One Student in La Chinoise Was Not Acting

La Chinoise was shot in March 1967 in a borrowed Paris apartment, with five young people playing at revolution. It opened on 30 August and took the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. Nine months later, May 68 happened. The film has been called a prophecy ever since.

That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that one of the five was not acting.

The wall

Godard had the apartment walls painted with slogans. One of them holds the entire film in a sentence.

"Une minorité à la ligne révolutionnaire correcte n'est plus une minorité." A minority on the correct revolutionary line is no longer a minority.

It is commonly credited to Mao. We could find no primary source confirming that, and the film credits it to nobody, so we leave it unattributed. What is certain is that the sentence does the exact thing the film accuses its characters of doing. It settles by definition a problem that politics settles by work. Be right, and you stop being a minority. Nothing else required.

Four actors and one militant

Anne Wiazemsky plays Véronique. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Guillaume. Juliet Berto plays Yvonne. Those are actors performing Maoists.

Omar Blondin Diop, born 18 September 1946 in Niamey, was not an actor. He was reading philosophy in Paris, by way of Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, and organizing with the Union of Communist Students before joining the Marxist-Leninist youth union. Godard heard about him and brought him onto the film. He plays "comrade X", the student who turns up to lecture the others.

So the only real revolutionary in the film is cast as the revolutionary.

What happened to him after

Diop was at Nanterre and in the 22 March Movement through May 68. France expelled him to Senegal in 1969.

In February 1971 comrades of his attacked Georges Pompidou's motorcade in Dakar. Diop tried to organize their release. He was arrested in Mali in November 1971, extradited in February 1972, sentenced to three years for threatening national security, and held in Gorée Civil Prison, cell number 3.

He died there on 11 May 1973, aged twenty-six. The official account was suicide. His brother, in the next cell, heard the beating. The autopsy, carried out by their father, a physician, found blows to the neck. The investigating judge convicted two guards and called the suicide account a cover-up. The judge was then removed and replaced, and the new proceedings were terminated for lack of jurisdiction.

His face is still carried at demonstrations in Senegal, fifty years on.

Why it ends up on a shirt

The Une Minorité tee takes the sentence off the wall, in the wide squared lettering Godard had painted, with no imagery and no explanation. Nothing else. That is the correct treatment, because the sentence carries itself and because it turns depending on who is wearing it.

Godard was filming bourgeois children reciting formulas in an apartment they had borrowed, and he knew it. The film mocks them for most of its length. Then it puts somebody in the middle of them who meant every word, and six years later that person was dead in a cell for meaning it.

The sentence on the wall is a consolation. It says being right is enough. It is not enough, and that is what makes it worth wearing.

Related: the rest of the Screen shelf, or the full catalogue.

Another sentence everyone quotes and nobody attributes correctly. Kill One Man and You Are a Murderer, who actually said it.

More people who meant every word in Emma Goldman Never Said "If I Can't Dance" and Mikhail Bakunin, the one who out-argued Marx.