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La Chinoise
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Real Theatre
La Chinoise, ou
plutôt à la Chinoise (to give its rarely cited complete title) was
shot on locations in Paris during March 1967. In the documentary Two American Audiences (1968, produced
by D.A. Pennebaker and directed by Mark Woodcock) – filmed April 4 1968, the day Martin
Luther King was killed, although no one present yet knew it – Jean-Luc Godard
tells a group of students from New York University and the Institute of Film
and Television that “it took one month to shoot, and three months to edit”.
The
film was inspired by people and events that Godard observed among students at the
University of Nanterre – where he would drive his partner of the time, Anne
Wiazemsky, to her classes. The phenomenon of the “Maoist cell” (named
Aden-Arabie in the film, after Paul Nizan’s 1931 novel) existed in several Western
countries in this period. In Australia, for example, the Maoist-inspired
student groups at Monash University (which produced a notorious pamphlet to
incite teenagers called The Little Red
School Book, in homage to Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s The Little Red Book) directly involved and influenced many key cinephiles
in the period 1966-1968. As has always been his way, Godard drew from everything
going on around him: an important citation in La Chinoise is to les Cahiers
marxistes-léninistes – a journal to which Jean-Pierre Gorin and Alain
Badiou contributed in the period that Godard consulted it.
La Chinoise marked
a decisive step in Godard’s adoption of the Brechtian theatrical practice of
using character-types, and the closely associated performance device of the gestus (combining the senses of gesture
and gist). Yet, as we see in the synopsis of the narrative written by Godard
for its press book, these character-figures are not simply derisive ciphers to
be satirised (as if the film were merely “a comedy on the relationship between
fashion and ideology”, as Iannis Katsahanias would cheekily propose thirteen
years later in the Cahiers du cinéma special Godard issue Trente ans depuis).
Godard
set out his plan for the film in this press book: these characters are the
“‘Robinsons’ of Marxist-Leninism” (as in Robinson Crusoe), and each one has
their own specific, personal trajectory in trying to make the teachings of Mao
relevant to their lives – such as Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), whose path
(theatrical training, apprenticeship and travel) is taken from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s
1917 novel Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship. In Two American Audiences,
Godard is confronted with the objection that all the characters are merely
“bourgeois”, pretending to be “fashionably” or trendily militant, and he
disagrees: as he patiently explains, there is a peasant, an actor, a painter, only
the Wiazemsky character is clearly marked as significantly bourgeois. In the
press book, Godard likens the spread of the characters to the “five particular
levels of society” traced in Maxim Gorki’s play The Lower Depths (1902).
Godard
usually directs his films not from a conventional script but from a notebook or
workbook containing sketches, key words, diagrams, and so on. Not all of these working
documents exist today, but 14 pages of the cahier for La Chinoise appeared in the art
magazine Opus International (no. 2) in
July 1967. As Godard absorbed each of his notes in the process of realising a
scene, he would cross it out – thus resulting in the heavily erased pages left
behind. As the writer and critic Alain Jouffroy (1928-2015) pointed out in the introduction
to this document in Opus International,
the cahier excludes “technical
specifications” (of camera movement or framing), and instead lists “indications
of concepts and dialogue elements”, thus privileging “words and ideas” in the
construction of La Chinoise (Jouffroy
cites Leonardo da Vinci’s concept of the cosa
mentale or “mental model”).
There
were several intriguing people involved in the production of La Chinoise, beyond the well-known
Godardian figures of Wiazemsky (who quit acting in the 1980s to become a novelist,
and died in 2017 not longer after the filming of her 1960s memoirs as Michel Hazanavicius’ Le Redoubtable), Léaud (today a cinematic
icon and a Nouvelle Vague emblem for directors around the world), and Juliet
Berto (who died from cancer in 1990, after directing three films).
