Comment Ça Va (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

Despite the blatant reflexivity of the film's premise, Comment ça va might have been a remarkably straightforward film about a newspaperman making an instructional video about the paper business with his partner. But as much as Godard has always been fascinated with process, the single question out of the journalistic "Five Ws" that is truly addressed here is "Why?" The complexity that will eventually push the film into some of the director's most challenging work to this point (no mean feat) is prompted by an almost childlike simplicity on behalf of the radical woman, Odette (Miéville), who oversees this project with the Communist newspaper editor (Michel Marot). Though her questions are complex, political, philosophical and aesthetic, they ultimately boil down to that simplest yet most agonizing of queries.

The editor considers himself a radical but, as Odette points out, he pays little heed to the process of his video editing beyond utilitarian and populist concerns; what's more, he also routinely comes into conflict with the more commercialized and tepid mainstream media, which always finds a way to soften and bury his more radical stories. He shows her a workprint, and immediately Odette asks why the film cut over information, demanding to see all of the footage first. Naturally, this results in a flood of imagery and explanatory text, but even that is soon challenged by the silhouetted Odette as she criticizes the imagery of Portuguese and French worker uprisings shown within the educational film Marot put together. After all, can text really break down an image, or can it only propose one interpretation, usually prompted by a narrow focus on but one aspect of the image?

Godard and Miéville, through Odette and a slowly contemplating Marot, delve into that theme with exacting analysis of the primary film stills of the workers. For the editor, he believes that showing such scenes while cutting out the fluff hones his statement into its clearest form. Odette, however, uses the still images to point out how one's interpretation is often formed by preconceived notions, and that to edit together only these striking images only serves to make the meaning more ambiguous. For example, Odette asks, is the gesture of raised fists a show of solidarity or a precursor to violence? For already-converted radicals and leftists, a glance at such an image would provoke the former interpretation. But what of the conservatives? Would they not view the fearsome collection of angered workers as a mob? But even then, Godard moves beyond dialectics to show even more observations that arise from the image: Odette points out that, without any context, the one worker with his mouth agape looks almost like a pop singer in gesture and body language.

And once text gets placed over the image, the meaning only further obscures. Marot, by now wise to what Odette is arguing, types "To go on strike, that is joy" onto the screen, the word "joie" making him view that same worker's open mouth as a smile or laugh. Then, he muses about removing the letters r-e-v-e from "grève" (strike). In French, "rêve" is dream, suggesting that Marot just robbed his interpretation of its optimism. This being 1976, the primitive computer equipment that allows for Godard and Miéville's image manipulation throws up text via a giant pixel of a cursor, a block that darts over the screen as it types out the letters and simply moves according to the whims of the computer operator. Perhaps this signifies the movement of the eye over the image and how importance of the mise-en-scène is subconsciously imparted to the viewer, that same ordering of importance defining meaning for the viewer before he or she truly has time to think about it. Godard had pursued a democratized film image since at least 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and here we see a refinement of the philosophy and motivation behind that push, a desire to parcel out how we perceive images, and indeed whether auterial intent, however intellectually reasoned and intricate, matters at all the second someone else views the product.

Complementing this obsession with perspective and interpretation is Godard's pointed critique of the gap between ideological beliefs and commitments to those beliefs. Marot and his estranged son believe themselves to be radicals, but we see the son primarily getting his news through half-heard newscasts in the morning when he eats breakfast in his comfortable apartment with his lover. Meanwhile, Marot's aforementioned ignorance of the full power of his editing and film construction blinds him to the potential impact of his sloth. For him, he wants to edit the shortest distance between two idea-affirming images, but Odette demonstrates the folly of his approach.

She (and by extension the filmmakers) also subtly critiques the repression of women among these so-called radicals, showing how they assign stereotypical roles to women: the son's lover appears almost solely as a homemaker, while Odette herself gets roped into stenographer work typing out print copy, something that annoys her almost visibly (amusing, since we never see her unobscured by shadow) to the point that she slowly types and even later replays the scene in an attempt to get the man to see the error of his ways. But by then Marot's already dropped a line about women being "copying machines," effectively spitting out genetic duplicates of, erm, let's call it input data.

