Courtisane Cahiers

8/10/2019 Courtisane Cahiers

1/64

cahiers\1


2/64

Chris Marker, Mario Marret & SLON, bientt jespre(1967-1968)


3/64

3

Notes on Militant Cinema(1967-1977)

Start from zero

For a brief moment, the world was on fire. Impossible to say how and when

the spark was lit, but we know the air had been thick with tense anticipation for

quite some time, and it wasnt long before the flames were crackling all over. What

was felt during the long 1968 did not, as many still seem to imagine, erupt as a

momentary and localized flash of lightning in a serene sky, but flared up at the

convergence point of multiple smouldering hot spots and flaming areas, dispersed

in space, evolving over time. The fires were spreading at a moment when strug-gles against Western colonialism and neo-colonialism gripped the entire Third

World: at the same time the Vietnam war was increasingly polarizing the world

stage, guerrilla groups such as Uruguays Tupamaros and Chiles Movimiento de

Izquierda Revolucionaria(MIR) were sprouting throughout Latin America, independ-

ence movements were gaining ground in Portugals African empire, the Palestine

Liberation Organization (PLO) had brought together various forces struggling

against Israeli colonialism, and left-wing rebellion was proliferating in various Asian

countries, from India and Nepal to Malaysia and the Philippines. Che Guevaras

1967 call to create two, three, many Vietnams was taken to heart by resistancemovements all over the world, while propositions to construct new societal forms in

Cuba and China seemed to offer fresh, grassroots-based models of socialism.

Meanwhile, in France and Italy, a wave of strikes and occupations took hold

of factories and universities, coming to a head in the events of May 1968 and the

hot autumn of 1969. In the US, the large-scale civil rights protests that had been

gathering steam since the mid-1950s boiled over when the surge of demonstrations

against institutional racism and the Vietnam War led to violent uprisings, escalating

in the 1968 Chicago riots. The clashes with police and army troops painfully reso-

nated with another event that had happened just a few days earlier, when Russiantanks brought winter to the Prague Spring, brutally crushing the dream of a social-

ism with a human face. From Brazil to Japan, from Northern Ireland to South Africa:

everywhere, the sky was filled with smoke and ashes. As if there were nothing to

be seen but the light of the flames. But behind the haze, there was still a lurking

sense of horizon, connecting local and specific struggles to a broader narrative,

seemingly bound together by resistance against class oppression and imperialism,

holding the promise of another world.

Where was cinema, this great art of light and shadow, in all this turmoil? As

oppositional leftist politics seeped deeper into all areas of cultural life, filmmak-

ers were increasingly confronted with questions such as: How to contribute to the


4/64

4

struggle? How can cinema make itself useful? For filmmakers of all leanings, wrote

French critic Serge Daney, in this near-open battle, in their very craft of film-making,

a single problem emerges: How can political statements be presented cinematical-

ly? How can they be made positive?1The radical cinema that flourished so brightly

in those years, on the wings of the various, adventurous new waves that had

infused the cinematic landscape with a playful spirit of liberation and iconoclasm,

was one that saw itself as part of a broader project of national and international

socio-political transformation. Its ambition was no longer solely to free up the

camera and rewrite the codes of representation, but to make itself into a powerful

vehicle for this transformation, by all means necessary. As worldwide revolts gave

more and more currency to the idea of revolution, filmmakers were compelled to

revolutionize their own means of production, expression and exhibition. When Bra-

zilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha was working on his fabulous opera-mitrailleuse,

Terra em Transe (1967), he wrote:

When film-makers organize themselves to start from zero, to create a cinemawith new types of plot lines, of performance of rhythm, and with a different poetry,

they throw themselves into the dangerous, revolutionary adventure of learning

while you produce, of playing theory and practice side by side, of reformulating

every theory through every practice, of conducting themselves according to the apt

dictum coined by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos from some Portuguese poet: I dont

know where Im going, but I know Im not going over there.2

To start from zero, recharging with every film: for Rocha and many other

filmmakers in Latin America and elsewhere, it was not merely enough to dress

up political subjects and messages in traditional outfits, as so many colleagues

inclined to do at the time. It was hardly enough to proudly raise the red flag and

use revolutionary theory as a signpost of good will and sentiment, as Sergio Leone

did in Gi la testa, opening with Maos statement: The Revolution is not a dinner

party... . No, these ideas had to be thoroughly explored and followed through with-

incinema, which meant that the fundamental aesthetic, economic and ideological

conditions and conventions of cinema had to be rethought anew. What could a

cinema be if it were free from the overpowering influence of what Jean-Luc Godard

referred to as the devious pair of Hollywood/Mosfilm? How could cinema be

liberated from the clutches of what Guy Debord and his Situationist posse, in 1967,called the immense accumulation of spectacles, keeping the spectator at bay in a

state of passive contemplation, separated from life itself?

This challenge was not entirely new. Debates on cinema as a possible form of

political intervention had been raging ever since the rise of Soviet Cinema in the

aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin commented that cinema was

the most important art form and had resurged at various times, not in the least

at the pinnacle of the Internationalist Popular Front alliance, when filmmakers such

1. Serge Daney, Fonction critique, Cahiers du cinma250, May 1974

2. Glauber Rocha, Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society, The DramaReview,Winter 1970


5/64

5

as Jean Renoir and Joris Ivens were swept up in their enthusiasm for communist

ideals and the fight against fascism, and after World War II, in the context of the

reconstruction of Italy and the revolution in Cuba. The heavy political stakes that

were manifest in the 1960s put some of the debates that had been simmering

within Marxist thought for decades back on the agenda, leading to radical, if often

erratic re-readings of the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Bertold Brecht

and Walter Benjamin. Only now it was done in the light of the neo-Marxist and

libertarian thinking that marked the time, from the pamphlets of Mao Zedong and

Che Guevara, the anti-colonialist writings of Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire to the

structuralist work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser. Once again, the fundamen-

tal tensions between art and world, appearance and reality, practice and theory,

were subject to intense inquiry, centred around the idea of militant cinema.

Amongst the people

But the notion of militant cinema, always at the service of the people, actuallyindicated a divided landscape. There are two kinds of militant films, argued

Jean-Luc Godard in 1970, those we call blackboard films and those known as

Internationale films. The latter are the equivalent of chanting Linternationaleduring

a demonstration, while the others prove certain theories that allow one to apply to

reality what he has seen on screen.3This division essentially redoubled a debate

that had already been initiated in 1920s Soviet Union, between those who consid-

ered the primary concern of revolutionary art as being the search for new formal

and theoretical models and those who saw it as first and foremost a question of

effective communication in a form and language that was already understood bythe common people. In the 1960s, the latter tendency was exemplified by the pro-

liferation of a popular model of militant cinema, according to which the camera

had to place itself in the heart of the struggle, where the filmmakers task consisted

of capturing the shimmering traces of life as vividly and authentically as possible,

plucking the living reality like the flowers that Mao encouraged to bloom. In a way,

this notion of militant cinema was already apparent in the work of internationalist

cin-travellers such as Ren Vautier and Yann Le Masson: cameras were taken to

the battlefields and the barricades, to occupied universities and factories on strike,

not only to testify to the events, but also to give voice to those who had remained

voiceless for so long.This task was taken up by militants and filmmakers worldwide. In Japan, the

students of Zengakuren, with the help of documentarists such as Shinsuke Oga-

wa, started to use cameras to document their battles with the authorities; In Italy,

Cesare Zavattini, one of the proponents of the Neorealist movement, successfully

promulgated the idea ofCinegiornale liberi; in the US, the October 1967 Penta-

gon riot led to the establishment of a broad network of Newsreel collectives;

in the Middle East, the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) dedicated itself to recording the

Arab-Israeli conflict, under the motto, gun in one hand, camera in the other; and

3. Godard par Godard, ditions de lEtoile - Cahiers du cinma, Paris, 1985, p. 348


6/64

6

during the May events in France, hundreds of film technicians and filmmakers

joined forces in the tats Gnraux du Cinma and started to produce Cin-tracts.

This series of anonymous shorts (some made with the help of established filmmak-

ers) was instigated by Chris Marker, who had previously also set up SLON (La

Societ de Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles). It was under the auspices of this

collective that Marker put together Far from Vietnam (1967), a portmanteau film

made as a protest against the American military intervention in Vietnam, including

contributions by Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, Agns Varda

and William Klein. How to make a useful film?, asked Klein, Fiction, agit-prop,

documentary, what? We were never able to decide, but we had to do something.

