https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/c06f79ac-c290-431b-8686-7eb76bbb1224 'Lettre à Jane' / 'Letter to Jane' France, 1972, Groupe Dziga Vertov Language Audio: English, Subtitles: N/A "'Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still' is a 1972 experimental documentary by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, produced under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group, and which is a sort of companion piece to 'Tout va bien'. Through the use of flashbacks, this 52-minute experimental film condenses a set of reflections on the power of the image from a single photograph of Jane Fonda taken during the Vietnam War. It was the last collaboration between Godard and Gorin. ... During the press presentation of the film 'Tout va bien', instead of talking about the feature film, Godard and Gorin offered journalists a critical reflection on a photograph published in L'Express on July 31, 1972, that is, shortly after the end of the film. ... American peace activist Jane Fonda came to show her solidarity with the Vietnamese people who were being subjected to indiscriminate bombing by the US Air Force. According to the two authors of the Dziga Vertov Group, the analysis of the photo can help answer the question 'What should intellectuals do for the revolution?' This means that we need to get to the bottom of the role of capitalist and anti-capitalist information. After exchanging a series of letters to finalize the project of a film to be presented at the New York Film Festival, on the occasion of the American promotion of 'Tout va bien', the two directors worked on 'Lettre à Jane' in a single day in August 1972, at the editing table, for the minuscule cost of $500. ... With this rather cynical exercise in revolutionary semiology, Jean-Luc Godard's long collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin comes to an end. It is the end of the Dziga Vertov group, born of the revolutionary emergency of May 68." -https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettre_%C3%A0_Jane (machine translation) "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) Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:03:17 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/c06f79ac-c290-431b-8686-7eb76bbb1224 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.