Abstract
The chapter begins with an overdue exploration of Godard’s “militant filmmaking” in the context of intellectual history of May 1968 and the debates around political filmmaking in France. The lens through which I analyze Godard’s films of this period is the crisis of aesthetic and political representation translated into experiments with image and sound juxtapositions, within the frame of the Dziga Vertov Group experimentations with the ideologemes of the Left. I also examine the DVG’s use of Maoist techniques such as the logic of contradiction, self-critique or positing the sound/image struggle as analogous to the class struggle. Two questions that persist in the DVG’s films and that are asked in an array of experimental forms relate first to the representability of the political struggle and indignation, and second, to the authority of the voice of the filmmaker as the harbinger of political change.
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Notes
- 1.
See Serge Daney’s “Le thérrorisé (pédagogie godardienne),” Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 262–263 (January 1976), 32–39; Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: British Film Institute/Macmillan, 1980); Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002); and Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Le Vent d’Est,” in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), pp. 79–91.
- 2.
According to Stefan Kristensen, Godard’s thought is nourished by an array of thinkers, writers, painters, scientists, philosophers and political scientists and thus we must situate cinema in relationship to the activity of thinking. His point of departure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Kristensen, Godard’s point of departure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty but he also suggests to avoid indexing any of Godard’s films to such currents of thought, or to divide his work into “philosophical periods” according to authors that would correspond to the readings that marked certain films. I agree with Kirstensen that the questions he has posed in his films since the 1960s, in dialogue with certain thinkers, are always enriched and transformed in later works. See: Stefan Kristensen, Jean-Luc Godard Philosophe (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2014).
- 3.
See What Is To Be Done? , printable edition produced by Chris Russell for the Marxist Internet Archive, available at www.marxists.org, p. 46.
- 4.
In André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, édition complète (Paris: France Loisirs, 1962), p. 248.
- 5.
See Michel Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. xiii.
- 6.
Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties” Social Text no. 9/10 (Spring-summer 1984), p. 182.
- 7.
See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review 1, no. 62 (July–August 1970), pp. 83–96.
- 8.
Godard’s radical avant-garde position somehow resembles—at least metaphorically—Antonio Gramsci’s war of position, a combination of strategy and tactics, as opposed to a frontal attack like the vanguardist position. The war of position is a stage in the struggle that takes place behind the trenches, a battle against ideology. The war of position, thus, does not take place in armed struggle but in the political plane; for example, Gandhi’s passive resistance. See Antonio Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 296–298, and Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,” Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Mouffe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 195–198.
- 9.
In Passées cités par JLG: L’Oeil de l’histoire, 5 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2015), Georges Didi-Huberman also notes the Maoist influence in Godard’s montage as a dialectic of contradictions parting from the analysis of a “concrete situation” (pp. 51, 52).
- 10.
Following Fredric Jameson in “Periodizing the Sixties,” p. 186. The Leftist ideologemes I mention are part of materialist theoretical practice that was derived from certain readings and practices of Marxism in the 1960s.
- 11.
As opposed to vertically. Sartre’s relationship to the Gauche Prolétarienne exemplifies this transversality: he was something like the “great uncle” of the Maoists—la mascotte, as Deleuze put it. As we will see, Sartre’s iconic figure of political engagement took over the role that the PCF had occupied before; intellectuals, writers and artists needed to take a position regarding Sartre’s engaged position.
- 12.
Michel Foucault, “La fonction politique de l’intellectuel,” Politique Hebdo, 29 (November–December 1976), 31–33, reprinted in Dits et écrits, volume III (1976–1979). (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 113–114.
- 13.
“Art is dead. Godard will not be able to save it.” Julien Besançon, Les murs ont la parole: Journal mural Mai 68 Sorbonne Odéon Nanterre etc.…, (Paris: Tchou, 2007), p. 42.
- 14.
“The art of today is Jean-Luc Godard.” Jacques Aumont would further Aragon’s conviction by equating modern art to cinema (as the most advanced art form of the twentieth century and thus Modernism) as its proper name: “Godard.” See Jacques Aumont, “The Medium” (New York: MoMA, 1992).
- 15.
Louis Aragon, “Qu-est ce que l’art, Jean-Luc Godard?” Les Lettres Françaises no. 1096 (September 9–15, 1965). Available online at: http://tapin.free.fr/godard/aragon.html. Date consulted: February 1, 2007. We can see how Aragon would read Pierrot le fou and Une femme mariée as socialist realist films.
- 16.
