xp you're right s1ocki, but on that point it might also be worth figuring out in which language the interview was done, how it was translated etc etc. I'm not trying to bail JLG out at any cost but the subtleties of definite/indefinite articles sometimes get lost in translation.
― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:07 (thirteen years ago) link
when i have a mo im gonna scare up the french interview and report back
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:09 (thirteen years ago) link
paying attention to interviews is a bad habit of music fans/writers. If it's not in the work, it doesn't matter.
I don't like Godard's answer on the etymology of "anti-Semitism" either, but at this point I get the feeling his only goal in interviews is to fuck w/ the questioner.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:14 (thirteen years ago) link
don't you post links to interviews all the time?
i mean i kind of agree but i'm not using his comments to judge "film socialisme"
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:16 (thirteen years ago) link
it is simply a case of somebody saying some hateful shit and me having an emotional reaction to it, sorry i'm not some detached aesthete robot
Again, I've not seen the film, so it could be violently anti-semitic and I'd have no idea. Not trolling btw, I asked for a specific interpretation of the diversity/commerce line last night. I get the impression I'm totally misunderstanding what he meant by 'diversity'.
― Gukbe, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:18 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/ich_werde_nicht_gern_mit_picasso_verglichen__er_malte_zu_viele_teller_1.8293071.html
^ original interview. unfortunately in german not french.
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:20 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah, sure. I read stuff that doesn't matter a lot. (ie, in the end, it doesn't matter to judging the art if it's extrinsic)
I detest Mel Gibson and am sort of intrigued to see this Jodie Foster film he stars in.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:40 (thirteen years ago) link
that movie looks so bad, like the most generic "lars and the real girl" indie dramedy
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:42 (thirteen years ago) link
What's your stake in this, Morbs? Godard has pretty much always been indefensible as a human being.
― C0L1N B..., Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:42 (thirteen years ago) link
Morbs is saying that most artists are indefensible as a human being.
― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:43 (thirteen years ago) link
*human beings
I don't really see how that cliche is germane here since no one is really using this against his work.
― C0L1N B..., Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:46 (thirteen years ago) link
great. more jaded received wisdom.
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:46 (thirteen years ago) link
xp
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:47 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't have a stake here. It's obvious to me Godard is a muddled thinker at best and at worst a, yes, anti-Semite.
― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:50 (thirteen years ago) link
*an
not sure if "an" is necessary there, that is an interesting conundrum
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:51 (thirteen years ago) link
But how is he as a filmmaker?
― Miss Garrote (Eric H.), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:52 (thirteen years ago) link
the last Godard I liked a little was Notre Musique.
― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:53 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/ich_werde_nicht_gern_mit_picasso_verglichen__er_malte_zu_viele_teller_1.8293071.html^ original interview. unfortunately in german not french.― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:20 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:20 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark
this reads pretty much the same in german as it does in english, so I don't think the perceived anti-semitism is a translation to english issue.
I'm guessing the original interview was done in french (unless JLG speaks fluent german, I have no idea really), so maybe there was some mistranslation there.
― peter in montreal, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 17:55 (thirteen years ago) link
There's a well-known quote from Godard where he says that, as much as he despised John Wayne politically, the moment near the end of The Searchers where Wayne lifts up Natalie Wood and says "Let's go home, Debbie" made him love Wayne. Seems like you're having more or less the same discussion on Godard himself.
― clemenza, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:22 (thirteen years ago) link
The other day someone said to me, upon realizing that I was Jewish, "oh you've got nothing to worry about then, you'll do fine HERE" HERE being Hollywood I suppose. It was not Godard, just some woman I was talking to at the AFI festival.
― ralph NAGLer (admrl), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:29 (thirteen years ago) link
And I'm about to graduate - how do I get my resume to be more "Jewish"?
