Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane: The Role of the Intellectual in the Revolution
Asking questions instead of giving answers, learning to listen to others—these are the modest, even self-effacing revolutionary virtues Godard and Gorin attempt to practice in Tout Va Bien, the latest and perhaps the last (at least for a while) of their collective films. Yet even as they talk of working separately (and of quietly dropping out of film-making in order to experiment with videotape), they have also collaborated on a companion-film to Tout Va Bien—a unique “film-letter” entitled Letter to Jane, which is directly addressed to Jane Fonda, who “co-starred” in Tout Va Bien, but is also indirectly aimed at all intellectuals and artists who seek to serve the cause of revolution.
As usual, contradictions abound in the work of Godard and Gorin. The film-makers, of course, are well aware of the contradictions; and for the most part they deal with them, dialectically, in ways that manage to be illuminating. However, somewhere in the complex set of relations between the parent film, Tout Va Bien, and its offspring, Letter to Jane, there may be contradictions that Godard and Gorin are not fully aware of, or at least contradictions they have not yet dealt with as productively as they might. In any case, some of the questions raised by these two films seem to indicate that Godard and Gorin, however insightful their films may be, are working themselves into a corner where they are more and more isolated and alienated, even from those who, perhaps with less apparent sophistication but with equal dedication, are also working to serve the cause of revolutionary liberation.
Let’s start with some material concerns. After four years of making low-budget 16mm films as “theoretical exercises” for “a handful” of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist militants, Godard and Gorin decided to make a political film for a much wider audience. To obtain financial backing for such a film, they reasoned, they would have to use some big-name “stars.” So they contacted Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, who not only filled the bill as stars but also as an actress and an actor who each were known for their support of liberal, even progressive political causes.
Fonda and Montand were interested; and on the basis of the box-office potential of the two international stars, Paramount Pictures put up the money to produce Tout Va Bien. For Jane Fonda, however, the decision to accept a role in a film directed by two men was not an easy one for her to make, as she was ardently calling for women to work with other women and to make their own films. Nonetheless, because she was sympathetic to the political concerns of Godard and Gorin (and an admirer of Godard’s films), she agreed to work with them in Tout Va Bien.
The shooting went well, although Fonda found Godard distant and uncommunicative; while Godard’s and Gorin’s version of the story is that Fonda and Montand, the two big names, remained aloof from the rest of the cast, mostly nonactors who were enjoying themselves in a collective spirit of creative invention. Nevertheless, the shooting was completed, the film was edited, and Paramount Pictures decided not to take up their option to distribute Tout Va Bien. Godard and Gorin found other distributors, and the film was released in France, where it had a fairly good commereial run.
Invited to show Tout Va Bien at the New York and San Francisco film festivals in the fall of 1972, Godard and Gorin brought along with them Letter to Jane. They explained that they had made the 16mm film for only $300 in a few weeks of work and that they wanted it to serve as a starting point for discussion of Tout Va Bien.
Letter to Jane is one hour long, and for most of the film all that we see on the screen is a photograph of Jane Fonda. The photo was taken by American photographer Joseph Kraft during Ms. Fonda’s much-publicized trip to Hanoi in 1972. It was released for widespread circulation by North Vietnam’s governmentoperated news agency; and it appeared in the Paris weekly magazine L’Express in the first week of August 1972, accompanied by a text written by the staff of L’Express. The sound track of Letter to Jane consists of the voices of Godard and Gorin analyzing the photo and its accompanying text.
The film-makers acknowledge that an analysis of a photo of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi might seem like a roundabout way of discussing Tout Va Bien, a film that deals with the political situation in France; but they argue that it’s a detour that enables them to confront directly and very concretely the problems explored in Tout Va Bien. They acknowledge, too, that one might ask if this isn’t in some way a disclaimer regarding Tout Va Bien, an admission of failure to confront things directly and concretely in that film. But Godard and Gorin argue at the very outset of Letter to Jane that they are by no means disavowing Tout Va Bien or avoiding discussion of its relative merits. In any case, they point out, both Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane deal with the same fundamental question: what is the role of the intellectual in the revolution?
