"Chinese Girl" seems to take our readers back to the distant "Cultural Revolution" era. But to think that this film is just a naive simulation of the "unprecedented" "revolution" by Westerners is to greatly underestimate its impact.
This film is Godard's 14th feature film. Prior to this, as one of the main generals of the "New Wave", he has been internationally renowned for his business cards such as "Exhausted", "Little Soldier", "Do As You Want", "I Know A Little About Her" and "Mad Man Biello" Cinema. "Chinese Girl" can be regarded as the beginning of his second creative stage, the so-called "politicization of films", followed by Pravda, Dongfeng, Vladimir and Rosa, British The Voice", "Everything Goes Well", etc. are all products of this "politicization", and they are all film illustrations of the extreme "left" political and social trends that were all the rage in Western intellectual circles at that time.
However, "Chinese Girl" has its own special meaning. It appeared on the eve of the "May Storm" in France in 1968, and was not only called "a preview of the 'May storm'", but also highly praised by some celebrities in French academia. The famous poet Louis Aragon wrote a famous paper entitled "On Collage", praising Godard's "movie collage" technique used in this film as a new creation; the international film academia Henri Langlois, the predecessor and director of the French Film Archive, in his preface to Georges Sadour's History of World Cinema, proposed that the entire history of film should be written as "before Godard" and "after Godard". Argument for division.
Langlois's apparently exaggerated assessment of Godard should be said to be for a reason. During the ten years when our country was almost completely isolated from the outside world, Godard was indeed a man of influence in the international film circle. According to relevant data, the number of comments on Godard in film and magazines published in various countries was only slightly second to that of Chappe. Lin and Eisenstein's comments. Even the film newspapers of the Soviet Union at that time published articles in a series of heated debates on his ideological views and artistic expression, and "Chinese Girl" was even criticized as a black specimen of "anti-Sovietism". Nonetheless, the famous director Utkiewicz, who first set the tone for the above-mentioned commentary, affirmed that it was "the pinnacle of the artist's entire creative path" and said that it "has a great impact on the entire contemporary film art, especially for young people in developing countries." The influence of filmmakers is indisputable."
So, how to understand Langlois's distinction between "before Godard" and "after Godard" and what Utkiewicz called "the undisputed influence on the entire contemporary art of cinema..."?
As far as the "New Wave" period is concerned, Godard has obviously dealt a heavier blow to the traditional form of film narrative than Astlück, Melville, Chabrol or Truffaut, undermining the entire They also went further than they did in terms of film conventions. The psychological motives of the protagonists' actions are thrown out of the sky, the illogicality of their actions is taken as the benchmark, and the entire montage of thought structures is uncompromisingly re-examined. Not the parallel montage pioneered by Griffith, the rational and metaphorical montage introduced by Eisenstein, or Vertov's poetic emphasis, but the dramatic leaps and explosive transitions of the montage process that make Godard's film It is astoundingly different from the films of all his contemporaries. For example, a person who is driving behind the wheel of a car can, without any connection and grounds, be joined with a shot of the same character teasing the skirt of a girl strolling in the Elysée Palace ("Exhaustion"). Exhausted, 1959), and when filming the actors' long dialogues, they can only shoot their backs without showing their faces once ("Do whatever you want", 1962). Minor things are highlighted as substantive, and major things are ignored. As for the random use of lengthy monologues of others that have nothing to do with the plot and theme, it is even more common in his films.
This editing technique known as "jump connection" or "hard connection" has been hailed by Western critics as a great creation of Godard. However, while people talk about his "form innovation", they often ignore the evolution of his ideas.
As early as the early 1950s, Godard published a paper entitled "The Cinema that Creates Politics", arguing that "now only Russia has an image that reflects its destiny on its own screen". Two years later, "What is a Movie?" " in the article, he believes that the film "first and foremost to express good feelings." Regarding the relationship between content and form, he also expressed a fairly correct opinion: "Content must precede form and dominate form. If content is false, form must also be the same." And he believes that "the first talent in film A hallmark is to give meaning to what is happening in front of the camera more than the camera itself", answering the question of "why" first and then "how". He subsequently declared himself not only a Marxist, but a "true Marxist-Leninist".
After the mid-1960s, the class contradictions in Western capitalist society have intensified, and the long-standing anarchist ideology and "New Marxism" have merged into a powerful "new Marxism" in the intellectual circles under this specific social and political condition. The “Leftist” trend of thought has had a certain shocking effect on the basis of capital’s rule, but it has little to do with the real struggle of the working class and its political parties. Godard was a prominent representative of this trend in the French film industry. He was keenly aware of the various problems faced by French society at that time, but the solutions he proposed were obviously naive.
