Vladimir and Rosa (Dziga Vertov Group, 1971)

Vladimir and Rosa is the most successful of the Dziga Vertov Group films to this point because, among its innovative styling and fresh comic timing, it dares to show the intellectual grappling with his efficacy. Though I've found the DVG films have not been as polemical as many claimed, Godard and co.'s use of Marxist dialectics to this point has chiefly resulted in political films that may be balanced but are still fiery. Vladimir and Rosa is the first to get at what I feel is the greatest concern of great thinkers: am I reaching anyone? It is well and good to be the greatest physicist or philosopher in the world, but what if no one can break through your impenetrable thoughts? Consider books on economics or astrophysics. Which receives more praise: thoroughness or accessibility?

Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, play the titular Vladimir and Rosa, respectively, and they open the film by contemplating the nature of revolution. Godard, playing the spirit of Lenin, looks at pictures of the revolutionary and thinks of the dialectic between theory and practice, of translating abstract thought into concrete action. That is the central issue with any revolt, and Godard and Gorin know it is the crux of revolutionary film as well. Godard's intentions of forming the DVG, to go beyond making political films and making the construction of the films themselves political, make all the group's films inherently self-reflexive, and this video is the culmination of the incremental revelations contained in previous works.

More so than the other group films, Vladimir and Rosa actually has something of a plot. Structured like Kubrick's Paths of Glory mixed with Peter Cook's legendary "Entirely a Matter for You" sketch at the Secret Policeman's Ball, Vladimir and Rosa makes for engaging political satire crossed with surprisingly effective courtroom drama. A free jazz riff on the trial of the Chicago Eight, the film replaces most of the actual people with deliberate archetypes of sociopolitical outsiders, and the actors use their real names. Anne Wiazemsky appears as a women's lib feminist, Juliet Berto a hippie from a commune, Yves Afonso as a protesting student who appears at the limits of his commitment to nonviolence, etc.

Each represents a different facet of the counterculture, but all (well, all but one) are equally silenced in court by the stand-in for Judge Julius Hoffman, a cartoonish fascist unsubtly named Judge Ernest Adolf Himmler. Himmler makes a mockery of the trial, refusing to allow any evidence or testimony that might exonerate or at least contextualize the defendants' actions, and he stacks the jury with nothing but old housewives and bureaucratic paper-pushers in gray flannel suits. Eventually, Vladimir and Rosa enter and ask to show what they've made of their film so far in the hopes of demonstrate to the jury what it is they see that informs their worldview, and the judge flatly refuses any plea for empathy (or maybe he just watched Pravda; anyone's guess).

One of the two members of the Chicago Eight actually represented here is Bobby Seale, for the simple reason that Godard could not have written a character more farcically put-upon than the co-founder of the Black Panthers. Transparently chosen by the actual Chicago authorities because he was black -- he was actually a replacement for another Panther, Eldridge Cleaver -- Seale received such absurd treatment that all he could do was shout insults to the infuriated judge, who eventually had him bound and gagged and severed from the other seven. I couldn't believe that when I looked him up, assuming that Godard chained and gagged his version of Seale to exaggerate the degree to which this court stripped anti-Establishment protesters of their rights.

Seale is also the impetus for a deeper, more complex portrait of radicals that reveals Godard's capacity for subtlety and distinction even in his political thinking. Both the real and fictional Seales requested their own lawyer instead of being tried with the other seven. One could attribute this to Seale refusing to let himself be considered among the group since his arrest was so laughable and clearly unconnected; by letting himself get lumped in with the others, he at least partially acquiesced to the Establishment's distortion of events.

Yet Seale also seems to recognize how little he has in common with the white radicals from middle-class backgrounds, a distinction Godard masterfully weaves into the narrative. All the issues Godard examines between theory and practice, of the difficulty of breaking from an all-encompassing social structure that has been the only system one knows, does not apply to Seale. As a black man, he never fully meshed with the bourgeois, white society before breaking with it, and so he successfully left with minimal effort -- it's easy to leave a party you weren't invited to, less so for the children of the host. Compare his action to the theoretical discussions of the whites, and the cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. Who can forget that moment in Gimme Shelter when the hippie woman walks around fundraising to free some Black Panthers from prison, airily cooing "After all, they're only Negroes."

