Godard’s practice of this period has been equated to terrorism by Serge Daney and condemned as nihilistic and iconoclastic by Colin MacCabe. See Serge Daney’s “Le thérrorisé (Pédagogie godardienne),”Cahiers du Cinéma nos. 262–263 (January 1976): 32–39, special issue on five essays about Numéro Deux by Godard; and Colin MacCabe,Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: British Film Institute/Macllian, 1980). See also Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo. (Paris: La Différence, 1990); and Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Le Vent d’est” in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), 79–91.
What Is To Be Done?, printable edition produced by Chris Russell for the Marxist Internet Archive, 46. See →.
It must be noted, echoing David Caute, that in France the term “intellectual” designates a moral-political vocation that was affirmed during the critical climate of the Dreyfus affair, epitomized by Emile Zola’s famous letter “J’accuse.” According to the PCF’s definition, the notion of “intellectual” embraces writers, philosophers, scientists, scholars, artists, and people in the performing arts and liberal professions. In short, it designates society’s disseminators of ideas. See David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 12.
André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, édition complète (Paris: France Loisirs, 1962), 248.
See Michel Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.
Frederic Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” Social Text 9/10 (Spring–Summer 1984): 182.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review vol. 1, no. 62 (July–August 1970): 83–96. In an early version of this text, Benjamin cited the following quote from Trotsky but crossed it out before publication: “When enlightened pacifists undertake to abolish war by means of rationalist arguments, they are simply ridiculous. When the armed masses start to take up the arguments of Reason against War, however, this signifies the end of War.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, 362.) Trotsky advances two regimes of enunciation here: the speech of “enlightened” intellectuals, made up of “rationalist arguments” based on knowledge and theory; and the speech of the masses, based on Reason or causal explanations, that is, based on practice.
In linguistics, the suffix “-eme” indicates a structural unit of some kind in the lexicon, grammar, and phonology of languages. As Fredric Jameson has demonstrated, the leftist ideologemes mentioned here are part of a materialist theoretical practice that was derived from certain readings and practices of Marxism in the Sixties. See “Periodizing the Sixties,” 195–196.
André Breton, “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” trans. Dwight MacDonald, in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd edition, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 533. Originally published in Partisan Review vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 1938): 49–53.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Pingaud, and Dionys Mascolo, Du rôle de l’intellectuel dans le mouvement révolutionnaire (Paris: Le terrain vague, 1971); and Sartre’s three conferences held in Kyoto, Japan in 1965, published inSituations, VIII Autour de 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
La Cause du people along with J’accuse were journals directly linked to the Proletarian Left, a party supported by Sartre and other prominent intellectuals. It dissolved in 1973 due to internal conflicts.
Interview with Godard by Marlene Belilos, Michel Boujut, Jean-Claude Deschamps, and Pierre-Henri Zoller, first published inPolitique Hebdo, nos. 26–27 (April 1972); reprinted in Godard,Godard par Godard (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998), 374.
In The Family Idiot (1974), his multi-volume work on Flaubert, Sartre combines existentialism and social critique to explore the situation of Flaubert in 1840, when the young writer wrestled with the opposing legacies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism: truth versus beauty, communication and the enlightening of others versus literature. Sartre studied Flaubert as part of his attempt to resolve the contradictions between bourgeois ideology and literature, searching for a classless writing, that is, writing as a matter of “se déclasser,” or expelling oneself from the bourgeois class. For Sartre, in Flaubert and in his own intellectual and political practice the autonomy of art is a matter of how a writer’s work should be understood in relation to his life and to the historical forces and social conditions that shape a writer’s life. See Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, vol. 5 (Chicago: The University Press, 1993); and Graham Good and T.H. Adamowski, “Sartre’s Flaubert, Flaubert’s Sartre,” review of Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille, vol. 3, in NOVEL: A Forum on Fictionvol. 7, no. 2 (Winter 1974), 175–186.
Sartre’s position is similar to Barthes’s position on the “author function.” This is a conception of authorship based on depersonalization in favor of subjectivity in writing, implying that there is an intransitive relationship between reality and fiction. Thus, the writer function implies a subject separate from the real subject that becomes manifest in the here and now of the reader encountering the text.
What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtam (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), 5. First published in France in 1947.
See Pierre Bourdieu, “Sartre, l’invention de l’intellectuel total,”Libération, March 31, 1983.
Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine, founded in the 1960s by Yasser Arafat.
Quote from Manifeste: “En literature et en art, lutter sur deux fronts. Le front politique et le front artistique, c’est l’étape actuelle, et il faut apprendre a résoudre les contradictions entre ces deux fronts.” Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard Documents, ed. Nicole Brenez et. al. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 138.
Many famous intellectuals were associated with the Maoists, who referred to these intellectuals as fellow travelers or “democrats.” Among them were Sartre (who lent his name to the directorship of La Cause du peuple), Simone de Beauvoir, Marin Karmitz, Katia Kaupp, Mariella Righini, Alexandre Astruc, Agnes Varda, and Gérard Fromanger, among others. See Christophe Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes: La folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plon, 1996), 198.
For an account of Godard’s involvement with the French leftist press during his DVG period, see Michael Witt, “Godard dans la presse d’extrême gauche” in Jean-Luc Godard Documents, 165–177.
Jean-Pierre Gorin and Godard met in 1966 while Godard was filming La Chinoise, at a time when Gorin was associated with the Marxist-Leninist movement Union de Jeunes Communistes Marxistes-Leninistes (UJCm-l) at the École Normale Supérieure. It is said that after the events of May ’68, Godard sought to work with someone who was not a filmmaker. Legend has it that he and Gorin met again while attending a meeting of the États Généraux de Cinéma, a collective of militant French filmmakers founded during the events of ‘68. (For more information on the États Généraux assembly, see Cahiers du Cinéma [September 1968]; and Silvia Harvey’s account in May ’68 and Film Culture &leftbracket;London: British Film Institute, 1978&rightbracket;). Dissatisfied with the eclecticism reigning in the États Généraux, Godard and Gorin fled the meeting and founded the Dziga Vertov Group. According to David Faroult, Godard filmed two DVG films with Jean-Henri Roger: British Sounds and Pravda, both in 1969. In Faroult’s account, Gorin entered the picture that same year when he collaborated with Godard on the DVG manifesto and the filming of Le Vent d’est in Italy. (See Faroult, “Never More Godard,” Jean-Luc Godard Documents, 123.) Other militants who gravitated toward DVG included Gérard Martin, Nathalie Billard, and Armand Marco. According to Julia Lesage, Pravda was filmed in Prague with Jean-Henri Roger and Paul Burron. (See Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics,” Jump Cut 23 &leftbracket;April 1983&rightbracket;.)
Interview with Godard by Marlene Belilos, Michel Boujut, Jean-Claude Deschamps, and Pierre-Henri Zoller, ibid.
Cinéthique 5 (September–October 1969): 14.
See the original manuscript of “Quoi Faire?,” reproduced in Jean-Luc Godard Documents, 145–151.
For an extremely detailed account of the “political lines” followed by DVG in Pravda, Le Vent d’est and Lotte in Italia, see Gérard Le Blanc, “Sur trois films du Dziga Vertov Group,” VH 101 6 (September 1972). According to Le Blanc, the main political line that shaped DVG’s overall practice was theoricism, characterized by abstract analyses of real contradictions in social formations. Furthermore, each individual film was dominated by an additional political line. Pravda was dominated by “dogmatic spontaneism,” a political line followed by students who had quit the PCML-F (Partie Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste Français), objecting to its revisionism. Le Vent d’est was dominated by “right wing opportunism,” a line followed by those who tried to maintain “the organizations” (the UJC-ml) that attempted to take over the student movement in May ’68. Lotte in Italia was dominated by “leftist opportunism,” or the first line of the Proletarian Left.
For detailed descriptions of DVG’s films see Peter Wollen, “Godard and counter cinema: Vent d'est” and Julia Lesage, “Tout va bien and Coup pour Coup: Radical French Cinema in Context,”Cineaste vol. 5, no. 3 (Summer 1972); David Faroult, “Never More Godard,” ibid.; James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution(Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 1975); and Gérard Le Blanc and David Faroult, Mai 68 ou le cinéma en suspense (Paris: Syllepse, 1998).
See Mao Tse-Tung, “On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice, between Knowing and Doing,” and “On Contradiction” in On Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 52–102; also available at →.
To be continued in “Between Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Militant Filmmaking’ (1967-1974), Part II.”