After a certain amount of thinking, and a little serendipity, a project is decided, and from there a winnowing, or a grinding of the lens, where small things enter and are seen in greater detail. Then, if you're lucky, an explosion of sorts, and all kinds of stuff floating in the air, like the house in Zabriskie Point (1970).
The explosion for me was finding a structure in Godard's La Chinoise (1967), a fast-moving film about student revolutionaries a year in advance of those who joined with organized labour and brought France's economy to a standstill, its president Charles de Gaulle taking refuge in Germany.
Last week I watched La Chinoise for what is probably the third or fourth time, but this time with my finger on the PAUSE button, scribbling notes with my free hand. The image up top (a screen grab) came out of nowhere; so too did the picture it reminds us of.
Godard's inspiration for La Chinoise came from actor Anne Wiazemsky, who was studying philosophy at Nanterre and to whom he was recently married, and his fascination with Dostoyevski's Demons (1871), which I am reading again (the Pevear/Volokhovsky translation) after attempting the Macandrew translation as a teenager, when the book was then known as The Possessed.
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