Afterword to the Collective Cinema Festival. Godard, Gorin, Miéville

Jean-Luc Godard, in the company of close collaborators, turns away from traditional cinema in an epilogue to a major festival at the House of Culture.

In September, the Collective Cinema Festival took place at GES-2 House of Culture—an event inspired in large part by the ideas of Jean-Luc Godard. Following the events of May 1968, the director sought to renounce both the bourgeois forms of mainstream cinema and his own status as a universally recognised genius. Over the next five years, he endeavoured to “make films politically”: radicalising not only the content of his work but also its formal structure, distribution, and even the production process itself, in which the traditional hierarchy of roles within a film crew gave way to collective co-authorship, permeated by a drive towards constant and exhaustive self-criticism.

Programme 

The collective experiments of Godard are so significant to the history of co-authorship in cinema that GES-2 is devoting a special festival afterword to them. As part of this programme, Wind from the East (1970) will be screened—a quintessential film that most fully embodies the revolutionary explorations of its makers, produced by the Dziga Vertov Group, founded by Godard, the Maoist journalist Jean-Pierre Gorin, and several like-minded collaborators. The second film in the afterword programme is Here and Elsewhere (1976), made after the group’s dissolution and in many ways reflecting on its methods and fate. Godard’s co-author on this dialectical film-essay was Anne-Marie Miéville, who would go on to become the New Wave classic’s lifelong collaborator for the next five decades—and help him at last to realise his dream of genuine creative partnership.