How & Why Did It Come Into Being? Godard's British Sounds at The Place. Made for London Weekend TV but rejected. A budget of £12,000, ot s than half went into the film, the rest into other projects.
A crucial film for the militant, as it poses very basic questions concerning its own naturehow and why did it come into being. In Godard's terms, a political film in that it extracts criticism and class identification from the audience, a non-political film in that it merely objectifies the problems, and itself becomes the object of the bourgeoisie, to be consumed in the usual indiscriminate way.
A simply constructed film, evolving through seven stages: (i) image-tracking shot along BMC assembly line at Oxford. sound-industrial noise plus revamped quotes front the Communist Manifesto. (in) image naked belly of woman.
sound-voice of women's liberation milftant. (ili) image- •V announcer.
sound -his words-extracts from speeches by Wilson, de Gaulle, etc. (iv) image-an assembled group of militants from Dagenham. sound-their discussion. (v) image-students at Essex making posters and changing the words of popular songs. sound-their conversation, plus the theoretical exposition of a Marxist-Leninist film. (vi) image-bloody hand reaching through the snow for the red flag. sound-revolutionary songs from around the world. (vil) beage-a fist smashing repeatedly through La paper Union Jack. sound-a chorus of voices claiming "solidarity with... " various radical groups Suspended Between Two Worlds This is plainly a film suspended between two wartda -one, the past, where the cinema was an end in itself and gauged its success on Its means of total dissimulation of reality, the other the future, where the cinema becomes just one more weapon in a frontal media attack on capitalist ideology. Godard's concern seems to be as a propagandist for a popular cinema-a ten-minute tracking shot down an assembly line has little meaning apart from the exhortation to get cameras rolling in factories. His films are essays, even notes and jottings, en what a militant film might be. As such his failures are more interesting than his successes.
Militants Playing Militants The main weakness of British Sounds lies in its status as a commodity-to get seventy minutes of film that was "authentic", Godard used militants in a way that prevented them from being true to themselves. Rather than record British Sounds, he has created Godard Sounds, no matter how self-effacing he tried to be. Again it is the suspended quality of the film which is so uncomfortable-La Chinoise was full of actors playing militants (struggle as drama) where their role was to interpret the feelings of others rather than express their own. While British Sounds points to a cinema full of militants playing actors (drama as struggle) whose role is to choose a path of self-expression that leads themselves and others to greater political awareness. But Godard's present work has militants playing militants, and neither is really suited to the part.
Eisenstein's & Godard's Dialectics If the abstracted subject of the film is Godard unwillingly imposing himself on others, the language it speaks is "autocratically" his own. Le Gai Savoir was a first step towards the articulation of images, and in British Sounds Godard has formulated a concept of "dialectical struggle between sounds and images", thus forming a revolutionary arena purely in terms of media. Godard's is a backdoor approachto simplicity via sophistication, to analysis via synthesis. He is experiencing his own Warhol reaction to a montage which does everything in its power to deny the reality it corresponds to. In fact Godard's use of the term "dialectical struggle" is precisely the converse of Eisenstein's: Godard is referring to the clash of perceptive elements on a screen, reflecting a clash of forees in "real life", which are then reconciled in a "higher plane of awareness" in the viewer's consciousness- -awareness of the nature of the clash in real life. Whereas Eisenstein's dialectics were concerned with positing a frozen ambiguity, a plane of perception divorced from its contributing elements.
Who Is It Aimed At?
A fundamental question concerning British dunds is: just who is it aimed at? Godard has now made two films for TV, presumably in an attempt to reach beyond the art-home ghetto he has been relegated to. But both films have been rejected: two political failures then? Not really, because as expressions of solidarity with the working class made under bourgeois conditions and seen by bourgesis audiences, they are in themselves a political victory. It could be thought that they act only as escape vetives for bourgeois guilt, but they are more concerned with exploiting the cinema as an organising force-as catalysts for group discussion leading to group activity. That this review goes on talking all much about Godord as about militant cinerna shows just how much imprisoned in a cultural ghetto the man is. To Make Political Films Is To Make Film Politically Godard's new slogan is that we must make political films, and we must make films politically. The slogan is powerful, and seems ti contain the following points. 1. The primary distinction underlines the fact that the revolution takes place on the streets, not on a screen, while putting this fact in a nev light-for social changes to occur in reality. there must be corresponding changes in mediated reality. 2. This already assumes that our political consciousness is inextricably tied in with our cultural consciousness, as implanted by the media. We thus work within the context of our media conditioning, not against it. 3. If this is true, then it is possible to qualify the class analysis of society. The basis of this analysis is to define a social stratum's common relationship to capital, or its own labour, and now the way is open to defining its relationship to the media. This media analysis must be in terms of access, feed-back potential (capacity criticise) and audience identification/ atomisation. 4. Given this media analysis, the call to make films politically means to create situations where people are able to create their common interest group-TV watchers of the world, unite -as much as their common enemy. This would be a start towards using the media as fantastic potentiators of human communication. 5 Class orientation is still the primary factor in t. ploiting the potential of the media, as underlined in British Sounds. The relationship of the working class to the media at present is one of total enslavement-a revolutionary programme would be to smash the outlets of bourgeois cultural and political propaganda and substitute for them a working class media situation. This would then act to reinforce political conscious ness rather than debilitate it. The relationship of the middle class is more complex-while ostensibly being fed its own ideals, the bourgeoisie is in fact ossifying itself in rigid cultural facades which only barely disguise the military basis of its supremacy. The yippie tactics seem to be effective here-using the media to smash the facades.
Such assumptions are far-reaching, and involve a complete re-orientation of our view of the cinema. Godard remains one of the most stimulatina fiaures of our time.