A similar split occurs across gender lines. Wiazemsky reads from a feminist tract by a South African woman, and she has Afonso read with her to prove the point that extreme feminism cannot come from a man. Indeed, as the man reads, he simply powers through the words and offers perfunctory agreement, but flecks of chauvinism peek through -- "We're men and you're girls" -- and he clearly does not get on the woman's frequency. Yet even Wiazemsky cannot identify fully with the piece, as it is written by a working-class black woman whose perspective is completely different than hers. These radicals enjoy a privilege they cannot escape, and Godard himself seems to look upon black revolutionaries with naïve envy, wishing he too could so fully break from bourgeois society.

Watching a dilapidated, rust-tinted print, I missed a great deal of the visual cleverness, but if I couldn't play the usual game of quick-translating the scribbled messages of dialectical juxtaposition for the dim film quality, I could at least smile at some of Godard's funniest mise-en-scène in years. The filmmakers recall the use of infinite black space in Le gai savoir for the backdrop of the trial, giving the whole thing even more of a Kafkaesque flavor than it already has. Set apart from time and space and staring ahead with blank eyes, the bourgeois jurors look like aliens despite being chosen by the prosecution and a biased judge for their "normalcy." The scenes in which he and Gorin discuss the nature and aim of their film are hilarious: for a time, they pace around a tennis court as couples play doubles, the back and forth of the matches offering a wry visual gag at the games both the filmmakers and the subjects the film play with conventional power and artistic structures. Eventually, the players seem to get so pissed with their games being interrupted that they stand on the sidelines until Lenin and Rosa just go the hell away.

The most brazen joke shows Godard and Gorin dressing up as a cop and judge, respectively. To demonstrate police force, Godard unzips his fly and pulls out a straight nightstick, a hilariously suggestive image that bitterly attacks the pent-up sexual aggression of wanton beating but also exposes how much of a laugh the filmmakers are having. Their usual incorporation of artifice is so heightened here that the movie starts to turn back to more conventional forms. The police beating that opens the film is openly cartoonish, with obviously fake blood and nightsticks that look about as sturdy as twigs, a bit of mock theatricality that sets the half-acidic, half-parodic nature of the film. Shots of cranes erecting buildings recalls 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and Godard's sympathetic but critical look at young revolutionaries brings La Chinoise to mind. If Godard threw himself into the DVG to find himself, he seems at last to have discovered that the way forward is also somewhat circular.

The central motivation behind Vladimir and Rosa, indeed of all the DVG films, is the question of how to make a film that will be practically useful. By being by far the most entertaining of the collective's films, Vladimir and Rosa might actually be the least useful of the lot as it motivates one to keep watching. The filmmakers amusingly suggest that it is the radical's job to simplify complicated views for the masses, but Godard cannot bring himself to stick to one idea. Too many thoughts bounce around his head for him to give preference to any one of them, and he struggles to find the way forward here. He admires one man's nonviolence but displays frustration at the inefficiency of it, just as he goads the young radicals on but also recognizes their weaknesses.

The film ends with more polemics, but they're delivered through a tape recorder. They're instructions from someone else, an acknowledgement of the trickiness of a democratic revolution when a movement needs a leader, needs guidance. Godard seemed to understand the artistic implications of this as well, and with his next film he began using his name again. Whatever he did or didn't learn from his DVG experiment, all the messy contradictions and intriguing insights can be seen in this film, making it the most essential of the collective's output. Happily, it's also the most enjoyable.

Le Vent d'Est

After the combined weight of British Sounds and Pravda collapsed the last bridge connecting Jean-Luc Godard to his former life, he and the Dziga Vertov Group now had the freedom to build a new structure, one that could take them wherever they pleased. Le vent d'est ("Wind from the East") still contains all the elements that are grating about DGV films, but if the agitprop itself still fails, Godard and the others slowly put together a way to tell their story inventively, even cheekily.


Opening with a held shot of two people lying in a field, the warring narration that defined the last few films returns as a woman and man overlap each other. The woman wins out, speaking of her bourgeois father's work at an aluminum company. She mentions that mounting union pressure led the man to lock himself in his office in fear, leading to panicked conversations between "Daddy and Uncle Sam" in which the man begged for aid from the capitalists. In dad's mind, the poor are used to being poor, so the continued exploitation of miners will not affect them, but for the rich to suffer even the slightest loss of money would be bewildering and far more harmful. I couldn't help but smile at that bit of dialogue as I thought of all those screaming "redistribution of wealth" now, in a time when the rich continue to profit off the recession they created. For all the hullabaloo over May '68, France did not change as drastically as some would have you believe, but the threat of mass union uprising shifting the power back to the worker could easily have put the terror into the wealthy.

