Word: godard
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...