Vladimir and Rosa (Dziga Vertov Group, 1971)

Vladimir and Rosa is the most successful of the Dziga Vertov Group films to this point because, among its innovative styling and fresh comic timing, it dares to show the intellectual grappling with his efficacy. Though I've found the DVG films have not been as polemical as many claimed, Godard and co.'s use of Marxist dialectics to this point has chiefly resulted in political films that may be balanced but are still fiery. Vladimir and Rosa is the first to get at what I feel is the greatest concern of great thinkers: am I reaching anyone? It is well and good to be the greatest physicist or philosopher in the world, but what if no one can break through your impenetrable thoughts? Consider books on economics or astrophysics. Which receives more praise: thoroughness or accessibility?

Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, play the titular Vladimir and Rosa, respectively, and they open the film by contemplating the nature of revolution. Godard, playing the spirit of Lenin, looks at pictures of the revolutionary and thinks of the dialectic between theory and practice, of translating abstract thought into concrete action. That is the central issue with any revolt, and Godard and Gorin know it is the crux of revolutionary film as well. Godard's intentions of forming the DVG, to go beyond making political films and making the construction of the films themselves political, make all the group's films inherently self-reflexive, and this video is the culmination of the incremental revelations contained in previous works.

Le Vent d'Est

After the combined weight of British Sounds and Pravda collapsed the last bridge connecting Jean-Luc Godard to his former life, he and the Dziga Vertov Group now had the freedom to build a new structure, one that could take them wherever they pleased. Le vent d'est ("Wind from the East") still contains all the elements that are grating about DGV films, but if the agitprop itself still fails, Godard and the others slowly put together a way to tell their story inventively, even cheekily.


Opening with a held shot of two people lying in a field, the warring narration that defined the last few films returns as a woman and man overlap each other. The woman wins out, speaking of her bourgeois father's work at an aluminum company. She mentions that mounting union pressure led the man to lock himself in his office in fear, leading to panicked conversations between "Daddy and Uncle Sam" in which the man begged for aid from the capitalists. In dad's mind, the poor are used to being poor, so the continued exploitation of miners will not affect them, but for the rich to suffer even the slightest loss of money would be bewildering and far more harmful. I couldn't help but smile at that bit of dialogue as I thought of all those screaming "redistribution of wealth" now, in a time when the rich continue to profit off the recession they created. For all the hullabaloo over May '68, France did not change as drastically as some would have you believe, but the threat of mass union uprising shifting the power back to the worker could easily have put the terror into the wealthy.

That, sadly, is one of the last moments of the film that makes any sense, as Godard, Gorin and the rest waste no time overlapping sound and image until, once again, they create incomprehensible agitprop. Yet where the polemical dialogue fails again, the film's form demonstrates Gorin and Godard getting the hang of their new radical cinema. Godard always believed that the best way to criticize a film was to make another one, and never before has a work of his been more of its own critique. "What does it mean to ask the question 'Where are we now?' for a militant filmmaker?" posits the female narrator, and Godard's attempt to answer that question make for his most interesting filmmaking since Le gai savoir.

We see a film-within-a-film being made, what appears to be a spaghetti Western made in West Germany. As the actors prepare their roles, the narrator delves into the idea of revolutionary film. She castigates Sergei Eisenstein for being influenced by the "imperialist" D.W. Griffith and angrily laments that he went back in time to find an event of social upheaval for Potemkin rather than using an examination of then-current social strife to instruct through his lens. Of course, for Godard to slam anyone for looking to past movies and events is rich, but he acknowledges that and used Le vent d'est to grapple with that nagging sense of cinephilia that beckons to him as he tries to move beyond his previous life.

