Godard, La Chinoise

Monika Szewczyk
Negation Notes (while working on an exhibition with Allan Sekula featuring This Ain’t China: A Photonovel)




Jef Wall, the Outburst



▴ Jean Luc-Godard, La Chinoise (1974).

At the time that This Ain’t China was made (Alan Sekula, 1974), an image of The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was making the rounds throughout the Western world, convincing many left-leaning artists and intellectuals to consider Maoism as a viable alternative to a Soviet style Marxism, which was progressively discredited as Stalinist atrocities continued to come to light and as Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. China’s support for North Vietnam also won it anti-imperialist credentials as the American position became increasingly untenable. In the late 1970s and 1980s, as information came to light about the famines of Chinese peasants, the humiliation of intellectuals, and the ruthlessness of the Red Guards, Maoism too was discredited. However, the international spread and mutation of Mao Tse-Tung’s ideas—precisely in places that are not China, but also not the West—cannot be overlooked. It is impossible to delve in depth here into such disparate phenomena as the protracted Naxalite struggle in Indian state of Bengal or the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela (with its reverberations throughout Latin American); suffice to say here that their success—many on the symbolic front—continued to inspire the leftist political imagination in the West, even after people become disaffected with the news from China proper. But I do not want to make too much of these cases, which are based mostly on agrarian reform. For in the late 1960s and early 1970s, what was particularly inspiring for the Western culturati about China’s proletarian revolution was that it prioritized culture as a site of struggle. Culminating in the protracted Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution also constituted a revolution within a revolution, promising a fresh start to those disaffected with the evolution of socialist imaginaries thus far.


The mystique of Mao Zedong (and Western Maoism’s potential influence on the events of May 1968) is signaled already in 1967 by Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, a film which features Claude Channes’ heady chanson “Mao Mao.”6 The student protagonists, undergoing a self-imposed period of reeducation and self-critique, all quote from Mao’s Little Red Book and debate correct thinking, contradiction, and the merits of violence in class struggle. This certainly ain’t China: most of the action takes place inside a big bourgeois flat in Paris and the conditions of the countryside—so valorized by Mao—are represented arch-ironically with glimpses of chickens running near the semi-industrial suburb of Nanterre, the site of early student unrest and rehearsal for May 1968. Yet Godard does present very concrete images and thus something we could call a Western Maoist state-in-formation, which adopts China as the operative chimera. Godard would go on to form The Dziga Vertov Group with Pierre Gorin the next year. This was an experiment in collective production, which yielded some extraordinary experiments in film, and went on to tour the US in 1970 (a tour promoted by Grove Press of San Francisco).