Political cinema is among the oldest media in the history of moving pictures. However, it has always been a moot point what form politically effective films should take if they are to be more than Hollywood films with a different content. Right up until the present day, there has been a constant stream of new attempts to define political film, to conceive of a type of cinema going beyond the illusionary. One of these endeavours, going back to the late sixties, was greatly influenced by the filmmaker and theorist Jean-Pierre Gorin. As a 25-year-old, Jean-Pierre Gorin approached the then star director of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard, to found with him the group Dziga Vertov in 1968. In the course of their many years of collaboration, they made a number of low-budget movies, which Gorin now likes to call »garage films« or »punk movies«. In 1972 this form of fast, improvisatory political film activity slowly came to an end. Gorin went to the United States, where he continued to work on experimental documentary films, as well as taking up a teaching post at the University of California in San Diego. At the VIENNALE 2004, where the following interview took place, a programme was shown of selected works by the group Dziga Vertov as well as films made by Gorin alone.

[b]Christian Höller:[/b] At the time when you first became involved in filmmaking, one of the main principles – and you were actually a co-author of this – was no longer to make political films, but to make films political. How would you go about elaborating this distinction in retrospect?

[b]Jean-Pierre Gorin:[/b] In the late sixties, there was a need to define the possibility of a type of political cinema that was not locked in the idea of agitprop. Or what had happened to the idea of agitprop, which of course was greatly influenced by the Stalinist experience and social realism. We were a group of people who thought there was a legacy that nobody really wanted to talk about – partly through laziness, partly because of a reactionary desire to define once and for all what cinema was, and what it was supposed to be doing. So a first decision was – and this actually came from me, not from Godard – to make an explicit reference to Dziga Vertov, whom very few people still knew at the time. What was so extraordinary about Vertov was that, in the early years of the Russian revolution, he was the first one to theorize, or hint at, what we now know as the idea of media. The idea that there was something that existed beyond film, that there was something coming to the fore which would be called media. That film, which had almost imperially ruled the highs and lows of culture, was – like all empires – coming to an end. And that this would have consequences which one should not necessarily lament. We thought that cinema, by rethinking itself along this Vertovian idea of media, might be able to reinvent itself. And one place where this reinvention seemed likely to happen was precisely political cinema. This is one way to look at the context retrospectively, but I am not quite sure if we saw things quite so uniquely at the time.

[b]Höller:[/b] There was also a certain polemics directed against a particular type of political cinema, wasn’t there?

[b]Gorin:[/b] Yes, definitely. You have to remember that we were not so much talking to the public in general. We were more interested in talking politically, especially to people on the left. And we were quite struck by the fact that, for quite a while, the left had been aesthetically as reactionary as it gets. I think that some of the radicality of the films done by the Dziga Vertov group derived precisely from the fact that they did not care and weren't afraid to put themselves out on a limb. At the time, a lot of people interpreted the phrase »to make film political« as a proclamation of collective creation. But that was not really a delusion we had. In the Dziga Vertov group, we were essentially two people, and we were not fooling anybody about that. Although there were other people gravitating towards us, we were very plain about the fact that this was essentially an enterprise generated between Godard and myself. What we meant went well beyond the idea that collective creation would bring salvation. Rather, we thought that there was a need to reflect on the history of representation, on what political cinema had been. What ruled at the time was mostly realistic representation, and what people called »political film« was primarily film in which the figures were involved in some political activities, but apart from that remained pretty much within the formal tropes of classical Hollywood cinema. Thus, the question was constantly put in terms of distribution: film was supposed to be political because it would reach the greatest possible audience. We thought that all these self-evident truths were maybe not so self-evident, that they were banalities that had been repeated time and again, but had not changed anything. It was not very interesting to keep thinking that the only way to make political statements was films like »Battle Of Algiers« or »Z«.

[b]Höller:[/b] The films of the Dziga Vertov group attempted a kind of re-invention of cinema and wanted to install a kind of counter-cinema. At the same time, the films were widely appropriative, borrowing from genres like the Western in »Vent d’est«, or using a kind of television-report style in »Lotte in Italia« and even forms like the courtroom drama in »Vladimir et Rosa«. They experimented with a radical newness of cinema, while at the same time ripping off all sorts of materials.

