Projecting a Foreign Ideology: Sekula/Godard/Vienet
Wednesday March 31th - 7PM
e-flux
41 Essex Street
New York, NY
This is the third of three Jean-Luc Godard film screenings* e-flux has presented around its repertory/revival exhibition of Allan Sekula's This Ain't China (1974), which runs from February 20th through April 3rd. We have added to the bill Rene Vienet's Mao by Mao (1977), and an open discussion featuring McKenzie Wark.
In all works the artists deal with the spectre of China, and the promise and legacy of Maoism; issues by no means outdated, and perhaps now more relevant than ever. This idea of a (Marxist) internationalism has come up in a number of our screenings*, as we continue to debate what solidarity with both foreign and past struggles might mean. Further, how our artists and cultural producers might support and mediate such activity, and with what goals--be it sympathetic and engaged reportage; bourgeois travelogue; partisan propaganda; or fictionalized Brechtian posturing.
Jean-Luc Godard's film, the second produced by the Dziga-Vertov Group, was commissioned for British television, but rejected for broadcast (a fate shared with a few other films from this era of his career). It was distributed in the United States as See You at Mao, but has been generally out of distribution on any format for over three decades.
Rene Vienet's film is a compilation film/(auto)biography, using only found archival and newsreel footage of Mao, paired with a narration edited together from Mao's own writings. It was released the year after Mao's death in 1976. It has been previously available in the United States on 16mm and VHS for educational institutions, but is largely forgotten and unknown.
Vienet (1944-) is best known here as a member of the Situationists; the author of one of the first published accounts of May 68, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement (1968); and for his debut film, Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973). Vienet's third and final feature film, Peking Duck Soup, also released in 1977, deals as well with the history of Maoist China. Writing about Godard in "The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art" (1967), Vienet says: "...it’s all really just banalities. But Godard, the most famous Swiss Maoist, will never be able to understand them. He might well, as is his usual practice, coopt the above--lift a word from it or an idea like that concerning filmed advertisements--but he will never be capable of anything but brandishing little novelties picked up elsewhere: images or star words of the era, which definitely have a resonance, but one he can’t grasp (Bonnot, worker, Marx, made in USA, Pierrot le Fou, Debord, poetry, etc.). He really is a child of Mao and Coca-Cola."
--Mao by Mao - Francis Deron, Rene Vienet, Wu Zingming, 1977, 28 minutes
--British Sounds (See You at Mao) - Jean-Luc Godard, 1969, 50 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes | Digital Projection
Discussion with:
--McKenzie Wark - author, professor; wrote 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (2008); and the introduction to Guy Debord's Correspondence, 1957-1960 (2008).
Co-curated with Monika Szewczyk
e-flux
(Godard's film was released as part of a 4DVD set (2008, region 2) put out by Intermedio in Spain. We have previously screened Pennebaker's film on Godard, One PM (1970); the Dziga-Vertov Group film Vladimir and Rosa (1970); and Godard/Gorin/Mieville's Ici et Ailleurs (1974). We have also screened part 3 of Michelangelo Antonioni's film on China, Chung Kuo (1972), Aleksandr Medvedkin's Night Over China (1971), and Frontier Films' China Strikes Back (1937).)
*Previous screenings in the series featured Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1967) on March 3rd, and Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Tout va Bien (1972) on March 17th. This missing link might be Godard and Gorin's Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972), the companion to Tout va Bien. Letter to Jane is an essay film about photography, representation, and politics which, like British Sounds and One PM, is in English.
*On this subject we have screened the films by Godard mentioned above; the films on China mentioned above; Agnes Varda's Salut les cubains (1963) on July 16th; Peter Greenaway's Death in the Seine (1989) on July 18th; Kenneth Richter and Claude Lelouch's films on Iran (1953 & 1971) on July 27th; Pier Paolo Pasolini's La Rabbia (1963) & Seeking Locations in Palestine (1965) on July 28th; the US Army's The Crime of Korea (1950) & Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' Cunnilingus in North Korea (2007) on August 17th; World in Action's The Life and Death of Steve Biko (1977) on August 19th; the US Army's A Tale of Two Cities (1946) & Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) on September 10th; Haskell Wexler's Introduction to the Enemy (1974) on October 13th; Susan Sontag's Promised Lands (1974) in February; and Herbert Kline's Heart of Spain (1937) in March.