FILM REVIEW: GINGER & ROSA

Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa is an emotionally shattering film about how the sexual and political environment of the 1960s affects the lives of two teenage girls living in London.  Ginger (Elle Fanning) is introspective and quiet, and has a pessimistic view of the world, while her best friend Rosa (Alice Englert) is outgoing and adventurous, and views the world as full of possibilities.  The sometimes reckless abandonment of Rosa, who embodies the “free love” and sexual liberation ethos of the 1960s youth generation, attracts Ginger, despite her innate timidity. 

In fact, Ginger is more like her mother Natalie (Christina Hendricks), who is more reserved and at times obsessively anxious, while Rosa’s bold and temerarious personality is similar to Ginger’s father Roland (Alessandro Nivola), an anarchist whose brash behavior oftentimes leads to trouble.  Both Rosa and Roland fully embrace the more open-minded sexual mores of the 1960s counter-culture movement, as they casually engage in indiscriminate sex with multiple partners.

The main event of this era that informs every scene in Ginger & Rosa is the threat of nuclear annihilation.  As the film begins, we discover that Ginger and Rosa were born at the exact same moment in 1945 when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  This event haunts Ginger when she becomes a teenager, and she spends her days and nights obsessively worrying about the end of the world as a result of a nuclear war. 

Indeed, the central concern of Ginger & Rosa is of an era, specifically the 1960s, coming to an end.  For Ginger, this end is a literal end brought about by a nuclear war.  However, on a more symbolic level, Sally Potter is exploring how the “free love” movement of the 1960s, when sexual partners were freely exchanged without consideration of emotional attachment or familial concerns, came to an end. 

The constant switching of sexual partners by both Rosa and Roland leads to the eventual destruction of their respective family units.  Rosa sleeps around to compensate for the lack of a real father figure in her life, leading to her mother falling deep into despair.  Roland sleeps with multiple women to the detriment of his wife and daughter, who are fully aware of his behavior. 

It is no coincidence that nuclear war is a central theme in Ginger & Rosa, an obvious allusion to the concept of the nuclear family which was formulated in the 1950s.  During the 1950s, the ideal nuclear family was based on the heterosexual couple of the mother and the father, along with the son and/or daughter.  This central unit had to fend for itself without the help of any outside support. 

Ginger & Rosa explores how this idea of the nuclear family came into direct conflict with the changing mores of the 1960s, as revealed by the characters of Rosa and Roland and their attempts to reshape the nuclear family.

Just as a nuclear bomb could destroy the whole world, Sally Potter reveals how the outdated concept of the nuclear family was broken apart and changed during the 1960s.  

This is also revealed with her introduction of a homosexual couple in the film, played by Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt, who form a sort of alternate nuclear family to Ginger’s heterosexual mother and father.

Ultimately, Ginger & Rosa, with its cast of anarchists, free-thinkers, sexually liberated men and women, and gay couples, is Sally Potter’s attempt to reconfigure the idea of the nuclear family into something more inclusive, open-minded, and more fitting to the ever-changing modern world.

FILM REVIEW: LA CHINOISE

In 1960, Jean Luc Godard burst onto the cinema landscape with his groundbreaking debut film Breathless, a huge critical and commercial success that ushered in the influential French New Wave momement.  One can make the argument that from his debut film onwards, Godard's 1960s work defined the entire turbulent decade.  Indeed, Godard has an astonishing 12 films from the 1960s in the prestigious Criterion Collection, which is perhaps the most respected DVD/Blu Ray distributor of classic and important contemporary films.

Jean Luc Godard

As the 1960s came to an end, Godard’s work became more experimental and politically radical.  Godard didn’t want to only entertain audiences; instead, he wanted to engage viewers in an active and cerebral manner.  As events such as the Vietnam War and the 1968 student protest movements dominated the social and political climate, Godard felt that cinema had to actively address these issues.  This led Godard to start making politically radical films such as Weekend, La Chinoise, and a series of works known collectively as the Dziga Vertov Group films.

La Chinoise is Godard’s most politically incisive work.  With its examination of Marxism and the student protest movement, La Chinoise is Godard’s ultimate manifesto on the politics of the 1960s.  It takes the same vibrant color palette of his less political films, such as Pierrot le fou and Made in U.S.A., and places it within a story of student revolutionaries in France during the late 1960s.  Most of La Chinoise takes place in a single apartment shared by a group of young students who are deeply dissatisfied with the government.

La Chinoise translates to the Chinese, alluding to the fascination that 1960s student intellectuals had with the ideas of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution in China.  These students were deeply influenced by Mao’s leadership role in the revolt of the proletariat class against the bourgeoisie.  Throughout La Chinoise, we see the students reciting from Mao’s Little Black Book, and even dressing in the traditional dark blue clothing of the Chinese peasant revolutionaries. 

Another important thinker that the students are influenced by is Karl Marx, who espoused a similar critique about the dialectical struggle between the proletariat and the elite classes.  However, while the students spend their days studying the works of Marx and Mao, Godard ultimately views their actions with disdain and skepticism.  For Godard, the students are hypocrites because while they talk about oppression and exploitation, they never actually leave their apartment to engage with the outside population that they claim to want to help.

Instead, as Godard reveals, the students spend their days isolated from the wider society, entertaining themselves with theatrical games.  In one scene, a student stands in front of the other students, reading aloud from the works of Marx.  The seated students holler and yell at the standing student, as if he was an actor performing for them.  Godard emphasizes this theatrical aspect of the scene further by panning back and forth from a distance between the standing and seated students, as if the viewer was yet another spectator of this grand theatrical production. 

In another scene, one of the students states directly that the Vietnam War is a performance made up of different actors, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam as the three main players.  For these students, politics is just a form of distraction, or a way to entertain themselves without having to face the real world.

