Word: godards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...like Godard's kind of stuff over here in America. We say: let's reach the people, let's get the people on the streets. So when we Americans make movies with radical points of view, we aim to reach the masses. Make it so they can understand it, we say. Well, what do they understand? Oh, Grapes of Wrath. Salt of the Earth. On the Waterfront, Catch 22, Or, Hunger: U. S. A. Maybe, Newsreel, Sure, it looks like Hollywood. Sure it looks like CBS. But then Hollywood and CBS reach a lot of people...
...Godard's "political" films address themselves to the formal convergence of CBS and Newsreel. He argues that such affinities are by no means coincidental, but instead arise from an identical purpose-the mere conveyance of information. Godard says it's not what you know, but how you come to know it; not information, but the way you process it, Regardless of its source-CBS or its Newsreel counterpart-information is "neutrally" transmitted to the same society, where the images are analyzed according to the same set of assumptions. You can't tell a picture of a peasant in a Newsreel...
...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...