Tout Va Bien [1972]

 Godard, who’d just survived a near-fatal motorcycle accident, and Gorin achieved the apotheosis of their collaboration with the bold, brilliant, boisterous, trenchant, lively and formally flamboyant Tout Va Bien. It remains particularly arresting in its evocation of Godard’s Nouvelle Vague films – stylistic flourishes, tonal exuberance, iconic stars, ingenious set-pieces and wicked humour – within the distinctive Dziga Vertov Group framework marked by radical left-wing politics, caustic critique of the bourgeoisie and consumerist capitalism, provocative diatribes, and dialectical subversion. After travelling to the UK, US, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Palestine and Jordan, they returned to May’68 four years after that momentous event and in turn A Film Like Any Other with which they’d heralded the DVG phase, while joining hands with two immensely popular actors – Jane Fonda, who’d become an outspoken anti-Vietnam War activist, and Yves Montand, well-known for his participation in leftist causes and films. It dealt with a wildcat strike at a sausage factory where a disenchanted expat journalist (Fonda) and her husband (Montand), a former intellectual who now makes TV commercials, witness class struggle – thus developing bitter perspectives about themselves, their marriage and post-1968 French society – while held captive with the plant’s hilariously buffoonish head (Vittorio Caprioli). Striking turns by the actors and ambitious use of diverse narrative / Brechtian devices aside, it was especially memorable for three aspects – caustic commentary on the commercial dependence of cinema through a deadpan off-screen dialogue accompanied by a plethora of cheques signed towards its production; an unforgettable cut-out set that allowed the entire factory cross-section and goings-on to be seen simultaneously; and an extraordinary unbroken dolly shot where the camera glided laterally across a massive supermarket, observing the gradual brewing of a riot.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Avant Garde/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: France

Vladimir et Rosa [1971]

 The importance of transitioning from “theory” to “practice” for the left – and thus achieve their revolutionary purpose by supplementing their socialist principles with direct action – formed the undercurrent in Vladimir et Rosa, as it did (albeit, much more overtly) in Struggle in Italy. However, while it had a decidedly serious core – addressing topics of race, violence, exploitation, oppression and tyranny – it was outrageously funny, zany, bitingly satirical, gleefully outlandish, cutting and even gleefully unhinged at times. One might, in fact, say, that Godard packed this with the kind of playfulness, irreverence, irony and humour that one witnessed regularly in his Nouvelle Vague years, and hardly much since British Sounds in his DVG period. Using the “Chicago Seven/Eight Conspiracy Trial” as a vital springboard, it presented a loopy, absurdist trial of six disparate militants, protesters, saboteurs and activists – a hippie (Julie Berto), a woman’s lib advocate (Anne Wiazemsk), a factory working dissident, a student radical, a steadfast pacifist and a Black Panthers spokesperson, along with “Friedrich Vladimir” (Godard) and “Karl Rosa” (Gorin) – in a kangaroo court presided by a cartoonish, brazenly biased judge aptly named Adolf Himmler (Ernest Menzer) who keeps doodling on a raunchy Playboy centerfold. The way Godard/Gorin unabashedly lampooned the establishment and the bourgeoisie – the wealthy capitalist class, along with its principle stooges, viz. the legal system, police and mass media – was both ferocious and farcical, which he complemented with political dialectics, polemics and rhetoric. A catchy heavy rock motif often played out in short bursts, and that, along with the Brechtian setup and roguish tone added further doses of liveliness to the proceedings, while still retaining a politically charged atmosphere laced with dissent, anger and urgency.

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Experimental Film/Agitprop

Language: French

Country: France

Wind from the East (Le Vent d'Est) [1970]

