[The] Cinema of the People

In the late sixties, Godard broke with the cinematic apparatus he himself had helped to shape. Together with Anne-Marie Miéville, he founded the Groupe Dziga Vertov in 1969 – a name as a program, named after the Soviet montage theorist. What followed was not a return to auteur politics, but their radical negation: The Cinema of the People pitted collective filmmaking practice against bourgeois authorship, the video camera against the 35mm film reel, the viewer against the consumer.

Practically, this worked as follows: Godard and Miéville shot with portable cameras – Panasonic AK-100, later VTR devices – not out of aesthetic minimalism, but out of political necessity. 16mm and video were the counter-program to the studio, to the industry, to distribution through rental and the cinematic apparatus. Editing was reinterpreted as montage: not continuity, but friction. The images did not speak to the viewers; rather, they were meant to work with the material, to produce meaning themselves. The audience was transformed from a passive recipient into an active force – a materially conceived cinematic practice.

Films like Vent d'Est (1970) or Tout va bien (1972) are not works in the classical sense. They are interventions, discussion materials, tools for collective analysis. The text runs counter to the image, sound and image are decoupled – not as a formal experiment, but as a method to destroy naive trust in representation. Those who see are not lied to. Those who edit become cameraman and critic simultaneously.

The group dissolved, the videos are now partly lost or fragmentarily preserved – which was also part of it: a resistance against archiving by institutions and commerce. The Cinema of the People did not live on in museums, but in the practice of video activists, community filmmakers, and later in the workshop approaches of Expanded Cinema. Godard himself never returned to this position, but the question it posed remained: For whom do we film? And who films?