只是一场运动 Juste un Mouvement

Juste un Mouvement (‘Just a Movement’) is Vincent Meessen’s free take on La Chinoise, the 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard, and a “film in progress of making itself” in Dakar. It is conceived as a re-editing operation of Godard’s film, reallocating its roles and characters, and updating its plot. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original, now becomes the key character.

Juste un Mouvement harnesses the “methodology for practical works” and the “lessons of things”, Godard’s preferred pedagogical and aesthetic methods. The lesson is no longer the singular lesson given by Omar to his comrades in La Chinoise, but those, plural, offered here: first, a lesson in Mandarin about the cinema of La Chinoise. Secondly, tai-chi and kung fu lessons, both martial art and a philosophy of life. And last but not least, the lesson learned from the dead-ends of the past by the family and friends of Omar.

Shot exclusively with non-professional actors and including Omar Blondin Diop’s brothers and friends, everyone in this film plays themselves: a filmmaker (Mamadou Khouma Gueye), a rapper and militant (Malal Almamy Tall aka Fou Malade), a poet (Thierno Sall), a Chinese labourer (Fi Lu), a Shaolin master (Doudou Fall), a Senegalese intellectual (Felwine Sarr), an actor (Madiaw Njay), and also the Minister of Culture of Senegal and the Vice President of the People’s Republic of China visiting the Museum of Black Civilization, a project devised by the former Senegalese President Senghor in the mid-sixties and recently made possible thanks to Chinese financing.