https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/2fc85990-d730-46e2-8e76-57bb0fa74cfd 'Vladimir et Rosa' / 'Vladimir and Rosa' France, 1971, Groupe Dziga Vertov Language Audio: French, Subtitles: Russian & English "Godard received a new commission for a film that turned out to be the only work on which he had actually worked in a group. Filming took place between the end of August and mid-September 1970 in Paris, in a studio on the rue de Rennes. The title, alluding to Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, was intended only to attract German funding; in reality the subject was the trial of the Chicago Eight, representatives of the American extreme left accused of having provoked a riot during the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968. The accused, who were ultimately convicted only of "contempt of court", had transformed the hearings into a spectacle with burlesque dialogues with Brechtian overtones, and the trial into a sort of six-month circus. Godard and Gorin study the minutes of the hearings, their aim being to 'turn the spectacle against the power of the bourgeoisie'. In this comic and deeply farcical film, the two authors also appear in the film as actors, as police officers equipped with batons. The film, officially the last of the Dziga Vertov group, is a kind of 'reconstructed television news' like those that Georges Méliès staged using actors in place of kings and generals, but in an agit-prop style, between Mayakovsky and Brecht. ... "The Dziga Vertov Group is a film collective founded in 1968 by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin to produce militant films of a Maoist orientation. The collective's name refers to the Soviet director Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), his cine-oeil (Kino-Glaz or Ciné-Eye) and his cinéma-vérité, but it is also influenced by the ideas of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). All the films are signed collectively. ... The films produced by the group were described by critics of the time as abstract, intellectualist, formally ugly and unbearably heavy compared to Godard's previous films. For almost two decades, they literally disappeared from biographies of the Franco-Swiss director until they were rediscovered, thanks to the distance of time (and the restoration of prints); today, critics see in them a continuous aesthetic vertigo, a rigorous formal experimentation and an investigation into the language of cinema. ... The collective acronym appears rather in conferences, interviews and written texts. Its slogan is the intention 'not to make political films, but to make films politically', which is obviously the culmination of a Godardian evolution going from "Brechtian" films ('Les Carabiniers') to investigative films ('Two or Three Things I Know About Her' or 'Masculin Féminin') and up to political didactic films ('La Chinoise' and 'Le Gai Savoir'). Concretely, its slogan means that if a film is not 'politically thought out' from its production, it cannot play an effective political role; at most, it can have a consoling function, for example galvanizing activists or shocking democratic spectators with police brutality." -https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Dziga_Vertov (machine translation) Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:08:29 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://tankie.tube https://tankie.tube/lazy-static/avatars/3ba3ff73-a8b6-49c9-add8-9653ef090c7f.webp https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/2fc85990-d730-46e2-8e76-57bb0fa74cfd All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.