A Film Like Any Other [1968]

 Cinema was as much a medium as it was a weapon for Godard, and that was increasingly and unequivocally accentuated towards the magnificent last leg of his trailblazing Nouvelle Vague years. And, with the closing message in his explosive masterwork Week-end, viz. “Fin de Cinéma”, he announced an irrevocable breach with its conventional confines. He forsook authorship and transitioned into his most politically radicalized period by founding the Dziga Vertov Group – named after the renowned Soviet filmmaking pioneer – along with fellow militant leftist Jean-Pierre Gorin (discussions with him had already played a part when the French enfant terrible wrote his subversive gem La Chinoise the previous year). This overlooked period in his career – wherein, as per their manifesto, they sought to “make political films politically” – was marked by guerilla filmmaking, Marxist and revolutionary themes, championing of anti-bourgeoisie and anti-imperialist stances, and experimental works defined by dense essayistic form and Brechtian distancing techniques. A Film Like Any Other, which formed the first title of this underground, agitprop collective, bore all the quintessential hallmarks that made this invigorating, provocative and intellectually dense in equal measures. This fiercely discursive, dialectical and kaleidoscopic essay, foregrounded on the epochal student demonstrations and massive worker strikes that it was made in the aftermath of, was a free-association treatise on May’68 in terms of what transpired and what it stood for. Godard structured it along two parallel strands – a group of students, whilst in relaxing postures amidst tranquil grassy environs and whose faces we hardly ever see, engaging in dry, rhetorical, crisscrossing discussions analyzing and interpreting the events; and, intercut with that, were riveting B/W documentary montage capturing the May'68 protests, rallies, blockades and police crackdowns.

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Essay Film/Experimental Film/Agitprop

Language: French

Country: France

Le Gai Savoir (Joy of Learning) [1969]

Experimental, allusive, oblique, modernist, dense and formally adventurous, Le Gai Savoir defied simple categorizations and easy comprehension. And yet, despite its thematic and stylistic complexities, it was also playful, irreverent, idiosyncratic, subversive and thought-provoking, and filled with mock-serious musings on the relationship between images and words – and in turn cinema and language – in how the politics of one laces meaning to the other, that would profoundly inform Godard’s filmography hereon. And these contrasting aspects made this, along with the boldly provocative and stupendously brilliant One Plus One, an intriguing thread between his groundbreaking Nouvelle Vague years and the firebrand anti-cinema of his Dziga Vertov Group period. However, considering how it was alternately discursive and solemn, chaotic and sombre, variegated and cogent, it was an undeniably mishmash, at times infuriating and oftentimes exasperating work, despite its many fascinating aspects. The film, therefore, was like an assault on intellectual and audiovisual paradigms – the artifice of an overly theatrical setup accompanied with deadpan and rambling discourses between two militants deliciously (played by Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Léaud) which swung between serious dialectics and pungent satire; lyrical vignettes of people and streets; revolutionary images and slogans; indictment of consumerist pop-culture through cartoons, superheroes and sexualized advertisements; darkened screens and beeped sounds indicative of both censorship and subterfuge; and ample moments of humour and levity. And from these also emerged a sly commentary – worth its weight in fool’s gold – on some of Godard’s exalted contemporaries ranging from Bergman and Antonioni to Straub and Glauber Rocha to Bresson and Bertolucci; along with wide-ranging thematic excursions covering imperialism, war-mongering, police brutality, bourgeoisie, social conservatism, consumerism, revolutionary politics, protests, working-class, form, aesthetics, and of course cinema itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Drama/Political Satire/Experimental

Language: French

Country: France

The Case of the Grinning Cat [2004]

 In the otherwise serious, rigorous and formally variegated film A Grin Without A Cat – arguably his magnum opus – Chris Marker had cheekily commented that “a cat is never on the side of power”. This impish aphorism hasn’t just eventually come to define the chosen persona of this reclusive maverick artist, it also tantalizingly provided the springboard over a quarter century later for his beguiling, whimsical, droll, satiric and yet agitational, discursive, piercing and subversive video essay The Case of the Grinning Cat. This fascinating gem, therefore, may very well be considered a quirkier and more freewheeling – but equally politically trenchant – companion piece to his landmark masterwork. This decidedly Parisian and bristling post-9/11 film hinged on a wacky graffiti art called M. Chat, by a mysterious art collective, that seemed to have been popping up all across the French capital – buildings, walls, museums, metro stations, pavements, and as part of various flash mobs and anti-government street protests – featuring a yellow-and-orange grinning cat impudently taunting, confronting and therefore defiantly speaking truth to power. And Marker, true to his love for the feline, even funnily inserted the lively Cheshire Cat into celebrated Van Gogh and Picasso paintings. Thereon he – using his typically off-balancing, irreverent tone – covered a slew of politically incendiary topics, including protest movements by the Left against the abominable Iraq War engineered by Bush and the outrageous banning of Muslim headscarves in France, along with the extreme right raising its ugly head in mainstream French politics in the form of Jean-Marie Le Pen. This experimental piece, therefore, was unabashed in its indictment of war-mongering, the military-industrial complex, Islamophobia and wealth disparity, but with irresistible humour, cutting wit and charming levity.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental

Language: French

Country: France

¡Cuba Sí! [1961]

 Cuba – like French Indochina before it, and Algeria and Vietnam after – remains a remarkable example for the global south in how a fearless group of rebels, revolutionaries and freedom fighters refused to bow down, dared to fight, and ultimately overthrew an oppressive regime. Cuba Si!, which may perhaps be considered the final film in Marker’s initial period – wherein, like Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia, he made a series of highly personalized yet politically sharp travel essays imbued with his signature, idiosyncratic and ironic voice, thus honing a form that he’d make his very own over his prolific career – was his attempt at chronicling the heroic Cuban Revolution and its hope-filled aftermaths upon the establishment of an egalitarian state. The film, therefore, operated at an interesting intersection between documentary, travelogue, political testament and a surprisingly equanimous agitprop. Marker, true to his multi-faceted authorial and cinematic style, approached the subject through diverse lenses. Large sections of it comprised of evocative celebration of this defiant little Latin American country, with the air filled with music, culture, carefree bonhomie, fetes, joie de vivre and comradeship. And these were accompanied by cataloguing of their dream of building Cuba bottom-up – mass literacy campaigns; nationalization of the sugarcane and other key industries to plug the resource drain; citizens’ initiatives; etc. – along with typically free-flowing, voluble, self-effacing and perceptive words of Fidel Castro, the man himself, who’s impishly described as somewhere “between rebel with a cause and leader of the partisan”. Though the poor picture quality was unfortunate, its vigour, spirit and observations were unmissable, given that Agnès Varda too would make a dazzling film on this country inspired by it, viz. Salut les Cubains.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: French/Spanish

Country: France