Le Livre d’image [2018)

And so I’m back.

Sort of.

Maybe.

With Godard.

Can we go from back to front?

After having gone halfway from front to back?

More importantly: WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST WATCH?!?

I’m guessing JLG might relish such a reaction.

But really.

Le Livre d’image (The Image Book) is a thoroughly fucked-up film.

Music stops and starts.

Ok, standard Godard.

Images run and then go to black screen.

Again, standard Godard.

But something is further about this film.

Perhaps the most accessible touchstone would be the glitchy music of Radiohead circa Kid A and Hail to the Thief (to name my two favorites).

To wit: Godard seems to be enjoying fucking with his audience.

Every possible convention of cinema is destroyed and frustrated by his anti-art approach.

It is Swiss. It is dadaist (in a certain sense).

But it is stranger…

Which brings us to a crossroads.

Is Godard getting senile?

I mean, seriously: is this the work of someone falling apart?

It may be.

There is an achingly-sad moment near the end when we hear that trademarked Godard narrative voice break up.

Coughing.

Too many cigars.

Almost 90 years old…

But there are other possibilities.

Indeed, The Image Book hearkens back to the Godard of his Dziga-Vertov years.

Extremely obtuse.

Painful cinema.

A cinema of cruelty (for Artaud).

We catch glimpses (literally) of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Yes.

There is a pessimism here.

But mostly a hard reality.

And yet, is it reality?

The Image Book is surreal…while being mostly in a stark cinematography.

A bit like Picasso’s Guernica.

But more boring.

Can I say that?

Boring.

When you’re 88 years old (like Godard), perhaps things move slower.

Perhaps you could call it “slow cinema”.

But it is FAST and boring.

Many cuts.

Many, many cuts.

Painstakingly (painstakingly?) spliced.

It seems.

Also seems random.

Aleatory.

I Ching.

John Cage.

But onto another aspect.

That of revision.

Revisiting.

The Image Book is to Godard’s oeuvre as Histoire(s) du cinéma is to film history as a whole.

Le Livre d’image could be said to be a sort of CliffsNotes to the work of Jean-Luc Godard.

But there’s just one catch.

You would need to know the oeuvre in its totality to really make much of this pithy summation.

So it is, in a sense, useless.

But it still speaks.

Galileo.

And yet it moves.

Godard is not dead.

Not yet.

And he should know that he will never die.

Not with the timeless body of work he has contributed to humanity.

And yet, that tobacco cough says otherwise.

To live in those lungs.

To feel the weight of mortality pressing down.

Le Livre d’image is a frustrating piece of work.

It has very little (almost none) of the lyrical poeticism that its predecessor Adieu au langage had.

Indeed, perhaps this is a purposeful “let down”.

Like Neil Young’s On The Beach or Lou Reed’s Berlin.

To extend the metaphor there, it is mostly like Metal Machine Music.

It is jarring.

Annoying.

It gets under your skin.

But it makes you think.

And perhaps that is the whole point.

Perhaps Godard is reaching for a new filmic language.

He may not be there yet, but he is reaching.

This is essential, cranky cinema.

The bleeding edge…

-PD

Le Vent d’est [1970)

Film by Godard.

Dziga Vertov.

Group in Mozambique.

Marxist Western.

Cowboys and Indians.

Das Kapital.

No no.

I must be wrong.

Not Mozambique.

That was much later.

I was confused.

So this is just Italy.

But still.

Quite possibly the only Marxist Western ever made 🙂

And, yes: the Dziga Vertov Group.

With Jean-Pierre Gorin.

So here was the great filmmaker (Godard) subsuming himself in the communalism of group creation.

Like being in a rock band.

There might be a main songwriter (or two).

And there might be a lead vocalist.

But it is a group effort.

Rock bands are kinda like little democracies (in my experience).

So, does that mean that communism/socialism starts at its most cellular level as something resembling democracy?

It is an interesting thought.

Because Godard was most certainly a hardcore socialist at this point.

A communist.

A Maoist!

But we remember those strange counterintuitive phrases like “dictatorship of the people”.

In other words, Marxist-Leninist thought was promising popular representation SO POWERFUL that the PEOPLE became a META-DICTATOR.

But it all kinda turned out like Tom Cruise’s witchcraft 🙂

A big bollocks burger in Eastern Europe.

And a Soviet Union that collapsed beneath its own weight.

