Wind from the East

Godard and Gorin create counter-cinema drawing on Marxism-Leninism, Brecht, and Western elements. Special screening as part of the Afterword to the Collective Films Festival.

Le vent d’est
1970, Dziga Vertov Group

France
95 minutes, French with Russian subtitles

Starring: Gian Maria Volonté, Anne Wiazemsky, Allan Midgette, Christiana Tullio Altan

A top executive at an aluminium corporation is kidnapped by his own striking workers. All signs predict a spaghetti western with a touch of class struggle—but actually, the viewer is in for Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt and an irresolvable clash of internal contradictions.

Still from The Wind from the East, 1970

Le vent d’est is a pioneering film, an avant-garde film, an extremely important film. It is a starting point for a revolutionary cinema. But it is not that revolutionary cinema itself.

— Peter Wollen, Afterimage

One critic called The Wind from the East “a partisan handbook of subversive cinema and politics.” This is the very “film made politically” that Godard spoke of—and, as Gorin observed, “an opportunity to see what the works of the Dziga Vertov Group really were: garage punk DIY experiments.”