Dangerous New Games
Eckstein, George
As A FILM-MAKER, Jean-Luc Godard has been uniquely associated with the sensibility of the young; he has given it models to live by and images of at least partial self-approval. From his first...
...To succeed, La Chinoise will have to become French...
...the slogans ("A minority with the correct revolutionary line is no longer a minority," etc...
...one of the chaps—in a pseudo-scientific "position paper"— shows himself too friendly to the "revisionist" NOTEBOOK Communist party line of co-existence, and is promptly and mock-ceremoniously expelled...
...Godard's ambiguity shows itself most significantly in the way the supreme expression of this kind of politics--the terrorist act—is transformed into a game...
...Meanwhile, we can wonder at the way the ambiguities of art and life interweave in the twentieth century, with an intimacy perhaps unprecedented: you can't always be sure where a movie ends and a demonstration begins...
...Politics as Pop Politics, the pastime of an uneasy, bored romantic youth in an affluent, tolerant society...
...an increasing use of text rather than of pictorial elements...
...With La Chinoise, a film that has recently been showing in art theatres throughout the country, Godard has turned to an exclusively--or what seems an exclusively— political theme, the politics of the New Left as seen in France...
...It would seem Godard wants to have it both ways at once...
...And the commitment to the cause is also without passion...
...There is a scene in the film where, to the strains of romantic music, Veronique casually terminates her love affair with Guillaume, the young actor: "I don't even like the colors of your sweaters any more" is her final answer to his meek pleas...
...Over the years, Godard has developed various techniques for rendering this detachment...
...So with the real events of the spring of 1968 in mind, we look at La Chinoise which Godard turned out in the spring of 1967...
...Realizing her mistake ("zut...
...Not unlike Brecht's characters whose Verfremdung permitted them to be simultaneously inside and outside their parts as actors in the social drama, Godard's young people detach themselves from their own behavior...
...Pop politics began to pop...
...His frankness tends to be verbal rather than visual...
...the study-group lectures turn into boring babble, into a stringing of stock phrases out of Hegel, Lenin, Sartre, Fanon, Che, and Mao...
...Their fight has shaken the apparent tranquility of the French factories, the smugness of official uniondom, the lethargy of a benevolent autocratic regime...
...and this ambiguity becomes a liability when the revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary politics of the New Left are transferred from the Latin Quarter of the screen to the real Boul' Mich...
...But in the same ambiguous— half-serious, half-ironical—way as Pop Art treats the comics, soup cans, hamburgers, traffic signs, and other artifacts of industrial mass culture, Godard turns this New Left Politics into what might be called Pop Politics...
...Her answer: "We'll worry about that later...
...But, having read the sheet with directions upside down, she kills the man in apartment 32 instead of the one in Number 23...
...Revolution as a happening...
...He takes its artifacts and puts them to aesthetic use: the Little Red Books of Mao become decorative accessories to go with the white walls and blue doors...
...We do not see the murders—as usual, Godard is rather reticent when it comes to showing violence (or sex) on the screen...
...reliance on comment to the point where actors drop their role in order to address the viewer directly...
...A main characteristic of this style is its peculiar kind of detachment...
...Manner begins to dominate matter in a way that subtly transforms the latter, that erodes it, that creates an ambiguity which makes it often difficult to determine what is serious and what is just a put-on...
...From his first and perhaps still his best picture, Breathless, through A Woman Is a Woman, Sande A Part, Masculine-Feminine, and into his very latest work, he has explored the new life style which now seems a feature of the international scene: its attitudes toward sex, violence, crime, domesticity...
...the "International" blaring from a radio is unable to arouse a pooped group that has plopped on the beds...
...There are all the trappings of Maoist politics: the "Little Red Books" of the Chairman, the primitive cartoons, the pseudo-Marxist slogans, the "study groups," the terrorist acts, and all the other little games of sectarian politics...
...She is the leader of a Maoist cell of five young people whose summer of communal life in a borrowed Paris apartment forms the subject of the film...
...A sympathetic old-line radical, he presses her about her political vision, about the purpose of her contemplated terrorist actions, about what the group plans to do after blowing up the Louvre or closing the Sorbonne...
...the use of music or color as ironical counterpoint...
...But meanwhile, the happening has become serious...
...a simple shrug of shoulders), back she goes into the large building to get her man, while her friend in the getaway car circles playfully in front of the building, and the camera alternately focuses on a small dachshund promenading on a balcony above...
...The "Chinese Girl" is a young French co-ed studying at the suburban branch of the Sorbonne at Nanterre...
...and the primitive Chinese posters depicting Yankee Imperialism become wall decorations...
...Such techniques have been used by other exponents of the new style (Francois Truffaut, Richard Lester, Arthur Penn), but no one has pushed them quite as far as Godard, to the point of coming dangerously close to mannerism...
...All of these reverberations no doubt fed the irresponsible tendencies of a movement which, though wildly incoherent in its aims, has shown considerable ingenuity in its methods—at least at the outset...
...Godard, unambiguously for once, sided with the embattled students of the Sorbonne...
...In a long discussion, Veronique is confronted with her philosophy teacher at the Sorbonne, the ex-Communist intellectual Francis Jeanson (in person on the screen...
...puns, references to other films, books, paintings, public figures...
...Once they came up against a still powerful if shaken regime, which would not hesitate to call on the police and the army, the French equivalents of Godard's characters had little to offer except their personal courage...
...The game became dangerous...
...It is a sign of the greater political sophistication of Western Europe that the CP is now, as a matter of course, considered in alignment with the bourgeois Establishment...
...This is politics as gesture, an exercise in style, rather than as an answer to pressing social problems...
...Veronique (the "Chinoise" of the title) picks up the address of the visiting Soviet Party-line writer Mikhail Sholokhov, whom they have planned to kill as an example...
...abrupt cutting or change of pace...
...its people are at the same time "with it" and without it...
...A casual mess of voice, word, and gesture in making love or causing death...
...But he is unsurpassed in rendering the casual attitude of this generation in such matters...
...Style was tested by stubborn social realities...
...Kirilov, the artist, patterned after the character in Dostoevsky's Possessed, abruptly commits suicide after changing the wall decor from precise slogans to wavy abstract stripes...
...first we have to tear down...
...There is, finally, a central scene where Godard seems to abandon both his casualness and his ambiguity (but can one ever be quite sure with him...
Vol. 15 • September 1968 • No. 5