But China soldiered on.

And juche (North Korea).

Notice that “zhoosh or tjuz” means to “smarten up” or “stylize” in that Cockney code language known as Polari.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

And for my dear pizzagate researchers, you should be heartened by this further corroboration of James Alefantis’ sick mind:

Screen Shot 2017-10-14 at 11.20.10 PM

Why do I have a feeling about this?

Because of Bowie’s last album: Blackstar.

Screen Shot 2017-10-14 at 11.24.26 PM

But reinserting ourselves in history, it is rather obvious that communism soldiered on mostly in the East.

Let’s not forget Vietnam and Laos (both still communist to this day).

Thus, Wind from the East.

Yes, Peter Wollen, there’s definitely some Brecht in here.

Especially in that scene when a fucking horse finally shows up 🙂

Not much of a Western without a horse.

So there is eventually one horse for Gian Maria Volontè.

Volentè, of course, really WAS in Westerns (about five years previous).

A couple of those great Sergio Leone “spaghetti Westerners” with Clint Eastwood: A Fistful of Dollars and also For a Few Dollars More.

So kudus to Godard, Gorin, and the whole Dziga Vertov Group for getting Volontè.

But really the star is the beautiful redhead Anne Wiazemsky, who passed away just nine days ago.

It is no wonder Godard fell in love with her.

As he had fallen for Anna Karina previously.

But Wiazemsky was a mind.

A beauty, but a total 180 from Karina.

Of course, neither marriage worked out.

But Wiazemsky is lovely in this film.

Indeed, she is one of the few breaths of air in the whole picture.

There are certainly some suffocating scenes.

The opening shot is interminable.

Slight movements.

But eventually things get rolling.

Sorta.

Wiazemsky is splashed with blood as she is repeatedly choked by Volontè.

A bizarre scene.

Also part of this amalgam was Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

I thought I was seeing Mozambique.

It colored everything I was watching.

I was looking out for poisonous snakes.

Godard would eventually make it to Mozambique…later in the 1970s…but I was merely confused.

I mean, here’s a film that until recently was available only as a Japanese DVD (with no English subtitles).

That is the version I watched.

I hear there is another release of this film recently with other of the Dziga Vertov work, but I am happy enough (for the time being) to have seen it as a Frenchman might have in 1970.

My French was tested.

Allors…

This is a rather experimental film.

Perhaps it is no great masterpiece.

But it teaches that we can go backwards or forwards through time by way of cinema.

Forwards with imagination, and backwards in reality.

We were already beyond this point, and yet we have been blessed to return.

To get one step closer.

To close a loop.

Solve a riddle.

Replace a missing stone.

It was a lot of work seeing this film.

That is love.

-PD

Letter to Jane [1972)

Fucking goddamned brilliant.

It is not surprise. An exclamation without an exclamation point.

It is a reaffirmation.

That Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, in 1972, could dismantle the entire system imposing ill upon the world.

If their critique was not inclusive enough to include the shortcomings of communism, we must forgive them somewhat.

It really doesn’t matter that this film operates in a Chris Marker manner.

It was the right form to address a picture. In fact, the spirit is much more akin to Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

The ontology of the image.

André Bazin.

This is the world from which Godard and Gorin emerge.

But the key touchstone may indeed be, as the filmmakers say, Uncle Bertolt.

Brecht.

Truth simple. Telling the truth difficult.

Dziga Vertov.

Lenin.

It is a revelation to hear Godard speaking English.

Yes, there are no subtitles here (unless, perhaps, you are French and don’t understand English).

That makes this an especially important film for the English-speaking world. Like British Sounds.

But most importantly this film encourages intellectual scrutiny of mass media.

Scrutiny of photographs. Scrutiny of captions. Scrutiny of context.

I think, therefore I am.

This is the acting default which we are told emerged (with sound) in the 1930s of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Beware of pity (advises Stefan Zweig).

A town without pity. Gene Pitney. Pithy.

No filmmaker has been more bold, in every way, than Jean-Luc Godard.

But his collaborators deserve their due for standing by him.

Gorin. Anne-Marie Miéville.

So many ways to be bold…

To show the futility of 3-D. Actually, to show how mundane superheroes are.

Just one aspect in the latest installment of brilliance (Adieu au langage).

His latest, Letter to Jane, Histoire(s) du cinema…

They all smash to bits flailing failures like San Andreas.