In Tout Va Bien, which is a scripted and acted fiction film with a nominal narrative “plot” (“an account for those who take no account” or “a story for those who shouldn’t still need one” are roughly the twin meanings of a cryptically punning intertitle), Jane Fonda and Yves Montand play husband and wife media intellectuals. She is an American doing political commentary broadcasts for the Paris office of an American radio network. He is a French new wave movie director radicalized by May 1968: having realized that the art market for avant-garde films is just another annex of capitalism’s consumer-society, he has given up making “art” and turns out advertising commercials to make a living.
As the so-called plot gets under way, he accompanies his wife on an assignment to visit a meat-packing plant to discuss labor problems with the plant manager. Once there, however, they find that the manager, and indeed the whole plant, are unexpectedly “occupied” at that moment by wildcatting workers unhappy with both the management and the unions.
In a very Brechtian way, however, the narrative of their encounter with life in a factory is not presented as a continuous narrative at all, but becomes a juxtaposition of confrontations— first with the manager, then with the union representative, then with the workers. Shot head-on, with the actors delivering little set-speeches directly into the camera, these confrontations are aimed at us in the audience, forcing us to confront the respective elements and alignments of power in capitalist industry.
The plant manager tries to gloss over the present difficulties and fatuously suggests that Marx’s writings are passé now that, in his view, class struggle has been superceded by “the collaboration of the classes in order to find permanent material progress.” The union representative admonishes the wildcatting workers to get back to work, even threatening them with disciplinary action; and he tries to convince them that the problem is more complex than they think, and that they should let the union officials handle it. But the workers themselves express their gut-level feelings of frustration and pent-up resentment at constantly being told to cool their anger while someone else—the management and the union officials—promises solutions that never solve anything.
Ultimately Tout Va Bien seems to make the point that it’s precisely the experience of being frozen out of any power to make decisions vitally affecting one’s own life that constitutes the most alienating and intolerable condition of the worker’s existence. Moreover, as the film emphasizes, it’s not just factory workers who are alienated in this way. The Fonda and Montand characters begin to see how they, too, are systematically alienated and exploited in their respective work situations. And they begin to see how their private life as a couple offers no refuge from the alienated work-relations that cast an ominous shadow over their ways of relating to each other.
Tout Va Bien: Jane Fonda protests that she had an appointment to interview the manager.
Tout Va Bien: The boss and the whole plant are unexpectedly ״occupied!”
Tout Va Bien: Yves Montand as an ex New Wave director now turning out commercials
Tout Va Bien: Jane Fonda explaining that in class society not even sex is all that simple
Significantly Tout Va Bien ties up none of the loose ends of the narrative. We don t learn how the situation at the meatpacking plant develops. (We can guess, however.) Nor do we learn whether the deteriorating relationship between the Fonda and Montand characters can be saved. The film closes with the admonition to “let each individual create his own history”—a call not for individualism of the bourgeois stripe but rather for the revolutionary transfer of power to the people themselves so that history will no longer be the domain of leaders and representatives but the exercise of each individual’s power over his own social practice.
And it’s precisely this emphasis on “power to the people” that Godard and Gorin find blatantly missing from the news photo (and accompanying text) depicting Jane Fonda’s visit to Hanoi in 1972. In Letter to Jane, therefore, they give what amounts to an illustrated lecture in which they analyze this photo and text, pointing out what they consider reactionary connotations within the image itself and in the combination of image and accompanying words.
They make the following specific critical observations:
( 1) Jane Fonda dominates the foreground of the picture while an unidentified Vietnamese is overshadowed in the background. This composition, Godard and Gorin argue, makes the famous American actress the star of the photo while relegating the Vietnamese people to a secondary role. In reality, however, the star of the struggle in Vietnam is obviously the Vietnamese people, while a representative of the American left is obviously a secondary character.
