Dave McDougall



'Work,' for the Jean-Luc Godard of the late 1960s and early '70s, is a necessary component of revolutionary struggle, a value because it is the necessary response to jobs that need doing. In La Chinoise, Juliet Berto's character espouses a similar ideal, doing dishes because the dishes need to be done. This is both a revolutionary metaphor and a statement of fact about work’s necessity (for JLG, revolution is one of the necessities that must be addressed). Work, for Godard as for Mao, is a force that must be harnessed in order to achieve revolutionary progress, but neither escapes abstract concepts or struggles with the human cost of work.