LETTER TO JANE

This extraordinary little movie emerges from the then recently formed French Dziga Vertov film collective, led by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Godard and Gorin had originally become united in a dream of a new revolutionary cinema and to all intents and purposes the Dziga Vertov Group became these two men as other members broke off to form their own equally obsessive and more or less purist groups. The entire premise of Letter To Jane is a deconstruction of a notorious news photograph of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi and surrounded by Vietnamese communists. The best parts of the film function as a withering critique of the iconography of Hollywood and the (fashionably unfashionable) Hollywood star system. Ironically, this system or its European model, was something Godard had in a lesser way made use of, or at least flirted with, in such films as Le Mépris (1963). (Jonathan Dawson)

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