Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

you cld say that godard's ignorance of basic film technique meant that he wasn't held back by the dogma of the 'well made film' and therefore was more likely to do something new, different (tho' it's surprising to me that someone who'd been such a student of movies the previous ten years or more didn't pick up more classical film grammar). i'm also guessing that raoul coutard *did* know the basics, and took charge of the technical side of things on goard's first few features (there've certainly been plenty of other film directors who have leaned heavily on their dps and editors.) i'm always struck by the fact that fellini and (especially) antonioni had been making movies, working in or around the film industry, for quite a while before they had their big breakthrough hit - i don't know the history well enough, but it seems as if the french film industry was a much more of a closed shop than the Italian film industry.

i don't know enough about that. i think there was some crisis in the french cinema that led to lots of cheap first features being commissioned, and that the international breakthrough of 'and god created woman' encouraged.

the question of breakthroughs has to relate to the wider picture of art-house distribution... get the feeling this ramped up in the 1950s, especially in america. no single film or filmmaker is responsible for that, but there is a kind of temperature-change about 1960 (for convenience's sake). i don't think antonioni's debut was even shown in the UK for example.

breathless is different from those three, but not more important or better

yeah, I didn't say that, neither did that NYT quote. punk rock existed before never mind the bollocks but it's hard to argue it wasn't a landmark cultural detonation for a lot of folks.

the overuse of the jump cut is basically a result of godard not knowing what he was doing, yes? can't remember where it's documented, but fritz lang gave him a stern talking-to and tried to teach him the basics later. of course it's fine to use jump cuts for a reason, but i think antonioni and resnais were manipulating form in a way way more interesting way.

the idea of lang talking sternly to him is, if I can extend the punk rock metaphor here, like elvis giving johnny rotten singing tips. there was a method in the madness. I've said this before, maybe not in this thread, but godard made 10 films between 1960 and 1965, and at least 5 of them (your pick) are some of the best films ever made. a lucky naif with a movie camera can make a great film but godard's track record belies he was something more than that.

(btw I have watched the lang/godard interviews, godard was totally in awe of the guy but it's evident there's a gap in where their respective heads were at)

and at least 5 of them (your pick) are some of the best films ever made

lol

tbrr i just don't think the extreme reverence for the new wave is a good thing

i like a o scott, but there are some really bad offenders out there

obviously it's fine paying tribute to good things that are old, but spare me yr "touchstones of modern art"

5 YEARS

Pierrot le fou (1965)
Alphaville (1965)
Une femme mariée (1964)
Band of outsiders (1964)
Contempt (1963)
Les carabiniers (1963)
Le petit soldat (1963)
Vivre sa vie (1962)
Une femme est une femme (1961)
Breathless (1960)

if you don't like godard I guess it doesn't mean a hill of beans but I'm always gonna find that run as staggering as eno's first 4 albums

and he kept going, too. 15 in 7 years. gah.

Week End (1967)
La chinoise (1967)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Made in U.S.A. (1966)
Masculin féminin (1966)

i like contempt a lot although anytime it gets referred to as "subversive" i cringe but yeah i dont get godard most of those movies are unbearably corny to me. week end in particular is just str8 shameful

i like em better than brian eno's first four albums, but not as much as a whole bunch of other stuff

lot of them have some really memorable images, but they're also often really dumm, and have patches of boring stuff, are badly constructed, or whatever

i think the worst thing about all the contemporary godard adulaish is his being misunderstood as a profound/original thinker. he's a very muddled thinker and a pretentious so-and-so to boot. politically he's all over the place, but somehow he gets a free pass/is taken to be a leftist

Pretty much OTM there - apart from the Eno bit

part of my appreciation of godard is driven by looking at his 60s work as a whole, pieces of an enterprise or approach. you can pick any one of these films in isolation and push them around for their deficits and weaknesses, but godard was landing more punches then he was missing on the whole imo.

breathless is not my favorite godard but it lays out the ground rules he'd work from during the 60s. watching breathless is more of forensic activity for me, hearing faint sounds that would become bigger echoes in contempt, band of outsiders, and pierrot le fou. in a way, band of outsiders is breathless remade by a godard who was much more in control of his materials.

and yeah I finally read that whole NYT article, it does get a little cloying with the hosannas.