The
philosopher and political activist Francis Jeanson (born 1922), among
Wiazemsky’s teachers at Nanterre, appeared frequently in Godard’s social circle
in 1967. He played a part in both the French Resistance during the World War II,
and anti-colonial struggles during the Algerian War. The second volley of
Wiazemsky’s memoir, A Studious Year (2012), vividly records both Godard’s attraction to Jeanson as a public,
engaged intellectual in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the subsequent
distancing from him due to unbridled (and unfounded) jealousy on the
filmmaker’s part. Although disconnected on the personal plane thereafter,
Godard and Jeanson, in the decades to follow, would often be drawn to similar
causes and situations, whether the radical psychiatry movement (which Jeanson
called a “psychiatry of the subject”) or the Bosnian crisis in Sarajevo. Even
the title of Jeanson’s 2001 book, Notre
guerre (“our war”) seems echoed in Godard’s subsequent film title Notre musique, partly shot in Sarajevo.
Jeanson died in 2009 at the age of 87. In Two
American Audiences, Godard reveals that, during La Chinoise’s train dialogue scene featuring Jeanson, he fed
Wiazemsky her lines through a microphone placed in her ear – because “I am a
better Maoist than her”.
Lex
de Bruijn was a painter who, from the mid ‘60s, worked in the same milieu as
Philippe Garrel’s friend and collaborator Frédéric Pardo. Although little
documented today, examples of his art can be found in Robert Masters’ anthology Psychedelic Art, published in 1968 by
a future Godard producer during the Dziga Vertov Group years: Grove Press.
Michel
Séméniako, who acted in only this one film, began taking photographs in 1967,
after his studies in sociology, and is today a renowned photographic artist, as
well as a teacher at Amiens, noted for “a body of work perfectly balancing the
artist’s past, his culture, his militancy, his surroundings, his artistic
photographic style, and current world events”. He is best known for his “negotiated photographs” in
which (according to the statement on his website, http://www.michel-semeniako.com/),
“the photographed subject actively participates in the creation of the image,
based on a proposition from the artist – thus becoming co-author of the
produced images”.
A fascinating
figure of great significance in La
Chinoise is the black militant Omar Blondin Diop (also referred to,
variously, as Omar Diop, Omar Diop Blondin or Omar Diop-Blondin). In the
original (rather threadbare) French edition of Godard’s 1978 lecture series Introduction to a True History of Cinema and
Television, he mentions Omar Kiop [sic], and describes him as (to cite now
the improved and expanded English-language edition) “another character who is
real”, a student at Nanterre whom he met through Wiazemsky, and who “died in
[Léopold Sédar] Senghor’s prison in Senegal” at the age of 34.
Diop’s imprisonment
in Gorée and
likely murder in May 1973 at the hands of the authorities (despite the
appearance of a suicide by hanging) is still mourned today by his family and
friends, as well as left-wing intellectuals and artists in Senegal. According
to material available on www.Seneweb.com,
Jacques Foccart (the
French President’s chief advisor on African policy, who died in 1997) gave the
command to Senghor – once a great poet and literary figure – to “repatriate
this troublesome Senegalese student who had militated alongside [Daniel] Cohn-Bendit
in May ’68. People from that time believe that Senghor ordered his
assassination”.
Omar Blondin Diop’s
encounter with the cinema was brief but prodigious; apart from La Chinoise, where he delivers an
eloquent lecture, he travelled to London to appear in Godard’s One Plus One (1968) alongside Frankie Y (Frankie Dymon) and other
Black Panthers,
and also in Simon Hartog’s experimental film Soul in a White Room (UK, 1968, 16mm, 3 mins). Omar Blondin Diop’s
brief but powerful life story also inspired a track (his name provides the
title) by Gilles Deleuze’s disciple Richard Pinhas on his 1975 album, Heldon II: Allez Teia. A sample of
Diop’s brilliant writing (at age 30) on cinema, an account of the radical
significance of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea
Girls (1966), can be found reprinted here. In 2021, a feature
film was devoted to Diop’s life, work and legacy: Vincent Meessen’s Juste une movement.
To follow
the musical thread further: the pop song “Mao Mao”, played in fragments and in
one extended burst of several verses in La
Chinoise, has a colourful history. The singer and composer, Claude Channes
(real name Jean-Claude Champon, also known as Jean-Claude Lannes in the 1980s),
had been a figure in French rock’n’roll music (inspired by Elvis Presley, Bill
Haley, The Shadows, etc.) since 1960. He had been a member of les Champions
(1960-1962), les Fantômes (1963-1964) and les Vampires (1965). In 1966, he
began his solo career.