At last, Godard returns to placing provocative and even beautiful images on the screen. The actors, walking around a large field, put on flowing gowns that make them look as if they got lost on their way to the nearest Bergman film, and the narrator repeats "Death to the bourgeois" as a saintly clad Anne Wiazemsky reads in the meadow as hands bearing a hammer and sickle threateningly close around her head before pulling back again and again. The jumbled title cards bring back the invention of Le gai savoir's use of written word on the screen. As the narrator attempts to figure out how to proceed from May '68 (and, alternately, how Godard expects to move forward with his radical cinema), the words "que" and "faire" (literally "what to do") appear on a piece of paper over and over in perfectly arranged columns as if a kindergartner's copying assignment. The word "repression" uses the Schutzstaffel insignia for its SS. Lutte, meaning "fight, is scribbled over a page with a heavy black marker used to write "CRITIQUE" over everything, suggesting the manner in which Godard and Gorin have chosen to wage their fight against the bourgeois is through savage criticism.

The agitprop is, as ever, maddening, but Godard never lost track of his ability to see the aspects of Communism that failed. He delineates between "worker Leninism" and "student Leninism," and he takes aim at himself when he dismisses the latter as being naïve and unfocused. A shot of mass graves reminds everyone of what happens when a maniac like Stalin takes power. At any rate, Le vent d'est also takes the time to consider the Western wind, and compared to the more Maoist leanings of previous DGV films, this feature examines less the virtue of Communism than the ways capitalism undermines individual freedom even as it purports to be the most free societal structure. Godard is, of course, too scathing toward capitalism as a whole and not the abuse of it, but there are some valid points buried in the aural muck. His most damning critique, naturally, is of Hollywood, which he charges with being falsely liberal. My ears perked up at this, as I've been hating on Hollywood's love of cheap, faux-liberalism for years, the sort of pandering hogwash that serves only to rake in cash to studio executives (which doesn't exactly scream "socialist," does it?). Over an image of a man riding a horse, the narrator rages that Hollywood would have us believe that the horse on-screen is really a horse. Not just that, that it is more than a horse. Even as the DGV tries to uncover the true nature of the contemporary political climate, Godard still carries his pet theme of the illusory quality of the cinema, a them the film industry in Hollywood just sweeps under the rug because it raises too many questions.

Le vent d'est continues the director's deconstructionist streak, but for the first time since joining the DGV he begins to reconstruct images as well. A great deal of the film doesn't work, especially as it's nearly incomprehensible aurally or visually from taking low-quality source elements and blowing them up far beyond their capacity (not to mention the only way I could find of viewing the film was on a horrendous VHS rip), but I was finally interested in Godard again. I couldn't wait to see what he'd do next, and I felt rewarded by straining my eyes to make out what it was I was supposed to be looking at. Godard makes the camera into the general assembly with this film, posing questions about the revolution for other to answer. After talking down to us for the last few films, Godard continues to pontificate but finally lets the audience formulate its own thoughts and asks us for responses to the questions posed. We're not out of the woods yet, but Le vent d'est was a pleasant surprise after suffering the Dziga Vertov Group's nonsense for what felt an eternity after but two films.

Pravda

Pravda is the first film of the Dziga Vertov Group to definitively achieve Jean-Luc Godard's aim to tear down his brand as a marketable, even identifiable filmmaker, and it is perhaps because of this that even Godard has since dismissed it as "Marxist-Leninist garbage." Indeed, it's perhaps the hardest slog of any of his films to this point, a half-focused explosion of frustration over revolution and failed Communism in the Eastern Bloc that plays as horrifically naïve for such an intelligent man.


Godard shot the film in Czechoslovakia with a 16mm camera and a local crew, and the mere fact that he even got away with seems to irk him. For before he traveled to the country, the Czechs revolted against the Soviet government, and while Godard had already recognized the horrors of Stalinism, the Westernized Prague he surveys fills him with no uncertain amount of disgust. Western music blares on the streets, Godard rents a car from Hertz and a Coca-Cola will assuredly be within reach wherever one goes.

As they must, sound and image collide. Static shots show factory workers producing the cars that they cannot afford and will not be afforded by the government for their labor rubbing up against shots of American businesses that are either creeping into the semi-liberated country or never left in the first place, suggesting that both are equally oppressive. Godard seems to position himself as a war correspondent covering the latest invasion to befall the land: first they suffered the Nazis, then the Soviets, and now the corporations.

