Not impressed...


Im a big Godard fan - BUT....

Unless you are VERY interested in Maoism and french politics, i think this film is EXTREMELY uninteresting to watch. Apart from Raoul Coutards cinematography, and the good direction, the film is very boring if your not into the politics.

I say this because, im not a huge fan of such explicitly political content, and the film is very hard to follow if u dont understand all the subjects they discuss ALL the way through. There is not much to it other than this, apart from the small romance storyline.

I hope this doesnt get anyone too angry, and i would like to remind people that i am, among other things, a viewer of cinema, and this was not fun to watch.


Comments...

reply

[deleted]

I haven't seen this movie. But this is the Godard with Anne Wiazemsky, yes? I think she was pretty amazing in Bresson's "Au hasard, Balthasar" and Pasolini's "Porcile," so I'd like to see this, especially since she was married to Godard at the time.

--
I should warn you -- he's a Fourierist.

reply

You don't have to follow the subjects they discuss all the way through, because the subjects they discuss is not the point, it's *why* they are discussing them, and what they expect to get out of it, and how they will ultimately fail. This is no primer on Marxism--it's a depiction of a point in time where french students thought radical politics would save them. Certainly no one could watch this film and think it's some kind of propaganda piece to serve maoist politics. He states it in one of the first captions: "A film in the process of being made." These events are developing all around him as he makes the film, and he already knows they're going to fail.

After seeing this movie and Weekend again over the last two days, I have to re-evaluate whether or not I think Godard was ever really a Marxist, or a filmmaker studying this phenomenon as it played itself out.

reply

He did claim to be a Maoist, but I agree that La Chinoise seems more like criticism than celebration (albeit affectionate, intrigued criticism).

reply

What in-particular should I read to get me up to speed? I got to the half-way mark before I turned it off.

reply

Don't bother. The film is awful, pretentious and unnecessary!

reply

What was "pretentious" about it? I mean, really, did you even give any thought to the true meaning of the word before you threw it out there in an attempt to censor any further discussion/analysis?

Also;

Why was it "unnecessary"? Don't you think a film like this, which offers a genuine reflection of the time and place in which it was created, has now become an important historical document; an insight into the mindset of twenty-something Parisian students in the lead-up to May 1968 and the events that eventually followed?

Don't you think art/music/fashion/cinema/etc has an obligation to speak for its generation for precisely this reason? Without this film, what actual lasting document of this world would still exist?

La chinoise is now a genuine historical film, though one that still has an incredible cultural significance in light of the more pressing threat of radicalised "armchair terrorism", post-9/11.

reply

Satire first. Criticism second.

reply

I really could not enjoy this film either. I really tried but it is so painfully slow moving and there is no discussion,just lots of pro-mao conversations that get really boring really quickly. If anyone else had made this it would have quickly disappeared into obscurity and would (hopefully) never have been released in the first place. A pain to watch. I would rather sit through an Adam Sandler film (and that IS saying something).

reply

Hear Hear! I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than sit through this nonsense again. Historical document? Do me a favour!

What happened to BuzzSaw?
He had to split!

reply

Well, if that's what you call engaging with a discussion, then fine.

You can't even be bothered to back up your opinion so it's not really worth paying much attention to. I doubt you've even seen the film to be honest, you seem like a troll.

reply

Doesn't matter if you do not understand the politics in the film (the college students did not understand the politics).

What matters is you understand there are two sets of politics in the film, the politics of the government and the counter-politics of the Young Generation, and both politics are "bad" because the former are destroying humanity and the latter are superficial ineffective non-entities playing mindless games.

What matters is you understand the film is, as another person in this board said, a brilliant and clever critique of the anti-establishment, anarchist, revolutionary student groups of G-dard's time.

What matters is you understand the film is a representation of activism in general, not an enactment of one specific type of activism.

What matters is you understand G-dard intentionally used confrontational misé-en-scene and garish photo direction and zero frame depth and disjointed dialogue and disjunctions between the imagetrack and soundtrack to indict the beliefs and actions of the students as largely artificial, and to defamiliarize viewers from their default expectations of being dazzled, given all the answers, then lulled to regenerative sleep by cinematic art.

The confrontational in-your-face garish red colour schematic combined with the plastic military toys combined with the campy stage theatrics combined with meta-comic stripping combined with the artificial revolutionary rhetoric combined with genuine attempts towards mastering political criticism combined with the rest of world of G-dardian Art were meant to reduce the viewers' emotional reaction to the aesthetic collargery of the film, reduce the viewers' sympathetic identification towards the students, ironically reduce mimesis, and literally reduce all direct emotional involvement.

Viewers should be jolted into thinking about why G-dard was presenting student counter-revolutionaries as largely wishy-washy and ineffective and artificial.

G-dard is known for defamiliarizing capitalist social relations as artificial and destructive, but he also had no compunction about indicting the opposition to that as equally artificial and destructive, and in La Chinoise, his criticism is against all the ideologies, and against how groups formulate the ideologies put into action.

This is something I wrote about Masculin Feminin, and it applies to this film as well because this film is the Children Of Marx And Coca Cola:

Young people think they are smart and know everything (because they're living in the moment and full of intense political/social awareness and a desire to do something about that awareness, and they are surrounding themselves with people whom they believe are the greatest minds of their time), but they're really not, they're wasting away in the furnace of their own narcissism, self-centeredness, commercialism, consumerism, materialism, desire for personal gratification, etc.

The young generation felt like they were intelligent and a force-of-society, making things happen (Marx = intellectualism, knowledge, awareness, concern, compassion, action), but in reality they did nothing but litter and loiter, smoke and drink, have sex and prattle on without action, have abortions and act with random violence (Coca-Cola = shallowness, satiate your materialistic/consumeristic desires, avoid responsibilities, waste away).

