Visions of post-Liberal capitalism: "Alphaville," "Week End," and "A Boy and His Dog"

MAOIST.WS

2008 February

In this article, MIWS will discuss two of Jean-Luc Godard's films, "Alphaville" and "Week End," and the political science-fiction movie "A Boy and His Dog," in relation to Liberalism, as a way of beginning a concrete discussion of theory films and their place in the cultural contradictions of the West. MIWS will also begin a discussion of the communist practice of theoretical filmmaking, in imperialist countries, after "Week End" and the prospects for making change through theoretical films in the majority-exploiter First World. First, MIWS will restate previous comments about "Alphaville" and go into more detail on "Alphaville." This will not be a review of Godard's work as a whole, his early work, or even Godard's ideas mainly. However, MIWS will refer to various films by Godard.

MIWS has referred to Godard's "Alphaville" (1965) as a petty-bourgeois movie. In particular, MIWS has described "Alphaville" as a Liberal-individualist critique of industrial society, both capitalist and socialist. "Alphaville" juxtaposes the suppressed humanity of emotionally dead, indoctrinated individuals, subject to a classless or alien state apparatus characterized by technical progress and efficiency -- on the one hand -- with liberation through romantic and aesthetic love. Industrial society is totalitarian, and the emergence of industrial society was accompanied and achieved by the dehumanization of people. In Alphaville, there is hierarchy, organization, and atomization, but not self-motivated individuality. People's names, devoid of truly humyn individual distinctiveness, merely function as designations for control by the state and for the procession of social relationships in which people are individually insignificant parts. Ideas and language are also a site of the state. Discourse has been closed. The emotional has been lost and rendered inaccessible through the gradual forgetting and disappearance of emotional language via the rationalizing, regulating tyranny of society and everyday life. Individuals are constrained at the level of their affect. Individuals do not know love, and neither do they express it. When individuals reconnect with their humanity, totalitarian society quickly disintegrates. There is no revolution, but a crack that appears in the state and then a rapid return to humyn normality. The stature of the individual is diminished and then regained through the blossoming of emotion and individual freedom.

Within "Marxism," there are those who grasp basic realities of exploitation in the world, and those who don't. To MIWS's knowledge, Godard never said, in any of his so-called radical political films, that the labor aristocracy was the majority of any First World nation's workers. However, there is also a struggle for Marxist concepts, as opposed to Liberal concepts.

Western movies are generally individualist or Liberal, in different ways and to varying degrees, but the particular environment in which "Alphaville" emerged may have determined its effects at the time it was first seen. For Godard fans, this would have included other Godard films. This is important, because earlier films may have been worse than "Alphaville," making "Alphaville" an advance; and within Godard's pre-1980s work, there is a communist, if not always Marxist and scientific, trend that may need to be considered as a whole to understand "Alphaville." If one accepts that the period of so-called early Godard, containing movies potentially important for consideration by communists, ranges broadly from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, or even to 1972 (the year in which "Tout va bien" and "Letter to Jane" were made and the last year of the Dziga Vertov Group), the searching analyst is faced with the task of studying nearly thirty films, many of which are not commercially distributed today. Some have been seen by few Godard reviewers; MIWS is just admitting it. The current reviewer has seen a large assortment of Godard's early films and examined scripts of some early-Godard films not watched, but has not seen most early-Godard films. Also, some Godard films refer to or build on earlier Godard films. The question arises, is MIWS missing some context for understanding "Alphaville," because of a lack of complete firsthand exposure to Godard's early-period work. MIWS is comfortable saying that "Alphaville" is objectively Liberal-individualist seen in isolation, that is, standing alone, in any Western imperialist country today, including France. However, perhaps, "Alphaville" was not Liberal-individualist in the context in which it appeared. Since few people may see "Alphaville" today, MIWS is wrong, maybe, to criticize "Alphaville" as if it were seen today and in today's circumstances, aside from problematizing its inclusion in the contemporary Western sci-fi filmic discourse, within which "Alphaville" would be Liberal-individualist. Sci-fi fans who have not seen other early-Godard films may respond to "Alphaville" as a Liberal movie, but the question here is whether "Alphaville" is historically a Liberal movie. It is important to consider the effects of film over time, to have an understanding of how various films have different effects in different situations, an understanding that can be used for future, revolutionary transformation and today's public-opinion struggles, but it is important also to examine the historical practice of leftist filmmaking and film distribution.