Viewing Pravda from this perspective makes it at least somewhat bearable, as Godard's insistence that he obliterate his namesake results in him finally taking too big a step away from any semblance of coherence. He edited this while Jean-Pierre Gorin cut Vent d'est, and when they compared their final products they were both pleased to see that neither could differentiate between the two, though whether one could really feel victorious when looking upon such a creation is dubious.

The playfulness that made Le gai savoir enjoyable returns to Godard's style, but if these films were cinematic essays, Pravda reads like a diary entry by a jilted lover, pouring out pain and anger at the once-appealing partner who so cruelly cast him aside. He does not want Czechoslovakia to remain under harsh rule, but for them to so instantly and blindly embrace the advances of the American corporations enrages him disproportionately to the change of public opinion. His English narrator tells us that men in the country "would rather wash their cars than fuck their wives," and even the man's matter-of-fact deliver cannot help but communicate Godard's revulsion. Meanwhile, the shot of tanks in fields watching over peasants earns half the focus.

Viewing the film as a take on the TV documentary, however, it becomes more wry. The flat delivery lends itself to a feeling of authenticity, playing off the title, which of course refers to the Soviet newspaper that translated as "Truth." Truth is not particularly on Godard's mind, as the narrator speaks of interpreting sound and image from his own perspective, seeking to document "external manifestations of the Communist reality, the Communist 'irreality' in Czechoslovakia" and the contradictions that each element of the documentary raises. There's even a shot of someone walking into frame with their head out of view, presaging the modern practice of showing overweight people on the streets only from the neck down.

If nothing else, Godard wants to make clear that just because we see something on television doesn't make it true, something many did not know back when government and business were keeping the worst of Vietnam off American airwaves and other forms of selective editing affected TV in other nations. As the narrator notes, the USSR runs on revisionism, constantly presenting their dictatorship as a people's empire and forcing the press into promoting this view. Godard emphasizes the false populism and secret capitalism that drives the Soviets with a boiled-down exchange between a factory overseer and a worker: "OK, comrade?" "OK, boss."

Eventually, Godard drops even this pretense, turning his flat newsreader into Vladimir, the disembodied voice of the revolution, and pairs him with a woman, Rosa, as the two overlap frequently. Rarely does one translate for the Czechs on-screen, and subtitles are absent as well. "If you don't understand Czech," deadpans Vladimir, "you better learn it fast." Godard wants complete control over how we interpret what he's showing, and he's not going to let a pesky thing like the people's voice get in the way, which makes his supposed Maoist intent all the more hypocritical and ill-formed.

Amusingly, the bits of the film that are most enjoyable and provocative are the ones that betray Godard at the helm and not simply a like-minded collaborator. His Brechtian influence has perhaps never been more overt, the narration structured as it is after Brecht's Me-Ti and its dialectical approach. Brecht's work was made in his own exile, and as Godard has his narrator speak of ceasing filmmaking, you can't help but wonder if Godard had begun to regret his decision to move away from making proper films, or if he still felt he hadn't gone far enough.

Still, he carries on with his didactic approach, tossing in lines like "It's by going in circles that we advance" with utmost seriousness and closing the film with Chinese tunes to promote Maoism as the true Communism. Pravda feels longer than its 58 minutes, and the greatest tragedy is, despite the danger of filming in Czechoslovakia, how few risks Godard takes. The rhetoric lacks the fire of earlier political works because disillusionment has set in, and a thudding sound fills the audio track for a minute or two during the film as if Godard is pounding his gavel in judgment of the failure of the Czech revolution and of the Communism that sparked it. I was grabbed, however, by a few parts of the film. One of the final shots of the movie is a long static shot of a factory worker staring at a machine doing work, subtly implying that the people can no longer really make a world for themselves because industrialization has left so many without anything to do. This unforced perspective on sped-up capitalist expansion is contrasted with appealing images of true Communism, such as a shot of cherry trees lining the streets for anyone to pick -- meanwhile, all private property is fenced off with barbed wire. By far the most memorable and poetic image is of a rose, positioned in the middle of a montage of shots of military equipment filling fields and factories, overproduced under Soviet orders to stock up for the pissing match with America. As the images of tanks and jets stack up, the rose begins to sink and wilt, finally appearing flattened on the ground, the red spirit of revolution trampled by the people it was meant to inspire. It's so powerful that its inclusion long before the end deflates the rest of the film somewhat, which only makes the tedium that much more unbearable.

