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"Where are we?" is the question posed to "cinéastes militants," thus the wilderness of the Left after May '68. Figures obscured by Manet foliage, it might be outtakes from Renoir's Partie de Campagne except it's a Western shot by the Dziga Vertov Group, sort of, not really. Triumphs and defeats of revolutionary cinema, early Soviet agitators proposing fiery manifestos only to be seduced by Griffith the Hollywood imperialist. The belle with her dainty parasol (Cristiana Tullio-Altan) and the Indian in his smeared greasepaint (Allen Midgette) for contrasting illusionist modes, a matter of maquillage. "Why these images? Why these sounds?" Jean-Luc Godard doubles down on semiotics activism, enabled by Jean-Pierre Gorin and determined to let the fanatic snuff out the poet. "A cinema for which nothing is taboo except the class struggle" is the enemy, give it a name, "Paramount-Nixon." The police state is a skirmish shot with a jerky tripod, Gian Maria Volonté in cavalryman uniform choking Anne Wiazemsky while buckets of red paint are splashed from behind the camera. (Faux-Cochise and Faux-Custer cross the screen, locked in their didactic little back-and-forth: "I am Palestinian!" "I am General Motors." "I am Vietnamese!" "I am General Motors.") Proust, Marx, a certain "Scarlett Faulkner from Louisville, Alabama" accusing Eldridge Cleaver of rape. Chart of la grève, detailed guidelines for bomb-throwers. At the crossroads with Glauber Rocha, "that way is the Third World cinema, a dangerous cinema, divine and marvelous..." Down with "the bourgeois concept of representation," and if that means scratching the celluloid itself then so be it. A picnic film, all harangues and seams and yet profoundly lyrical and moving in spite of itself. "Now critique, now fight, now transform," cf. Eisenstein's Strike.
--- Fernando F. Croce |