Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s for­got­ten cine revolution

In 1967, short­ly after com­plet­ing his con­tro­ver­sial film Week­end, French lumi­nary Jean-Luc Godard shift­ed gears. Along with the mav­er­ick film crit­ic and jour­nal­ist Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard out­lined a man­i­festo for a new kind of cin­e­ma, one that would reflect the polit­i­cal upheaval of the time while inves­ti­gat­ing the rela­tion­ships between image and sound, spec­ta­tor and sub­ject, cin­e­ma and society.

The result of this ambi­tious project was five films: A Film Like Any Oth­er; British Sounds, aka See You at Mao; Wind from the East; Strug­gle in Italy; and Vladimir and Rosa. Five rev­o­lu­tion­ary works that each pro­vide a fas­ci­nat­ing and cru­cial insight into Godard’s rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion. Now, these long-unavail­able films are being released togeth­er for the first time.

Includ­ed in this deluxe, spe­cial edi­tion Blu-ray boxset is a 60-page book con­tain­ing Eng­lish trans­la­tions of writ­ing by and con­ver­sa­tions between Godard and Gorin. Here is an exclu­sive extract to whet your appetite…

Godard: We didn’t leave Europe, we didn’t leave France, we didn’t even leave Paris. Instead we made more films, after May ​’68, than many oth­ers did. We made them with­in the sys­tem, with­in a dif­fer­ent place in the sys­tem: instead of mak­ing them with­in the same old movie indus­try, we spread out into the world of tele­vi­sion. And so we made a film for Eng­lish TV (British Sounds), a co-pro­duc­tion for a unit of Czech TV and a pri­vate French pro­duc­er (Prav­da), a film bankrolled by Ital­ian TV (Lotte in Italia), and a film for Ger­man TV with Munich Télé-Pool called Vladimir et Rosa.

What all these films have in com­mon is that they were reject­ed, and went unbroad­cast by the State organs that financed them. So we were inside the sys­tem more than ever, but in a dif­fer­ent place. Next, we start­ed a film on the prob­lem in Pales­tine, that’s unfin­ished. [Jusqu’à la vic­toire —ed.] We’ve drawn a cer­tain num­ber of con­clu­sions from all these pro­duc­tions that we’ve tried to apply to a spe­cif­ic domain, that of the present-day French movie indus­try, with known actors and things like that… It’s as a two-per­son unit that we realised some polit­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties for the prac­tice of cinema.

Gorin: You see, we’re a long way from the grotesque myth of the grand film­mak­er going underground…

Godard: A very spe­cif­ic image we cur­rent­ly find with regard to peo­ple like Clav­el or like Sartre. We might agree with them on cer­tain things, or dis­agree with them on the appli­ca­tion of gen­er­al prin­ci­ples that one pre­tends to abide by. Peo­ple think Sartre is mak­ing a break with the sys­tem. We say he’s more and more involved with it, in a cer­tain way.

Gorin: With regard to us, for three years now one of the prin­ci­pal dif­fi­cul­ties has been mak­ing peo­ple aware of the real­i­ty of a two-man way of work­ing. For pret­ty obvi­ous rea­sons, cin­e­mato­graph­ic prac­tice, because it’s the most overt­ly socialised form of artis­tic prac­tice, has become the last refuge of all the ide­al­is­tic banal­i­ties about ​“the pomp and cir­cum­stance of cre­ation”. It’s nor­mal to take off from the time where we start­ed work­ing togeth­er on the lev­el of mise en scène, to take off from the time we placed this work under the ​“patron­age” (sic) of Dzi­ga Ver­tov — they only want­ed to see in our attempt, at worst, the Rim­bal­dian sui­cide of a great cre­ator (see Michel Cournot’s arti­cle, in ​’70, in L’Observateur), and, at best, a ​“tan­dem” (see Michel Vianey’s arti­cle, in ​’72, in L’Observateur).

Okay, actu­al­ly, it was a lit­tle sim­pler. We start­ed ask­ing our­selves the ques­tion of his­to­ry and of the func­tion of images and of the spe­cif­ic atten­tions we ​“spon­ta­neous­ly” employed. We start­ed to inter­ro­gate cin­e­ma ​“his­tor­i­cal­ly”, bet­ter to make images and sounds cor­re­spond­ing direct­ly to our history.

Poli­tique Heb­do: Jean-Luc, how did meet­ing Jean-Pierre bring about the ​“break” you spoke of…?

Godard: What I did for 15 years in movies allowed a guy by the name of Gorin, at a point in which his process of rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion was tak­ing place, to pass through the cin­e­ma into some­thing else instead. He could only go to one place where there was already a pos­si­bil­i­ty of break­through or of a dia­logue. As he want­ed to make films of such a new sort that he could only ben­e­fit from what I had already done. In the same way a savant (if we go back to the sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry that inter­ests us so much) dis­cov­ers in cer­tain works by anoth­er savant what the lat­ter, liv­ing in a giv­en time, hadn’t been able to put to use. For exam­ple, Lavoisi­er was able to exploit Priestley’s dis­cov­er­ies in chem­istry, which the lat­ter didn’t know how to put to use him­self. Only Lavoisi­er, on these bases, was able to estab­lish new con­cepts. Some of my old films allowed Gorin to draw con­clu­sions that I was unable to draw myself. And so a new unit was formed.

