LA CHINOISE (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

If The Fall is a study of a time and a place that simultaneously maps an inner landscape, La Chinoise is in some ways its reverse. A film that attentively traces the psychological, intellectual and ideological experiences of a small group of politicised French students, it is also a microcosm of a generation at a moment when revolution was a genuine, and earnestly desired for, possibility. In more recent years, it has even been hailed as prophetic: the quintessential May '68 film despite being completed and released in the summer of '67.

While dating the young actress Anne Wiazemsky (soon to be his wife), Jean-Luc Godard began spending time with Maoist radicals at the university where she was a student: Nanterre, one of the strongholds of student revolt in '68. Godard, who was discovering his own political identity at the time, was fascinated by the Maoists: they were passionate, militant and intellectually rigorous, and had divorced themselves from the PCF (the official French communist party). Soon Godard would be openly joining their ranks, but La Chinoise (filmed and edited in a matter of months in early '67) by no means makes this clear. As critic Keith Reader has written, the film "was generally perceived on its release as a satire on Maoism rather than a polemical embracing of it" and, unsurprisingly, Maoists hated it. More recently, the film has even been praised by critics such as Armond White for illustrating "how Left romanticism can betray personal and democratic ideals". Yet, if many of his characters' convictions were his own, why would he make a film (“a film in the process of making itself”, as he called it) that would reveal those same beliefs as so problematic?

In making sense of La Chinoise, it helps to recognise its position as one of the key transitional works in Godard's career—emerging at the end of his prolific string of French New Wave classics (from Breathless [1960] to Made in USA [1966]), and on the cusp of his stark rejection of commercial cinema under the guise of the Marxist-Leninist film collective, the Dziga Vertov Group. Weekend (1967), the film made immediately after La Chinoise, would signify his definitive break with what had come before (it ends with the words, "END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD"), and it would in turn be followed by the minimalist Le Gai Savoir (1968), an explicit attempt to "return to zero" and start afresh. But in La Chinoise, the "old Godard" and the "new Godard" are both present, and the results reveal some of the consistent principles that have underlined the diverse phases of his career.

Godard's output from '60 to '67 has been firmly canonised in film history—but while the likes of Bande á Part (1964) and Alphaville (1965) have been re-released in DVD boxsets and parodied in commercials, almost everything since his '67/'68 shift has been ignored with impressive consistency. Most mainstream accounts characterise his subsequent developments as either a descent into dogmatism or solipsism—but in reality, Godard's turn in '68 was less of a foolhardy conversion than an inevitable tipping point. Since the start of his career, Godard had been experimenting with cinematic form. Searching for his own expressive language, Godard began by appropriating and reworking the styles and genres (mostly American) that had inspired him. However, as the '60s progressed, the social and political implications of these formal concerns became more and more pronounced, and Godard's innovations (still safely within the realm of mainstream narrative cinema, albeit on its margins) no longer seemed innovative enough. The emergence of a new generation of radical and culturally-engaged activists was undoubtedly one factor that accelerated Godard's development: according to his biographer, Richard Brody, it became evident to Godard "that the radical politics of the time had surpassed the radicalism of his cinema".

An awareness of and attempts to critique political and social problems had been working their way into Godard's films for several years, in tandem with a growing formal sophistication. The contrary looseness and irony of Breathless (rules of composition and montage violated, people playing at being movie stars and living out B-movie plots) gradually gave way to increasingly complex methods of self-reflexivity: jarring disruptions and dislocations of sound and image, actors breaking out of character, blatantly artificial actions and effects and, above all, a proliferation of quoted images (TV, movies, photographs, paintings) and texts (spoken by actors or narrators, inserted as titles, or scrawled on any available surface). For those who had misunderstood what he was attempting in the first place, these developments seemed like exasperating wrong turns—but Godard hadn't changed his approach so much as sharpened his tools.

