# La Chinoise
**La Chinoise** is a 1967 French political film directed by [Jean-Luc Godard](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-luc-godard), in which five young people spend a summer in a borrowed Paris apartment forming a Marxist-Leninist cell, reading [Mao Zedong](https://www.edgepedia.org/mao-zedong), listening to Radio Peking, and debating whether revolutionary violence is justified. It was released in France on 30 August 1967, less than a year before the May 1968 student upheavals, and it won the Special Jury Prize at the 1967 [Venice Film Festival](https://www.edgepedia.org/venice-film-festival).[1](https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/visas-et-classification/32862) • [2](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director and writer | Jean-Luc Godard; his subtitle was "a film in the making"[3](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/la-chinoise/) |
| French release | Visa dated 28 August 1967; theatrical release 30 August 1967; 98 minutes per the CNC record[1](https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/visas-et-classification/32862) |
| Principal cast | Anne Wiazemsky (Véronique), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Guillaume), Juliet Berto (Yvonne), Michel Semeniako (Henri), Lex de Bruijn (Kirilov)[4](https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/48842.html) |
| Key crew | Cinematography Raoul Coutard; editing Agnès Guillemot; production companies Anouchka Films, Les Productions de La Guéville, Athos Films, Parc Film, Simar Films[4](https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/48842.html) |
| Award | Prix Spécial du jury, Venice Film Festival 1967[2](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107) |
| Setting | A Maoist collective, the Aden Arabie Cell, in an apartment on the rue de Miromesnil in Paris, the newly purchased actual residence of Godard and Anne Wiazemsky[5](https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-la-chinoise-1967-online) |
| Historical position | Released August 1967, months before May 68; widely read as a portrait of the Maoist student milieu then forming in France[6](https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/directors-best-years) • [7](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254905) |
## Spoilers
### Plot and characters
The five characters are defined by their social positions. Véronique is a philosophy student at Nanterre, Guillaume is an actor, Henri is an economics student, Kirilov is a painter, and Yvonne is a peasant girl.[2](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107) Godard himself described them as representing, like the characters of Gorky's *The Lower Depths*, "5 niveaux particuliers de la société" (five particular levels of society).[4](https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/48842.html) Over the summer they read Mao, listen to Radio Peking, hold discussions and performative skits on French colonialism, American imperialism, and the [Vietnam War](https://www.edgepedia.org/vietnam-war), and start each day with calisthenics and slogans.[2](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107) • [5](https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-la-chinoise-1967-online) • [8](https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2025/la-chinoise)
The cell does not hold together. Henri is expelled because he advocates the pro-Soviet Communist line and is called the "revisionist". Yvonne, who had been illiterate, is taught to read and sells *l'Humanité nouvelle*. Kirilov commits suicide over the uselessness of art in the context of the revolution. Véronique kills a man by mistake and then murders a Soviet minister of culture, and returning to the university decides to continue her violent activities. Guillaume, in Godard's terms the "most advanced one" at the end of the film, applies revolutionary principles by starting a door-to-door theater: politics has made him discover his art.[9](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/jean-luc-godard-la-chinoise-usa)
A central scene takes place on a train, stripped of the bright pop-art colors of the apartment, where Véronique debates the ethics of a planned political assassination with her former professor, played by the philosopher Francis Jeanson appearing in his own role.[10](https://blueprintreview.co.uk/2018/03/la-chinoise/) • [4](https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/48842.html)
## Production and context
By 1967 Godard had become disillusioned with the cinema he had been making, and *La Chinoise* is the film that most clearly shows him in transformation, abandoning cinephilia for a direct but playful polemicism.[11](https://www.nzfilmsociety.org.nz/uploads/4/4/8/5/44856883/close_up_2025_final_sml.pdf) The Cultural Revolution in China was, in his own later account, the spark that triggered the film.[9](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/jean-luc-godard-la-chinoise-usa) The script parallels [Fyodor Dostoevsky](https://www.edgepedia.org/fyodor-dostoevsky)'s *The Possessed*, a satire and tragedy of young radicals.[12](https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/downloads/fe897a3b-6468-4bcb-90ea-938ccf26313f?locale=en)
The film was shot in Paris in 1967, in the apartment on the rue de Miromesnil that Godard and Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife from 1967 to 1970, had newly purchased; Wiazemsky, who had introduced Godard to the young Maoists of Nanterre, plays Véronique.[5](https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-la-chinoise-1967-online) • [13](https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/jean-luc-godard-obituary) • [14](https://metrograph.com/film/9999003859-la-chinoise/) It was conceived at least in part for the 1967 Avignon Theater Festival and a theater-going audience, the culmination of Godard's 1960s exploration of blending theatrical and cinematic forms.[15](https://lallianceny.org/event/theater/)
*La Chinoise* was one of three features Godard released in 1967, alongside *2 or 3 Things I Know About Her* (March) and *Week End* (December), a trio that pushed the stylistic experimentation of the [French New Wave](https://www.edgepedia.org/french-new-wave) to its limit before Godard abandoned narrative film for militant collective filmmaking.[6](https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/directors-best-years)