It is important to note that the profession Godard uses to prompt this film is journalism, a profession nominally dedicated to publicizing the truth. But religion was quick to teach the concept of lying by omission, and Godard wishes to show how casual editing for the sake of legibility and flow can undermine the power of journalism even as it makes the profession more esoteric and unappealing to the common reader. He does let on an understanding for the complicated, self-defeating position in which that places everyone, and he wryly notes "Language is the place where the executioner transforms the victim into another executioner." But if Godard finally works out that success in his quest to democratize the film image will obliterate meaning in the flood of interpretation, he suggests a path back to full directorial control by having Odette say, "What is unseen is what directs." However slowly, Godard is working his way back to narrative cinema even as he consolidates his more radical experimentation of the decade.

The first text of the film, projected on a black screen, dubs Comment ça va "A film between active and passive," and Godard shows how easy it is to lean back into passivity. Even Odette notes how she can switch her brain off while typing up copies of polemics, arguing that even a blind man can do this job. Godard shows how life itself gets in the way of full dedication to one's beliefs: can a mother be a full-time radical if she must worry about the health and progress of her children? Can someone in even the most liberal profession not devote a portion of his time to ensuring some form of paycheck to survive? It is, however, unclear whether Godard has fully accepted the truth he has uncovered, for he still suggests irritation with passive commitment. Still, the fury and autocritique of the DVG years is cooling into more a measured response to his frustrations, and if Comment ça va is not as stunning a work as Numéro deux, it is at least a refined insight into Godard's thought process as he navigates ever headier waters.

Numéro Deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975)

Numéro deux represents Godard's first fully successful attempt to include the elements of his previous films into a cohesive whole. Ironically, it may also be his most abstract and jumbled film yet. Shown entirely on video monitors (even the two establishing shots showing Godard in his studio contain running images on screens), Numéro deux takes his Brechtian distance to a new extreme, creating such an aesthetic distance that the cold abstraction of his characters can be attributed as much to the blatant falsity of it all as it can to Godard's philosophical and political musings.

And yet, the film represents the best-yet examination of Godard's obsession with the line between discussing politics and embodying them. Despite its formal minimalism -- employing nothing but static shots of video monitors themselves displaying solely static shots -- Numéro deux at last emerges as the true heir to the poetic 2 or Things I Know About Her, a film that partially informed every Godard film that came after it, as well as a further exploration of not only the ideas behind the Dziga Vertov Group but of the reasons that collective failed. It represents a better meditation and autocritique than Here and Elsewhere, and somewhere in its brutal asceticism is a poetry I'd begun to think Godard lost.

After a brief play with images on two video monitors, the film cuts to Godard in his editing suite giving a monologue about his move from Paris to a smaller home outside the city, which then leads into a discussion of money and the difficulty of financing movies. Purportedly, Godard made this film when the producer of his landmark debut, Georges de Beauregard, proposed that the director remake that film. Godard agreed but naturally had no interest in returning to Breathless. Instead, he used the money to get the equipment needed finish Here and Elsewhere, then made this movie, which examines a French family suffering a bourgeois implosion. Not exactly a jazzy genre exercise.

With voyeuristic still shots of the family in their social housing complex, Godard takes the contradictions and metaphors of his monologue and examines them in action. In his speech, he referred to his editing studio as a factory, where he is both boss and worker, a semi-equal but nevertheless distinct dichotomy that speaks to socialism as it turned out, not in its fully egalitarian utopian model. For the film's subjects, their bodies are themselves machines in a factory; I don't know of a film with a less romantic vision of sex.

The young couple between the other pairs of the film -- two children, two grandparents -- use sex as an empty means of power and brief pleasure. The father caught the mother with another man, but only one part of him reacts with anger. Another part is turned on, and his internal struggle occasionally explodes in physical and sexual violence against his wife. Yet he still idealizes the act: in bed, Pierre and Sandrine compare men and women. Pierre romantically speaks of woman as a river crashing into the shore that is man. Known for washing away the shore, the river does not receive much consideration for the effects of the shore upon it, limiting its graceful flow and span. Sandrine's views of Pierre are far less rosy: she notes that she sees his ass every morning when he goes to work and leaves her to do chores and his dick when he comes home expecting some action.