[b]Gorin:[/b] This is exactly what it was – and very consciously so. One way to make films political was, for us, to always be aware of the conditions of production as well as the conditions of distribution. A lot of those films were produced with money from television – and supposedly distributed through TV. They were in a way taking on this institution, being very conscious of the kind of flow of visual and audio information that is organized by TV. The question was how to create a glitch in that flow. How to produce something that, for an hour or 96 minutes, could create a moment of formal disruption. We were very aware of the fact that this moment could only be created as a formal distortion. This implied two things: that in some way you had to recall forms that were commonly used in the medium itself; and that you had to transform them. The political aspect lay exactly in this kind of switcher effect. For instance, at the end of »Lotte in Italia«, a TV anchorperson talks for four minutes, but very differently from the usual television style. Before that, the film is about images separated by long periods of black – which is already a major interruption of the flow of images on TV and which gets filled in by different types of information. We were interested in the fact that, among other things, film called upon tropes and forms that existed in the present as tactics, but that it also called upon experiences that were highly interior. In that respect, »Lotte in Italia« is like a repetition of the Kuleshov experiment. Something that people did not want to hear at the time was that you do not decide to be radical, but that you have to work on your radicality. And working on your radicality had very much to do with a certain kind of knowledge, an examination and resurrection of the past. At that time, Pasolini did a film for UNESCO which he shot in Yemen, and which ends with the phrase »never underestimate the revolutionary strength of the past«. A lot of the films that we did cannot be understood – and they were not at all understood at the time – if you do not see that they function like a bridge. »Vent d’est«, for instance, is anchored in certain things that Griffith did, as well in a certain tradition of agitation theatre. In some ways, its radicality is the reproduction and reactivating of that tradition. So it should be no surprise that all kinds of pre-existing modes were appropriated, called into question, displaced – like the genre of the Western, which was an allusion to the fact that a lot of left-wing militants loved spaghetti Westerns. »Lotte in Italia«, by comparison, is typically a television film, and »Vladimir et Rosa«, which to my mind has aged extremely well, is a kind of saturated soundtrack that in its strident way draws on the best of pop and, in some respects, anticipates hip-hop. Seeing these films 30 years after they were made still gives you the impression that they were very much »Alive«, with a capital A. If critics had been serious about them, and if you think of what was held up as the grand examples of truly interesting political art at the time, we would have come out as geniuses!

[b]Höller:[/b] Were the films generally trashed at the time?

[b]Gorin:[/b] Generally, yes. But the critics who trashed them did not understand what was going on. And the ones who said great things about them did not understand either. Mostly, people were baffled by the fact that Jean-Luc could be involved in such stuff, so they completely dismissed him. When they were excited they could not take on the fact that the films had actually been made by two people.

[b]Höller:[/b] Coming back again to the notion of making films political: you make it clear that the politics of a film have to pass through its form, and do not have that much to do with content, plot and so on. This is especially true of the early Dziga Vertov group films from 1969 to 1971. By comparison, »Tout va bien«, made in 1972, seems to put a lot more emphasis on plot and its two big stars (Jane Fonda and Yves Montand). How did that development come about?

[b]Gorin:[/b] Well, we knew that we could not keep going materially. Around 1971, we were facing a number of problems. For instance, we noticed that the kind of social energy that had given rise to the Dziga Vertov group was disappearing. Also, the mode of production was getting more and more difficult and restrained. »Tout va bien« translates all that – for instance, to continue a desire that would otherwise not continue, hoping that we could export these things into a larger context. In the end – and there was really some fundamental honesty about it – it really expresses, like no other film at the time, that something was receding and ending. It does not endorse the discourse of »gauchisme«, but it registers a kind of machine in which a complexity of voices gets heard, and it also tries to confront the contradictions of a certain practice. Within all that, it also has a very personal tone – which I think is not perceptible to a lot of people. After that, we did »Letter to Jane«, which is still an amazing film and which sums up a lot of questions. The whole development from »Vent d’est« to »Letter to Jane«, not forgetting films like »British Sounds« or »Pravda«, was an extremely rich experience.

