Screening of Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (France, 1967, 95’)
as part of the Tournees Film Festival of French-speaking and French-produced films being screened at CalArts from Feb. 8-March 9, 2019.
More than fifty years after it was released into the turmoil of the late sixties, Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray in his overtly political phase re- mains as radical in its form as in its contents. Focusing on a group of young students, artists, and workers who have gathered in an elegant borrowed apartment in Paris to study Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, Godard combines the clean lines and primary colors of pop art with revolutionary discourse to present a typically kaleidoscopic vision of the political ferment that would lead to the uprisings of May ’68. Played by actors whose characters reflect their own lives (such as Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto), the young people in La Chinoise struggle with the schism between the Soviet Union and communist China and excoriate American imperialism in Vietnam. The film abounds with innovative visual strategies including filmed photographs and comic book frames, theatrical skits, and a proto-video for a pop song about Mao, but its greatest achievement rests in its dialectic approach, making room for entrenched radicalism and an embrace of political violence as well as their critiques, which are no less hopeful but considerably less destructive. It remains a vital, dazzlingly stylish primer of political engagement before the era of identity politics.
“Godard's brilliant dialectical farce, distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny…” – Time Out London
“La Chinoise is ultimately about the thrill of discovering new ideas and the ways in which thought can transform individuals. No director has been better than Godard at communicating these phenomena in sounds and images; the film is downright joyous in is sequencing of ideas, employing rapid-fire montage and densely layered soundtracks that suggest a brain working in overdrive.” – The Chicago Reader
Tournées screenings take place in the Bijou Auditorium as part of the courses “Film Today” and “Film History”. They are free and open to the entire Institute.
Tournées Film Festival is made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), the French American Cultural Fund, Florence Gould Foundation and Highbrow Entertainment.