These harsh, clashing dualities comprise the film's philosophical conflicts, as well as its aesthetic framing. Using two monitors, Godard juxtaposes sight and sound against each other, creating jarring miniature compositions. Before the film turns to the family, Godard experiments with the two screens, juxtaposing news broadcasts concerning revolutionary activity and Establishment crackdowns of same with light TV programming, suggesting television's capacity for indoctrination and how it's used to retard mental growth and independence with endless fluff. Anne-Marie Miéville, who co-wrote the film but did not share a direction credit, speaks in a voiceover as these two screens keep going, discussing how all images, including those in a film, are manufactured just as TV images and ads are. At one point, she drifts into a tangent where she speaks of Numéro deux as if it were a coming attraction, thus exposing how film can be its own advertisement. She also amusingly wonders whether the film is political or pornographic, placing the two as flip sides of the same coin.

Tempering these comparisons and dualities is a written-in admonishment to this dialectical approach. "Why do you always ask 'either/or?'" ponders Miéville. "Maybe it's both at once." Though the characters of the movie often talk politics, the true focus is on the mundanity of their lives, hence the presentation through the smaller scope of television. From their quotidian routines come questions on many of the same topics Godard explored with the DVG, delivered without the collective's polemics.

Despite the stark framing, Godard clearly put care into his compositions, and they betray some of the higher ambitions of this essay film. He shows the grandmother doing chores, her head either cut out of the frame or so far away we cannot read it. He then lays a monologue on top of these images of her reflecting not only on mortality but feminism. She speaks bitterly about gender struggle as the video shows her ironing and cleaning, and one gets the feeling that she's voicing a suppressed cry she never got to vent to another person. The grandfather, far more steeped in self-pity, summarizes his life (one that coincides with various radical movements and their failures) as he sits nude from the waist down, his own chilling conflation of the death of rebellion with his own mortality sending shivers down the spine.

Perhaps this is still too polemical despite Godard's efforts to present politics through human interaction and emotion, however abstract. Indeed, some parts challenge the audience's patience, if not its sense of propriety. The two children pose a number of those simple-but-deep questions children always ask -- a precursor to Godard's TV series France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants? -- and, since sex takes up so much room in the film, their questions naturally gravitate in that direction. Eventually, the parents invite the kids into the bedroom to explain sex by pointing to their exposed genitals. Even a liberal viewer might question the necessity of this, particularly when Godard had already effectively used dissolves to layer the kids' faces over shots of the couple screwing.


However, there's a perverse beauty in the moment. The parents refer to their genitals as mouths and portray sex as a form of kissing and silent communication. It's a poetic view of sex, and one the parents certainly don't believe, but they at least try to put intercourse on the pedestal for the next generation. Even then, Godard can undercut the moment: part of the reason the sex in this film is so unerotic is that it has been abstracted to the point of objectivity and obscurity. Like Howells' anti-romantic point about the ideal grasshopper, Godard demonstrates how losing track of the actual object or action robs it of its true meaning, a lesson he might need to re-learn after the radical analysis of the DVG.

Rather than focus on the dichotomies between each pair of characters, Godard and Miéville show how each group, however emotionally isolated from each other through their self-absorbed worldviews and the aesthetic oppression of Godard's editing, links with each other. The grandparents resemble less the previous generation than futuristic visions of the young couple currently mired in acrimony, aged and bitter endpoints for these post-radicals burned out on politics after the failure of May '68. In turn, the kids' inquisitiveness about sex reflects the moments of innocence in Pierre and Sandrine's sexual play, and perhaps they will internalize their parents' more beautiful talk of sex instead of the brutal reality of their acts.

Godard's attempts to tie these people together are but one facet of his desire to link threads: he might have burned his old producer by making this film, but he drops a vague reference to Breathless in the form of a gangster story the two children tell each other, bits of which recall the plot of Godard's first feature. Likewise, Godard's wordplay reveals a respect for puns as a means of experimenting with, and expressing a love for, language. As Miéville says, "Numéro Deux isn't a rightist or leftist film but a before and behind film." It sees what lies before it, but it takes care to incorporate the past as well.

In Godard's rambling monologue, he briefly touches upon the idea that "there's too much DNA not enough RNA." I interpreted that to mean he sees too many completed thoughts that cannot be manipulated. He wants to get a hold of the half-strands, the ones that leave space for learning and exploration. Numéro deux looks to the past (its Breathless reference, its abstract reflections on May '68) and the future (paving the way for both Godard's miniseries and Histoire(s) du Cinéma), but the most striking revelations it contains deal with the present. Godard has not quite returned aesthetically to cinema, but he certainly believes in it once more: in one shot of the typed text intertitles frequently placed in-between scenes, "cinema" changes into "possible," as if to say film can make anything happen. That reinvigorated look at film fits nicely with my favorite summary of the film courtesy of this capsule review: "If we look at the 1960's as Godard's childlike enjoyment of pop culture, genre cinema, and primary colors, and if we look at the Dziga Vertov Group as Godard's rebel without a cause years, then Numéro deux is when Godard finally becomes an adult."

Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975)

Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of the group's material but because Godard uses the opportunity to investigate why the group failed. Predictably, he cannot go into such details without making a movie as messy as one of the DVG films.

Though five years removed from his time in Palestine, Godard clearly has not forgotten his outrage, and as Miéville translates the revolutionaries' anti-Zionist rhetoric, it becomes clear Godard agrees with them even before he starts visually comparing Hitler to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. As ever, Godard thinks in terms of the Marxist class struggle, and when he cuts to a petit bourgeois family in France watching these images on their TV the connection -- Palestinians and Westerners held down by the same capitalist powers -- is obvious. Too obvious, in fact; Godard does not account for religious tension, and his equation of Hitler with Meir is but one example of his single-mindedness getting the better of him.

And yet, Here and Elsewhere also serves as a response to that dogmatic commitment Godard displayed even at his most open and considerate during the DVG years. Godard and Miéville discuss collecting all the footage and feeling confident in relating the story and its currents of theory and practice, only to return to France and see how all the careful ordering was inherently false, no matter how pure Godard's intentions were. Adding further sobriety to this autocritique is the reason Godard and co. left Palestine before completing their original film in the first place: so many of the natives involved had been killed. Shots of children training in a camp to fight in the insurgency may once have convinced Godard of the commitment of the Palestinians to their cause, but as he looks back he clearly wonders how many of them are dead now, and the images seem tragic and mournful. By filming these people at all, Godard ensured he would present their struggle against Western domination through Western means and interpretations of art. All filmmaking is interpretive, meaning that, for all the elements the director stripped from his style during his Dziga Vertov years, he always retained the most bourgeois one.

Still, he presses on in search of a universal form, and the film largely serves as his attempt to sift through his failure and learn from the mistakes. The text on the monitor at the start reads "Mon/Ton/Son Image," communicating that everyone can lay claim to the image, not merely the filmmakers who believe they are getting the full story. As frustratingly didactic as the film can be, Here and Elsewhere is yet another fascinating peek into Godard's insecurity and self-doubt in his lofty goals. He considers images in both time and space and seeks a way to put images in the same space at the same time instead of having one follow the other as it must in film. Multiple monitors and new editing equipment allow Godard the freedom to juxtapose more images than ever, and he uses these toys, these capitalistic innovations, to try to get a more accurate representation of his Marxist aesthetic.


More than any of his preceding late-'60s/early-'70s work, Here and Elsewhere captures and further develops the ideas and desires that motivated 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which he first surrendered autonomy of the image to seek all around him. By finding methods of not only cutting up images to fit them all in the frame -- which he does here using video technology that allows him to blur, overlap and melt images -- he instead places all these monitors on the screen, so that we are in effect watching others watch the movie, sitting in the editing suite with the filmmakers as they judge which images to use. Thus, Here and Elsewhere transcends Godard's efforts to find a Marxist image by not only showing more freedom in the selection of images beyond those that serve Godard's narrative means to making the viewer a semi-equal participant in viewing the complete footage. Of course, Godard still has the power to interpret it, but now he starts to leave

Here and Elsewhere expands the scope of Godard's attempts to capture the world on film, delineating all around one's vicinity from the images we ultimately receive on TV or in film, all of which were shot "elsewhere." Because of this, the images and sound lack their full power. The family in France look no different watching Godard's imposed images of horror and war than they do watching an ad with a catchy jingle play in-between the Palestinian footage. By, however unwisely, tossing out religious considerations, Godard can frame the Palestinian cause as class struggle and draw comparisons from the families elsewhere who grew fed up with their station and began organizing to the Western drones who can start their own revolution on a similarly small scale before expanding. But since he does leave out all that vital information when compiling his thoughts, Godard's conclusions can be messy and taxing, like the worst of Dziga Vertov output.

