Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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.

fellini was a comic bk guy too, THE WHITE SHEIK is even abt fumetti (photo comic strips)

still think BREATHLESS *feels* different to L'AVENTURRA and LA DOLCE VITA (and most other films of the period), and that's partly to do w/ the improvised feel, the naturalistic lighting and performances, and of course the jump cut. godard of course wasn't the first to use the latter, but i really can't think of a filmmaker who had made it so central to their technique before. Wld love to hear (and see) counter-examples.

It wasn't called the new wave for nothing.

yeah but JLG wasn't even the most famous new waver -- came after truffaut and chabrol (and resnais though of course he wasn't a cahiers guy)

i think 'new wave' was even applied to vadim -- it was just a quasi-sociological term to do with 'liberated' postwar french youth [via bardot, trintignant, et al] that got applied to the cinema c. 1958–9

there were pretty good critics (like raymond borde) who were having none of it

xpost

i think the feel of 'shadows' is not dissimilar to 'breathless'... 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.

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)