Just a few notes on an obscure film, 19 January 2003
Author: Alvy_Singer from Sydney
Just a few notes on this film, which is very obscure. I believe it was broadcast on Channel 4 in England in the 90s, but don't quote me on it.
Pravda was filmed clandestinely in Czechoslovakia on 16mm. It's one of those films Godard made with the Groupe Dziga Vertov - a Marxist film about the political situation after the '68 revolution. I'd call it a kind of essay. Basically, we get an hour's worth of montage of very interesting documentary images with voice-over. The version I saw was in English (American accent). One memorably Godardian moment is when a man is shown speaking Czech and the narrator doesn't translate - he just says "If you don't understand Czech, you better start learning".
It's been compared to 'Letter to Jane' and that's probably a good comparison. Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard's frequent collaborator at the time, gets no credit from the IMDB, but I have read in other sources that he was involved in post-production.
Godard apparently described Pravda in retrospect as 'a marxist-leninist garbage movie'.