There was another graffiti at the Sorbonne that recalls Situationist animosity toward Godard: “Jean-Luc Godard est le plus con des suisses pro-chinois.” [Godard is the biggest pro-Chinese Swiss asshole.] Julien Besançon, Les murs ont la parole.
- 17.
Guy Debord, “The Role of Godard” (1966), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), pp. 175–76.
- 18.
“Everything that was directly lived has drifted away in its own representation.” La Société du Spectacle (1967) (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 9. Available in English at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
- 19.
Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 103.
- 20.
Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle, p. 176.
- 21.
The symbolic power that Guernica has acquired throughout the twentieth century was highlighted by its being covered up in the UN headquarters at the end of January 2003 when a Security Council meeting was held discussing the impending war in Iraq. The reproduction of Guernica was covered in order to impede the production of photographs of the Security Council with the image in the background. The collective Retort begins its book Afflicted Powers with a reflection on the meaning of this event crystallized in the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld in front of the UN’s reproduction of Guernica as a way into the question of Spectacle after September 11th. See Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 16.
- 22.
“Did you find (a job)?” “No, I arrived too late.”
- 23.
“Can you explain it to me dad? I don’t understand!!” “No, I don’t have time now, we’ll see later.”
- 24.
André Breton, “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” trans. Dwight MacDonald, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 533. Originally published in Partisan Review IV, no. 1 (Fall 1938), pp. 49–53.
- 25.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Pingaud and Dionys Mascolo, Du rôle de l’intellectuel dans le mouvement révolutionnaire (Paris: Le terrain vague, 1971), and Sartre’s three conferences from Kyoto, Japan from 1965 published in Situations, VIII: Autour de 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
- 26.
La Cause du people along with J’accuse were journals directly linked to the Proletarian Left supported by Sartre (amongst other intellectuals) but dissolved due to internal conflicts in 1972.
- 27.
Godard in the interview with Marlène Belilos, Michel Boujut, Jean-Claude Deschamps and Pierre-Henri Zoller, first published in Politique Hebdo, no. 26–27 (April 1972); reprinted in Godard par Godard, p. 374.
- 28.
What is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), p. 5. First published in France in 1947.
- 29.
See Pierre Bourdieu, “Sartre, l’invention de l’intellectuel total,” Libération , 31 March 1983, pp. 20–21.
- 30.
Quote from Manifeste (1970): “In literature, as in art, to struggle on two fronts. The political front and the artistic front; it is the current stage, and we will need to learn to solve the contradictions between the two fronts.” Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, p. 138.
- 31.
For an account of Godard’s involvement with the Leftist French press during the DVG period see Michael Witt, “Godard dans la presse d’extrême gauche” in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 165–177.
- 32.
For a detailed history of the Dziga Vertov Group see Antoine de Baecque, Godard Biographie (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010), pp. 445–448.
- 33.
Antoine de Baecque, Godard Biographie, pp. 450–457.
- 34.
“Cinéma, tâche secondaire de la révolution pour nous actuellement en France; mais nous faisons notre activité principale de cette tâche secondaire.” [Cinema is for us, in France, a secondary task to the revolution, but we make of this secondary task our principal activity.] Manifeste (1970) reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, p. 138. Godard wrote: “There is no cinema above classes, no cinema above class struggle: also we know that the cinema is a secondary task and our program is very simple: to see and show the world in the name of the world proletarian revolution .” Jean-Luc Godard, “Pratique révolutionnaire,” Cinéthique nos. 9–10 (Fall 1971), p. 74.
- 35.
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 88.
- 36.
Ambiguity attended the birth of the DVG; while British Sounds and Pravda were made by Godard in collaboration with Jean-Henri Roger and were retrospectively vindicated by the Group, Le Vent d’Est and Luttes en Italie (1970) were mostly made by Godard and Gorin. According to Baecque, Vladimir et Rosa (1971) is the only “true” film by the Group, as it is the result of the effective co-operation of the half a dozen people working on it. Armand Marco joined in as the chef opérateur in 1969 to supervise the shooting in Palestine for what would become Ici et ailleurs (1976) . Letter to Jane (1972) was also made by Godard and Gorin and Un film français is a project that dates from 1968 written by Jean-Pierre Gorin and Nathalie Biard about France, “an experimental film about France’s history, actuality, revolution and other political struggles.” The film was never made and neither was La Jeune Taupe, written by Nathalie Biard and Raphaël Sorin in 1972, a “documentary fiction film” and portrait of a Leftist community and of an engaged woman. L’ailleurs immédiat was written collaboratively by Gorin, Sorin, Biard and Pons and their establishing of Tout Va Assez Bien Films company signaled the beginning of the rupture with Godard rendered definitive by Gorin’s move to California in 1974. See: Antoine de Baecque, Godard Biographie (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010), pp. 500–513. See also Faroult , “Never More Godard,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 123 and Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics,” Jump Cut, no. 23 (April 1983).
