Jean-Luc Godard

[O'Grady]

Someone in For Ever Godard felt that the soundtrack was meant to parody other films overuse of music at the time.

It did seem like a parody. The problem is that none of the rest of the movie is. So what's the point?

I'm not entirely convinced that it is parody. But I don't really have a problem with it being one either. What's the point of the shot with Raoul Coutard and his camera near the beginning of the film? What's the point of the gratuitous ass shots?

[surfer]

What's the point of the gratuitous ass shots?

Oh come on now.

[jon abbey]

besides the obvious, as I recall (going from memory), the film's producers wanted Godard to show more of Bardot, and that was his over-the-top answer, I believe that sequence was added late in the production.

[franz bieberkopf]

the film is pretty obviously on the meta tip. that it might not be so consistent as to be construed as parodic should come as no surprise to Godard-headz because he very seldom makes films that are homogeneous in approach... if ever.

[Ttai]

the film's producers wanted Godard to show more of Bardot, and that was his over-the-top answer

"woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings." --Max Ernst in Godard's Amore e rabbia segment.

he's not showing Bardot, he's showing a woman.

it's poetry, it's Rimbaud's L'Eternite. a very beautiful scene, i think.

it shows us what is about to be shattered.

And the soundtrack is syrupy Romanticism and too heavy and suffocating.

nonsense!

[Dan Warburton]

Instead of posting in Recently Watched Films as usual



Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) ("Slow Motion"), 1980

[j-p]

Masculin, Féminin (1966)
Saw this last night and was pretty much blown away, certainly one of my favourites now. Hilarious, poignant, brilliant and a whole lot of fun at the same time.

[O'Grady]

For those who don't know

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pdS8jEYzU4

socialisme film announce

[Dan Warburton]

I see he's describing this as his "last" film (but the French word "dernier" also means "latest"..) - but from IMDb it seems several people are credited with direction. Film à sketch à l'italienne? If anyone has any more info, point the way.

[surfer]

With movies maybe above all, there is surely almost no accounting for tastes; this is at the base of both (iirc) Truffaut's comment about every person on the street having two vocations, his work and film criticism, and also the current and at least partially hilarious despair of (paid) film critic hacks over the state of "their" profession. For what it's worth, I remember loving Herzog in JDB, but more to the point, I think almost anything gets better when Herzog opens his mouth, especially when he speaks for me: “Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film, a Fred Astaire picture, or a porno” (HERZOG ON HERZOG, p. 138) and elsewhere repeats the insult and proceeds to praise Jean Rouch as "rock solid" (true dat). I guess I hated MR. LONELY, too, but I loved Diego Luna; and since I saw ML before my burning infatuation with Denis Lavant, I might just need to see it again. (It's possible that the awfulness of the impersonators' impersonations is part of what could be wonderful about ML, if it turns out that it's wonderful after all.) I know I'll see Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL after despising it several years ago, just to see Lavant do his slithery electro-shock thing; having seen several of her flicks in the interim, I bet I'll dig it this time around.

and if Godard is intellectual counterfeit, it's a sad indictment of film, because he's pretty much the only one in the game. As much as i love Herzog, his career hasn't exactly arced in the fashion JLG's has.

Well, death is not the end, right? Herzog's still done more than his share to change not only cinema but sight as well, so I grant him as much schlock as Hollywood lets him produce; sounds like a good retirement. As for Godard as shibboleth, he's been working that angle since before he was filmmaker, and I just don't subscribe to JEAN-LUC CINEMA GODARD. All I see is a curmudgeonly mean-streak (apparently an occasionally anti-Semitic mean streak, speaking of things that get conveniently overlooked, as I discuss below re: Lance Hammer's guilt) that rubs off all too easily; an aristocratic arrogance that renders the aristocrat in question ineffectual if not ineligible to become a class warrior (not for working classes at least...maybe as a stealth conservative operative, sure...I mean, why go into the movies? why the bad conscience? I ask this of literature professors regularly...why insist on continuing to profit from what you despise? doesn't that lack character?); and a contempt for the audience, and for most people generally, that gives the lie to protested motivations of liberation. I read lots of Bataille and Simone Weil, but I don't need to have my back pat about it. So why all the cultural-capital-mongering? Why all the dead-end referentiality? Why talk about political urgency when all you're prepared to do is congratulate people on what they think they know? Coutard himself said more than he intended to: JLG has a "deep seated need" to oppose people and things....not a specific outrage over oppression, environmental devastation, anti-Semitism, or, say, old-school, high-modernist literary decadence or glib postmodern self-promotion...no, none of these are a problem, as evidenced by the way JLG conducts business, and conduct business he most certainly has. What he exhibits in the way of resistance is a useless, generalized resistance that is more temperamental, "aesthetic" (etymologically speaking) than considered. For Jean-Luc Godard to be "the only one in the game" is exactly the way he's planned---marketed---things all along. I read and read and read about the guy, I read his own words and the words of his interlocutors, and all I see is arrogance, selfishness, misanthropy, self-exemption, more than mild misogyny, grouchy curmudgeon instead of active critic, and---for someone so greatly regarded for so long, and so creatively free (so to speak)---an unquenchable fire of ressentiment and corrosive bitterness. It's fantastic that he addressed Algeria, and more generally terror, so early, and so incisively (and these only as examples, among so many others); I just wish he didn't undo with the left hand what he did with the right hand: by making movies that are clumsy not through an "obsession with reality" (Bresson) but out of spite. And I wish he'd not been such an operator masquerading as liberator. We have enough of those in academe, and now JLG has added his own bloated, lumbering corpse to their number.

