



With reference to the historical trajectory of modern French cinema, the Mao- leaning period (1967-1972) of Jean-Luc Godard under the collective spell of the Groupe Dziga Vertov (Dziga Vertov group, or DVG in short) was often a controversial and divisive subject among his critics and commentators following the political watershed of French May ‘68. This essay will take two of the most provocative and representative features made during the DVG period, Vent d’est (Wind from the East, 1969) and Tout va bien (All’s Well, 1972), as the major point of departure to critically re-examine how Godard and his major lm collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin, endeavored to revolutionize the bourgeois traditions of Western narrative cinema with the radical introduction of Maoist discourses and dialectics shortly after the wake of May 1968. Also, by re- orienting some lingering epistemological and ethical questions of post-68 French Maoism back into the predominant symbolic fabric of contemporary neoliberal consensus, the aim of this paper is to re-examine the profound dialectical nexus between Western political cinema and the legacies of global 1968 to illuminate the current predicaments of leftist utopianism in our midst.




application/pdf
2036-461X
16580
30
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts Godard, Dziga Vertov Group and the Ethical Predicaments of Post-1968 French Maoism
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
18
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2018-03-01
2021-10-06
2018-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Man-tat Terence Leung
2018/03/01
School of Professional Education and Executive Development, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
2036-461X
30
en
Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts Godard, Dziga Vertov Group and the Ethical Predicaments of Post-1968 French Maoism
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16580/17147
18
Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts
Godard, Dziga Vertov Group and the Ethical Predicaments of
Post-1968 French Maoism
Man-tat Terence Leung, School of Professional Education and
Executive Development, Hong Kong Polytechnic University



Abstract

     With reference to the historical trajectory of modern French cinema, the Mao-
     leaning period (1967-1972) of Jean-Luc Godard under the collective spell of
     the Groupe Dziga Vertov (Dziga Vertov group, or DVG in short) was often a
     controversial and divisive subject among his critics and commentators following
     the political watershed of French May ‘68. This essay will take two of the most
     provocative and representative features made during the DVG period, Vent
     d’est (Wind from the East, 1969) and Tout va bien (All’s Well, 1972), as the
     major point of departure to critically re-examine how Godard and his major
     film collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin, endeavored to revolutionize the bourgeois
     traditions of Western narrative cinema with the radical introduction of Maoist
     discourses and dialectics shortly after the wake of May 1968. Also, by re-
     orienting some lingering epistemological and ethical questions of post-68 French
     Maoism back into the predominant symbolic fabric of contemporary neoliberal
     consensus, the aim of this paper is to re-examine the profound dialectical nexus
     between Western political cinema and the legacies of global 1968 to illuminate
     the current predicaments of leftist utopianism in our midst.


    Introduction

   With reference to the historical trajectory of modern French cinema, the Mao-
leaning period (1967–1972) of Jean-Luc Godard, under the collective spell of the
Groupe Dziga Vertov (Dziga Vertov Group, or DVG), was often a controversial
and divisive subject among his critics and commentators following the political
watershed of French May ’68. On the one hand, this overtly politicized period
of Godard that emerged during the heyday of 1968 forcefully advanced what
renowned critic Peter Wollen called ‘counter-cinema’,1 a highly subversive art


1
 Peter Wollen, in his highly influential essay on Godardian ‘counter-cinema’, argued that the overt
visual plainness of Vent d’est offered the best illustration of how the reigning discursive construct
of Western capitalism, which was traditionally assumed to be a universal, mystic background
that imperceptibly sutured together and manoeuvred all the onset characters, could be radically
foregrounded as a founding myth or illusion to help maintain the existing social status quo. With

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                      Man-tat Terence Leung


practice that sought to demythicize both the aesthetic elitism of the bourgeoisies
as well as the consumerist implications of Western narrative cinema. But on the
other hand, Godard’s Maoist fascination between the late 1960s and the early
1970s was also met with extensive criticism from various liberal-humanitarian
circles. Many of his critics found that the pervasive Maoist rhetoric appropriated
in Godard’s political films, especially his cinematic discourses on the use and
legitimacy of revolutionary violence against the reigning bourgeois ideology,
were often greatly problematic, dogmatic, and at times self-defeating. However,
without properly historicizing this radical epoch of Godard in relation to the
multifarious meanings and ambivalent legacies of the Maoist currents in post-
68 French intelligentsia, these conflicting comments might help perpetuate an
impressionistic, partial reading of his political works, and consequently failed to
truly address their latent dialectical novelties and egalitarian potentialities.
   This essay will take two of the most provocative and representative features
made during the DVG period, Vent d’est (Wind from the East, 1969) and Tout va
bien (All’s Well, 1972), as the major point of departure to critically re-examine
how Godard and his major film collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin, endeavoured
to revolutionize the bourgeois traditions of Western narrative cinema with the
radical introduction of Maoist discourses and dialectics shortly after the wake
of May 1968. Although Godard’s idiosyncratic cinematic experiment eventually
failed to help synthesize a concrete and coherent countercultural strategy
against the ruling ideology of the time, I will argue that the very emancipatory
potential pertaining to the post-68 French Maoism movement was perhaps far
from fully exhausted. By re-orienting some lingering epistemological and ethical
questions of post-68 French Maoism back into the predominant symbolic fabric
of contemporary neoliberal consensus, which always causally naturalizes and
rationalizes the very impossibility of proletarian struggles in global capitalist
settings, the aim of this paper is to re-examine the profound dialectical nexus
between Western political cinema and the legacies of global 1968 to illuminate
the current predicaments of leftist utopianism in our midst.




reference to the peculiar film structure of Vent d’est that profoundly demythicized the ruling
capitalist ideology as a sort of generic background or empty screen, Wollen thereby proposed
seven characteristics (also known as the ‘seven cardinal sins and virtues’) — ‘narrative transitivity-
intransitivity’, ‘identification-estrangement’, ‘transparency-foregrounding’, ‘single diegesis-
multiple diegesis’, ‘closure-aperture’, ‘pleasure-unpleasure’, and ‘fiction-reality’ — that sharply
differentiated classical narrative cinema from subversive counter-cinema. See Peter Wollen,
‘Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est’, in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. 2, ed. by
Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 500–509. In the same vein, Colin
MacCabe even argued that Godard-Gorin’s Vent d’est was not only ‘the most experimental of the
series of Maoist film’, but was also ‘the most coherent in its application of Althusserian politics’.
See Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York: Farrar, Srauss, and
Giroux, 2005), p. 225.

