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.

Sympathy for the Devil (a.k.a. One Plus One)

[Note, in the wake of Jean-Luc Godard's final work of his "classic" period, Week End, I will continue to review works by the director, but I cannot promise that I can find all of his films, even with the benefit of torrents. I will watch what I can when I can get my hands on it, but forgive me if this series suddenly stretches out even further than it already has.]

Whenever an artist loses control of his or her work, one naturally sides with the wronged party, raging at the profit-driven system that relegates those who actually make the art to the sidelines to satisfy those who use art as a tax write-off. Sympathy for the Devil, originally titled One Plus One, may be the one film where, appropriately, we actually do sympathize with the enemy. If this is the final product, what on Earth were the producers working with, and could Jean-Luc Godard have made a more complete movie if he'd retained control?

As with his subsequent, Le Gai Savoir, Sympathy for the Devil was made in a time of tremendous sociopolitical upheaval around the world: during the course of recording the titular song, the band had to amend a mention of the Kennedy assassination to the plural in the way of Robert's death in June of 1968. May '68 had unleashed the pent-up sexual tension of French youth, and riots broke out across America for various reasons. In Vietnam, growing resentment, fear and hostility toward the Tet Offensive early in the year led to the My Lai Massacre (though the revelation of this event would not be revealed to the American people for another year). Everything was going to hell, and a fully radicalized Godard needed something to crystallize his revolutionary thoughts.

As youth spurred the protests in America and France, Godard decided that rock 'n' roll bad-boys the Rolling Stones would be the perfect catalyst to spread his Maoist message. At the time, this must have seemed a keen decision: if sexual frustration was openly fueling one social cataclysm and at least partially influenced some of the riots on the other side of the pond, who better to kick-off sexual freedom than the most nakedly sexual rock band on the scene?

By the 10-minute mark, however, I was already checking my watch. It is difficult to write about Sympathy for the Devil without lapsing either into a list of outrages or a strained grasp at straws to forgive some of its numerous issues. When I first started this long retrospective in an attempt to get a handle on Godard, I had an image of the artist in my head of a pretentious intellectual who valued his ideas over how he used them. Very quickly I realized I was mistaken, that even at his headiest, the director could combine the intellectual with the sensual; who else could make an essay film like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her into such an affecting portrait when most of its shots are plainly symbolic shots of industrial production? Even the brazenly radical La Chinoise had a wry twist that kept matters from becoming too serious. Sympathy for the Devil is the first film to conform entirely to that initial, reductive vision of Godard, a mash-up of intellectual images without a bedrock of emotion. Granted, this is the producer's edit, but most of the vignettes are themselves lifeless and not even Godard's editing genius could save all of them no matter what tricks he pulled.

For Godard is not content to sit in the studio with the Stones and watch them compose the titular track. Instead, he intersperses his footage of the band with various sketches demonstrating his radical stances, albeit in the vaguest terms possible. A voiceover reads what sounds like erotic fiction with political conviction. A bookstore sells comics, pin-up magazines and radical pamphlets where paying customers must give the proprietor the Nazi salute and slap two bound Maoists. Various vandals spray-paint messages onto walls and windows, and Black Panthers read militant texts while handing out rifles as if preparing for a race war.

Each of these vignettes certainly has a purpose when stacked against the slow progression of the Stones' greatest track from its beginnings as a loose acoustic outline. Just as the band is composing its most sinister, relevant song, so too are the battles lines being drawn around the UK and, by extension, the Western world. Those spray-painted messages are rarely completed before Godard cuts away and, even though the film came out after the tumultuous events of the year, the director sought to make a film about preparing for revolution.

Yet the fact that, despite the continuation of social unrest for years, the movie was dated upon release severely undermines its impact. It's interesting to see some of the crosswords the vandals make of their graffiti, such as writing "HILTON" and then using the 't' to draw "STALIN" vertically, insinuating that companies can be as dictatorial and ruthless as political tyrants. I also couldn't help but look upon the scenes with the Black Panthers, situated in a junkyard sitting among derelict cars, and not think of Detroit and the upcoming post-industrial fallout, even though the scene, as with everything else is filmed in the UK.

Such moments are fleeting, however, and Sympathy for the Devil quickly morphs into a mess. The Panthers bring in white women as one of the group reads from the texts of Eldridge Cleaver, specifically his rapacious ideas concerning white women. By the end of the film, several of the ladies have been shot and one hangs from a movie crane. Godard's second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, appears in a scene as "Eve Democracy," a woman who walks around as a film crew follows and responds to increasingly complex sociopolitical questions solely in the affirmative or negative. Godard links the pornographic bookstore with fascism, but wasn't the whole point of hitching his wagon to the Stones that they represented sexual anarchy?

Speaking of ideas that don't gel with what the Stones were about, the threatened violence of Godard's revolutionary skits is completely at odds with the titular song, a composition about the temptations and downfalls of evil behavior. The murderous Panthers do not even take their armed revolution to the streets, settling only for killing a few white women (thus conforming more to an alarmingly racist vision of militant blacks than a depiction of oppressed people finally fighting back). As I watched Godard abandon the dialectical method that allowed him to counterbalance his radicalism with more measured study, I thought of that aforementioned line from the Stones' magnum opus: "I shouted out, /'Who killed the Kennedys?'/When after all/It was you and me." I also considered just how terribly the band would blanch at violence just a year down the road when their free concert at Altamont would erupt into fighting and murder.

I don't know who this film could thoroughly please. Not Godard, certainly, forced to contend with the producer's take on his vision and also confronted with a band that clearly failed to meet the philosophical importance he'd placed on them -- it cannot be coincidence that the band are never actually interviewed or shown doing anything but rehearsing the tune. Not the Stones, who, as previously mentioned, do not do anything on-screen other than work out a single song and work as a group solely because of their roots-rock simplicity and suffer from the intellectual attention. Fans of either camps also have nothing to latch onto, from the Godard lovers who won't understand why the director is wasting his time with one of the thicker bands on the scene and not the Stones fans who have to put up with the director's meandering nonsense.

Godard objected to the use of the full song over the end credits, and it's easy to see why. Made during social upheaval, he wanted to make a movie about preparing for the coming revolution he perhaps thought inevitable. Pay attention to the beautiful tracking shots with which Godard captures the Stones in the studio: they get more complex each time, reflecting how the song comes together from an initial acoustic sketch through a more complex arrangement as keyboards and increasingly layered percussion stack on top of the sound in each session. The spray-painted messages are never fully completed before Godard cuts away. Clearly, the director wishes to visualize how revolutions start, as gestating ideas that must bud and bear fruit before the time is ripe for an uprising. Unfortunately, what the unfinished thoughts of Sympathy for the Devil primarily illustrate is that, for the first time in his career, Jean-Luc Godard went off half-cocked.