At the time, Far from Vietnamcame about not only as a vibrant expression of the

solidarity that many tiermondistesin Western Europe and the US felt for the nation-

al liberation struggles that were raging all over the world, but it also opened up

the question of usefulness, a concern that has always been central to the debates

on art and politics: how does one close the gaps between here and there,

between those who take images, those whose images are taken and those whowatch them? How does one translate the struggle without re-inscribing the relations

of domination between those who have the power to represent and those who are

merely represented? And in doing so, how does one create art that can reach the

broad masses, not only adopting, but also enriching their own forms of expression?

In his contribution to the collective film (a segment with the Vertov-inspired

title Camera-eye), Godard explicitly took up these questions. I am cut off from

the working class, but my struggle against Hollywood is related. Yet workers dont

come to see my films. Perhaps engaging in the worldwide resistance against

imperialism and colonialism, and creating a Vietnam in each of us, suggested God-

ard, can make us aware of what is common to both the filmmakers and the work-

ers struggle. What can bind us, the workers of Rhodiacta and me, is Vietnam.

Godard had actually visited the Rhodiacta factory in Besanon just after March

1967, when the first occupations in France since 1936 had taken place, and would

later also be there for the premiere of Far From Vietnam. On those occasions, he

was always in the company of Chris Marker, who, during the production of the film,

had been invited by the organizers of the local cultural programme to come and

take a look. To Marker, who had previously been working in China, Cuba, Israel,

and Siberia, they made a plea to give some attention to local matters: If you arentin China or elsewhere, come to Rhodia. Important things are happening.

After a first visit, Marker decided to make a film about the strike and secretly

started shooting footage in the factory, interviewing workers, trying to involve them

directly in the production of the film. The initial result of this effort was bientt

jespre, created by Marker, filmmaker Mario Marret and the SLON team. The film

not only provides an account of the strikers concerns about working conditions, but

also shows how they attempted to escape from their imposed identity, by laying

claim to experiences deemed inaccessible and inappropriate to them: culture,

education, communication. However, when the film was first shown to the strikers,

they expressed a certain dissatisfaction toward it, finding it altogether too bleak,

because it lacked perspective, and too romantic because it showed militants and


7/64

7

strikes, while skipping over the preparation for the strikes and the training of the

militants, which were considered the most important aspects of militant activism in

factories. One of the workers, Pol Cbe, told Marker:

Maybe you believe that audiovisual language, like written language, requires

years of study, but we are convinced that this is not the case We have so many

things to say and we have a new way to say it, a new medium, a new weapon.4

Responding to the criticism, Marker replied that the cinematic representation

and expression of the working class should indeed be taken up by the workers

themselves, from the inside of the struggle, not by well-meaning explorers coming

from the outside. The only way to represent the people without relying on the

hallowed forms and customs that keep them in their place, so it seemed, was to

provide them with their own means of representation. This would be the starting

point for a longstanding collaborative effort between filmmakers and workers

dedicated to fostering a cinma ouvrier. They named themselves the MedvedkinGroup, after the Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin, who in 1932 had travelled

around the Soviet Union in a specially equipped cin-train. Starting with Classe de

lutte (1968), the collective initiated a model of filmmaking that aimed to annul the

division between expert and amateur, producer and consumer, a model that would

last in Besanon for almost five years before spreading to other places in France

and beyond. The aim was no longer to simply produce militant films about the

workers conditions, but a militant workers film, expressing, as Marker commented,

a change of consciousness, incited by a desire to learn how to see.

Learning to see

For others, however, the challenge was not to make films about the process

of learning how to see, but to make this process itself inherent to the production

and reception of films. It is not enough to do what Chris Marker did at Rhodiaceta

what The New York Timesand Le Mondecall information. We must rise above

sensible knowledge and fight to make it rational knowledge It implies a concrete

analysis of a concrete situation. This quote, ripe with Marxist axioms, is taken from

Pravda(1970), one of the films that Godard made with Jean-Pierre Gorin as the

Dziga Vertov Group, undoubtedly the best-known proponent of the so-called black-

board films. For these filmmakers, it did not suffice to start from zero and explore

new sensible forms for new content: it was necessary to return to zero,5to go back

to the blackboard and start learning all over again, to rediscover the meaning of

the simplest acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. This radical-re-

gressive tendency took flight in France, where filmmakers and critics were looking

for new tools of inspiration in the theoretical raids that had been traversing the

4. Trevor Stark, Cinema in the Hands of the People: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group,and the Potential of Militant Film, October 139, Winter 2012

5. Quoted in Le Gai Savoir(1969)


8/64

8

discursive landscape since the beginning of the decade, particularly in the guise

of Althusserianism, which in its desire to re-found Marxism, brought together fairly

heterogeneous theories drawn from psychoanalysis and semiology under the

concept of Structuralism. The most elaborate application of the structural thinking

in the field of cinema emerged on the pages of such magazines as Cinthique

and Cahiers du Cinmawhich, triggered by the work of the Tel Quel group, started

to cultivate a lively debate on problems of ideological criticism and a potentially

revolutionary theoretical practice in cinema. After 1968, critical thinking in film

increasingly found itself in the throes of a mode of reading associated with what

Louis Althusser called symptomatic: a reading that searches for meaning under

the surface of things, lifting the veil of images to reveal the constitutive presupposi-

tions that make them possible in the first place, the underlying logic that deter-

mines what can and cannot be seen and thought within its framework.

The key word in this period was ideology, which was considered not simply a

lie made up to fool the ignorant, or the inverted reflection of real social relations(as in Marxs Camera Obscura model), but as a system of representation with its

own logic and materiality: a set of images, myths, ideas and concepts that defined

how the world was supposed to be experienced or negotiated. The reality put

forward through ideology is not the system of the real relations that govern how

we live, but our imaginary relationship to the real relations in which we live. What

is generally taken for visible self-evidence should in fact be read as a form of

encoding, whereby a society or authority legitimates itself by naturalizing itself, by

rooting itself in the obviousness of the visible. According to this logic, all films had

to be considered political, because they were always already overdetermined

as expressions of the prevailing ideology, merely reproducing the world as it is

experienced when filtered through this ideology. In view of a reality which was

considered already coded, the challenge for any filmmaker was to break with

reproduction or naturalization of reality, to uncover the unconscious mise-en-scne

that precedes any cinematic mise-en-scne. As Serge Daney wrote, Realism must

always be overcome. Truth was put on the side of the signifier, while the signified

was put on the side of ideology, or in Lacanian terms, on the side of the imaginary.

Everything that involved a direct relationship between the sign and a referential

reality, image and appearance, was suspected of being ideological, conforming to

the self-evidence of the given. The only possible counter-strategy consisted in creat-ing an awareness of the gaps between referent and sign, between what the image

represents and how it represents it. It was this idea of disjunction, this breaking up

and questioning the apparent unity of cinema by way of a radical separation of

elements (Brecht),that was at the heart of Godards aim to produce films political-

ly. Political struggles should not merely be made into an object: film itself should

be made into an object of struggle and criticism.

Godard did not simply want to create or represent an alternative worldview,

but to investigate and deconstruct the whole process of signification out of which

worldviews are constructed. Starting with La Chinoise (1967), the Althusserian ped-

agogy of seeing, listening, speaking, reading became the basic rule in his play-


9/64

9

Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise(1967)


10/64

10

book, the fundament of his so-called blackboard films. La Chinoiseis a depiction

of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola who placed cultural concerns at the centre

of their revolt in an attempt to rescue everyday life from the clutches of the hidden

persuaders which had colonized it. But Marxism not only functions as the subject

of representation, it is also the principle of representation. While the Marxism

represented here is Chinese Maoism as it figured in the Western imagination at the

time symbolized by the two Red books, Maos Little Red Bookand the student-run

Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes the films mise-en-scene is constructed according to

the basic ideas underlying Althusserianism.6The rhetoric and stereotypes of Maoism

and Marxism are here merely used as a catalogue of images and a repertoire of

phrases from which Godard, as always, had sampled various quotes, symbols and

objects, setting them up as part of an extensive classroom exercise. Indeed, this is

a film in the making, about learning how to see, listen, speak and read the leftist

discourses that were pervading Parisian cultural life, at a time when the Cultural

Revolution in China served as a projection screen for the hopes and dreams of the

radical left, as an exit route to escape the straightjacket of orthodox Marxism. It isalso a lesson on how to see and listen withthem, as if they were but a set of illustra-

tions and formulas written on a big blackboard. The scenographic setting becomes

a classroom, the dialogue a recitation, the voice-over a lecture, the shooting an

object lesson, the film-maker a schoolmaster: always the logic of school.

