[Film Club] Loved the stile, not the content

Do you?

The only pointer, my dear Mr. Mac Alain, is to the great Bertolt Brecht, and Godard's often ambiguous, sometimes confused, but usually brilliant extensions of his work. Godard does want to alienate you here. But he wrote the film at a time when the Brechtian attitude towards theatrical and cinematic representation was in the air. Nowadays, Brecht seems passe to the informed, who think we had this all before, while he still seems scandalous to younger audiences who find any attempt to subvert a more realist mode of artistic reproduction of the real world scandalous.

But the didactic quality of the film is simultaneous with the parodic aspect (the poking fun at the bourgeois French Maoist youths as they try to run their revolutionary cell). Think of the way these young Maoists act. Godard gives shots of pictures of Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, and then of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. They are given in various vibrant colors that recall the color scale, eye-catching advertisements; they are like comic book heroes for these youths. So while Godard certainly was a Maoist, he was saying something about the naivete of the youths. But it's a sort of affectionate mockery.

Even though I find Maoism extremely distasteful, and Godard's peculiar version of French Maoism lame (as did the Situationists, mind you, who held on to the best aspects of Marxism, and made cinema like Godard BEFORE Godard [see: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.godard.htm]), I do like this double aspect of his depiction of these youths-- A critical, but affectionate portrayal. It is not merely a cynical, reactionary rejection of the revolutionary desires of the young, but points out the aspects that are more like child's play, and not serious critical thought and action.