More than any other art form, cinema captured the energy, the truth, of the times. To an extent rarely matched before or since, filmmakers did not simply record the upheavals and crises of the time; they were participants and catalysts. None more so than Godard. It seems apt that the Film Forum and Lincoln Center programs share "La Chinoise," one of a flurry of films he began, completed or released in 1968, and one in which he indulges his fondness for epigrams and proverbs. One of his slogans proclaims that with vague ideas, we need clear images.
Contemplating 1968 after 40 years, it seems we have plenty of both: an increasingly blurry and sentimental (if also sometimes cautionary) notion of "the '60s" accompanied by sharp and dramatic images of exemplary events. Start with the Tet offensive at the end of January; segue into the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June. Between them, the French événements and the student uprising at Columbia University in New York.
In the summer, a glimpse of the massacre of student demonstrators by Mexican soldiers at the Tlatelolco Plaza, a bloody prelude to the Mexico City Olympics, where Tommie Smith and John Carlos offered black power salutes from the medal stand. August brings the Democratic convention in Chicago, overwhelmed by antiwar demonstrations and a police riot.
In the autumn, Soviet tanks arrive in Prague to smash the human face of Czech socialism. And in November, the "silent majority" elects Richard Nixon president of the United States. Swirl it all together with a soundtrack of slogans and classic rock songs. The whole world is watching! Be realistic: Demand the impossible! There's something happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear.
And neither is "La Chinoise." By turns heady, charming, infuriating and impenetrable - a Godard film, in other words - it represents its moment with an authenticity that is both undeniable and hard to specify. The political passions of the young characters contribute to this feeling, of course, but Godard is not simply dramatizing a chapter in the lives of good-looking people in the throes of militancy.
To the extent that a narrative can be discerned, it is fractured and oblique. Moments of unvarnished, appropriated reality alternate with sequences of arch and self-conscious theater. (The same methods inform "Le Gai Savoir" and "Un Film Comme les Autres.")
The series at Film Forum is called "Godard's 60s," and the possessive seems entirely appropriate. Godard, now 77, was surely the most widely imitated and ferociously debated filmmaker of the decade. From "Breathless" in 1960 to "Le Gai Savoir" in 1969, he was a cinematic perpetual-motion machine, completing 23 features and contributing to a number of omnibus and anthology films. This rate of production was not just a result of a uniquely accelerated artistic metabolism but also, and more decisively, the enactment of an aesthetic principle. Cinema, for Godard in the '60s, was an art of the present tense, which meant that an individual film was not a framed and finished work but rather something more like an essay: provisional, disjunctive and almost by definition incomplete.
Godard was hardly the only filmmaker of the era who embraced an open-ended, experimental conception of the medium. A speech at the end of "Le Gai Savoir" suggests that he saw himself as part of a loose international fraternity of iconoclastic filmmakers, including Bernardo Bertolucci in Italy and Glauber Rocha, the father of Latin American cinema novo, in Brazil. A strong cumulative impression left by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "1968: An International Perspective" is that the political and cultural paroxysms of the time were accompanied by and refracted through a revolution in cinematic form and technique, one that leapt over boundaries of language and nation and fed on similar impulses in the other arts.
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