Note on Godard's "La Chinoise"

In this film, if you look closely, you can see that Godard at some level believes far less in radical politics than art. Certain ideas of theater and cinema are expressed in the film at oblique angles to the political diatribes. One of these has stood the test of time much better than the other. See over the course of his career, Godard's anti-capitalism and his interrogation of the relationship between art, or his own practice of it, and the society he lives in and in some ways doesn't like very much at all, is complex and interesting. And this has been a constant in his work from the beginning. Marxism failed to capture it. In fact, this is rather clear in La Chinoise at least when the film is viewed at some distance. It's also clear in the Dziga-Vertov films made after Le Gai Savoir, which are abysmal and only saved from complete boredom by hints of the filmmaker's attempts to reflect from a point of view that belongs as much to the artist as to the ideological militant. La Chinoise remains a brilliant film for the many ideas it throws out in its satire. The young militant Godard would soon marry and whose posturings presage the student revolt that emerged a year later after starting at the very school where both she and the character she plays in the film were studying philosophy, come across less well than her actor boyfriend played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, one of Godard's alter egos. Like Godard himself, Guillaume is searching for a politics and a form of art that will realize it. Godard apparently found enchanting the ideas he essentially parodies in the behavior of the young militants. That is because, like Léaud's Guillaume, he is looking in this for something. Some of it is thematically simplistic and flat, and the film exploits this in an aesthetics of painterly tricolorism and flatness of image. The film is knowingly brilliant in spite of and because of the poses it stages in its mise-en-scène, and, as always in Godard, juxtaposes. And what better to juxtapose than a pose, or to place in a montage than something mise-en-scène or staged? The film fails as politics, is fascinating as art, and it clearly knows that and informs us of it. Godard the filmmaker is way ahead of where you think he is, and sometimes of where he thinks he is. Far from being a militant who (ridiculously) puts theories into action, he is an artist who experiments with them, who examines and makes us look at them. The revolution will not be televised, but de- and re-constructed as an art film. Its lessons accordingly do not inform us but call into question what they present. The film was fated at the time to be misunderstood by its own seeming sincerity. But as a work of art about supposedly revolutionary thought and posturing, it remains brilliant, and poorly understood. It is satire, but both its denunciations and its sincerity, which seemingly contradict each other, are investigated, interrogated, and shown.