I admit I got a bit lost with this film and felt I were missing something in between what Godard was aiming for and the final product, so I looked to Ed Howard (one of the people chiefly responsible for me deciding to go through Godard's canon in the first place and a fantastic resource for where to find so many of the director's forgotten films) to see if he made anything out of it. I think we largely agree, but one of the passages of his review of the film caught my eye:

"It is not so much a political film as it is about political films, about the ways in which images, sounds, and their combinations can contribute to or impede understanding. It is also a study in contrasts, with the title's dual concepts the central dichotomy at work: "here" for the familiar, the domestic; "elsewhere" for the unfamiliar, the foreign.

That's a spot-on observation, though I find it amusing that Godard would divide locations into "here" and "elsewhere" given the time he devotes to criticizing his obsession with Marxist dialectic. "It is too easy and too simple," Miéville repeats, "to simply divide the world into two." In fairness, his dichotomy here is flexible and relative as opposed to the more hardline "good/bad" splits of earlier rhetoric. However, the key component of the film's title (and the filmmakers' focus) is neither on "here" or "elsewhere" but on the "and." Godard stresses the "and" in comparisons as if stuttering, and a giant "Et" fills the screen when he does so. He wants to bury into the "and," the conjunction taken for granted, to find the mysteries it contains. Godard notes that even the most quotidian, insignificant image becomes part of "a vague and complicated system," and Godard desperately wants to map that system.

Despite these humanistic aims, Here and Elsewhere still contains the frustrating limitations it criticizes, including its moments of rigid condescension. "There are no more simple images, only simple people, who will be forced to stay quiet, like an image," the filmmakers say. And yet, Godard and Miéville do internalize some of their inclusive aesthetic lessons, lumping themselves in with the crowd when Miéville posits "It seems we do not know how to see or listen." The solution, it seems, is to "learn to see here in order to understand elsewhere." I can't say I'm not glad to finally emerge from Godard's political period (barring the chance to catch up with a few of the DVG films I couldn't track down). But as many issues I have with Here and Elsewhere's pacing and contradictions, its mature evaluation of those politics and the human motivations and limitations behind them make the film a surprisingly moving elegy for an ambitious but misguided period for the world's most ambitious filmmaker.

Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

Conceived as a postscript film to Tout va bien, the 52-minute Letter to Jane closes the door on Godard and Gorin's partnership and the lingering remnants of the Dziga Vertov Group. Structured around the infamous photograph of Fonda in Hanoi, Letter to Jane seeks to break down the image's symbolic meaning and every implication of Fonda's visit to North Vietnam.

Yet the most readily apparent aspect of these interpretations is the acrid tone of the two men's discussions. Perhaps this can be traced to Fonda's unease with Tout va bien, which confronted her naïve political sensibilities with all-out radical filmmaking and so offended her that Gorin ranted at her for three hours until she broke down and agreed to what ultimately amounted to a slyly minor role.

Thus, Letter to Jane too often smacks of sexist condescension. Godard used several of his '60s films to directly attack the commodification of the image of women. Here, however, the men pore over her looks seeking discrepancies between her actions, their true motivations and the effects of them on the revolution. Gorin says that, as a woman, Fonda will be more sensitive to their criticism and practically tells her to put aside her womanly hormones to engage with them. They then try to absolve themselves by saying, "We are not aiming at Jane but a function of Jane." Gorin and Godard could be dropped into the male roles of Une femme mariée or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her without skipping a beat.

Then again, it's possible that Godard and Gorin are addressing that obsession over the female image. They break down the image's aesthetics in taking its politics to task, noting that right-wing and left-wing papers ran the photo in equal measure because it was structured by the photographer to be ambiguous. Conservatives can mock it, while leftists can celebrate it. The filmmakers hit upon something when they note how the actual Vietnamese in the photograph are minimized and not even named in the cutline. In an age where some celebrities attempt to funnel their camera magnetism into social activism, this analysis points out the true effect of a celebrity lending her voice to a cause: the cameras follow her there but only shoot her.

Some of their aesthetic analysis deconstructs the subconscious tone of the shot until one cannot look at it the same way again. Its low angle emphasizes Fonda's superiority, a point the filmmakers support by contrasting it with stills of films like Citizen Kane as if the whole film were a class lecture (and it certainly feels like one). They break down her body and facial language as if Fonda gave a performance to the North Vietnamese, comparing the look of sympathy on her face to various condescending glances of pity in paternalistic Hollywood films, suggesting that, in coming to North Vietnam to protest her homeland's imperialism, she brought that Father-Knows-Best social tone with her.

