Here's my essay on Godard's La Chinoise, as promised. It's so fresh that I haven't even read over it since turning it in to my professor.
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Reality of the Reflection
“The socialist literature and art must fight on two fronts. Art doesn’t reflect reality, but is a reality of reflection.” - Kirilov in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise
In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard released La Chinoise, his thirteenth feature film. The work follows four French youth who align themselves with Maoist communism in their search to find meaning in their lives. Through a series of documentary-style vignettes collaged with pop art and arranged into a linear narrative, La Chinoise shows the characters seeking great leaps forward based on Mao’s philosophy and aiming to coordinate a communist revolution in France for the benefit of its citizens.
In May of 1968, the student protests and general strike considered to be the catalyst for France’s shift in social morality occurred. Now, in 2008, La Chinoise does not exist on DVD, and is only available for viewing when its film print is shown in theaters.
There is a very real possibility that the release of La Chinoise, the protests in 1968 France, and the current inaccessibility of the film are not connected; however, the three ideas in a group can represent the role of art in social impact.
After a recent viewing of the film at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, a middle-aged man asked me if I’d liked it. I answered him simply: I thought the film was fantastic. Despite the dramatic irony supplied by its dating, the story felt fresh and the cinematography and general artistic risk-taking was unlike anything I’d seen. The man scoffed at me, and I realized he’d been looking for something a little more scathing. I asked him what he thought, and he response was something to the extent of
“I found it self-indulgent and narrow-minded. You know who the main character was? The director. And I think he’s got the wrong idea about the value of collective action. You can’t just go around killing people and think that it will solve society’s problems. The people in power don’t always do what they should, but individuals can’t change that. You know Barack Obama? He wants to send more troops to Iraq. There’s no one we can trust anymore, and those selfish kids in that movie set a bad example of social action.”
Though I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, the man’s outburst had me floored. Incorrect assertions aside, that interaction can represent a complicated idea that’s present in most socially-conscious work of today. The film, which is classified as a fictional work (though it could easily be argued otherwise) seemed to soften the intersection between social responsibility and beautiful art in a method of changing peoples’ perspectives on the causes they address. In the case of the man I spoke to, this purpose was clearly not achieved: he only reacted to the social content. Though the film could probably stand alone on either side of the argument (social commentary vs. piece of art for art’s sake), it provides a good representation of what is referred to in La Chinoise as “the struggle on two fronts”: the attempt to make a work that successfully addresses a social issue while making it available to a larger audience through artistic accessibility.
DEUXIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI
La Chinoise’s level of success as a reconciliation of the two sides of the struggle and generally as an artistic piece of social commentary can be examined through the theories of Kant and Nietzsche. Both theorists write on the pursuit of truth’s animation through the reconciliation of two different worlds - for Kant, noumena and phenomena, and for Nietzsche, for the Apollonian and the Dionysian - which relates directly to Godard’s struggle on two fronts. Relating more specifically to redemption aside from truth, however, both theorists also advance the idea of going through and then destroying beauty as a method of liberation that resonates well with La Chinoise.
TROISIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI
We can first take a look at beauty and responsibility in the one of the documentary-style interviews with Guillaume - one of the film’s principle characters - in the second portion of the film, where he begins rehearsing the first few lines from a play he’s practicing and then stops, laughs a little, and then explains “Yes, I’m an actor.” At this point, we are introduced to the idea of “true theater,” which Guillaume advances as the idea that everyone is an actor at all times reflecting on true situations, and that just because he is an actor (which we see by the questions asked of him off set and the turning of the camera on the cameraman) we should never doubt the sincerity of his words.
He follows up this beautiful idea of sincerity’s necessity in social critique and art with the assertion (in the same breath) that you also need violence. He takes one idea, for example by rehearsing an idea of the cultural Marxist, Louis Althusser: “I turn around, and suddenly the question is the words I’ve just said are part of a greater play continuing through me,” and then makes it his own: “the play of the worker in the theater.”
We can begin to understand Guillaume’s assertions through Kant’s thinking. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant writes on new methods of judgment as well as a new method of looking at the movement inspired by beauty and truth. We see a definition of two distinct worlds of existence: one of natural necessity, and one of freedom. This division between nature’s objective, deterministic laws and moral freedom’s subjectivity is not unlike Plato’s division between the sensory and intelligible realms; however, it is not based on a dialectic where an individual can ascend or descend within those two realms on their journey toward a single One. Here, the two worlds - the sensory, subjective world of the noumena and the intelligible, objective world of the phenomena -are animated via their need for some sort of unity, which can occur through a supersensible substrate: art.
Throughout this film, we sense a need for the students to be able to apply their theories to real life; they need to find a way to apply their facts, which are based on the objective assertions of the collective workers ethos and Mao’s Little Red Book, to the rest of the world. They become obsessed with the idea of devoting themselves to a cause and being completely engrossed in their endeavors, ensuing in a fanatical study of Mao’s doctrines and subscribing to the Cultural Revolution in China. In so doing, however, we could doubt their sincerity just due to the fact that they are trying to “struggle on two fronts”: that they are focusing their energy both on their art - acting - and on supporting their cause.
Guillaume pleads that we don’t doubt, and instead only realize that a film can be the work of a collective group of people who share in similar ideas and should therefore be taken very seriously in their methods of demonstration.