It’s as if the master is saying, “Just think for a minute.”

But the master, JLG, dove into thought and grabbed handfuls of paradoxes.

That is the true artist.

That is the eternal man.

It makes me a bit emotional.

What dedication!

From Roxy the dog all the way back to Michel Poiccard.

It is hard to focus on just one episode in this immense body of work.

That said, the true message of Godard is elusive because his fame (and infamy) overshadow the meaning conveyed.

But his work says…carry on.

-PD

10 Comments

Tout va bien [1972)

This might be the most important film ever made.

You can’t start like that.

This whole “internal monolog” gets boring…

Illiterate Joyce fanatic.

After fucking around for four years, Godard and Gorin (like Marx and Engels) finally got the funding needed to deal a deathblow to bourgeois capitalism. Bourgeois? Monopoly. Monopoly?

I feel film review coming on…itching like a well-known wool blanket.

Jane Fonda is devastatingly good in this.

Yves Montand nails it.

Godard and Gorin fling a manifesto at the world. Hollywood has failed miserably in mustering a riposte.

Over 40 years ago.

Who speaks for Hollywood?

And who speaks for not Hollywood?

A state of mind more than a place.

New forms for new content.

Not Hollywood.

You know Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis.

We get a hilarious choking performance from Vittorio Caprioli.

It’s not a thing to hide…the fact that one is marked for death.

But hidden it is.

A loudmouthed agitator who learned to unlearn. Through books.

A conundrum. No, there is no stopping being an intellectual.

If you don’t know the Dziga-Vertov Group’s work, you won’t realize that Tout va bien is actually reflective.

It is a perfect gentle art bomb.

No box office data.

Not what we meant anyway.

Must be a pain in the ass to parse these “reviews” on behalf of the control freaks.

A good psychologist would tell you to buy a mirror. Buy some time. Reflect.

But there are no good psychs…seems.

No, surely there are.

A lot (two words) of professions seem glutted with criminals.

And the psychs are there to define criminality.

Judges by the benison of nepotism.

By which we mean judges. [new subject]

By this time they broke the fourth wall so efficiently and effortlessly. With Jane Fonda.

The wrong woman.

Diegesis or die a Jesus?

Opacity of performance?

I think what they mean is, by being weird it causes the audience to ask, “Why are they being weird?”

Who cares.

Too beautiful to end there.

The most important. Perhaps.

Can’t this motherfucker complete a goddamned sentence?

New forms for new content. (2)

Seriously, the boss has to piss!

And is that the cock from Persona?

Cock. I never would’ve said it that way.

Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.

She told me.

Double-spacing was an antiquated technique. Something about a journalism degree. I tried.

Obviously, people are watching.

Route me out of the main stream. Rout.

I know my true brothers and sisters, but they remain invisible.

Little signals over the ether and we take the helm.

Rub your jade.

Yes. Look look look.

Doesn’t matter. They want you to know that clearly.

The movies where the hero is a shitbag who finally does the right thing at the end…and utters one last dying quotable.

Karate for life. For instance.

Capitalize the first noun, and then shut the fuck up. It’s just a title.

What’s in a goddamned name?

Shaky sphere at the globe. On the shore. Of a ditch.

The borr(o)wed. Borr()wed.

Barred.

If there’s a right way to write about film, this ain’t it.

Unremitting self-referential showmanship.

Serves to defuse…de fuse.

Someday. Someday. A couple of holy grails will roll down the hill.

Goddamn.

-PD

6 Comments

Pravda [1969)

There are few things more difficult. More difficult. Than divining the truth as it is happening.

Happening? The truth happens. Or is.

We don’t know. Prague Spring. PRAHA.

Did you know that Ceaușescu condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia? Really.

Fascinating. We hear that name and we think bad guy. Maybe. We do.

Youthful errors. I can only affirm the brilliance of this film in absence of French comprehension.

In absence of Italian comprehension.

In absence of Czech comprehension.

In absence of Marxist comprehension.

You will notice the monolithic structures as a Western capitalist on the outside looking in.

On the inside perhaps some saw provisions for all.

Heat in winter. Food on the table. Poverty squelched or shared.

Socialism.

It explains why this film is barely in print. You must remember how radical the Dziga-Vertov Group was.