22
                                Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


Vent d’est and Its Inherent Contradictions with Maoism

   In the wake of the lessons of May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most
distinguishable icon of modern French cinema, realized that the proper direction
in political filmmaking was not simply to ‘make political films’ but to ‘make films
politically’ as a militant collective.2 In the winter of 1968, Godard, Gorin, and
an ensemble of young French Maoists established the Mao-leaning Groupe
Dziga Vertov to experiment with a new form of film production through the
dialectical juxtapositions of Maoist politics and collective authorship. Named
after the Soviet pioneer documentarian Dziga Vertov, the founding members of
the DVG believed that Vertov’s film aesthetics had succeeded in his proletarian
‘struggles on two fronts’ — the Soviet cinematic tradition set forth by Sergei
Eisenstein, who they called a ‘revisionist filmmaker’, and the seductive paradigm
of Hollywood’s commercial narratives. Between 1968 and 1972, the DVG made
eight collective features, namely, Vent d’est, British Sounds (1969), Pravda, Lotte
in Italia (Struggle in Italy, 1969); Jusqu’à la victoire (Until Victory, 1970); Vladimir
et Rosa (Vladimir and Rosa, 1971); Tout va bien; and Letter to Jane (1972), during
the Maoist heyday in Western Europe. The DVG’s membership fluctuated over
the course of their films and included French and Italian Maoist revolutionaries,
but its nucleus was mainly established by Godard and Gorin, both of whom
were highly dedicated to exploring the possibility of radical Marxist filmmaking
in the post-68 context.
   On the film set of Vent d’est, the crew members, who originated from
different ideological backgrounds, aligned themselves as a ‘general assembly’
that enjoyed a good share of creative autonomy. They decided to work together
as a non-hierarchical, egalitarian group throughout the course of production,
which was based on continuous political discussions and collective arguments
beyond the epistemological confines of bourgeois elitism and auteur aesthetics
that heavily characterized the pre-68 cinematic era.3 The members of the DVG
were increasingly aware of how traditional storytelling methods pertaining to
both European art cinema and American commercial cinema could be easily


2
  According to Godard, ‘[t]he notion of an author, of independent imagination, is just a fake. But
this bourgeois idea [of cinematic authorship] has not yet been replaced [by collective filmmaking].
A first step might be to simply gather people. At least then you can have a free discussion. But if you
don’t go on and organize on a political basis, you have nothing more than a free discussion. Then
collective creation is really no more than collective eating in a restaurant’. See Kent E. Carroll,
‘Film and Revolution: Interview with the Dziga-Vertov Group’, in Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S.
Brown (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 50–64 (p. 51).
3
   More recently, Godard recounted how the first filming experience with the French Maoists,
including May ‘68 icon Daniel Cohn-Bendit, came out in 1969. He said: ‘When we met for the first
time, in Nanterre, we had nothing in common, but we lived in communal situations. We haven’t
moved away from one another, but there’s a fraternal side, despite the fact that we’re poles apart’.
See Vincent Remy, ‘Jean-Luc Godard à Daniel Cohn-Bendit: “Qu’est-ce qui t’intéresse dans mon
film?”’, Telerama.fr, 15 May 2010, <http://www.telerama.fr/cinema/jean-luc-godard-a-daniel-
cohn-bendit-qu-est-ce-qui-t-interesse-dans-mon-film,55846.php> [accessed 7 March 2017].

                                                                                                    23
                                  Man-tat Terence Leung


hijacked as a counterrevolutionary weapon to help promote the predominant
capitalist discourse and revisionist ideology par excellence. In particular, Godard
and his colleagues, who were passionately inspired by the reigning Maoist
ideas of ‘The East Wind Prevails Over the West Wind’ and ‘Imperialism and
All Reactionaries are Paper Tigers’ following the Bandung Conference in 1955,
saw the Hollywood industry as a cultural extension of American imperialism as
well as a powerful ideological force that silently regulated and conditioned mass
subjectivity through the routine implementation of categorized cinematic codes
and narratives. As such, Godard and Gorin were convinced that they must create
a new aesthetic language that could not be readily translated or re-appropriated
by Western imperialist modalities.
   Also deeply influenced by the Brechtian redefinition of the ‘epic theatre’, one of
the major objectives of the DVG films was to transform the bourgeois and passive
traditions of Western cinematic practices into a realm of living revolutionary
aspirations and critical empowerments.4 Unlike his auteur works made prior to
1968, which put a major emphasis on visual innovations over audio experiments,
there was a noticeable epistemological shift in the use of voice-overs, dialogues,
and film sound during Godard’s DVG period, which articulated and erected
various sets of revolutionary discourses, especially the Maoist teachings, against
the conservative appropriation of image and sound in mainstream cinematic
productions. During the post-68 period of collective filmmaking, there was a
perpetual tension between Godard’s manoeuvring of images and sounds, the
objective of which was to radically de-familiarize and estrange the established
viewing experiences of the bourgeois critics and audiences alike.
   Reducing its storyline to a minimal level, Vent d’est is loosely divided into
seven chapters that partly overlap in terms of their film form and content.
These chapters address political issues like the various conflicts and debates
experienced in May ’68, the post-1968 Maoist currents in France, Lenin’s
commentary on left-wing infantilism, socialist experiments of self-management
in Tito’s Yugoslavia during the 1960s, egalitarian medical welfare in Maoist
China, the latent contradictions between revolutionary terror and bourgeois-
humanitarianism, and the ambivalent relationship between Western political
cinema and Third Cinema. Although Vent d’est touches upon a wide array of
political issues and intellectual discussions, the two filmmakers put a particular
emphasis on the radical disagreements between workers, students, and trade
unions during May ‘68; the Sino-Soviet debates among the different leftist groups
in Western Europe after 1968; and the rationale of and justification for the use of
revolutionary violence in post-war capitalist societies. At the formal level, the two
directors incorporated extensive voice-overs, especially female commentaries,
to present and develop a dense political discourse on May ’68 and its Maoist


4
 Serge Daney, ‘Le t(h)errorisé (pédagogie godardienne)’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 262–263 (January
1976), 33–39 (pp. 34–35).

24
                               Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


trajectories in Vent d’est.5 Yet they required their audiences to actively engage in
the own critical interpretation and evaluation of the philosophical messages and
dialectical subtleties of this film from time to time.
   However, according to a prominent Marxist critic, Vent d’est was highly
incoherent and tedious in terms of its political argumentations and intellectual
delineations, in which it exemplified nothing more than an Olympian pseudo-
rigor.6 In fact, what seemed to be highly irritating to the audiences of this film
was that the two filmmakers constantly kept obliging their viewers to identify
with and even acknowledge a full-fledged Marxist teleology and utopianism. The
audiences of Vent d’est were frequently presented with, if not bombarded by, a
set of stereotypical voice injunctions and moral imperatives that in turn dictated
their cinematic reading; for example, the female voice-over continually repeats
the same political instructions — ‘Think. Manufacture. Simplify. Reflect. Learn’.
The tone of these voice-overs is highly ritualistic, didactic, and repetitive, while
their speed is so fast that it hardly allows any time and space for the audiences’
judgments and apprehensions. Whereas Godard and Gorin endeavoured to
critically engage audiences beyond the long-standing epistemological narrowness
of artistic elitism in Vent d’est, this very first Mao-leaning film of the DVG
eventually served a handful of highly sophisticated spectators and hardline
Marxist supporters. Film critic Andrew Britton once harshly commented that
Vent d’est was arguably ‘one of the most repressive films ever made’,7 in that it
‘precisely forbids analysis, or, rather the analysis has been made, and the only
positions left are those of unbeliever or proselytizer’.8
   Even so, this Godard-Gorin work may have somewhat rationalized and
idiosyncratically mythicized the use of revolutionary violence in post-68 capitalist
societies. With regard to the rationale and legitimacy of revolutionary terror in
capitalist societies, the first female voice-over, which represents the bourgeois-
humanitarian position in Vent d’est, blasts the terrorists’ utmost cruelty and
inhumanity towards the innocents. In her eyes, terrorism is never morally
justified under any circumstances: ‘It’s disgusting. A bomb has been thrown in
a supermarket. A lot of people have been injured. What have you got out of it?
[…] Fanatics are sent to do the killings, gangsters whose only aim is to kill and
destroy, even though no advantage can be gained from it’. Shortly afterwards,
the second female voice-over immediately argues against the convenient moral