"Only one in the game": what does this even mean? So Panahi and Kiarostami are not in the game? Lucrecia Martel is not in the game? Pedro Costa is not in the game? Soderbergh, for that matter, is not in the game? Sorry, Godard is the "only one in the game" the way that Schoenberg was, briefly, the only one in the game; the way that Wagner was, briefly, the only one in the game. (After "defeating" Brahms! Yeah, that lasted.) David Thomson is more right than he probably wants to be when he says that Godard is probably the first great director who was not a human being, but I'll go further and say that the only greatness in Godard's direction is his direction of critics, his direction of cinema- (and not reality-) obsessives, and his direction of his own career.

[kscotthandley]

Well, that's it for Handley. (FWIW, biberkopf and I have made glad with each other, in a pretty non-awkward, Cassavetes-sharing kind of way. I believe he firmly finds the later Godard to be especially the stuff, but I have yet to concur.)

[Dan Warburton]

I'm looking forward to going back to some of the later Godards soon (have to watch Une Femme Mariée first though - never seen that and DVD arrived from Amazon on Saturday, yippee) - have seen Je vous salue Marie 5x (so I like it, you can guess), but I've only had one crack at Passion, Nouvelle Vague, Carmen, Detective and the Histoire(s), and have yet to see Helas pour moi, Soigne ta droite, Lear and Eloge d'Amour. Any particular recommendations, Herr Bieberkopf?

[O'Grady]

I'm looking forward to going back to some of the later Godards soon (have to watch Une Femme Mariée first though - never seen that and DVD arrived from Amazon on Saturday, yippee) - have seen Je vous salue Marie 5x (so I like it, you can guess), but I've only had one crack at Passion, Nouvelle Vague, Carmen, Detective and the Histoire(s), and have yet to see Helas pour moi, Soigne ta droite, Lear and Eloge d'Amour. Any particular recommendations, Herr Bieberkopf?

I like je vous salue Marie also, you should definitely think about watching Helas pour moi soon. For Ever Mozart is another late one I think a great deal of. Not forgetting JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre.

[img]http://auteurs_production.s3.amazonaws.com/stills/28868/king-lear-1987.jpg[/img]

I've always enjoyed JLG's performances in King Lear and Soigne ta droite but I can imagine they might grate on some people.

[Dan Warburton]

Détective, 1985

Not only can Johnny Hallyday not sing, he can't act either. But that doesn't spoil it - there are plenty of people here who can (Terzieff, Cuny, Baye, Léaud, Brasseur..). Made to order for Alain Sarde, who wanted a more "commercial" proposition to offset the risk of Je vous salue Marie (though Godard of course never makes things easy - if you can figure out the plot here, drop me a line.. for once Godard reminds me of Lynch), it was shot quickly in the Hotel Concorde Saint Lazare in Paris. Enjoyed my first real viewing of this (I seem to recall dozing off in front of it on TV about twenty years ago), but need a few more before I can share Colin McCabe's enthusiasm for it.

[j-p]

Détective, 1985

Saw this recently again too. I've always thought it was underrated. Enjoyed Leaud's performance a lot.

Enjoyed my first real viewing of this but need a few more before I can share Colin McCabe's enthusiasm for it.

Man, McCabe has the worst French pronunciation ever.