## Style
The film is built from primary-color images, intertitles that both mark sequences ("Dialogue 4: Henri after his exclusion from the Aden-Arabie Cell") and display ideological remarks, and a stream of propaganda posters, comic books, news photos, book covers, and slogans filling the frame.[5](https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-la-chinoise-1967-online) • [12](https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/downloads/fe897a3b-6468-4bcb-90ea-938ccf26313f?locale=en) • [8](https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2025/la-chinoise) One of the first shots shows a slogan hand-painted on a white wall: "Il faut confronter les idées vague avec des images claires" (we should replace vague ideas with clear images), a statement at odds with the film's own fractured, allusive texture.[10](https://blueprintreview.co.uk/2018/03/la-chinoise/) The film keeps an ambiguous distance from its characters' beliefs, offering no internal benchmark for judging whether their ideas are absurd or idealistic, so that judgments fall to the viewer.[12](https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/downloads/fe897a3b-6468-4bcb-90ea-938ccf26313f?locale=en)
## Reception and interpretation
The film won the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 1967 but was pilloried by many traditionalist critics, whom Godard's satire of revolutionary posturing infuriated.[2](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107) • [7](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254905) • [16](https://kinolorber.com/film/lachinoise) Because it appeared months before the events of May 68, it came to be read as prescient; the Larousse film dictionary notes that Godard had perceived both the student malaise and the influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, while showing the utopian character and isolation of these bourgeois "revolutionaries in chamber".[2](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107)
Later scholarship has pushed against the prescience reading. James S. Williams, a scholar of French film at [Royal Holloway, University of London](https://www.edgepedia.org/royal-holloway-university-of-london), argues that the film has been over-read as a forecast of May 68 and under-read as an interrogation of the political limits of revolutionary violence: in the Jeanson train sequence Godard is both attacking the state terrorism of de Gaulle's Fifth Republic and warning student agitators that the path of revolutionary terrorism entails illusion, error, and catastrophe.[17](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047244110371901) Matthew Raymond Mason's 2020 conference paper reads the film as capturing, comically, the evolution of Marxist theory in the West against its ostensible practice in the East, through its treatment of the [Cultural Revolution](https://www.edgepedia.org/cultural-revolution) and the [Sino-Soviet split](https://www.edgepedia.org/sino-soviet-split).[18](https://ciencia.ucp.pt/en/publications/spectres-of-postmarxism-cultural-revolution-and-the-sino-soviet-s/)
In early 1968 Godard accepted an offer from Leacock-Pennebaker, the film's US distributors, to tour 20 American universities with a print, engaging student audiences on Vietnam, Cuba, China, and American foreign policy.[9](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/jean-luc-godard-la-chinoise-usa) The film opened the militant, most divisive phase of Godard's career, sometimes termed his "Mao years", and it remains an entry point to the Dziga Vertov Group films that followed.[13](https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/jean-luc-godard-obituary) • [14](https://metrograph.com/film/9999003859-la-chinoise/)
## References
1. [La Chinoise, visa n° 32862, CNC](https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/visas-et-classification/32862)
2. [La Chinoise, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/la_Chinoise/2107)
3. [La Chinoise, Film at Lincoln Center](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/la-chinoise/)
4. [La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), La Cinémathèque française](https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/48842.html)
5. [Watch La Chinoise online, BFI Player](https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-la-chinoise-1967-online)
6. [What's the best year a director ever had? Jean-Luc Godard's 1967, BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/directors-best-years)
7. [Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254905)
8. [La Chinoise screening, UCLA Film & Television Archive / Hammer Museum](https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2025/la-chinoise)
9. [Jean-Luc Godard in the USA, Sight and Sound, BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/jean-luc-godard-la-chinoise-usa)
10. [La Chinoise review, Blueprint: Review](https://blueprintreview.co.uk/2018/03/la-chinoise/)
11. [La Chinoise, NZ Film Society Close-Up 2025](https://www.nzfilmsociety.org.nz/uploads/4/4/8/5/44856883/close_up_2025_final_sml.pdf)
12. [Projected Comrades, University of Pittsburgh dissertation](https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/downloads/fe897a3b-6468-4bcb-90ea-938ccf26313f?locale=en)
13. [Jean-Luc Godard obituary, BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/jean-luc-godard-obituary)
14. [La Chinoise, Metrograph](https://metrograph.com/film/9999003859-la-chinoise/)
15. [The Shameless Old Lady and La Chinoise, L'Alliance New York](https://lallianceny.org/event/theater/)
16. [La Chinoise, Kino Lorber Theatrical](https://kinolorber.com/film/lachinoise)
17. [James S. Williams (2010), 'C'est le petit livre rouge / Qui fait que tout enfin bouge', Journal of European Studies 40(3)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047244110371901)
18. [Matthew Raymond Mason (2020), Spectres of (post)marxism? Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Soviet split in La Chinoise, Universidade Católica Portuguesa](https://ciencia.ucp.pt/en/publications/spectres-of-postmarxism-cultural-revolution-and-the-sino-soviet-s/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1966 to 1969*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license