The question of whether "Alphaville" is Liberal or Marxist is not cut-and-dry for MIWS, because MIWS does not make the assumption that Godard's films that don't contain concentrations of Marxist language aren't Marxist, as some parasitic bourgeois people trying to appropriate Godard's early work do. Besides not having seen all early-Godard films, the current reviewer has not studied communist poet Paul Éluard's poetry, which inspired "Alphaville" and figures in "Alphaville." On the chance that MIWS was oblivious to something, maybe an interfilmic, literary or cultural connection, MIWS as a shortcut took a look at published self-proclaimed Godard expert analyses of "Alphaville." Two analyses were interesting in that they both dealt with the geometric circle motif in "Alphaville" and had different interpretations of that, but arrived at conclusions that suggest the film's location in Liberal discourse and ideology. For one analyst, the circle represented a closed social system, under which romantics and individualists suffered and were repressed. For the second analyst, the circle was, more in keeping with what is said in the movie's dialogue, part of a statement on temporality and affect, and the essence of humanity. These analyses ring with MIWS's understanding of the film's message. If there is no past, nor future, only the present as dictated by an impersonal state or society, there can be no emotion, which is reactive or anticipatory. If there are no origins (Alphaville citizens came from somewhere else, but from where, they don't remember or are unable to articulate), there can be no individuality. Individuals achieve liberation through remembrance of their origins and mortality. With either of the analyses that MIWS mentioned, people in Alphaville exist as individuals, but are subject to the state or its ideology. Classes are de-emphasized. Alphaville residents may be from the interstellar equivalents of Tokyo, Florence, New York, Angoulême, or an exceptional Beijing, but there is no Third World other than as something that may have been forgotten by Alphaville citizens. There is a comment about well-off people's requiring a different "religion" than people who are suffering, perhaps a religion of rationality, science and technology, as opposed to "conscience," but the Third World is not depicted. Natacha Von Braun is not shown arriving at a destination after leaving Alphaville, but Lemmy Caution does come from the Lands Without, and the implication is that Von Braun will eventually return to the Lands Without. Receptive First World film-watchers, signaled with "Florence," "Nueva York," and so on, will return to their origins. "Alphaville" arrives at an imagined First World before people lost their humanity. Liberation is thus a reversion, not revolutionary progression to an advanced stage. In order to liberate themselves, individual Alphaville citizens must become humyn again.

Autonomy that potentially allows subconscious or non-rational thinking and behavior is central to "Alphaville"'s conception of humanity. Without autonomy, individuals don't have humanity and dwindle as individuals. "Alphaville" contrasts humanity and non-humanity and defines autonomy via a theme of knowledge and the meaninglessness of time under totalitarianism. In Alphaville, there is no knowledge, only rules and calculated probabilities and conclusions. There is no need for emotion or any individuality. This is manifested in the concept, surrounding the computer Alpha 60, of time. The future is contained in the present. Alpha 60 predicts the future, and it determines it. The future tense and the past tense, too, are redundant. The past as distinct from the present is irrelevant, because the powerful computer's plans encapsulate what is possible, and Alpha 60's objective is a progress that is not based on individual people's differing wishes, memories, or dreams. The only communication tolerated in Alphaville is that needed to carry out orders. All possible meanings among words have already been calculated. Words that are obsolete from the perspective of Alpha 60's operations are removed from language. Individuals are components of a system that has a fixed and determinative logic.

"Alphaville" is partly a parody of the dark detective story; it gives the film a distinctiveness. Peter Cheyney's character is an amerikan agent. While the use of spies to attack governments and systems in other countries is real, MIWS took Godard's use of Lemmy Caution as comedic or a way of producing dissonance in filmgoers' minds. To call "Alphaville" pro-FBI or -CIA as a criticism would be without justification. However, it is a challenge to tell whether certain things are supposed to be taken seriously in "Alphaville" or not. MIWS found the love story in "Alphaville," while evidence of the film's Liberalism and individualism, to be unconventional and vacuous by traditional standards, not something with which the audience would particularly become engrossed with on an emotional level (which is arguably Godard's intention) or something that would make the movie strong commercially other than being a way to have an attractive actress on the screen. Citing the dream-like feel or tongue-in-cheek tone of "Alphaville," some have called "Alphaville" a parody of the love story, a mockery of the notion of fulfillment and liberation through love. On the other hand, the empty-seeming love story in "Alphaville," a reflection of Alphaville's stifling of the humanity of humyn relationships, fits what the film tries to do overall with the Natacha Von Braun character. Emotion and love are beneath the surface, struggling for expression. Alphaville residents don't have emotional or affective attachments (Natacha Von Braun is not particularly attached to her father) and cannot express emotion. The love story cannot have the conventional substance, because Von Braun does not regain her humanity as an individual until the end. "Alphaville" ends where love stories begin. As an individualist movie, "Alphaville" never departs from where it starts.

The most positive interpretation of "Alphaville" would be that it is mainly a critique of imperialist society. Alphaville assimilated "Swedes, Germans and Americans" most easily, but presumably encountered difficulty assimilating Third World people. Alphaville engages in political and psychological warfare against the Lands Without and plans to invading them. Yet, Alphaville citizens are indicated to be originally inhabitants of the Lands Without. To the extent that Alphaville represents a state of mind, as suggested by Natacha Von Braun's reading words apparently of a poem in Caution's copy of La Capitale de la douleur -- "Are we near to our conscience, or far from it?" -- "Alphaville" becomes a movie vaguely impelling people to action or thought, rather than a materialist movie about struggle or ideology in the First World.

"Week End": an alternative societal-breakdown movie

MIWS offers an alternative when it criticizes a movie. As an alternative movie about Western society, MIWS has suggested "American Psycho" (2000). Within Godard's oeuvre, if "Alphaville" is indeed a Liberal-individualist film, then Godard's later 1967 "Week End" may be viewed partly as progress with respect to "Alphaville." "Week End" contains several of the themes of "Alphaville" and is an improvement over "Alphaville" in some of these areas. At the same time, "Week End"'s target, capitalist society or so-called modern society, is, like "Alphaville's" target, indefinite, though "Week End" contains more specific references to capitalism, or "Week End"'s solution is indefinite. Or "Week End" is ambivalent in invoking Liberalism as a way forward for humanity.

