Sightlines · reception
How La Chinoise was received
1967 · Jean-Luc Godard · La Chinoise on Sightlines
The arc
In 1967 it baffled almost everyone — even actual French Maoist students dismissed it as a dilettante's cartoon of their politics — but when May '68 erupted months later, it suddenly looked prophetic, and it's now ranked among Godard's essential works.
What’s debated
The forever-debate: is Godard satirizing these play-acting student radicals or endorsing them — and does the film's ambivalence make it sharper or just evasive?
Its footprint
Its pop-art imagery — walls of Little Red Books, primary-red apartment, slogans painted everywhere ('One must confront vague ideas with clear images') — is endlessly screencapped and imitated, basically the visual shorthand for chic '60s radicalism.
Where it stands
A Letterboxd aesthetic favorite and the gateway film to Godard's political period — cited constantly, grid-posted often, watched somewhat less.
Did you know? Godard married his lead actress Anne Wiazemsky — a real philosophy student at Nanterre, the university where May '68 would ignite — in July 1967, the year the film premiered and won the Special Jury Prize at Venice.