You either find it brave or you find it disgusting…like the Aden Arabie cell from La Chinoise. Juliet Berto chanting

Revisionist!

…as if brainwashed.

Skoda. Now owned by Volkswagen. How ironic?

Skoda. Founded by two Vaclavs.

There is a 20-year gap in Skoda’s history on Wikipedia. Škoda Auto. My guess is we can thank Volkswagen for “cleaning up” the history a bit. They cleaned a little too well. Now there’s a hole. And it’s noticeable.

Two shirtless fat men. Two Vaclavs? I have no idea. But these gents make it all worthwhile…shoveling dirt in front of a post office. One of the two so impressively hirsute (back and front) as to have a pseudo-shirt.

Socialism was a belief in something. The U.S. lost the Vietnam war. Little debating that. And now Vietnam is socialist (at least in name). Did the globe stop spinning? Of course not.

These are not brave details. I have been much more bold before.

Yet reason.

She was so beautiful as to make us cry.

We stood no chance.

She never smiled.

Not like the first one..

To understand Marx. To understand European socialism. To understand Russia riddle enigma matryoshka. Through the lens of Dostoyevsky. Karamazov. Religion. Culture. Vast expanses of land…

I may be at the end of the world. It may be necessary for me to take a step back.

Mmmm…to be intoxicated by something so bizarre, so rare, so taboo, and so unknowable…for now.

It is why Alex Jones’ films fail. They are artless. Had he channeled Godard there would have been no stopping his cinema.

But the spectacle is where James Clapper, much to his own chagrin, realizes that “deceit deceives itself” (to quote Debord).

TPTB have never grasped the coded messages in Shostakovich. Stylometry can only undermine a Snowden email. If that.

Like Dylan I have no big answers.

You will be punished for thinking. That.

Thought crime.

Guillotine.

Guileless in Seattle.

We are getting closer to the truth. Dangerously close.

You will know knowledge hack. Coined term. Here. Like 4’33” Cage.

Life hack. Kryptos.

Somebody forgot to take their medicine.

We can joke.

Did Ezra Pound’s punishment befit his crime? His crime? [DHS] [[VHS]]

Kino Pravda.

Should keep several good intelligence analysts busy for a week.

Several petaflops of drivel occupied.

To not be fucked with.

Moloch in Bohemia.

Practically free.

Just keep the angles which predate Orson Welles. Dziga. Vertov.

The Académie française will never accept. Their loss.

Propaganda will always show blood dripping from fangs…even if blood is dripping from fangs.

We could make a deal. He says.

Petaflops.

Liquidated.

Rights reserved, wrongs reversed.

Elision says stylometry.

Experimental literature.

This is not a film review.

Think on your sins.

Gets to feeling like a powerful shit. Ripe for manipulation.

A lot of things can happen to dog shit.

Flash tits change world.

Sure, you know what’s going on…but you don’t REALLY know.

Two-way mirror of social media. Instant fame.

We’ve been trained to utter scumbag.

” ”

Twice. de Chirico.

Yep. Someone else has caught the scent. Freud cerebral. Marx visceral.

The angles converge. Méliès. Rampling, Charlotte. Trampoline.

I need a love to keep me happy. Keith Richards said that.

It is the most fertile field of Godard study.

This key-logging software is really slowing me down.

Doesn’t matter. We take the stairs.

AIPAC, Carole King, Black Maria?!?

Now you know the key. Of a different sort.

-PD

6 Comments

British Sounds/See You at Mao [1969)

Bloody fucking bollocks!

I’ve wanted to say that for a long time. I’ve said it before. But it looks better in writing.

It has a sort of permanence to it. Yet we never know.

Why the non sequitur expletive? Because this film is a brilliant expletive ~~deleted~~.

Long ago…in a galaxy…in OUR galaxy, as a matter of fact,

there were some clever blokes (?) who called themselves the Dziga-Vertov Group.

Chief among them, of course, was Jean-Luc Godard.

But it is telling that he wanted his celebrity subsumed by something greater than himself.

Ach, Gott! Fuck this. I have caught myself slipping into a routine voice.

A routine voice will tell you nothing about this film.

And so we come to the crux of this experiment: struggle.

Film is a struggle between images and sounds.

In a Godard film, even images struggle amongst themselves in a feeding frenzy.

It is a manifestation of a mind trying to process the unfathomable complexity of the world.

