La Chinoise, Part 1

I wanted to say a little bit about Godard's La Chinoise in response to its recent review on "Abby Loves Films." One, because I want to say too much to really fit as a response over there, two, I don't want to sign up for Tumblr. As such, my little post here might end up seeming a little bit schizophrenic-- I'm trying to juggle responding to her review and articulating my own thoughts on the film.

First of all, Abby does a great job of discussing the setting of the film:

"La Chinoise revolves around five students, hardline socialists and Maoists, who share an apartment. The place is bright; doors and panels are painted in primary colors, copies of Mao’s Little Red Book populate shelves and lie in a huge pile on the floor. The majority of the film takes place here and it’s one of those situations where the mise-en-scene is executed in such a brilliant way, that you forget the purpose it might be serving. In this case, the set, was so reminiscent of a nursery or school room, that I found myself viewing the characters as such. "

This space really is an incredibly well-executed piece of set. As in his earlier A Woman is a Woman, the area the characters inhabit is given a huge responsibly in filling out the contours of their personalities, of simultaneously lending history to the film's figures and laying out the entire aesthetic in concrete form. In La Chinoise, Godard gives us long, smooth shots that really draw our attention to the apartment and the very physical place-ness of it. The camera lingers on a table flanked by red chairs and a vidid red lamp as characters speak off-screen, pores over the posters and chalk-notes that furnish each room, and, in one extraordinary shot, pans back and forth from outside its windows, neatly dividing the characters into psychological and spatial groups as it peers in from around the faded shutters of the windows. In a similar shot later on, the camera rests outside a set of two doors onto the balcony. As the film's two pairs of lovers perform their morning calisthenics, the chunk of wall between the doors partitions them neatly. The set's refusal to accommodate the camera lends weight to the documentary conceit of the film while its geometrical neatness bolster Godard's strict stylistic demands (more on that later).

Abby's right to point out the reliance on primary colors. Everything in the apartment is decked out in warm yellows and golds, rich blues, and overwhelmingly bright reds (along with the paler red of the windows). The painter, Kirilov (yeah, the whole movie is kind of a spin on Dostoyevsky's "Demons") lays it out in one of the film's pedagogical set-pieces:

"Use only three colors. The three primary colors, blue, yellow and red. Perfectly pure and perfectly balanced on the pretext that all other colors are there."

Abby is also correct in nothing the school-house vibe of the set. Its both a literal classroom, the site of numerous lectures on politics and aesthetics, and a kind of emotional, psychosexual boarding school. As the above quote hints at, these characters exist in worlds of primary colors, boldly struck slogans, and stark ideologies. They're dogmatists inflamed and fermented by their enclosure, their social dynamics torn apart by their slavish attraction to magnetic poles. They talk about truth, sure, but what they truly seem to be looking for are systems, clean ones, reliable conceptual frameworks. As much as Godard delights in the ludic possibilities of undermining the narrative and grammatical assumptions of cinema, on one level his film laments and prefigures the effects of a too-well absorbed postmodern mindset. In a void of traditional historical narratives, La Chinoise's students hue with savage loyalty to any replacement narrative that seems to make sense (Lacan blah blah blah). Instead of replacing the lens of tradition with an appreciation of the complicated and bewildering texture of reality, they return back to a new "daddy," a new but identical set of simplifications-- in politics as well as in color coordination, they mistake aestheticizing for philosophizing, all while making appeals to the most practical and intuitive concerns (interesting to note how often a scene will show us the four bourgeoisie students reading or taking notes while their proleteriet buddy, Yvonne, cleans windows or shines shoes).

This struggle between the intellectual and aesthetic charm of the abstract or fantastic and the claims of access to something real offered by a more prosaic view is acted out in the narrative (scientific, humanistic Henri ousted by wealthy and extreme Veronique), as well as the metanarrative (Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor playing an actor playing a revolutionary, declaims on Meliere and the Lumieres; characters name-drop the same articles by Althusser and Brecht that inspired the script) and even between the camera and the cutting room floor. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, and hopefully figure out how to grab screen-caps from the Mac DVD player thing.