Hearing that
Godard was looking for music for La
Chinoise, Channes waited for him in the street for two days until the
director agreed to listen to the tape of his latest tracks, containing topical,
political themes (other titles of songs he recorded between 1966 and 1968
include “Il est grand temps de faire … boom” by Alain Bashung, “La haine”, “Le
fric”, “Hippie hippie” and “L'amour pas la guerre”). Godard chose “Mao Mao”,
which contained lyrics written quickly and in a somewhat frivolous, satirical
vein by Gérard Guegan (who was involved in the radical publishing house Champ
Libre). At the 1967 Avignon Festival screening of the film, Godard presented
Channes to the audience. Later, it would seem that Nino Ferrer’s song “Mao et
Moa” (“Perhaps it’s true that love’s pleasure can only last a very short
Maoment”) was
conceived as a comic reply to (the already rather comic) “Mao Mao”. And a 2021
postscript: it is strange to see and hear in the pompous tele-series Can’t Get You Out of My Head – which
decries the misinterpretation of certain cultural gestures when wrenched from
their initial context – the way in which Adam Curtis recycles “Mao Mao” as a
straight piece of ‘60s ideological propaganda without the slightest nod to
Godard, let alone Guegan.
An even stranger irony involves the central Latin
Quarter apartment in which virtually all of La
Chinoise was shot. On the website of Georg Thomann,
the appointed leader of the Austrian anarchist art collective monochrom, he
relates how, in 1968, he became involved with Blandine Jeanson (1948-1999),
“one of his friends from Café Flore”, a prominent feminist militant and one of
the founders of Libération newspaper,
who appeared in several Godard films apart from La Chinoise (she is Emily Bronte in Week-end, and has a memorable scene in Two or Three Things I Know About Her). She was also, in the 1960s
and ‘70s, a friend of Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After the filming of La Chinoise, the apartment in question
had become an open commune for young actors – because Godard’s production
company had forgotten to stop making rent payments.
There is an important connection between Thomann and
Godard: in March 1968, according to his detailed biographical CV, Thomann
co-wrote a Situationist-inspired play titled La Fraction de la Structure, in which two actors sit incognito in
the audience for a long time until they climb onto the stage and deliver a long
tirade alternately chastising and praising the people in the audience who have
remained. Converted into a film script, La
Fraction de la Structure was realised by Jean Eustache’s close associate
Jean-Noël Picq and the critic Jean Douchet, as a three-minute episode of the Cinétracts (1968) project initiated by Godard and Chris Marker.
An odd footnote, twenty years later: according to the
documentation on Thomann’s website, Blandine Jeanson wrote a letter to him in
1989 to inform him for the first time that they had a son, Clément-Edouard Jeanson,
who was now the deputy chairman of France’s ultra-right-wing National Front. And
an even odder footnote: at the moment of his death in 2005, Thomann was
declared to be an entirely fictitious personage, created by the monochrom group
for the sake of acts of conceptual art subversion! This and the preceding two
paragraphs should be re-read in this light. (Jeanson’s real son, David July, is
not a right-wing politician.)
Philippe Garrel’s television reportage on Godard’s
influence on younger filmmakers (Godard
et ses émules, 1967) brings us to the critical reaction of Romain Goupil to La Chinoise (“He turns militants into
neurotic cases!”) – a reaction typical of many accusations hurled at the film
from the left in 1967. Let us recall that, in 1967, Goupil was only 16 years
old! A year later, in the midst of the events of May 1968, Goupil was
interviewed by Marguerite Duras for a television program called Les lycéens ont la parole, thus becoming
indelibly known as a “sort of Leftist double of Antoine Doinel”. In 1968 he
also began making films, and for his short Ibizarre,
made for television in 1969 (a clip appears in Goupil’s autobiographical Mourir à 30 ans [1982]), he asked Godard
to be his Godfather. Years later, Goupil would be Godard’s close assistant on Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and Allemagne année 90 neuf zero (1991), commenting on this enriching experience: “It’s the kind of thing people
look for their entire lives”.
We know from the Histoire(s) du
cinéma (1988-1998) the importance that Godard places on the
prescient or prophetic role of film. He, like many commentators, has often
cited La Chinoise as a film that
played a prophetic role in relation to the events of May 1968. In America, in
fact, the film played an even more direct part in inciting radical, political
action. La Chinoise was distributed
in America by Pennebaker’s company (reluctantly so, as part of the agreement to
produce the unfinished 1 A.M./One
American Movie), and toured around campuses in April 1968. According to the
personal testimony of critic David Ehrenstein, author of Film – The Front Line 1984: “It inspired the student revolt at Columbia University.