In the film under review, it is especially the sounds which cannibalize one another.

But this is not new in Godard films. Always, ALWAYS…there is a plethora of content.

Like a honey ant ready to explode.

[ ] Space left intentionally blank.

Analogous to paragraph.

If you are thinking poetry,

you are not far off.

We miss the mark daily. It is not a Christian confession.

There is not a way to look over the summary to this film on Wikipedia.

In that sense, I am offering a service.

Yet, I am giving you a very subjective, personal impression of this film.

I write film criticism which strives to harmonize with each individual film under consideration.

In other words, each film must be reviewed differently.

There really isn’t, despite a tendency to the contrary towards generalization, such thing as

a film like all the rest.

Yet I have my patois. My schtick.

Take it or leave it.

Only know that the message is under continually scrutiny.

Self-criticism of film criticism in a controlled system seeking to explain it all.

If you are looking for the answer to the question,

“Who’s in control?,”

the answer is,

“No one’s in control.”

I’m sure my friends at the CIA will agree with me on this.

To clarify, I have no friends at the CIA (that I know of).

Speaking sequentially and descriptively with deference to “plot” is useless here.

We have lost the plot. [Thank God!]

And so a guitar can change he world.

And some extremely-advanced students can change some Beatles lyrics (months after The White Album was released).

You must struggle in the mud. Mud and blood. Le sable et le sang. Rimbaud.

I failed miserably.

And she was hoisted into the air on a Panavision boom.

Nude ascending a staircase.

This just in…THREE LEVELLERS SHOT BY CROMWELL IN BURFORD…

ORIOLES DEFEAT WHITE SOX IN BOURGEOIS VACUUM

Ah,…now I am weeping for the revolution…or for the auteur.

But the auteur has given us a lasting oeuvre.

Was Truffaut’s only English-language film Fahrenheit 451?

It matters. Here. …et ailleurs.

I am weeping for the old auteur…before he’s even gone.

And next I will view but not review.

Solely my own experience. To remember where I started. (which is basically where I am at this very second)

I have not moved an inch.

It is essential to see British Sounds. To hear British Sounds.

As an English speaker. In April 2015. You won’t even need the Italian subtitles.

They are telling us we are losers. THEY they.

I have no message. “Too many messages.” –Harry Partch

I am just floating on the waves of free association.

Go on: call me an amateur.

A lover , not a fighter…who didn’t claw his way up to gargle in the rat-race choir.

He lives. Let me check.

He lives.

Regardless.

And we have no way of communicating with our fellow man. The life sucked out of the 21st century.

This is by design.

“Separation is the alpha and the omega of the spectacle.” –Guy Debord

I present the conspiratorial view of history applied to cinema.

Paranoid nonfiction. I have never read Dick.

Quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. The difficulties.

Such a quintessentially British euphemism.

The Troubles. Northern Ireland.

We know nothing. It’s not as easy as shot/reverse/shot.

It’s like the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

KGB calling it a CIA false flag.

Need we remind the perceptive reader of world history that Dr. Ewen Cameron was being paid by the CIA to carry out hideous psychiatric experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute on the grounds of McGill University in Montreal as part of Project MKUltra over a period of time which overlapped with the activities of the FLQ? That is established fact and not a conjecture with which the KGB had any connection.

And so the question becomes, as Godard and co-director Jean-Henri Roger ask, [to paraphrase] “Is Marx the best weapon with which to confront the situation before us?”

Baltimore is haunted by the past (capitalism). China is haunted by the present (vestigial communism). In America there is no present moment (minus the times when reality erupts within the spectacle). In China there is no past. Not really. It is forbidden. Communism requires the primacy of the present moment. History is history. Gone. Capitalism requires the continuation of the past. Inheritance. Both suffer from the status quo. Capitalism is no longer capitalism…and communism is no longer communism. The great irony is that monopoly capitalism and totalitarian socialism are no longer easily distinguishable (if they ever were). Why more people don’t seek out the power elite of this two-sided conspiracy coin is beyond me.

Fear. Fear prevents us. Only the dispossessed have what is called courage. Rage. Courage.

-PD

2 Comments

Un film comme les autres [1968)

I took the road less-traveled.

And then I cheated

But there is no cheating this.

A film adrift in the cosmos.

My grasp of French is not good. Watching this film is not the same as ordering a sandwich at Subway in rural Quebec–and I am not very good at that (to put it mildly).