This pedagogic principle is the basis for Godards militant films: only the

application of a Marxist analysis of image and sound was able to bring light to all

those roaming in the dark. And there could be no semiology without semioclasm:

the unified appearance of the audiovisual had to be broken up, the correspond-

ences between sounds, words and images undone, so that they could speak for

and against themselves. In Godards films, there is hardly any attempt to point

out the origins of the sampled elements. There is not even an attempt to question

discourses by others, such as Althussers Ideology and Ideological State Appara-

tuses in Lotte in Italia(1971), or Brechts lesson on the role of intellectuals in the

revolution in Tout va bien(1972). It is merely a matter of looking for other elements

to put them to the test, rearranging their connections and reframing their meaning.

The urgency of learning anew in order to put a halt to the endless circulation of

images, to look underneath the surface of images, to read between the lines: this

was the inclination that was feverishly developing among the French cinephiles ofthat time the post-nouvelle vague moment of structuralism and the golden age of

semiology. Political commitment in cinema once again appeared as commitment

to form, rather than to revolutionary content. Against the old assumption that there

is no responsibility of forms, there could no longer be a representation of politics

without critically reflecting on the politics of representation.

6. See Jacques Rancires analysis: Le rouge de la Chinoise, Trafic 18, spring 1996


11/64

11

Beyond the surface

In reference to Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, Godard would say,

The dominant class creates a world after its own image, but it also creates an

image of its world, which it calls a reflection of reality.7With the idea that the re-

flection of reality should be considered an ideological construction, a longstanding

debate was once again brought to the fore: the debate on realism. For those whowere trying to develop a film critical thinking in a Marxist framework, Andr Bazins

longstanding legacy of ontological realism was no longer of any use. Everything

that constituted that paradigm the notions of continuity and transparency, the

epiphany of the sensible real had to be violently renounced. As Godard had

already indicated in the scenario of Les Carabiniers (1963), it is not enough to

say how things are real: one has to say how things really are. It was this adage,

adapted from Bertold Brecht, that was at the heart of the impulse to decipher the

world, the desire to look behind the appearance of things. It was Brecht who, back

in the 1930s, had stated:

Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality.

A photograph of the Krupp works or the A.E.G. tells us next to nothing about these

institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human

relations the factory, say means that they are no longer explicit. So something

must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.8

Brechts ideas on realism as the exposure of a societys causal network and

dominant order had already been used as a reference in the film criticism of the

1940s and 50s, even mediated by the work of Joseph Losey in the Cahiers duCinma. Throughout the first half of the 1960s, however, another interpretation of

Brechts ideas would hold sway, one less concerned with film as an art of percep-

tion than film as a system of signification. The main inspiration from this turn came

from Althusser and Roland Barthes, who treated Brechts views as a counterpoint

for the primacy of psychology and identification in art, which was considered part

and parcel of the bourgeois worldview. It had never been Brechts intention to

condemn the lies displayed by art, but rather to call attention to the ways in which

art can demonstrate to spectators the workings of a society that lies beyond them,

and invite them to take part in its transformation. What is stigmatized is the illusion,

which tends to present reality as a natural and unproblematic given and whichkeeps the spectators in a state of passivity, hanging up their brains with their hats

in the cloakroom. An active spectator should refuse identification and remain at a

distance, to be able to assess the causes and remedies for the injustices suffered.

The mirror of transparent myths in which a society can recognise itself first has to

be broken, before it can really learn to know and change itself. In Mythologies

(1957), Barthes uses Brechts critique of mystification and identification to point

out the shortcomings in Eli Kazans On the Waterfront, especially in its final scenes

7. Godard quoted in James Roy McBean, See You at Mao: Godards Revolutionary BritishSounds, Film Quarterly, 1970-71, pp15-23

8. Bertold Brecht, quoted by Walter Benjamin (1931)


12/64

12

when, after having exposed the violence and the corruption of the workers union,

Marlon Brandos character decides to go back to work and give himself over to the

exploitative system. Barthes wrote:

If there ever was one, here is a case where we should apply the method ofdemystification that Brecht proposes and examine the consequences of our identifi-

cation with the films leading character... It is the participatory nature of this scene

which objectively makes it an episode of mystification... Now it is precisely against

the danger of such mechanisms that Brecht proposed his method of alienation.

Brecht would have asked Brando to show his navet, to make us understand that,

despite the sympathy we may have for his misfortunes, it is even more important to

perceive their causes and their remedies.9

Similarly, in Brechts famous Mother Courage,what is shown in the play is not

so much the suffering of a mother figure, but the result of a failure to come to grips

with her historical situation. As spectators, we participate in her blindness at the

same time as we are made aware of it. As Barthes once observed (in reference to

Charlie Chaplins films), to see someone else not seeing is the best way to intense-

ly see what he or she does not see. Staging events in such a way that what had

seemed natural and immutable is revealed as historical and thus changeable: this

is what Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt.As a derivative of the Marxist theory

of alienation, the formalist notion of oestranenie and the surrealist practice of

errance, this strategy consists of turning the object of which one is made aware, to

9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies,1957, pp. 6869

Jean-Marie Straub & Danile Huillet, Othon(1970)


13/64


14/64

14

When Othon was released in France, it was heavily criticized in certain leftist

circles as an abject film, not only because of the unusual setting and diction (the

worst recitation in a school context, wrote a critic), but mainly because of its

incapacity to adapt and enlighten a historical text for spectators in the present,

instead translating it into an incomprehensible film in which no political message

could be found. The response of the Cahierscritics was that films such as Othon,

as well as Sotto il segno dello Scorpione by the Taviano brothers,Yoshishige

YoshidasEros + Massacre, or Robert KramersIce films that had been vigorously

defended on the pages of Cahiers were to be considered political precisely

because they were not satisfied with the pure and simple delivery of a straightfor-

ward political message. Rather, they start at the beginning (which is also one of

the conditions of political analysis) and carry out on their very materiality that

of the signifiers they put into play, as well as that of the conditions and means of

production of these signifiers a scriptural work which, as such,constitutes political

work.11In other words, political cinema has to start from its own materiality,

examine its own means and conditions of existence, and reveal rather than hidethe work which has gone into its making, as well as its production of meaning. Only

by refusing the effects of recognition and transparency, by criticizing the illusions of

consciousness and unravelling its real material conditions and contradictions, can

cinema activate the spectator, prompting him to start where the film ends, complet-

ing what it has left unfinished.

Politicsof representation

Can a revolutionary film be made without criticizing the dominant forms ofrepresentation? This question, at the core of the many debates on militant cinema,

became explicit in the discussion over two French films released in 1972: the Dziga

Vertov Groups Tout va Bienand Marin Karmitz Coup pour Coup. The similarity

between the two films is striking. Both proposed an account of the class struggle

which was stirring in France four years after 1968, complete with factory occupa-

tion and sequestration, but in contrast to the various direct documentations of

particular uprisings and strikes, the filmmakers chose fictional forms with which

to depict the workers revolt. Additionally, the filmmakers, who shared similar

political sympathies which leaned towards Marxist-Leninism, chose to produce anddistribute the films through conventional channels rather than the various parallel

circuits that had been set up in previous years. So the difference between the two

films could not be found in the choice of subject or diffusion, but in their formal

approach. What characterized Coup pour Coupwas an adherence to what Althus-

serians referred to as a spontaneous ideology. Karmitz chose to ask real workers

to act out their actual life in a natural way, and filmed them in a dispositive that

put the spectator in the heat of the struggle, directly amongst the people. At last,

11. Jean-Louis Comolli, Film/politique (2) LAveu: 13 propositions, Cahiers du Cinma 224, Octo-ber 1970


15/64

15

commented advocates of the film, a voice was given to the people. For once, the

working class was shown in their own environment, which is to say in the place

of production, exploitation and repression. For once, by reflecting the concrete

manifestations of the proletarian class, a film actually provided sensible knowl-

edge of capitalist social relations. As an enthusiast wrote, Confidence was given

to the experience and the naturalness of the workers, and that paid off well: life is

revealed in all its truth and intensity.

