La Chinoise
Encyclopedia
La Chinoise is a 1967 French political film
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
about young revolutionaries in Paris
.
).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky
), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud
), Yvonne (Juliet Berto
), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy
in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet "revisionism", comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray
movie, Johnny Guitar
. In this sense, he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirilov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
Eventually, Véronique's once tender feelings toward Guillaume sour, and she uses a declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for what will prove to be a botched attempt to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966-67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network
which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.)
In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man. As in The Possessed, the revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell have proved unsuccessful.
political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia
, and especially the Cultural Revolution
brought about by the Red Guards
under Mao Zedong
in the People's Republic of China
. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser
.
Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party
, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become ironically fetishized as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project.
This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet
against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard seems to suggest that the students are at once serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change as well as confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction.
. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael
, Andrew Sarris
and Renata Adler
have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.
Along with Pierrot le fou
, Masculin, féminin
, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin
and the Dziga Vertov Group
, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.
La Chinoise is a 1967 French political film
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
about young revolutionaries in Paris
.
).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky
), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud
), Yvonne (Juliet Berto
), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy
in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet "revisionism", comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray
movie, Johnny Guitar
. In this sense, he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirilov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
Eventually, Véronique's once tender feelings toward Guillaume sour, and she uses a declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for what will prove to be a botched attempt to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966-67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network
which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.)
In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man. As in The Possessed, the revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell have proved unsuccessful.
political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia
, and especially the Cultural Revolution
brought about by the Red Guards
under Mao Zedong
in the People's Republic of China
. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser
.
Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party
, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become ironically fetishized as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project.
This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet
against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard seems to suggest that the students are at once serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change as well as confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction.
. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael
, Andrew Sarris
and Renata Adler
have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.
Along with Pierrot le fou
, Masculin, féminin
, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin
and the Dziga Vertov Group
, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.
La Chinoise is a 1967 French political film
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
about young revolutionaries in Paris
.
).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky
), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud
), Yvonne (Juliet Berto
), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy
in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet "revisionism", comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray
movie, Johnny Guitar
. In this sense, he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirilov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
Eventually, Véronique's once tender feelings toward Guillaume sour, and she uses a declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for what will prove to be a botched attempt to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966-67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network
which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.)
In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man. As in The Possessed, the revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell have proved unsuccessful.
political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia
, and especially the Cultural Revolution
brought about by the Red Guards
under Mao Zedong
in the People's Republic of China
. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser
.
Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party
, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become ironically fetishized as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project.
This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet
against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard seems to suggest that the students are at once serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change as well as confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction.
. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael
, Andrew Sarris
and Renata Adler
have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.
Along with Pierrot le fou
, Masculin, féminin
, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin
and the Dziga Vertov Group
, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.
Political cinema
Political cinema in the narrow sense of the term is a cinema which portrays current or historical events or social conditions in a partisan way in order to inform or to agitate the spectator...
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
about young revolutionaries in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
Plot summary
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation, if not parody, of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel, The Possessed. In the novel, a group of five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students — three young men and two young women — belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named for the novel, Aden, Arabie, by Paul NizanPaul Nizan
Paul Nizan was a French philosopher and writer.-Biography:He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV...
).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky
Anne Wiazemsky
Princess Anne Wiazemsky is a French actress and novelist, of the Russian Rurikid family of Princes Vyazemsky-Counts Levashov. Through her mother, she is the granddaughter of François Mauriac. She appeared in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar and in Godard's films La Chinoise and Week End...
), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
), Yvonne (Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto was a French actress. A member of the same loose group of student radicals as Anne Wiazemsky, she first appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and would go on to appear in many of Godard's subsequent films, including La Chinoise, Week End, Le Gai Savoir,...
), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization...
), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of three features he completed that year. Like the other two , it is considered both socially and stylistically radical. Many American critics, including Village Voice critics Amy Taubin and J...
). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet "revisionism", comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
movie, Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar is a 1954 Republic Pictures Western film starring Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, and Scott Brady.The screenplay was based upon a novel by Roy Chanslor. Though credited to Philip Yordan, he was merely a front for the actual screenwriter, blacklistee Ben Maddow. ...