- 37.
Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, with Mick Eaton and Laura Mulvey (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 120.
- 38.
David Faroult, “The Dziga Vertov Group filmography,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, pp. 132–133.
- 39.
“To abandon the notion of auteur, such as it was. We find it treacherous, sheer revisionism. The notion of auteur is completely reactionary.” Statement by Godard in an interview with Tribune socialiste (23 January, 1969) quoted by Antoine de Baecque, p. 445.
- 40.
Godard par Godard, p. 334.
- 41.
Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, p. 18.
- 42.
See Gérard Leblanc, “Sur trois films du Groupe Dziga Vertov,” VH 101 no. 6 (September 1972), unpaginated.
- 43.
By 1972 many gépistes were in prison on political grounds. This drew attention to the deplorable state of French prisons, prompting the creation of the GIP or “Groupe d’information sur les prisons”.
- 44.
Michèle Manceaux, Les Maos en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 201. Cited by Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and in the United States, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1988) p. 102.
- 45.
“People’s speech: that the priority of revolutionary power is established as expression.” Pierre Victor (pseudonym of Benny Lévy), On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 103.
- 46.
The practice of établissement was not new. In the mid-1930s, the thinker and activist Simone Weil experienced the assembly line by enlisting to work in a factory. See Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1955), (London: Routledge, 2001) and La Condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). See also Robert Linhart’s L’Établi (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978), where he narrates his experience in a factory and describes the dehumanizing conditions of Taylorist assembly lines.
- 47.
Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism, p. 103.
- 48.
Ibid., pp. 101–130.
- 49.
For an extremely detailed account of the “political lines” followed by the DVG see Gérard Leblanc, “Sur trois films du groupe Dziga Vertov,” VH 101, no. 6 (September 1972).
- 50.
See Mao Tse-Tung’s “On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice, between Knowing and Doing,” and “On Contradiction,” On Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 52–102; also available at www.marxists.org
- 51.
For detailed descriptions of the DVG films see Peter Wollen,“Godard and counter cinema: Vent d’est”; Julia Lesage, “Tout va bien and Coup pour coup: Radical French Cinema in Context,” Cineaste 5, no. 3 (Summer 1972); David Faroult, “Never More Godard”; James Roy MacBean’s Film and Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975); and Gérard Leblanc and David Faroult, Mai 68 ou le cinéma en suspense (Paris: Syllepse, 1998).
- 52.
For analytical descriptions and analyses see Peter Wollen, Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin’s Le Vent d’est: Looking at a Film Politically,” Jump Cut, no. 4 (November–December 1974), David Faroult, “Du Vertovisme du Groupe Dziga Vertov,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006), James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), and Gérard Leblanc, “Sur trois films du groupe Dziga Vertov.”
- 53.
According to David Faroult, Lotte in Italia is a mise-en-scène of Althusser’s text “Idéologie et Appareil Idéologique d’Etat” [Ideology and ideological state apparatus], 1970, to which Godard had access through Gorin because it circulated clandestinely amongst his students before it was published.
- 54.
See: Georges Didi-Huberman, Passées cités, pp. 51–52.
- 55.
Jean-Luc Godard, “Interview with Godard and Gorin (with Goodwin and Marcus),” in Michael Goodwin and Greil Marcus, Double Feature: Movies and Politics (Dutton, 1972), p. 36.
- 56.
“Hasty, opportunistic and petit-bourgeois shooting. This shooting is not ‘montage before montage’ (Vertov). Montage that is not montage before montage, instead of being montage within montage…False images because they were still produced from the viewpoint of imperialist ideology.” Reprinted in Godard par Godard, 340.
- 57.
Kent E. Carroll, “Film and Revolution: Interview with the Dziga Vertov Group,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 83 (October 1970), p. 54.
- 58.
Both quotes are from Double Feature, pp. 10 and 20 respectively.
- 59.
Mao Tse-Tung, “On Contradiction,” pp. 63–64.
- 60.
Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance” (1938) trans. Rodney Livingstone, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ernst Bloch (London and New York: Verso, 1987), p. 33.
- 61.
Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” Aesthetics and Politics (New York: NLB, 1979), p. 205.
- 62.
Guy Hennebelle and Daniel Serceau, Écran (Décembre 1975) quoted by Paul Douglas Grant, Cinéma militant: Political Filmmaking & May 1968 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 7.
- 63.
Grant, Cinéma militant, p. 36.
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
From the original manuscript, reproduced in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, pp. 145–151.
- 66.
First printed in Cahiers du Cinéma no. 300, special issue by Godard (1979), reprinted along with a response from Roussopoulos in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, pp. 298–299. Godard would make similar critiques in his films in the 1970s of photo-journalistic and documentary images, which have “objective” meaning for Godard in that “no-one speaks” in them, thereby hiding the point of view of the speaker.
- 67.
“Towards a Proletarian Cinema: An Interview with Marin Karmitz,” Cinéaste Vol. IV, no. 2 (Fall 1970), pp. 20–25.
- 68.
In 1969 Godard broke with Cahiers, for which he had written since the late 1950s, and joined Cinéthique , demanding that Cahiers take a position regarding Cinéthique and to elicit a political program. See the Cahiers/ Cinéthique debate: Cahiers du Cinéma , nos. 216–17 (October–November 1969) and Cinéthique no. 5 (September–October 1969).
- 69.
For a taxonomy of “ideological” and “materialist” filmmaking see Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 216 (October 1969).
- 70.
Jean-Paul Fargier, “La parenthèse et le détour,” Cinéthique no. 5 (September–October 1969), p. 21.
- 71.
Jean Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique 2: D’une critique a son point critique,” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 217 (November 1969), p. 9.
- 72.
For an account of Le Gai savoir through the lens of post-structuralism see Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard (New York: The University Press, 1998).
- 73.
Arguably, Le Gai savoir inspired the position Cinéthique took in the 1969 debate with Cahiers.
- 74.
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971) in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 155–164.
- 75.
Vague ideas should be confronted with clear images.”
- 76.
“Photography is not a reflection of what is real, but the reality of that reflection”. Jean-Luc Godard, “Premiers sons anglais,” Cinéthique no. 5 (September–October 1969), reprinted in Godard par Godard, p. 338.
- 77.
See Mao Tse-Tung, “Where do Correct Ideas Come From?” (1957), in On Practice and Contradiction: Slavoj Zizek presents Mao, pp. 167–168.
- 78.
See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (expanded edition), (London: BFI, 1998).
- 79.
See Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics: 1967–72,” Jump Cut, no. 25 (April 1983).
- 80.
“Sound is the union delegate of the eye; it goes without saying that the image is the political front desk of the ear.” From the script of Le Gai savoir : Mot-à-mot d’un film encore trop réviso (Paris: Union Ecrivains, 1969), unpaginated.
- 81.
Jean Baudry quoted in Kaja Silverman, Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 4.
- 82.
“Taking power is possible when the image // at the same time that it reinforces a sound by presenting itself in the place of a sound // when the image in return lets itself be represented by another sound // like a worker letting himself be represented by his union // and the union translates this fact (of representation) // into slogans which are in turn applied and given back to the worker as order-words.”
- 83.
Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
- 84.
For an account of the repressive measures taken by Raymond Marcellin, the French Minister of the Interior, between 1968 and 1973, see Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998).
- 85.
“We never have discussions during a general assembly. Everybody leaves frustrated saying ‘it’s not possible.’ Worse, in certain organizations like the AJS [Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme] they have the sad habit of hanging onto the mike to ask people to vote for a motion when it’s only them who are left in the room. On the contrary, true discussion concerns everyone. How can discussion become a means of struggle, a political practice?” In On a raison de se révolter, p. 280.
- 86.
See Tom Conley’s “Afterword” to de Certeau’s The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, p. 183.
- 87.
Following Christophe Bourseiller, who stated that the Proletarian Left used the generic terms of “democrats” or “fellow travelers” to designate the intellectuals who gravitated around the party. They included Sartre (who assumed the editorship of the Maoist journal La Cause du Peuple ), de Beauvoir, Karmitz, Katia Kaupp, Mariella Righini, Alexandre Astruc, Agnès Varda, and Gérard Fromanger. Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes: La Folle histoire des Gardes-Rouges français (Paris: Points, 2008), pp. 152, 198.
- 88.