If anyone had gone to Godard's films wishing to be told a story, it was abundantly clear by 1967 that they were looking in the wrong place. However, it's a mistake to characterise Godard's formal project in purely negative terms; his cinema, even at its most oblique, is as structured and principled as Hollywood narrative; they're just different structures and different principles, with different effects and implications. Several metaphors have been used to describe Godard's conception of cinema but perhaps the most useful was suggested by Serge Daney in an essay called "Godardian Pedagogy": cinema as school.

The metaphor can be applied in several ways and most of them are appropriate: Godard is alternately teacher and student, but so is the film itself; as are the actors and (potentially) the audience. This isn't school in its institutionalised sense (which in cinematic terms, would probably be called propaganda); the teacher/student dynamic in Godard's work is not a fixed hierarchy but an evershifting roleplay to facilitate learning. This is school as a place for asking questions and learning how to ask better ones; for challenging and being challenged; for studying, researching and experimenting; for making assertions, then revising them. School that is, as critic Nicole Brenez described Godard's cinema, 

a permanent laboratory of understanding and exchange with phenomena, the place where we can see most clearly human thought at work, in its obscure stumblings, in the impatience of its efforts, its tensions and its ironies.

Nowhere does the metaphor fit as aptly than with La Chinoise. Like the three or so films that preceded it (Godard was averaging two a year by this stage), dense citations of images, texts and sounds abound in this film—but it's the first in which Godard's powers of juxtaposition and interrogation are matched by his own characters. One of the ways Godard facilitates this is by putting his characters in a scenario in which they can create their own makeshift montages. Limiting the film's action almost entirely to the plush apartment where the five politicised students spend their summer together, Godard offers his characters its blank walls and spacious rooms as a tabula rasa for use as their own screen, canvas, gallery, stage and, of course, classroom. The texts, images, sounds and performances with which they fill these spaces are still mostly orchestrated by Godard, but by dramatising his own formal techniques within the film's narrative, he manages to not just question the various social, political, cultural issues at hand, but question the very forms that his questions take.

That may sound like a tautological, postmodern stunt—but in the context of Godard's burgeoning politicisation and the revolutionary storms then on the horizon, it can be seen as an attempt to maintain perspective during heightened, impassioned times. This self-critical form can be considered in various ways, but one of the most important is its examination of Godard's extensive use of quotations. In many of Godard's '60s work, there is a sense that his characters are possessed by texts. In Masculin Feminin (1966), Godard famously describes his young Parisian characters as "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola", and the phrasing suggests how the youth for Godard are rarely in control of the signs they express themselves with; the texts speak them rather than the other way around. In La Chinoise, the process of radicalisation is revealed to be as susceptible to this as anything else. The characters may be quoting Mao rather than Bogart, but the problems are the same. As Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Leaud say in the film's first few minutes: "We are the words of others".

The second target of self-critique is the way in which politics and ideology are inevitably mixed with baser human needs, desires and weaknesses. It's not just a critique of capitalism that sustains these revolutionaries, but also charisma (Leaud is an icon of French New Wave cinema), passion (is the Little Red Book everywhere because of its content or because of its colour?), spectacle (the agit-prop theatre, comic book imagery and pop music) and community (before La Chinoise, Godard's characters were usually loners). No wonder the Maoists were considered by some as France's political "New Wave". The film allows us to appreciate the energy of this, while never letting us forget that, as Brody writes, “These young people are in effect on summer vacation and not so much forming a cell as playing at one."

The third key object of self-critique is dogmatism. Keith Reader writes:

The dogmatic rhetoric that dominates the film has an incantory appeal, a self-enclosed and circular religious certainty that shuns the ambiguities of critical thought and introspection for the energising simplicity of exhortation and advocacy. To reach such naïve ecstasies, Godard had to film his own brainwashing.