. In this sense, he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirilov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
Eventually, Véronique's once tender feelings toward Guillaume sour, and she uses a declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for what will prove to be a botched attempt to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966-67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network
Jeanson network
The Jeanson network was a group of French communist militants led by Francis Jeanson who helped Algerian National Liberation Front agents operating in the French metropolitan territory during the Algerian War. They were mainly involved in carrying money and papers for the Algerians and were...
which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.)
In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man. As in The Possessed, the revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell have proved unsuccessful.
Themes
Thematically, La Chinoise concerns the 1960s New LeftNew Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
, and especially the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
brought about by the Red Guards
Red Guards (China)
Red Guards were a mass movement of civilians, mostly students and other young people in the People's Republic of China , who were mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the Cultural Revolution.-Origins:...
under Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
in the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
.
Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become ironically fetishized as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project.
This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet
Parapet
A parapet is a wall-like barrier at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony or other structure. Where extending above a roof, it may simply be the portion of an exterior wall that continues above the line of the roof surface, or may be a continuation of a vertical feature beneath the roof such as a...
against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard seems to suggest that the students are at once serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change as well as confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction.
Responses
La Chinoise is not one of Godard's most widely seen films, and until 2008 was unavailable on DVD in North AmericaNorth America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
, Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
and Renata Adler
Renata Adler
Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and film critic.-Background and education:Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A...
have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.
Along with Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou is a 1965 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film is based on Obsession, a novel by Lionel White. It was Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature film, released between Alphaville and Masculin, féminin...
, Masculin, féminin
Masculin, féminin
Masculin, féminin is a 1966 black-and-white French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.The film stars French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a romantic young idealist and literary lion-wannabe who chases budding pop star, Madeleine...
, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of three features he completed that year. Like the other two , it is considered both socially and stylistically radical. Many American critics, including Village Voice critics Amy Taubin and J...
and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin is a French filmmaker and professor, best known for his work with Nouvelle Vague luminary Jean-Luc Godard during what is often referred to as Godard's "radical" period....
and the Dziga Vertov Group
Dziga Vertov Group
The Dziga Vertov Group was formed in 1968 by politically active filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their films are defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship...
, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.
External links
- Jean-Luc Godard et La Chinoise- an Essay
- MIM (maoist) review.
- Filmaster, La Chinoise La Chinoise '98 Video 48']. Anne Wiazemsky has a dialog with A. Bergala, A. de Baecque, spectators of MK2 Beaubourg (Paris) after the projection of La Chinoise (1998.5.10)
La Chinoise is a 1967 French political film
Political cinema
Political cinema in the narrow sense of the term is a cinema which portrays current or historical events or social conditions in a partisan way in order to inform or to agitate the spectator...
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
about young revolutionaries in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
Plot summary
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation, if not parody, of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel, The Possessed. In the novel, a group of five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students — three young men and two young women — belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named for the novel, Aden, Arabie, by Paul NizanPaul Nizan
Paul Nizan was a French philosopher and writer.-Biography:He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV...
).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky
Anne Wiazemsky
Princess Anne Wiazemsky is a French actress and novelist, of the Russian Rurikid family of Princes Vyazemsky-Counts Levashov. Through her mother, she is the granddaughter of François Mauriac. She appeared in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar and in Godard's films La Chinoise and Week End...
), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
), Yvonne (Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto was a French actress. A member of the same loose group of student radicals as Anne Wiazemsky, she first appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and would go on to appear in many of Godard's subsequent films, including La Chinoise, Week End, Le Gai Savoir,...
), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization...
), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of three features he completed that year. Like the other two , it is considered both socially and stylistically radical. Many American critics, including Village Voice critics Amy Taubin and J...
). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet "revisionism", comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
movie, Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar is a 1954 Republic Pictures Western film starring Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, and Scott Brady.The screenplay was based upon a novel by Roy Chanslor. Though credited to Philip Yordan, he was merely a front for the actual screenwriter, blacklistee Ben Maddow. ...
. In this sense, he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirilov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
Eventually, Véronique's once tender feelings toward Guillaume sour, and she uses a declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for what will prove to be a botched attempt to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966-67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network
Jeanson network
The Jeanson network was a group of French communist militants led by Francis Jeanson who helped Algerian National Liberation Front agents operating in the French metropolitan territory during the Algerian War. They were mainly involved in carrying money and papers for the Algerians and were...
which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.)
