(1969)
1.5
Michael Buening
British Sounds is a vague, ridiculous, irritating, and occasionally formalistically thrilling example of Jean-Luc Godard's often radical mid-career work, after the May '68 Paris uprising and the formation of the Groupe Dziga Vertov. The arrogant tone that the director brings to this political lecture is perhaps its biggest detriment. Interesting ideas, like a tracking shot along a factory floor while the narrator reads from Karl Marx, aren't very effective in execution. The autoworkers are laughing and look happy, not oppressed. It's not clear how this factory would look different if run as a socialist enterprise. An attempt at proto-feminism, involving a naked woman in her house, is laughably naïve. Another scene has young activists earnestly transposing communist propaganda to Beatles songs. It's hard to believe, with this scene in particular, that the movie wasn't supposed to be a satire of radical movements, or at least a commentary on the ineffectuality of well-meaning but empty bourgeois youth gestures. But Godard's intentions aren't clear. The documentary contains some of his intriguing experiments to liberate image from sound, but this film should only be of interest to devotees of Godard and/or agitprop films.
British Sounds on AllMovie
British Sounds (1969)
