* Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-The Revolution Is No Dinner Party, Indeed!- Jean-Luc Godard’s Film “La Chinoise”

DVD Review

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin


La Chinoise, (in French, English subtitles), starring Jean-Pierre Leard, Juliet Berto, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1967

The last time the name of famous (1960s famous) French experimental filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard appeared in this space was in last year’s retro-review of his documentary/didactic montage of The Rolling Stones as they went through their paces in creating the rock classic “Sympathy For The Devil” in 1968. I faulted Godard's efforts there for trying the patience of even the most ardent Stones fan (including this reviewer) with his interspersing of 1960s hard political rhetoric and zany antics with a rather long drawn out exposition on the creative process that it took to create a song lasting a few moments. All the faults there, however, turn into pluses in this 1967 look at the trials and tribulation of a small group of ardent radicals trying to make sense of their world (their French world, by the way) during the tumultuous 1960s and during the heat of the struggle to break with, what in France, was the status quo- adherent to the Communist Party that, although having at one time perspective for socialist revolution and the road to a communist society, had seemingly (to them) given up that mantle to Mao and the Chinese Revolution.

The story line here is fairly simple, although perhaps rather obscure and didactic to the last couple of generations since the generation of ’68 had its heyday. Fair enough. I need not spent much time on this here however because the plot has its antecedents in, and the script fairly accurately follows, the famous Russian writer Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed”. (Dostoevsky, by the way, came within a hairbreadth of the hangman’s noose for his own youthful political activism, something while colors in a perverse way the cautionary tale he tells). The plot centers on a small group of college students who, during the summer break and with time on their hands, are struggling with ideas about their place in the world, their seeming being left out of the decision-making process of that world, and most importantly, for the “lessons” to be taken from the film what to do about it. That small group which as the plot unfurls turns itself into a political cell, as was the nature of the times, turned to revolutionary politics, or what they thought was revolutionary politics in an attempt resolve these conflicts.

In those days it was that struggle was directed against the placidity of official modern French revolutionary traditions, the Moscow-loyal French Communist Party. Interestingly and probably appropriately, not a thought was given by the group to the program of the French Socialist Party of the time, the party of the tendency in the international workers movement that merely wanted to reform modern capitalist society with a few bandages, if that was acceptable to the bourgeoisie. But neither did they investigate (except for the obligatory Trotsky slanders) the traditions of Trotskyism either, although France, historically, was a strong center for those who followed the teachings of that Russian revolutionary. Thus, the struggle is between the old style Stalinism of the Russian-oriented party, represented here doctrinally by one of the cell members, and the spirit of Mao’s Red Guards (or at least those of the Red Guards that Mao favored at the time- the film shows and, one can look up that fact, that at some point all Mao adherents with different perspectives were shouting slogans from the “Red Book” at each other).

Of course, the logic of the Maoist variant of Stalinism in the West, at least before the Chinese deals with American and international imperialism were made in the early 1970s, was based on the Chinese peasant-based guerilla warfare revolutionary struggles and therefore, in practice, was to forsake the working class and “take up the gun” in heroic individual acts of terrors, and what in fact were rather empty moral gestures. The irony here, or rather the tragedy, is that this search for a revolutionary agency was worked out in a country where the working class, unlike in America, not only had a revolutionary past, but in the next year (1968) would come very close to bring the French state to its knees in a massive general strike.

But that is music for the future. What comes out clearly here, and this is part of Godard’s genius, is that, as ardent or rigid as the students became, and as foolhardy as their endeavors proved to be in the end, their strategies were doomed to failure in the end. There is a very good train ride dialogue between the woman student leader and her philosophy mentor, Francois Jeanson, a recognized, and rightly so, heroic French supporter of the Algerian liberation struggles in the 1950s who seems both perplexed and astonished by the proposals of small group individual heroic acts of terrorism.

