Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

UnionDocs and E-Flux are thrilled to team up for a special co-presentation of Vincent Meessen’s Just a Movement (Juste un Mouvement), his critical repositioning of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise that reframes revolutionary cinema across time and perspective. 

Shot in 1967 in Paris, Godard’s original film follows a group of French students who embrace revolutionary ideals and eventually turn to violence. Reallocating its roles and characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original movie, now becomes the key character. 

Made exclusively with non-professional actors and including Omar Blondin Diop’s brothers and friends, everyone in this film performs themselves:  a filmmaker, a rapper, a poet, a Chinese worker, a Shaolin master, a Senegalese intellectual, the Minister of Culture of Senegal and the Vice President of the People’s Republic of China.

Juste un Mouvement seeks out the countershots and off-screen spaces of the Western political imagination, and unfolds through a narrative that unabashedly borrows and reworks existing commentary. Meessen stages a dynamic exchange between La Chinoise and contemporary Senegal, where present-day images echo and reverberate with the soundtrack of Godard’s film. 

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Vincent Meessen. We hope you’ll join UnionDocs and E-Flux for this collaboration and for a lively post-screening discussion. 

Program

Just A Movement by Vincent Meessen

108 mins, 2021

“Omar is dead!”, a voice cried out in Dakar, 11 May 1973. The eldest of the Blondin Diop family, a young militant philosopher, and the articulate Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise had allegedly committed suicide in his Gorée Island prison cell. His family and friends did not believe a word of it, demanding that light be shed on this political crime. A phantom haunts the Senegalese capital, itself in a state of unrest.

Program Duration: 108 mins

Bios

Vincent Meessen was born in Baltimore, USA, in 1971, and lives and works in Brussels. His artistic work is woven from a constellation of actors, gestures, and signs that maintain a polemical and sensible relation to the writing of history and the westernization of imaginaries. He decenters and multiplies gazes and perspectives to explore the variety of ways in which colonial modernity has impacted the fabric of contemporary subjectivities. Both in his work as an artist and in his paracuratorial activities, he likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives. Vincent Meessen is a founding member of Jubilee, a platform for artistic research and production.