Godard and Gorin do believe in the Vietnamese cause, and they even stress the importance of answering the question, "How can cinema help Vietnamese people win their independence?" Clearly, they come to the conclusion that Fonda's visit is not the solution, and they argue she does more harm than good. As they argue, photos of the Vietnamese are of relevant people with stories, while an "American's face a function that only reflects a function." Fonda is only a symbol, interchangeable and distracting. As maddening as this harangue can be, Godard and Gorin achieve a haunting level of meditation in their close-up isolation of the only person besides Fonda to face the camera, a Vietnamese man. Out of focus to begin with, the Vietnamese looks even blurrier when blown-up, as if Fonda's presence and ostensible assistance actually turns the indigenous people into ghosts in their own home. Then, the two find the joke in the situation: by isolating this member of the proletariat in the background, Fonda makes herself into the embodiment not of the leftist movement but the oppressive bourgeoisie.

Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

In Paul Tingen's survey of Miles Davis' electric period, Miles Beyond, the author repeatedly returns to the idea of "transcend and include" as a way of charting Davis' substantial musical growth by way of seeing how he maintained a link to the past. No filmmaker embodies this ideal like Jean-Luc Godard, whose 1972 film Tout va bien marked a return to more cinematic storytelling even as it incorporated ideas and stylistic traits he'd picked up with collective filmmaking and tried to move forward. Having ditched the Dziga Vertov Group moniker to share name credit with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard took elements of his mid-'60s pop art aesthetic, essay film structure and DVG polemics and autocritique and mixed them to try to find his way in a France he could not recognize from its turbulent days in May '68.


Indeed, Godard's return to his more filmic mise-en-scène may be a visual cue of how thoroughly France had returned to the status quo by 1972: capitalism emerged victorious, and lingering political hostility only displays a fraction of the turmoil present in the streets during the national riots. His titles, which return to the blue/white/red format of his mid-'60s credits sequences, juxtapose May '68 with May '72, and when the film begins one can see the marked difference between the two despite the prevalence of revolt in the film's narrative.

The fully transparent self-reflexivity of the Dziga Vertov Group films returns in the opening sequence, as two voices argue about the best way to make the film. Where the autocritique of the DVG films focused on Godard and co.'s political purity and the contradictory forces of their bourgeois upbringings, Tout va bien incorporates more critical views of Godard and Gorin's aesthetic choices. One voice, largely in the role of producer, tells the other that putting a star in the movie will help them get more money, and a coherent and, more importantly, recognizable narrative subject will ensure a better box office.

Godard and Gorin have the last laugh, though. The two major stars they cast, Yves Montand and Jane Fonda, were at the height of their political involvement: Montand had just starred in two of Costa-Gavras films, while Fonda was on the cusp of leaving for Hanoi to record some propaganda for the North Vietnamese. Then, the directors further subverted expectations.

Fonda plays Suzanne, an American ex-pat working as a radio announcer for the American Broadcasting System. Her husband, Jacques (Montand) shoots TV commercials, having once been a New Wave filmmaker. Sent to interview the manager of a meat-packing factory, Fonda (with husband in tow) finds herself holed up with the boss when the workers revolt and take him hostage. Ergo, for the first half of the movie, the money-making stars barely appear, only getting one or two lines each time they appear on-screen.

After years in the ascetic wilderness, Godard and Gorin suddenly display a sense of formal adventurousness that does not forsake the ideals of the DVG but does seek to tie them to more aesthetically appealing images. The camera tracks through a factory made to look like a dollhouse, a reference to Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man (and containing flecks of Tati's Playtime) that makes Brechtian art out of the filmmakers' self-examination once more. Confining the stars in one area, the filmmakers instead cover the factory workers, who bring Fonda out of holding only to spread their message to this member of the press.

As with their previous films, Tout va bien at once supports Marxism but spares scant sympathy for the revolutionaries. Though some of them talk tough and attempt to whip up the frenzy of May '68, even the most radical of the workers ultimately looks like little more than a schoolboy who seized the school from the teachers, or an inmate who took over the asylum. Apart from vague demands of social change, the workers seem more content to muck about and tease their boss than funnel their takeover into further action. One worker even deflates the impassioned rhetoric of her colleague and wonders why the media never shows a dissenting voice poking holes in the simplistic logic of stilted propaganda.

