Godard Wind From The East at Emerson 105, Saturday and Sunday

JEAN-LUC GODARD'S recent tour was a showpiece for America's critical and political intelligence. Look, he thinks he's a revolutionary yet no worker understands his films, the national magazines said. Look, he thinks he's a revolutionary yet he can't reach the masses, the leftist newspapers said. Aw, he's just another French intellectual. Aww, he's bourgeois. Carl Oglesby summed it all up. He walked out of Lowell Lecture Hall while Godard was speaking. "He's escapist," Carl said.

We don't like Godard's kind of stuff over here in America. We say: let's reach the people, let's get the people on the streets. So when we Americans make movies with radical points of view, we aim to reach the masses. Make it so they can understand it, we say. Well, what do they understand? Oh, Grapes of Wrath. Salt of the Earth. On the Waterfront, Catch 22, Or, Hunger: U. S. A. Maybe, Newsreel, Sure, it looks like Hollywood. Sure it looks like CBS. But then Hollywood and CBS reach a lot of people.

Godard's "political" films address themselves to the formal convergence of CBS and Newsreel. He argues that such affinities are by no means coincidental, but instead arise from an identical purpose-the mere conveyance of information. Godard says it's not what you know, but how you come to know it; not information, but the way you process it, Regardless of its source-CBS or its Newsreel counterpart-information is "neutrally" transmitted to the same society, where the images are analyzed according to the same set of assumptions. You can't tell a picture of a peasant in a Newsreel film from one in a TV documentary.

What obtains here, then, is the analysis one brings to bear on data. Language systems (including images and sounds) are our methods of analysis. To a Marxist the New York Times provides all the information he needs about power relationships in America. An ad for Carey Chauffeur-driven cars reads: "There is a new aristocracy in America. Its peers are plainly titled.... If you are a vice-president, you are an earl.... Your castle is the corporation.... You are the most powerful aristocracy in history. You decide what two hundred million people will eat, ride in, wear, laugh at, live for." But the presentation of this information is not enough: for the progressive artist in the capitalist society there must be within his presentation a new method of analysis.

Glauber Rocha, the Brazilian director of Antonio das Mortes, appears in Wind from the East as a figure pointing in two directions at the Crossroads of Cinema. A pregnant woman carrying a camera approaches him and asks the way. Down one road, he says, is the militant cinema; down the other the cinema of adventure, of spectacle. Godard maintains that there are two films to be made: another of the type "Nixon-Paramount" has been ordering for fifty years-a Western, an adventure film, any film that clings to the idea of realistic representation; or a militant film, a film whose anti-representational form challenges the ideology implicit in that same old Western.

A LONG TIME ago Godard said, that to move the camera, in other words, to analyze the material presented by a set shot, was a political act. For Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group the criteria for formal choices are political. It's silly to accuse them of not having coherent or correct politics; their movies are not about politics, any more than any art work is about any phenomena. Rather their films are a series of formal choices made according to a given criteria, and relate to possible criteria for formal choices, not strikes or demonstrations. Their political films are about making political films. Works like See You at Mao and Pravda are definitely not intended to incite the masses; rather they are to serve as objects of analysis for Glauber Rocha, Chris Marker's SLON group in Belgium, the Medvedkin group in France, and other cadres of political filmmakers wrestling with the creation of revolutionary forms.

Wind from the East, co-written by Godard and Danny Cohn-Bendit, has three sections. The first is a kind of Third World Western in which we are presented with seven episodes in class war: strike, choosing of a delegate, the militating of active minorities, an assembly in which the composing of the rest of the film is discussed, repression, an active strike followed by the introduction of a police state. The second part is an extension of the ongoing criticisms of the first; the narrator says: "Okay, from a real movement you made a film. How'd you do it?", and proceeds to criticize both the logic of the strike presentation and the cinema verity offered as a substitute. The main thrust of this section is an attack on the idea of representation. That struggle begun, the third section is an abstract guerrilla film, titled "Army Combat," reminiscent of the Soviet agitki made in the twenties and replete with bomb constructions and hypnotic exhortations.

WIND FROM THE EAST is an incredibly rich and suggestive work, both for those enamored of Godard's explorations and those generally hostile to his films, and I can only hope to touch on one or two ideas here. Stylistically the most striking features of East are its few shots and long disembodied ******narrations. These narrations seem to me the key to Godard's assault on bourgeois notions of realistic representation.

Late in the film we see a close shot of Anne Wiazemsky, followed by a shot of her reflection in a mirror. The narrator is attempting to analyze photography as a class weapon, specifically the weapon of the bourgeoisie in its fight against the proletariat. Photography, it is claimed, serves two reactionary functions: first, it is used to identify class enemies, and second, it disguises the world. Replacing the novel and painting as paradigms of realistic portrayal, it re-establishes the idea of "mirroring " the world. Analysis of the world "mirrored" is substituted for analysis of objective conditions.

But we know that photographic images have to be "read"; they are signs in the same way that mimetic movements are-they have meaning only within a sign system. How images are read is part of the dominant ideology of a community-its superstructure, determined in large measure by socio-economic relations of members within the community. Our standards of realistic representation are therefore not our own, but rather those of a given system of economic relationships.

From this, one can see why the recent films of the Dziga Vertoy Group are so dependent on text, text unexplained (hence unconstrained) by the visuals-unseen narrators. Images alone, or images whose sound source is identified (synchronous sound) are potentially, or in Godard's eyes, invariably, reactionary. They are more understandable, "easier" images, in the sense that information issues freely from them-we are accustomed to such images. But the sign system by which we read these images is an ideology of the class in power. Whenever a conscious formal design does not structure our reading of an image, we have fallen into "the ideology of real life" ( Gai Savoir ), i.e., the implicit ideology in the bourgeois way of seeing. The first step for the revolutionary moviemaker is, as Juliet Berto says in Savoir, "to dissolve sounds and images." "The ear is the eye's politburo."

In the progression from Mao to East, the latter film is the most violent in the Group's attempts to structure through sound our apprehension of visual meaning. At one point the screen shows us a green field, and the narrator screams, "Red! Red! Red!" Earlier, a four-minute shot of a nineteenth-century couple obscured by tall grass is described in eight different periods, and peopled by eight different historical figures. These are not empty exercises. They are instead statements of Godard's belief that any image can denote virtually anything; and more importantly, that our inability to recognize this fact of perceptual life is testament to an imaginative enshacklement attendant upon an economic one.

An aesthetics too ashamed to show its face in discussions of the novel has long held sway in theories of the cinema. Writers like Kracauer and Bazin have elaborated value systems whose central equation comes whole from the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel tradition. Godard fights alone the arts' last battle against realistic representation.