Dziga Vertov Group
The Dziga Vertov Group, which included Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gérard Martin, Nathalie Billard, and Armand Marco, emerged in France in the wake of May '68. It grew out of the encounter between Godard the filmmaker and Gorin the political activist and their shared belief in the necessity of "setting up a new unit that would not make political film but try to make political film politically" (Godard). The name of the revolutionary Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov thus became the symbol for a kind of filmmaking that would reveal the world in the name of the proletariat. The group's focus was production rather than distribution. For its Marxist-oriented members, production was to determine distribution and consumption. Through Godard's repution, they were able to get commissions from the television networks, although these were sometimes later canceled, as was the case with the BBC and RAI. They also made films for German television. Convinced of the poor quality of political films and the fact that these preached to the converted, the Dziga Vertov Group did not attempt to enter the parallel distribution circuits that existed for them. They did not seek to create new forms but rather, new relationships. They attempted a different approach to filmmaking, which, behind a certain didacticism, was no less virulent in its content, as suggested by this excerpt from a page prepared for the radical magazine Politique Hebdo: "During the projection of an imperialist film, the screen sells viewers the voice of the Owner-State. This voice caresses you, puts you to sleep, or beats you over the head. During the projection of a revisionist film, the screen is a loudspeaker projecting a voice that had once been delegated by the people but which is no longer their voice. The people look silently at their own deformed faces. During the projection of a political film, the screen is simply a blackboard inscribed with the images and sounds produced by the concrete analysis of a concrete situation, namely the class struggle. In front of this screen, the poopulation thinks, learns, struggles, criticizes, and transforms itself" (Godard par Godard, Paris, l'Etoile, 1985).