9/10
Pure poetry. The ultimate cinematic exercise from Godard
14 January 2011
Whatever you feel about the French New Wave and Godards work in this period we have to realize one thing - it had imprisoned him. The wave he himself had co-created would tie him to norms. Now it was gone. He was no longer in the searchlight, his films got smaller and smaller.

JLG was always experimental, always unique and often too much in his own world to be relatable for the public. However, he had for a certain time been an icon. Now, he was free. He could make whatever he wanted, regardless of form and norms. The end of the New Waves marks the beginning of his experimental awakening and the growth of his love for cinema.

In all regards Wind From the East can be considered an "anti"-film. A film so far from the norm of what beauty and storytelling is that it becomes an example of just that. A exercise of creativity, of styles and of ideas.

Emotionally, I get throwback to Jancso's Red Psalm(which ironically was made a two years later), because this is indeed a work of communist art - A political belief system that does not coincide with my own, from a time that disappeared long before I was born.

It speaks of revolution and violence as so many other Godards have done, but here it becomes part of both the abstract and the unconscious. But then, this is what beauty is. It's poetry - pure but perhaps not too simple. It reflects times that are gone, ideas left behind and a world unknown.
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