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"Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires," Jean-Luc Godard does his part. A Maoist cell in Paris, la nouvelle Gauche of bourgeois brats in worker caps, "sincerity and violence" are the tools. The actor plays an actor in "a film in the making," Jean-Pierre Léaud putting on and taking off flag-tinted glasses and waving to Raoul Coutard behind the camera. His squeeze is the ascetic coed who yearns to bomb the Louvre, Anne Wiazemsky taking over Karina duties, wide eyes and parted lips and all. Other comrades include the bucolic lass who dabbles in prostitution (Juliet Berto) and the expelled chemist (Michel Séméniako) whose specialty is dunking bread in milk while pontificating. A Romper Room of slogans and chants, "un véritable thêàtre socialiste," shutters opened and closed. Malcolm X and Johnny Guitar are admired, otherwise America is a swarm of toy bombardiers marauding a Vietcong maiden. "Enough theory. Now, an exercise." Youth and revolution, Godard the poet and the radical at his most alert and vigorous. Words are "sounds and matter" but also images on a blackboard, the names of literary giants effaced one by one with a damp sponge. Modern France is compared to a sink full of dirty dishes and the militant's worst tendencies to catching birds blindfolded, thus the need for new ways of seeing. (Lumière's actualités are the works of an impressionist, it is argued, while Méliès created futuristic documentaries.) Yellowface Castro, blood-eyed Stalin, "le petit livre rouge" piled up and thrown about like bricks. News from Peking Radio fill the air, "L'Internationale" on a portable radio disrupts nap time. A suicidal assassin out of Dostoyevsky (Lex De Bruijn), a leisurely train ride with Francis Jeanson, debating dogmatism versus pragmatism while outside the countryside scrolls by. Time is of the essence for activist and cinéaste alike, summer's over already. "I thought I'd made a leap forward. And I realized I'd made only the first timid step of a long march."
--- Fernando F. Croce |