Comments on: Jean-Luc GODARD et La Chinoise

By: s

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:45:58 +0000

This film took another meaning for me once I read about the Situationist International movement in Paris. I always felt like I didn’t understand what Goddard wanted, in terms of how should we look at the characters, and this helped me realize that I was looking in the wrong places.

By: John

John — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:08:51 +0000

Gaurab: I took it to mean that the young man (and French youth generally) being torn between his mother (and the politics that such a figure represents) and the whore (likewise).

By: Gaurab

Gaurab — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:46:15 +0000

I liked the movie but could not get the facts in the end. Firstly the girl mistook in killing . Was it just a fiction or reality?
Secondly what was Godard trying to tell by showing one old woman and a girl knocking and then undessing inside a glass box?

By: L D D

L D D — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:51:29 +0000

More than any other film, La Chinoise represents Godard’s attempt to destroy cinema by reducing it, in Brechtian spirit, to pure text. From one perspective, Godard’s cinema is so brilliant precisely because he was so uncomfortable with the illusory power of the image and so much at home, in Brechtian spirit, with text. I think more important than trying to understand a “message” or “theme” in La Chinoise is the appreciation of the film as an act of reading. No matter what the political stance of the film–and there may not be one (i.e. there may not be JUST one), given that any text is polysemous and can be read in multiple ways–the film forces us to read it rather than view it. In this respect it is unlike any other film.

By: Gautam

Gautam — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:03:55 +0000

Thank you Nitesh for sharing your thoughts with us! I appreciate it very much!

By: nitesh

nitesh — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:25:54 +0000

The sequence where Jean Pierre Leaud wipes out the names of each great man he admires only to be confronted and left with Brecht speaks volume regarding the nature of the film and Godard’s basic dialectic. I think it’s important to understand that the film came in at an important juncture (a year before the May 1968 event) and little before Goddard’s final proclamation and adieu to filmmaking: Weekend. La Chinoise is more a formalist experiment in true Godardaidan form, since it’s seriously marks his departure from his beloved Hollywood heroes into more of his strand into political commitment and Maoism. Some things like his thematic color use of primary colors: red, blue and white, that he largely owes to his influence to the abstract painter Nicolas De Stael, and even the lateral tracking shot you talk about, frequently used in his films, often flattens the surface and creates a certain void- the loss of space(deep).From La Chinoise Godard completely moved away from his idea of having any form of necessity to tell, something one could witness slowly forming in his in former works before this film. For eg: As you put.

Sometimes, the viewer can even hear the faint voice of Jean-Luc Godard off-screen posing a few questions at his subjects and indeed there is a fantastic shot of Raoul Courtard filming these “interviews”. The second narrative technique is the traditional cinematic technique of recording the characters while they converse, walk around and do the things that they do. Godard cleverly juxtaposes both these seemingly unrelated techniques with colourful typography to create somewhat of a collage

This particular Godardian tract can be seen in development form the early stages of his career, I presume due to his fascination with not only Rossellini but also Jean Rouch, a la “Cinema Verite”. One of the fascinating usages of this particular self-reflexive, brechaitan technique can be witnessed in Masculin and Feminin during the interview of the Miss Paris. It is like Godard from this film onwards and his return in the 80s to narrative cinema (according to pure Godard standard) slowly shifted his quest for doubts, images, and obviously plenty of philosophical musing, but the underlying fact was that in 60s it was playful and resonated with the overall nature of counterculture, but by the 70s and return to 80s its somewhat all seemed to hard to take. In this context La Chinoise is a remarkable film since it documents the overall nature and preoccupation of the culture.

As the late and great Serge Daney wrote in his essay on GODARDIAN PEDAGOGY:

School, we said, is the good place (where you make progress and from which you must move on) as opposed to the cinema (the bad place where you regress and never move on).

But,La Chinoise brought in the movement for Godard and less for Cinema( since it has never quite moved on) , and remains and important and landmark film.