By Phil Wegner, September 2008

One recent anniversary that has been largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. media has been that of the events in France now referred to, as with 9/11 here, as simply Mai 68.  This was a moment when it briefly appeared as if a first world government would fall at the hands of a rebellion led by students, workers and youth.  

The passion that this moment still recalls was indicated last year by current French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who during his election campaign declared that the heritage of May ‘68 should be “liquidated once and for all.”  Alas, the “heritage” of the revolution’s failure largely has been a gradual rightward turn of many French intellectuals, something beautifully treated in Kristen Ross’s 2002 book, May ’68 and its Afterlives and now in François Cusset’s recently translated, French Theory (that latter achieved notoriety last April following a review by New York Times columnist and FIU professor Stanley Fish).

One of the preeminent cultural figures of May ’68 was filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and so I thought this summer would be a good time to take another look at some of the films he made in these years.  A number of them—Pierrot le fou (1965), Masculin Féminin, 15 faits précis (1966), Le week-end (1967), Tout va bien (1972), and Letter to Jane (1972)—I had not viewed in years; and one, La Chinoise (1967), I had never seen, as it was just released on DVD this past May.  Two things in particular struck me. 

First, these films feel like documents of a wholly alien past—as the art historian T.J. Clark once noted of Godard’s modernist predecessors, “This is a world, and a vision of history, more lost to us than Uxmal or Annaradapurah or Neuilly-en-Donjon.”  The films are not without their problems; there is something particularly disturbing in their representation of women.  However, in many ways it is their critical dimensions—the images of the emptiness of modern life, the crushing alienation of working class existence, the periodic explosions of senseless violence, the horrors of the Vietnam War or even the imminent apocalypse of consumer culture—that feel most familiar today. 

Rather, and here we come to my second observation, what felt most alien was the care and seriousness with which they interrogate the role of cultural intellectuals—artists, writers, academics and of course, filmmakers—in any radical political struggle.  This is most explicit in the later films, from the flailing first efforts of the student radicals in La Chinoise, to the interrogations of film and middle class radicalism in Tout va bien to the painstaking reading in Letter to Jane of what Roland Barthes would have called the “myths” of a single photographic image of Jane Fonda and the Viet-cong (Fonda was, along with Yves Montand, the “star” of Tout va bien).  They all invite, in fine Brechtian fashion, deep engagement, discussion and debate by their audience.

To get a real sense of the distance of this world, we need only compare the similar interrogation of intellectual work in Godard’s recent and brilliant, Notre musique (2004).  The film unfolds in three parts, modeled on Dante’s The Divine Comedy: Hell is an unblinking montage of images of war’s violence; Heaven, conversely, is represented as a fenced-in paradise, access to which is controlled by U.S. soldiers (shades of Baghdad’s Green Zone). The longest segment and middle one, Purgatory, focuses on intellectuals—poets, journalists, activists, students and Godard himself—whose paths cross in contemporary Sarajevo. Like the spaces of Sarajevo, intellectuals, the film suggests, occupy a precarious indeterminate space between the violence suffered by the majority of the world’s peoples and the privileges of a few.  The question of the intellectual’s responsibilities and what they might do to address this situation remains suspended in space and time.

All of these films are currently available on DVD.  Watch them, think about them, argue with them, and honor a moment when “being realistic” meant demandez l’impossible.