Janis Joplin died fifty years ago, and she is often remembered as the poster child of the counterculture. Yet, her values did not fully mesh with the counterculture ethos. Whether or not Janis deserves to be the icon of the counterculture depends on how the counterculture is remembered.
Read moreA Fight on Two Fronts: On Jean-Luc Godard’s “La Chinoise”
Godard's La Chinoise follows a group of communist students as they plan for revolutionary action and create a “socialist theater.” Godard drew heavily from German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of “dialectical theater,” a method of political theater that forces the audience to engage with the ideas presented to them. At the same time, Godard drew upon the teachings of Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-Tung, whose ideas were discussed closely among French intellectuals during the 1960s. By merging Brechtian concepts with Maoist ideas, Godard sought to turn film into a revolutionary art form, and this goal is most fully realized in La Chinoise.
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