Like "Alphaville," "Week End" depicts the breakdown of individualistic, alienated and consumerist society. In contrast to "Alphaville," "Week End" depicts the breakdown as taking place in over time, with progressively greater levels of barbarism. In "Week End," society has become so individualistic that the bourgeoisie is no longer able to pursue its own interests as a group. Individuals are so impulsively selfish that they are no longer humyn, but animal-like and even more self-destructive than non-humyn animals. The idea of the Third World and of a world and reality larger than the First World appears in "Week End." Furthermore, "Week End" presents a bleak, hopeless picture of romantic relationships between females and males in a society that is destroying itself.

There are many things to talk about with "Week End" from a Maoist standpoint, most obviously the film's explicit and prominent presentation of revolutionary theory and strategy. However, the immediate question here is whether "Week End" could be reconciled with "Alphaville" as a movie about societal breakdown; in what ways are they similar and different in this respect. "Alphaville" criticizes a collective emotionless rationality without a role for individual uncertainty and questioning. The society depicted breaks down from the inherent contradictions of its logic as humanity appears in the gaps in Alpha 60's control and information (its calculation-memory process). "Week End" criticizes aggressive individualism and callousness. Society implodes from antisocial tendencies. "Alphaville" and "Week End" seem to suggest different essences of modern society, but may be reconciled with each other in that they may represent different aspects of breakdown. The core of modern society could be characterized by technical rationality or hellishly individualistic, or both. One may just appear at the edges of society and its breakdown, or in the society's ideology, which reproduces the society's social relationships.

Godard reuses things from his earlier films, not just actors and formal elements, but also images and themes. So, there are elements of "À bout de souffle" (1960) ("Breathless") that are even in "Week End" (such as taking on a hitchhiker only if they are attractive, the female-male couple, the whole automobile motif present in several different films of Godard's, the idea of females in patriarchal capitalist society as prostitutes, etc.), despite what appear to be the totally different tones of these films. As to whether there is some particular chronological or sequential continuity between "Alphaville" and "Week End," two works have been identified as sequels to "Alphaville," neither of them "Week End": "Anticipation, ou l'amour en l'an 2000" (1967) and the much more recent "Allemagne 90 neuf zéro" (1991), which reuses the Lemmy Caution character (and Eddie Constantine, the actor who played Lemmy Caution in "Alphaville"). MIWS has seen neither of these and will not comment on them. However, any connection to "Germania anno zero" (1948) would be interesting, because the Rossellini film depicts the breakdown of society in a devastating way and emphasizes the dehumanization of people by violence and individual survival. In "Alphaville," Caution and Von Braun talk about what happened to Alphaville residents as Alphaville collapsed. Caution compares the surviving residents to crazy ants (whereas earlier in the film Alphaville is described as as an ant-like technocracy). The residents who didn't die may "recover," Caution tells Von Braun. This is potentially significant, because in "Week End" individuals move from place to place, concerned with only their own well-being, as they narrowly conceive of it, and the liberation fighters in the movie are depicted as being products of the same society as the married bourgeois couple. Von Braun begins a process of liberation through remembrance as Alphaville disintegrates. In "Week End," the liberation front revolutionizes society through society's own systemic violence. There seems to be an incongruity between the two film's conceptions of liberation, but "Week End" may represent the fate of those who do not undergo a process of self-realization, and do not gain self-knowledge. Or "Alphaville" and "Week End" may represent revolutionary development in two different contexts, the individual and society, "Alphaville" focusing on the ideological development of the individual in breaking out of society's supposed emotional straitjacket.

As complementary films, the worst message "Alphaville" and "Week End" may send is that Third World people need to pass through a violent stage, while First World people have skipped that stage and need only to be awakened -- a white-nationalist mixture of the Theory of Productive Forces and the false-consciousness explanation for the political situation in the First World. One idea with currency today among so-called Marxists is that amerikans already have advanced ideals in comparison with people in other nations. But the bourgeois couple in "Week End" does not show sustained interest in the intellectual ideas to which they are exposed on their journey, which ends in ruthless violence.

If First Worlders have not skipped a violent stage, then they have already passed through one, is another implication: a bourgeois stage of revolution. This reduces revolution to anti-colonialism and anti-feudalism and not socialism. "Week End" relates Third World anti-imperialism to Western bourgeois revolution. While this may be intended to persuade First World Liberals of the merits of Third World anti-imperialism, it also, with "Alphaville," risks suggesting that countries in which bourgeois revolutions have been completed and gains consolidated, or even countries that have just developed economically, have no need for further violent transformation.

Taken together, another interpretation is that "Alphaville" and "Week End" depict a decadent, dismal society, which has departed from supposed Liberal norms to become a post-Liberal society, but in which Liberalism still plays a progressive role. Society is at once post-Liberal and in need of Liberalism. The theme of post-Liberal society, in which relationships are no longer based on individual rights or the rule of law, is found in both "Alphaville" and "Week End." The violence and gore, and the situations in "Week End" in general, are satiric or symbolic in nature. (Appropriately, characters in the self-referential "Week End" pose the question: Are these things just in a film, or are they also in reality?) Thus, it may seem that the violence is not meant to be taken seriously. But in "Week End," there is no Liberal man, only ignorant and self-absorbed decadent people with no sense of citizenship.