In "Chinese Girl", Godard attempts to copy a set of practices from China's "Cultural Revolution" to France. "Oppose American imperialism", "oppose Soviet revisionism", "support Vietnam's struggle", etc., were the slogans we often shouted in China at that time; claiming to blow up the University of Paris, the Louvre and the Comédie de France, and our Red Guards' "" Destroying the Four Olds” and destroying precious cultural relics and monuments are exactly the same; taking terrorist actions such as assassination is nothing compared to the massacre of innocent people and the murder of the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries during the “Cultural Revolution”; Cultural celebrities in history, in our era of "overthrowing the reactionary academic authority" and even "Kong's second child" "overturned to the ground and stepped on a foot", are even more of a problem.
Veronica's conversation in the carriage with union leaders and reporters from "Contemporary" magazine is the best way to show the author's thoughts at this time. When talking about the topic of "the class nature of culture", Veronica cites the recent exhibition of Egyptian pharaohs' relics that opened in Paris as an example. In her view, the workers rushed to see the exhibition, and because of the gold displayed there, the workers also became bourgeois. We learned from the conversation that the reporter opposed terrorist activities in the Algerian war in principle, but admired Zamilia, the female revolutionary who threw a bomb in the cafe. Veronica immediately said that bombs should also be thrown at various universities. Her interlocutors shrugged this off, saying that behind Zamilia stood the people defending her independence. However, Dagor's "Chinese girl" claims that she is also maintaining her independence, and has spent two full years studying the issue of terrorism; those young nihilists in Russia also kept throwing bombs at first, That led to the success of the October Revolution. The reporter tried to retort that the situation in Tsarist Russia could not be mechanically compared with the situation in France today, and that the line devised by Veronica seemed unpromising to him. But nothing could stop the fanatic girl. Immediately after, she put the declaration of the assassination into action.
It can be seen that Godard did not "completely accept the influence of China's "Cultural Revolution" as some comments said here, but has the European nihilism and anarchism that have lasted for nearly a century as its far-reaching roots. of.
The extreme "left" trend of thought in China's "Cultural Revolution" obviously contributed to this. There is a scene in Godard's "East Wind" shortly afterward: a female college student wearing deep glasses is sitting under a tree reading a book, her two male classmates have a sickle in one hand and a hammer in the other, "Knock out your bourgeois ideas!" from his mouth. In the film Vladimir and Rosa, the two pioneers of the proletarian revolution, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, Godard asks a pregnant young woman to stand at a fork in the road. There are road signs of "socialism" and "capitalism" on the side of the road, meaning of course which way to choose, and then to give birth to the child. In "Everything Goes Well", which seemed to put an end to his "politicization of the film", the slaughterhouse workers revolted because of the unbearable poor labor conditions, and ended in failure due to the suppression by the authorities. All of these are enough to explain some "European characteristics" of his ideological views, and also show that his opposition to capitalism and support for socialism is still sincere. But he, like many representatives of the "New Left", was deeply dissatisfied with and sharply criticized the reality of capitalism on the one hand, but did not understand what real socialism was on the other hand.
Godard's anti-film tradition in the "New Wave" period and his anti-capitalist tradition in the "movie politicization" period are extremely attractive to young filmmakers in developing countries, especially in Latin America and Africa. The emergence of "new films" or "new waves" in these countries, in addition to their own social conditions and other factors, undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the ideological tendencies and expressions revealed in Godard's films. Utkiewicz's "undisputed impact" does not appear to be an exaggeration. French progressive film critic Anabery also noted Godard's "strong influence" on many young filmmakers in the Third World.
Finally, let's talk about the "movie collage" technique advocated by Aragon. "Collage" appeared in painting at the beginning of this century. It introduces objects or materials from the real world into the painting, thus putting a question mark on the whole painting, even if one suspects that the world represented in the painting is fake. "Collage" is an acknowledgment of the artist's inimitableness, and at the same time a starting point for a new structure of painting, that is, from the fact that the artist refuses to imitate. The use of 'collage' is a unique way for the artist to express his desperation, while at the same time rethinking the world he represents. Aragon, speaking of the contemporary significance of this invention and of its resemblance to recent phenomena in other fields of art, argues that "the 'film collage' method characteristic of Godard's films is surprisingly close to it. ". He not only defended the accusations that Godard's films were "patchwork" and "searching for chapters and excerpts", but also believed that the "new novel structure" of "Chinese Girl" was one of his great inventions. The sex subtitle is refreshing to divide the film into chapters.
Many scenes in the film, especially the use of the flags of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United Kingdom to replace the lenses of Girome's glasses, the "American paper tiger" and the Kremlin's hotline, the toy plane going back and forth around Ivona Hovering, subtitles, slogans, character portraits, etc. are constantly interspersed in the process of the plot, which can be said to have reached the extreme of "collage". This is unacceptable to the general audience, but in Godard's mind, it is a clever use of Brecht's "distancing effect". "Chinese Girl" is destined to not have many audiences, but it has left a rather distinctive page in the history of world cinema.
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