"Cinemarxism" - the Joke Falls Flat
Eckstein, George
TWO RECENT FILMS illustrate the problem of art and politics under sharply differing social circumstances. The Joke is a Czech film made in 1968 by Jaromil Jires who, in contrast to some of...
...readings from revolutionary books, sometimes doubled with voiceovers...
...The Joke is a Czech film made in 1968 by Jaromil Jires who, in contrast to some of his colleagues, so far has elected to remain in his country...
...But with him the Medium is not so much the Message as it is the Actor...
...the slogans on walls or cars are sprayed on before our eyes...
...political interviews, sometimes with reversed roles...
...the armed black rebellion is staged for moviemaking...
...Godard is clearly a contemporary of McLuhan in his emphasis on the Medium...
...But with respect to Godard's film one cannot help wondering...
...Interviews are not only given, but taped or filmed...
...This rash defiance of solemnity led to his expulsion from both the Communist Youth group and the university, a proceeding sponsored by his best friend, and then to a year in a punitive army brigade and three years of hard labor in the mines...
...The other, I + 1, dealing with rebellion in America, is the first English picture by Jean-Luc Godard...
...The Joke is sad and bitter, haunting the life of Ludvik Jahn, a student and later a researcher in biology...
...In terms of their lives, unquestionably, Jires's film is not lacking in significance...
...the repetitive sequence in a Nazi-pornographic bookstore...
...Apparently delayed by difficulties with the producers, it is being shown in a slightly different version under the title Sympathy for the Devil...
...In an interview during the Czech spring, Jires expressed the hope "that art will be able to return to true creativity, to playfulness, to fantasy, without losing its social significance," though in the midst of shooting The Joke he had a foreboding "that it may already be too late...
...Like the hero in Gunter Grass's Dog Years, Ludvik decides to get even with the bastard by seducing his wife, only to learn afterwards—next joke!—that the two had already been estranged...
...Even the Rolling Stones are, in a way, subordinated to the omnipresent, elaborate recording equipment and recording procedure...
...To his girl friend who had preferred a Political Training Course to the private pleasures of a vacation with him, the young student had sent a jocular postcard proclaiming: "Optimism is the opium of mankind...
...In its New York showing, the Czech picture was preceded by a short documentary filmed a few months later under the Russian occupation —the funeral of Jan Palach, the young student who had immolated himself on Wenceslas Square...
...GODARD woiucs under no such restrictions...
...the joyful cooperation in a small orchestra evokes contrasting memories of harsh labor in the mine gang...
...A million and a half men and women, young and old, workers and students, in a slow cortege through the grey wintery streets of Prague, in silent sorrow, spreading a vast expanse of flowers and wreaths around the symbol of their country...
...Artistically, the Czech picture does not break any new ground...
...But without any action, they are confined to symbolic gestures—the passing back and forth of guns...
...When art must concentrate on uncovering the diseases of society...
...By subordinating, nay transmuting everything—actors, message, medium —into "esthetic" elements, has he not thereby drained his black rebels, his revolutionary texts, his images of decay of political significance...
...Current situations evoke in him images of the past: a communal Communist "baptism" ceremony brings back the expulsion session at the university...
...The interview is for Godard what the trial was for Brecht, which may suggest something about the transition from the time of Stalin to that of McLuhan...
...He now sees his country thrown back to a "dark age when the main artistic value is courage...
...Both enjoy power and/or the good life...
...the reading of revolutionary texts is repeated, sentence by dreary sentence, for taping...
...It comes during the "Prague Spring," when he is interviewed on his biological research by a radio interviewer who turns out to be his former friend's wife...
...Marxism into "Cinemarxism"—the joke falls flat...
...Old scenes answer the new questions, often in contrapunctal fashion...
...Slogans are hidden (the heArt of ocCiDent, bLack nOVEI) or made into puns (Cinemarxism, Sovietcong...
...In the end, Ludvik is MOVIES attacked by the woman's young lover...
...He is free to seek out the revolutionary forces in Western society, to express openly his own revolutionary attitudes, and to experiment stylistically...
...Healthy spirits stink of stupidity...
...The human actors become its extensions, it auxiliaries...
...the filming of the final revolutionary attack scene on the beach...
...art is tragically diminished...
...TWO RECENT FILMS illustrate the problem of art and politics under sharply differing social circumstances...
...Does not the formalization, or formula-ization, of his film betray the extent to which the youthful rebellion in which he is interested finally has more to do with the media than with political issues...
...snatches of studio rehearsals by the Rolling Stones...
...Cinematically, Godard's work is an exciting tour de force, not always successful, but brilliant and fascinating, full of that "playfulness and fantasy" Jires longs for...
...One is reminded of the way many of our radical demonstrations—most consciously those of the Yippies—have been aimed not so much at a political issue, but at their potential usability by the media...
...Ludvik is waiting for revenge...
...The film is basically a pure collage of images and words—word/pun titles and slogans on walls...
...he batters the boy savagely, only to realize—last joke— that "it wasn't you I wanted to hit...
...In line with this statement, Godard turns the radical message into formula and gesture, until at the film's end the shot of the huge movie crane, carrying the bloody body of "Eve Democracy" with the red and black flags of Liberation planted over it, is frozen into various monochromes...
...The key to Godard's outlook is perhaps a phrase in one of the interviews: "The revolutionary intellectual must give up his intellect in order to remain revolutionary...
...they have no use for the few sensitive souls who have survived...
...Heil Trotsky...
...THESE TWO POLITICAL FILMS make an incon gruous pair...
...There are still some actors, or people functioning as such, in addition to Mick Jagger and his group—mainly a group of Black Power revolutionaries and some media people...
...As other movies from behind the Iron Curtain, it is a bit pedestrian, and at times downright coarse, especially in its "humorous" passages...
...Declamations of texts by some blacks are juxtaposed with ritual movements (gun-toting, killing) by others...
...Ever since, he has lived in a sort of private hell, diffident and aloof...
...the piecemeal rehearsal of the theme song...
...tolerated' courage...
...There are voice-overlays of pornographic or violent literature...
...the reading from Soul on Ice and other Black Power writings often becomes pure droning, or it overlaps other sounds or activities...
...The hedonistic new generation is as despicable as the cynical bureaucrats of Ludvik's own...
...In 1 + 1 he dispenses completely with any kind of action...
...Futility forever...
...the ritual "slaying" of three white girls by black militants...
...Like the actors, the message itself is largely drained of meaning...
Vol. 17 • November 1970 • No. 6