According to the critics of the film, however, the idea that there was an actual

truth to capture and communicate through images and sounds completely ignored

the fact that truth is not inherent in things, but alludes to a relationship of conformity

between an object and its knowledge, between a reality and its reflection. As this

relationship is always part of an ideological process, it does not suffice to produce

sensible knowledge of capitalist social relations and proletarian class struggles. It

is necessary to go beyond that and create rational knowledge of the internal laws

of this process. These critics challenged the assumption that a redoubling of realitygives way to an active reflection of that reality: it is not because the reflection of

reality on the screen is antagonistic to the dominant vision that they have revolu-

tionary value. Making a film from the point of view of the working class should not

be confounded with giving voice to the workers. It can never be an end in itself.

To leave things at the level of appearances, of the sensible, only affirms the cult

of spontaneity and leaves the dominant ideology unchallenged. Furthermore, as

Daney suggested, naturalising also implies a denial and an effacement of the

dialectics of exclusion that lie at the heart of the dominant order.

Naturalism is the game of readjustment where those such as young people,

immigrants and peasants who were previously forbidden from making films and

were never seen on the screen are now suddenly included in fiction films as though

they had always been part of them. They are naturalized in every sense of the

word, recognized by the law, made normal, natural and legal, and accede to a

sort of iconic dignity. but what is glossed over in this process ... is how and why

they break intothe story.12

Naturalism always the bte noireof the Cahiers at the time - is thus seen

as a point of view and a way of filming that renders natural what is in fact not.According to the same critics, this tendency towards naturalism in Coup pour Coup

is confirmed by Karmitz typecasting decision to give the roles of the other char-

acters the bosses and the union delegates to professional actors, conforming

to the idea of everyone in his or her place, in harmony with their nature, with the

way people are. Class struggle is neither represented nor suppressed, it is simply

taxonomlzed. Karmitz essentially reasserts a capitalist division of work, founded

on a simplified analysis of class struggle based on relations of repression and

resistance. As he himself explained, The form of the film is conditioned by the

12. Serge Daney, Pascal Kane, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Serge Toubiana, Une certaine tendance ducinema franc;ais, Cahiers du Cinema 257, May-June 1975.


16/64

16

contrast between repression and resistance. Everything is based on that. Godard

and Gorin, on the other hand, opposed this mise-en-scene of workers playing their

natural roles by working with professional actors:

The militants who distrust actors ask workers to play their proper role. Tradition-

al cinema takes big stars and makes them play the roles of proletarians. We think

that, in the present situation, a worker who plays like Jean Gabin cannot embody

his condition but only recount himself. So we have taken actors to play the roles

of workers, but downtrodden and exploited actors, who feel the class struggle in

their stomach. That has permitted us, by putting them in a correct situation, to really

oppose them to the actors representing the chieftains.13

This choice was rooted in a desire to highlight the contradictions between

the status of actors and the social roles that fiction traditionally assigns to them.

Casting the well-known French actorYves Montand,for example,was not based on

his natural tendency towards repression, but because of the dominant idea thatactors should stick to their characters. It is precisely because Montand is perfectly

able to embody a worker with a flair for spontaneity that they did not ask him

to do so. For Godard and Gorin, one cannot transform actors into workers and

workers into actors without asking what has to be transformed. Before representing

classes, one has to reflect on the ideological conception of that representation,

because there is already a dominant idea on how to depict class models, in their

way of being, moving and talking. Exploring the theme of class struggle to destroy

this idea does not hold up. Rather, the struggle itself has to traverse the work on

the film; it has to be extended through cinema.

The point of Tout va bien, whose mise-en-scene is clearly inspired by Brechts

lehrstcke(an attentive critic called the film the Sesame Street of political radical-

ism), is to take up the contradictions that are left unspoken in Coup pour Coup

between the practice of cinema and the practice of politics, between the status of

workers and the status of actors in order to make them productive. This is also

why Karmitz was criticized for not using the recordings of the discussions between

members of the film crew and the actors before and during the shooting: instead of

developing an active reflection of the working process, he chose to give the film a

sense of authenticity, covering up what is at stake in the contradiction between pol-itics and cinema. Both Tout va Bienand Coup pour Coup essentially started from

the same assumption: that one has to know the world, reveal the reality under the

surface of things, in order to be able to transform it. While the first chose to create

a reflection of reality, the second chose to expose the reality of reflection. While

the first chose to revive a specific struggle and reproduce a sensible perception

under the watchful eye of the camera, the second chose to put to work a rational

reflection on the internal laws of the struggle. Why else has Marxist thought broken

with the notion of contemplation? A film too, it was said, should intervene.

13. Jean-Luc Godard in Nouvel Observateur388, April 1972


17/64

17

Behind the firing lines

In Vent dEst, another film by the Dziga Vertov Group, there is a sequence

in which Glauber Rocha stands at a dusty crossroads, with arms outstretched.

A young woman with a movie camera goes up to him and says, Excuse me for

interrupting your class struggle, but could you please show me the way towards

political cinema? Rocha points in front of him, then behind and to his left and says,That way is the cinema of aesthetic adventure and philosophical inquiry, while

this way is Third World cinema a dangerous cinema, divine and marvellous,

where the questions are practical ones... Rocha puts forward what was felt to

be the main difference between the European counter-cinema and the so-called

Third World cinema - which is in itself anything but a stable phenomenon. While,

for European filmmakers, it seemed in the first place to be a matter of radically

opposing, or even, as Godard mentioned to Rocha, destroying the industrially and

ideologically dominant cinema, for many filmmakers in the Third World, it was not

a matter of destruction, but of invention, as a way to escape the stranglehold of

(neo)colonization, repression, censorship and underdevelopment. Although Rocha,

one of the pioneering filmmakers of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, always

expressed a strong admiration for Godard, he was also aware of the deep gap

between them:

Godard sums up all the questions of todays European intellectuals: is making

art worthwhile? The question is an old one And that is what is so annoying in

Europe today: the issue of the usefulness of art is old, but it is in fashion, and, in

cinema, it is up to Godard alone to come to grips with the crisis. Godard is what

Solanas is to us in Buenos Aires. The truth, however, whether our intellectual fel-low-countrymen want to hear it or not, is that European and American cinema has

gone up a road without hope, and it is only in the Third World countries that there

is a way left to make cinema.14

For Godard, Rocha laconically notes, cinema was over and done with. For

filmmakers in the Third World, it was just beginning: Godard & Co. are above zero.

We are below zero. Some of the most prolific explorers of these new beginnings

could undoubtedly be found in Latin America, where filmmakers offered argu-

ments for a cine de liberacion, for cine imperfecto, for an aesthetic of hunger,

a third or triccontinental cinema of decolonization all terms that have sinceframed many debates on political cinema and have become part of the rhetoric

of resistance against imperialist oppression, and for the empowerment of the

people in the Third World. All these filmmakers were grappling with the rise of

nationalism and militancy in the aftermath of several political and social incidents

that had erupted throughout the continent, from the unfinished workers revolution

in Bolivia in 1952 to the military overthrow of Argentinas President Pern in 1955,

and, most significantly, the guerrilla war in Cuba, which led to the establishment

of a socialist regime in 1959. It was not only the Cinema novo filmmakers, but also

14. Rocha, O ltimo escndalo de Godard, Manchete928, 31 January 1970


18/64

18

Jorge Sanjins and the Ukamau group in Bolivia, Julio Garca Espinosa and Toms

Gutierrez Alea in Cuba, Miguel Littn, Ral Ruz and Patricio Guzmn in Chile, and

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in Argentina: they all expressed the need

for thinking about cinema as a social instrument, as a weapon in the struggle for

national liberation and cultural transformation with an idea in ones head and a

camera in ones hand.