 Wind from the East, the first formal collaboration between Godard and Gorin (the release years for the collective’s films are often difficult to pin down, on account of having been made outside studio, distribution and theatrical systems), was a straight-up, unadulterated and undiluted exercise in polemics more akin to a political pamphlet / lecture vis-à-vis a more involving discourse. This rather drab, uninviting work – filled with lengthy diatribe – was also a rarity in the French iconoclast’s canon for being nearly bereft of his off-balancing, tongue-in-cheek humour. And yet, a film of his is never formally dull or intellectually trite or lacking in confrontational posturing, as evidenced by its sly mix of disparate images, genre subversion, outspokenness and lashing critique on both bourgeois hypocrisy and revisionist tendencies. And, like Le Gai Savoir, he also posited his revolutionary ideas on cinema – therefore underscoring DVG’s manifesto about not just making political films, but films politically – albeit without the earlier film’s impish playfulness. It operated along two planes – one real and in the present, while the other in a staged, "metaphorical past – with both deconstructing conflicts between the bourgeoisie, revisionists and militants. The former strand postulated the contrasting interpretations to a factory strike by the three groups – the capitalist class is derisory and hostile, the party bosses advocate moderation, while radical agitators are antithetical to compromise. And this dynamic was then enacted through the parodic artifice of a mock Spaghetti Western filled with types, ideological pedagogy, metatextual devices and interweaving harangue advocating violent counteractions to fascism, racism and oppression. Anne Wiazemsky aside, this experimental featured Italian thespian Gian Maria Volonté who was as known for iconic roles as for his firebrand left-wing affiliations.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin

Genre: Drama/Spaghetti Western/Essay Film/Agitprop/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: France

Struggle in Italy (Lotte in Italia) [1970]

 Conflict between theory and practice, one’s social conditions and thoughts, awareness and involvement, and ultimately image and sound, formed the key strands in Struggle in Italy, the second of five formal collaboration between Godard and Gorin (Wind from the East was begun first). Shot partially in Italy and in the flat in Paris that Godard shared with Anne Wiazemsky, this rather stark, analytic, discursive and deliberately incoherent work foregrounded on Althusser’s texts – a relatively lesser Groupe Dziga Vertov output, despite its undeniable political clarity – was centered on Paola (Cristiana Tulio-Altan), a young Italian university student, who’s striving to juxtapose her bourgeois upbringing with her Marxist convictions, and therefore realizing that active transformative action would ultimately define her revolutionary political consciousness and therefore shape her journey as a militant. The cyclical narrative was broken into two halves wherein the first half portrayed “theory” – i.e. her realization of the disparity between her convictions and the conservative social construct she belongs to – while the latter chronicled her active opposition to the various tenets of a capitalist sociopolitical structure – the university, family and state apparatuses – and therefore “practice”. The achronologically sequenced and repetitive vignettes featuring the girl were, in turn, interjected with grainy outdoor shots, footage of workers in shopfloor, B/W political images, and blank screens In an interesting stylistic choice and a touch of Brechtian distancing technique, the film’s spoken language was Italian, which was dubbed in parallel into French, albeit oftentimes out of sync. Further, as an aside, automobile giants continued to serve as a rhetorical metonym for capitalism on wheels, with Fiat here taking the place of British Motor Car Company in British Sounds and Skoda in Pravda.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Essay Film/Agitprop

Language: French/Italian

Country: France/Italy

Pravda [1969]

 Godard, in his 2^nd collaboration with filmmaker Jean-Henri Roger, shifted his searing, pugnacious and rasping attention to Czechoslovakia just a year after possibly the single most dramatic moment in the country’s post-WW2 history, viz. the thudding end to its liberal socialist years – fondly referred to as Prague Spring – through the emergence of Soviet tanks in Wenceslas Square. Lacking in the dialectical lucidity of A Film Like Any Other and the rebellious bravura of British Sounds – the other two works made thus far as part of his radical Marxist-Maoist phase – Pravda was a comparatively more straightforward essay and a decidedly straight-up polemical diatribe, which made it relatively less absorbing on stylistic front; and yet, its epistolary formal device, politically satiric metaphors, whiplash sarcastic tone and ferociously confrontational stance made it an intriguing agitprop of surprising vitality despite its deliberately dry, monotonous, drone-like and testy tonal palette. The film’s political discourse was posited as a mock-serious, ironic and incisive conversation between Vladimir (Lenin) and Rosa (Luxembourg), and the central tenet was the contention between words and image – and therefore between theory and practice – when it comes to what socialism as was envisaged by Dubček (where the proletariat superseded the state) vis-à-vis the revisionist manifestation of it imposed on them by the Soviets (with the state dominating the proletariat in an ironic mirroring of a capitalist consumerist economy). Contradictions, therefore, abounded – be it in a tree full of fruits available to be plucked by the people but the massive field behind it enclosed by fences; or a people’s car built by nationalized auto company, but profited by auto agencies and advertisers; or a sexually liberated woman turned into consumerist prop; etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Henri Roger

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Agitprop

Language: French

Country: France