The Chinese
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The Chinese |
| Original title | La chinoise |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1967 |
| length | 96 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jean-Luc Godard |
| script | Jean-Luc Godard |
| production | Henri Bérard |
| music |
Pierre Degeyter Michel Legrand Franz Schubert Karlheinz Stockhausen Antonio Vivaldi |
| camera | Raoul Coutard |
| cut |
Delphine Desfons Agnès Guillemot |
| occupation | |
| |
The Chinese is a French feature film by Jean-Luc Godard that has been heavily influenced by the Cultural Revolution that has raged in China since 1966 . It is loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel The Demons .
action
As is often the case with Godard's works from the late 1960s, this film does not have a plot in the classical sense, but is theses-like and experimentally designed in terms of staging and color technology. At the center of the action are five young people who have come together to form a municipality. They share their dissatisfaction with the prevailing social and political conditions, and they believe they can put this into practice with the help of Mao's theses and in an effort to create a pure socialism that transcends the system.
The protagonists are the actor Guillaume, the philosophy student Véronique, the Soviet painter Kirilov, the casual whore Yvonne and Henri, a student of natural sciences. In lively sessions they analyze current social problems, quote Marx and Mao, discuss socialism and the Vietnam War, as well as the need to use force in the struggle against the establishment. But their striking worldview and their own inability let the grandiose plans all fail. Guillaume's idea of a “socialist theater” based on the model of the Chinese Cultural Revolution turns out to be unfeasible, Kirilov kills himself, and the terrorist action planned as a liberation measure against the Soviet Minister of Culture, in which Véronique is involved, fails in a surrealistic and absurd way: due to When turning a dial, Véronique comes across a door other than the intended one and shoots the wrong person.
Production notes
The Chinese premiered on August 30, 1967 in Paris and ran in Germany on January 18, 1968.
At the Venice Film Festival in 1967 the film received the Special Jury Prize. Godard was also nominated for the Golden Lion.
Reviews
“Now a Godard film is coming to German cinemas that can be understood in Paris as in Berlin, in New York as in Beijing:" La Chinoise "(The Chinese), made before" Week-End ", depicts life and speech in a commune of French young Maoists. When Chairman Mao's thoughts became a student bestseller at the beginning of 1967 ... Godard had designed the scenario ... "La Chinoise" is the name of the main character of a commune of five who are driving from Mao meditation to revolutionary activity. With the murder of a Soviet cultural functionary named Scholokhov "who is staying in Paris to fraternize, revisionism is to be dealt a first blow. The lot for the terrorist act falls on the" Chinese woman ", daughter of a banker from the French provinces. (...) Godard works, as is usually the case, with reportage technology, assembling facts and fiction, hack cuts create the impression of a cinema interruptum, and Godard's loyal camera comrade Raoul Coutard builds his fashionable color aesthetic on the red of the Mao Bible that is always at hand. Talking and smoking are the main activities of the Communards, they share about capitalism, revisionism, Brecht and Vietnam, and Godard presents the minutes without reflection. "La Chinoise", both naive and artificial, offers no analysis, but at best material for it - Fragments of a great confusion. "
Reclam's film guide said: “Godard developed a new form of cinematic expression here, which he later varied and occasionally overused in films like Le gai savoir and One plus one . Here, however, it still looks fresh and exciting. The usual narrative structure is broken up. Images and scenes no longer derive their meaning from the context of a story, they are themselves direct statements. And what is depicted is constantly being exposed as fiction, as “only” cinematic reality. (...) In the color scheme, the red of the “Mao Bible” becomes a design element. Play on words in the text and in the inserts ... highlight the context and the position of the actors and the director. "
In the lexicon of international films it is written: "The motto for the film could be a slogan that is written on a wall:" We have to contrast blurred thoughts with clear images ". The way in which the relationship between art and politics is examined is reminiscent of Brecht's didactic pieces, whereby the film is designed as a "film in the making". In his protests, Godard seems to foresee the student unrest of May 1968. The use of the colors, among which the red of the Mao Bibles dominates, is particularly effective. "
Filmrezensions.de says: “ La Chinoise is a polyphonic film that formally breaks with all common narrative traditions. Godard quotes, assembles, collages and comments from the fields of politics and culture that the viewer sometimes gets dizzy. In doing so, he creates a unity of form and content, for example the French filmmaker quotes comics, while his film language uses the language of comics. Godard plays the primary colors yellow, (but above all) blue and red and reflects on them in the film. (...) The attack on the bourgeoisie is underpinned by the red Mao books, which are representative of the entire Marxist-Leninist theory. In the film, the Mao books serve as a barricade, which suggests that the attackers are theoretically holed up behind the Maoist texts. Historically, Godard's fictional film revolution is simply visionary because a year later, in May / June 1968, a group of revolutionary students from Nanterre actually spearheaded the unsuccessful real revolution. Obviously Godard imitates the Brechtian theater in La Chinoise . "
literature
- Maurice Bessy, Raymond Chirat, André Bernard: Histoire du cinéma français. Encyclopédie des Films 1966–1970. (with photos for each film) Éditions Pygmalion, Paris 1992, ISBN 2-85704-379-1 , p. 181.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Reclams Filmführer, by Dieter Krusche, collaboration: Jürgen Labenski. P. 256. Stuttgart 1973.
- ↑ The Chinese. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 7, 2015 .
- ↑ The Chinese on filmrezensions.de
Web links
- The Chinese in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Chinese essay in Der Spiegel on February 5, 1968