La Chinoise

While all of the films in our 81 for 81 series are inspiring and push barriers in terms of their content - only a few have done this and also actually helped to create change.  Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise is not only an examination of France’s Maoist Youth in the late 60’s, it inspired the student protests at Columbia University as well:

One of Jean-Luc Godard’s most underrated and misunderstood films, this 1967 feature isn’t so much an embrace of France’s Maoist youth movement as a multifaceted interrogation of it--far more nuanced and lively than the theoretical agitprop Godard would make with others after the May 1968 uprisings. Though it explores the dogmatism and violence of a Maoist cell in Paris, Godard is equally preocccupied by such things as French rock, the color red, the history of cinema, the “revisionism” of the French Communist Party, and the rebels’ youthful romantic longings. The spirited cast--including Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Juliet Berto--make all this touching as well as troubling. The movie helped inspire student revolt at Columbia University soon afterward, but that’s a tribute to its style and energy, not its political intelligence. [Jonathan Rosenbaum]

With a hint of red in every frame, La Chinoise dissects idealism and youth with it’s story of a young group that forms a Maoist cell. It is a film that is still very much alive today and even though the particulars of it aren’t nbeccessarily relevant, the spirit is.  And often it is spirit that inspires people more than details.

Watch this film to see how it pushed the envelope and then takepart to learn about a group of students that recently tried to create change and make their own revolution in New York City.

La Chinoise was not nominated for and did not win an Academy Award®