relation to the defendant Abbie Hoffman, was countered by the latter, "Oh Dad, Dad, why have you forsaken me?"
Bobby Seale, Bobby X in the film, was for a time shackled to his courtroom chair, his wrists chain-connected to his ankles. That this actually happened to a Black man in a Chicago courtroom in the late 1960s should tell us, at the least, about how fearful and corrupt the American legal system was and still is. The Eight were put on trial because of the riots occurring in connection with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. To placate popular viewpoints, eight cops who'd acted with extreme violence during the riots were also put on trial to "balance" the equation. This equation of vicious authority figures acting on behalf of a brutal and racist justice system with those protesting that system demonstrates the cracked mentalities at work, thus justifying in many ways the thrust of this film.
Godard's and Gorin's freeform style, using setbacks as strengths, as for instance their use of cuts to black screens with narration over what initially had been footage shot by CBS, illustrates their point about corporate profit-driven news media holding control over the images they use in a propagandistic manner. As Godard and Gorin say in the interview I read today, movies are movies, reality is reality. They do not pretend that Vladimir et Rosa, even though it deals directly, if satirically, with the Chicago Eight trial, is meant to represent reality. Consequently, it's a fusion of documentary and fiction, and Godard has said, too, that documentaries are fiction.
It took many years for me to be able to see any of Godard's experimental film work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I read about it in books and articles. I didn't anticipate liking this stage of his work, but the examples I've seen so far are consistently fascinating, fresh, and original, just like all of his other work.
Vic Neptune
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