In terms of the breakdown of society, an important question is: Which society? "Week End" is frequently described as a critique of "modern" society, rather than capitalist society, in spite of the film's specific references to capitalist society. Since "Breathless," Godard has been concerned with problems of so-called modern society, particularly as they are expressed through relationships between adult females and males.

If MIWS were to suspect "Week End" for being a petty-bourgeois movie about modern society in general, in spite of its references to capitalism, it would be because of the bourgeoisie's response to the film, as a stylistically innovative film about consumerism, corporations, and a general selfishness and decadence as some kind of defect, rather than an inseparable aspect of the imperialist system -- themes that would not be controversial among the petty-bourgeoisie. For some viewers, "Week End" is even more specifically about the united $tates and u.$. corporations. In the petty-bourgeois view, there is no major difference between monopoly capitalism -- what the petty-bourgeoisie variously calls "corporatism" and so forth -- and socialism, and so it is natural for the petty-bourgeoisie to identify First World imperialist society with modern society without making distinctions, even when socialist countries exist, which they did when "Week End" was released. A variant idea is that there is something unique about First World society, but all nations must become like the First World and pass through a stage of monopoly capitalism, eventually culminating in a totalitarian or anarchic post-Liberal capitalism without the possibility of further development of society.

In "Week End," the suggestion at one point (during a commentary on art discussing Mozart) is that the bourgeoisie has become so decadent it can no longer appreciate even classical music. Corrine cries over her Hermès handbag, but is uninterested in Mozart. Other things in the movie suggest that the bourgeoisie is against art in general that is not attached to consumption. Godard has a point in critically portraying the bourgeoisie as uninterested in Mozart, because the bourgeoisie is decadent, and bourgeois art has become politically moribund. Gone are the days when bourgeois music played a progressive role. And, so, there are shifts in bourgeois art signaling boredom, advertising and market needs, and reactionary trends; old bourgeois art becomes obsolete and is displaced. Yet, in a variety of ways, such as the seemingly out of place, but heavy, reference to Saint-Just (which may have the effect of evoking class struggle in general or the right of the oppressed to be as violent as European revolutionaries, but gives some prominence to Saint-Just's ideas about freedom, violence, and change), "Week End" seems to point more to the past and Liberalism for solutions, than to modern movements and other societies. While putting the idea of a bourgeois artistic avante-garde into question, "Week End" sees a glimmer of hope in the obsolete.

In France, some believed that anti-colonial struggles were realizing the ideals of the French Revolution. In oppressed nations today, the revolution is still in a democratic stage, but proletarian leadership is needed to leave behind neo-colonialism permanently. The use of Saint-Just in "Week End" evokes a parallel with European bourgeois revolution, but one that is not ideal in a Marxist theory movie without elaboration. A proletarian movement is needed to unite the Third World and overthrow neo-colonialism and imperialism, which includes the First World labor aristocracy.

In terms of content manifested that is inconsistent with MIWS's own thinking, MIWS can object to little in "Week End." If "Week End" contrasts the present with the Liberal or imagined past, and with art, "Week End" balances that out by also contrasting Mao Zedong with Lyndon B. Johnson. A film could steer away from controversy by saying things that cancel each other out or by saying nothing at all. But MIWS has to consider the bourgeoisie's reactions to "Week End," because ultimately films, including theory films and essay films, in which the filmmakers' ideas are intended to be explicit, cannot be separated from the audience's interpretation. It is not just that the biography and intentions of a filmmaker are not decisive. When a film or any work of art is distributed, it ceases to be something that is merely for self-reflection, so-called self-expression, or self-realization, or for therapy, but has effects through an audience and commentators. When MIWS sees a Marxist Godard film, it is like preaching to the converted. When MIWS hears the theory in a Marxist Godard film, MIWS pays attention to it and understands it, unlike the couple depicted in "Week End." The mostly bourgeois First World population can listen to the same words and hear just another bourgeois or petty-bourgeois tune, or see an apolitical artistic reflection of political images and language from the surrounding environment. The audience's own perspective and abilities for understanding are constraints that any film striving to be propaganda or agitation faces.

While Godard viewed the petty-bourgeoisie as having the ability to comprehend a cerebral movie, Godard was aware of the role of the audience in a film's effects, that is, the audience's actual understanding. Aside from Godard's use of Brechtian devices and techniques, which reflected Godard's theory of film and the debates that were taking place about film and art at the time "Week End" was made, MIWS does not know why Godard chose to do the things he did in "Week End" particularly. "Week End" is jarring, perhaps in a way that some of Godard's most radical political films are not. It seems plausible that "Week End" is so unsettling, because Godard was concerned that filmgoers weren't "getting" his movies, or concerned with bourgeois appropriation of his films. Ironically, the unique formal elements of "Week End," rather than the theory in the film, have attracted the most attention with some commentators. In some cases, more than an anti-capitalist film, "Week End" is seen as an anti-cinema film, for reasons having to do with the film's formal characteristics.

