Word: godards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...simply caught, not structured. Bertolucci is too busy using facile Freudianisms to account for Paul's aggression and Jeanne's passivity, or emphasizing yet another in a long chain of random perversities (like Mother's loves for Father's boots). He does throw in a welcome parody of Godard and his films, all hollow Hollywood-loving childishness, abetted by the eternally adolescent actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. But even its welcome is soon worn out. And the last tango itself is pathetic: painted Fellini faces contort, and toothpick bodies sway on a dance floor as Paul tries to impress Jeanne...
HARVARD EPWORTH CHURCH. "One Week" by Buster Keaton, "Bondu Saved from Drowning" by Jean Renoir, March 1, 7:30, $1, Far From Vietnam, edited by Chris Marker from footage given to him by Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Renais, Agnes Varda, Joris Iven, and other, March 4, 7:30, free-sponsored by Institute of Politics. "The Boat" by Buster Keaton (1921), "Toni," by Jean Renoir (1935), March...