5
  According to Serge Daney, the master-discourse of Godardian cinema after 1968 was virtually
embodied by women’s voices. The female voice in Godard’s political films was responsible for
‘theorizing’ the revolutionary strategies as well as ‘terrorizing’ the counterrevolutionaries in equal
measure. See Daney, p. 36.
6
  Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p.
141.
7
  See Andrew Britton, ‘Living Historically: Two Films by Jean-Luc Godard’, Framework, 2.1
(1976), 4–15 (p. 9).
8
  Ibidem.

                                                                                                   25
                                      Man-tat Terence Leung


gesture of the first female’s commentary by revealing the obscene underside of
her bourgeois-humanitarianism:

     That’s what bourgeois-humanitarianism says when the oppressed get the means of
     grasping the exploiter by the throat. When bourgeois-humanitarianism talks about
     innocent victims, unnecessary violence, what is it hiding? […] The daily reality of
     bourgeois terror, the reality of the struggle.

   Shortly afterwards, the second female voice-over in Vent d’est, which casually
borrows Mao’s political disseminations of ‘principal contradiction’ and ‘non-
principal contradiction’9 during the height of the Anti-Rightist Campaign
erected in the early 1960s, goes on to criticize that in May ’68 the bourgeoisies and
the established powers falsely rendered the ‘secondary contradiction’ (i.e., the
division between labour and sex) of post-war French society as a ‘primary issue’
(i.e., the civil war between labour and capital) to cover up the true primordial
antagonism pertaining to the reigning capitalist system. To such an extent,
the second female voice argues that it is precisely this overt emphasis on the
‘secondary contradiction’ over the ‘primary contradiction’ that sets up the very
condition for armed resistance among the oppressed. The radical concealment
of the ‘primary contradiction’ in French social life as such provides the moral
justification for the initiation of militant proletarian struggles against the latent
discursive violence of the ruling power, which seeks to keep social order intact
and stable by all means. The second female voice-over then assertively raises the
core question of the film:

     What is to be done? You’ve made a film, you’ve criticized it. You’ve made mistakes, you
     corrected some of them. Because of this you know a little more about making images
     and sounds. Perhaps now you know better how this production can be transformed.
     For whom and against whom? Perhaps you have learned something very simple.

  Eventually, the second female voice-over receives a didactic conclusion from
her Marxist listeners: ‘Marxism, which is composed of multiple principles, can
be summed up as “it’s right to rebel”’.
  Paradoxically, although this second female voice-over seems to stand
antithetically to the first female commentary, it may have actually recuperated the
same kind of reductive logic in the very ‘theorization’ of revolutionary resistance

9
   In his famous speech ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among People’, Mao
differentiated two types of social contradictions — ‘principal contradiction’ and ‘non-principal
contradiction’ — that constantly emerge in a given society. For the ‘principal contradiction’
between the capitalist ‘enemy’ and the proletarian ‘people’, their contradictions are so vast that
they are, by and large, irresoluble without an initiation of class struggles and civil warfare. But
for the ‘non-principal contradiction’ among ‘the people’, say the workers and the peasants, their
contradictions can be solved and reconciled by meaningful dialogues and active persuasion.
According to this Maoist view, ‘dictatorship’ is applied to the ideological ‘enemy’ while ‘democracy’
is only designated for the proletariats.

26
                             Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


in post-68 France. In particular, the film scholar Joan Mellen was also highly
dismissive and critical of the hazy political discussion and the casual justification
for the employment of revolutionary terror in Vent d’est. Mellen accused Godard
of being as ‘impatient as a child with the long process of convincing a majority
and building a revolutionary organization’, where his radical prescription of
bomb-throwing was ‘the most attractive action for the adolescent revolutionary
who spends most of his time picnicking on the grass’.10 She added, ‘[T]he end
of Wind from the East is a call for terrorism — which for serious revolutionaries
should mark a lack of confidence in the ability to win through persuasion the
great majority of a people’.11 In fact, the very revolutionary justification that
the second female voice-over previously presented somewhat falls short of the
necessary contextualization and critical appropriation.
   Historically speaking, the aforementioned Maoist theory of contradictions
advanced during the heyday of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which saw the
political persecution of over half a million people in Mao’s China, was widely
seen by many commentators as certain brutal ideological foreclosures of the
political excesses left behind by the preceding One Hundred Flowers Campaign,
which contrarily promoted the expressive freedom of the Chinese people against
all odds. The true irony here is that the two consecutive movements — first the
One Hundred Flowers Campaign and then the Anti-Rightist Campaign — were
by and large two sides of the same coin, as both of these political campaigns
were virtually initiated by the Maoist government to help establish some sort of
‘controlled democracy’ in Chinese communist society. Yet this important historical
detail pertaining to Mao’s theory of contradictions was relatively overlooked by
Godard and Gorin in this film. Consequently, their casual recuperation of the
Maoist doctrines of ‘principal contradictions’ and ‘non-principal contradictions’
in Vent d’est failed to cement the revolutionary insurrections of the Chinese
Cultural Revolution and French May ‘68. Instead, this radical gesture alienated
itself further from the epistemological trajectory of Chinese Maoism at large,
which constantly emphasized the dialectical importance and necessity of a
critical, historicized adaptation of Marxist theories to certain concrete political
situations and changing social realities.
   In short, according to Mellen, the radical political ideas in Vent d’est could
not be taken seriously, insofar as the so-called ‘Eastern Wind’ or ‘Maoist vision’
was never actually rendered visible or intelligible at the textual level of the film.12
In fact, Godard and Gorin’s cinematic representation of revolutionary violence
in Vent d’est was often extremely tacky and trivial. While the two filmmakers
included a ‘terroristic’ scene about the process of making a ‘home-made bomb’
in this work, the essential tools for making the bomb were simply composed of a
set of toy tanks and a handful of domestic explosives. Meanwhile, they also made


10
   See Joan Mellen, ‘Wind from the East: A Review’, Film Comment, 7.3 (1971), 65–67 (p. 67).
11
   Ibidem.
12
   Ivi, p. 66.