This trend in Western leftist student circles at least, however, became somewhat pervasive in the late 1960s when despair over ending the Vietnam War and/or taking political control over one’s own life swamped other more realistic theories of social change. I note, in particular the Weather Underground in America, a comparable grouping to the one portrayed here. Sadly, Jeanson had the better of the argument as subsequent history bears out, if not to our mutual benefit. This fundamental moralistic strategy was so thinly based (and hardly the first time that it had been proposed, the Russian revolutionaries of the 1880s, including Lenin’s brother got caught up in the fever, to speak nothing of the nihilistic characters in “The Possessed”) that after the first few failures to effect change those who advocated the strategy walked away from the whole thing…and went back to school.

The beauty of Godard experimentalism in this work is that, although there is some dialogue it really does not depend on that as much as the visually imaginary that he projects. I mentioned above his use of montage in the Stones film. Here he, seemingly, pored through every known photograph of every known, wannabe or has-been revolutionary up until that time as he adds to his main story. However, that is only part of the brilliant use of film here. I will just point out a couple shots that struck me. Most of the action takes place at cell headquarters, an apartment where the students live, read, smoke many cigarettes, and are lectured to, and at, on Mao Thought. Visually the process of turning the group from bored, if intelligent, students to armchair Red Guards is shown by the depletion of the library from the standards of Western literature until near the end the shelves are almost filled with Red Books.

I have already mentioned the importance of the Jeanson train conversation but that too, especially Yvonne’s detached casualness bears additional mention. Another is the use of lectures in traditional lecture style in the tiny apartment where there are only three or four others present. They took turns at this. The most interesting one was when the pro-Moscow student tried to lecture and was given boos and catcall for his efforts. No one said there was no shortage of infantilism in those days, as the overhead cost of trying to figure out the political universe. There are many other shots like these that give you a fairly realistic picture of that small world, replicated many, many times throughout the world in those days. Well done, Monsieur Godard

Note: I am somewhat under the spell of the gods of ’68 in reviewing this film. Unfortunately one needs to know quite a bit about the struggles within the international left in those pre- “death of communism” days here in the West to appreciate Godard’s take on it. In the end, he was not really sympathetic to those struggles, guerilla warfare Maoism or any other. Seemingly, he takes his lead form Dostoevsky on that as well. He did, however, know enough about those controversies to do a believable, and for the most part, accurate job of detailing them in this film.

The real problem is that for today’s audiences, two or more generations removed from the action, this film can only seem “quaint”. Frankly, as we have been gearing up our opposition to Obama’s Afghan War strategy here in America, more than one friend has noted this: today’s students would have no clue about the action of this film because they do not think, for the most part, about how to change the world fundamentally, how to bring about a classless society. Sadly, I agree. That said though we will have to get them thinking this way again. Agreed?

Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Our Mother, The Mountain- The Music Of Jean Ritchie"

Our Mother, The Mountain- The Traditional Mountain Music Of Jean Ritchie

CD REVIEW

Mountain Hearth And Home, Jean Ritchie, Rhino Handmade, 2004

The last time that the name of traditional mountain folk singer Jean Ritchie was mentioned in this space was as part of the lineup in Rosalie Sorrel’s last concert at Harvard University that spawned a CD, The Last Go-Round. At that concert she, as usual, she performed, accompanied by her sweet dulcimer, the mountain music particularly the music that she learned in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and that she has been associated with going back at least to the early 1960’s. Here, in the CD under review, Mountain Hearth and Home, we get a wide range of those traditional mountain songs from those parts that provide something for every palate.

The songs, simple songs of the mountains that befit a simple folk with simple lyrics, chords and instrumentation representing what was at hand, many of which have their genesis back in the hills of Scotland and Ireland, never fail to evoke a primordial response in this listener. The songs speak of the longings created by those isolated spaces; and, occasionally of those almost eternal thoughts of love, love thwarted, love gone wrong or love disappearing without a trace. Or songs of the hard life of the mountains whether it is the hard scrabble to make a life from the rocky farmland that will not give forth without great struggle or of the mines, the coal mines that in an earlier time (and that are making a comeback now out west) represented a key energy source for a growing industrial society. Many a tale here centers on the trails and tribulations of the weary, worked-out mines and miners. Add in some country lullabies, some religiously-oriented songs representing the fundamental Protestant ethic that drove these people and some Saturday dancing and drinking songs and you have a pretty good feel for the range of experience out there in the hills, hollows and ravines of Eastern Kentucky.