In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man. As in The Possessed, the revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell have proved unsuccessful.
Themes
Thematically, La Chinoise concerns the 1960s New LeftNew Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
, and especially the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
brought about by the Red Guards
Red Guards (China)
Red Guards were a mass movement of civilians, mostly students and other young people in the People's Republic of China , who were mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the Cultural Revolution.-Origins:...
under Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
in the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
.
Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become ironically fetishized as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project.
This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet
Parapet
A parapet is a wall-like barrier at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony or other structure. Where extending above a roof, it may simply be the portion of an exterior wall that continues above the line of the roof surface, or may be a continuation of a vertical feature beneath the roof such as a...
against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard seems to suggest that the students are at once serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change as well as confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction.
Responses
La Chinoise is not one of Godard's most widely seen films, and until 2008 was unavailable on DVD in North AmericaNorth America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
, Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
and Renata Adler
Renata Adler
Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and film critic.-Background and education:Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A...
have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.
Along with Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou is a 1965 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film is based on Obsession, a novel by Lionel White. It was Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature film, released between Alphaville and Masculin, féminin...
, Masculin, féminin
Masculin, féminin
Masculin, féminin is a 1966 black-and-white French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.The film stars French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a romantic young idealist and literary lion-wannabe who chases budding pop star, Madeleine...
, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of three features he completed that year. Like the other two , it is considered both socially and stylistically radical. Many American critics, including Village Voice critics Amy Taubin and J...
and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin is a French filmmaker and professor, best known for his work with Nouvelle Vague luminary Jean-Luc Godard during what is often referred to as Godard's "radical" period....
and the Dziga Vertov Group
Dziga Vertov Group
The Dziga Vertov Group was formed in 1968 by politically active filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their films are defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship...
, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.
External links
- Jean-Luc Godard et La Chinoise- an Essay
- MIM (maoist) review.
- Filmaster, La Chinoise La Chinoise '98 Video 48']. Anne Wiazemsky has a dialog with A. Bergala, A. de Baecque, spectators of MK2 Beaubourg (Paris) after the projection of La Chinoise (1998.5.10)
La Chinoise is a 1967 French political film
Political cinema
Political cinema in the narrow sense of the term is a cinema which portrays current or historical events or social conditions in a partisan way in order to inform or to agitate the spectator...
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
about young revolutionaries in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
Plot summary
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation, if not parody, of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel, The Possessed. In the novel, a group of five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students — three young men and two young women — belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named for the novel, Aden, Arabie, by Paul NizanPaul Nizan
Paul Nizan was a French philosopher and writer.-Biography:He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV...
).
The five members are Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky
Anne Wiazemsky
Princess Anne Wiazemsky is a French actress and novelist, of the Russian Rurikid family of Princes Vyazemsky-Counts Levashov. Through her mother, she is the granddaughter of François Mauriac. She appeared in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar and in Godard's films La Chinoise and Week End...
), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
), Yvonne (Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto was a French actress. A member of the same loose group of student radicals as Anne Wiazemsky, she first appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and would go on to appear in many of Godard's subsequent films, including La Chinoise, Week End, Le Gai Savoir,...
), Henri (Michel Semeniako) and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijin). A black student named Omar (Omar Diop), "Comrade X", also makes a brief appearance. The two main characters, Véronique and Guillaume Meister (the latter named after the titular hero of Goethe's famous 1795 bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization...
), discuss the issue of terroristic violence and the necessity of political assassination to achieve revolutionary goals. As an advocate of terrorism as a means of bringing about the revolution, Veronique roughly corresponds to the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Véronique and Guillaume are engaged in a personal relationship, with Véronique as the more committed, dominant partner.
Yvonne is a girl from the country who occasionally works as a prostitute for extra money to purchase consumer goods (much like Juliette Janson, the principal character in Godard's previous film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of three features he completed that year. Like the other two , it is considered both socially and stylistically radical. Many American critics, including Village Voice critics Amy Taubin and J...
). Yvonne does most of the housecleaning in the apartment and, together with Guillaume, she acts out satirical political skits protesting American imperialism in general, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
in particular.
