May 1968: Cinematic Aftermath

      Lotte in Italia (Struggles in Italy, from 1971) and Un film comme les autres (A Film Like Any Other, from 1968) resemble abstract paintings; cinema not meant to conform to narrative practices typical of storytelling from Hollywood or anywhere else.

     After May 1968, with France's explosive general strike, workers walking out from their jobs and demanding progressive changes from their employers, leftist intellectuals like Jean-Luc Godard tried to make sense of what happened.  In A Film Like Any Other, Godard went from making One Plus One (featuring the world famous Rolling Stones) to directing a group of non-actors sitting in a field of overgrown grass near boxy apartment buildings reminiscent of the geometric backgrounds in his film, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), an amazing movie revealing its riches more and more with each viewing, yet possessing the spirit of experimentalism present, pungently, in A Film Like Any Other, Lotte in Italia, and several other challenging movies of his made from 1968 to 1980, the year he returned to making narrative (though still Godardian) cinema.

     A group of students and a worker, their faces mostly not seen, sit in the overgrown grass, smoking cigarettes, analyzing and strategizing, their ideas a mishmash of practical methods learned from May 1968 combined with some youthful and even silly idealism, as when one of them suggests that only "high quality" films be shown on television.  What is a high quality film?  I assume the student means a movie with relevant socially critical content, which rules out, among thousands of "quality" films, The Wages of Fear (1953), an exciting action movie pitting Yves Montand's character against South American jungle dangers as he and his partner drive a truck filled with nitroglycerin over bad roads and bridges during a torrential rainstorm.  In other words, a great film having nothing to do with politics or regular societal activities but possessed of a great script, great direction and performances, and a great story thrilling to experience even over seventy years later.

     Such a film, perhaps, may be considered bourgeois (bugbear of the European intellectual left), but as entertainment, it's magnificent.  I mention this one line in Godard's film, the expression of disgust for French TV of 1968, to challenge myself to wonder how a peculiar, experimental movie such as A Film Like Any Other, or any of Godard's radical films from 1968 and into the 1970s, can simultaneously be so odd and anti-narrative but also be so intriguing to encounter as an art work; that is, if the viewer is willing to be a sponge soaking in 100 minutes of students talking, mixed with black and white on the street imagery from May 1968: cops spraying people using water cannons, engaging violently with protestors, thousands of students marching in support of striking workers.

     The film's in-the-grass color scenes contrast sharply with the black and white footage, which looks much older, even though Godard's group of students and one worker speak their ideas just a few months after May's general strike.  Sitting around talking, or really doing something?  I recall the opening scene of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), with the male protagonist, after listening to several minutes of student planning for their next demonstration, stands up and tells them they don't know how to do a revolution, they're full of hot air.  He proceeds to kill a cop and go on the run; not an effective way to lead a revolt, probably, but by 1969, perhaps, when Antonioni made the movie, some coherence had crumbled away from youth-led movements, with students themselves, as at Kent State in 1970, becoming target practice for government forces.

     Lotte in Italia deals with a young Italian woman (Cristiana Tullio-Altan) exploring leftist ideas but challenged constantly by bourgeois temptations; a person, like many, capable of being influenced by the capitalist propaganda ever present in Western societies.  This film has a more dynamic flow than the other: but neither film would I recommend to a Godard-newcomer.  Watch some of his narrative (yet experimental) earlier work first before tackling such baffling non-narrative experiments like the two films dealt with in this essay.  Or not.  I'm just recommending that a viewer interested in trying out a Godard movie might want to start with Breathless (1960) or Band of Outsiders (1964).  Even in those films, though, the director plays with the so-called limitations of the medium, adding little touches no Hollywood executive would have ever tolerated in the old days, or even now, like when Sami Frey in Band of Outsiders tells his companions that a minute of silence can seem to last forever, this followed by a minute of silence on the audio track.  I can't picture Robert Taylor or Rod Taylor in 1964 saying the same thing followed by their directors imposing silence on the audience.

     Godard was always a bit of a filmmaking weirdo in the 1960s and 1970s.  He followed, always, his artistic instincts, never compromising them.  He pushed, and still pushes (his latest feature film coming out just two years ago) the boundaries of what cinema, fundamentally, is.  As the Russian genius filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, wrote, "The longer I work in cinema the more convinced I am that this domain of art is not ruled by any laws.  I do not even attempt to find them.  Everything is possible."

     That Tarkovsky did "not even attempt to find" the "laws," indicates a creative mind, like Godard's, not bound by conventionality.  I enjoy the fact that a famous director like Godard was so willing in the late 1960s and 1970s to make such crowd-displeasing movies as the ones dealt with here; to have the nerve to call one of them A Film Like Any Other (in 1968 it really wasn't like any other movie) or to shoot a movie mostly in his apartment about political controversies in Italy.  Tiny budgets, a quest for non-stardom, a willingness to not have his name on the final product even as these two films scream "This is a Godard movie!  No one else would make a movie like this!"

     I admire that, even as I, a Godard appreciator, find such films of his from 1968 to 1979 challenging on a level I can't compare to anything else I've seen.  One must, to enjoy such "entertainment," set aside all preconceived notions about rules of cinema.  Must soak it in, waiting for the impacts of image, emotion, and philosophical viewpoints, to alter perceptions, making possible never before personally experienced revelations.  

Vic Neptune