― ralph NAGLer (admrl), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:30 (thirteen years ago) link
They are, bacause they've made a thread about his films about this topic, and I imagine it will be the dominant topic on this thread until he dies. See also Polanski's film thread since the week he was seized.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:31 (thirteen years ago) link
what a lowering of the discourse it is to discuss an interview a filmmaker gave to a newspaper
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:33 (thirteen years ago) link
Perhaps we should have a thread for "bad celebrity personalities," and "Roger Ailes slams the White House" links could go there too to save a lot of fucking time
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:36 (thirteen years ago) link
i mean considering the amount of bullshit you spew on threads about movies you haven't even seen, the charge of dishonouring the thread topic or whatever it is you think we did here is really fucking rich dude xp
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:36 (thirteen years ago) link
yes, what a lowering of the discourse it is to discuss two sentences in an interview nonstop for 3 days
the amount of bullshit you spew on threads about movies you haven't even seen
^ILX's version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:38 (thirteen years ago) link
actually, we were discussing several paragraphs, for about half an hour, before you barged in and insulted me using my real name for no fucking reason at all
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:40 (thirteen years ago) link
what you "were" doing is past, what you "are" doing is probably about 500 more posts on this single issue.
I'm sorry, I thought I sufficiently googleproofed your name. And don't forget to friend me.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:46 (thirteen years ago) link
haha
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:47 (thirteen years ago) link
i believe a good reason we're still talking about it is because you're also, still talking about it
okay so this is not an allegation I make often, or one that I particularly like to make, but: you have got to be pretty damn sensitive — or deliberately uncharitable in your interpretation (i.e. the person upthread going 'wah wah godard said jews can't be doctors, doesn't he know there were tons of jewish doctors in vienna' just no, shut the fuck up), or just bored and looking for a high-profile witch-hunt — to get butthurt about this.
we are not talking about a gibson- or richards-esque freakout revealing a white-hot core of hatred at the heart of a seemingly normal human being.we are talking about a notoriously anti-hollywood dude, saying some shit in an interview about the jews who founded hollywood which, while maybe not a 100% accurate reflection of the historical truth, is also hardly an elders-of-zion-level crazy paranoid distortion of said truth.
I'm maybe even willing to defend his "ah but what does 'anti-semite' even mean???" dodge, because I think at a certain point one has a right to question what, exactly, his self-appointed prosecutors have put him on trial for, in whose name, and what they're trying to prove by it.
but I mean tbperfectlyh, I don't know what the hell kind of non-'anti-semitic' answer you can give to a question like "are the jews for diversity?" — "oh yeah, those dudes love diversity! it's cuz their rootless cosmopolitanism has deprived them of any authentic sense of cultural belonging, so now they find themselves drawn, like moths to a flame, by whatever's most appealing in all the other real cultures!" so I guess maybe I blame the interviewer.
and the stuff about blacks seems like even more of a non-issue... or is anyone here going to seriously dispute either the existence or the wrongheadedness of the "hey, look, now y'all have the same opportunities to spend money on shit that we do! everything's groovy!" ideology?
― undervalued aerosmith memorabilia I have appraised (bernard snowy), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:50 (thirteen years ago) link
guess gukbe's on his lunch break
― buzza, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:52 (thirteen years ago) link
you know, i am the LAST person to cry "anti-semitism!" on a hair-trigger, i really resent it when other jewish people do, and i was really kind of upset by this shit, so i guess you can go ahead and call me sensitive or uncharitable if you like, but that's how i felt
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:52 (thirteen years ago) link
look s1ocki, aside from the high-heat of our little flareups I judge you as a decent guy (testimony from rrobyn included). But there are plenty of instances of old artists saying *even more* offensive things in interviews.
