Before the Revolution

The films of the Dziga-Vertov group are, in this sense, films of struggle. To begin to talk about them, you must first of all understand those against whom they struggle, instead of deploring their inaccessibility, their unintellibility, their lack of human warmth, etc; as though criticism's first task was to prohibit boredom in the spectator.

As for their content, these films are conceived as instruments of struggle against the bourgeoisie and revisionism, against imperialism and social imperialism, with the theoretical help of marxist-leninism and the thought of mao. But there is also at stake something new, something previously unheard of in cinema, and in this new content, we cannot be satisfied with a worn-out form. These films also struggle, ideologically, against the passivity of the spectator, as Brecht struggled in his time: because this passivity is not an aesthetic necessity as some people would have us believe (a spectator is always a spectator). It is linked to the system of representation in class society. Our goal is not to wrench the spectator out of his chair, as some accuse us (so that they can dismiss us as ultra-leftists); it is simply a question of arousing mental activity and the critical faculty. --the Dziga-Vertov group in Cahiers de Cinema, August 1972

TOUT VA BIEN is the Sesame Street of political radicalism. It teaches its Marxism like the alphabet, a step at a time, no subtlety, no distractions. Godard assumes we know nothing and so tells us everything, lessons in the form of variety skits, the revolution as camp comedy.

That is not always easy to take, and at one point or another, Godard succumbs to his inevitable weaknesses: tedium, didacticism, political naivete. Still, I'm going to treat Godard sympathetically here. Not because Tout Va Bien is the masterpiece we were hoping for. But because Godard's concerns are real concerns, and because every so often it's useful to take experimentation as seriously as you possibly can, forgive its stupidities, assume that its wildest excesses are flights of genius.

Godard dates his political conversion quite specifically: the rebellion in the streets of Paris, May 1968, and his films before that date now qualify as bourgeois garbage. In the aftermath of May, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin formed the Dziga-Vertov group, a revolutionary film collective (that for a long time had just those two members). Their early work consisted of a series of quasi-documentary polemics (Pravda, See You at Mao, Struggles in Italy) that managed to alienate most of the critics who had made Godard's reputation in the middle sixties.

Tout Va Bien is the first fictional film the group has made. Its plot, such as it is, is this: Him (Yves Montand) is a former director of art films who now makes commercial advertisements to avoid hypocrisy. Her (Jane Fonda) is his wife, an American television correspondent ("I am an American correspondent in France, but I correspond to nothing"). Out to interview the manager of the Salumi food-processing factory, Him and Her find Themselves locked up in the plant by striking workers. They spend the night thus exposed to the reality of class warfare and are set free with apologies the following day.

The two set out to resume their ordinary lives, but their consciousnesses have been irrevocably raised. They suddenly find themselves much dissatisfied with their occupations and one another. They separate and undergo their respective crises, each led to the realization of the political hypocrisy of living their private lives in isolation from the public historical arena. At film's end, they reunite, having recognized the inextricable links between the personal and the historical, and promise to do better.

The story works by a series of comic revolutionary skits, some more clever than others. Perhaps the best is a workers' musical number which Godard presents in a two-tiered factory set in cutaway, complete with ascending staircase a la Bye Bye Birdie, around which are draped the singing strikers. Later, the captive plant manager is forbidden to urinate, until he is so tormented that, irony of ironies, he breaks the factory window and lets fly on the street below.

There is no continuity to Godard's parable. There is no consistency in his plot. The characters are blackboard stick figures; they provoke no sympathies; the climax offers no resolution. There is not the slightest degree of realism. There is stylization and fragmentation and polemic.

By any set of traditional aesthetic criteria, Tout Va Bien probably fails. But indicting Godard on traditional grounds is rather like accusing Lenin of disturbing the peace. If traditional criteria are the only ones, then of course he fails, he intends to fail. There is nothing more to be said. But Godard and Gorin have lavished much ingenuity in puzzling out a new set of criteria, and here the presiding figure is neither Marx nor Mao but Bertolt Brecht.

GODARD'S PREMISE is simple. He is a militant filmmaker in service of the revolution, and the meaning of his films derives entirely from their participation in the class struggle. But here the Dziga-Vertov group sees a problem where conventional filmmakers see none, and that problem is in the very nature of political art. The method of conventional political films--Costa-Gavras' Z and The Confession, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers -- is to assume that the way to political commitment is through faithful depiction of political reality. So they select an important event and recreate it on screen, aiming to provoke a specific chain of emotions and to construct a specific moral stance.

For Godard and the Dziga-Vertovians, that is not permitted. Realism, they insist, is a surrender to reality. It makes criticism impossible; it actually defuses political emotion. It enforces passivity on the spectator who becomes a witness to the class struggle instead of a participant in it.

The Dziga-Vertov group insists on two levels of political struggle. The first is obvious. It is the struggle against the enemy outside the film, the bourgeoisie and the revisionists. But there is a second aspect to the struggle, and that is within the film itself, in the political order of the sounds and images themselves. A truly revolutionary cinema must create a revolutionary film form, and that is Dziga-Vertov's present goal.

So where the conventional film engrosses, the Dziga-Vertov film alienates. In place of entertainment, it offers irritation, in place of subtlety, didacticism. Against the passivity of film as diversion, it seeks to provoke an active and critical response. That is the justification for the irrealism of Godard's plot and characterization, for the constant interruptions of the film's movement, for the ceaseless polemic, for the refusal to let the film come to any satisfactory climax.

The difficulty in all this, I think, is that Godard is a militant filmmaker before he is a militant, and I'm afraid that much of his theory is more personal rationalization than revolutionary program. His critique of conventional political cinema is certainly well-taken, as is his contention that all film form has implicit political content. But that is a symptom, not a cause. The way to attack the problem is not to make isolated films that happen to be ideologically justified and then go unseen.

For Godard is rapidly losing his constituency. The bourgeois intellectuals that made his reputation in the middle sixties have responded not at all to this latest phase. And the working class among whom he now seeks support have yet to rally around him. Probably, the most encouraging thing about Tout Va Bien is that Godard has begun inching toward popular art. But to make genuinely popular art out of such theoretical experimentation seems an achievement that is many years away.

Those same realistic filmmakers whom Godard so consistently disparages are the ones working in a popular idiom. Admittedly, their active contribution is small, but they at least legitimize much radical activity. From them, Godard could learn the political virtue of beginning with an audience, not just a theory.

THERE IS MORE than a little of Sartre in Godard -- a quirky French naughtiness, a hatred of the conventional above all. You may remember that Parisian farce of a year or so ago, when Sartre decided to have himself arrested. Well aware of the implications of such an act, the government kept hands off, and while demonstrators all around were hauled off to jail, Sartre went untouched. Much frustrated over a period of months, his comments and conduct became progressively more outrageous, until arrest was unavoidable, and a self-satisfied Sartre was dragged off to martyrdom.

Godard has been playing out the same little drama recently. Once, the more he damned the bourgeoisie, the more bourgeois intellectuals adored him. Now, he has at last earned the antagonism of bourgeois critics, and proudly he points to the general condemnation of Tout Va Bien. But the politics of self-flagellation can go only so far. If you will use the bourgeois's guns, why not use his critics? And why not a plot convention or two?

Godard has grown vulnerable recently. He is no longer an object of fashion. In fact, he is now the victim of a new fashion of critical hard-boiledness that fears being put-on more than anything else. It may be that he will soon redescend into private political fantasies and pass out of our attention altogether. In any case, it is more than likely that his present experiments won't succeed; most experiments don't. But I suppose that's what is finally most to admire in Godard: not his path-breaking successes, but his willingness to fail.