G-dard was dissecting and partially slamming the anti-establishment, anarchist, revolutionary youths - especially students - and movements of his time.

The children of Marx and Coca-Cola are all superficial ineffective non-entities that are part of the problem, and they are in control of the future.

Alas, what G-dard achieved with La Chinoise was a rare 1 hour and 36 minutes of what one user termed G-d but what I term Nirvana, 1 hour and 36 minutes of the absolute extinguishment of thought and feeling, 1 hour and 36 minutes in which a confrontational collage of images and sounds shut down all thought and feeling, and afterward, when you find yourself wandering into a dead-end as you're trying to decode all that red, the distanciation finally wears off and you realize G-dard's aesthetic effect was just as imaginary and artificial as the student revolutionaries, which makes you then realise that G-dard's heuristic designs forged a revolutionary mode of expression so powerful and dangerous that if he stepped out from behind the camera to be a real revolutionary (like John Lennon) instead of hiding behind the camera and dreaming cinematic revolutions, he would likely have been shot down like the John Lennons of the world.

Yes, this film was extremely interesting to watch, it was not long enough, it's not that hard to follow, it's made to be watched multiple times so watch it multiple times to understand all the images and words and sounds, and just because a film is not fun to watch does not mean it's bad or incomprehensible, it means the director does not want you to have too much fun while watching.

10/10

reply

As much has been written about understanding the film on here - in the end, it is quite a dated and boring picture. All this discussion about marxism and revolution might have seemed revolutionary in 1967 - and yes, it failed, and yes, Godard realized this, but... come on, watching this today, it is boring and dull.
--
VOTE JACOB'S LADDER INTO THE TOP 250's!!!
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0099871

reply

@Temporary: Perfect, except when you called John Lennon "a real revolutionary."

@Others:

Many of you are getting hung up on trying to understand the politics in this film. But what is your basic, knee-jerk reaction to when people start speaking in such ridiculous and contrived language? For the overwhelming majority, the knee-jerk reaction is that such talk is meaningless gobbledygook, unintentional doublespeak, and utterly meaningless tripe (this is why when Woody Allen parodies intellectual discourse in many of his movies, it's actually funny).

Well, putting the conclusion first, 75% of what the students say in this is garbage. This is realizable fairly early in the film, probably the first 5 minutes. Where every intellectual worth his salt (including Marx and Lenin) has (or "had" in 1967) a library of rich, complex, conflicting works, this little troupe has one single red book that they have 100 copies of. Their understanding of philosophy, of Hegel and Kant and Descartes, and the theater is all filtered through that book. Their understanding of contemporary politics is as thin as the newspaper, and they name-drop for the shear purpose of name-dropping. In one scene, there's a chalkboard where one of the men almost proudly and eagerly erases names of famous intellectuals like Schiller who they've neither read nor understood, leaving only Brecht before it cuts away. It's open to interpretation, of course, but to me it's an indictment of the intellectual honesty these people; their counter-revolution would, in effect, wipe out the enlightenment and take the west back to the dictatorship of one book.

But I wonder why so many of you seem to automatically give credence to their words, try to figure out what they're saying as if there's a real argument there and that it's super-important to the plot? Yes, their debates are boring if you try to follow them. But the film isn't about that, it's about everything else EXCEPT what they are specifically talking about. It seems like it's a tyranny of the spoken narrative argument; where traditional film of the 30s, 40s and 50s required that you prioritized the inevitably-coherent spoken words over everything else to connect and complete the plot, here Godard's point is that you should be absorbing the scene as a whole. He's trying to balance out and enliven a cinema (and television at the time) that only told stories through a-b-c verbal narrative. In this vein, I think Godard pays great homage to the silent film era and many of its finer points that were forgotten entirely once the soundtrack developed. Look at the facial expressions of his actors (esp. the brunette part-time prostitute) and his use of inter-titles.

Notice also that the longest take in the film, by leaps and bounds, is the only scene where the words actually matter (the one where the genuine public intellectual was putting the student in her place for her terrorist ideas). The foreground is dark, the background is the passing countryside, and there's no bright red in sight. This is the real world, and there the words of a reasoned man of intellect are given their proper due. By way of contrast, he's reaffirming the meaninglessness of the rest of it by making his images trump whatever verbal crap is being spewed.

I'm not the biggest Godard fan and feel some of his early stuff (Breathless, Alphaville, Contempt) is overrated to some degree, but this is brilliant. It's perfectly understandable and only boring if you give too much power to meaningless babble, and it concerns a universal issue, the relatively arrogant naivete of students (e.g., the "college sophomore" response of many social/political commentators in the U.S.).

"Always look on the bright side of life. Do do. Do do do do do do."

reply

I understand that the students in the film are naive, pretentious and ignorant, but that doesn't mean that the film is particularly illuminating or interesting to watch. As a satire it's almost completely unfunny and dry, and the film doesn't really say much other than "young activists holding revolutionary beliefs often don't have much of a practical understanding of politics or economics". Which I'm sure most of us knew beforehand.

You can go on about how the film is interestingly shot or how its use of dialogue is irregular, but none of these things matter because they aren't sufficiently interesting on their own to make the film worth watching.

I have no doubt that there are a lot of interesting ideas in La Chinoise. But I found it insufferable.

4/10

reply

Although I am not a follower of the politics in La Chinoise, what I got out of it besides the cinematography and direction you messaged was sheer intellectual stimulation and, at least to my eyes, a bit of irony. Also, that song "Mao Mao" is hilarious.

reply

I have no idea what they were talking about the whole film but I liked the aestethics of the movie and enjoyed it as something abstract

reply