La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?
is a hilarious and yet political, serious film made by French
Situationist René Viénet in 1973.
In this masterpiece of detournement, Viénet took an old, mediocre kung-fu movie (The Crush, by Doo Kwang Kee) and re-dubbed the sound with new dialogue. Steve Seid of the Pacific Film Archive said of the result:
...the martial arts school is the center for revolutionary resistance. The devotees hone their dialectical skills in preparation for the final confrontation with the bureaucrats. Viénet's appropriation is a brilliant, acerbic, and riotous critique of the failure of socialism, in which the martial artists counter ideological blows with theoretical thrusts from Debord, Reich, and others of their unalienated ilk. But Viénet's target is also the mechanism of cinema and how it serves ideology.
I would recommend this film to anyone interested in
recycled culture, and also to fans of
Karl Marx, the Situationists, and even Hong Kong film geeks. It's a bit hard to find, but is out there in your cooler metropolitan video stores.
A similar film formally, though without the political goal, is
Woody Allen's
What's Up Tigerlily?