Tout va bien

Infobox Film
name = Tout va bien


caption =
director = Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Pierre Gorin
producer =
writer =
starring = Jane Fonda
Yves Montand
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor =
released = 1972
runtime = 95 min.
country = Italy / France
language = French
budget =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
amg_id = 1:114211
imdb_id = 0069398

"Tout va bien" is a 1972 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand.

The film centers on a strike at a sausage factory witnessed by an American reporter and her French husband, who is a film director. The film is Marxist in its political message, explaining the logic of the class struggle and Brechtian in its formal qualities, which involve non-diegetic inserts and emphasis on the motion of the camera.

The set of the factory consists of a cross-section of the building and allows the camera to dolly back and forth from room to room, theoretically through the walls. This technique makes the factory look like an ant farm, and serves the overarching Marxist agenda. This staging is also an homage to Jerry Lewis's film "The Ladies Man" in which a similar set is used for a women's boarding house.

Godard and Gorin followed this up with "Letter to Jane", an essay film which deconstructs a photograph of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War. It asks what the position of the intellectual should be in the class struggle.

External links

*imdb title|id=0069398|title=Tout va bien
* [http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=275&eid=402&section=essay Criterion Collection essay by J. Hoberman]