Jean-Pierre Gorin stated: “Le gauchisme, en tant que pratique politique, a apporté des éléments radicalement nouveaux, mais en ce qui concerne les intellectuels, ce qu’il propose est une solution de type révisionniste réadaptée aux exigences d’une lutte et d’une pratique anti-révisionniste.” [Leftism as a political practice has brought in radically new elements, but in what concerns intellectuals, what they propose is a kind of revisionist solution that is re-adapted to the demands of a struggle and a practice that are in principle anti-revisionist.] Interview with Marlène Belilos, Michel Boujut, Jean-Claude Deschamps and Pierre-Henri Zoller, Politique Hebdo nos. 26, 27 (April 1972), reprinted in Godard par Godard, 374.
- 89.
See Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (The University Press, Chicago, 2002), pp. 110–111.
- 90.
See the 1973 discussion on sacrifice and militantism between Philippe Gavi, Pierre Victor and Jean-Paul Sartre in Victor, On a raison de se révolter, pp. 178–198.
- 91.
“But it’s not true that these people work without receiving a salary. Excuse me, but this is a fascist discourse; in fact, it goes beyond fascism. This is the discourse of a slave of fascism, which is as bad as anything. You go off to interview people and you do not earn a salary out of it? And you interview a guy whose sole problem is to find a job that pays him one, and you do not have a salary? What are you going to discuss with the poor chap? Nothing!” From unpublished material transmitted on June 22, 1976. Source: the archives of the Phonothèque, l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris. For the television series he made with Miéville, Six fois deux: sur et sous la communication (1976), they interviewed a number of people, including a mathematician, a painter, a prostitute, a peasant, a photo-journalist and a young man. For Godard, the interview is work, and he makes it a point to have remunerated his interviewees the equivalent of an hour of work.
- 92.
James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 118.
- 93.
According to David Faroult, Godard and Henri Roger (with whom he had been working in previous DVG films) were approached by a rich Italian patron who wanted to bring together fashionable names to make a politico-collective film with figures such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gian Maria Volonté. After a few days of shooting, most of the members of the group fled to Italian bistros and beaches with the money from the film. Godard asked Gorin to come and help him. They took over the “production team,” and the result was Le Vent d’Est, their first film together. David Faroult in an interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin, cited in “Never More Godard: Le Groupe Dziga Vertov, l’auteur et la signature,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, p. 123.
- 94.
Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d’Est,” in Readings and Writings, p. 80.
- 95.
“Two voices have continued to lie and two to stammer. Which one is ours? How to know it? What is to be done?”
- 96.
“The delegate translates workers’ struggle into the language of the factory owner.”
- 97.
“When the delegate translates, he betrays.”
- 98.
Godard and Gorin bestow on the worker the “imperialist” language, English. The dialogue goes:
- The delegate to the striker::
-
“Che cosa vuoi? Che cosa vuoi?” [What do you want? What do you want?]
- Striker::
-
“Down with the moving lines! Power to the working class!”
- The owner to the delegate::
-
“Che cosa vuole?” [What does he want?]
- The delegate::
-
“Vuole migliori condizioni del lavoro ed essere pagato meglio; lo vede c’è un poveraccio d’indiano; lui a la moglie malata, gli figli malati. Secondo me, possiamo anche metterci d’accordo. Io non me ne posso occupare… lei è responsabile di portarli al campo di concentramento…” [He wants better working conditions and to be paid better. You can see that he is a pitifully poor Indian; his wife is ill, his children are ill. I think that we can reach an agreement. But I’m unable to take care of this, you are responsible for bringing him to the concentration camp…]
- 99.
“He is lying! He talks, talks and talks”
- 100.
On May 17th, 1968 the Parisian film community held their own General Assembly, the États Généraux du Cinéma (EGC). It was agreed that the filmmakers would interrupt the Cannes Festival in order to show solidarity with the striking workers and students, to protest against police repression and to contest Gaullist power along with the actual structures of the French cinematographic industry. The EGC published three bulletins and a dossier in Cahiers du Cinéma. At the end of May, it prescribed the total or partial nationalization of the cinematographic industry, administered through a self-managing scheme. Many collectives would be spawned by the EGC’s efforts, such as SLON, ISKRA, the Groupes Medvedkine and Cinélutte. See the editorial of Cahiers de Cinéma no. 202 (June–July 1968), and the editorial and the dossier of the EGC published in the following issue of Cahiers du Cinéma , no. 203 (August 1968).
- 101.
Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 11.
- 102.
Cohn-Bendit was the leader of the group of students from Nanterre, Le mouvement du 22 mars; he became one of the main figures of May 1968, known as “Dany Le Rouge” and famously stated: “Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands.”
- 103.
