From the Feb 17 – Feb 23, 2000 issue

Film

How Kids Become Monsters

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Children Seriously

by Bruce Reid

NO ARTIST is as emblematic of the radicalism of the '60s as Jean-Luc Godard. Caught up in revolutionary fervor, by the end of the decade he'd gone so far as to denounce all his previous efforts as bourgeois, and threw himself into the supposed anonymity of political collective filmmaking, forming the Dziga-Vertov group with Jean-Pierre Gorin. Nothing lasts forever, and by 1977 Dziga-Vertov was disbanded, most of the political idealism that swept through Europe had faded away, and Godard had retreated to a small studio in Switzerland and found a new partner, Anne-Marie Miéville (the two collaborate to this day). Realizing that the revolution he'd predicted hadn't come about, Godard needed time to think, to reflect on why the dream had failed. And for Godard, thinking is another word for seeing, and seeing means making movies.

What he and Miéville decided to look at is how children can grow up to be self-contented, greedy, consumerist adults -- "monsters," as we adults are called throughout France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants, a series of 12 half-hour "Movements" made for French TV, which the Little Theatre will show over three consecutive Wednesdays starting February 23. Each episode consists of a brief prologue at the beginning and a longer visual essay at the end; in between is the heart of the series -- a long, unbroken interview with one of two children, Arnaud Martin or Camille Virolleaud, both aged around 10.

What do you talk to 10-year-olds about? If you're Godard, you debate philosophy and ethics with them: Are your dreams reality? Is night a time or a space? Is school modeled after the conformist policies of the military? Is it right that having or lacking money should determine so much of one's life? These interviews can be uncomfortable to watch -- the camera never moves from a tight close-up of the kids' faces, and it's clear how often they'd rather be anywhere else than answering this man's strange questions -- but they're also easily the most thorough portraits of young people any filmmaker has achieved. Who else has ever taken children this seriously?

Like all great political art, France/ Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants works not just sociologically, but autobiographically as well -- as a portrait of transition in Godard's cinema. This reflects his first interest in video, the awakening of a renewed engagement with aesthetics (which he'd abandoned as insufficiently revolutionary), and ultimately, for as much as the project claims to examine culture and society, as a portrait of his isolation and solitude. Seeing the last sequence, it's clear how much the radical Godard of the '60s was motivated by a thoroughly apolitical wish to belong.