Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/2600/super_breakout.png

Has anyone else watched the A-Z of Bande a Part that comes with the DVD? I've hardly seen its like before. It's bitty - you have to keep restarting on each letter - and maybe it's not stunningly insightful, but it is the work of people who've watched the picture very closely and related it to Godard's career (and it features a quite healthy-looking Karina, interviewed, what, this decade?) -- and of course it's an aptly formalist device a la Barthes.

i watched band of outsiders again last night, the end of that movie always makes me inexplicably happy. the last line of the narration is one of my favorite moments in all of cinema.
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Sunday, 10 July 2005

You mean 'my next film, in Cinemascope and Technicolor, will concern the further adventures of Franz and Odile au pays chauds'?

True, what someone said upthread, about a dog in that last shot.

I watched most of the extras on this Sunday night, and have it sitting next to me to finish off.

Timely thread.

pinefox i am disturbed by the idea of you basically liveblogging a film viewing. films should be watched in one without pausing in dark rooms only eating foods if they are not crunchy or distracting.

about the a-z thing though; i think i watched a bunch of the bfi extras, is one of them - uh, m, i guess - for magpie director? it's one of the things i love most about the stream of sixties godard films; that they explicitly document his pasttimes and preoccupations, that if he wanted to interject something into his film he just gave the words a mouthpiece and let it stumble into shot. this was kind of less successful later on, but i remember it adding to the mood, the picture of a literate bohemian parisian society, in bande a part.

i just love the atmosphere of the film -- that melancholy little refrain that plays over those long shots of the car scurrying around, the fact that it seems to be drizzling throughout the whole thing, the playful narration. i don't know what it adds up to, really, but i can't think of many films i'm more attached to.

it's been a long long while since i've actually seen bande a part, but my memory of the score is that it's wes montgomery at his peppiest twinkling a score for parisian street scenes. my memory is patchy and all, but i can't see the darkness in the descriptions of bande a part above - the content could be as macabre-as-could-be, and it'd still be carried along by its zippy momentum. la petit soldat is my favourite godard, and i think is a genuinely darker, colder film to contemplate, i guess an interesting counterpart to the liveliness of some things from the same period.

http://eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/une-femme-mariee/

^ Anyone?

woah

"Long out-of-circulation and unavailable on home video" is no joke. i've seen pretty much all of godard but this one has always evaded me. not convinced it's been on tv even (i saw most of them for the first time on tapes taken of channel 4).

think it's an anti-consumerist thing.

only one of the 60s Godards I haven't seen.

Yeah I saw it at the while browsing at the nft shop last night.

Also, very pleased that Eureka have also bought out Resnais' Muriel on DVD - would've bought it straightaway except its being screened on Bank Holiday Monday so I'll watch it then instead.

I've had the US DVD of Une femme mariée sitting on my shelf for a couple months, haven't gotten around to watching it yet

I saw it (Une femme mariée) on a shitty bootleg vhs a few years back. It's not great, but there is a cool montage set to a Sylvie Vartan song, and--if you are pretty literate on Godard's next few films--you'll notice him trying out a few things (negative footage, ye-ye pop) that he'd quickly reuse in 65-67.

started searching the thread to see if i'd groused about contempt on it yet, and found morbius grousing for me:

I mostly find Contempt a beautiful bore.

otm.

(NB: there are many of his ostensible classic that i haven't seen and want to, including weekend and alphaville. i like breathless, love bande a part and love parts of masculin/feminin. but contempt seemed sorta hollow and awfully pleased with itself.)

the long argument scene in the middle of contempt is one of my favorite godard moments. it so accurately captures the dynamics of a relationship falling apart, I can't fathom allegations of hollowness. also love palance's american caricature, that's funny stuff.

I'd recommend pierrot le fou but you are quite possibly mentally deranged.

contempt is the worst date movie ever.

the long argument scene in the middle of contempt is one of my favorite godard moments. it so accurately captures the dynamics of a relationship falling apart

eh. it's a good scene, but it seemed a little stagey to me. and since i really didn't care about either of them as characters or archetypes or whatever godard conceived them as, i mostly just wanted to be let out of the room.

(i felt that way about the latter half of l'avventura too, fwiw. a lot of that '60s "candor" about "how relationships really are" hasn't aged very well, imo.)

I saw it just a couple of years ago and it resonated

http://eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/une-femme-mariee/

Macha Méril! aka Traunitz from Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette!

omg omg omg Traunitz! gwee!

I mostly find Contempt a beautiful bore.

otm.

yeah, but 'mostly', because it's simultaneously really entertaining and satisfying; geeking on fritz lang bigging up M, enjoying the technicolor etc. it's like watching radio days and sitting through mediocre woody allen for the few good jokes. i think the beautiful thing about the sixties godards is that the stars aligned for a few of them and everything was in place to make them great, deep, rounded films, but the rest are almost like a travelogue or a diary, where he'd voice whatever interested him, throw it in like a magpie and just stir it around. this is BEST when some philosophy is voiced by jean seberg or by a passer by in bandé a part, but it's still absorbing even if it's in something sketchy (almost literally sketchy) like 2 or 3 things.

