La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire (1967)

Synopsis

Disillusioned by their suburban lifestyles, a group of middle-class students form a small Maoist cell and plan to change the world by any means necessary.

After studying the growth of communism in China, the students decide they must use terrorism and violence to ignite their own revolution.



Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Michel Séméniako, Juliet Berto, Lex De Bruijn, Omar Blondin Diop, Francis Jeanson, Jean-Claude Sussfeld

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Edited by: Delphine Desfons, Agnès Guillemot
Music by: Pierre Degeyter, Michel Legrand, Franz Schubert, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Antonio Vivaldi


La Chinoise is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel Demons (also known as The Possessed). In the novel, five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence.

The film, set in contemporary Paris and largely taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students—three young men and two young women—belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named after the novel Aden, Arabie by Paul Nizan). The film won the Grand Jury Prize in 1967 Venice Film Festival.

La Chinoise is not one of Godard's most widely seen films, and until 2008 was unavailable on DVD in North America. However, a number of critics such as Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and Renata Adler have hailed it as among his best. Given that the film was made in March 1967—one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France—La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years.

Along with Pierrot le fou, Masculin, féminin, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Week End, La Chinoise is often seen as signaling a decisive step towards Godard's eventual renunciation of "bourgeois" narrative filmmaking. By 1968 he had switched to an overtly-political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group, which lasted for the next six years until 1973. (Wikipedia)

Read about this film

Country: France
Language: French
Runtime: 96 min.