La Chinoise, written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967, and released that same year, is probably best remembered as Godard’s sharply prophetic vision of the student upheavals in Paris that next year, which history would label “May ‘68”.  The film itself has suffered from a lack of critical evaluation of its qualities, as well as a lack of attention in relation to other more prominent Godard works.  We’re here to address that imbalance, and not only discuss the film’s formal and ideological qualities, but also its relation to the student demonstrations of 1968 in France and Yugoslavia.

"La Chinoise" (1967), by Jean-Luc Godard

Historically speaking, Godard made this film in the beginning of 1967, and it was sandwiched between two other celebrated works by Godard: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle in 1966, and Weekend in late 1967.  This is one reason for the film’s lack of attention in Godard’s oeuvre.  2 ou 3 was Godard’s first decisive step towards the second phase in his career, a post-narrative phase; the film is explicitly documentary-styled and explicitly polemical and politically-engaged.  This proved to be a wildly-influential film, referenced by a generation of cineastes, and for many, one of Godard’s greatest achievements.  Weekend effectively closed the door on this first phase of Godard’s career, which he himself wrote off as bourgeois trifles.  This film is best known for including one of the most famous of Godard’s signature intertitles, which claims Weekend is the “end of cinema.”  This declaration not only ended Godard’s first narrative phase, but also in effect anticipates the end of the modernist era in filmmaking and also the end of the 60s, and its unique brand of revolutionary idealism.  But that revolutionary idealism gets a thorough probing in the film La Chinoise.

The closest ancestor for La Chinoise, with regards to subject, style, and spirit, is perhaps Godard’s 1966 film Masculin Féminin, 15 faits précis.  Not only do both films feature Jean-Pierre Léaud in a leading role, both films are preoccupied with the state of youth as a gauge for the general state of society.  As Godard himself said, this was, “a film on the idea of youth.  A philosophical idea, not a practical one.”  Those youth were, as famously dictated in another Godardian intertitle in Masculin Féminin, “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”  In the sense of this philosophical idea, the youth are the inheritors of Marx’s revolutionary sentiments while at the same time being the first consumer generation.  These are half-breed children.  Though Marxist (or more specifically in La Chinoise, Maoist), they are also literally the rebellious children of the bourgeoisie.  Certainly in Yugoslavia it was the children of Marx who occupied the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade in June 1968 and renamed it “Crveni univerzitet ‘Karl Marksa’” (Karl Marx Red University).  Both La Chinoise and Masculin Féminin are structured around piercing interviews with the youth depicted, and are largely reliant on documentary methodology and style.  As Godard said, “I wanted to use cinema to speak of youth, or else I wanted to use youth to speak of cinema.”  So the societal critique Godard projects is seen through the lens of the youth, which then becomes a meditation on the future of that society and the youth’s position in it.  La Chinoise is the societal analysis and revolutionary program that predicts and polemicizes for the events of May ’68 in Paris.

Lex De Bruijn as Kirilov

The film opens in a traditional Godardian manner, which is anti-traditional in relation to classical, mainstream narrative cinema.  That’s because this is revolutionary cinema, and as the Yugoslav filmmaker Želimir Žilnik once said, one can’t affect revolution with classical instruments.  The first intertitle spells out “a film in the making.”  This announces the work as an attempt at cinema, a film under construction in front of our very eyes.  The unfinished and rough nature of the film sustains this idea.  La Chinoise is a film that is falling apart at the seams.  This points towards the momentary societal disintegration and chaos of May ’68, and also prefigures Weekend and the “end of cinema” that it embraces.

The opening intertitle is rendered in blue, white, and red: the colors of the French flag, and also the primary color scheme of the film itself.  These primary colors make up the palette of the film, and also affix a close, critical view of the French Republic.  The apartment that the film takes place in features doors painted red and blue, and red chairs and lamps as part of the production design.  This apartment belonged to Godard himself, who lived there at the time with Anne Wiazemsky, the lead actress.

The opening intertitle is fractured, as words appear partially, and the revelation of meaning is delayed.  This is a typical strategy that Godard utilized repeatedly to frustrate the chain of significance in his films.  Though a polemical filmmaker, and an accomplished writer due to his years as a working film critic, Godard often problematized communication in his films.  Not only for the characters within the drama, but for the viewer trying to absorb it.  This reveals his alternating trust and mistrust in words as a primary form of expression.  As it is defined in the film by Léaud, words are “what is unsaid.”

