British Sounds / The Third Generation
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Reel Politik: Seizing the Means of Projection With Nathan Gelgud. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
British Sounds (1970)
When their surprised patrons ask the theater staff in Nathan Gelgud’s book Reel Politik what they plan to show in their newly liberated movie house, “the Godard-Gorin stuff” is at the top of their list. An agitprop primer in Marx and Mao, radical feminism, and the deconstruction of capitalist image production, British Sounds was Jean-Luc Godard’s first completed project with the Dziga Vertov Group, a militant film collective that included Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Henri Roger, and marked the New Wave icon’s radical break from auteurist filmmaking. Overlapping voiceover readings from the Communist Manifesto and other radical texts illuminate and clash with an extended montage — a car assembly line, a union strategy meeting, a nude woman at home, student organizers — that suggests, if not a fully realized vision, a vital new cinema struggling to be born.
DCP, color, 54 min. Directors/Screenwriters: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Henri Roger.
The Third Generation (1979)
The precision and elegance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s camerawork (he also acted as cinematographer) stands in sharp contrast to the shambolic activities of the would-be terrorist cadre he turns his gaze on in this late ’70s satire of bourgeois revolutionaries. Contrasts bold and subtle abound in this film suffused with high art cinematic allusions and bathroom graffiti, banal routines and sudden bursts of violence. Ostensibly living underground while making vague plans to kidnap a corporate fat cat, these middle-class Marxists play Monopoly to unwind even as their target unspools plans of his own to turn the threat of terrorism into higher profits.
DCP, color, in German with English subtitles, 110 min. Director/Screenwriter: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With: Harry Baer, Hark Bohm, Margit Carstensen.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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