I really have no patience for Godard except for Breathless, Contempt, and bits of Masculin-Feminin. Criterion did us a favor by releasing those films in beautiful prints though.

i think the worst thing about all the contemporary godard adulaish is his being misunderstood as a profound/original thinker

haha yeah the idea that just having your characters talk about hölderlin makes a movie "intellectually challenging" or w/e is kinda :/ and a lot of his "critiques" feel like point missing/obfuscation

it'd be ok if they talked about all this cultural art hotness in a way i understood, but i don't, and more to the point, i don't think godard does either. i did actually read a blog post recently that said he was clearly very erudite because of all the references/allusions he makes, but that isn't quite right. it doesn't work that way.

i've also seen it said that the cahiers writers all felt like outcasts because they weren't university graduatess and french cultural life is very snobbish and exclusive, and that maybe they overcompensated a lil bit by being deliberately obscure. i find other intellectual filmmakers -- like resnais -- comparatively lucid anyway.

i 'get' the 60s ones, and even the dziga-vertov movies to a degree, but 'eloge de l'amour', the 80s movies, not so much

anyone ever manage to sit through one of the dziga vertov group films? (i did, a couple of nights ago. rough going, to say the least.)

hah xp

never seen any of the dziga vertov group films and seeing ici et allieurs pretty much put me off them; the film basically seems to say "we were sort of full of shit, weren't we?"

i paid a lot of money to see the d-v films

but here are some of them, apparently

http://www.ubu.com/film/dziga_vertov.html

That's money, uh, not well spent

contempt - subversive, yeah I don't get that. playfully irreverent and satirical is more like it.

i think the worst thing about all the contemporary godard adulaish is his being misunderstood as a profound/original thinker. he's a very muddled thinker and a pretentious so-and-so to boot. politically he's all over the place, but somehow he gets a free pass/is taken to be a leftist

agree with this. godard's politics are the least interesting thing about him. he's a super intelligent guy and he did a lot of original + memorable work, but he's not as deep as he thinks he is. you throw some lines of sartre at ppl and some are gonna be like "wow, deep thinker!"

godard's value for me is as an aesthetic trickster. he's brilliant but take him seriously at yr own risk. but y'know I wouldn't trust bob dylan with my personal effects either.

The roughest going for me Godard-wise was having to sit through godawful Jefferson Airplane trying to recreate the "Let It Be" rooftop jam in "One P.M" - though I'll guess most of that is DA Pennebaker's doing.
Anyway - I think he's brilliant. Far from a "pretentious so-and-so" (what's that, exactly?)
Here's a good recent interview.And I can't recommend "Histoires du Cinema" (sp?) highly enough as a hallmark of DIY video filmmaking. Great shit.

Godard is into quoting a lot of sources he hasn't understood or cares to understand/engage with to draw something out of (having started to watch them when I had already read/listened/experienced some of the sources not first seeing them through a G film as a 16 year old) but I always pictured that he was using it on the moment, and if it did the job on the day...he is probably one of the few I picture as somehow 'living' as a filmmaker on a set, on a day-to-day basis. I see a real struggle for inspiration: sometimes coming through, sometimes not.

It lead to a lot of boringness that you could pick apart retrospectively but as a whole its a rollercoaster rush at the cinema. Really unique without the preciousness that implies.

Hate all the films I've seen post-68. Look forward to watching the "Histoire" docs one day.

I really have no patience for Godard except for Breathless, Contempt, and bits of Masculin-Feminin. Criterion did us a favor by releasing those films in beautiful prints though.

― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Donnerstag, 27. Mai 2010 18:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

have you seen "vivre sa vie"? it's probably the most devastating film i've ever seen.

Pierrot le fou (1965)
Alphaville (1965)

These are two of my very favourite movies. I haven't seen any of his other work. I don't think. Maybe I should.

Didn't Ophuls have a hand in kickstarting the New Wave? La Ronde really is one of my top movies too; it's a total headspin, and has that impish sense of modernist New Wave fun to it as well. Feels a lot more modern/timeless/whatever than it actually is, and the cinematography is sorta level-up at points, especially in that opening scene

watch any of these next

Band of outsiders (1964)
Contempt (1963)
Vivre sa vie (1962)
Une femme est une femme (1961)

Godard's political confusion is a big part of why I like him, to be honest - I think his movies are pretty upfront about not having any answers, or even a medidated grasp on what the problem is. Which works well with their breakneck pace, they're these ADD pieces where pop culture, love, politics, everyday shit all gets jumbled and played around with. Which jives well with a certain (perhaps excessively fetishized, I grant you) vision of the 60's, it's all about big, colourful chaos. Not a good life model or anything but as an aesthetic I enjoy it.