British Sounds

The Dziga Vertov Group years, both Godard's most contested and largely ignored, take after the anonymity of the collective's ethos by setting no definite start point. Having contributed already to one anthology project in the wake of May '68, the Chris Marker-led Cinétracts, Godard made clear his intentions to head in new, radical directions with Le gai savoir. Yet there is still some debate over which resulting film truly marked the start of the DGV collaborations. Both Un film comme les autres (which I could not find in subtitled form) and this bear no attached name, but purportedly Godard was the sole figure at the helm of both, with Pravda being the first movie that everyone can fully agree on being a collective film. For all intents and purposes, however, let us take British Sounds to be the beginning of this controversial period in Godard's career, following as it does the plate-cleansing Le gai savoir and generally conforming to what one may envision of the Dziga Vertov Group based on preliminary readings of their work.


Yet, if Le gai savoir proved that Godard could subvert my expectations for his Maoist years, British Sounds, released in the U.S. as See You At Mao, largely conforms to the opinions I've heard of the DGV years even from noted Godard enthusiasts like Jonathan Rosenbaum. Divided into five or six (depending on how you treat a portion of the middle) segments, British Sounds continues to expand upon the director's fascination between the relation images and sound, but not even his previous reinterpretations can adequately prepare one for the leap he makes here. As a narrator intones early in the film, the bourgeoisie "make the world into their image" -- implicitly suggesting that they have a God complex -- and British Sounds is his most aggressive film yet to seek the destruction of that image, to the point that the mildest attack in the entire film is the title card, which sports an 'X' over the word "Images" between "British" and "Sounds."

Godard films each segment with minimal technique, using long takes broken up by the odd flash of still photos before returning to the scene as if the shot had not changed. Where Le gai savoir presented the director's polemics through visual montage, here he roots the film in quotidian, even banal images in order to experiment with the sound. The first segment follows an automotive assembly line as workers weld together cars from basic skeletons into finished products. It's an everyday sight, something that fills untold hours of "How It's Made" and programs of that sort.

In Godard's hands, however, this sequence exists to place a droning narration of a man reading Marxist rhetoric about the emptiness of these workers' labor. Banging on about issues of wage slavery, the narrator almost sounds like a nature documentarian describing the curious social arrangements of less enlightened creatures. As the Marxist narration winds around the images, the tracking shot comes to take on a wry second meaning, as if deconstructing the noted tracking shot of Week End and its endless traffic jam to the point when the cars have not even been made yet. One cannot hold that thought too long, however, or indeed any other one, once Godard introduces the other aspect of the soundtrack, the amplified screeching of industrial metal-on-metal as car parts are carved and welded. Strangely, this diegetic noise is so overwhelming, bewildering and just plain annoying that the tedium of the flat narration becomes the only steady line of coherence, even when presented with molasses-thick pronunciations like "In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present. In Communist society, the present dominates the past."

