Abstract

In my thesis, I examine the responses of four politically radical filmmakers—Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Dušan Makavejev, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—to their cultural, ideological and theoretical contexts. I am particularly interested in the filmmakers’ respective conceptions of the politically radical work of art and their understanding of the role of the politically committed intellectual in the aftermath of the 1968 movement. I undertake an analysis of Godard's and Gorin’s Tout va bien (All’s Well, 1972), Makavejev's WR:Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 1968-71), and Pasolini's Porcile (Pigsty, 1969), in light of the filmmakers’ political modernist projects. The first chapter establishes the cultural and political contexts in which the filmmakers worked. I pay close attention to the intellectual debates in France, Yugoslavia and Italy that shaped the directors’ understanding of the role of the committed intellectual and the social and political function of art. The second chapter discusses their respective "returns" to the avant-garde aesthetics of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht. I examine Godard-Gorin’s, Makavejev’s and Pasolini’s use of the montage and collage techniques. The third chapter examines understanding of revolution and revolt, highlighting the directors’ different ideological and political positions.