The word “Les…” appears on screen, and that’s all we get of the title of the film.  No credits are featured, and no statement of authorship of the film.  This foreshadows the subsequent period of Godard’s career, in which individual authorship is forsaken in favor of working under the collective named the Dziga Vertov Group – which was chiefly a partnership with Jean-Pierre Gorin.  This rejection of authorship, or artistic ownership, aligns his film with a Marxist-Maoist stance on collectivism, while also rejecting the bourgeois “auteur theory” which he did so much to create and popularize during his time as a critic.  But this absence of credits and a title proper also strengthens the initial claim of “a film in the making.”  In some ways, La Chinoise is anti-cinema; a self-reflexive, self-destructive rejection of the dominant model and method of narrative filmmaking, which for Godard is just one more form of class oppression to be struggled against.

Unknown Artist - Subject to Copyright

La Chinoise features many formal transgressions that seem to work together to implode the film.  There are multiple dips to black, in which the image seems to die out repeatedly before being resuscitated; and the film uses other types of self-reflexive techniques to reveal its own status as a film, as a commodity.  The clapper board at the opening of a shot is often included in the shot, as well as frame markings etched directly onto the emulsion of the film.  We can hear Godard’s voice as he asks questions during interviews and also as he gives screen directions.  The actors in the film refer to the camera and the crew filming them, and we see images of the film workers as they shoot, most notably, Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer.  At one point he aims his camera directly at us, the viewers, making us into the subject of the interview and further blurring the boundary between reality and fiction.  This shot also self-reflexively refers to the similar shot at the opening of Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris, in which Coutard again turns the camera on us, the viewers, reversing the normal flow of spectatorship.  These techniques which expose the very process of “a film in the making” are also distancing techniques that mark Godard’s cinema as a highly Brechtian one.

Brecht is specifically mentioned in the film twice; the first time when the students are discussing their definition of real theater as a “reflection on reality, like Brecht or Shakespeare”; the second time when they discuss the dichotomy between the cinema of Lumière and that of Méliès.  The former is associated with the development of the documentary tradition in filmmaking, the latter with that of fiction.  However, one of the students argues that Lumière was more akin to a painter, one of the last great impressionists, a contemporary of Proust, and Méliès in fact was more akin to a documentarian, and an equal of Brecht.  This is because Méliès filmed recreations of reality, or current events.  The example given is of him filming the King of Yugoslavia’s visit to President Fallières, or the voyage to the moon, which then was not yet a current event, but was on the horizon, like La Chinoise and its prediction of May ’68.

The chief concern of this film is a depiction of the student’s search for a revolutionary ideal in society.  Because of the state of their own society, they find this ideal far away in Peking.  Like the Red Guard, these five students strive to create a utopia in the form of their own university in the apartment they live in.  They spend a great deal of their time delivering lectures to each other on culture, politics, and philosophy, and also studying.  Not satisfied with the quality of education they receive, nor the society that supports it, their aim quickly becomes a violent overthrow of that system.

Production Still from "La Chinoise" (1967)

These are most likely philosophy students from Nanterre University.  This is because Wiazemsky was actually one in reality.  There is an extended question and answer scene featuring her and one of her real professors of philosophy, Francis Jeanson.  They discuss the viability of her violent revolutionary plan, and this scene recalls a similar one in Godard’s 1962 film Vivre sa Vie, in which his then wife and lead actress Anna Karina entertains a long discussion on communication with Brice Parain, another philosopher.  Also, early in La Chinoise, one of the students comes home beaten and bloodied, and it is discovered that it happened at a meeting on the Cultural Revolution sponsored by the Sorbonne Marxist-Leninist group, who are labeled as “disgusting”.  During the 60s, Nanterre students exhibited an influence of anarchism, which explains the eagerness of the students in La Chinoise to resort to violence to affect change in society.  Also, May ’68 had its roots at Nanterre University, which was the site of the “Movement of 22 March” that same year, in which students and related comrades invaded an administration building to hold a meeting on class discrimination and educational issues.  This event soon flowered into the general unrest of May ’68, which lit a spark in Yugoslavia the following month, where students in Belgrade demonstrated in like manner.

Though the students in La Chinoise have the initial aim of closing their university through bombing, they soon settle on the alternative of assassinating the Soviet cultural minister, in town for a visit with the French cultural minister, André Malraux.  During the closing voice-over narration from Wiazemsky, she critically analyzes her revolutionary summer with the admission that she “thought she made a leap forward, but in fact it was only the first timid steps of a long march.”  The “leap forward” references Mao’s program of the same name in China, and the admission of her own shortcomings also function as a criticism of the same shortcomings in the Chinese program.  In any event, the “long march” is the revolutionary road yet to be traveled in the 60s, longer in hindsight now that the goals of that generation have yet to be realized.  Godard’s film investigates the virtues and faults of this revolutionary activity; and Wiazemsky’s last line of voice-over includes the phrase, “it’s fiction, but it brought me closer to reality.”  This statement summarizes Godard’s film, which blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, as it creeps ever closer to bringing the actuality of May ’68 to fruition.