And I'm not denying your right to be upset.
anyway, a couple years old:
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/hes-not-there-20080604
Toward the end of his book, Brody levels a direct charge of anti-Semitism against Godard. His evidence lies in a couple of comments made in moments of echt-assholery, a lifelong fondness for certain rightwing French authors, a questionable reading of certain sequences in his later films (such as the "invention of stereo" monologue from JLG/JLG), and the testimony of vacuous pop philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. Since the '70s, Godard has explicitly identified himself as "anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic." That's a distinction that doesn't really exist in America's mainstream political discourse, and it doesn't carry much weight for Brody either, which isn't too surprising given his apparent disinterest in radical politics and philosophy. It's true that in recent work Godard has been waging a polemic war against the word, and that he mentions Judaism in this context as a "culture of the Book" (complicating this considerably are his occasional assertions, as in his video short Meetin' WA, that he regards his own frequent use of text as imagistic rather than literary, also that one of the primary sources for his notion of image is Walter Benjamin). He also has a beef against the category of a chosen people or chosen nation—whether the term is used by Jews, Germans, or "the Americans of the North." However, it is also true that he views the Holocaust as the defining event, the central horror, of the corpse-ridden 20th century. The Histoire(s) mark it also as the moment of cinema's fall from grace, obsessively worrying at the question of how the medium could have failed to perceive it, whether a "true image" could have prevented the atrocity.
Godard's political and philosophic statements can be elusive, arrogant, profound, or silly, but they too are an attempt to find ways of speaking and showing outside the rigidities of dominant thought. They can and should be argued with, but labeling them simply anti-Semitic is hardly conducive to dialogue. It is what they call a conversation stopper.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:55 (thirteen years ago) link
i know lots of artists say bad and stupid shit in interviews, and i think they should be called out for too!
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:57 (thirteen years ago) link
xxpost: okay that's fair, sry to question motives, just feels like this is really not a big deal compared to, I dunno, like a zillion other things even just within the world of 'potentially offensive things famous people say'. (but also nb I have not seen Film Socialisme, which seems to be the 'real' cause for this whole discussion, and sounds like it's maybe much more anti-semitic than any of the stuff quoted here?)
― undervalued aerosmith memorabilia I have appraised (bernard snowy), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:57 (thirteen years ago) link
look as a fairly left-wing, anti-zionist jew myself i have to field so much persecution complex from my friends and relatives that when i genuinely get upset about something anti-semitic, having it batted away as such is really frustrating
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 18:59 (thirteen years ago) link
ok, I don't mean to bat it away. I'm sorry if I did.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:00 (thirteen years ago) link
Having no real, emotional tether to a cultural background I obviously can't begin to understand the where the line of offensive, anti-semitism is.
The way he's phrasing these things are pretty stupid and baiting, but again, I don't see any problem with asserting that early Hollywood Jewish moguls were interested in commerce (as opposed to art). fwiw I think the fact that they were Jewish has no real relation to any of the output other than the Hays code and the deliberate attempts to 'Christianize' their output to ward off the government and anti-semites who think they're indoctrinating the nation. I don't think the fact that they were Jewish informs their desire to make money. On the flip side, I don't think the fact that they were Jewish meant they were using their films to create an America they could fit into. I don't think that makes me anti-semitic though.
― Gukbe, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:26 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.tamemymind.com/blog/images2007/smiley-bangheadonwall.gif
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:30 (thirteen years ago) link
fine, Godard is a raging anti-semite.
― Gukbe, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:32 (thirteen years ago) link
i'll take that over the same exact post you've been making and re-making for 24 hours
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:33 (thirteen years ago) link
I probably just missed where you explained why it's so offensive (other than HE'S TALKING ABOUT ALL JEWS)
― Gukbe, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:34 (thirteen years ago) link
THAT'S WHERE IT'S OFFENSIVE
― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:35 (thirteen years ago) link
but I'm saying he isn't talking about all Jews and you're just saying he is so I guess that's an impasse
― Gukbe, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:36 (thirteen years ago) link
unless I'm missing something with the word 'diversity'
― Gukbe, Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:37 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah, despite poorly-chosen words on both his and the interviewer's part it seems p.clear they're talking about a particular subset of the group "all jews"
maybe the problem is that he's talking about them "as" jews tho, rather than "as" immigrants or businessmen or early hollywood ppl or w/e? I dunno just thinkin' out loud here, still not totally sure where slocki's comin' from
― undervalued aerosmith memorabilia I have appraised (bernard snowy), Wednesday, 17 November 2010 19:38 (thirteen years ago) link