In Letter to Jane, news photograph first appears on the screen Jane Fonda towering above some Vietnamese, and on the sound track Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin discuss the implications of the photograph. Their talk is didactic, and reveals what Laura Mulvey referred to later as Godard's “always interesting” misogyny (quoted in Williams 1992: 84). Certainly the intensity of a film consisting of a still picture and two ideologues berating the subject of the picture has something of the feeling of a show trial about it. The Marxist/Maoist Dziga Vertov movement and Jane Fonda's own short career as a bourgeois idealist collide in what in retrospect is a film by two rather privileged intellectuals who both seem to lack a sense of history's ironies. Thus, the entire premise of Letter to Jane is a deconstruction of a notorious news photograph of Jane (Hanoi Jane was her nickname in America at the time) visiting Hanoi and surrounded by Vietnamese communists. Letter to Jane is, in one sense, a very long lecture (or harangue) by two filmmakers that is almost the purest example of agitprop in cinematic history as well as possibly the most graceless. But it still makes fascinating viewing and sums up a period in the political life of cinema that can be linked to the more formalist stylistic strictures of Lars Von Trier's Dogma Group.
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