                                                                                               27
                                    Man-tat Terence Leung


use of several revolutionary writings of Mao and books of matches to convey
the meaning of the great explosive chemistry between radical political theory
and leftist terror. As the matches ignite, the filmmakers cut to a shot of a ruined
factory, with the noise of an explosion on the soundtrack. In this respect, no
actual explosion was filmed as the explosion was envisioned only in terms of
injunctive voice-overs and tacky visual metaphors. In his critical review of Vent
d’est, Britton remarked that the radical lack of an ‘accurate’ and ‘convincing’
image of revolutionary terror symptomatically revealed the latent political
tediousness and intellectual emptiness of the film as a whole. As Britton critically
pointed out,

     [t]he image of the books of matches, plus the sound of explosion, is supposed to show
     us revolutionary action: in fact, the impoverishment of image, its trite obviousness and
     banality, are a sufficient measure of the sloppiness of thought and paucity of feeling
     which can even suggest it as being inadequate.13

   In a dialogue between Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki with regard to
Godard’s La Gai savoir (Joy of Learning, 1968) produced shortly before Vent
d’est, the two intellectuals agreed that compared with Stalin’s dictatorship in
the Communist Party, the Maoist Cultural Revolution seemed to offer a more
authentic revolutionary model to young French intellectuals during the 1960s,
as long as ‘Mao actually provides a much easier access than classical Marxism
to a position of untroubled knowledge’.14 In La Gai savoir, the ‘libidinal’ and
‘anti-authoritarian’ appeal of Chinese Maoism was perhaps the most revealing
to French left-wing intelligentsia during the heyday of the 1960s; as Silverman
carefully noted, there was a scene where the camera focused on a poster with the
words ‘Mao sait tout [Mao knows everything]’.15 Farocki further responded that

     [i]ronically, Mao’s simplifications have a primarily poetic appeal. They interpellate us
     into politics through their artistic radicality. You don’t have to become a Protestant
     just because you love Bach, but May ‘68 activists began by admiring Mao’s prose
     and ended up by becoming Maoists. This shows that Maoism finally appealed less to
     conscious knowledge than unconscious desire.16


13
   Britton, p. 10.
14
   Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University
Press, 1998), pp. 121–122.
15
   Ivi, p. 122.
16
   Ibidem. In his book The Wind from the East, Richard Wolin summed up how this empirical
ignorance about Mao’s China paradoxically helped survive certain grandiose French revolutionary
traditions: ‘None spoke Chinese, and reliable information about contemporary China was nearly
impossible to come by, since Mao had basically forbidden access to outsiders, little matter. The
less these normaliens knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes. Cultural
Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their innermost radical
political hopes and fantasies, which in de Gaulle’s France had been deprived of a real-world
outlet’. See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,
and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 3.

28
                               Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


   In other words, the pronounced Maoist yearning of Godard and Gorin after
1968 was always more prone to a lyrical expression than a rational activity. In
almost all of the films produced by the two filmmakers between 1968 and 1972,
there was an obvious discrepancy between what have been constantly announced
as the radical revolutionary actions against the oppressors and what they simply
manifested as political struggles in their concrete visual format.


From Political Antagonism to Tout va bien … and Back

   What is really at stake here is that this radical mismatch between the
revolutionary urges and manifestations pertaining to the DVG films was never
simply an isolated instance in the French political scene after May 1968. Although
some of these features may have lacked certain intellectual substances or rigor
in their revolutionary prescriptions, they were not entirely meaningless if one
were able to dialectically reconnect the historical affinity between the political
works by the DVG and the various Maoist currents emerged in post-68 France.
During the late 1960s and the 1970s, many French Maoists, like Godard and
Gorin, fervently took up the radical Maoist notion of ‘on a raison de se révolter
[it is right to rebel]’ during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to resist against
the dominant political institutions and established order.17 In fact, Gorin also
admitted that in films like Vent d’est and Lotte in Italia, ‘they are the perfect
image of what was militancy at that time, that incredible drive of madness which
was inside it. They are affected by history, not on a theoretical level, but in the
flesh and blood of the films’.18
   Yet this overt radicalization of politics in the French leftist scene was not entirely
unjustifiable and inconceivable if read as the last defensive outcry towards the
increasingly oppressive bourgeois regimes following the political watershed of
1968.19 According to Christophe Bourseiller, ‘the situation in France in 1969 was
[somewhat] comparable to the Nazi Occupation’.20After the traumatic failure in


17
   In a book which records a series of conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre and two French Maoist
leaders during the early 1970s, it unambiguously states that: ‘In 1969-1970, when a worker wanted
a short break and so sabotaged production we would say “well done”. When a guy had reached
the end of this tether and thumped his foreman we would say “well done”. And we would add that
it’s better done in small groups and done discreetly otherwise you’re bounded to be sacked but
we said “well done”. In short our thinking could be summed up as: it is right to rebel’. See On a
raison de se révolter, discussions, ed. by Philippe Gavi, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Victor (Paris:
Gallimard, 1974), p. 154.
18
   Christian Braad Thomsen, ‘Jean-Pierre Gorin Interviewed: Filmmaking and History’, Jump Cut,
3 (1974), <http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC03folder/GorinIntThomson.html>
[accessed 7 May 2017].
19
    See Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought
(Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 59.
20
    Christophe Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes: La folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plon,
1996), pp. 114–115. Peter Dews added that after 1968 ‘the French state was undergoing a process

                                                                                                 29
                                     Man-tat Terence Leung


May ‘68, political disagreements among different leftist groups in France became
even more pronounced. In particular, these leftist camps failed to come up with a
formal consensus over the tactics of revolutionary insurrections against the post-
68 French government. Out of this massive political rupture, the largest Maoist
group in France, Gauche prolétarianne (Proletarian Left, or GP), was established
in the fall of 1968 and radically differentiated itself from the traditional leftists
of the Communist Party and official leftist organs. Recognized by many critics
as a ‘non-hierarchical’ and ‘anti-Stalinist’ Maoist group, Gauche prolétarianne
was best known for its highly spontaneous use and renewal of Marxist-Leninist
doctrines. Although it was a new Maoist group formed in the aftermath of May
1968, the founders of the GP initially originated from the former Union des
jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (Union of Young Marxist-Leninist
Communists, or UJCML), a highly intellectual and sophisticated Maoist
Althusserian circle based at the École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm
during the mid-1960s, as well as a large faction from the anarcho-libertarian
current of the March 22nd Movement that catalysed the May ‘68 barricades in
Paris.
   In the fall of 1968, the leading figures of the UJCML underwent a severe self-
criticism over their misjudgement of many pivotal moments during May ‘68.21
Referring to Vladimir Lenin’s teachings in What Is to Be Done? (1902) and his
dismissive comments on left-wing infantilism, a small ‘liquidationist faction’ of
the UJCML, including Althusserian intellectual Robert Linhart, argued that the
sheer misfire of French ‘68 was attributed to the lack of a revolutionary vanguard
party that could organize and mobilize the workers and students strategically
and effectively. However, for the rest of the ‘non-liquidationist’ members such
as Benny Lévy and André Glucksmann, they were convinced that the inflexible
allegiance to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy as well as the overt emphasis on the
revolutionary primacy of the working class somewhat trivialized and constrained
the latent subversive potentialities that had been openly manifested by the young