[b]Aspects of a cultural revolution[/b]

[b]Höller:[/b] Something extremely important in these films is the emphasis on sound in relation to the image. As you say, the project that Godard had started earlier very much consisted in freeing cinema from the tyranny of the literary model and bringing to the fore a »cinema of sound« while also opening up cinema towards painting. Which of these directions had priority?

[b]Gorin:[/b] What Godard did – and of course, he was not the only one, but he did it in the most explicit fashion – was to start with the idea that there was a certain dominance of the literary model in cinema. So he said, ok, let’s accept that dominance - but it does not have to be Balzac or Dickens. I still remember a panel on which Henri-Georges Clouzot said that a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end; and Jean-Luc replied, »I totally agree, but not necessarily in that order«. To me, this seemed like a brilliant way to define the problem. Once you apply different types of literary models, and this phrase sums this up quite clearly, film is pushed in a different direction, one that has nothing to do with literature, but everything to do with painting. Once the scene becomes more autonomous, all the plastic properties of the scene become more important. If you look at Godard’s films you will see that he practically invented visual arts movies, and that he did them by the ton. Of course, this soon became the rule of the game, while less and less interesting results were produced. In the late sixties, it became obvious that the luxuriousness and painterliness of the image was increasingly employed by people who thought that, if it looked like a painting, that was already enough. By contrast, Godard was not really interested in making the image look like a painting, but in making it function like a painting. At the moment when I intervened (around 1968), the dependence of film on painterliness was, at the one end, starting to evolve into the ridiculous, the imitation of painters and so on; but, at the other, it was really starting to catch up with its model, with what painting was preoccupied with at the time, properties like flatness and so on. That was really what we did: devaluate the literary model, make the image as »unjuicy« as possible and really work the whole film from the sound end. Of course, the results still looked very painterly. There is absolutely no doubt that »Vent d’est« and »Vladimir et Rosa« are gorgeous looking films, even if that’s »gorgeous-shitty«. One way to achieve this was to create these bizarre soundtracks that use the kind of saturation of speech and discourse that existed at the time, but really focus on the layering. At the end of that period, there is an emergence of the soundtrack, a new possibility of the musicality of the soundtrack. It is not there yet, but in a way it feels like the end of the talkies. The sheer saturation starts to jam your ears.

[b]Höller:[/b] The relation of film to sound and painting has a lot to do with the opening up of film towards media. In more recent years, this has come true in a very different sense: that is to say, the opening up towards the whole audio-visual realm that surrounds us these days, sometimes in very obnoxious ways. Back at that time, TV could in fact serve as a kind of model, for instance in »Lotte in Italia«. What hopes were actually connected to the institution of television? Did this primarily have an instrumental aspect, of maybe reaching a wider audience? Or was there something in the medium itself that was promising?

[b]Gorin:[/b] I think both. The crass, practical aspect of it was that these films could only be financed within the medium of television. Also, there was a kind of left-wing liberal bureaucracy within the space of television. TV was of course a Moloch – it functioned like a huge common grid that had an enormous appetite for images and sounds. Within that, even people like us could find a possibility of functioning. The other aspect was that it seemed to be a terrain of political intervention, no matter how late something was broadcast – in the case of our films, usually at two in the morning. But there is also a historical dimension to this, related to the whole history of cinema. For Lumière, filming was not just showing workers coming out of the factory, but also filming a baby’s breakfast. This was a gesture of considerable importance: namely, that the private could be spectacularized by the very people involved in it. Suddenly, everybody could make an image of her- or himself. In fact, Kodak derived far more of its revenue from this spectacularization of the private than it did from Hollywood. Cinema dealt with this notion of the private and sent it into another realm. But there was still another side to this, and Jean-Luc defined it quite well when he said that cinema took us away from mummy and daddy and sent us out on the streets; and that was so dangerous that they had to invent television. In TV, there is a tendency to channel the source and flow of images back into the private, where the conditions of viewing are radically different from those in a theatre. But that also opened up a kind of political space, because films could be made that, in a random and uncontrollable way, would be a kind of looped intervention; films that grabbed people as they were set in their familiar environments and showed them these bizarre things on the screen. So for us, this provided a very interesting terrain to intervene. We did not know exactly the effects this would have, but we were persuaded that people would stay in front of the screen because of what we did and what we were. Without our work, someone like Alan Clarke, who made »Elephant« (1989), could not have used the medium of television in the way he did. I am not saying that we were the originators, but we were definitely part of a movement in which such questions were raised.