( 2) The caption states that “Jane Fonda questions the citizens of Hanoi about the American bombings” when in fact it is evident from the photo that Jane Fonda at that moment is listening to the Vietnamese man whose back is turned to the camera in the lower right foreground of the frame. This inaccuracy, Godard and Gorin argue, is no mere accident. Among other things, it’s a question of who rightfully has the initiative in this encounter between an American movie actress and the Vietnamese people. The film-makers suggest that Jane Fonda ought to have emphasized that she was there to listen to the Vietnamese, that as an American her proper role was to shut up and let the Vietnamese people explain what they sought to accomplish.
(3) The camera angle is itself strongly “loaded” with reactionary connotations : it is a low-angle shot that makes the person photographed look “larger than life.” It is the camera angle Orson Welles used to make Kane look imposing, and, they add, “the fascist Clint Eastwood is always shot from a low-angle” to produce this same imposing effect.
(4) Of the two persons whose faces are shown in the photo, Jane’s is in focus while the face of the Vietnamese man in the background is blurred and out of focus. This, too, of course, helps make Jane the star of the photo. But Godard and Gorin point out that in terms of visual metaphors it ought to be the other way around: the anonymous representative of the Vietnamese left ought to be in sharp focus because his position is sharp and clear, whereas the famous representative of the American left ought to appear fuzzy in the photo because the position of the American left is fuzzy and unfocused.
(5) The expression on the face of the actress/militant is tragic, but it can apply to many different situations. Here Godard and Gorin show photographs of a similar expression on Jane Fonda’s face in Klute when she asks the detective to take pity on her and stay the night, and in Tout Va Bien when she listens to the factory workers. They also show photos of a similar expression on actor Henry Fonda’s face in The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln. Then they show a photo of John Wayne with a similar expression on his face in The Green Berets. And one cannot fail to get the point that John Wayne’s attitude toward the Vietnam War was diametrically opposed to Jane Fonda’s attitude, but that the same expression served both of them. Ultimately, Godard and Gorin argue, the expression lacks any specific content. It is devoid of sense while seeming to be heavily laden with profound sense. Like bourgeois humanist art in general, it covers up its emptiness with an appearance of fullness.
(6) If L’Express can characterize Jane Fonda’s position on Vietnam as “pacifist,” it is probably because Jane’s own conception of her role as a “militant for peace” is vague and oversimplified. Simply calling for “peace in Vietnam” is not enough, they argue, since it does not deal with America’s imperialist intervention in the rest of the world’s affairs and therefore overlooks the reason for the fighting in Vietnam in the first place. Nor does it deal with the vital question of peace on whose terms?
On the whole, there is something very impressive about Godard’s and Gorin’s detailed analysis of a single photograph. In many ways their critique is a remarkable tour de force. But there is also something very disturbing about it.
Part of the problem is that Jane is singled out for criticism as if she were personally responsible for each aspect of the photograph and its accompanying text. Godard and Gorin acknowledge of course, as the text itself does, that the photo was taken by Joseph Kraft and released for circulation to the press by the North Vietnamese government-controlled news agency. Nonetheless, they argue that in going to North Vietnam Jane ought to have thought out more carefully exactly what image she should project.
Then, too, it is unfortunate that the commentary of Letter to Jane, spoken by Godard and Gorin themselves, hardly makes its points in the clear and concise manner outlined above but rather belabors them in a verbose and smugly condescending way. In fact, the rhetorical overkill of Letter to Jane smacks of an unfortunate “more radical than thou” kind of one-upsmanship. Jane Fonda is thoroughly put down and Godard and Gorin appear to have all the answers. And, coming in the aftermath of Jane’s professional contribution to the making of Tout Va Bien, their rebuke of her seems to function as a kind of parental scolding, as if Godard and Gorin were self-righteously demanding of Jane, “After all we’ve taught you, how could you possibly have gone out and made so many thoughtless mistakes?”
