HomeThe Left Godard’s judgment

Godard’s judgment

May 25, 2008 By dev 1 comment

I’d never seen Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” before last night, when I watched it twice, first without David Sterritt’s commentary, then with. It’s funny, the moral authority people still impute to Godard (and his role model Bertolt Brecht) on the subject of politics. The long passages of Maoist cant in “Weekend” are supposed to “get us thinking,” notes Sterritt, and yet most critics and commentators leave it at that, not doing much thinking at all, opting to address political art on the level of art rather than the level of politics. This is contrary, as Sterritt himself observes, to Godard’s own intentions. In “Weekend,” politics is the main point — hence Godard’s heavily Brechtian “distancing” devices, which are meant to downplay the plot and foreground the ideology.

With “Weekend,” what we’re watching, despite all the elliptical avant-garde turns, is a tacit endorsement of Mao’s then-unfolding Cultural Revolution. The sanctimonious paeans to guerilla warfare and violent revolution in Africa are hard to bear, given the spasms of political murder that plague Africa to this day. Aesthetically the film has its brilliance. Politically it has aged incredibly poorly, though I’m sure many disagree.

This was Godard’s “scathing critique of the bourgeoisie,” notes the DVD sleeve — how fashionable in 1967, how fashionable 41 years later. It’s also the filmmaker’s amicus brief for left totalitarianism. I’m reminded of Alan Johnson’s recent post “Why I am not a Marxist,” specifically point number 8e:

…the extraordinary romantic hostility to ‘bourgeois’ society that Marxism projects. Hatred of ‘bourgeois’ rights, ‘bourgeois’ democracy, ‘bourgeois’ morality, ‘bourgeois’ art, the ‘bourgeois’ family (and on and on), has fuelled hatred toward decent if prosaic societies and institutions and indulgence or worse toward appalling societies and institutions. And all in the name and the spirit of being ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-bourgeois’.


And after “Weekend” it apparently got worse.
[PS — See my related post on composer Cornelius Cardew. And Nick Cohen’s on Brecht. And because I’m in the mood, Anne Applebaum’s merciless assault on Nicholson Baker’s book Human Smoke.]

One Comment

  1. stripey7-
    January 10, 2010 at 8:50 pm

    I haven't seen the film, but I think the imputations in the quote from "Why I Am Not a Marxist" are inaccurate. Marx himself never advocated totalitarianism, while many non-Marxists (e.g., some liberals and anarchists) have apologized for it.

    Some professed Marxists have also done so, but others have unambiguously denounced it. The real problem here is not Marxism but romanticism, fuelled particularly by a desire to find something in the real world to support uncritically, so that one doesn't feel so powerless. Unfortunately most people are conditioned by society to want something like this, starting with religious indoctrination about an all-powerful, all-loving being. People rebelling against a conservative upbringing but lacking any training in critical thinking are likely to fall into this trap. (The Sixties counterculture is replete with examples — the romanticization not just of Maoism but of psychedelics, gurus, etc.) And in some cases, of course, it's mainly about wanting to shock society, starting with one's parents.