We must discuss, we must invent... It was this quote by Frantz Fanonthat

opened the manifesto Toward a Third Cinema (1969), written by Solanas and

Getino, who in the same year also released La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the

Furnaces), a didactic film fresco produced clandestinely under the Pron regime

and signed by the Cine Liberacin Group. In the manifesto, arguably the most influ-

ential articulation of Third World cinema, Solanas and Getino follow Fanons lead

and argue that cinema should be placed first at the service of life itself, ahead

of art; dissolve aesthetics in the life of society. Its objective was nothing short of a

decolonization of the mind. In line with the thinking of the Russian avant-gardes ofthe 1920s, and Eisenstein in particular, according to whom films had to plough the

mind of the viewer, cinema not only had to contribute to the development of a

new radical consciousness, but should also be instrumental in the revolutionary

transformation of society, as a means to an end. According to Rocha, however,

revolutionary cinema should be seen as more than a simple instrument that could

supposedly push spectators into the path of political consciousness and action:

The artist must demand a precise identification of what revolutionary art at

the service of political activism actually is, of what revolutionary art thrown into the

spaces opened up to new discussions is, and of what revolutionary art by the left

and operated by the right is. As an example of the first case, I, as a man of film,

cite La hora de los hornos, a film by the Argentine Fernando Solanas. It is typical

of the pamphlets of information, agitation and controversy that are currently being

used by political activists around the world.15

To illustrate the second case, Rocha suggested his own films, which are not

composed as theoretical guides for action, but rather as attempts to break with

what he saw as bourgeois rationalism and the colonial logics of representation,

induced as they were by exotic primitivism and social miserabilism. Rocha claimedthat the work of Godard and Solanas, which basically consists of opposing an op-

pressive logic with a revolutionary one, does not allow for a way out of the dead-

locks imposed by imperialism and capitalism. For him, revolution could only be

accomplished as a form of anti-reason and irrationalism: Revolutionary art must be

magic, capable of bewitching man to such a degree that he can no longer stand

to live in this absurd reality. The hopelessness of reality could only be overcome

through enchantment; freedom could only be devised through popular mysticism (in

favor of ideological demystification), something he saw arising from the historical

relationship between religion, folklore and rebellion. This interest in breaking the

15. Glauber Rocha, Aesthetic of Dream, presented at Columbia University in 1971
http://../Library/Caches/Adobe%20InDesign/Version%208.0/en_GB/InDesign%20ClipboardScrap1.pdfhttp://../Library/Caches/Adobe%20InDesign/Version%208.0/en_GB/InDesign%20ClipboardScrap1.pdf


19/64

course of history and advocating some kind of return to the past not unlike Walter

Benjamins tigers leap into the past was not only something that Rocha shared

with the Straubs (Rocha organized screenings of Othonin Brazil, while Straub

spoke highly of Rochas Antonio das Mortes,from 1969), but even more so with Pier

Paolo Pasolini, whose work is also characterized by a certain regression towards

religious themes and irrational impulses. There has always been a fraternal, yet

heated dialogue between the two filmmakers. Rocha criticized Pasolinis depiction

of the Third World, which he saw as merely an alibi for perversion. Pasolini ac-cused Rocha of having succumbed, as had Godard & Straub, to the blackmail of a

certain leftist thinking which prescribed a radical subversion of representation and

a conscious frustration of the spectators expectations.

What is it that Godard, the Straubs and Rocha are supposed to have in com-

mon? According to Pasolini, through their boundless provocation and transgression

of cinematic codes, their unpopular films at the same time render themselves as

agent provocateurs, martyrs and victims: the search for freedom from repression

had led to a suicidal intoxication and didactic self-exclusion, veering violentlytowards the negation of cinema. For Pasolini, who was a great admirer of Christian

Metz semiology of cinema, there was no doubt that an infraction of the codes is

Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino & Grupo Cine Liberacin, La hora de los hornos(1968)


20/64

20

a necessary condition for invention after all, the first step towards liberation is to

let go of certainties and open up to the unknown. But it also implies a refraction

of self-preservation, one that opens the way to self-destruction. When the codes

are too violently violated, when the front lines of transgression and invention are

crossed too far behind the firing line, there comes a point when the codes can be

recuperated for endless possibilities of modification and expansion, and any notionof struggle ends up being neutralized. This is when the struggle is no longer fought

on the barricades, but on the other side, behind vacated enemy lines, at which

point the enemy has disappeared, because he is fighting elsewhere. What is

important, wrote Pasolini, is not the moment of the realization of invention, but the

moment of invention. Permanent invention, continual struggle.16

16. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Unpopular Cinema, 1970.

Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol(1964, poster)


21/64


22/64

22

Godard, together with Anne-Marie Miville, did what he had always done:

take the question and put it at the heart of the film. The film turned into a moving

mournful reflection on the impossibility of a filmmaker to intervene in political strug-

gles, and the difficulty of escaping the endless chains of images and sounds in

which we are all caught up. Godard bemoaned how self-proclaimed militant films,

despite good intentions, tend to put the sound too loud, always covering up the

sound of one voice with that of another, obscuring what really is there to see in the

images. As part of a vigorous auto-critique, the film exposes the cinematic trickeries

by which we just love to be fooled: how images always deceive us, how sounds

always hide something else, how we are to learn to read the signs. The desire to

put a halt to the circulation of sounds and images ends up being a lamentation

for the end of a certain belief in the power of cinema, accompanying the end of a

belief in any change whatsoever. The act of mourning the failure of the Palestinian

revolution becomes an allegory for the failure of all revolutions.

Chris Marker, Le fond de lair est rouge(1977)


23/64

23

The end of the leftist era is also depicted in another film that came out around

the same time: John Douglas & Robert Kramers Milestones. The film portrays the

demise of the oppositional movements from the inside, something which both film-

makers, as former members of the Newsreel collective, had experienced first hand.

At the end of the 1960s, both had worked on various films denouncing American

imperialism, including Peoples War, which aimed to give a view on the Vietnam

war from the perspective of partisans in North Vietnam. Kramer had already made

a trilogy of films In the Country(1966), The Edge(1967) and Ice(1969) which

explored the limits of a collective desire for revolution and armed struggle. Mile-

stoneswas an attempt to grasp what had happened to these militant desires once

those limits had been reached, and they were redirected towards the exploration

of new communal forms. As Kramer said:

A lot of people say that the 70s are like a time of falling away from political

militancy. There is a sense in which that is true if emphasis is put on the word

militant and a strong, sustained confrontation with the powers that be. But there isanother sense in which that is not true, because we came to a dead end, and it

seemed as though we could not continue to be militant in that same way.17

Kramer & Douglass Milestoneswanted to make a film about rebirth, provid-

ing a mirror for all those who had been involved in the struggles to look into and

evaluate themselves, in order to go further. In a sense, it was not only the rebirth

of certain militant ideas and energies that was at stake, but the rebirth of a certain

cinema, a cinema of myth and dream, a cinema steeped in tradition and history.

Is it any wonder that at the end of their naive red period, the Cahiers du Cinma

celebrated the film as a positive example of a new militant cinema? Tired of their

own dogmatism and voluntarism, exhausted from the terror of the significant, the

Cahiers once again turned to their roots, to Bazin and his concern for morality, to

American cinema and its mavericks (a few months later Monte Hellmans Two-lane

Blacktop washeralded for its refutation of the old cinema of acute difference and

fatal necessity18). As a sort of counterweight for Ici et Ailleurs, which problematizes

any possible reflection on militant history by confronting all discourse with its own

lies, Milestonesattempted to make the militant left tell its own story, by returning to

the foundations of classic American cinema: the travelogue, the Western, the com-

munitarianism of John Ford and Anthony Mann. A strange return of the repressed.But hadnt Passolini seen it coming all along: Excessive transgression of the code

can only lead to a nostalgia for it?

17. G. Roy Levin, Reclaiming our Past, Reclaiming our Beginning, interview with Robert Kramer

and John Douglas, Jump Cut10-11, 197618. Pascal Bonitzer, Lignes et voies : (Macadam deux voies), Cahiers du cinema266-267,

May 1976.


