Film Screening and Discussion with Claire Fontaine of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967)

October 4th, 2017 at 6:30pm

MAISON FRANÇAISE EAST GALLERY, BUELL HALL

Free and open to the public. Subtitles are in English

A group of French students embrace Maoist ideals and try and incite revolution thorugh terrorist violence. When the group eventually plots to assassinate a high-ranking Russian government official visiting Paris, things don’t go according to plan.

This screening is being shown in conjunction with Uprising 13/13, thirteen sessions exploring different forms or modalities of uprising, organized by Bernard Harcourt and Jesús Rodriguez-Velasco. For more information on Uprising 13/13, please click here.

To RSVP, please click here.

***

Background reading

La Chinoise in Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East

Wolin, Richard. “Who Were the Maoists?” In The Wind from The East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton University Press, 2010.

 

“La Chinoise” and the Re-education of Jean-Luc Godard, an article by film critic Bilge Ebiri

 

Manifesto from the Press-Book for La Chinoise, August 1967.

Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecittà-Mosfilm-Pinewood-etc. empire, and, both economically and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradly and bonded in friendship.

 

Translation of part of an interview of Jean-Luc Godard for the Cahiers du Cinéma n°194, October 1967.