See the section on “Parrhesia and the Crisis of Democratic Institutions” from Foucault’s lectures at Berkeley in November 1983, Truth and Discourse available online at: http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.DT3.democracy.en.html
- 104.
“We turned up the volume too loud.”
- 105.
After Charlotte Nordmann in: Bourdieu/ Rancière: La politique entre sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Amsterdam Poches, 2006), p. 117.
- 106.
According to Faroult, Godard and Roger wanted to hook up with Maoists in London but because they did not find any, they filmed the Trotskyite workers instead. David Faroult, “Never More Godard,” p. 123.
- 107.
See LIP 73, edited by Edmond Maire and Charles Piaget, with texts and interventions by André Acquier, Raymond Burgy, Jacques Chérèque, Fredo Moutet, J.Paul Murcier and Claude Perrignon (Paris: Seuil, 1973) and LIP 20 ans après (propos sur le chômage) by Claude Neuschwander and Gaston Bordet (Paris: Syros, 1993). For a recent English source, see: Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (London: Berghahn Books, 2004), 63. In the film, the reference to LIP signifies the struggles here in addition to the struggles elsewhere. LIP was also one of the most mediatized strikes in France, as even Henri Cartier-Bresson documented it. The collective Groupes Medvedkine from Besançon , France, made a movie about LIP in 1968 called Classe de Lutte.
- 108.
An account of the LIP strike from a Maoist point of view is articulated in the series of interviews between two Maoists, Philippe Gavi and Pierre Victor, and Jean-Paul Sartre in: On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
- 109.
See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives and Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible.
- 110.
The La Gauche Prolétarienne dissolved on November 1, 1973 in what is known as “La Réunion des Chrysanthèmes.”
- 111.
“We did what many others were doing. We made images and we turned the volume up too high. With any image: Vietnam. Always the same sound, always too loud, Prague, Montevideo, May ’68 in France, Italy, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, strikes in Poland, torture in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Chile, Palestine, the sound so loud that it ended up drowning out the voice that we wanted to emerge from the image.”
- 112.
See Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), p. 201.
- 113.
Guernica is the symbol par excellence of intellectual militant struggle. It was deprecated by Sartre in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What is Literature?] (1948) and championed by Adorno in his article “Commitment”, New Left Review, I/87–88, 1974. In 1968 protests in America against the war in Vietnam used Guernica as a peace symbol; in 1967, some 400 artists and writers petitioned Picasso: “Please let the spirit of your painting be reasserted and its message once again felt, by withdrawing your painting from the United States for the duration of the war.” In 1974, a young Iranian artist, Tony Shafrazi, sprayed Guernica with the words “Kill Lies All.” See Picasso’s Guernica, ed. Ellen C. Oppler, Norton Critical Studies in Art History (New York, London: Syracuse University, 1988).
- 114.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is writing?” in What is literature?
- 115.
Walter Benjamin calls the power of intellect “logocracy,” an already established activist position in which the intellectual does not acknowledge his/her own role in the process of production. This position implies a system in which words are the ruling power. In “The Author as Producer,” written in 1934 and published in New Left Review I/62, (July–August 1970).
- 116.
“There is a moment // A point in time when one sound assumes power over the others // A point in time where the sound seeks almost desperately to conserve its power. // How did the sound take power? It took power because at a given moment it made itself to be represented by an image // this one, for example…” While we hear this part of the voice-over, during which Hitler can be heard giving a speech, we are looking at the amplifier that is measuring the given sound’s intensity (a fragment of the Internationale).
- 117.
According to Theodor Adorno in “Commitment.” He further quotes an apocryphal anecdote about a Nazi officer coming into Picasso’s studio and, pointing to a photograph of the painting, asking him: “Did you do that?” Picasso’s answer being: “No, you did!”
- 118.
Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, Collection “Théorie” par Louis Althusser (Paris: François Maspero, 1966), pp. 89–91.
- 119.
See “Économie politique de la critique de film: Débat entre Jean-Luc Godard et Pauline Kael,” published originally in Camera Obscura nos. 8-9-10 reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, p. 481.
- 120.
“The image as a proof. The image as justice, as the result of an agreement.” Jean-Luc Godard , Cahiers du Cinéma no. 300 (1979), p. 125.
- 121.
“Me, I am a political animal // Me, I am a machine.” From the 1973 script of an unrealized film, Moi, je.
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Emmelhainz, I. (2019). Who Speaks Here? Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Militant Filmmaking’ (1967–74). In: Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72095-1_2
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