Macha Méril! aka Traunitz from Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette!

omg omg omg Traunitz! gwee

Always loved the venomous letter Truffaut sent to Godard after his scorching attack to La nuit américaine.
Best bit: "Il y a encore à Paris assez de jeunes gens fortunés, complexés d’avoir eu leur première voiture à dix-huit ans, qui seront heureux de se dédouaner en disant : “je produis le prochain Godard".

Ouch!

I liked it when Truffaut calls him the "Ursula Andress of the protest movement" (or something like that).

Yeah, one of the few occasions the usually quiet Truffaut really flew off the handle.

My problem with Le Mépris is that Brigitte Bardot is terrible in it, would have been a hundred times better with Anna Karina.

it's stunt casting on a meta level

the only thing I remember not liking about contempt was bardot's denouement. it plays like sour grapes from godard. "I will have my revenge! things will end terribly for you in my motion picture!"

now I'm thinking about what a completely different film contempt would be with anna karina in it... karina is awesome in general but bardot's bombshell cinema goddess really works in context of the movie.

rewatched Pierrot last nigh. God, Anna Karina...

Does ILM accept Dailymotion links?

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xo15z_a-bout-de-souffle_shortfilms

guess not :-(

i think bardot is right for 'contempt'; it is an incredibly meta movie and she was the face of the new wave*

*kind of. i think back then (1963) vadim wasn't seen as a completely different breed from the cahiers lot, of whom rohmer and rivette were very obscure anyway.

She wasn't so much the face of the New Wave as she was (in the eyes of the public at large) the face of all French cinema at that time. Deneuve was just starting to make a name for herself, and I guess an argument could be made for Jeanne Moreau, but really now, BB was one of the most famous women in the world in the early 60s.

yeah, if you watch some of the extras on the contempt criterion disc you can get a sense of the media circus bardot brought with her to the production... like if some indie filmmaker cast beyonce as the lead in his new movie

Yeah, that Paparazzi one is nuts. Photographers hanging off the cliffs on the island set trying to score pictures.

yea that's pretty much what i mean.

"the new wave" was a huge thing from 1956 cos of her and vadim. the first book in english on the subject covers ~50 directors.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/images/covers/200905.jpg

(this looks good)

http://criterion_production.s3.amazonaws.com/release_images/2656/512_box_348x490.jpg

In April

all this fiftieth anniversary ish for breathless is sheer myth, no disrespect for the film

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/movies/23scott.html

Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before

no

don't remember 'hiroshima mon amour' or 'l'aventurra' or 'la dolce vita' getting this kind of hyperbole

hmm? It's been spoken about like this for as long as I can remember (the late '70s)

don't remember 'hiroshima mon amour' or 'l'aventurra' or 'la dolce vita' getting this kind of hyperbole

― long time listener, first time balla (history mayne),

don't remember you alive in 1960.

Less a "decisive break" and more a "successful one," though I guess two of those other three movies you mentioned didn't do too badly at B.O. either.

Breathless has always seemed, to me, a sort of porridge-just-right situation in terms of its reputation against other landmarks of the era.

don't remember you alive in 1960.

― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 27, 2010 3:49 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

a. o. scott wasn't around in 1960 either

i do a lil thing called "research"... anyway, i don't think "breathless" was a big decisive break, less so than "HMA" by a long shot. of the four films, i think "la dolce vita" was probably the biggest commercial success -- not a "decisive break" (formally) either, but a huge deal in terms of increasing the art film's visibility.

anyone seen Film Socialisme?

Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before

no

don't remember 'hiroshima mon amour' or 'l'aventurra' or 'la dolce vita' getting this kind of hyperbole

that's because breathless *is* different from those three, which are film extensions of 20th century high art ennui. breathless was the marriage of low and high art, concerned with stuff like gangster films, youth culture, rebellion, bringing the kineticism of b movies to the art house. so I def see it as a break and something that influenced folks like scorsese in a big way, but also agree it hasn't aged as well as some of godard's other 60s films.

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

i wouldn't bat 'em away by saying they're about ennui: they are sincere responses to the human condition/life in post-war europe/__________

i don't see where the high art is in breathless: it's in french? they have pretentious convos?

resnais was a huge and vocal comic books guy, l'aventurra is kind of working with a 'lady vanishes' plot line, and la dolce vita is all *about* the alleged breakdown in cultural standards... but these are all secondary concerns

i don't like the high culture/low culture idea you're using anyway: a good gangster movie is only 'low art' if you buy into that bipolar view of culture in the first place. go back to the 1920s and the highbrows were greeting popular genres because they abolished the bigh/low split.

it's inarguably "a decisive break with what came before" It wasn't called the new wave for nothing. The reverence which it's afforded is a different matter (and I don't think it's much elevated critically from your choices in the wider scheme of things), but the original nature of the film is difficult to counter.

Watched Slow Motion again recently, having not seen it for years. That's a strange but hypnotic piece of work.