Godard: A Revolutionary In More Ways Than One

Jean-Luc Godard was a terrorist.

That's not President Bush talking. That's the French filmmaker's former wife, actress Anne Wiazemsky, in an interview included among the DVD extras on Godard's "La Chinoise" (Koch Lorber; $29.98). Watching that 1967 film, along with the director's 1969 "Le Gai Savoir" (Koch Lorber; $26.98), it's easy to see why Wiazemsky, who stars in the first movie with Godard regular Jean-Pierre Léaud, would say that. Taken together, the two films reverberate, even today, with the force of a molotov cocktail.

She speaks, of course, metaphorically. If her famously Marxist ex-husband was a "fanatic" (another of Wiazemsky's choice terms), his '60s-era radicalism was as much aesthetic as political. The two movies break almost every rule of Hollywood narrative filmmaking. Like improvised explosive devices, they seem less edited than patched together from whatever happened to be lying around the director's studio.

Dramatic scenes are intercut with static visual scraps: pages from a comic book here, a photo of Mao Zedong there. ("La Chinoise," or "The Chinese Woman," was contemporary slang for Maoism.) Scrawled bits of agit-prop text in the director's handwriting pop up between scenes in both films. In "Savoir," lengthy voiceovers play against a blank screen; musical snippets stop as abruptly as they start.

Set mainly in a bourgeois apartment borrowed for the summer by a group of five young members of the radical chic, "La Chinoise" is nominally about the quintet's arguments over Maoist theory and practice, which they digest through radio broadcasts from Communist China and the copies of Mao's Little Red Book that fill their shelves. It's a talky film, made talkier by Godard's use of on-screen titles and the chalkboards and apartment walls on which the kids scrawl and paint their political slogans. Coupled with the French film's subtitles, the film is not for slow readers or the impatient. Toward the end, the action suddenly explodes out of the apartment with the group's clumsy assassination of a Russian poet, which plays, in Godard's hands, like black comedy.

"La Gai Savoir" ("The Joy of Learning") is more inert, at least from a dramatic standpoint. Léaud and Juliet Berto (another of the teeny-bopper terrorists from "Chinoise") reunite to play a pair of militant intellectuals who meet in an abandoned TV studio. Broken up by an absurdist collage of seemingly random images and sound effects, their conversation is a protracted analysis of the use of propagandistic words and pictures (i.e., film). Beautifully shot against a stark black background, the film may be anti-establishment in tone, but what its subtext condemns most strenuously is not social injustice but stale moviemaking.

Who, then, are these films for, on the 40th anniversary of the student-led riots of May 1968 that rocked France to its core and that these films seem to both predict ("La Chinoise") and to perform a postmortem on ("Le Gai Savoir")?

Godard fans, to be sure. Brainy, goofy, often dated, outrageous and, at times, confusing to the point of infuriating, the films are reminders of just what a prickly artistic innovator he was. But maybe also the young, anti-globalization protesters of today, who might see some of their own idealism -- and naivete -- reflected in Godard's lens, which looks on his subjects with a mix of affection and paternalistic head-shaking.

Those generalists looking for an introduction to the filmmaker's canon, however, might be better off starting with something like the noirish "Breathless" (1960) or "Week End" (1967), the latter of which shares some of "Chinoise" and "Savoir's" cultural critiques but is less didactic.

Did Godard fancy himself a revolutionary? Sure, but his weapon of choice was a camera. Cinema, he once said, was not a gun, but "a light which helps you check your gun."

"Breathless," "Week End," "La Chinoise" and other films by Jean-Luc Godard will be screened as part of the AFI Silver Theatre's festival "Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s." Screenings run Thursday through July 3 at the theater, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. For more information, call 301-495-6700 or visithttp://www.afi.com/silver.