Order your copy now: http://bit.ly/2AKKkqW

JeanLuc Godard’s ferocious run of ground breaking 1960s commercial features neared a terminus point as the filmmaker turned his gaze onto the nascent leftwing student organisations coalescing on university campuses across France and environs. The resulting film was his searing masterpiece La Chinoise — a mordant satire, pedagogical treatise, political tract, and popartwork“plus blood” rolled into one.

It’s early ’67 and Radio Peking’s in the air for the Aden Arabie Cell, a Maoist collective holed up in a sprawling flat on Paris’s rue de Miromesnil — the newly purchased actual residence of Godard and thenwife and star Anne Wiazemsky. Véronique (Wiazemsky) and her comrades, including JeanPierre Léaud (The 400 Blows, Out 1) and Juliet Berto (Out 1, Céline and Julie Go Boating) lead a series of discussions and performative skits addressing matters of French colonialism, American imperialism, and the broader conflict raging in Vietnam. A meditation on the efficacy of violent protest and militant counteraction played out between Wiazemsky (conducted by Godard via radioearpiece), and her thentutor philosopher Francis Jeanson gives way to a plot to assassinate the Soviet minister of culture — a redhanded point of no goingback on the path to complete radicalisation.

A tourdeforce of the primarypalette images — the ‘household images,’ perhaps — of Godard’s early career, La Chinoise serves as both cautionary tale and early sign of fascination with the political currents that would soon lead to the next period of JLG’s life and work. — “The revolution is not a dinnerparty.”


Like us on Facebook:   / arrowacademy  
Follow us on Twitter:   / academy_arrow  
Follow us on Instagram:   / arrowacademy