Brigham Narins writes:
 
"No medium has power--power is the province of institutions . . .
The political authority of the mass media has nothing to do the
proclamations of theoreticians. Power and authority are corporate and
global, and will never be--have never been--seriously challenged by art.
Godard and the theoreticians--artists and critics--to the extent that art
and criticism is all they do, shout from the sidelines."
 
 
I would have to argue against this "top-down" theory of power structure in
favour of the Baudrillardian notion of the "disappearance" of power.
Power today cannot be located or for that matter "fought" through any
means (since we are fighting against phantoms).  Godard's failure, then,
resulted from the fact that he wanted to enter this power game by using
aesthetic means to sway the mass toward revolution (or to at least start
an aesthetic revolution through materialist dialectic fiction, something
his pre-'68 films seem to have achieved much more than the Dziga Vertov
films: how many times have we heard how A BOUT DE SOUFFLE "revolutionised"
film aesthetics? how many times do we hear the same about BRITISH SOUNDS
or TOUT VA BIEN?).  Believing in the certainty of a dialectic world has
something to do with this failure (really a misplaced trust in Marxism,
or, at the very least, a tactical error) -- there is "us" (critics,
"liberals", avant-garde filmmakers, etc.) and "them" (Hollywood, Narrative
Realism, Escapism, "Mass-media").  Today (and in '68) the poles have
disappeared -- Godard was fighting against something which didn't exist,
using a Marxist dialectic framework that was out of date!  The interesting
thing for me about Godard is that he actually REALIZES this fact after the
break-up of the Dziga Vertov Group sometime after TOUT VA BIEN, and starts
to critique his own past, especially in ICI ET AILLEURS (1974).
 
 
. . . Jerry Johnson asks:
 
"I'm not sure I understand the question- by "theoreticians"  do you mean
film academics, popular reviewers, directors, studios, or all of the
above?
Likewise with the "medium itself"?"
 
 
I guess the question can be boiled down to "what is theory/criticsm?" Is
it inquiry into "real" aspects of society in an effort to better
understand them, or is a game, a simulation of power, a fusion of the old
dialectic of subject (critics/criticism) and object (film-as-object of
inquiry).  Do we as critics and theoreticians play the game of theory?  In
other words, doesn't criticism/theory have as much (or as little)
authority as the object of criticism?
 
 
. . . and Mark Lynn Anderson mentions:
 
"Well, I was seven-years-old when May '68 happened, but
I was politicizied by Godard's work in the mid-1980s."
 
 
I was still waiting to be born!  :-)
 
This also happened to me -- JE VOUS SALUE, MARIE (1984) was the first
Godard film I saw that really brought to life the power of his thought and
art, but not really in any political way.  It was more of a "sublime"
experience for me.
 
 
Sorry everyone -- no answers, just some more confused thoughts!
Glen.
________________________________________________________________
 
Glen Norton
Graduate Programme in Film and Video
York University, Toronto, Canada
 
THE PANTHEON: http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/3781
 
"When you see your own photo, do you say you're a fiction?"
                                              -- Jean-Luc Godard
----------------------------------------------------------------
 
----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite 
http://www.sa.ua.edu/screensite