La Chinoise
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La Chinoise (1967) was the thirteenth narrative feature film by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. This is a political film that takes place at a small apartment in Paris and centers around the interactions of four students. Thematically, the film concerns late 1960s left-wing political interest in theorists/leaders Mao, Marx, Lenin, Althusser; and the role certain objects and organizations (such as Mao's Little Red Book, the French communist party, and small leftist groups) play in this group's ideology.
While not revered as one of Godard's best films (in fact, the film is not even available on VHS or DVD in the United States), La Chinoise paints an interesting picture of French youth on the eve of the May 1968 student riots.
La Chinoise is seen, for the most part, as signalling Godard's switch to his overtly political phase of the early 1970s. But while La Chinoise seems more nearly tied to real events than much of Godard's 1960s cinema (Le Petit Soldat is another example), it still paints a highly ambiguous portrait (wavering between sympathy and contempt) for the student movements, seemingly suggesting at once that the students are serious revolutionaries and confused children.
The film features regular New Wave actors Jean-Pierre Leaud and Anne Wiazemsky.