of internal fascisization “from above”, against which the GP attempted to reactivate the mythology
of the French Resistance. Trade union delegates and foreman were labelled “collaborators”, the GP
proclaimed itself the kernel of the “New Partisans”’. See Peter Dews, ‘The Nouvelle Philosophie
and Foucault’, in Towards a Critique of Foucault, ed. by Mike Gane (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1986), pp. 81-106 (p. 65).
21
   The UJCML argued that the student revolt culminated in pitched battles with the police on 10
May 1968, the Night of the Barricades, as a manifestation of the students’ petty bourgeois ideology.
A. Belden Fields wrote: ‘It interpreted that a true revolution must be made by the workers and
that confrontations without them were meaningless. It urged students to go out to the factories
and the working-class neighbourhoods rather than mounting the barricades in the Latin Quarter.
Members of the organization did not participate in the battle that night’. See A. Belden Fields,
Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger,
1988), p. 93. See also Julian Bourg, ‘The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the
1960s’, History of European Ideas, 31.4 (2005), 472–490; Camille Robcis, ‘China in Our Heads:
Althusser, Maoism, and Structuralism’, Social Text, 30.1 (2012), 51–69.

30
                                Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


bourgeois students in May ’68.22 For Lévy and Glucksmann, it was the political
teaching of Mao, instead of the writing of Lenin, that had been largely misread
or overlooked by many leftist intellectuals in May ’68. After the fusion between
the former ‘non-liquidationist’ UJCML members and the anarcho-libertarian
movements led by Alain Geismar in 1969, the GP thereby realigned themselves
more seamlessly with the Maoist principle of ‘mass-line’ to break down the long-
standing division between intellectuals and workers, and to allow students ‘to
learn from the masses’ and ‘to serve the people’.23 In the eyes of the GP, the
Chinese Cultural Revolution was first and foremost anti-bureaucratic and anti-
authoritarian. In the words of Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, it was a ‘return to one of
the forgotten origins of Marxism, that of the texts on the Paris Commune taken
up by Lenin during the époque of the Soviets: the libertarian source’.24
   After the resignation of Charles de Gaulle in 1969, police repression in
France became even more severe than ever. Jean-Paul Sartre, the chief editor of
the banned Maoist newspaper La Cause du peuple (The Cause of the People),
offered a vivid example of the sheer repressiveness of the new Pompidou
government: after ’68, when young people were found carrying only two copies
of the same issue of La Cause du people, they were sent directly to prison without
the possibility of suspended sentences.25 Beginning in 1969, the GP managed
to attract widespread public sympathy, from prominent intellectuals to left-
leaning journalists and celebrities, including Michel Foucault, Maurice Clavel,
Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Ranciere, and the famous French actor Yves
Montand. Within the single year of 1969, the number of GP members multiplied


22
   One of the most eloquent Maoist leaders, Benny Lévy, argued that since the ‘liquidationists’
always read Mao through the lens of Lenin’s ‘What Is to Be Done?’, they did not really grasp
the true novelty and singularity of Maoist dialectics as such. See Benny Lévy [pseudonym Pierre
Victor], ‘Investigation into the Maoists in France: Interview with Benny Lévy’, trans. by Mitchell
Abidor, Communist Archives, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/levy-benny/1971/investigation.
htm> [accessed 19 April 2017].
23
    ‘Mass-line’ is an internal people’s critique of bureaucracy and the division of labour in
revolutionary society. It was founded on the conviction that the eyes of the peasants always see
more justly than those of the bureaucrats and technicians. A. Belden Fields also added that in
the first two years after its formation, the GP attempted to close the gap between what it called
the ‘anti-authoritarian youth revolt’ and the proletarian revolution by sending its members into
the Renault automobile plant at Flins, a plant which had erupted in 1968. See A. Belden Fields,
‘French Maoism’, in The 60s without Apology, ed. by Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley
Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 148–177
(p. 156).
24
   Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Les dangers du soleil (Paris: Les Presses d’Aujourd’hui, 1978), p. 94.
25
   Jean-Paul Sartre, Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. by Paul Auster and Lydia
Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 165. However, although Sartre approved of the GP’s
direct militant actions, its radicalism, and its rejection of bourgeois reality, he never claimed himself
to be a legitimate ‘Maoist’. According to David Drake, Sartre was rather sceptical of the uncritical
Chinese fascination among the GP Maoists, as he ‘was dismissive of “Mao Zedong Thought”
and rejected the parallels the maos drew between France in 1970s and the Occupation (bosses =
fascists, PCF = collaborators, Maoists = resistance)’. See David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in
Postwar France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 141.

                                                                                                      31
                                      Man-tat Terence Leung


from a few hundred to a few thousand, celebrating the popular cause of the
proletariats. Calling themselves the Nouvelle résistance populaire (the New
Popular Resistance), the GP orchestrated a series of direct and voluntary actions,
such as stealing and distributing free subway tickets to protest a rise in fares and
pillaging a luxury food store in Paris and handing the booty to immigrant workers
living in shantytowns, as a way to radically expand or widen the capacity and the
scope of proletarian struggles.26 Jean-Luc Godard was one of the pronounced
sympathizers of the GP. As Godard personally recounted, he joined Sartre several
times to distribute free copies of La Cause du peuple, which was founded by the
GP, in railway stations and other public areas.27 Godard also wrote five articles
for the aligned Maoist journal J’accuse and helped create another Mao-leaning
newspaper, Libération.28 According to Alain Badiou, ‘French Maoism was the
only innovative political tendency in France in the aftermath of May 1968’.29
   However, the radical period of post-68 French Maoism proved to be rather
elusive as well.30 Beginning in the early 1970s, some of the most eloquent


26
   See Donald Reid, ‘Établissement: Working in the Factory to Make Revolution in France’, Radical
History Review, 88 (Winter 2004), 83–111 (p. 90). In the meantime, due to the enhanced state
repression, many university protests and occupation movements gradually retreated from Paris to
suburban France. In particular, many French Maoists collectively set up revolutionary bases and
stunts at the University of Vincennes, which was newly established by the post-Gaullist government
in the suburban district of Saint-Denis to help neutralize the social discontent of the young students
and 68ers. Within the worldview of the GP, ‘revolution was like theatre, a show that depicted the
war to come’. See Terrorisme et démocratie, ed. by François Furet, Antoine Liniers, and Philippe
Raynaud (Paris: Fayard, 1985), p. 181. See also Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A
History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 558; Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération vol. 2: Les anneé
de (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988), p. 180. One of the most representative and controversial GP
leader, André Glucksmann, who was hired to teach Marxism at Vincennes, regularly organized
‘class occupations’ and ‘ideological hijackings’ of the ‘bourgeois, aristocratic and revisionist
teachers’ on the school campus. See Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey
of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 266–267. See also François
Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, The Sign Sets, 1967–Present, trans. by Deborah Glassman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 149.
27
   See Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, ed. by Alain Bergala (Paris: Editions
de l’Etoile, 1985), p. 374.
28
   For an account of Godard’s involvement with the GP and other French leftist press during his
DVG period, see, for example, Michael Witt, ‘Godard dans la presse d’extrême-gauche’, in Jean-
Luc Godard Documents, ed. by Nicole Brenez (Paris: Edition du Centre Pompidou, 2006), pp.
165–177.
29
   Alain Badiou, ‘One Divides into Two’, in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, ed. by
Sebastian Budgen, Eustache Kouvélakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007),
pp. 7–17 (p. 12).
30
   Historically speaking, the 1970s saw a chronicle of left-wing violence spreading across Western
Europe. However, French leftist radicalism, most notably La Gauche prolétarianne, compared with
the adjacent German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades, seemed to have evaded the
reign of true terrorist activities. As David Drake wrote, the very ‘non-violence’ of French Maoism
had more to do with the young intellectual’s faith in symbolic terror than actual bloodshed. Instead,
the terrorist attacks in Munich prompted the French Maoist group to rethink the moral future of
struggles for an egalitarian society. Caught in an irreconcilable impasse and political disagreement,