24/64

24

The fire next time

The dream is over, a voice tells us at the end of Chris Markers Le fond de lair

est rouge (1977). When the smoke had cleared, all leftist resolve seemed to have

withered away. In France, Chile, Portugal and elsewhere, revolutionary movements

fizzled into rupture and defeat. In Italy and Germany, the hopes of the radical left

collapsed in violence and despair. In China, the Cultural Revolution turned out tobe a cruel failure, leading to famine and chaos. And so mourning began, mourn-

ing for failed hopes, mourning for possibilities that had turned in on themselves,

mourning for a sense of togetherness that had somehow collapsed into contorted

factionalism: a mourning without end. Soon enough, the energies of militant histo-

ries were overturned by some of those who had once fully embraced them. All that

the children of Marx and Coca-Cola and their actions had accomplished, so they

argued, was to pave the way for a rekindled capitalism, allowing our societies to

become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of

any affiliation, completely at the mercy of the law of capital. All resistance was said

to be futile, even suspect, in any case causing more harm than good. Revolt could

hardly change the world; it could only give rise to cruelty and catastrophe. History

was identified as an enormous, catastrophic ruin, perpetually piling wreckage upon

wreckage. The memory of the Gulags dissolved all memories of revolution, just as

the memory of the Shoah had replaced remembrance of antifascism. In claiming

to have delivered us from the fatal abstractions inspired by the radical ideologies

of the past, Western capitalism and its political system of democratic parliamentar-

ianism presented themselves as a universal shield, protecting us from all forms of

terror and totalitarianism. Capitalism won the battle, if not the war, the voice says,

but in a paradoxical logic, some of the staunchest opponents of Soviet totalitarian-ism, these men of the New Left fell into the same whirlwind.

In 1977, the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 set a gruesome series of events

in motion, the Bologna uprising and the Egyptian Bread Riots collapsed violently,

and Margaret Thatchers re-initiation of privatization announced the neoliberal turn.

In 1977, the Sex Pistols gave voice to the No Future generation, Jean-Franois

Lyotard wrote the first draft of La Condition Postmoderne, and former Marxists Ber-

nard-Henri Lvy and Andr Glucksmann declared the impossibility of all revolutions.

In 1977, Chris Marker presented the first version of his requiem for the revolutionary

era (Le fond de lair est rouge), Robert Kramer documented the aftermath of thelast revolution in 20th-century Europe (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal)

and Robert Bresson made his portrait of the lost generation of post-May 68 (Le Di-

able Probablement). According to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this was a generation

that rejected every form of commitment, because commitment for the films young

characters whom Bresson seems to understand so well is mainly an escape into

an occupation which keeps that commitment alive, an escape from the aware-

ness that everything goes on regardless of you and your commitment.19

19. Rainer Werner Fassbinder interviewed by Christian Brad Thomson


25/64

25

A year later, Fassbinder would create his own vision of this third generation,

coming after those who had dreamed of changing the world and those who had

faded into violence, a generation which simply acts without thinking, which has

neither a policy nor an ideology, and which, certainly without realizing it, lets itself

be manipulated by others, like a bunch of puppets. After the collapse of utopian

rebellion into desperate dystopia, all that seemed to be left was an overwhelming

sense of bitterness and nihilism. Nothing but lost illusions, utopias gone wrong, ru-

ins amidst the ruins. As if despair, as Godard mentioned in Numero deux, became

the ultimate form of criticism.

At the same time that the leftist era crumbled under the weight of historical

fatality, a certain utopia of cinema was believed to have come to an end. Serge

Daney once claimed that Pasolinis death in November 1975 a few weeks before

the release of Sal, which was his own personal cry of desperation marked the

point when cinema stopped playing the role of sorcerers apprentice and became

a consensual landscape, instead of the space for division and confrontation that itused to be. The politicization of cinema whether in content or in form that had

been associated with the upheavals and the hopes of the 1960s and 70s, gave

way to a general feeling of disillusionment and powerlessness. Just as the failure

of the October Revolution had accompanied the end of the utopia of cinema as a

mystical marriage between art and science, poetics and community, the implosion

of leftist dreams accompanied the dissolution of the idea of cinema as a realm

of discord or a weapon in the struggle. What had once been called militant or

political film had disappeared in the shadows of a bygone time that was best left

to forgetfulness. In 1977, Daney explained why Cahiers du Cinma, after having

abandoned the ideological critique of the non-legendary years, too lost interest in

the familiar models of militant cinema:

It is because it failed to furnish this imaginary encounter with the people,

because there were nothing but sectarian films, made hastily by people who didnt

care about cinema Today I think that militant films have the same defect as

militant groups they have the Mania of the All: each film is total, all-inclusive. A

true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film

would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject.20

After the deluge, with the disappearance of the material reality of the struggles

and the horizons that gave them meaning, the existing forms of militant cinema

could no longer be sustained. Straub & Huillet shifted their dialectical dispositive to

a lyrical one (Dalla Nuba alla Resistenza, 1978). Rocha put his remaining energies

into a self-destructing anti-symphony (A Idade da Terra, 1980). Oshimas Brechtian

articulations of revolutionary desire in the light of political repression gave way to

portrayals of the exasperation and impotence of desire (Ai no corrida, 1976). As

if desire could no longer be thought of as a mode of resistance, but only one of

escapism: is this not the sentiment that has been haunting us since the end of the

20. Serge Daney in conversation with Bill Krohn (1977)


26/64

26

1970s? The overflow of democratic mass individualism, that which the 1968 genera-

tion was supposedly seeking all along, has allegedly culminated in an infinite drift

of narcissistic consumers who do not care for anything but the instant satisfaction

of their own needs and desires: this is the narrative that the contemporary left has

embraced. The same criticism that used to denounce the society of the spectacle

and the mythology of consumer ideologies in view of possible change had started

to turn on itself, trapping itself in an endless vicious cycle in which the power of the

market can no longer be distinguished from the power of its denunciation. As if

everything equals everything else, and all resistance is futile. As if we are now all

political realists, stuck in an endless refrain of consensual melodies, stuck with the

way things are, this natural order of things that the character of Ned Beaty so

vigorously evangelized in Network (1976).

But we can not continue much longer on the way of disillusion, wrote Daney

towards the end of his life. Despite his growing disenchantment with the dissolu-

tion of the cinema that he had so much cared for, the cin-filsstill put his wageron optimism. Between the spectacle and the lack of images, is there a place

for art to live with images, at the same time demanding them to be humanly

comprehensive (to better know what they are, who makes them and how, what

they can do, how they retroact on the world) and keep at their core this remnant

that is in-human, startling, ambiguous, on the verge?21 With Daney, we can ask how

we might gain a renewed trust in the power of the image. How can we get out of

the fatalistic scepticism that the society of disdain has bestowed on us? Can the

history of militant cinema, beyond all rhetoric, still infuse us with a much-needed

sense of risk, adventure and emancipatory potential? It is clear to us now that the

belief in the causal relations between affection, understanding and action, which

once provided the basic foundation for militant cinema, is no longer valid: the lack

of any horizon of change has made sure of that. It has also become increasingly

clear that the overwhelming feelings of disorientation and disappointment, the

sense of something lacking or failing that arises from the realization that we inhabit

a violently unjust world, all too easily sweep us away into the never-ending depths

of fear and nihilism. The challenge, then, is to break with this dominant discourse

that tells us that any notion of politics is constantly undermined by disillusionment.

Now that cinema, being unsure of its own politics, is once again encouraged to

intervene in the absence of the proper political, the question is how it can generatea new power of affirmation, one that is consistent with the interruption of the logic

of resignation evidenced by recent uprisings, one that breaks with the febrile steril-

ity of the contemporary world. In a time when capitalism has colonized most of our

dream life, can cinema once again become a laboratory of distant dreams, invig-

orating a new sense of the impossible, something to hold on to, hold on dearly?

Stoffel Debuysere

21. Serge Daney, Lexercicea t profitable, monsieur, P.O.L, 1993, p. 210


27/64

27

Godards Latest ScandalBy Glauber Rocha

Originally published as O ltimo escndalo de Godard in Manchete, n. 928, 31 January 1970.

This years talk of the town will be Vent dest, the latest film by Jean-Luc Godard,

made after Le gai savoirand before Pravda. An Italian film. Still a complete mystery.

This grande fofocais possibly of the same stature as La dolce vita. Cineriz, a big

distributor associated with Rizzoli publishers, has paid an advance of one hundred

thousand dollars to producer Gianni Barcelloni for a western in colour written by

Cohn-Bendit, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and featuring Gian-Maria Volont. Does

the film meet the requirements of Cineriz? I saw the first, secret screening, in the com-

pany of the producer and a lawyer. Cineriz, suspecting that the film would have noth-ing in common with what they expected, are threatening to sue the producers and

ask for their money back, but as yet none of them has seen the film, on which subject

the craziest jokes are going around. For example, I met this young guy who asked

me, Have you heard? In Godards far-west, there are two horses reciting Mao!