But it's unfair to equate the film itself with the dogmatism it explores. Some scenes, such as Leaud erasing a list of great playwrights one by one until only Brecht is left, can be seen as expressions of Godard's own emerging purism (he certainly made many statements as sweeping as this in interviews), and in this sense, Brody is right to call this gesture “something of an intellectual suicide”. But in its position within the film, it is also an examination of that dogmatism in the process of working itself out: a truly dogmatic film would have simply stated "Brecht is theatre" rather than showing us the wilful negation that makes such a statement possible. As Gilles Deleuze put it, in Godard's hands, it is “a method which cinema must ponder at the same time as it uses it”.

This interrogation within the interrogation has another advantage, because while it pushes his self-critical approach further, it also gestures beyond it, raising the question of action. In putting Godard's methods into his characters' hands—into the world, so to speak—he leads us to ask what should actually be done. The paths of each character suggest several different possibilities, and none of them are ideal: one rejoins the Communist Party, another commits suicide, a third makes a bungled assassination attempt on a politician and Jean-Pierre Leaud embraces avant-garde theatre. If Godard seems to avoid drawing a conclusion here, it's partly because he really doesn't know. As he said of an earlier film, he devotes himself to problem posing rather than problem solving: "If one thinks after seeing the film, ‘he showed this but not the solution,’ one should be grateful to the film, not angry with it."

The specifics of La Chinoise's politics may be dated and, in key aspects, seriously misguided—but as a model of politicised film form it's still powerful. Both on its initial release and more recently, some have approached the film by seizing one single element as the film's overarching viewpoint. Jean de Baroncelli, for example, wrote at the time that the film was “an avatar—vintage 1967—of the eternal revolt of youth", while Armond White has since hailed the film for "refusing to be a pet of cultural progressives" and instead showing "their dogmatic rigidity and arrogance". This  romanticism and cynicism are both in the film, but they do not define it, any more than the Maoist pop song (created specially for the film) could be taken as Godard's definitive take on Mao. The blogger Zach Campbell suggested that the most interesting thing about Godard is that "his didacticism is shared with the viewer—as is his ignorance". Daney observed that "there is always a great unknown in his pedagogy, and that is the fact that the nature of the relationship he maintains with his "good" discourses (those he defends) is undecidable." His work is one proof of the saying "trust the tale, not the teller"—or, put another way, the films have a greater capacity for honesty and clarity than their own author.

A case in point: In a key scene in the film, Wiazemsky (playing a Nanterre student) and Francis Jeanson (a real professor at Nanterre and former participant in the Algerian resistance) enact an unscripted debate on the necessity of violent action. Jeanson insists it is futile without popular grassroots support, but Wiazemsky (her responses dictated by Godard through an earpiece) begs to differ. The film gives each side an equal footing in the discussion, but Jeanson clearly emerges as the voice of reason here. And yet, during the making of the film, Godard believed that Jeanson was wrong—it would be years before Godard would come round to the perspective his own film seemed to put forth.

Even if the film's inquisitive openness allowed such perspectives to be included, there are still some things La Chinoise assumes as given. The students' attempts at re-definition are flawed, but re-definition is nonetheless essential; their attempts at resistance are naive, but resistance is still imperative. The film ends with two important lines by Wiazemsky that capture this mixture of humility and assurance: first, she admits her folly, saying “Yes, OK, it’s a fiction—but it brought me closer to reality.” The final line (accompanied by a title declaring "The End of a Beginning") could as well have been spoken by Godard: “I thought I had made a great leap forward, and now I realise that I have only made the first timid steps of a very long march.” 

What's more, the act of quotation, despite its dangers, is ultimately seen by Godard as something to be harnessed rather than dismissed. Nicole Brenez says of Godard that "all the texts, sounds, shots and cuts in his work are citational and, if they ever appear original, it is simply because we have not yet come across the reference." The problem is not in the act of quoting itself. As Godard says, "When I shoot in the street then that, too, is a quote for me. After all, I didn't invent the Champs-Elysées." The question is in our ability to appropriate them, to use them rather than be used by them. Many years later, in the final minutes of his magnum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998), Godard would quote a passage by Denis de Rougemont from his book Penser Avec Les Mains. Rougemont asserts that "man's true condition is to think with his hands". But in taking creative action,

... The danger is not in our tools but in the weakness of our hands ... A thought which abandons itself to the rhythm of its own mechanisms proletarianises itself. Such a thought no longer lives of its own creation. Man is formed by others.