32
                                Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


members of the GP, such as André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy,
subsequently realigned themselves as a group widely known as Les nouveaux
philosophes (The New Philosophers), who pronouncedly broke with French
Maoism and harshly denounced the underlying ‘totalitarian’ implications of
May ’68 and Marxist philosophy under the doctrinal rubric of bourgeois-
humanitarianism in many commercial channels.31 Glucksmann, in particular,
even lent his open support to the former rightist French president Nicholas
Sarkozy, who notoriously urged the ‘liquidation of May 1968’ during his reign.
With reference to these obscure, confusing aftermaths of May ‘68, Godard and
Gorin thereby offered a radical (self-)critique of the dominant revolutionary
imaginations and tactics of many French Maoists during the heyday of the
1960s in their final DVG feature, Tout va bien. After several years of Maoist
exile, the two filmmakers gradually realized the latent epistemological deadlock
and ethical predicaments pertaining to Western political cinema itself, as they
felt an increasing urge to move out of the narrow ‘gauchiste ghetto’ and reach
out to a wider spectrum of film audiences.32
   Contrary to their early Maoist works such as Vent d’est, which conspicuously
dismissed the predominant issues of film marketing and other economic aspects
of political filmmaking, Godard-Gorin’s Tout va bien was mainly financed by
Gaumont, the largest commercial film company in France, and recruited two
prominent global film stars — Jane Fonda and Yves Montand — to draw
a wider spectatorship. However, that did not necessarily mean that the two
filmmakers fully forsook their previous leftist engagements for a commercial
film market. Rather, they endeavoured to creatively transform their previous
leftist errors into a new social inquiry in Tout va bien, which explored the very
contradictions of making a commercial Marxist feature. According to Gillian
Klein, ‘[Godard-Gorin’s] films are part of a process of change, of a dialectic,
where the contradictions of one stage are worked out in the next’.33 Klein added:



the GP eventually disbanded in the fall of 1973, only to find that their initial Maoist fascination had
been more or less turned back to their various domestic moral concerns on various occasions. See
David Drake, ‘On a raison de se révolter: The Response of La Gauche Prolétarianne to the Events
of May–June 1968’, in Violence and Conflict in the Politics and Society of Modern France, ed. by Jan
Windebank and Renate Günther (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1995), p. 72.
31
   To their most severe critics such as Gilles Deleuze, the nouveaux philosophes in France could be
at best understood as a kind of impressionistic journalism and a quasi-moral philosophy that bred
nothing but ‘philosophical marketing’. See Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and
Interviews 1975–1995, ed. by David Lapoujade, trans. by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 18. According to Deleuze, the nouveaux philosophes seemed to
have invented a highly idiosyncratic ‘witness function’ towards the imaginary victims and corpses
in totalitarian countries that simply defied proof and records. These intellectuals were simply
‘writing a martyrology’ on behalf of ‘the Gulag and the victims of history’, acting as if they were
either the sufferers of the Left or the eyes of the righteousness. See Deleuze, p. 18.
32
   Gillian Klein, ‘Review: Tout va bien by Jean-Luc Godard’, Film Quarterly, 26.4 (Summer 1973),
35-41(p. 35).
33
   Ibidem.

                                                                                                    33
                                      Man-tat Terence Leung


     [I]n Tout va bien [Godard and Gorin] moved another step, beyond what Mao called
     critically the poster and slogan method. Here they are neither attacking nor ignoring
     the wider audience. Seen as a process the “political” films show a progression from
     a detached satirist’s attack on the decadence of society, to political commitment,
     followed by an application of that commitment to the social situation.34

    Tout va bien’s announced purpose was to ‘consider the class struggle in France
four years on from 1968’; as Godard confessed in a TV interview, one of the
major objectives of Tout va bien was to critically re-examine the ambivalent
role of Western leftist intellectuals during the course of global revolutionary
insurrections.35As a highly self-reflexive work of their own Maoist yearning
between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Godard-Gorin’s Tout va bien was
a critical diagnosis of the changing class relations and new social contradictions
among the three major forces in post-68 French society: the reigning bourgeoisies,
the working class, and the leftist intellectuals. At a formal and aesthetic level, Tout
va bien was radically simplified and blatantly diagrammatic. The key set of the
film consisted of a cross-sectioned occupied factory, which allowed the camera
to move back and forth from room to room, theoretically through the walls. The
film begins with a self-examination of filmmaking itself, with a unique opening
sequence that shows a chequebook being subsequently signed for different
departments and employees. The off-screen voice-over ironically pinpoints that
‘if you use stars, people will give you money’. The profound innovation of Tout va
bien is that it brilliantly captured the oft-overlooked dialectics between Marxism
and capitalism in the post-68 context, insofar as one inevitably encountered the
logic of economic capital when attempting to give Marxism a new voice.
    Narratively, the film orbits around a spontaneous workers’ sequestration
against senior management that occurs at a rural sausage factory during the
early 1970s. This wildcat strike, which echoed an actual historical incident
that happened in early 1972,36 is witnessed by an American feminist reporter,


34
   Ibidem. Another renowned film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, echoed this view: ‘In films like Un
film comme les autres, Wind from the East, and Vladimir and Rosa, one felt that Godard was trying
to divest himself of all that was superfluous to his political evolution. At their most painful, these
works resembled desperate acts of self-mutilation. In Tout va bien, one observes a new sense of
calm and assurance, a consolidation of the previous experiments, and the apparent beginning of a
new cycle’. See Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Journals: Paris’, Film Comment, 8.3 (September–October
1972), 76–77.
35
   Jean-Luc Godard, ‘1972 Video Interview Excerpt with Jean-Luc Godard’, Tout va bien, DVD
special feature, The Criterion Collection, 2005.
36
   On 26 February 1972, a group of young GP Maoists distributed polemical tracts outside the
Renault automobile factory in Boulogne-Billancourt that called for a demonstration against racism
after the assassination of a young Arab worker in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood in Paris. In the
midst of a fight between the Maoists and the plant managers, a 24-year-old Maoist worker named
Pierre Overney was killed by one of the factory security guards. The police came to the scene
the next day and demanded that the factory owner fire all possible witnesses. In response, about
200,000 people attended Overney’s funeral and participated in the subsequent commemorations.
Historians believe that this episode was highly significant and symbolic because it was literally the

