Making a Cunt Boring
Jean-Luc Godard's British Sounds
It's long been my suspicion that when people say they don't like Brecht, and Brechtian techniques, what they really mean is they've seen some of Godard's 'political' films and been rather scarred by the experience, ending up with the entirely false view that the Verfremdungseffekt consists in breaking character to read bits of the Little Red Book, a general peevish 'politicality' in the editing and stiff performances. It's almost as if his extraordinary visual talents, his ability to generate pointless filmic euphoria (oh, Bande a Part, Alphaville, etc) made him enter a sort of tedious self-criticism tribunal. That this continues without the politics today is obvious from his recent, utterly middlebrow film-essays collected in the ECM Four Shorts box: Arvo Part, work of mourning, etc - like Chris Marker with none of the wit or style, or general interest in people and the means of their emancipation.
The only film from his most explicitly political phase (after he'd stopped posing and took up a genuine 'commitment', during his collective work with Jean-Pierre Gorin and/or the 'Dziga Vertov Group') that I've seen is Tout va Bien, which mixed tremendous set pieces, as in the occupied factory sequence, with indulgent pseudo-Brechtian autobiographic interjections; and the 'cine-tracts', an anonymous series of films produced by and for the enrages of May 68 - you can tell which of the films are his, because (literally) his handwriting is all over them. So I was surprised, to put it mildly, to be very impressed with the first of his collectively produced, 'Maoist' films, British Sounds. The story of the film is intriguing enough in itself, commissioned by Tony Garnett for ITV and unsurprisingly not shown - and the political and aesthetic reasons for this must surely be identical.
The opening sequence is a startling example of the televisual 'ambient uncanny' that Ads without Products has been so good at pinpointing. A tracking shot across the Ford works in Dagenham, in which you suddenly realise that every production line you've seen on film has been a lie - none of them were this deafening, a huge, forbidding industrial screech of metal on metal, with the workers having to yell to be heard above it. Before you get the chance to assess this, to evaluate this cacophony, you hear a patrician, BBC newsreading voice reading out Marx and Engels, and making an oblique state-of-these-islands pronouncement, as if the master voice has suddenly gone haywire, as if the reality studio has genuinely been stormed. Rather than being agitational, the effect is extremely unnerving - something here is decidedly not right, the images, the sounds, the ideas are all used with such aggression, that at no point can you sit back and take them in, as one can in Tout va Bien or a Marker film - they agitate in the sense of irritate.
After this astonishing opening sequence, the rest is still intriguing, mainly for the sheer violence of the techniques used - rarely does a sentence go by without being interrupted, an image emerge without being immediately placed in question. In one of the most famous/notorious sequences, Sheila Rowbotham reads while a woman walks around a house naked, occasionally stopping to quote some of the same text, all but inaudibly. The second of Colin MacCabe's two books on Godard reveals that Rowbotham was suspicious until being assured by JLG that he could 'make a cunt boring'. (ironically enough, the staggeringly unerotic nudity is what keeps this sequence off YouTube). Some of it features examples of estrangement that are perhaps a tad obvious - in the only sequence where someone directly addresses the camera, the speaker recites in that same BBC English a sort of neo-fascist manifesto. It's effective, though, in that every illustration for his rant is completely oblique, not just directly contrary to the content but baffling, making the viewer wonder exactly what it's doing there.
It also has the very welcome accidental effect of reminding us that 1968 was the year of the greatest general strike in history, not just of some students demanding unisex halls of residence. Expecting perhaps some attack of fierce dialectics, when we end up at an occupied university what we have is some remarkably dulcet folk (and the accents are another of the remarkable components of the 'sounds', utilising their class power and status throughout) wondering how to get the precise revolutionary message out of an acoustic rendition of some of the more whimsical songs of the White Album. Not the least of the problems this ferocious film raises is - what exactly is the point of changing the words when you're still singing the same song?
It's long been my suspicion that when people say they don't like Brecht, and Brechtian techniques, what they really mean is they've seen some of Godard's 'political' films and been rather scarred by the experience, ending up with the entirely false view that the Verfremdungseffekt consists in breaking character to read bits of the Little Red Book, a general peevish 'politicality' in the editing and stiff performances. It's almost as if his extraordinary visual talents, his ability to generate pointless filmic euphoria (oh, Bande a Part, Alphaville, etc) made him enter a sort of tedious self-criticism tribunal. That this continues without the politics today is obvious from his recent, utterly middlebrow film-essays collected in the ECM Four Shorts box: Arvo Part, work of mourning, etc - like Chris Marker with none of the wit or style, or general interest in people and the means of their emancipation.
