SEE YOU AT MAO

British Sounds, d. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger (1970)

Jean-Luc Godard was eight years into a highly successful career when he formed the Dziga-Vertov Group, a loose affiliation of politically charged film makers who, almost certainly, spent most of their time arguing about Chairman Mao and dialectical materialism. 

Named after the influential Soviet film maker Dziga Vertov (perhaps best known for 1929's Man With A Movie Camera), the groups films are defined primarily by their Brechtian forms, Marxist ideology, and a lack of personal authorship. Their time together (1968-1971) resulted in four completed films, the most interesting of which is British Sounds, an experimental film essay that takes in car manufacturing, a naked woman reciting Marx, an upper class fascist blow-hard, a discussion between depressed trade unionists, and a bunch of dippy hippies making posters and trying to rewrite Beatles songs to include revolutionary slogans, a task that is seemingly beyond them.

Angry and uncompromisingly polemical, this film is a bit like being flicked with a wet towel for sixty minutes. It ends with a series of shots of fists punching through the Union Jack, smashing the system, once piece of thin cardboard at a time.