La Chinoise

Overview

La Chinoise is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film about mostly bourgeois students forming a Maoist commune in a Paris apartment.

Current Profile

242. French History on Film presents the film as both sympathetic to and critical of radical students on the eve of May 1968. Primary colors, slogans, Mao’s Little Red Book, and debate stage revolutionary desire, while Yvonne’s repeated domestic labor exposes the class relations that rhetoric fails to abolish. Its link to Dostoevsky’s The Devils places revolutionary argument beside self-deception and violence.

Key Characteristics

• Anticipates the visual language and political intensity later associated with May 1968.
• Uses a confined apartment commune to test revolutionary theory against everyday hierarchy.
• Keeps Godard’s stance toward the students supportive and critical at once.
• Makes labor distribution a practical counterargument to bourgeois radical speech.

Evidence

• Political anticipation: 242. French History on Film calls the film prophetic of May 1968 while placing it in the fragmented postwar and Algerian-War left.
• Formal method: 242. French History on Film emphasizes slogans, primary colors, books, and debate as visible elements of political thought.
• Class contradiction: 242. French History on Film contrasts the students’ theorizing with Yvonne’s continuing work.

Qualifications

Calling the film prophetic does not make it a cause or comprehensive explanation of May 1968. The episode’s claims about Godard’s stance, Maoism, and the Algerian War are critical interpretations rather than a complete intellectual history of the French left.

What Changed

• Created the profile around revolutionary anticipation, formal debate, and the contradiction between radical language and labor.

Relationships

• French New Wave / 法国新浪潮 - movement context for Godard’s formally self-conscious political cinema.
• May 1968 in France - later crisis the film is said to anticipate but not cause.
• Cinema as National Memory - framework linking screen politics to later historical remembrance.
• Student-Worker Coalition Limits - neighboring distinction between radical solidarity language and unequal social positions.