ah cool, Ed III

Daniel Rf, that sounds pretty on the mark. Alphaville is perhaps more pointedly political of the two I've seen but even it has many ambiguities - it works best AS a piece of cerebrally-playful science fiction. PLF is such a blast of escapism it manages to get away with having two perfect endings, one after the other

godard's best films are this run, i think: sauve qui peut (la vie) / passion / prénom carmen / je vous salue, marie / détective / king lear / nouvelle vague / allemagne année 90 neuf zéro / hélas pour moi. somewhere in there is soigne ta droite which isn't up to the same level. but to make up for that there are several short films i love: grandeur et décadance d'un petite commerce de cinéma, soft and hand, armide (from aria), puissance de la parole.

passion-->détective, in particular, are films i watch all the time. they are just ravishing. and i know this will sound weird, but they are all "catchy" in the way a pop song is "catchy"--they stick in my brain. sequences from them run in my mind all the time. more than in almost any other films.

that's not to say i don't love many of the other films from other periods. my favorites from the '60s are probably vivre sa vie and la chinoise. the latter is very, very funny.

i also really like the television essays (?) he made just prior to his so-called comeback: six fois deux, sur et sous la communication and especially france/tour/détour/deux/enfants. the latter might actually resemble political lucidity in a weird way. i don't generally turn to godard for his politics, though, which are quite capricious. i'm not sure has has much to "say" in that respect. read recent quote, someone responding to brouhaha over new film: "he's a poet who thinks he's a philosopher." that seems close to apt. but a lot of people don't seem ready or willing to even find the poetry in his films of the last 30 years.

for some reason i went to see hélas pour moi with my mom who is not a big cinephile and she was like WTF. have you guys seen (or rather heard) that one? the weird croaking voice, man. let's see if i can find that. no, i can't.

but i have to admit i kind of like this mashup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvRen4eiPQ4

in fact, fuck it, i'm going to watch je vous salue, marie right now. might be my favorite film.

and here's the opening to nouvelle vague:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6_K2NXLyFs&feature=related

just LISTEN to that.

by the way it really sucks now that when i type in "nouvelle vague" into any kind of search, i get stuff from some shitty british band or whatever.

oh fuck, never mind that last clip, it's got some russian guy speaking on top of the french dialogue. try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h80izhcPfPM

Saw The Old Place for the first time tonight, which I rather liked, bcz for one think I didnt know there was a jazz version of the Rosemary's Baby lullaby.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183595/

It played w/ JLG/JLG, which is pretty much the only thing of his I'm passionate about post-1970.

I remember the sound of Hélas pour Moi being astonishing. What it all meant I wasn't clear on.

hmmm, a post 1970- JLG poll could be quite interesting

curious fact: 'le mepris' (1963) had not been released in the UK as of september 1967

life imitating art:

Worst traffic jam ever? Gridlock spans 60 miles

He's getting an honorary Academy Award this year. They trotted out Satyajit Ray and Elia Kazan when they were on death's doorstep, so maybe this means he's sick. In any event, I hope it's part of the televised ceremony, and I hope he attends. It will be very moving to see him get a standing ovation from Miley Cyrus.

...as she mouths "who???" to the person seated to her right.

Le Mepris is great, everything else I've seen has been mostly a bore.

lol at the thought of the compendium of clips

No clips; Billy Crystal will do a lighthearted song-and-dance reenactment of everyone's favorite scenes from Weekend, La Chinoise, and Letter to Jane.

Have they found him yet?

Somehow missed this news.

He's not coming, and good for him.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/jean-luc-godard-to-be-an-oscar-no-show/story-e6frg8n6-1225915014578

he should send polanski

i would think more "good for him" if this wasn't the reason:

"He just told me, 'It's not the Oscars,' " she says, referring to his reaction on learning about the award. "At first he thought it was going to be part of the same ceremony, then he realised it was a separate thing in November."

At a time when a movie like Crash can win best picture I don't know why anyone gives a shit.

Ugh, that was worded badly.

I think that article probably overstates the non-televised thing as being a factor. I doubt he'd have shown up anyway, and that was just another reason to skip it.

Well, maybe not that article, but a different one I read that used the same quote. Definitely bed time.

At a time when a movie like Crash can win best picture I don't know why anyone gives a shit.

― optimizing the emotional effects of Redneck Hoe by Insane Clown Posse (corey), Tuesday, September 7, 2010 5:54 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah im sure jlg wishes it were the 50s, when classics like 'around the world in 80 days' took best picture

all gone downhill since then