Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Tout Va Bien


"I am an American correspondent in France, but I correspond to nothing"

Jean-Luc Godard created Tout Va Bien in 1972. The film is a comedy that looks back to May 1968. Jane Fonda plays an American reporter who goes with her husband, a commercial director, to interview the manager of a sausage factory. While they are there a strike happens and all are held captive. The scene emphasizes the issues of May '68 an the ongoing struggle.

The film is a Marxist critique of French culture. The issue of class struggle and cultural production are the basis for the entire film. Godard sympathizes with the conditions of the factory workers. He also makes an important cultural record of France's grève générale and shows the excess of mass production in a famously long supermarket tracking shot.

Tout Va Bien is also important as a visual media. The film is shot like documentary with occasional interviews of the characters, giving it a reality television feeling much earlier than other media. Like his other films Godard also emphasizes the primary colors red/blue/yellow, giving the film a decidedly modernist De Stijl aesthetic.


See an excerpt here.
Read the Harvard Crimson response to this film.

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