REALISING UTOPIA: CINEMA & 1968
Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies
Film Screening and discussion
Tout va bien – All’s Well
France, 1972, directed by Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin
Venue: Ormston House,
Wednesday 18th Apil at 19:00
The first, fantastically inventive stage of Godard’s career ended with the flaming apocalypse of Weekend (1967) and the events of May ’68, in which he participated both as a demonstrator and (anonymous) filmmaker. Over the next five years, he would strive to reinvent movies again, both on his own and with erstwhile student activist Jean-Pierre Gorin, as the Dziga Vertov Group. His mantra: “The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.” (J. Hoberman, ‘Tout va bien Revisited’, The Criterion Collection).
Tout va bien marks Godard’s return to shooting films in France after 1968, and is his last collaboration with Gorin. Released in 1972, it is an attempt by the filmmakers to distance themselves from the hermetic qualities of their earlier works for the Dziga Vertov Group, making a more accessible film while, at the same time, engaging with a Marxist critique of contemporary society and reflecting on the legacy of May ‘68. In fact, the aim of the film, according to Gorin, was to “consider the class struggle in France four years on from 1968.” The result is a provocative and iconoclastic work that is as much a critical exploration of politics and class as it is of the language of cinema. The screening will be introduced by Dr Mariano Paz, School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, UL.
For more information please visit https://ahss.blog/2018/02/23/realising-utopia-cinema-1968/