34
                               Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


Suzanne (Jane Fonda), and her French husband, Jacques (Yves Montand),
who went to the factory to conduct interviews. Fonda’s character, an American
journalist living in France and working for the American Broadcasting Company,
meets her future husband during the general strike in May ‘68, while Montand’s
character, once a left-leaning Nouvelle Vague filmmaker, undergoes a period
of self-questioning after 1968, then returns to shooting TV commercials in the
entertainment industry (he later claims that making commercials is even ‘more
honest’ than indulging in leftist cinema). The political situation in the sausage
factory is that of disarray. The workers who are engaged in the wildcat strike
capture their Italian factory manager, yet the major trade union does not lend
their support to the strike and openly criticizes the radical actions of the workers
as naïve ‘betrayal’ of the proletarian cause.
   Despite this increasingly heightened political atmosphere, the two main
characters, who had scheduled an interview with the Italian manager to discuss
modern capitalist management, are immediately thrown into the turmoil of the
strike and the workers lock them up with the factory boss. The two protagonists
confront the manager, who is forced to justify the social achievements and
economic importance of the reigning capitalist system. He claims that Marxism
has gradually lost its significance and charm due to the enhanced standard
of living for all Western people following the Second World War. The Italian
manager eventually argues for a modern collaborative society where different
classes and individuals peacefully cooperate instead of causing ‘unnecessary’ and
‘wasteful’ conflicts against each other.
   Similar to the tragic aftermath of May ’68, the factory strike is eventually called
off by an extended ‘negotiation’ and ‘consensus’ among the various stakeholders.
The workers on strike are forced to apologize and release the factory manager and
other innocent captives. After Suzanne and Jacques are released from the factory
occupation, they go back to work as usual, yet they encounter new difficulties
(which have perhaps already existed) in their marriage, which is radically shaken
by what they witnessed and learned during the unexpected turbulence in the
occupied factory. Suzanne begins to reflect on the precarious position of women
in patriarchal setting, as well as the latent fragility of her marital relations with
Jacques. On one occasion, the heroine even elevates a picture of an erect male
genitalia when quarrelling with the hero to demonstrate her growing discontent


last large-scale mass gathering among the French militants to show comradeship and solidarity
after May ‘68. As a quick response to Overney’s death, Sartre and Maoist journalist Maurice Clavel
immediately wrote a plea in a newspaper that called for a popular trial to investigate this highly
unjust and suspicious murder. However, the GP militants, who were even more impatient than
Sartre, kidnapped the factory’s head of personnel, Robert Nogrette, as a quick manifestation of
the people’s resistance. After forty-eight hours, when the GP members finally decided that it had
defied the authorities long enough and had gotten sufficient publicity and media coverage of the
kidnapping, the group simply released Nogrette without receiving anything in return. See Michael
Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 62.

                                                                                                  35
                               Man-tat Terence Leung


over Jacques’ indifference and distant feelings towards many daily sentiments
and the subtle changes that gradually occur in their relationship following the
demise of May ’68.
   In response to her marital turmoil, Suzanne, who has just quit her
broadcasting job after a dispute with the producers over the issue of political
censorship, decides to engage in individual research and empirical study on
a highly modern yet alienated supermarket (i.e., Carrefour); in this scene, a
remarkable ten-minute-long tracking shot shows people buying groceries,
symbolizing the gradual transformation of political voices, leadership and
directions in the post-68 capitalist system. In this defining long take, the
audience sees the customers calmly piling up their groceries at the check-out
counters in the foreground. Beyond the cashiers, Suzanne is seen taking notes
on the shoppers and wandering in the aisles in line with the movements of
the tracking camera. As this is taking place, a male delegate sent from the
Parti communiste français (French Communist Party, or PCF) appears, trying
to promote his new communist book Change Course to people near a food
stand. Here the Party representative is portrayed as just another commodity
to be bought and sold on the marketplace, a structural component of the
same capitalist system that bears little difference from the groceries which the
consumers are purchasing. In the meantime, there is no obvious connection
between these different social individuals inside the supermarket. The moving
camera remains radically ‘neutral’, without highlighting the primacy and
importance of any of these social agents. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum,
‘in the lengthy supermarket sequence in Tout va bien, groceries remain only
groceries — neutral objects to be recorded like the rest’.37
   A couple of leftist students pop up and begin to question the PCF delegate,
pointing out some latent contradictions and inconsistencies in his political
line. A crowd of young radical leftists suddenly rushes in and provokes a
physical confrontation with the Party representative as well as his supporters
in the distant background. Initially, the shoppers, located in the foreground,
are oblivious of this conflict and continue to pile up their purchases at the
check-out counters. In this scene, the two filmmakers were trying to present
the very spatial connections, or the lack of connections, between all these social
groups in clear visual terms. While the official leftist organ is presented as part
of the capitalist structure of a modern market-driven society, the key leftist
intellectual, Suzanne, who is in line with the hidden tracking camera, moves
back and forth without clear direction, while the young leftists simply bump
into the scene out of nowhere, attempting to assert themselves as the ‘new
voice’ or ‘new agent’ of this advanced capitalist society following the tragic
demise of May 1968. But when the young radicals idiosyncratically incite the
lay consumers by leading a sort of mass theft of groceries (shouting ‘everything


37
     Rosenbaum, p. 76.

36
                          Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


is free of charge!’), the scenario becomes increasingly uncontrollable and
chaotic, and the mini-riot is soon violently suppressed by the incoming police
sent from the cinematic off-screen.
   The various social predicaments that were left largely unanswered throughout
the film Tout va bien — the lack of concrete direction of the working-class militancy,
the gradual fading of revolutionary momentum in post-68 French society, and
the new contradictions faced by the left-leaning intellectuals pertaining to the
predominant capitalist system — culminate in the key supermarket sequence.
This relatively pessimistic implication was further underlined by Godard-Gorin’s
intercutting of several footages containing the loose, disorganized insurrections
of the younger generation during the early 1970s, which reminds the audience
of the insurmountable failure of both the old and the new political agency in
the post-68 capitalist world. The audience is placed outside the scene with a
camera that is situated behind the check-out counters, which moves inexorably
left and right in a single long take. The overarching sense of political impasse
presented by this prolonged, contemplative camera movement belongs to the
two filmmakers, as much as to the audiences and the social critics.
   While the above is true, it is also true that the two directors sought to ingrain
their revolutionary optimism in a radically alternative way. One minor stroke that
has often eluded critics and audiences is the very cinematic position of Godard
and Gorin in Tout va bien with regard to the revolutionary impossibility of
proletarian struggles in post-68 capitalist system. Although many commentators
have consensually applauded the ‘distanciated’, ‘minimalist’, and ‘non-didactic’
approach to the representations of revolutionary insurrections in this final
DVG work, I argue that the two filmmakers sought to radically showcase their
unrepentant leftist conviction and sympathy in this mesmerizing long take. Upon
closer inspection, one can see that Godard and Gorin did not simply retain a
contemplative, distant, or non-engaging perspective throughout this protracted
sequence. Instead, there is actually a nuanced adjustment in the speed of their
camera movement pertaining to its own oscillation in the same tracking shot:
the movement of the camera here subtly accelerates when showcasing the
spontaneous mini-riot led by the radical youth in the shop throughout the entire
sequence. Godard and Gorin’s camera work remains minimally ‘intrusive’ in the
scene, effectively echoing the imposing political gestures of the post-68 young
leftists in the supermarket. This tiny visual trace inherent in the camera tracking
thus profoundly helps render the ideological position of the two directors
formally intelligible and comprehensible to the audience in the post-68 context.
In essence, Godard and Gorin radically integrated their political manifestations
in the tracking shot, as well as engaged their critical views within the new social
contradictions that the film sought to ‘objectively’ present in the first place.
   This irreducible failure to conceal its own epistemological limit or intrusiveness
could, far from simply undermining Godard-Gorin’s critical dissemination of
post-1968 French society as a whole, have radically helped them manifest, or
more precisely reassert, their unchanging Marxist-Leninist position a few years

