High Jinks – the varied cinema of ’68 - PR9

In the autumn of 1967 as students returned to their colleges in Paris the latest Jean-Luc Godard film, La Chinoise, was released at the Cinémathèque and in the arthouse cinemas of the Left Bank. Six months later, De Gaulle’s government dismissed Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque. It was the latest abuse of civil liberties by a vicious, authoritarian government.

For students on the left the cinema espoused by Langlois and the filmmakers of the “Nouvelle Vague” was a direct expression of their frustration and aspirations, especially when a protest march packed with film directors and producers was brutally broken up by police. They took this latest instance of state thuggery very personally. Indeed it was to prove one of the trigger point for the riots that followed later that year.

It is odd to reflect how these riots, which gave rise to a general strike that almost toppled the government and sent shock waves across Europe, should have their roots in an event barely noticed beyond the confines of the Latin Quarter. It is typically French that the sacking of a cinema manager should help to plunge the country into wholesale civic strife.

Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise presages these events very accurately. Its sole focus is on five students, holed up in an apartment reciting Maoist ideology to one another and contriving their own response to the injustices of the world around them. There is no attempt here to link into a wider movement, to seek strength in numbers, to root their discontent in the concrete realities of the poor and dispossessed.

The apartment, stripped of most of its furniture and brimful of “little red books”, is the only world these students need. Godard simultaneously mocks and admires his young revolutionaries. He highlights the parochialism of their machinations – many of their pronouncements owe less to Mao than to a naïve poetic sensibility, as the students dream wistfully of a red sun that never sets. But Godard is entirely sympathetic to the energy with which these young people labour to forge out of this imported ideology a way forward for themselves. He sees this energy as enough of a justification for their actions.

Godard, a child of the Second World War, uses La Chinoise to align himself entirely with “The Young”. Whatever the shortfalls of their immature perspective on the world, the energy and drive they bring to their cause is reason enough to back them. Yet the ad hoc, ill-considered pursuit of their goals and the solipsism that lurks behind their revolutionary rhetoric becomes of real issue when they resolve to take their cause beyond the walls of their apartment by assassinating the visiting Soviet Minister of Culture.

With the stakes raised, Godard puts the young revolutionary appointed to this task (played by Anne Wiazemsky, shortly to become Mrs Godard) in front of the philosopher Francis Jeanson, playing himself. Jeanson had been the head of a network that supported Algerian resistance fighters and had stood trial in 1960. Wiazemsky encounters Jeanson on a train and tells him of her plan to kill the minister. Jeanson needs no script with which to present a counter-argument to this drastic course of action.

A rather hesitant Wiazemsky (her lines fed to her by Godard through an earpiece) counters that what she proposes to do is no different to the female bomber Jeanson supported in Algeria.

“But there is a difference” counters Jeanson, “that woman had a whole country behind her.”

I do not know what the contemporary audience for La Chinoise made of these debates or if they fully appreciated the satire behind Godard’s depiction of their peers. Whatever, unrest grew palpably over that winter and by the close of 1967 Godard had renounced conventional cinema entirely and declared his support unequivocally for the revolutionary cause. His films became a great deal less amusing and insightful as a result.

With the revolt in Paris in full pelt, Lindsay Anderson, like Godard, was training his camera upon the youth this side of the Channel for his study in rebellion, if...., set in a public boarding school.

The atmosphere here is not parochial, it is stifling – the privileged sons of diplomats and bankers are imprisoned in a highly reactionary regime and are prey to the whims of whips and prefects given carte blanche by feckless house masters to terrorise the boys in any way they choose. The school is a lawless Hades – a metaphor for a repressive state.

Anderson was no revolutionary – he believed in capital punishment and read the Daily Telegraph – but he was an iconoclast, a peculiarly English type of anarchist. Just as it’s the manner of the French middle classes to launch a revolution from outside a cinema, their English counterparts take their call to arms at the gates of a public school. In neither case does it have much to do with the workers, but I suppose they all believe they have Brecht on their side.

The sprit of Brecht is evoked to explain why half of the film is shot in black and white, although the real reason, as usual, was a lack of money. From a distance of 40 years, if.... is a more dated work than La Chinoise, the work of a less accomplished filmmaker, a more conventional work, and with much less of the energy both films espouse. Still, the dull monotony of school life is beautifully captured in the muted tones with which the film is shot.

Malcolm McDowell’s first major role was as Travis, the young sixth former who leads his small band of rebels to the film’s thrilling dénouement – letting loose a volley of bullets upon the rabble of masters, boys and assembled dignitaries from the tiles of the school’s roof.

That scene has freshness enough to survive the passing of years, as does the one in which a beating is meted out to Travis and his chums by the prefects – an act of such gross and unwarranted violence that it hastens the bloodbath with which the film concludes. F

ar more shocking films had been made before if.... and many more would follow it, but at the time Paramount, duped into funding it, refused to release it on the grounds that it might incite a riot. If only.

The bosses of Paramount had less cause to be worried by a low-budget British film than by the movie pitches they were getting from the young and gifted of Hollywood by the late 1960s. The tide of rebellion across European cinema was washing up on the shores of LA. When Warren Beatty persuaded Warner Brothers to give him $200,000 to make Bonnie and Clyde with a failed director, Arthur Penn, at the helm, the studio had little reason to expect such a radical picture would emerge from their back lot. Unlike the European films featured here, Bonnie and Clyde had its story rooted firmly in the lives of the poor – in this case the rural poor of 1930s America.

But the film doesn’t soberly document the travails of these people, as does work from an earlier era, such as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. Instead, it zeros in on two young rebellious free spirits and has them let rip across the south, hotly pursued by the law. From the moment Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) lays her hand on Clyde’s gun (in a perfectly pitched performance from Beatty), she is freed of the confines of her small town waitressing life, to ride high on danger and adrenalin.

The two young robbers are genuinely hurt when ordinary civilians, poor like them, take umbrage at their enthusiastic and amateur attempts to rob them. Clyde sees himself as a man on the side of the people; he proudly lets a man, dispossessed of his home, use his gun to fire holes into the sign erected outside his house by the auction company and in one of the many banks they hold up, Clyde tells an old farmer to keep his hard-earned cash, the gang only wants what is in the hands of the bank.

This may all be a distance from Maoist ideology, but Bonnie and Clyde are really no different from the young protagonists of Godard’s film or from Travis and his pals tearing down the walls of their school. They are two rebellious spirits raising havoc and now given centre stage by a new wave of filmmakers fully sympathetic to their anguished frustration and boredom.

From our perspective, then, we haven’t travelled such a long distance from the flowerings of youthful cinema in the 1950s, still exemplified by Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. The rebels of ’68 may espouse a cause they only partially understand, or they may strike out in no higher cause than their own. Either way, the films of this era are most certainly not offered as direct indictments of the injustices of the world. America’s introspective angst about its war in Vietnam was yet to play out across its screens.

In Europe, the spontaneous outburst of violence we see in if.... came to pass hard on the heels of the film’s completion, much to the surprise of its own makers, who were no more prepared for it than anyone else. But it was a brief explosion of youthful exuberance.
A more systematic campaign of violence by an extreme group as presaged by La Chinoise is to be found only some years later in the 1970s. In 1968 it’s still just high jinks.

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:17