The Film Sufi: “La Chinoise” - Jean-Luc Godard (1967).
Doug Enaa Greene and Shalon van Tine discuss Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise in its historical context. Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) is not an ordinary film. On the surface, La Chinoise seems simple enough: it tells the story of French students in the 1960s who form a Maoist collective, live together, have political discussions, and eventually turn to revolutionary violence.
Films of the next decade, such as Contempt (1963), Pierre le Fou (1965), La Chinoise, and. are openly essayistic in form and less concerned with character and story than with ideas and analysis of social issues. The 15 films made from 1959 to 1967 form the main basis of his reputation as one of the late 20th-century's great filmmakers.
Director Jean-Luc Godard, whose advocacy of Maoism bordered on intoxication, infuriated many traditionalist critics with his swiftly paced satire La Chinoise. Godard's then-wife Anne Wiazemsky plays a philosophy student who commiserates with the four members of her campus Maoist group. They are so taken by the external trappings of their cause--the posters, the Little Red Books, the by-rote.
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY JEAN-LUC GODARD. Petit Soldat, Contempt, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and La Chinoise, Godard would continue to push formal and aesthetic boundaries while pursuing. He continued working in the essay format as well, with King Lear (1987) being.
Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary debut feature, an insouciant and iconoclastic crime film that paved the way for the French New Wave.. La Chinoise La Chinoise. Drama 1967 96 mins Director: Jean-Luc Godard. Jean-Luc Godard’s acerbic and disorienting essay on the decline of Western civilisation, shot aboard the famously grounded cruise.
The Movie: The 1967 film La Chinoise marks one of the first transitions (of many) in the career of Jean-Luc Godard. A darling of the French New Wave, Godard was always known for his formal and narrative experimentation. In the baker's dozen of feature films that Godard directed leading up to La Chinoise (in a span of 7 years, no less!), he revealed himself to be a hyper-literate intellectual.
La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright so far. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France.