That, sadly, is one of the last moments of the film that makes any sense, as Godard, Gorin and the rest waste no time overlapping sound and image until, once again, they create incomprehensible agitprop. Yet where the polemical dialogue fails again, the film's form demonstrates Gorin and Godard getting the hang of their new radical cinema. Godard always believed that the best way to criticize a film was to make another one, and never before has a work of his been more of its own critique. "What does it mean to ask the question 'Where are we now?' for a militant filmmaker?" posits the female narrator, and Godard's attempt to answer that question make for his most interesting filmmaking since Le gai savoir.

We see a film-within-a-film being made, what appears to be a spaghetti Western made in West Germany. As the actors prepare their roles, the narrator delves into the idea of revolutionary film. She castigates Sergei Eisenstein for being influenced by the "imperialist" D.W. Griffith and angrily laments that he went back in time to find an event of social upheaval for Potemkin rather than using an examination of then-current social strife to instruct through his lens. Of course, for Godard to slam anyone for looking to past movies and events is rich, but he acknowledges that and used Le vent d'est to grapple with that nagging sense of cinephilia that beckons to him as he tries to move beyond his previous life.

At last, Godard returns to placing provocative and even beautiful images on the screen. The actors, walking around a large field, put on flowing gowns that make them look as if they got lost on their way to the nearest Bergman film, and the narrator repeats "Death to the bourgeois" as a saintly clad Anne Wiazemsky reads in the meadow as hands bearing a hammer and sickle threateningly close around her head before pulling back again and again. The jumbled title cards bring back the invention of Le gai savoir's use of written word on the screen. As the narrator attempts to figure out how to proceed from May '68 (and, alternately, how Godard expects to move forward with his radical cinema), the words "que" and "faire" (literally "what to do") appear on a piece of paper over and over in perfectly arranged columns as if a kindergartner's copying assignment. The word "repression" uses the Schutzstaffel insignia for its SS. Lutte, meaning "fight, is scribbled over a page with a heavy black marker used to write "CRITIQUE" over everything, suggesting the manner in which Godard and Gorin have chosen to wage their fight against the bourgeois is through savage criticism.

The agitprop is, as ever, maddening, but Godard never lost track of his ability to see the aspects of Communism that failed. He delineates between "worker Leninism" and "student Leninism," and he takes aim at himself when he dismisses the latter as being naïve and unfocused. A shot of mass graves reminds everyone of what happens when a maniac like Stalin takes power. At any rate, Le vent d'est also takes the time to consider the Western wind, and compared to the more Maoist leanings of previous DGV films, this feature examines less the virtue of Communism than the ways capitalism undermines individual freedom even as it purports to be the most free societal structure. Godard is, of course, too scathing toward capitalism as a whole and not the abuse of it, but there are some valid points buried in the aural muck. His most damning critique, naturally, is of Hollywood, which he charges with being falsely liberal. My ears perked up at this, as I've been hating on Hollywood's love of cheap, faux-liberalism for years, the sort of pandering hogwash that serves only to rake in cash to studio executives (which doesn't exactly scream "socialist," does it?). Over an image of a man riding a horse, the narrator rages that Hollywood would have us believe that the horse on-screen is really a horse. Not just that, that it is more than a horse. Even as the DGV tries to uncover the true nature of the contemporary political climate, Godard still carries his pet theme of the illusory quality of the cinema, a them the film industry in Hollywood just sweeps under the rug because it raises too many questions.

Le vent d'est continues the director's deconstructionist streak, but for the first time since joining the DGV he begins to reconstruct images as well. A great deal of the film doesn't work, especially as it's nearly incomprehensible aurally or visually from taking low-quality source elements and blowing them up far beyond their capacity (not to mention the only way I could find of viewing the film was on a horrendous VHS rip), but I was finally interested in Godard again. I couldn't wait to see what he'd do next, and I felt rewarded by straining my eyes to make out what it was I was supposed to be looking at. Godard makes the camera into the general assembly with this film, posing questions about the revolution for other to answer. After talking down to us for the last few films, Godard continues to pontificate but finally lets the audience formulate its own thoughts and asks us for responses to the questions posed. We're not out of the woods yet, but Le vent d'est was a pleasant surprise after suffering the Dziga Vertov Group's nonsense for what felt an eternity after but two films.