Kant’s distinction between the analytic of the beautiful and the sublime also lends itself to an examination of this film. “[Nature] excites the ideas of the sublime in its chaos or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation, provided size and might are perceived,” he writes (Kant, 84). And as for its redemptive value? “[In] general, it displays nothing purposive in nature itself, but only in that possible use of our intuitions of it by which there is produced in us a feeling of purposiveness quite independent of nature.” The idea of a strange kind of uneasiness leading to great joy connects to another of the film’s interviews where Veronique, arguably the leader of the group, looks the camera in the eye and explains that she would dynamite the Sorbonne (education), the Louvre (visual art), and the Comedie Francaise (theater) if she had the courage, just for the sake of starting over from zero and reconsidering our morals from the present, based on the collective (size-based) ethos. She tells us that the Revolution can’t be art: it can’t hold the tenderness or finesse of a piece, but rather it rips away all that we know and forces us to begin from the present, starting from scratch.
We can also see a representation of this ideology Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where he provides us with the examination of the Dionysian-Apollonian duality within Greek tragedy. The Greek tragedy, Nietzsche writes, is the only instance where the mutually exclusive Dionysian and the Apollonian are united - and are united only for a moment - and in that moment of reconciliation we have a glimpse into whatever reality we can conceive (though Nietzsche writes that we can never know the thing itself). As said in the film: art isn’t a reflection of reality, it’s the reality of reflection.
The Apollonian wisdom is that of dreams, which is purely based on images and allows appearances to appear at all. These images, which are also referred to (among other things) as masks, are able to cloud the dark chaos that Nietzsche believes characterizes the world. As such, forgetting is a fundamentally Apollonian characteristic, which also allows individuals to trust in their own individual frameworks via their faith in their own autonomous ego. The Dionysian wisdom, on the other hand, is the wisdom of terror and is specifically characterized by the awe of and resulting drunkenness relating to that terror. As said, Nietzsche believes the universe is ultimately is irrational and wants to devour everything. Dionysus, as the representation of this belief and the primal heart of the world, breaks down the barriers developed and sustained by the individual trust in Apollonian aesthetics: “Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man […] Now the slave is free; now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or ‘shameless fashion’ have erected between man and man, are broken down” (Nietzsche, 501). When the barriers between man and man (and man and Nature) are broken down, man senses his participation in universal harmony and a higher community and experiences a “redemption through release” (Nietzsche, 508). This redemption, Nietzsche writes, is deserving of a “rapturous vision” and further fuels the Dionysian energy as it is the closest portal to reality man can possess.
Kant finds some unity with Nietzsche based on the concepts of the sublime with Nietzsche’s idea of the redemption of Dionysis. Dionysian unity tears down Apollonian principium individuationis, thereby ripping away the Apollonian masks to expose reality. As Nietzsche writes, there is a certain satisfaction to this deconstruction: “The horrible ‘witches’ brew’ of sensuality and cruelty becomes ineffective: only the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers remind us - as medicines remind us of deadly poisons - of the phenomenon that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us” (Nietzsche, 504). We see further application of Veronique’s theory in the film in her long, static scene on the train with her professor when she discusses, in complete earnest, her intentions to bomb the universities as a method of reevaluating their abysmal situation which is tired and complacent, even in the face of the Vietnam War. Her professor, who was involved in the Algerian War, explains that she will never find any lasting support unless she has popular backing at the time of her bombings, and she only had control of three people in a movement.
DERNIÈRE MOVEMENT D’ESSAI
As suggested before, the idea of the struggle on two fronts as well as the idea of ripping way apathetic, indifferent exteriors in favor of the reality that lies beneath and starting from scratch at the present isn’t just applicable to La Chinoise’s content: it’s also applicable to the film’s aesthetic and technical elements.
Godard’s innovative filmmaking ethos expertly walks the line between social commentary and work of art. From the beginning, the film doesn’t let the viewer a rest or retreat into a streamlined narrative. Though the narrative progresses in a somewhat linear fashion, we are often subjected to a different form of blurring fiction and reality. As said, this film is based on a fictional narrative of four students living together in a comfortable Parisian apartment over the summer, and the narrative works in a circle that begins and ends on the same image of their apartment doors, giving us the perception that nothing has been accomplished in the film, but within that revolution (as in a circle), we are engrossed in various vignettes. To further complicate ideas, the art of the film varies between scenes full of jump cuts between images of the actors as well as collages of pop art. Though the alignment of visual art with images of human actors may prompt some explicit questions, they do more to excite a feeling rather than actually promote any further understanding of the subject.
Godard additionally creates a new sphere with his audience as viewer-listeners rather that just viewers alone, which is a hugely significant part of his filmmaking. Rather than just being able to lose ourselves in a progression of images, the sounds he uses keep us off-balance, never let us sit back, make sure that we’re still extremely present. It makes us experience the rejection of passivity that he’s trying to support. This experiencing of emotions is what makes La Chinoise so riveting, and what gives it a redemptive power that even the man who talked to me after the film had to understand. Which brings us back to Kant’s original point: we don’t necessarily all have to agree that La Chinoise is a great film, but we should all feel a certain way about its effects.
There is a notable scene relating to the power of music which may be a caricature, but still raises a valuable point. As Kirilov, another of the comrades, lectures the others on socialist art and literature’s need to struggle on two fronts - in other words, to have a moral purpose behind its beauty, just as Godard attempts to do - Guillaume considers the idea and then claims that it is much too complicated, asserting that he wouldn’t be able to make sense of two things at once. At that point Veronique, his girlfriend, asks him if he loves her, as she had done before in the film.
“Of course I do,” he responds.
“Well, I don’t love you anymore.”
He stares at her, bewildered, and says that he doesn’t understand. “You will,” she replies, and she lets a record drop and aligns the needle. As the music begins to play, she says,
“I don’t love you anymore. I don’t like your face, and I don’t care for your sweaters. And you bore me terribly.” She removes the needle from the record. “Understand now?”
He responds in the affirmative.
“You see? You can understand two things at once - you’ve just done it.”