The only film from his most explicitly political phase (after he'd stopped posing and took up a genuine 'commitment', during his collective work with Jean-Pierre Gorin and/or the 'Dziga Vertov Group') that I've seen is Tout va Bien, which mixed tremendous set pieces, as in the occupied factory sequence, with indulgent pseudo-Brechtian autobiographic interjections; and the 'cine-tracts', an anonymous series of films produced by and for the enrages of May 68 - you can tell which of the films are his, because (literally) his handwriting is all over them. So I was surprised, to put it mildly, to be very impressed with the first of his collectively produced, 'Maoist' films, British Sounds. The story of the film is intriguing enough in itself, commissioned by Tony Garnett for ITV and unsurprisingly not shown - and the political and aesthetic reasons for this must surely be identical.
The opening sequence is a startling example of the televisual 'ambient uncanny' that Ads without Products has been so good at pinpointing. A tracking shot across the Ford works in Dagenham, in which you suddenly realise that every production line you've seen on film has been a lie - none of them were this deafening, a huge, forbidding industrial screech of metal on metal, with the workers having to yell to be heard above it. Before you get the chance to assess this, to evaluate this cacophony, you hear a patrician, BBC newsreading voice reading out Marx and Engels, and making an oblique state-of-these-islands pronouncement, as if the master voice has suddenly gone haywire, as if the reality studio has genuinely been stormed. Rather than being agitational, the effect is extremely unnerving - something here is decidedly not right, the images, the sounds, the ideas are all used with such aggression, that at no point can you sit back and take them in, as one can in Tout va Bien or a Marker film - they agitate in the sense of irritate.
After this astonishing opening sequence, the rest is still intriguing, mainly for the sheer violence of the techniques used - rarely does a sentence go by without being interrupted, an image emerge without being immediately placed in question. In one of the most famous/notorious sequences, Sheila Rowbotham reads while a woman walks around a house naked, occasionally stopping to quote some of the same text, all but inaudibly. The second of Colin MacCabe's two books on Godard reveals that Rowbotham was suspicious until being assured by JLG that he could 'make a cunt boring'. (ironically enough, the staggeringly unerotic nudity is what keeps this sequence off YouTube). Some of it features examples of estrangement that are perhaps a tad obvious - in the only sequence where someone directly addresses the camera, the speaker recites in that same BBC English a sort of neo-fascist manifesto. It's effective, though, in that every illustration for his rant is completely oblique, not just directly contrary to the content but baffling, making the viewer wonder exactly what it's doing there.
It also has the very welcome accidental effect of reminding us that 1968 was the year of the greatest general strike in history, not just of some students demanding unisex halls of residence. Expecting perhaps some attack of fierce dialectics, when we end up at an occupied university what we have is some remarkably dulcet folk (and the accents are another of the remarkable components of the 'sounds', utilising their class power and status throughout) wondering how to get the precise revolutionary message out of an acoustic rendition of some of the more whimsical songs of the White Album. Not the least of the problems this ferocious film raises is - what exactly is the point of changing the words when you're still singing the same song?
posted by owen hatherley at 5:54 pm
4 Comments:
You can download, here and elsewhere here - http://www.mininova.org/tor/640156
which i think was the last dziga vertov group film, and a favourite of straub / huillet apparently, i thought it was pretty bad actually, mainly due to jlg's terrible politics. As for the collective nature of these dvg films, i remember seeing jacques rivette asked about it and he just laughed. i saw vladimir and rosa a few years back, and i seem to agree with what you said about british sounds, the seem constructed to irritate with jlg's visual sense the only occassional interest. Good article, thanks for the links i never thought to look for gorin/godard films on you tube.
There's no doubt that politically he was pretty awful - I wonder if he picked Maoism simply because it was the most bloody obnoxious political creed on offer...but British Sounds has some pretty powerful moments that seem born out of that same obnoxiousness.
shame about gerry healy
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