Interesting fact: Godard and Leni Riefenstahl both met Mick Jagger in persyn. At the time "One Plus One" (1968) was made, Mick Jagger said that he liked Godard's work. But also, Mick Jagger liked Riefenstahl's work. MIWS points this out not to treat Godard, Mick Jagger, or Riefenstahl, or an examination of their work, carelessly, but to draw attention to the fact that politics is not central to some people's view of Godard. MIWS is not claiming that Mick Jagger agreed with the politics of Riefenstahl's Nazi-era work, but if Jagger were interested in only Riefenstahl's or Hitler's techniques for captivating people, that would suggest something about the bourgeoisie's attitude toward artists. The bourgeoisie has shown since "Triumph of the Will" that it is willing to take in innovative artists, whatever their politics may be. If the politics are interesting, they are interesting in a Liberal way; the bourgeoisie likes to sample different ideas. As an excuse for liking Godard's radical political films, it is sometimes claimed that it is not Godard who had these radical political ideas, but the characters and the people he filmed.

While the bourgeoisie may not take Godard seriously politically, but only cinematographically, and artistically in a non-political sense (or, rather, in a sense that presupposes Liberalism as both an accepted ideology and a prevailing political condition), depoliticizing the early Godard's films is a way of struggling against or displacing the ideas associated with those films. It is supposed that Godard just used Mao in "Week End," and Mao and Black revolutionaries in "One Plus One," as backdrop, or for effect, as provocative art or to shock. Connected to this depoliticization is the idea that it is not possible for anyone else to make a "Godard" film, because Godard's work is so diverse and undefinable. In contrast to this view, MIWS sees a trajectory in Godard's work, not infinite variation. The trajectory ended, unfortunately, in degeneration; however, MIWS sees a development between "Alphaville" and later films.

In "Alphaville," Godard emphasized love and remembrance in a First World context. In "Week End," in addition to attention given to the Third World, there is repeatedly the idea that liberation is necessarily violent. While not romanticizing, in fact, undermining the idea of, revolutionary violence as something in an action movie, "Week End" puts forth the idea of revolutionary violence in both explicit and metaphorical ways. "Why disembowel him? . . . The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror." Saint-Just (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) says that "freedom" grows out of violence. In "One Plus One," the idea is put forward that humanity, for the oppressed, means not just love, but hating the oppressor.

For MIWS, there are few moments in film history as powerful as the words "I love you" against a repugnant backdrop of a bloody skinned rabbit. Where others see just another instance of Godard's use of distanciation, MIWS sees a comment on the emptiness and narrowness of love in a world of violence where First World females and males try to manipulate each other even as they oppress the Third World. There is a variation in the gender ideas expressed in Godard's early films. In "Breathless" appears the idea that relationships between females and males are degraded by capitalism and prostitution; in "Week End" and intervening films since "Breathless," "Alphaville" notwithstanding, the idea is more pronounced that intimate relationships in society are not only prostitution, but marked by power, domination and oppression in a broader way.

Whereas some commentators see "Alphaville" as a critique of capitalist planning, MIWS sees an aversion to collectivism and any system in which the individual has less than central role or lives with constraints. The non-emphasis on the emotionality-rationality dichotomy in "Week End" is therefore interesting. Characters in "Week End," except the bourgeois couple, state their rationales strongly, but unemotionally. The educated privileged bourgeois couple stands for a peculiar of rationality, belonging to the professional technocratic order of the so-called advanced and civilized West, but all else equal, it is the oppressed who are rational. The bourgeoisie is dead mentally.

"Week End" and the labor aristocracy

The status of the First World working class as a labor aristocracy has become a dividing-line question. As with other Marxist films by Godard, MIWS is concerned with Godard's line relevant to the question and what things Godard chooses to show, what words he chooses to have spoken. The part of "Week End" before the bourgeois couple crash their car and have to abandon it is ambiguous. Appropriately, the intervening text in the farmer/tractor accident scene starts out as "SS" before turning into "THE CLASS STRUGGLE"; it may as well stand for "Schutzstaffel," because the scene ends with the arguing farmer and distraught bourgeois female uniting and attacking the bourgeois couple with anti-Semitic insults. When the First World working class becomes discontented, it takes up fascism, not communism, because it is already bourgeois and clings to that position. Before the reconciliation and insults, though, the farmer defends himself by saying that France needs his labor. He also defends his tractor after Juliet calls the tractor old, cheap, and union- or co-op-owned: the tractor costs a lot "if you have to work with your own hands."

A white-chauvinist version of the Theory of Productive Forces says that white workers fundamentally have a right to whatever capital they work with, because they are exploited. Later, though, "Week End" explicitly addresses one form of the Theory of Productive Forces, in the part where two refuse collectors (presumably an Algerian man and a Congolese man) talk about class struggle and revolution: "To be civilized means to belong to a class society, to a reality full of contradictions in which the development of the means of production is necessarily bound up with the development of methods whereby one group of men exploits another" (translation from the French dialogue by Marianne Sinclair, in Weekend, and Wind from the East : Two Films, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972). Prior to this, the Congolese, speaking on behalf of the Algerian, says: "We declare that we must not trust in the good will of the imperialists but that we must arm ourselves with strength and militancy. Africa will not be freed by the mechanical development of her natural resources -- rather, it is the hands and brains of her people which are setting in motion the dialectics of the continent's liberation and which will bring this process to a successful conclusion." What is left out is that the development of the productive forces in the world today is primarily linked to international exploitation, so much so that the entirety of new means of production in the First World may be attributed to the accumulation of capital through international exploitation, because First World workers consume more than they produce.