Thus, Godard ultimately views the students’ activities as being meaningless.  For Godard, it is futile to endlessly discuss political issues without taking any action.  And when the students do finally decide to take action, the result is equally misguided, as they ultimately resort to violence.

La Chinoise is a biting indictment of the deep gap which can exist between action and thought.  The students in La Chinoise espouse revolutionary thoughts, but their actions do not reflect this.  They ultimately do not succeed because in the end, they are members of the same class that they are trying to overthrow—the elite, bourgeois class.  Marx argued that a revolution must be carried out from the bottom up, as happened during the Cultural Revolution in China, not from the top up, as the students in La Chinoise are attempting to do. 

For Godard, bourgeois cinema seeks only to entertain, just as the students in La Chinoise seek to entertain themselves with theatrical games.  Instead, from the late 1960s and throughout the rest of his career, Godard sought to create a form of cinema that actively engages audiences, and forces them to view films in a new light.  Perhaps this is why many have chosen to ignore Godard’s wide output of great work after the 1960s, and to focus instead only on his earlier, more accessible films.  La Chinoise was Godard’s first film to completely divorce itself from the bounds of traditional narrative filmmaking, and to point cinema in a new, innovative direction.

FILM REVIEW: 2001

During the 1960s, many visions for a Utopian future existed—one which could only be achieved through technological innovations.  The common perception of the 1960s was that science was boundless in terms of its ability to advance human society.  Science allowed us to reach beyond the limits of Earth; on July 20, 1969, the United States astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human on the moon.  This achievement occurred in the larger context of the Cold War, during which the U.S. and Russia fought each other to gain technological global dominance.  As a result of this rivalry, the United States’ striving for dominance in the field of science was fertile grounds for creative expression by many 1960s artists. 

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 was the most significant film from the 1960s which reflected this glorification of science.  Although it presented a Utopian future of the United States as colonizing and exploring space freely, 2001 also revealed the limits and the dangers of technology.  In a world of rapid technological changes, the self-destructive side of science is a frightening reality.

Kubrick’s 2001 portrays humans in the process of creating wondrous technological advancements, such as building a space station and landing on distant planets.  In the film, the United States has sent a group of scientists, including the lead character of David, to explore the solar system.  The lives of these scientists are in the hands of HAL, a super computer which is a highly advanced form of artificial intelligence. 

At first, HAL cooperates with David and his crew, carefully monitoring those who are in suspended animation, and even playing chess with David when he is bored.  At this point in the film, man and technology live in harmony, which each side benefiting from the other; Hal keeps David and the other scientists alive and functioning safely in the hostile atmosphere of outer space, and David keeps HAL company by talking with him. 

This state of peaceful co-existence between man and technology is what scientists in the 1960s wanted to maintain.  Scientists were aware of the darker side of technological development, such as the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but they consciously chose to ignore the dangers of science in order to help the United States gain global dominance over Russia.

              

Kubrick realized that at a certain point, the harmony between man and science could reach a breaking point—eventually, HAL starts to make mistakes, and David and his crew debate over whether or not to turn HAL off.  This leads to HAL becoming more and more malevolent, as its decisions start to threaten the safety of David and his crew. 

Through his portrayal of the darker side of HAL, Kubrick is warning us about the inherent destructive nature of human beings.  HAL was created to replicate human behavior, and in doing so, the designers of HAL also recreated the more deadly side of human nature—the ability to kill. 

The creators of technology ultimately have control over how scientific innovations are used, and if the creators are inherently destructive, then their creation will also be destructive.  The irony of 2001 is that despite all the technological advancements that humans have made, they have not been able to evolve beyond their inherent desire to destroy themselves. 

2001 opens with the dawn of man, which is depicted as a dark era when the first humans, in the form of apes, lived in fear of the dark, and constantly fight and kill each other over territory.  The major technological advancement which occurs with these first humans is the discovery of the bone, which is ultimately used as a tool to kill other apes.  The bone itself is discovered after the apes kill another species of animal; thus the first scientific discovery could only be created through murder. 

In one of the most celebrated cuts in all of cinematic history, an ape throws a bone into the sky, and Kubrick cuts from the upward motion of the bone to an image of a nuclear device floating in space.  This single cut reveals how little humans have evolved, despite all of our amazing technological advancements.  Kubrick is saying that if we cannot evolve beyond our nature to kill each other, then we are doomed to ultimately destroy ourselves. 

However, Kubrick’s 2001 is not ultimately a pessimistic portrait of humankind.  Rather, it is a warning against the human race’s natural inclination to recede to its baser nature. 

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?”   Man in his basest nature is an ape, whose natural instincts are to destroy life and conquer land. 

However, it takes great effort to overcome these primal desires, and to ultimately become what Nietzsche referred to as a “superman.”  This concept of the superman has been greatly misunderstood by those in power, and has been used to justify war and destruction, as in the case of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  In order to become a real superman, a cleansing of what Nietzsche refers to as the polluted nature of mankind is necessary.

This cleansing is revealed in 2001 by the increasingly clean environments which the humans reside in throughout the film.  The first environment we see is the jagged and soil-filled environment of the apes.  This dirtier, more natural environment is replaced by the geometrically precise and clean environments of the spaceships.  The last environment is that of the elegant and clinically clean rooms which David lives in before he dies. 

Like the monoliths strategically placed in the film, an increasingly cleaner environment accompanies each stage of human evolution in 2001.  The final stage of evolution in 2001 is the rebirth of mankind into a higher consciousness—one based upon an alignment of the planets with the last monolith.  This final monolith serves as both a warning and a symbol of hope for the human race. 

2001 is both the most pessimistic warning against the destruction of humankind, and the most optimistic portrayal of our ability to evolve into a higher state of consciousness.