This process by which our thought is "proletarianised" (that is, made to be submissive, alienated, no longer our own) can be at the hands of a cinematic form, an ideology, or any other unquestioned premise underlying our expressions and actions. And it's from here that we can see that Godard's endless forms of reflection and interrogation are not an avoidance of radical action but a method by which those actions can be truly radical—that is, our own. 

THE FALL (1969, Peter Whitehead)

In “I Destroy, Therefore I Am”, a revealing essay written shortly after completing The Fall, Peter Whitehead writes, “For me my only weapon is film.” Notions of the assaultive power of moving images are almost as old as cinema itself, but such rhetoric came into its own in the 1960s. The increasingly transparent forces of state oppression, particularly as seen in the Vietnam War (the first televised war), lent an air of urgency to artistic activity. The Newsreel, a New York-based radical film collective, talked about making films that “explode like grenades in peoples’ faces”, and this desire for confrontation was widespread, informing strategies across the arts. Whitehead was not a political activist, however, and if he used cinema as a weapon, it was an interrogative rather than a coercive one, and something he wielded against himself as much as those around him. He describes his film in its opening as “a series of historical moments seeking a synthesis”, and in its diverse documentation of late ‘60s New York it is certainly that. But it is also very much a personal attempt to make sense of the world in order to act within it: a study of an individual seeking a praxis. As Whitehead would later say, “I put myself together by putting the film together.”

Starting his career as a TV cameraman, Whitehead directed a series of documentaries on British subjects throughout the ‘60s, including Charlie Is My Darling (1966), following the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland, and culminating with Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), the quintessential document of “Swingin’ London”. Feeling he had exhausted his interest in the London scene—he later said, “There seemed nothing more to film in London except my boredom, despair and apathy”—Whitehead took the opportunity of an invitation to the New York Film Festival to make a film about the cultural and political upheavals then in motion in the US. He would spend the next few months (from October 1967 to June 1968) living in and filming New York City.

From the sixty or so hours of footage Whitehead brought back to England with him, several films could have been made. There was undoubtedly ample material for a compelling cinema verité-style documentary, as his contemporaries Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers were (and still are) doing: a document of things “as they happened”, without narration or interviews. A director with a specific political agenda may have assembled the footage as a defence and rallying call for the New Left Movement, venerating activists and reinforcing their claims, while demonising the State. But Whitehead’s film is unique in that it is neither impartial nor didactic. The Fall does not argue the case of the New Left movement or any of its factions, but neither does it assume any pretense of objectivity towards its subjects. Instead, it foregrounds Whitehead’s own relationship to events (going so far as to add scenes of himself revisiting footage in the editing room), and creates a dialectic between distanced appraisal and impassioned advocacy, facilitated by Whitehead’s ambivalence towards radical politics. A natural filmmaker-voyeur (he admitted to impulsively “zooming and panning and editing with my eyes and ears”), Whitehead was astute and observant enough to recognise the myriad ways in which modern society was alienating and dispossessing its citizens, and the need for individual and collective resistance. But he was too observant to commit wholeheartedly to most of the forms of resistance he saw taking place. Yearning for a way to engage with and counter the injustice around him, Whitehead was nonetheless committed to doing so with his eyes wide open—whether that meant including details that undermined the radical cause, or even those that undermined his own authority as the filmmaker.