Letter to Jane: the L’Express photo criticized by Godard and Gorin
Moreover, if one considers Letter to Jane in terms of sexual politics, there is something even more disturbing about the film that goes beyond its mere condescension to and patronization of Jane. In fact, when Gorin showed a print of Letter to Jane to Yugoslav film-maker Dusan Makavejev (who directed WR: The Mysteries of the Organism; see Chapter 13), Makavejev’s response to Jean-Pierre was that the film amounted to “a double rape—two men taking turns assaulting one woman.”
There is indeed some of the character of a rape involved, for in Letter to Jane the woman, in effect, is pinned down on the screen, held there (in front of thousands of onlookers), and forced to submit to two men wielding the phallic power of langue, of language, of the Word. And the old sexist dualisms seem to be invoked: the male annexes mind as his domain (Freud called attention to the identification mind/phallus) and asserts the active power of his logic over the passive body (and mere intuition) of the woman. Significantly, Godard and Gorin depict Jane as having her heart in the right place (she shows pity) but as being too frail of mind to think things through very well.
Are they really right in Letter to Jane, and is Jane really guilty of making thoughtless mistakes? In terms of revolutionary struggle, both in Vietnam and in America, stopping the American bombing of North Vietnam was a vital objective. For the North Vietnamese it was a matter of survival. For Americans it was a question of whether the people were going to let their political and military leaders exercise unchecked and brutal force to annihilate a whole country. In going to Hanoi at the invitation of the North Vietnamese government, Jane Fonda had a very important and very politically delicate role to play. American opinion back home would certainly not be favorable toward her or the plight of the Vietnamese if she were to spout pro-Communist slogans and vilify American imperialism while in Hanoi. But American opinion could be moved by a woman’s plea for an end to the horrible destruction of human life that was resulting from the American bombings of the hospitals and schools and dikes of North Vietnam.
Jane Fonda could—and did—accomplish far more by presenting herself as a “militant for peace” than she could by taking a more explicitly revolutionary stance. And the “tragic” expression on her face in the widely circulated news photo succeeds in “bringing the war home” in a way that is both genuinely moving and ideologically “correct.” For in Jane’s grave expression we see the heavy weight of responsibility we as a people bear for the atrocities committed in our name against the Vietnamese people. And it is we, through Jane, who become the star of that photo; only, like Jane at that moment, we find that confronted with reality our role in Vietnam isn’t very glamorous. The tragedy in Vietnam is ours, and that’s precisely the realization that was necessary for the American people to use their will and strength to force their leaders to stop both the bombing and the American intervention in that country.
The main problem with Godard’s and Gorin’s revolutionary line in Letter to Jane is that it is divorced from any concrete situation. It is an abstract line, all the more dangerous for its impressive militancy. Godard and Gorin may argue that they are taking the long-range view, that one must never lose sight of the long-range objectives, but they seem so caught up in the revolutionary purity of their overall view that they themselves lose sight of events taking place in the immediacy of the here and now.
Throughout their collective work, there is something disturbingly fastidious about Godard’s and Gorin’s systematic rejection of immediacy. They may justify it in terms of Lenin’s rejection of the “spontaneous” approach to revolution; but it seems to go way beyond that. And, in any case, Lenin knew how to keep sight of the long-range goals while never losing his perspective on the immediate situation.
Perhaps control is the issue. Godard and Gorin, unlike Lenin, seem afraid to put themselves in situations they can’t control. Thus, art becomes the one refuge where they can exercise maximum control. Life, however, is too elusive, too much in constant flux, too messy to permit the kind of control that they are accustomed to exercising in their art. And in some ways they appear to acknowledge as much in Tout Va Bien, where control is not exercised in the same way that it is in their other films.
Not that Tout Va Bien is exactly brimming with you-are-there immediacy; quite the contrary, it is an extremely stylized and schematized film. Even the meat-packing plant that has been momentarily occupied by wildcatting workers is not a real meatpacking plant but a specially designed studio set enabling Godard and Gorin to emphasize the schematization of their presentation. Thus, the absence of a fourth wall makes it possible for the filmmakers to back off and shoot tracking and panning shots across a cutout view of the two-storied plant as a whole. And these shots are used as long, reflective “breaks” in the narrative, distancing us from the story just as they physically distance us from the scene of the action.