The key suggestion of the film is that capitalism returned so quickly in the wake of the '68 revolution that people cannot seem to remember those turbulent times despite name-checking them constantly. The union head is no longer an agent for worker's rights but a paid stooge on the boss' side who must be forced to read out the half-baked manifesto by the others and starts mocking them the second he finishes. The wildcat strike lasts only a day and a half before the workers relent and the factory returns to normal so quickly one would be forgiven for thinking that whole revolt was just a dream.

Even Suzanne and Jacques' relationship is defined in commercial terms. Suzanne emigrated the United States to become a leftist in Europe, where she enjoyed a brief spell of infamy as the go-to resource for the revolution, but now she pays the bills by flatly reading objective news, brought to you by these sponsors. Godard clearly had a bone to pick with some of his old friends when he fashioned Jacques as a disgraced Nouvelle Vague director now making commercials, and the long monologue Montand delivers after he and Fonda leave the factory suggest a deep level of self-loathing covered up by a total blindness to the full extent of his selling out.

After the characters' release from the factory, the filmmakers get to a conventional narrative topic, the "love story," to appease the projected mainstream audience. Yet Godard and Gorin once again undercut their own ostensible sell out, immediately showing the relationship disintegrating in the wake of their ordeal. The revolt only reminds Suzanne of what she's lost and what France has lost for her -- "I'm an American correspondent in France who corresponds to nothing," she says near the end. Perhaps their crumbling marriage serves as an allegory for disillusioned radicals unable to look each other in the face for fear of recognizing their failure. And what use have either of them for an international meeting of minds and beliefs in the Me Generation?

Though Godard and Gorin never tried to distinguish who did what in their creative collaborations, Gorin tends to get more of the credit for this film, mainly for the obvious reason that Godard got into a severe motorcycle accident and spent a great deal of the shoot in and out of the hospital. It still contains the more polemical thoughts of the DVG years to balance out Godard's aesthetic questions, and the long monologues might be Gorin's. Yet the film is a better showcase of the rapport the two filmmakers had formed, using the larger scale to transplant the political and aesthetic examinations of the DVG, and also the humor that peeked through in their late efforts. Fonda, who wanted to appear in political films but had to be harangued into appearing in this film by Gorin, is admirably game for their sense of humor, her largest chunk of dialogue involving an argument with her husband in which she brandishes a picture of a woman's hand holding a penis to emphasize the chauvinist thoughts clouding Montand's head. That the Marxist-Leninist revolt would be framed as a nod to an absurdist comedy points to the pair's wry take on politics they nevertheless believed.

But the best joke comes last. After following the stars' marriage in the second section of the film, the filmmakers turn to a gigantic supermarket at the end of the film. The slow camera track through this seemingly endless warehouse -- it makes IKEA look like a small-town hardware shop -- recalls the masterly tracking shot of traffic in Week-End. However, Godard and Gorin update the reference for '72: in Week-End, the tracking shot of cars congested suggested that, however hypocritical an action it might be in a new car, people were trying to escape. The end here suggests people have grown comfortable accepting the capitalist society and only revolt when their humanity peeks through all the stuff. When a riot breaks out, people simply try to grab what they can before the cops show up. There's no social revolution, no quest to bring about a better society; just get a little something extra for yourself. Even the Communist hawking Little Red Books at a stand has fallen sway to capitalism, offering the pamphlets "on-sale" -- what a prescient commentary on Red China, no?

Though not as delightfully wicked as Vladimir and Rosa, Tout va bien is a more welcome return-to-form in its literal sense, dragging Godard back into cinema without abandoning what he'd learned in collective filmmaking. Its lulls -- specifically in the long monologues late in the film -- deaden the flow, but it's a joy to see Godard working with his Pop Art color scheme, using film and finding ways to be subversive and relevant without being obtuse. The problem with the Dziga Vertov Group was that it sought to solve aesthetic and moral questions while jettisoning many of the complexities that make such question so hard to answer. Having found their footing with the last few DVG films, however, Godard and Gorin could begin adding all those elements back in to find answers. If Tout va bien frustratingly does not solve those questions, it at least continues the mature response Godard and Gorin began displaying with their best work: it seeks to determine why they cannot answer those queries.

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.