Girls of Kamare
A Situationist film by Rene Vienet that juxtaposes musings on film, censorship, and society with Japanese pinky film Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom.
René Viénet
Director
Also Directed by René Viénet
A film-détournement biography of Mao Tse-tung in which the life of the recently deceased Great Helmsman is told in his own words, using quotes culled from various Red Guard publications. The rise to power of the film's namesake appears as the inevitable outcome of a dialectical logical. Or so the voice-over might lead one to believe. If the usual practice of détourned films is for the soundtrack to undermine the image, here the reverse occasionally takes place. The images critique Mao's words. They show that which, even in the official visual record of the times, the narrative elides. The film is dedicated to Li Yhi Zhe, the nominal author of a famous Democracy Wall critique of the Maoist state.
After the version with his own subtitles, then the version dubbed at the initiative of Gérard Cohen with the actors of the Café de la Gare, René Viénet undertook to make an animated pencil rendition of his most famous film.
Unlike his earlier films "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" and "The Girls of Kamare", which "detourned" drama films, in this one, Viénet uses a great variety of sources (particularly archive footage of People's Republic of China leaders) to compose a political documentary sharply critical of Mao's legacy in China. The title is a reference to the pamphlet "Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains" featured in "Philosophy in the Bedroom" of Marquis de Sade.
Imagine a kung fu flick in which the martial artists spout Situationist aphorisms about conquering alienation while decadent bureaucrats ply the ironies of a stalled revolution. This is what you'll encounter in René Viénet's's outrageous refashioning of a Chinese fisticuff film. An influential Situationist, director René Viénet's stripped the soundtrack from a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong export and lathered on his own devastating dialogue. A brilliant, acerbic and riotous critique of the failure of socialism in which the martial artists counter ideological blows with theoretical thrusts from Debord, Reich and others.