[b]Höller:[/b] When did it become clear that the cultural revolution was not going to be effected through television?

[b]Gorin:[/b] Very early on. But the problem was not so much making it a vector for the cultural revolution. It was more a question of creating glitches in the system. This is something that we were constantly faulted for. But people really made us more naïve than we actually were, and it served them quite well because they did not see the questions we were asking. I am not saying we were absolutely right – we had plenty of naïve hopes, and the films were in some respects complicated, rhetorical and strident. But we were also something else – which is the more interesting part of it.

[b]Höller:[/b] You often talk about the films of the Dziga Vertov group as being »garage films« or »punk films«. »Vladimir et Rosa«, you said, could also be thought of as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious deciding to make a film. Punk, in its total assault on culture, always had a very nihilistic side to it, whereas you constantly stress the element of hope in connection with your films. Can you elaborate on this contradiction?

[b]Gorin:[/b] For me, this is not a contradiction. I am interested in art that gives me hope. This does not necessarily mean the notion that something can be changed, but rather that something else can be done, that the way in which things are put together can be radically changed. If you are a filmmaker, you are not condemned to do what everybody else is doing. Also, it does not mean that you will necessarily fail just because you have fewer means. Whether in literature, music, or media, I have always been excited by work that opens up a terrain. Sometimes the work that gives you hope can be very nihilistic in nature. Critics have not yet grasped the big change that happened with Nietzsche when he objected to Kant by saying that the reference to categories outside the work, like the beautiful or the sublime, is a radical mind-fuck. Rather, art has to be anchored in the gesture of the maker and great works are promises of hope. Sometimes, you have promises of hope that function very differently than you would expect.

[b]Höller:[/b] Something I also want to ask concerns the relation of the Dziga Vertov group to the Maoism of the time, as well as to other groupings on the left. In France, for instance, the cultural revolution was also propagated by groups like La Gauche prolétarienne, who put forward ideas of popular justice, or popular tribunals. From today’s standpoint, this seems quite stunning, and even someone like André Glucksmann admits how close this actually was to left-wing terrorism, like the RAF in Germany. What was your relation to La Gauche prolétarienne?

[b]Gorin:[/b] Well, there was a sense in 1968 that the people who had always ruled the roost were still ruling the roost, and would end up ruling the roost. In order to understand this, you only have to read »The Demons« by Dostoevsky. This is the great novel about the absolute twilight and delirium that existed in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, and that existed around 1968 as well. Glucksmann, who later on meditated on popular justice, was one of its great promoters. I never was. I always thought this was pretty hilarious and demented, but it was part of the big delirium. And why should it not be? It was the end of an enormous history that had left a lot of people on the ground; something that had started around 1917 and had gone through many avatars. All those groups took part in a larger historical enterprise in which, effectively, the ideology that had dominated Marxism and the 50 years prior to the sixties became extinct. There was madness, but this was all linked to some giant psycho-drama that had existed way before.

[b]Höller:[/b] When do you think a rupture occurred with that kind of thinking? At the end of »Tout va bien«, for instance, there still seem to be highly charged and unresolved contradictions in the air. In the great last scene, shot in the supermarket, a little revolt starts, but it is not a full-blown revolution. It somehow gives you sense that a revolution is yet to come.

[b]Gorin:[/b] That was what was happening. At the same time, it was the glacial edge, and a certain activism had come to an end. The truth is – and every time I tell this story nobody wants to believe it – that we were not involved in politics. We were involved in the fact of making films. And that happened to be first and foremost a renewed reflection on an effective change in the ways film would be made, and the ways it would be perceived. This is not a denial of what was going on, but we were not party members. Nobody was a party member at that time, nobody had a carrying card. La Gauche prolétarienne was a fluctuant organization that had part of its headquarters at the École normale supérieure in Paris. But it was also part of a gauchist movement that left marks in many different places. Things were a lot more fluid than people would like to acknowledge today.