Gianni Barcelloni asked me for a cigarette ten minutes into the screening, and

while lighting the match, I noticed he was in tears. Next to him, the lawyer kept his

lips firmly sealed. At the end of the row of seats, Ettore Rosbuck, a young million-

aire with long hair, was wrapped in silence. After ten minutes, the film is still in its

first scene, a scene showing a couple a youngsters lying around in the grass, while

on the soundtrack we can hear a political discussion, with the sound distorted

typical Godard, a specialized snob would say. But the joke stops there. After the

first half hour, the lights come on and the lawyer, in a frenzy, says, I agree with

Godards words, but this is not a film! Cineriz will sue us!

So I answered: Listen, doctor, what technically determines the definition of a film is

the length of printed pellicule, sound and image. Scientifically, the film does exist.

The lawyer answered, I am a practical man. It is the judge who will say that this isnot a film.

So I responded to the lawyer, Sir, there is no legislation that says what a film is, in

esthetic terms. If a judge ever ruled that this is not a film, you can appeal.

In the middle of this conversation, the lights go out and an image appears in which

Godard, in his protestant pastors voice, asks what a film is. The lawyer breaks out

in laughter, and Godard continues with an image showing Gian-Maria Volont on

a horse, dragging along the body of an Indian.


28/64

28

What is a film? Every day, the bosses ask filmmakers to make films. The boss could

be Brezjnev-Mosfilm, or Nixon-Paramount. The scene we are seeing now is typical

of a Hollywood western: an officer of the American cavalry torturing an Indian. The

scene is repeated, but this time the officer is reading a fashionable revolutionary

book. In this scene we see an image and we hear the sound of a progressive film,

such as those presented yearly at the festivals in Pesaro or Leipzig: a film that is

the same as the reactionary films weve seen before, since it shows the same spec-

tacular images, with false content.

After that, several other images are shown and numerous questions are asked

about militant cinema, always in the spirit of rigorous self-critique. I tell the lawyer,

You have seen it now: the discussion will go far. If the judge behaves like an ass,

call Moravia, Lvi-Strauss, Marcuse, Sartre. A Godard film can take a hit: Cineriz

would prefer to loose a hundred thousand dollars than to loose face.

The lawyer hasnt heard me, hes completely fascinated by the film. Barcelloni ispraying. Ettore seems possessed by this bestial silence that captures one in the

presence of the indecipherability of a genius.

More images follow, filled with quotes and discussions, and then the film ends. The

lawyer is even more furious now and I say while getting up, In my opinion, the

only problem with the film is that at this time it will not pass the Italian censorship.

Other than that, it is as good and as commercial as all the others.

The lawyer calls me an optimist and leaves. I go out with Jos Antonio Ventura, the

films sound engineer, and I tell him several things. The sound editing is brilliant.

Godard will end up making a record one day. It is not a political film as Godard

usually makes them: it is rather an anarchist film in the line of Artaud and Jarry.

From elsewhere I call Escorel22and I tell him all that. We ask ourselves if Paul Emilio

Salles Gomes23would like it. Surely. A bit later, still with Ventura, Its a bit of a joke.

With a hundred thousand dollars, we could have created a film industry in Brazil!

When I reach Gianni, I say, There is something in the editing of sounds and im-

ages, something that irritates me: a bourgeois anarchism, a destructive moralism,something taking itself seriously. What if, Gianni, Bach had put leftist phrases in

his music, in order to make himself heard at a music festival? Or if Mondrian had

22. Eduardo Escorelhas been a major figure in Brazilian cinema since the 1960s. He edited,amongst others, Rochas Terra em Transe(1967) and O Drago da Maldade contra oSanto Guerreiro(1969).

23. Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes(1916-1977) was was a leading Brazilian intellectual and filmcritic. His writings include a biography of Jean Vigo and Cinema: trajetria no subdesen-volvimento (Cinema: Trajectory in Underdevelopment).
http://web.international.ucla.edu/lai/calendar/10280http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/2013/01/18/presence-of-paulo-emilio/http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/2013/01/18/presence-of-paulo-emilio/http://web.international.ucla.edu/lai/calendar/10280


29/64


30/64

30

painted leftist legends on his tableaux? Or even in Brazil, if Tom24had succumbed

to the pressure, and had utilized leftist words for his music? You know, Gianni, I

remember when old Nicholas Ray told me in Cannes, Whenever I see a Godard

film, Im not always interested in the images, which are very beautiful. The big

problem with Jean-Luc is that he doesnt have the courage to speak himself!

Gianni answers, Jean-Luc, he worries me.

I turn to good old Ventura, You know, Z, Godards big frustration is that he

doesnt succeed in creating a political climate; he doesnt dispose of any violence.

He always approaches reality in a theoretical way. When he shows the officer of

the American military torturing a student, he doesnt generate any terror. The shot

is extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful shots in cinema, a shot made to

make cinephiles swoon.

Thats right, consents Z, In the scene in which the officer attacks the demonstra-tor, he wanted to have a brutal scene, and he really asked me to raise the sound,

and what remains, as youve seen, is this simple scene, almost lyrical.

But the scene has turned out brilliantly, I respond to Z, because the four cam-

era movements that he made are absolutely unprecedented in film history.

Yes, really beautiful!, whispers Z.

Z, I continued, the more I think about it, the more Im against the film, because

its us who are the weak part in it. This film is an instrumentalization of our misery

by a French bourgeois who is doing his own thing, explaining Marxism, a subject

that I dont know very well, but I dont think he understands it either. If a professor

of political science were to help out, perhaps that would please him. Having said

that, there is something, perhaps this desperate attempt to explain Marxism, that

doesnt respond very well to todays problems. And then I dont know It seems to

me that the film is a big joke!

It is useless to continue to describe my reactions to Vent dEst. In Brazil, when an

intellectual doesnt like a film from the new cinema, he says with the tone of agreat wise man: This is not a film!

A film for intellectuals generally obeys the American model, which they have been

seeing since childhood and which they place alongside their Oedipus complex: the

least provocation, and its immediately taken as pretentious idiocy. One day on the

24. Antnio Tom Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (1927-1994), also known as Tom Jo-bim, was a Brazilian songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, and pianist/guitarist. He wasa primary force behind the creation of the Bossa Nova style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B4nio_Carlos_Jobimhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B4nio_Carlos_Jobimhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B4nio_Carlos_Jobimhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B4nio_Carlos_Jobim


31/64

31

beach, an intellectual from Rio told me, I dont like El Justicero25because the cam-

era is always static, and in a comedy, the camera has to move!

And in groups, they all behave like babas. The fashionable intellectuals who al-

ready have a model of modern cinema in mind, in line with Godards work: Vent

destwill freak them out. And to the youngsters who have been imitating Godard

for the last five years or so, I address a warning: they should move fast, because in

his two next films, Jean-Luc is capable of reinventing everything and even the infer-

nal bazar of tropicalismo wont help them conceal their old-style soccer game, nor

make the goals against the teams of their colleagues. Sadly, it seems, with Vent

dEst, the Godard fashion has come to an end, and its Jean-Luc who is ending it

himself, horrified by his own brilliance. These are the last words I tell Ventura:

The tragedy is that in all of Latin America, it will be wild imitation all over again,

and just as the Africans should show all the white folks the door, we should prevent

foreign films from coming to Brazil. Brazilian cinema can only evolve if the audi-

ence, the critics and the filmmakers only see Brazilian films. For Godard, cinemais over, and for us, cinema is only beginning. In Brazil, a cameraman like Dib Lufti

makes a long shot la main and the whole world vibrates; if Godard saw that, he

would fall to the ground in tears.

In front of this man, skinny, bald, forty years old, I feel like an affectionate aunt

who is ashamed to give sweets to a sad nephew. The image is silly, but God-

ard provokes a great sentiment of affection. Lets talk seriously: its like Bach or

Michelangelo eating spaghetti swamped with cockroaches, thinking that its not

worth painting the Sistine Chapel or composing the Actus Tragicus.Because he is

like that, Godard today, more humble than Francis of Assisi, ashamed of his own

genius, excusing himself to the whole world, crying like a child when Barcelloni

scoffed him, complaining of feeling abandoned, of being a wreck, the glory of

being the greatest filmmaker since Eisenstein weighing on his Swiss bourgeois

anarcho-right-wing shoulders. Please, lets stop that. I am only a worker in cinema,

so dont talk to me about cinema: I just want to cause revolutions, help humanity.

