La Chinoise Series: 1968: An International Perspective [April 29-May 14] Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Country: France, Release: 1967, Runtime: 96
When Godard's La Chinoise opened in New York on April 3, 1968, the film both anticipated and critiqued the student movements that would storm barricades in Paris and take over buildings at Columbia just a few weeks later. Upper-class Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky) searches for the theoretical justification for her militant urges. Her actor boyfriend Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) wants to imagine a place for his art in the new order. Together they move into a well-appointed Parisian apartment for the summer, arguing militant strategies with fellow radicals while each battles for his place in the group's shifting hierarchy. No other Godard film more successfully uses the director's Pop Art sensibility: Images, colors and slogans flash across the screen as his characters act out their imagined revolutionary roles, living their lives as if they were quotations. "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola," indeed!