Theory films

MIWS cannot say that "Week End" has an edge theoretically today in terms of what is needed to advance in building science and scientific-communist forces, though some things may be controversial for white-chauvinist so-called radicals. Struggle over the labor aristocracy thesis has existed for decades in several different countries; it is long past time to take a stand. If there is going to be a Marxist theory movie, there cannot just be a movie about class struggle in the abstract, consumerism, and corporations, suggesting that First World workers are both backward and productive. "Week End" addresses colonialism, national struggle and racism (the Congolese says u.$. soldiers in Vietnam are "fighting for white America" and says nothing about Euro-Amerikan workers as opposing imperialism, effectively lumping Euro-Amerikan workers in "white men"), but MIWS finds "One Plus One," containing a statement about the oppressed's not needing to wait for white workers, to be more advanced in some ways. There are actually two topics involved here that revisionism spreads confusion on today: the labor aristocracy, and the international anti-imperialist struggle and the right of oppressed nations to defeat imperialism.

The principal task of communists in the First World is creating public opinion, not party-building, which in the worst case for some people means increasing the number of people agreeing with or linking to a communist position, not building scientific organizations that can carry out the range of tasks necessary in the First World. MIWS is questioning the whole idea of making or promoting theory films as what communists should be doing with film primarily. "Week End" is designed to make people think. MIWS is not against making people think or First Worlders' seeing a cerebral movie. However, at this time, that has to be separated from trying to teach First Worlders Marxist theory with one or two hours of film. That is not what the winnable or needed struggle is.

First Worlders' response to encountering Marxist theory is like the bourgeois couple's in "Week End": boredom. Sometimes, they may be captivated, but not because of systematic intellectual inquiry or because of thinking at length about their situation. (The bourgeois couple listens to various speakers, because they have to. The speakers have something the couple needs or interrupt the couple's travel. Stranded again, the couple ponders whether they truly know themselves, but this quickly gives way to consumerism.) The majority of those who are not bored and go on to study theory end up degenerating, or starting out as and staying revisionist, because the pressure to stay on the revolutionary track is not there in the First World for the most part. There are contradictions and struggles within the First World, but the urgency and necessity of action are not present or felt. The forms of the class struggle in the First World are complicated to begin with. Without the scientific ability, motivation, and footing, to carry out actual communists tasks in the First World, people floating around, drifting, are prone to getting used by the state, or degenerating into Christians (as Eldridge Cleaver, referenced in "One Plus One," did), Freudians, Lacanians, Liberals, postmodernists, post-structuralists, and even fascists; Godard himself turned away from Marxism. This is a result of promoting the development of intellectual or militant forces in an environment that is not conducive to people's remaining on the revolutionary road.

After seeing and criticizing many movies, it would be natural for someone to consider making a movie themselves, as Godard did. After "Week End" and "One Plus One," however, MIWS would have to ask: What is the point? The Rolling Stones continue to be popular. Stones fans may be disappointed by the non-Stones content of "One Plus One" (the u.$. release was named "Sympathy for the Devil") and discontinuous footage of the Stones, but it is hard to imagine easily making a film that would do better than "One Plus One" while containing the same revolutionary ideas. "One Plus One" has all the ingredients of a popular theory movie, as much as a Marxist theory movie could be popular in the First World. The "Sympathy for the Devil" version has been released on DVD, and marketing emphasizes the Stones themselves.

There is a possible idealist notion of practice and knowledge, which purports to have something to do with with Mao's "On Practice," but has more to do with ignoring practice out of a peculiar emphasis on individuals. This notion says that says one ultimately has no right to criticize Godard's communist work or really any movie unless one has made a movie. The notion is idealist, because it is focused on the individual and what he or she needs to do before being entitled to criticize a movie, as if reality were dependent on a sequence of development in the individual and her or his mind, whereas the concept of practice that is needed is social and historical. Revolution is both a science and a goal-oriented practice, making the formulation and implementation of new experiments necessary, but it is possible to compare practices and evaluate ideas using what already exists. Godard spent the effort to make "Week End," "One Plus One," "La Chinoise," and "Tout va bien"; so, one might as well make use of them as experiments and compare their results with those of other films (for example, critical Vietnam War films that don't try to teach the audience Marxist theory), in addition to using them to assess what is technically and logistically possible. If there is a doubt about that, it would be because the climate for theory films in 2008 may be different than the climate in the 1960s. Maybe MIWS is wrong and a Marxist theory movie for parasites would be somehow more beneficial to Iran than an agitation movie. It is in general not the case that a large number of scientific communists with sustained contributions to make will emerge from an effort to educate First Worlders about theory.