Moreover, symbolically the two-storied plant evokes the classical Marxist description of society being built on the economic foundations of the working class’s labor while the rulingexploiting class occupies the upper level of the superstructure. Except that in Tout Va Bien the workers have rebelled against this state of affairs (as Marx said they would) and have occupied, at least for a time, the whole works.
However, one striking difference between Tout Va Bien and the other films of Godard and Gorin is that here, for a change, their schematization is not so drastically concentrated in the Word. In fact, Tout Va Bien is not logocentric at all. The tyranny of the Word that marks their other films here gives way to a materialist mise-en-scène solidly rooted in things. And this change of emphasis from words to things is marked not only by the absence in Tout Va Bien of Godard’s and Gorin’s habitual reliance on a heavily rhetorical voice-over commentary; it is marked also by a change in the way words are tested against the concrete reality of things.
In a way it seems that Godard and Gorin have remembered the lesson taught by Godard’s Emily Bronte character in Weekend: words often come between us and things, and its important for us to get back to things themselves. Moreover, it’s as if Godard and Gorin have begun to realize that the more formally rhetorical language becomes, the more it also becomes abstract.
With this in mind, it is interesting to compare the little setspeeches delivered in Tout Va Bien by the factory manager, the union representative, and the young red-haired working girl who tells Jane Fonda what it’s like to be doubly exploited as a worker and as a woman. The manager’s speech is by far the most abstract, full of glib generalities that cover things up rather than reveal things as they are. (Incidentally, Godard and Gorin didn’t write this text themselves but simply lifted it from a tract entitled Long Live the Consumer Society by M. Saint-Geours.)
Likewise, the speech of the union delegate (this text lifted from the Communist Party’s CGT union magazine, La vie ouvrière) is also highly abstract in spite of his display of facts and figures, or maybe precisely because of it. As one of the wildcatting workers comments later in the film, the union officials deal with a problem by trotting out a whole bunch of statistics, and pretty soon you lose sight of the problem; except that you know it hasn’t been solved because the same things keep cropping up again and again. In any case, to the film-makers, as to many leftists in France, it is clear that the Communist Party and its huge CGT union are reformist rather than revolutionary, and that they function more to keep the workers in line within the system than to challenge and change that system.
By contrast, the set-speech delivered by the young working girl is for the most part very concrete. And although it, too, is a text lifted from a published article (in La Cause du Peuple, a Maoist journal that advocates wildcat strikes and other spontaneous acts of revolt), it is less formally articulated than the other texts. In fact, it is more like an outcry, or a sudden bursting into song. (And Godard and Gorin purposely call our attention to this quality of her speech by identifying it—in a repeated voice-over phrase—as “revolutionary song.”)
As she talks, she sticks to material concerns like the fatigue the working girl experiences and the factory smells that permeate her clothing and her skin (and thereby make her an object of ridicule in a sexist and classist society that forces her to spend money for costly perfumes to make herself presentable). Her words may not seem all that revolutionary. Her outpouring of words is, like the action of momentarily occupying the factory, spontaneous. And Godard and Gorin have been telling us over and over that the spontaneous approach will never bring about the revolution. But at least in Tout Va Bien the film-makers seem to acknowledge that the revolution has to be rooted in strong feelings, and that sometimes these feelings lie too deep for words.
One of the tasks of the intellectual, however, might be to find the right words to express these feelings, to bring people together and unite them in a revolutionary movement to change things. And this, of course, is a task Godard and Gorin have devoted themselves to carrying out, not just in Tout Va Bien but in all their films.
In Letter to Jane, however, they seem to get carried away in the tide of their own rhetoric. And in doing so they throw up a screen of words between themselves and things, between themselves and Jane, between themselves and all the rest of us. Instead of uniting us and spurring us to take a direction, their words divide us and inhibit us from taking action. Perhaps Godard and Gorin need to be reminded that in revolution, as in life itself, actions speak louder than words.