That enticing subversion of even Godard's standard of presentation makes up for its overall weakness, and both the intrigue and the frustration of British Sounds magnifies in the next segment as the director films in a nude woman walking around her home as two dueling narrations overlap. A woman, perhaps the disembodied voice of the figure seen on-screen, launches into an eloquent, intellectual rant on feminism, discussing the manner in which women are repressed in society through a series of small inequalities that form together into a prison. Then, a man joins in, his voice louder and his statements blunter. As much as he's confounding the listener, I wondered for a moment if Godard was making some comment on the communicative differences between men and women. Then, he breaks up the static long shot of the woman walking up and down the stairs to film her from the shoulder up in close-up talking on the phone. She says what the female narrator says, but not in unison, and their disconnect only adds to the aural overload when the man, too, inserts his thoughts, and the stab at feminist cinema -- albeit one clearly made by a male, what with the cutaways to the woman's pubic hair -- quickly gives way to Godard's other interests.

Thankfully, the film pulls itself together slightly in the second half. Godard presents a repulsive televised speech by a British nationalist who perfunctorily assures the viewers that his views are "not racialist" before launching into a venomous screed that denounces immigration and the extreme poor and suggests sterilization if not outright extermination for those who impede society's focus on capital. He then cuts to images of the targets of his invective. To emphasize the point, Godard, moves on to a hand-held shot of a group of working-class whites at a table as they discuss Marxist ideals. But where the previous narrations were intellectual readings of Marx and Engels, these men place ideas in concrete terms of their lives and struggles. It's unclear how much of the Marxist philosophy Godard fed these workers, but their hatred for their bosses is clear and real as they spit over the idea that they do all the work just so a CEO can live not even on the profits of their labor but the interest of the investment of those profits.

Taken with the lingering shot of the factory workers assembling cars, this round-table discussion suggests Godard's keen interest on the dissatisfaction of the working class and his hopes that they would rise up. Emphasizing the idea is the contrast with youth activists, hidden away at the very universities the DGV demanded their work be shown. As the workers break their backs to assemble society's commodities, these young men and women hunch over picket signs, etching out their condensed messages and changing lyrics to Beatles songs in a laughable attempt to politicize them ("You say U.S./I say Mao"). Godard doesn't appear to want to mock them, but one can hardly look at these youths and not think condescendingly of them in comparison to the workers.

Therein lies the problem with the film, possibly the Dziga Vertov Group as a whole. When DGV films arrived in America, they came with instructions to show them in art houses and college campuses, appealing to the intellectual crowd who, let's be honest, would be the only possible demographic for such films. Yet this undermines their Maoist intent and emits a more Bolshevik attitude, inspiring a group of bourgeois elite to rebel against themselves. Godard's focus on the workers within the film communicates whom he really wants to inspire, but he recognizes that he's a part of the bourgeoisie he wants to destroy (and if there's anything more bourgeois than an artist, it's an art critic, and he's both).

Still, there's a hint of self-awareness in his focus on the hippies, and perhaps his muted frustration with them explains the haughty tone of the rest of the film. In Le gai savoir, Godard's use of a child's dictionary and other such devices expressed a playfulness and a representation of his "return to zero" mentality. British Sounds contains numerous audio clips of male and female narrators teaching a child about various historical events of peasant and working-class revolts, which the kid dutifully repeats. Eventually, the entire film comes to fell like a lecture, a condescending polemic from a frustrated artist that seems less educational than editorial.

At 52 minutes, British Sounds feels incomplete, but that's a deliberate step on account of Godard. While certain trademarks are there, he stops short of making this an auterial work, and if he was not yet collaborating on his work, he was at least preparing himself to work in a collective. Narrations cut off, occasionally restart when the reader flubs a line and overlap into incoherence throughout the film. In the last segment, as a synecdochical close-up of a bloody fist moves along a white carpet, the noise builds to a cacophony, various clips of rhetoric crashing like waves on rocks. Then, at last, the fist makes its way to a blood-red flag and picks it up, and the image cuts to shots of the fist punching through the Union Jack as all the voices suddenly speak in unison. The message is clear: all voices of dissent -- male, female, intellectual, working-class -- are unformed, but only through a Communist revolt can we all unify. Unfortunately, Godard succeeds far more readily in tearing us apart with the film that he does in bringing us back together, and British Sounds never amounts to much more than a fleetingly engaging mess, and an often unbearable one at that.