“What Is to Be Done?”
by
Jean-Luc Godard
Translation by Mo Tietelbaum
First published in English and French in Afterimage, 1970
We must make political films.
We must make films politically.
1 and 2 are antagonistic to each other and belong to two opposing conceptions of the world.
1 belongs to the idealistic and metaphysical conception of the world.
2 belongs to the Marxist and dialectical conception of the world.
Marxism struggles against idealism and the dialectical against the metaphysical.
This struggle is the struggle between the old and the new, between new ideas and old ones.
The social existence of men determines their thought.
The struggle between the old and the new is the struggle between classes.
To carry out 1 is to remain a being of the bourgeois class.
To carry out 2 is to take up the proletarian class position.
To carry out 1 is to make descriptions of situations.
To carry out 2 is to make concrete analysis of a concrete situation.
To carry out 1 is to make British Sounds.
To carry out 2 is to struggle for the showing of British Sounds on English television.
To carry out 1 is to understand the laws of the objective world in order to explain that world.
To carry out 2 is to understand the laws of the objective worlds in order to actively transform that world.
To carry out 1 is to describe the wretchedness of the world.
To carry out 2 is to show people in struggle.
To carry out 2 is to destroy 1 with the weapons of criticism and self-criticism.
To carry out 1 is to give a complete view of events in the name of truth in itself.
To carry out 2 is not to fabricate over-complete images of the world in the name of relative truth.
To carry out 1 is to say how things are real. (Brecht)
To carry out 2 is to say how things really are. (Brecht)
To carry out 2 is to edit a film before shooting it, to make it during filming and to make it after the filming. (Dziga Vertov)
To carry out 1 is to distribute a film before producing it.
To carry out 2 is to produce a film before distributing it, to learn to produce it following the principle that: it is production which commands distribution, it is politics which commends economy.
To carry out 1 is to film students who write: Unity—Students—Workers.
To carry out 2 is to know that unity is a struggle of opposites (Lenin) to know that the two are one.
To carry out 2 is to study the contradiction between the classes with images and sounds.
To carry out2 is to study the contradiction between the relationships of production and the productive forces.
To carry out 2 is to dare to know where one is, and where one has come from, to know one’s place in the process of production in order then to change it.
To carry out 2 is to know the history of revolutionary struggles and be determined by them.
To carry out 2 is to produce scientific knowledge of revolutionary struggles and of their history.
To carry out 2 is to know that film making is a secondary activity, a small screw in the revolution.
To carry out 2 is to use images and sounds as teeth and lips to bite with.
To carry out 1 is to only open the eyes and the ears.
To carry out 2 is to read the reports of comrade Kiang Tsing.
To carry out 2 is to be militant.
Fool and Bird, 1978 by Cecil Collins (1908-1989)
Petroleum, 2021 by Martin Wittfooth (b. 1981)
Double Portrait,1968 by Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)
I’d been meaning to pick up a copy of Keith Ridgway’s A Shock for a while now and today I did.
Here’s US publisher New Directions’ blurb:
Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.
Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell—he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is …
The Wasteland, 2007 by Jia Aili (b. 1979)
Book Worm, 1980 by Abigail Rorer (b. 1949)
Chaos XXIX by Michael Palmer (b. 1942)
Sleeping Courier, 1986 by Odd Nerdrum (b. 1944)
Set in Place by Wes Magyar
Sea of September, 1983 by Julio Larraz (b. 1944)
Webster Groves, 1943 by Chiura Obata (1885-1975)
Biblioklept 