British Sounds

1969 TV film

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1969 (1969)

Running time

54 minutesCountriesFrance
United Kingdom

British Sounds (also known as See You at Mao) is an hour-long avant-garde documentary film shot in February 1969 for television, written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger, and produced by Irving Teitelbaum and Kenith Trodd.^[2] It was produced during Godard's most outspokenly political period.^[3] London Weekend Television refused to screen it owing to its controversial content,^[1] but it was subsequently released in cinemas. Godard credited the film as being made by 'Comrades of the Dziga-Vertov Group'.^[4]

Synopsis

The film opens with a long tracking shot of workers at an MG Cars manufacturing plant, with a voiceover containing quotes from the Communist Manifesto. Subsequent scenes depict a naked woman walking around a house with a voiceover from a Marxist feminist tract, a newsreader, representing the British bourgeoisie, delivering a reactionary rant interspersed with footage of workers, a meeting of Trotskyist trade unionists, students creating political posters against a soundtrack of parodies of songs by The Beatles. The film closes with footage of fists punching through Union Jacks.

References

^ ^a ^b Dawson, Jonathan (October 2005). "British Sounds". Senses of Cinema.
^ Roud, Richard (1968). Godard. Thames and Hudson. p. 187. ISBN 0-500-48010-9.
^ Buening, Michael. "British Sounds (1969)". AllMovie. Retrieved 27 July 2023.
^ "British Sounds on Vimeo (with Italian subtitles)". Vimeo. 11 December 2009.