La Chinoise

Wednesday 10 September at 7.30pm

Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1967 | 92 mins | M adult themes

In co-operation with the Institut Francais and the Embassy of France.

Godard’s pop-art masterpiece embraces and parodies the revolutionary spirit of a group of middle-class students determined to overthrow the establishment by any means necessary.

“La Chinoise is one of Godard’s most important and visually astounding works. A five-member Maoist cell (including nouvelle vague luminaries Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky) spends summer vacation in a Parisian apartment discussing the Chinese Cultural Revolution and plotting an assassination. Though clearly sympathetic to their rejection of bourgeois ideology, Godard portrays the members of the cell as bunglers, revisionists, and poseurs: when Wiazemsky finally gets around to a terrorist act, it seems accidental, thoughtless, without affect or effect. Shot in pulsing primaries (especially red), scored with Stockhausen, Schubert, and Vivaldi, and paced with breakneck wit, La Chinoise is, given its dire subject, oddly ebullient”—TIFF Lightbox

“Brilliant dialectical farce, distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny… Dazzlingly designed as a collage of slogans and poster images, it was widely attacked at the time for playing with politics. But Godard was well aware what he was doing… and his film stands as a prophetic and remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May 1968 in all their desperate sincerity and impossible naïveté.”—Tom Milne, Time Out