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:
Why do I have a feeling about this?
Because of Bowie’s last album: Blackstar.
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