Henri is eventually expelled from the group for his apparent backsliding Soviet "revisionism", comically suggested by his defense of the 1954 Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
movie, Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar
Johnny Guitar is a 1954 Republic Pictures Western film starring Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, and Scott Brady.The screenplay was based upon a novel by Roy Chanslor. Though credited to Philip Yordan, he was merely a front for the actual screenwriter, blacklistee Ben Maddow. ...
. In this sense, he loosely corresponds to the character of Ivan Shatov in The Possessed, a student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism.
Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirilov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide.
Eventually, Véronique's once tender feelings toward Guillaume sour, and she uses a declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for what will prove to be a botched attempt to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union during his official diplomatic visit to France.
On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique is engaged in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966-67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network
Jeanson network
The Jeanson network was a group of French communist militants led by Francis Jeanson who helped Algerian National Liberation Front agents operating in the French metropolitan territory during the Algerian War. They were mainly involved in carrying money and papers for the Algerians and were...
which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.)
In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However, this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond with the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow.
Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man. As in The Possessed, the revolutionary activities of the Aden Arabie cell have proved unsuccessful.
Themes
Thematically, La Chinoise concerns the 1960s New LeftNew Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
political interest in such historical and ongoing events as the legacy of Lenin's October 1917 Russian Revolution, the escalating U.S. military activities in the increasingly unstable region of southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
, and especially the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
brought about by the Red Guards
Red Guards (China)
Red Guards were a mass movement of civilians, mostly students and other young people in the People's Republic of China , who were mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the Cultural Revolution.-Origins:...
under Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
in the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
. The film also touches upon the rise of anti-humanist poststructuralism in French intellectual life by the mid-1960s, particularly the anti-empiricist ideas of the influential French Marxist, Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
.
Godard likewise portrays the role that certain objects and organizations — such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
, and other small leftist factions — play in the developing ideology and activities of the Aden Arabie cell. These objects and organizations appear to become ironically fetishized as entertainment products and fashion statements within a modern consumer-capitalist society — the very society which the student radicals hope to transform through their revolutionary project.
This paradox is illustrated in the various joke sunglasses that Guillaume wears (with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France and Britain each filling the frames) while reading Mao's Little Red Book, as well as the sight gag of having dozens of copies of the Little Red Book piled in mounds on the floor to literally create a defensive parapet
Parapet
A parapet is a wall-like barrier at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony or other structure. Where extending above a roof, it may simply be the portion of an exterior wall that continues above the line of the roof surface, or may be a continuation of a vertical feature beneath the roof such as a...
against the forces of capitalist imperialism, and a jaunty satirical pop song, "Mao-Mao" (sung by Claude Channes), heard on the soundtrack. Godard seems to suggest that the students are at once serious committed revolutionaries intent on bringing about major social change as well as confused bourgeois youngsters merely flirting with the notion of radical politics as a fashionable and exciting distraction.
Responses
La Chinoise is not one of Godard's most widely seen films, and until 2008 was unavailable on DVD in North AmericaNorth America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
, Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris is an American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.-Career:Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the U.S...
and Renata Adler
Renata Adler
Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and film critic.-Background and education:Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A...
have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.
Along with Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou is a 1965 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film is based on Obsession, a novel by Lionel White. It was Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature film, released between Alphaville and Masculin, féminin...
, Masculin, féminin
Masculin, féminin
Masculin, féminin is a 1966 black-and-white French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.The film stars French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a romantic young idealist and literary lion-wannabe who chases budding pop star, Madeleine...
, Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Two or Three Things I Know About Her is a French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of three features he completed that year. Like the other two , it is considered both socially and stylistically radical. Many American critics, including Village Voice critics Amy Taubin and J...
and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin is a French filmmaker and professor, best known for his work with Nouvelle Vague luminary Jean-Luc Godard during what is often referred to as Godard's "radical" period....
and the Dziga Vertov Group
Dziga Vertov Group
The Dziga Vertov Group was formed in 1968 by politically active filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Their films are defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship...
, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.
External links
- Jean-Luc Godard et La Chinoise- an Essay
- MIM (maoist) review.
- Filmaster, La Chinoise La Chinoise '98 Video 48']. Anne Wiazemsky has a dialog with A. Bergala, A. de Baecque, spectators of MK2 Beaubourg (Paris) after the projection of La Chinoise (1998.5.10)