If MIWS wanted to, it could publish scripts for perfect theory movies and research on what it would take to produce them. One could do everything to have revolutionary movies except finance, shoot and distribute them. Writing a script for a movie could be sufficient for proving that the movie is possible. Actually making a movie is not crucial. What is crucial is the question that making a movie attempts to answer. MIWS is not a movie studio, and so anything MIWS says or does about film would be to answer a question whose answering would support the communist struggle. If the question is, what kind of movie sells the most tickets in the First World, then one can just look at box office statistics. If a question cannot be answered using measurement or investigation, or there is no question at all, then the reasoning behind making a movie is probably idealist or mystical. Communist filmmaking, like other communist art and communist practice, has to do be based on science, both in its objective (not just for its own sake or self-expression) and in its design and creation. The reason why practice is important in the first place has to do with a scientific approach to knowledge production.

If there is not a clear rationale or question behind communist filmmaking, it can easily become like going to church or "self-expression," divorced from the actual needs of struggle. Something that Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and others knew in the 1960s is that many people who see political films are already basically converted believers in what they see and hear. Godard tried to make more controversial films, but there were limits to what he could accomplish, built-in to the class structure.

Some of Godard's films seem to have the purpose of taking the viewer to Marxism by way of passing through a stage of Liberalism, as if to recapitulate liberal democracy in the ideological development of the individual. Liberalism appears as a step on the way to Marxism. The reasoning could be that First Worlders must because Liberal people again before becoming communist people. To the extent that First World society is not now liberal-democratic and perhaps never was, and amerikans only know Liberalism as something having to do with a virtuous George Washington and a cherry tree, re-educating First Worlders in this way, with this progression, at some point in the future is thinkable. However, the principal task in the First World at this time is creating public opinion, not trying to get thousands of amerikans to become some kind of Marxist intellectual. MIWS is thus not particularly interested in questions of whether and how to educate amerikans for socialism by drawing from Liberalism. MIWS has only spoken in support of making agitation movies on specific issues of militarism and repression.

Theory films may be pedagogical or used as a primary medium for communication. MIWS does not believe film is better than writing as the first place to communicate theoretical advancements. Film may still be useful in generating interest in theory. There may be questions about how to best present theory using film. However, the principal task, public-opinion-creation, should narrow down the questions to be answered about film for the First World. The most important questions now are those seeking to determine what films work best as agitation, and they are also more challenging questions, because it would be easier to make a movie containing theory expressed in dialogue and text than a movie that would effectively accomplish agitation goals. How to do agitation, not connected to party-building as a priority, in a majority-exploiter country has not been satisfactorily resolved.

It may be tempting to want to make a theory film, because of a desire just to have the most correct theory represented in film, or to use film as a substitute for writing, for watered-down party-building. There is not necessarily a scientific question involved in wanting to make a theory film as opposed to doing something else. The kinds of questions that do need to be answered are connected to making advances in agitation practice, for example, how can one do better than "Syriana" for agitation without illusions about teaching First Worlders Marxist theory, and how can one make and distribute a less popular movie that would be an advance in an area that "Syriana" has not covered.

Between "Week End" and "A Boy and His Dog"

In the big picture of Western movies about alienation, "Week End" appears at the edges, but it is within the realm of bourgeois concerns. "Tout va bien" seems to recognize this in an indirect way: The factory manager in "Tout va bien" talks about finding a balance between productivity and prosperity, and consumerism and alienation. Making a movie for, and in which, bourgeois people reflect on themselves with what they already know or can relate to is one thing, which Godard tried to do, but that is different than making a movie that substitutes a focus on alienation for teaching scientific class analysis. "Week End" serves to illustrate how a theory film can end up reproducing the ideology of the class it opposes by failing to adequately teach an alternative. "Week End" may even be objectively lumped in the same category of non-communist non-theoretical political movies. Godard's films even more controversial than "Week End" ended up ignored or unseen by many who saw other films by Godard, while some of Godard's films that became popular have problems.

In "Le Mépris" (1963) ("Contempt"), Fritz Lang, played by himself, mentions a common recurring theme in storytelling: "the fight of the individual against the circumstances, the eternal problem of the old Greeks." The line is particularly suitable in "Contempt," but calls to mind how uncontroversial the theme really is. It is in fact the story in many movies dealing with alienation. "Week End" references Lyndon Johnson, counterposing him to Mao. It is indicative, of the commonness of feelings of individual powerlessness among the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie (economically and politically powerful as a group), that such a persyn as Harry McPherson, an important Johnson aide and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy known as a liberal, wrote the following in the early 1970s, which could have been part of a treatment for movies as superficially diverse as "The Matrix" and "Collateral" (2004):

"People were suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well-to-do as much as it did the poor. Middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons; fathers, working at "meaningless" jobs, or slumped before the television set; sons and daughters desperate for "relevance" -- all were in need of community, beauty, and purpose, all were guilty because so many others were deprived while they, rich beyond their ancestors' dreams, were depressed."(1)

McPherson captured the mood of the middle class, which found expression in the movies of the time and in many moves to come. "THX 1138" came out in 1971. A few years after McPherson wrote, "A Boy and His Dog" (1975) was released. Aside from the use of cannibalism as a metaphor and other superficial similarities that are striking and caused MIWS to connect the film to "Week End," "A Boy and His Dog" is interesting in the context of "Week End" as a post-apocalyptic film about a young white man who grapples with a choice between a life of uncertainty, barbarism, and want, and the promise of a stable, comfortable life of privilege in a totalitarian society.