This (perhaps irreconcilable) struggle between taking action and seeing clearly is so fundamental that it informs The Fall at every level—politically, aesthetically and metaphysically—and explains why the film takes the shape it does; it wouldn’t make sense to explore such a question within a form that had already, implicitly, settled on answer. Stylistically raw, exultant and startling, and packed with unexpected cuts and abrasive music, The Fall juts and jars around in ways that can at first seem haphazard and confused. While confusion is a necessary component of the problem Whitehead is exploring, if the film itself seems unformed, it’s only because, on a narrative level, we are not privy to a story or verbal argument on which to hang on to. Most political cinema tends to foreground “the message”, considering formal concerns as secondary or even peripheral, so it may take some adjustment to recognise that it’s at the formal level that Whitehead’s real political exploration is taking place.

The most overt element of this approach is the film’s three-part structure: In part one, “The Image”, Whitehead absorbs himself in the spectacle of the city, passively taking in the sights and the sounds. Part two, “The Word”, introduces Whitehead in the editing room, trying to structure and take control of this imagery; here, he says, “I start cutting, analysing and thinking.” In the final section, “Word and Image”, the possibility of a synthesis of vision and action is explored through the filmmaker’s participation in the 1968 student occupation of Columbia University.

Within each of these parts, Whitehead explores the film’s central question in several ways, considering different forms of resistance (and co-option), critiquing his own position as an observer, and in the tour de force climactic frenzy of the middle section, seeking a way to act through film itself. As it progresses, there are elements that may seem highly objectionable, but start to make more sense when considered in relation to the whole. In the film’s first section, Whitehead articulates his passive submission to spectacle through a channel-hopping montage aesthetic that actively works against the kind of synthesis the film professes to be seeking. Addressing the commodification and co-option of radical politics (already remarkably widespread by 1967), he dives into it head first, arranging a fashion shoot of an Italian model wearing a “peace dress” and telling her to act sexy. As isolated segments, these sequences could be argued to be part of the problem Whitehead is seeking to overcome, but within the multi-layered and self-critical mosaic that The Fall amounts to, they are strategies to be experienced and questioned rather than approved or submitted to.

Two more complex examples later on in the film bring this issue into focus. In what at first seems like one of the film’s most irrelevant and indulgent sequences, Whitehead films the Italian model (now his girlfriend) dancing in his apartment, his camera roaming her body in an unabashedly sexualised and predatory fashion. But the legitimacy of this scene’s approach is undermined from all directions. Aurally, the scene’s imagery is undercut with a quite brilliant narration from Whitehead that seems oblivious to the allure of its visual counterpart, abstractly discussing urban alienation and notions of objectification and objectivity, particularly as exploited by the media. Structurally, it is directly followed by a photographer discussing an erotic image of Marilyn Monroe and how the photograph must be transformed into an object in order to be sold. But above all, by emphasising Whitehead’s presence in the scene, and his relationship with his subject, the film brings the idea of objectification out of the mass media and into an interpersonal context, and in the process underlines the flawed and partial gaze of the cameraman whose images we have been immersed in.

A little later, we witness perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film: a Destructivist performance art event in which the artist Ralph Ortiz beats a chicken to death against a piano. The act is horrific, and the degree of Whitehead’s complicity in filming the event (though no more so than that of the paying audience which also witnessed it) should not be glossed over. But by being positioned so centrally and openly in the film (and paired with another steely voiceover, this time asserting that “murder is the ultimate act of objectification”), the scene serves both as a corrective to historical notions of ‘60s radical art, and a further interrogation of Whitehead’s position within the film. On the one hand, the alienation and frustration that fueled the social and cultural storms of the ‘60s is revealed at its basest and least romantic; on the other, Whitehead’s equivocation between detachment and engagement is now no longer tenable: witnessing is participating.

Whitehead has speculated that his films may have been “acts of aggression against film, against limits put on me by the nature of film itself”—and The Fall can be understood as an attempt to put those limits to the test. As participatory as the act of filming inevitably is, the indexical, second-hand nature of moving images can often militate against any sense of participation and engagement for the viewer—the social effect of which Guy Debord had brilliantly outlined in his book The Society of the Spectacle, the same year that Whitehead began The Fall. In Whitehead’s words:

In the culture we live in images are used to alienate us, not to invite us to participate. … The whole principle of the modern society in which we are saturated by images is that the images are aggressive, violating. They are violating us and deliberately making us feel alienated from everything, including ourselves, our own feelings and our own natural selves. The Fall is the ultimate expression of this kind of engulfment in images.