                                                                                   37
                                 Man-tat Terence Leung


after May 1968 — a somewhat utopian vision that began to wane in the French
leftist intelligentsia following the early 1970s. Undoubtedly, the two filmmakers
started to critically reflect on their previous Maoist engagement in the post-
68 years, yet this does not necessarily mean that their revolutionary yearning
was entirely withdrawn from the predominant leftist scene in the global 1960s.
But on the other hand, this very subtle way of political manifestation in Tout
va bien also resists casually lapsing into a convenient leftist dogma and binary
political side-taking insofar as the film was primarily made by Godard and Gorin
to help critically reflect on the various epistemological questions and ethical
predicaments of post-68 French Maoism at large. Compared with the rather
didactic implications of Vent d’est, the two filmmakers might have even taken
the Maoist teachings more literally, faithfully and creatively, since they succeeded
in re-domesticating and applying existing Marxist theories in a radically novel
social situation in Tout va bien, or in a brand-new epoch when the leftist and
rightist ideologies became increasingly converged and intermingled under the
same rubric of neoliberal capitalism itself.


What Has Been Left of Proletarian Struggles?

   Interestingly, upon closer re-examination of Godard-Gorin’s first DVG film
Vent d’est, the aforementioned second female voice-over, which idiosyncratically
favoured ‘revolutionary terror’ over ‘bourgeois-humanitarianism’ as the major
resistance strategy against oppressive regimes, reminds the audience that the
‘correct idea’ of Marxism-Leninism was never designated as a simple summary
or conclusion — ‘it is right to rebel’ — but instead, the proper analysis is
‘Marxism which is composed of multiple principles, in the final analysis, can be
summarized into “it is right to rebel”.’ If this is the case, then what is the main
difference between these two sentences?
   In his early work written during the height of the Red Years, Alain Badiou,
who still proclaims himself a Maoist in today’s neoliberal era, distinguished
among the three deeply entangled rationales inherent in the Maoist idea of ‘it
is right to rebel against the reactionaries’38 fervently elevated during the heyday
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and May ’68. First, Badiou argued that the
primary rebellion (being the reason) of the proletarian people was always justified
in itself, insofar as revolt as such is precisely the very reason of its own existence,
which does not wait for the symbolic mandate to justify its sheer legitimacy. That
is to say, social revolt always spontaneously happens and does not simply need a
legitimate or extrinsic reason to allow its happening. However, this kind rebellion
was highly arbitrary and could not be self-sustained because of the radical lack
of an antagonistic force, a symbolic mandate that paradoxically offered the

38
  See Alain Badiou, ‘An Essential Philosophical Thesis: “It Is Right to Rebel against the
Reactionaries”’, positions: asia critique, 13.3 (Winter 2005), 669–677.

38
                                 Struggles on Two Indivisible Fronts


‘reason’ for the refusal of that reason altogether. Therefore, Badiou argued that a
rebellion that could be symbolically mapped onto the epistemological paradigm
of existing Marxist theories to allow the proletarian revolt to take shape was
also simultaneously needed. Therefore, this radically alternative form of the same
rebellion (having the reason) would have its own justification right after the very
initiation of actual revolutionary struggles.
   Rebellion at this level is similar to a subjective wager, a revolutionary
assumption of the devoted social activists in response to the ideological
interpellation of Marxist discourses. Yet this kind of proletarian revolt is not
totally unproblematic, as it may help rationalize and justify the initiation of
rebellion against authority as a kind of moral duty and fixed obligation among
the oppressed, thus ultimately contradicting its own primordial existence that
radically resists against social stability in the first place. Interestingly, it is precisely
through this inherent contradiction between the primary and secondary levels of
proletarian struggles, which emerges in the final analysis, that may eventually
reveal the true literal meaning of the Maoist notion ‘it is always right to rebel’
par excellence. Having said that, this excessive dialectical link, or the inherent
impossibility of proletarian revolt as such that emerges in the final analysis, helps
retroactively cement the primary and secondary forms of revolutionary struggles
in an organic fashion without losing their initial antagonistic intensities. At this
very level, according to Badiou, ‘the statement itself “it is right to rebel against
the reactionaries” is both the development of kernels of knowledge internal to
the rebellion itself and the return into rebellion of this development.’39 Badiou
continued by saying,

      [r]ebellion — which is right, which has reason — finds in Marxism the means of
      developing this reason, of assuring its victorious reason. That which allows the
      legitimacy of rebellion (the first sense of the word “reason”) to become articulated
      with its victory (the second sense of the word “reason”) is a new type of fusion between
      rebellion as a practice that is always there and the developed form of its reason.40

   In retrospect, the two Maoist films Tout va bien and Vent d’est directed by
Godard and Gorin are not mutually exclusive pieces with regard to their profound
leftist orientation and radical aesthetic sensibility. Instead of simply gesturing to
a wholesale departure from their first counter-cinematic work during the DVG
period, Godard-Gorin’s Tout va bien continued to advance and (re-)assert a
radically emancipatory vision that not only resisted classical narrative cinema
but also helped problematize the reigning discursive construct of contemporary
neoliberalism, which often ontologized various political ‘failures’ and tragic
impasses of the global 1960s as something inevitable and insurmountable.
Although many critical insights of Tout va bien on the structural ambivalence


39
     Badiou, ‘An Essential Philosophical Thesis’, p. 675.
40
     Ibidem.

                                                                                           39
                              Man-tat Terence Leung


between leftism and rightism pertaining to modern capitalist system emerged
at the watershed moment when the major currents of French Maoism gradually
dissipated from the Left Bank, this very ‘belatedness’ of Godard’s cinematic
self-criticism may retroactively compel his followers to dialectically revisit and
reconstruct the highly nuanced and intimate nexus between revolutionary art
and Marxist politics so as to keep struggling against the predominant consumerist
narratives and depoliticizing ethos of our global neoliberalism nowadays,
whereby their nebulous traces have already been vaguely recorded and observed
in the capitalist West since the aftermath of May 1968.




40
