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Tout va bien Revisited, Current

$ 19.99

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The first, fantastically inventive stage of Jean-Luc Godard’s career ended with the flaming apocalypse of Weekend (1967) and the events of May ’68, in which he participated both as a demonstrator and (anonymous) filmmaker. Over the next five years, he would strive to reinvent movies again, both on his own and with erstwhile student activist Jean-Pierre Gorin, as the Dziga Vertov Group. His mantra: “The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.” A revolutionary maker of documentaries, Vertov was invoked in opposition to both commercial Hollywood cinema and the Soviet fictions identified with Sergei Eisenstein. The Dziga Vertov Group films—A Movie Like All the Others (1968); British Sounds and Pravda (1969); Wind from the East, Struggle in Italy, the unfinished Until Victory (1970); Vladimir and Rosa (1971)—were made on 16mm or for television (or both). These films were openly tendentious in their more or less Maoist analysis of the political situation in various countries, including the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, Jordan, Italy, and the United States. Save for small groups of committed militants or abstruse theoreticians, however, most audiences found the combination of recondite ideological hectoring and austere formal rigor all but unwatchable. In early 1971, making an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, Godard and Gorin returned to a more populist—and less sectarian—political mode. “We were in a kind of ghetto, and we really wanted to go outside,” Gorin explained a few years later. “That was both a matter of strategy and economy.” Tout va bien’s announced purpose was to “consider the class struggle in France four years on from 1968.” And as the culmination of Godard’s political period, the movie is highly reflexive. Indeed, Tout va bien’s autocritique begins almost before the movie itself. “If you use stars, people will give you money,” an off-screen voice opines amid a flurry of filmed check-signing. True: Thanks to the participation of Jane Fonda, who plays an American radio journalist in France, and Yves Montand, as her filmmaker husband, Tout va bien was financed by Gaumont. (For a time, Paramount was interested as well.) To drive home the point, Fonda and Montand are introduced quoting lines from Godard’s previous star-driven commercial feature, Contempt—a parody for which Gorin later took credit.