However, in “expressing” this engulfment, Whitehead seeks not to submit to it but to transform it. How to make an image that is not alienating—an image that demands participation, that empowers rather than pacifies? Whitehead implies: not by telling us to be empowered, or by illustrating empowerment, but by embodying it. As critic Ray Carney has put it, “you must reinvent the language to make it capable of carrying the meanings [you want] it to bear”. Recalling Serge Daney’s phrase that someone with a true passion for cinema expects everything from cinema, including “that cinema should free him from cinema”, Whitehead ultimately rejects the (too easily co-opted) theatre of protest and the (self-defeating) frustrated idealism of destruction, hesitantly embracing instead the collective and prefigurative direct action of the Columbia occupation—a position that inevitably pushes beyond cinema altogether.

Of course, as The Fall powerfully depicts, the Columbia occupation—and the ‘60s New Left movement as a whole—largely failed. As Whitehead would later say, “What I was actually filming was the collapse - the 'fall' - of an increasingly ineffective and impotent protest movement.” Nonetheless, as an attempt to redefine the relationship between cinema and the spectator that is both forceful and generous, this film has few peers. At one point in the film, Robert Lowell introduces a poem by clarifying, “This is not a propaganda poem, it’s a lived poem—there’s a difference”. Whitehead would later assert:

I want people to examine, re-examine their response to the world, their ability to see it as true or false. It's the basis of any morality, this belief in one's own experience. … I have used this film to re-examine my own existence and hope it will thus become valid for someone else, not because I tell them about it. I try to let it happen to them, by letting the film that happened to me, happen to them.

In bringing us into a “lived film”, Whitehead challenges us to match his own interrogative powers and to consider different models of vision and action—while acknowledging that the fundamental question of “what next?” is not something he can answer for us.

INTRODUCTION

"Films Politically" is a new series of Experimental Film Club screenings taking place at the autonomous social centre Seomra Spraoi, every second Tuesday at 8pm, beginning on February 17th. The series will explore the convergence of film and radical politics in the late 1960s from the perspective summed up in Jean-Luc Godard's famous line: "The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically."

For over a century, film has been recognised as a powerful political tool---but in the heightened climate of the US and Europe in the late 1960s, that power was understood in new and innovative ways. One of the key characteristics of the radical cinema that emerged in this time, particular in the epicentres of New York and Paris, was a keen awareness of the political implications of form, style and the filmmaking process that has often been neglected in contemporary radical and activist filmmaking.

For these filmmakers, it was not possible to simply make a Hollywood film, using the established modes of production and distribution and the established stylistic and narrative conventions, and insert within that a set of radical anti-war or anti-capitalist messages. It was not possible because those established conventions were not neutral, but had serious political implications themselves, implications that overrided any message one may try to propagate within them.

This series of screenings attempts to explore some of the new, politicised forms of cinema that were created during this time, and discuss what lessons they may hold for activists and artists in today’s world.

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The Experimental Film Club is dedicated to creating forums for the exploration of diverse and often neglected film works. It is perceived that there are a large number of people interested and engaged in aspects of experimental filmmaking in Dublin but no meeting point to build on this shared interest and knowledge. The club has been organising monthly screenings in the Ha'penny Bridge Inn since March 2008.

Seomra Spraoi is an autonomous social centre in Dublin city centre. It is run by a non-hierarchical collective on a not-for-profit basis. It hosts workshops, gigs, political meetings, film screenings, a vegan cafe and lots more. The centre seeks to be a hub of positive resistance, in a city and society where public spaces have been eaten away by consumerism, property speculation and the culture of the car.