Home Ā» Godard’s revolution was also a social revolution – Goffredo Fofi

Godard’s revolution was also a social revolution – Goffredo Fofi

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Godard’s revolution was also a social revolution – Goffredo Fofi

The importance of the figure and work of Jean-Luc Godard is very great in the history of cinema, but also in that of the movements that between the mid-fifties and the seventies broke the precarious balance of the societies born of war and reconstruction. . There new wave to which he belonged, he has recorded on cinema, theater, music and other arts. Less in literature where, instead of a revolt that also aspired to become social, in the end formal research prevailed, in France with the school of the gaze and in Italy with Group 63. Not in England, not in Germany, not in the United States, not in Latin America and in distant Japan.

It can be argued without fear of making a mistake that the new wave in the artistic field he has prepared, trained and supported social revolutions, especially those of young people and students. In a not always conscious way, the young militants of the sixties and seventies made their own models and ideas of the movement, inspired by the analyzes of the Frankfurt school (from Adorno to Marcuse to Habermas) and of American sociology (from Wright Mills to Goodman to Dwight Macdonald). In particular in cinema and theater (which Brecht had behind him, but above all Grotowski and Julian Beck’s Living theater), and with the musical accompaniment, let’s say, by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

At the time it was said that the new wave French or American influences little Italian cinema; that the freedom of Rossellini, father of neorealism, had been an example precisely for the French, so much so that Godard and Truffaut called him their Socrates; and that many works by Fellini or Antonioni were a sort of pre-new wave , although even Ferreri, Bertolucci and Pasolini himself had to admit their debt to the new French school. A school that in the meantime had already been divided between a return to order (sentiment and melĆ², and para-Hollywood narrative) by Truffaut and the more extreme experimentation of Alain Resnais.

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It would be necessary to deepen the comparison Godard and Pasolini, two central figures for the culture of the second half of the twentieth century (which arrives after the Second World War, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima), Italians not only in cinema. Both, with their provocations and their subjectivism, were more relevant and more influential than Brecht himself, who was instead strictly Marxist. And unlike the various Grotowski, Wajda, Kantor, Tarkovskij, Polański, ChytilovĆ”, JancsĆ³, Kusturica, Makavejev and, in other respects, even Rocha and Ōshima, both claimed a freedom of the gaze, a subjectivity of the narrative that could dig into contradictions of a society dominated by ideologies and structures that are in any case repressive, and which contributed to dismantling their foundations. In Eastern Europe and in other Eastern countries such as, with “neo-capitalism”, in the West. In this sense, the new wave it paved the way for the movements of 1968 and later almost everywhere in the world.

But Godard, with his provocative radicalism, with his tireless and always creative aggression against the traditional forms of cinematographic narration, with his starting from and returning to the social, widening his gaze to a global critique of the capitalist system, its novelties and its “Updates”, he was also very adept at becoming a media star, at least in France. And this despite the fact that he was an intelligent and ferocious critic of theirs, linking the criticism of forms to that of substances. He was not the only one to do it in those years (think, in France, of Guy Debord and the Situationists), but he was the only one who was also, in fact, a star.

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Even with his (very abstract but often also concrete) search for “images of the left”, with his very close link with the French May and, then, with his more radical souls both on the intellectual level (Tel Quel) and on that politician (the Maoists), Godard dug into the contradictions opened by the new ideologies of development. He often did it in a confused way, but with a more acute sociologist’s gaze than those of the sociologists of the time, excluding the Germans.

And he has shown the consequences of these contradictions in extraordinary films. For example in the masterpiece This is my life, but also in others that should be shown and commented on in schools to understand what world we entered, what world they let us enter, what world we accepted to enter. I mention a few, but I could mention almost all of them: Week-end, Two or three things I know about lei, The male and the female, All is well. I repeat: many have had the good fortune to have been contemporaries of various radical and provocative “elder brothers”, with whom to quarrel and discuss and from whom to learn. In the cinema there were Pasolini for Italy and Godard for France, very different from each other but much closer, in their project, than we wanted to see.

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