Just compare Vertov (above) with this statement from the ( Dogme) Group Manifesto of 1995:

It was this aesthetic, as well as the accompanying polemic, that Godard was trying to emulate: “The film drama is the Opium of the people… down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios… long live life as it is!” (2)Īll this sounds as much like the Italian Futurist Marinetti as it does like von Trier’s proscriptions for the Dogme film group in the very late years of the 20th century. Created largely from documentary footage, Vertov’s films represented an intricate blend of art and political and poetic rhetoric. A contemporary digital video clip screened alongside Vertov’s work from the 1920s might not look so modern (or post-modern) after all. But it still makes fascinating viewing and sums up a period in the political life of cinema that can usefully be compared to the more formalist stylistic strictures of Lars von Trier’s Dogme group.Ĭertainly, Vertov’s own films still look revolutionary today – in a way that Godard’s do not.

Just like A Letter to Jane (Godard and Gorin, 1972), British Sounds is, in one sense, a very long lecture (or harangue) by two filmmakers that is almost the purest example of agitprop in modern cinematic history. Godard was particularly down on any narrative cinema at this time and engaged in angry and polemical exchanges with a rather bewildered Truffaut (amongst others).Ĭertainly British Sounds could have been made by no other director in world cinema at that time, though Godard was opening the doors to a return to the agitprop cinema of the 1920s, specifically that of the Soviet documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, patron saint of Godard’s own movie-making collective. Indeed Godard, by this stage was at pains to distance himself from what he loudly and persistently referred to as an irrelevant and bourgeois tendency in contemporary French cinema. Stylistically, politically, artistically, this narrative-free movie could scarcely be more different from the smooth Hitchcockian thrillers of Claude Chabrol, the poetic vision of Jacques Demy, or the more gentle humanism of François Truffaut (1). Jean-Luc Godard’s wildly polemical piece of political cinema, British Sounds, offers clear evidence at the end of the 1960s that the French nouvelle vague (New Wave) was anything but monolithic or even offered a coherent or unified philosophy of filmmaking practice and intent.

Source: NFVLS Prod Co: Kestrel Productions for LWT Prod: Irving Teitelbaum Dir, Scr: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Henri Roger Phot: Charles Stewart Editor: Elizabeth Kozmian (actually edited by Christine Aya) Sound: Fred Sharp

Kino-Eye by Kevin O'Brien