This film is saturated with revolutionary philosophy, theory, literary allusions.

Fortunately for me there were subtitles available…in Italian.

My grasp of Italian is non-existent. Ok, maybe that’s a bit harsh. I can get the general gist by way of Spanish similarities.

My grasp of Spanish is poor.

Wow. What a quandary!

What am I even doing watching this film?!?

Well…because Jean-Luc Godard is my favorite director.

This film, however, might be rightly considered the official starting point of his years in the collaborative collective known as the Dziga-Vertov Group.

But any way you cut it: this is a difficult film.

What are my own thoughts about it?

It is an exercise in minimalism. It’s like Hitchcock’s Rope minus a plot.

But something has replaced plot. That something is context.

As I watched this it became clear that the May ’68 events in Paris were the essential detail about which a viewer must have knowledge to understand this film (especially if said viewer is fluent in neither French nor Italian).

The other aspect which occupied my mind during the viewing (as my brain was blowing gaskets from hearing French and “reading” Italian simultaneously) was the “strategy of tension” connected to the false-flag terror attacks (Operation Gladio) in Italy in the 1970s and 80s.

Mai ’68.

General strikes. de Gaulle. Latin Quarter. Situationist International. Nanterre. Sorbonne.

Rive Gauche. Molotov cocktails. Agents provocateurs?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Nantes. Nanterre. (WESTXLAYERTWO)

Renault. Billancourt. Paris Commune. 1871.

Sous les pavés, la plage!

“Ne travaillez jamais” –Guy Debord (1953)

Graffito. Graffiti.

Wikipedia leaves out the Debord quote, but the article is generally good.

Title: May 1968 events in France

I should however mention that Godard’s exclusion from the cinema portion at the bottom of the article is eye-popping.

So be forewarned: if you want to know the truth you will have to dig deeper.

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

1q84.

IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

strategia della tensione

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?

Anni di piombo

Fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, false-flag terrorists (sounding familiar?)

If you live in the USA it should. Same goes for UK. And Canada. And France. And Norway. Ad nauseam.

But the initial testing was in Italy. One might also mention Greece and Turkey.

Piazza Fontana. Aldo Moro. Henry Kissinger. Threats.

l’Ulivo. 2000 Italian Parliamentary Commission report. Strategy of tension was supported by United States.

On this subject Wikipedia is not very good. It is misleading. It is covering up for something. Of course, I am speaking about the English version.

My initial “cheating” was looking at a translated copy of the Un Film comme les autres page on Italian Wikipedia. The optimist in me hopes that this strange film “about nothing” (most would probably say) inspired the Italians even more than the French. Present availability of this film might bear this out. The pessimist in me sees some Italian opportunists out to make a buck (knowing that this film is available in no other territory). But the subtitles support the former assertion. If you are an English monoglot, good luck!

George H.W. Bush refused to comment. Of course he did! Operation Gladio.

1990. Seems so long ago that the European Parliament had the balls to condemn NATO and the US for the terrorism of Operation Gladio. Here Wikipedia succeeds.

Title: Operation Gladio

That’s cause the EU doesn’t really care about its people either anymore. Yes, we know…European Coal and Steel Community, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.

CIA director William Colby was quite candid about this whole operation in his memoirs, it seems… No wonder he died in a “boating accident” in 1996.

On the other hand… “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request.” Well that’s very fucking helpful, FOIA. Works like a charm!

I recommend Daniele Ganser’s work as well as that of Gianfranco Sanguinetti.

If you’ve made it this far, then you understand the gist of the film under review. That’s what I tell myself. I’m like one of those students in the weeds…trying to understand it all as the sun hits the hair of the beautiful girl in the yellow socks. There are no faces in the summer colors…just glimpses…glints. Memory is black and white. Recollections of a man with a movie camera.

-PD

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La Chinoise [1967)

Even geniuses make mistakes. That’s how I thought I’d begin. And then…viewing again. It is like “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground. Was Lou Reed, the songwriter, promoting the use of this drug in the song of the same name? Not necessarily. It boils down (no pun intended) to something I learned in economics: positive vs. normative.