There he is, calling the merry May leftist club for help, using production money to

pay for a nice holiday in Sicily, leaving Cohn-Bendit and his hysterical Mao-Spontec

discussions behind and rushing to Paris to show some excerpts of his film on Czech-oslovakia, coming back to Rome out of breath to declare that he doesnt want to

make money with the film, criticizing me of having a producers mentality. Then he

asks me to help him destroy cinema. I tell him that what Im into is something else:

I tell him that my business is creating cinema in Brazil and the Third World. Then he

asks me to play a role in the film and if I want to shoot a scene in Vent destand

being the old monkey that I am I tell him to calm down, because I am only there

for the adventure and Im not clownish enough to embark in the gigolos collective

folklore of the unforgettable French May.

25. El Justiceroby Nelson Pereira dos Santos (1967)


32/64

32

To simplify, Godard sums up all the questions of todays European intellectuals: is

art worth making? The question is an old one, Paulo Francis26would say: Joyce has

also destroyed the novel! And thats what is so annoying in Europe today: the issue

of the usefulness of art is old, but it is in fashion and, in cinema, its up to Godard

alone to come to grips with the crisis. Godard is what Fernando Ezequile Solanas27

is to us in Buenos Aires. The truth, however, whether our intellectual fellow country-

men want to hear it or not, is that European and American cinema has gone up a

road without hope, and its only in the Third World countries that there is a way left

to make cinema. Thats where the crisis resides and why Godard (and co.) has a

lot to do with us. In Vent dest, he asks me what the roads of cinema are, and he

himself gives the answer: That way is the cinema of aesthetic adventure and phil-

osophical inquiry, while this way is the Third World cinema a dangerous cinema,

divine and marvelous, where the questions are practical ones: production, distribu-

tion, training three hundred filmmakers to make six hundred films a year for Brazil

alone, to supply one of the worlds biggest markets.

I repeat: That is the difference. On the one hand, there is a general exhaustion

financed by big capital, and even Godard, in his desperation and as much as he

wants to escape it, makes film after film, financed by the system itself that, from

its side, doesnt care if Godard attacks it with all his strength, because cinema is

also exhausted and the whole world is collapsing in attendance of the Bomb. Vent

destis financed by Ettore Rosbuck, and this young man represents Fiat. Because

its Fiat that has been financing the most anarchist and terrorist films in recent

times, and basically Ettore doesnt care one way or the other, because for him Vent

destis as inoffensive as any other work of art, and the great beauty of this film is

just this: its desperate beauty, born imperceptibly of the exhausted intelligence

of poetry. On the other hand, tired of running, but still devoid of reflection, we are

here, we, the others from the Third World, and we ask permission to film.

Godard and co. are above zero. We are below zero.

We dont have the big capital to back us up. On the contrary, we have vicious

censorship on our backs. We also have an audience that hates our films because

its drugged out on commercial foreign and national films, and on top of that mar-

ket, we also have the intellectuals who hate our films because they are druggedout on Godard films, and who hate us because we dare to make films in a country

that doesnt have stars like Gary Cooper and doesnt speak a language that knows

how to say I love you. The difference is simply that, and that is why its worth-

while, I think, to say one last thing about Godard:

26. Paulo Francis(1930-1997) was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic.27. Fernando Ezequile Solanasis an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician. His

films include La hora de los hornos (1968).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Francishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Solanashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Solanashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Francis


33/64

33

The art in Brazil (or any other country in the Third World) makes sense, yes sir! The

underdeveloped country that does not have a strong or madly national art is to be

pitied, because, without its art, its all the weaker (its brain can be colonized), and

its here that the most dangerous extension of economic colonization can be found.

In the specific case of cinema, I want to let my colleagues know that they should

endure the criticism, the slander and the contempt without wavering, because I am

absolutely convinced that Brazilian cinema novo is currently producing images and

sounds that are what we can call modern cinema.

After seeing Vent dest, I havent said these last words to the lawyer, because that

doesnt interest him, but now I would like to say to everyone, interested or not inter-

ested, in the faraway homeland I love so much:

I have seen from up close the corpse of Godard, having committed suicide, up

there on the screen, projected in 16mm. It was the dead image of colonization. My

friends, I have seen the death of colonization! If I have been a privileged Brazilian,my apologies, but by spreading this news, I just want to let it be heard: WE HAVE

TO CONTINUE TO MAKE CINEMA IN BRAZIL!

Translated by Stoffel Debuysere, with the help of Mari Shields

Glauber Rochas A Idade da terrawill be screened on Sunday 6 April,

in the context of the film program Across the Margins, Beyond the

Pale (Re-imagining the post-colonial)


34/64

34

The Testament that Godard has Never Written

While Watching Ici et AilleursMasao Adachi

Written in 2002. French version published in Le Bus de la rvolution passera bientt prs de

chez toi, edited by Nicole Brenez and Go Hirasawa (Editions Rouge Profond, 2012)

1. About the black screen, once more

To be honest, until I watched Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), my memory

of Godards cinema was merged in my head with all the other films of the Nouvelle

Vague. They were mixed up in a blurry silhouette that seemed to erupt from a mag-

ic lantern. But then again, for those who know Godards films, this blur of memoriesisnt all that surprising.

And yet. While watching Ici et Ailleurs, my vague memories were going in all

directions, and every image, every sound was mutating into a tidal wave, sweeping

me away from all sides. Was I really watching Ici et Ailleurs, or was it my memory,

in which I had buried all those memories and those intimacies, which was forced to

open itself like an old book of magic spells with stuck-together pages? I was in the

grip of a great confusion.

Suddenly, in the middle of this wave of sounds and images, I could not help

noticing once more that my memories of Godard and his group were above all

tied to their force as militants, their capacity to evoke the agonies of their contem-

poraries. Ici et Ailleursmanifests a spirit that we shared with comrades all over the

world, mobilized as we were by the march towards the creation of a new world.

The film recounts the shadows of the historical time and space as we lived it back

then. It is an account that demonstrates the painful road travelled by those who

marched without halt in the middle of those shadows, towards a confiscated goal.

It is often said that Godard continued on this road with several other films, but

it is above all in Ici et Ailleursthat he tried, through his own desperation, to narrate

the problems of a whole era. In his inability to let himself whither away because

of this desperation, he has left us this ultimate letter, addressed to all those whowill survive him, a sort of testament. Twenty-seven years after being made, not a

single word has aged. On the contrary, I think that these are words that resonate in

the most lively way possible in todays world, in 2002. They reflect the effervescence

of agitators who were very much alive in the spirit of the time. In addition, the sor-

row and the irritation of a Godard who was constantly in search of a new life force

for cinema has reminded me of this era, and the zeal that emerged from it.

I have also made a decisive discovery in Ici et Ailleurs.

Godards group, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, used the method of the

tableau noir, or black screen, in a perfect example of this cinematographic lan-

guage that he and others developed, and which as he said, proposed to make

possible the realization of our images and sounds, our cinema. In other words,

they wanted to express a message by way of silence. At that time, I criticized that


35/64

35

method, wondering if it wasnt simply some sort of flight towards aphasia. But this

time, while watching this black screen, I told myself that Godard was giving us

an alarm call, warning us of danger, a trap: We are being seen so we dont see

anything. I was unable to sense this other message at the time, this despair of an

era during which Godard, with such dedication, explored ways to make himself

understood by all.

I might be reproached for repeating the same things over and over again, but

I really want to write Godard about this profound and new emotion that I felt while

watching Ici et Ailleurs.

2. The possibilities of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine

There are several points that link Godard and myself. The most obvious con-

cerns our common commitment to the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Let

us think, from our point of view, about what Godard and his friends were able to

consider as possibilities to explore, and what has, in contrast, disappointed them,and then compare their positions with the actions and analyses that my comrades

and myself conducted at the time. In other words, it is about asking, in the light

of this commitment to the liberation of Palestine, of what this despair of an era

contained in the black screen wants to tell us. We have to clarify the message that

Godard tries to communicate, and the reasons that have pushed him to change the

title from Jusqu la Victoire(Until Victory)to Ici et Ailleurs.

We can already discern an answer in the process of self-tra

Documents

Courtisane Cahiers