1968 and Global Cinema by Christina Gerhardt

Author:Christina Gerhardt [Gerhardt, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: art, Film & Video
ISBN: 9780814342930
Google: 7QaYswEACAAJ
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:41:52.121000+00:00

II

Aftershocks

11

RE-PRESENTING THE “JUST IMAGE”

Godard-Gorin’s Vent d’est and the Radical Thwartedness of Maoist Solidarity after May 1968

Man-tat Terence Leung

In the wake of the political watershed of the May ’68 movements in France, renowned French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard realized that the proper direction in political cinema was not simply to “make political films” but to “make films politically” as a militant group.1 Established in the winter of 1968 by Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and an ensemble of young French Maoists, the Groupe Dziga Vertov (Dziga Vertov Group, or DVG) was one of the first pioneering film collectives to practice and experiment with Maoist politics and group authorship in cinema during the long sixties.2 Unlike another famous film collective during that time, Société pour la lancement des oeuvres nouvelles (Society for the Creation of New Works, or SLON), established by Chris Marker and his Groupe Medvedkine, the DVG endeavored to adopt a formalist approach to cinema with “claims for self-reflexivity, collectivity, and class consciousness.”3

Although the aesthetic orientation of this rather elusive Maoist period of Godard seems to be radically at odds with his early auteur years and his later metaphysical and metahistorical explorations, it is equally important to keep in mind that his works made between 1968 and 1972 are often unfairly misconstrued and dismissed as either an egalitarian failure or a didactic exercise. Taking one of the most representative works of the DVG, Vent d’est/The Wind from the East (1969), as the point of departure, this essay seeks to rehistoricize the Mao-leaning years of Godard in the political aftermath of French May ’68, which continues the intense debates over the Sino-Soviet split of the 1950s with certain new and unexpected philosophical twists. In particular, it will show how this collective film produced shortly after May ’68, despite carrying a certain irreducible error of its own, may have actually advanced a new kind of dialectical thinking in political filmmaking that radically complicates the classic antidoctrinal aesthetic paradigm of what Peter Wollen called “counter-cinema” a few decades ago. Moreover, this essay will also point out that a critical rereading of Vent d’est in relation to the highly heterogeneous and dividing interpretations of “Maoist solidarity” during the European leftist heyday not only is constitutive in helping to resurface many unrealized revolutionary potentialities pertaining to Godard’s cinematic radicalism of the 1960s as such but also sheds new light on the continuous problematization of the reigning global capitalist discourse and its allying neoliberal ideology today. Although the discursive construct of neoliberal capitalism becomes increasingly obligatory and predominating in the current scene, there remains much room for our perpetual imaginations of various kinds of utopian possibilities in relation to the profound emancipatory spirit of global 1968 at large.

The Flawed Revolutionary Alliances after May ’68

Of all the DVG films, Vent d’est is thought to be the most radical experiment in reworking the established relationship between image and sound that characterizes Godard’s auteur period. Although Godard’s cinema is long distinguished for its deconstructive traits among his other Nouvelle Vague fellows, the

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