La Chinoise - Goddard

TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY CLASS AS A WAVE.

TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY ACTION AS PLAY.

("We must confront vague ideas with clear images.")

Jean Luc Goddard's 1967 "La Chinoise" is about a group of french communist students who are living in an abandoned apartment, the living room of which they have converted into a kind of temple to Mao, the revolutionary ideal, and violence. The film's narrative is less important than its style; collaged fragments of bold, uncompromising text, Chinese propaganda posters, Andy Worhol influenced pop images of famous figures, primary colors filling monolithically flat planes, and violent modern commodities (this style resembles Guy Debord and the situationists which later influenced Malcom McLaren and the Sex Pistols). (Great list of slogans from May 1968 from wikipedia.)

The content of the following may be a little hard to follow, though take heart; I think it would be for anyone who is not a scholar of Post-Leninist European Communism, Maoism, or the French student uprising of May 1968. However, take a look at this to understand the film's visual style;

Hello? Transformer gun/radio anyone?

The film takes an ambiguous critical look at the students; they are at once portrayed as very serious communists who are intellectually curious, have mastered the literature, are attempting to practice their theory, and are willing to make sacrifices for their cause. But on the other hand they are not workers, they are young students who talk about their summer job of picking peaches as though it were just a lark. They are portrayed as spoiled, overly interested in fashion and appearances, careless with the lives of themselves and others, and ideologically both uncompromisingly rigid and overly willing to avoid nuance in favor of a romanticised simplicity.

As the summer passes, the students' cell fractures and dissolves over ideological issues. In fact, what initially divides them is that one of their own criticises their ideology when he sees it becoming too romantic and unrealistic, too dreamy and extreme. This character is thrown out, his former comrades chanting "revisionist" and booing him inhumanly, as though he were a public speaker (although they are all inside a nice private living room), refusing to engage him in dialogue. As the romantic engagement with the idealised perfection of the revolutionary spirit increases, one of the characters, in pitiful emulation of the tragic tortured artist myth, commits suicide after painting expressionistic rainbows all over the walls of the living room. Does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology? And if so, is this a bad thing?

In the end, the group breaks up when the owners of the apartment return and school starts up again. In a key dialogue a professor convinces the leading woman not to throw a bomb in a class to close the university (it's a singularly unamerican scene; it takes place on a train and the student loudly declares that she is a terrorist, but without any of those helpful "if you see something, say something" signs around nobody seems to notice). However, this is not before she shoots two people, a Russian communist bigwig (seen as a corrupt traitor to the true spirit of communism) and an innocent bystander. There is a bit of ambiguity here; the violence and its effects are not shown, and the students seem to have avoided any consequences for their actions. However, despite the fact that the students were just playing around their summer of ideological extremism has had very real effects.

This is where I draw a tenuous connection:

Certainly all this violent revolutionary fervor and dedication to intellectual exploration of communist theory is the furthest thing from the minds of young americans in my generation. There is no class consciousness among american workers and certainly no connection between students and workers. Throughout history young people have invariably been called egocentric and hedonistic, but this is a generation that, while interested in politics, has clearly chosen not to make any personal sacrifices to protest the war, human rights abuses, political authoritarianism of the current administration, the ever deepening alienation of modern life, or the destruction of the environment.

I was once speaking with an old-school die-hard communist who insisted that there was no such thing as class in america. Her point was that equality of opportunity and social mobility made it possible for the individual to transcend class. My argument was that the existence of a social class is not contingent upon the members remaining in that class, as a wave consists of a pattern of energy with which individual molecules are associated only for a short time.

The "student class" was not important to Marx in his day, but is clearly an example of a class that is temporary for its members, yet still a constant sociopolitical force. Not that it is much of a force these days. So my question is, is there any potential for the current student class to be a force for social change, revolutionary or otherwise?

My answer has a lot to do with the behavior seen in "La Chinoise." The students are only playing, but their actions have real effects. In some ways, the insularity of the group brings to mind the oft-repeated observation that the internet has a propensity to create "echo-chamber" communities; forums where like-minded people compete to agree with each other. Indeed, the Maoist students' love of pop music and fashionable clothing, urge to romanticise their own lives, and state of moneyed unemployment all resemble the lifestyle that is propagated by my generation's primary environment; the internet, particularly online social networks. Most importantly to the internet analogy, the student commits a violent act in anonymity and escapes all consequences. But there is a positive side to all this, the current generation, while it is having huge trouble addressing current sociopolitical problems in art, music, and other creative disciplines, clearly values creativity and self-expression. The fact that everyone has a band up on myspace (even if it is the completely fake band of their made-up electronic doppelganger as represented by a busty pink-eyed avatar) raises a question we have heard before; does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology?

We can usefully address this question by talking about escapism in art, but there is a deeper question at stake here. Can a revolutionary class be motivated by the desire to play and express their individuality creatively?

My answer is yes, and I base this on two ideas you may have seen before on this blog. The first is based on the wonderfully (and perhaps dangerously) freethinking Luis von Ahn's revolutionary idea of using people's urge to play during their free time to accomplish useful tasks. He created games that took annoying tasks like labelling images and deciphering garbled text in scanned books, and turned them into fun games or biproducts of routine tasks (Google Image Labeler and reCAPTCHA). These are only humble beginnings, but they point to a new paradigm where compassionate designers use computer networks to make it possible to take advantage of people's natural propensity to to enjoy solving problems. This will be a democracy of governance by the interested, but also by the very bored. As evidence that I am not completely alone in this opinion I would like to cite the untitled essay by Kevin Kelly, published by the annual "World Question Center" which claims that new forms of democracy are appearing on the horizon, ones which will resemble wikipedia and myspace more than anything (the essay is worth reading!). In this new form of government "both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites" and which "has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable." I submit that these forms of government will languish as ideas unless they are supported by a revolutionary class, and that the only way that a majority of americans could ever function as a revolutionary class is if we expand the definition to include a steady yet ever-shifting wave of playactors who are attracted to justice because it is interesting... and FUN.

The final question, and it is a tough one, is; is the type of senseless, anonymous, and unpunished violence seen in the movie a narrative trick of Goddard's, or is it endemic to this type of play-based, temporary revolutionary class? Is there a systemic flaw in this way of effecting social change? I don't dream of utopia, but I wonder; does the potential for positive change outweigh the dangers? How can the system be created by a revolutionary class, rather than by the ruling class bent on exploiting our labor, our humanity, and the planet we live on? Finally, we return to the agonizing question of when, if ever, is a violent act justifiable?

I leave you with a scene from the film that shows these serious revolutionaries at their silliest:

BTW - I haven't checked to see if this film is available at all, but I guess I should end this review by stating that I did, in fact, like this film...