Several time over the past year or so I have mentioned, as part of my remembrances of my youth and of my political and familial background, that my father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner in the hills of Hazard, Kentucky (a town mentioned in a couple of the songs here) in the heart of Appalachia. I have also mentioned that he was a child of the Great Depression and of World War II. He often joked that in a choice between digging the coal and taking his chances in war he much preferred the latter. Thus, it was no accident that when war came he volunteered for the Marines and, as fate would have it, despite a hard, hard life after the war, he never looked back to the mines or the hills. Still this music flowed in his veins, and, I guess, flows in mine.

My Boy Willie

Traditional

Notes: This song has the exact same tunes as the song "The Butcher Boy" and is of a similar theme.

It was early, early in the spring
my boy Willie went to serve the king
And all that vexed him and grieved his mind
was the leaving of his dear girl behind.

Oh father dear build me a boat
that on the ocean I might float
And hail the ships as they pass by
for to inquire of my sailor boy.

She had not sailed long in the deep
when a fine ship's crew she chanced to meet
And of the captain she inquired to
"Does my boy Willie sail on board with you?"

"What sort of a lad is your Willie fair?
What sort of clothes does your Willie wear?"
"He wears a coat of royal blue,
and you'll surely know him for his heart is true".

"If that's your Willie he is not here.
Your Willie's drowned as you did fear.
'Twas at yonder green island as we passed by,
it was there we lost a fine sailor boy".

Go dig my grave long wide and deep,
put a marble stone at my head and feet.
And in the middle, a turtle dove.
So the whole world knows that I died of love.

"The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore"

When I was a curly headed baby
My daddy sat me down on his knee
He said, "son, go to school and get your letters,
Don't you be a dusty coal miner, boy, like me."

[Chorus:]
I was born and raised at the mouth of hazard hollow
The coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door
But now they stand in a rusty row all empty
Because the l & n don't stop here anymore

I used to think my daddy was a black man
With script enough to buy the company store
But now he goes to town with empty pockets
And his face is white as a February snow

[Chorus]

I never thought I'd learn to love the coal dust
I never thought I'd pray to hear that whistle roar
Oh, god, I wish the grass would turn to money
And those green backs would fill my pockets once more

[Chorus]

Last night I dreamed I went down to the office
To get my pay like a had done before
But them ol' kudzu vines were coverin' the door
And there were leaves and grass growin' right up through the floor

[Chorus]


Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies

Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They're like a star on a summer morning
They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story
And they'll make you think that they love you well
And away they'll go and court some other
And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks were black as ink
I'd write a letter to my false true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

I wish I was a little sparrow
And I had wings to fly so high
I'd fly to the arms of my false true lover
And when he'd ask, I would deny

Oh love is handsome, love is charming
And love is pretty while it's new
But love grows cold as love grows older
And fades away like morning dew

"BLACK IS THE COLOUR"

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I love my love and well she knows
I love the ground whereon she goes
But some times I whish the day will come
That she and I will be as one

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

I walk to the Clyde for to mourn and weep
But satisfied I never can sleep
I'll write her a letter, just a few short lines
And suffer death ten thousand times

Black is the colour of my true love's hair
Her lips are like some roses fair
She's the sweetest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground wheron she stands

Blue Diamond Mines

I remember the ways in the bygone days
when we was all in our prime
When us and John L. we give the old man hell
down in the Blue Diamond Mine

Well the whistle would blow 'for the rooster crow
full two hours before daylight
When a man done his best and earned his good rest
at seven dollars a night

In the mines in the mines
in the Blue Diamond Mines
I worked my life away
In the mines in the mines
In the Blue Diamond Mines
I fall on my knees and pray.

You old black gold you've taken my lung
your dust has darkened my home
And now I am old and you've turned your back
where else can an old miner go


Well it's Algomer Block and Big Leather Woods
now its Blue Diamond too
The bits are all closed get another job
what else can an old miner do?


Now the union is dead and they shake their heads
well mining has had it's day
But they're stripping off my mountain top
and they pay me eight dollars a day


Now you might get a little poke of welfare meal
get a little poke of welfare flour
But I tell you right now your won't qualify
'till you work for a quarter an hour.