Loin du Vietnam

Abstract

This article examines the coalitional documentary by Jean-Luc Godard and the Left Bank group, Loin du Vietnam, from the perspective of their treatment of Algeria earlier in the 1960s. The author considers how SLON's first feature marks a departure from modern cinema's emphasis on colonialism as a source of existential malaise for the alienated bourgeois individual. Loin du Vietnam cultivates a pluralist aesthetic, which aims to make the North Vietnamese struggle directly intelligible within the currents of intellectual and industrial contestation taking place across France. After a close analysis of the film, however, the author also identifies strong points of continuity between the representations of Algeria and Vietnam, illuminating how the history of the former explicitly conditions the political consciousness through which Godard and the Left Bank presented the first war ever broadcast on television. Algeria recurs as nodal point of memory across militant French cinema's engagements with the ‘Third World’, and the article concludes by isolating Godard's work as a chief example.