Left vs Right, Personal vs Political, Fact vs Fiction
A resolutely arthouse film loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel The Possessed and widely regarded as heralding a second (overtly political) wave of filmmaking by French iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard, 1967's La Chinoise is a heavily politicised and ultra-stylised study of leftist politics. Primarily concerned with a leftist political culture split between the revisionism of the Soviet Union (and the associated subsidiary communist parties) and the Marxist classicism of Maoist students, the film manages to break through the rhetoric to remain an interesting film both thematically and stylistically that foreshadowed the intricacies of Paris' infamous uprising in May of 1968.
'A Manifesto of Manifestos'
For Godard, La Chinoise is kind of a ‘manifesto of manifestos’ where the political is personal and the personal is political, fact is fiction and fiction is fact. Shot in a semi-documentary style and melds a series of 'interviews' of each of the main characters, with text read directly from numerous leftist tomes, including Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, revered in the film as a kind of communist new testament.
The loose narrative of La Chinoise unfurls within a Paris apartment commune, where its student occupants sleep, eat, read, discuss and debate the politics of life and their lives in politics. Told through a series of truncated vignettes, rather than as an overarching cohesive narrative whole, it is within the relationships between these central characters that Godard manages to salvage what could have become an extremely laborious viewing experience (and one which does lapse occasionally.)
The Idealism of Youth
The students in La Chinoise gained renewed optimism for an otherwise failed socialist experiment after the the overindulgence (and outright corruption) or Stalin-led Russia. In their eyes, Chairman Mao and the Chinese Cultural Revolution had delivered communism back to its Marxist/Leninist roots. The Chinese example had given new life into an almost lifeless corpse, providing a rallying point around which to attack the students' opponents on the right as well as their detractors on the left.
It is interesting also, to examine how Godard portrays these students. Are they, in his eyes, true revolutionaries? Or are they simply immature children, playing at politics? This is never really made clear for the viewer and perhaps hints at the fact that many people heavily involved in politics at both extremes of the sphere tend to embody elements of both. Godard’s own stance on the material at hand is similarly ambiguous, and the viewer is left to wonder how much of what is said on screen is a reflection of Godard’s own beliefs and just how much of it is Godard 'playing' himself.
A Tentative Premonition of May '68
La Chinoise is, of course, particularly interesting from a historical perspective in its focus on leftist students living in Paris in 1967. More or less a product of its environment, the film is a tentative premonition of the events of May ‘68, when a series of student strikes in Paris led to widespread civil unrest and a declaration of a general strike which would shake up the ‘old society’ of France. This shake up was reflected in Godard’s desire to remove the bourgeois pleasures that had previously populated his films, leading him to make a series of quite abrasive, heavy handed films in the 1960s. This includes La Chinoise, as well as Weekend - perhaps one of Godard’s finest films - which rode a wave of social and political unrest throughout Europe and merged Godard’s acerbic wit, social commentary and pop-art imagery with stark cinematic experimentation.
Godard strives, also, to show the day to day inconsistencies and hypocrisies of these young and petulant students. Of particular interest is the treatment doled out to the character of Yvonne, who is clearly from a working class background (as opposed to the middle-class bourgeois backgrounds of the others) and is treated as some kind of dumb house maid, constantly ridiculed and scorned.
A Brechtian Influence
Through the exploits of the students, Godard creates a farcical world of Brechtian proportions, culminating in an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Mikhail Sholokhov. In fact, Bertold Brecht’s influence is writ large across the whole film (as it is, in many respects, across Jean-Luc Godard’s whole career). In one memorable scene in La Chinoise, Godard pays homage to Brecht's influence when a blackboard full of famous names is erased one by one, until finally only the name of Brecht remains.
La Chinoise also features possibly one of the best songs about any socialist leader, anywhere in the world, Claude Channes' fuzzed up 60s guitar tribute to Mao Zedong.
It may not be one of Jean-Luc Godard’s better known works (only receiving a proper US DVD release in late 2008), yet La Chinoise does provide an interesting insight into 1960s politics, a time of radical political upheaval in France and of free-wheeling experimentation for one of its greatest filmmakers.
No comments:
Post a Comment