When it opened at the Kips Bay theater [around the corner from the University],
a great many students who became leaders of the uprising attended and discussed
it with their fellow students. Le fond de
l'air est Godard!”
There
are many major works in his filmography that Godard himself speaks little about
in retrospect, and of whose production he appears to have retained almost zero
memory. La Chinoise, however, has had
a lasting significance for him, and he has publicly cited it many times. In a
debate on “The Economics of Film Criticism” with American critic Pauline Kael
in May 1981, Godard remarked: “It’s a rather good picture, in the sense you say
‘he’s a good man’ or he’s a ‘good human being’.” In his 1978 lecture series Introduction to a True History of Cinema and
Television, Godard commented on the fact that French commentators of 1967
found the characters “ridiculous”: “Today, the film’s true reality is that –
fine, these people were ridiculous … children from good families playing at
being Marxist-Leninist … The film is a true documentary”. And he amplified the
theme in his dialogue with Kael: “It’s because they are childish that they are
important people”.
More
recently, Godard returned to La Chinoise in comparison with his later Notre
musique (2004). To Michael Witt’s question in Sight and Sound magazine (June 2005) about the radical, suicidal
gesture of the character of Olga (Nade Dieu) in that film, Godard responded:
“I’d already sketched this problem of suicide via the Kirilov character in La Chinoise. Here I reuse the same text
from Dostoevsky for Olga in her conversation in the café (…) She wants to
commit suicide because she finds it an interesting philosophical problem”.
Thus, La Chinoise sketches problems and
raises issues, of both an aesthetic and political kind, that Godard has
ceaselessly returned to and reworked since 1967. One especially prophetic aspect
of the film deserves particular attention. Already, in Masculin féminin, Dominique Païni (in the video discussion with
Freddy Buache on the Criterion DVD of this film) notes how Godard forecast the
age of “reality television” which began in the late 1990s: everyone turns
themselves into an image for consumer society, everyone wants to be a film
star, a pop star, everyone wants to be on TV, to become an idol (one of the
most popular reality shows is American
Idol, which has given rise to many derivatives around the globe).
La Chinoise, in
fact, provides the perfect template for the reality television of today: like Loft Story or Big Brother, it places a group of eager young people into an
enclosed, claustrophobic environment, spied on by the ghost of an external
authority (in this case, Mao), living out their regimented, everyday lives
together, making alliances, having arguments, expelling disobedient members who
disturb the collective harmony. Even the apparently candid interviews that
Godard conducts from off-screen, cinéma-vérité style, with each member of the cell, anticipates the “confessional room” (where
contestants speak privately to the camera) used in Big Brother.
Just
as an incident involving young French activists trying to disrupt the filming
of Loft Story by dropping inciting
pamphlets could have been inspired by an incident in another eerily (and
hilariously) prophetic film, William Klein’s The Model Couple (1977), the Australian edition of Big Brother has an even closer
connection with perhaps the most famous scene of Godard’s La Chinoise.
Léaud
as Guillaume demonstrates the art of “real theatre” (à la Brecht, Shakespeare and Althusser) in the story of a
protesting Chinese student in Moscow who, before the cameras of news reporters,
unwrapped bandages from his head to reveal that he had no injuries. In 2004,
when contestant Merlin Luck was evicted from the Australian Big Brother house, he appeared on live
television with a black gag he had placed over his mouth (thus blocking the
show’s host from speaking to him about the usual banal intrigues), and held up
a bold, political slogan painted on a sign: “Free the Refugees” – a reference
to the conservative Government’s appalling policy of mandatory detention of
asylum seekers from other countries who had fled to the shores of Australia,
appealing for compassion and help.
In
this sublime TV moment, the young “Australian idol” unconsciously relayed the
performance art of the Chinese student and of Guillaume/Léaud, once again for
the cameras of the media (now also including the Internet), creating a new
species of Godardian “real theatre”.
© Adrian Martin 2005 / February 2018 / February 2021 |