And so, we have a film by Jean-Luc Godard which is very difficult to sum up. On the surface it is easy. The Situationists called Godard a Swiss Maoist (a sort of double insult). Even in that, they were only part right. Yes, Godard today lives in Rolle…in the canton of Vaud: Switzerland. But he was born in Paris. He didn’t move to Switzerland until he was four years old. Of course, he would return to Paris for university (and eventually to make a name for himself as critic and director). Actually, it was a back and forth: la France, la Suisse, la France, la Suisse…like a tennis match.

Back to my point: this film does not necessarily “prove” that Godard was a Maoist. But was he? And what would that mean? Let’s investigate.

First, I should mention that I have read four books about Godard, one more which is a book-length interview, an additional collection of his writings, and finally an actual book by Godard which was published by Gallimard. Of the first category, two were biographies (by Richard Brody and Colin MacCabe respectively).

In my opinion, a short review of Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group are needed.

First Gorin. Wikipedia (in English) is typically terse when it comes to Jean-Pierre. For our purposes, it is enough to say that Gorin is nowhere called a Maoist in this short entry.

Next…Dziga Vertov Group. Again, no one is called a Maoist in this similarly curt Wiki reflection. The closest thing is a non-hypertext mention of the film(s) British Sounds/See You at Mao.

This may seem like laziness on my part (and it is), but it is important to note that the “Dziga Vertov” period of Godard’s oeuvre is the most unknown (and, one might say, mysterious). This would be roughly 1968-1972.

And so we are brought to the man at issue himself: Mao.

What ideas are pertinent? Anti-imperialism. The Long March. The People’s Republic of China. The Great Leap Forward. 45 million dead? The Cultural Revolution.

One must wonder whether it is a coincidence that the Dziga Vertov Group disbanded the same year Nixon visited China: 1972. Was this seen as weakness by Maoists?

Let’s recalculate: 40 million dead? 70 million?

Just as in the Holocaust, how much about China’s “dark side” was known outside of the country during Mao’s tenure? For young idealists, the concept of radical revolution might have an appealing luster, but when deaths are counted in millions and tens-of-millions the appeal should (must!) become appalling.

What were the nature of these deaths? Mao bragged about burying alive 46,000 scholars. One thing is certain: there is a persisting battle between those who seek to rehabilitate the tarnished image of Mao and those who perhaps feel that the extent of atrocities for which he was responsible has not yet fully been made evident to the world at large.

Mao is a strange figure…to whom just about every superlative and, equally, insult has been applied. Just as in a criminal investigation, we must scrutinize the sources and their authors with cui bono: what do they stand to gain by promulgating such theories?

Were 3 million tortured to death during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)? If even one was tortured to death, isn’t that too many?

Yes. We do not hold torturers and terrorists to be our heroes. They forfeit our respect at that point…no matter how great their theories are. It is solemnly inexcusable.

No, rather we uphold the nonviolent masters: Gandhi and King. Obama is no King (nor king). The end does not justify the means. We who torture lose our humanity. We are only torturing ourselves.

And so even Nixon himself was a Maoist in a cynical, Machiavellian way. Anything to counter what Reagan would later normatively call “the evil empire.” Yes Mao, it is still the imperialists who are the true axis of evil in this young century. But China is learning how to project its influence. It would be wrong to call the China of today anti-imperialist.

Enough about Mao. That is the freedom we have…at this late moment…to still express such a thought.

Godard’s dalliance with Maoism didn’t last long (in terms of his career as a whole).

Perhaps it was Dostoyevsky. No doubt Paul Nizan. Most importantly it was the ravishing Anne Wiazemsky. Godard was doubtless smitten…you can tell by the camera’s loving gaze. He would have gone to the end of the earth for her. A revolutionary goddess!

Veronique Verkhovensky. Her eyes are wild in their tranquility. She is no paper tiger. Juliet Berto is the brunette…Wiazemsky the redhead. Such a beautiful revolutionary group!

Henri Shatov. He endures the brunt of human stupidity here. No, he cannot entice Juliet to abandon the radical cell as they dive headlong into terrorism.

Kirilov adds a dash of Peter Max color before his inevitable demise.

Will the Maoists in power continue to struggle on two fronts (ISIS and Ukraine) while fronting like sucker MCs? Yeah, oops: Nemtsov and Nisman worked for you…32 was 23 (if 6 was 9).

Francis Verkhovensky. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rope. Should we contact Arthur Lee or Althusser in regards to all those little red books of Aden Arabie? I’m inclined to believe that Love is all you need.

-PD

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