Nuclear weapons destroyed cities in a fourth world war, driving people underground. People still live on the surface in a scattered, lawless scavenger society, searching for canned food and armed with guns. They cooperate in an economy, but kill each other. For some reason, there is a low female-male ratio on the surface. An inexplicably telepathic dog named Blood uses his nose to find food for Vic in exchange for food. Vic's "sexual frustration," as Blood calls Vic's behavior, and Blood's role in this context, serves as comedy. "A Boy and His Dog" has been criticized as patriarchal. Among other things, the protagonist rapes females at gunpoint, and this is represented as Vic's fulfilling his needs. Yet, the movie uses sex as a way of characterizing two societies, the surface and the subterranean society. Vic's activity on the surface is counterposed to the use of sex solely for reproduction in a puritanical society.

Vic ends up choosing a life of freedom on the surface. Blood talks about a third place somewhere that he wants to go to, called "Over the Hill," which represents either learned Blood's ideal society, or the conundrum that an individual faces in a sick society beyond her or his power to control, a problem that he or she can resolve only by growing old and moving closer to death. By contrasting the surface with the underground, both visions of a post-Liberal future or non-Liberal present, "A Boy and His Dog" supports Liberalism, a Liberal kind of utopianism to recover from a disaster visited upon humanity with its supposed Liberal project. "A Boy and His Dog" wants neither totalitarianism nor the excesses of individual freedom, but at least on the surface, in the uncertainty of an uncharted land opened up by societal decay, there is freedom. Similar to "Week End," "A Boy and His Dog" uses sexual violence to accentuate the unrestrained freedom in which humanity and an undefined future are supposed to emerge.

By vaguely gesturing toward a future without totalitarianism, a future within the realm of freedom, and without depicting class struggle, "A Boy and His Dog" evokes a Liberal vision of change in much the same way that "Alphaville" does. "A Boy and His Dog" only adds the suggestion that a lawless society both is horrifying, and contains the potential for change in its indeterminateness and transitoriness. Only the hellish underground society is forsaken by those in whom some humanity is intact; those embodying the worst of alleged humyn nature also shun constricted underground life. "Week End," in contrast, taken separately from "Alphaville," is less concerned with totalitarianism and sexual repression. In terms of formal characteristics, "Week End" exhibits qualities that would have improved "A Boy and His Dog." The director, L. Q. Jones, has claimed that that "A Boy and His Dog" was not intended to condone the protagonist's violent behavior, just depict a world that is supposed to be unpleasant and appalling. One problem with "A Boy and His Dog," aside from Liberalism, is not what it chooses to depict, but that the way the scenes are set up and shot, and the likability of the protagonist in spite/because of Blood's comical criticisms, permit the viewer to experience Vic's viewpoint and mentality vicariously. Some of the issues involved, relating to realism, narrative, perspective, identification, and emotion, are things that Godard dealt with. One manifestation of this is "Week End." Despite the relative merits of "Week End," formal elements cannot prevent it from pulling people in the same direction that "A Boy and His Dog" does.

Conclusion

Liberalism has undergone various mutations and become intertwined with "Marxism" in complex ways, particularly with the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, but starting before. Non-Liberal forms of white nationalism also infiltrate Marxism, but the intellectual struggle in its margins is basically between Liberalism and Marxism. Today, Liberalism in its Freudian, postmodern, "post-Marxist" and revisionist "Marxist" manifestations what non-Marxist intellectuals have to disentangle themselves from to become Marxist. Contradictions between Liberalism and Marxism characterize the milieu in which the early Godard developed and are expressed in Godard's films. It is unsurprising that Liberalism finds resonance or representation in Godard's films. At the same time, Godard's films such as "Week End," one of Godard's most radical films, serve as confirmation that Marxist filmmakers are faced with a challenge of appearing culturally relevant and addressing Liberalism, while differentiating from Liberalism enough to produce something new in viewers' heads. "Week End" easily interweaves with a contemporary discourse of post-Liberalism that is itself stuck in Liberalism. The extent to which the particular films of Godard's discussed in this article represent an unconscious compromising of science or drew from certain images to accomplish an intended communist goal, MIWS will not get into here. However, films such as those are competing with other films that may be appealing to petty-bourgeois audiences experiencing concern or disillusion with the viability of Liberalism: contemporaneous films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as "A Boy and His Dog," and recent films. That environment, of diverse films inquiring about Liberal capitalism, will shape and limit the impact of radical films, also. First Worlders do have the patience for cerebral movies, but they process them in a particular way, when they don't ignore them. If a theory film cannot be successful and scientifically uncompromising at the same time in the First World, then filmmaking needs to concentrate on agitation not attached to Marxist theory. Theory films may still have a use, but in a limited party-building setting, where the viewer is guided using discussion and text. MIWS has argued regardless that party-building is not the principal task and that communists, scientific leaders, in the First World largely recruit themselves at this time. Ambiguous theory films and films in general that contain a large amount of explicit theory have only a small role to play, if any at this time.

Notes

1. Harry McPherson, "Beyond Words: Writing for the President," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 229, no. 4, 1972 April, p. 39, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/72apr/mcpherson.htm

[edited 2008 April]