[b]Inside is outside[/b]

[b]Höller:[/b] Moving on to your »American period«, in particular your migration to the U.S. west coast in 1975, I first wanted to ask if you found the same counter-cultural climate there as in Paris? Or was the situation totally different?

[b]Gorin:[/b] In fact, it was. I did not go to the places where what I had done would have secured me a safe position, like in New York, San Francisco or Chicago. Instead, I went to San Diego because I was interested in the work of Manny Farber. I did not go to the U.S. because I thought I could find the remains of the counter-culture there. I went to a place that happens to be the seventh largest city in the U.S. but which is culturally very dead. Coming from the Dziga Vertov group, I was mostly asking myself questions about fiction, about how fiction was possible. I was concerned with the re-invention of fiction through a documentary perspective, which also had to do with the idea – entertained by the Dziga Vertov group – of information as drama. I started to do films that took on the experience of exile and migration, and created a genre that was about the idea of family, in the style of a fictional documentary. This was something, once again, that people absolutely could not understand at the time. For instance, when I put out »Poto and Cabengo« (1979), it took seventeen years for French television to show it. But I was very conscious of what I was doing, and »Poto and Cabengo« was really pushing the idea of doing primarily sound films. It was very much about language, and the idea of layering, and it was about creating a type of narrative where you end up with a set of questions more than answers. After that, I did another film that was even more aggressively a machine of that type – »Routine Pleasures« (1986), which is a completely unclassifiable movie. And then there is the gangster film »My Crasy Life« (1991), which is the most classical of the three. So where does that leave me? At a place where I feel that it is time to reinvent something else. Which I think has to do with the image.

[b]Höller:[/b] The trajectory of the three films is very much about the gradual process of getting inside American culture; from the position of the complete outsider to someone who has achieved a certain closeness, even to the gangster milieu (the Samoans in »My Crasy Life«). Can you briefly recapitulate that move?

[b]Gorin:[/b] The trilogy is about language, about the relationship to the Other. The three films re-trace an experience that is a fundamental experience in America: it is a place made by exiles, for exiles. It is actually very difficult to talk about exile in the U.S. because it is so general, because everybody comes from somewhere else. »Poto and Cabengo«, for instance, goes back to comic strips and the idea that, in this kind of visual representation, you find a particular type of story that has existed among the Germans, Irish, Jewish and so on. Among them all, you find a desperate fight against the English language, a struggle with the idea of polyphony or polyvoicious recordings. At the second stage, after you have arrived and mastered the language, you ask yourself, »Am I inside?« That is what I wanted to do with »Routine Pleasures«. But this becomes a kind of fantasy, because the horizon always recedes. So to be inside is to be outside – which is part of the duality of the American experience. The third stage, then, is to be so inside that you can effectively perceive a type of language that is in fact a gangster language. That is why »My Crasy Life« is written with an »s«. Also, the questions in the film are not asked by me, but by the gangsters themselves. It is about penetrating that kind of mystery.

[b]Höller:[/b] What made you first become a filmmaker was, as you said, seeing Straub/Huillet’s »Not Reconciled«. Although you did not understand a word, it made you feel like you had learned a whole language through that film. Do you see any similarities between the condition back then and today’s political climate, or for that matter, a new »Not Reconciled« somewhere on the horizon?

[b]Gorin:[/b] I really think that the people I am producing are quite promising in that respect. For instance, I am producing »Zigzag«, the first film of Judy Jy Ah Min, a young Korean-American woman, which contains an enormous amount of energy. It takes on, in a very radical fashion, the aesthetic nature of the digital. Although it does not refer to the Straubs or others, there is a kind a re-invention taking place. Altogether, the people I am producing are more marked by music than they are by cinema. Not necessarily by popular music but by the musical idea of layering. They are also very fluent in computers and new media. They are very familiar with the existence of things as layers, or screens of information, and how to pass from one level to the next. Although I am not quite able to analyze or foresee what will come out of this, I see a kind of energy and push that is quite amazing.

 

 

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