Gorin: Our meet­ing isn’t that of Claudel or André Frossard with God, nor J.-J. S.-S. [Jean-Jacques Ser­van-Schreiber, French jour­nal­ist, politi­cian, and co-founder of L’Express —ed.] with Jeanne la Lor­raine [i.e., Joan of Arc —ed.]. On one hand, Jean-Luc had 15 years of prac­tice; on the oth­er, before we actu­al­ly set out to work togeth­er, we had three years of ini­tial con­tact in which we didn’t always see eye to eye. And then, final­ly, he realised we felt the neces­si­ty to make films togeth­er. It turned out to be effec­tive — which is not to judge the val­ue of what we did.

Godard: We got to know each anoth­er grosso modo at the time I was mak­ing La chi­noise. I was in con­tact with the ​“Maoist” mil­i­tants of the era, but giv­en what they were and what I was, I’d been left to make my film all by myself. One of the peo­ple I met was Jean-Pierre Gorin. We’d see each oth­er around from time to time. May [’68] hap­pened and tight­ened our bond.

Poli­tique Heb­do: Today, what les­son do you take away from your group experiment?

Godard: The thing every group has in com­mon is it comes at a moment when there’s the desire to spread your wings. By dint of work­ing under­ground, of say­ing that rev­o­lu­tions hap­pen in culs-de-sac, you get the itch to leave the cul-de-sac. This hap­pens by tri­al and error, by the­o­ris­ing, by recri­tique. There was the desire to realise that cer­tain legit­i­mate things we put forth, even halt­ing­ly or imper­fect­ly in cer­tain films, demand­ed too much work for such a frag­men­tary result. We didn’t take enough advan­tage of the pow­er of the image. We didn’t always need to be present at the screen­ings to explain the film. When we weren’t there, it didn’t go over well! On the con­trary, we need­ed to allow, to per­suade the chil­dren we made to grow up on their own. In the begin­ning we want­ed to take on every prob­lem at once. Then we had to try to solve the prob­lems one by one, tak­ing every­thing from zero. A zero that changed where it was at. An his­tor­i­cal zero.

Gorin: What dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed us from oth­er mil­i­tant film­mak­ers is that we asked our­selves the ques­tion of pro­duc­tion as a pre­am­ble to the ques­tion of dis­tri­b­u­tion. What is to be pro­duced? Which is to say, for whom is it to be pro­duced? And: how is it to be produced?

Godard: To tru­ly reflect on the dif­fi­cul­ty of new dis­tri­b­u­tion (new ideas dis­trib­uted in a new way) requires ini­tial­ly pass­ing through a stage con­sist­ing of pro­duc­tion. Pro­duc­ing in a new­er and more legit­i­mate way in touch with the his­tor­i­cal state in which we live: this leads us to bet­ter ask our­selves about the prob­lems sur­round­ing the best means of dis­tri­b­u­tion. Ear­li­er, mil­i­tant cin­e­ma was mak­ing the poor out to be the same thing as the rich! If you look at the Viet­namese in rela­tion to the Amer­i­cans, the poor aren’t wag­ing the same kind of war as the Amer­i­cans; they’re wag­ing a war of a dif­fer­ent sort. Applied to cin­e­ma, this means: pos­ing prob­lems in a dif­fer­ent way.

Gorin: Mak­ing films, for exam­ple, while hav­ing the courage (or the audac­i­ty) to say they’re made for only 10 peo­ple, but 10 peo­ple with whom rela­tions of work exist. Then, able to speak bet­ter to 10 peo­ple, to try and reach a hun­dred… and slow­ly make progress in the analy­sis of the con­tra­dic­tions of the cin­e­mato­graph­ic sys­tem. Our aim actu­al­ly is first of all to be there where we reside, while being there dif­fer­ent­ly, which is the only effec­tive means of jam­ming the machine.

Being there where we reside and being there dif­fer­ent­ly. What might this mean for a pro­gres­sive film­mak­er? Maybe final­ly stop­ping let­ting your­self go to the ends of bad faith, to no longer lull your­self with remarks like: ​“The repres­sion I endure is pret­ty measly com­pared to that of oth­er class­es,” to think, just for a sec­ond, about the repres­sion these same class­es are made to endure, these same class­es one pre­tends to strug­gle on the behalf of while not dis­clos­ing the price of the trans­ac­tions by which films are made and who (the exhibitors, the dis­trib­u­tors, the star or stars, the pro­duc­ers) dic­tate them in actuality.

Jean-Luc Godard + Jean-Pierre Gorin: Five Films (1968−1971) is released 26 Feb­ru­ary by Arrow Academy.