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disappeared -- Godard was fighting against something which didn't exist, using a Marxist dialectic framework that was out of date!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