Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

His 1978 lectures on the history of film are to be released in book form: https://www.caboosebooks.net/true-history-of-the-cinema

i need to get that. so psyched for adieu au langage

I know he's never been the most consistent of political thinkers but that oh-so-provocative Le Pen statement was probably the biggest eyeroll moment in his later years (that have been full of them).

i don't know if the problem is inconsistency as much as puerility

he's never been much of a political thinker. pretty good filmmaker, though :)

(FWIW there were people on ILX who expressed hope for a McCain and/or Romney victory for similar reasons

they are also puerile)

I've read Michael Witt's book Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian, mainly on Histoire(s) du Cinema, but drawing in the whole story of Godard's carreer, his views on history, metaphors being used in the work, etc. It was really good. Now I'm rewatching bits and pieces of all those collages where I can find them.

Goodbye to Language is so good!

the best film

seein it in a few weeks --one screening only here. hopefully it will come around again.

AO Scott in a mildly scolding vein:

Mr. Godard has a habit of blending gravity with whimsy. His latest film, a 70-minute 3-D visual essay called “Goodbye to Language” (“Adieu au Langage”), exhibits the formal and philosophical mischief that has been his late-career calling card. It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures — of flowers, boats, streets, naked bodies and Mr. Godard’s own dog, a mixed-breed scene-stealer identified in the credits as Roxy Miéville....

Much of the film is spent with a couple in a state of casual undress and post-coital ennui... it is worth noting that the man and the woman have, within the film, distinct functions and positions. Not only does she remain standing while he conducts his business, but her own business is also, in no small part, to be displayed as an object for contemplation and erotic reverie. He, too, is naked, but the camera is far more interested in looking at her.

An old cinematic god can hardly be expected to learn new tricks, and women’s bodies have often served Mr. Godard — and not only him, goodness knows — as convenient metaphors for the mysteries of nature and the forces that lie on the far side of language. That is, no doubt, a topic for further discussion. In any case this movie, its title notwithstanding, is unlikely to be the filmmaker’s last word.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/movies/goodbye-to-language-the-latest-from-jean-luc-godard.html

At least I'm glad Godard is revealing the atrocious ethics of the french left when it comes to women rights and whatnot.

Bordwell analyzes (prob best after seeing):

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/directors-godard/

Godard just ain't riding my wavelength. Five hundred stars.

godard isn't french and it's questionable if he can really be considered of the left at this juncture

but yeah i'm not gonna defend the man. there are some troubling things going on in his head, for sure. i think one viewing of sauve qui peut would make that pretty evident.

Wait, who's attacking?

this graf in AO Scott;s review is pretty good

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” she concluded, and “Goodbye to Language” rewards just such an approach. If you try, especially on a first viewing, to crack its code or plumb its depths, you are likely to pass a frustrated hour and 10 minutes. But if you surrender, you might have a good time. The earth might even move.

'Godard isn't French' but he is part of the French culture really.

Need to see this film. They only gave it a couple of screenings over here so fuck knows when that'll happen.

there are some troubling things going on in many artists' heads, who gives a fuck?

take it to Branwell with an N

when a guy doesn't translate sauve qui peut, you can tell he's an academia nut.

(btw the first Godard film i saw in a theater)

it's sort of untranslatable though

the two english titles -- "slow motion" and "every man for himself" -- aren't actually translations of the french title (though the latter comes closer)

the closest might be "save yourself (life)"

the exact meaning is 'every man for himself'

Godard is french as it gets, part of the Monod family and relations to Chirac for crying out loud.

(not sure about the Chirac relation but whatever, the Monod family one should sell it)

Notre Musique was my first in the theater, and the thing I remember most clearly was telling some woman who kept rustling what sounded like the world's loudest cellophane that she was "ruining the movie for everyone here." She revealed that she was holding an ice pack on her freshly sprained ankle and I turned on my heels and high-tailed it to the last row in back. I still think she ruined it.

"End of cinema" indeed!

I'm not sure Godard's sexism ("and whatnot") 'reveals' anything other than that 84 year-old men are sometimes not the most enlightened. But as always with Godard, it's complicated: embedded in Film Socialisme was quite a clear-eyed observation of economic and, yes, gendered inequality, and the hellishness of poorly paid service industry jobs.

The first new Godard I saw at the cinema would've been Prenom Carmen. I definitely caught King Lear on its one week London run.

in college they showed us Masc/Fem and i imagine Breathless

Liked this one, not as rich as Socialisme on first viewing. Good dog.

I liked how brief it was.

Also glad it wasn't in Smell-o-vision.

it's the litttle things

“I think I might be one more viewing away from finally being able to say what the hell it’s about,” writes Bilge Ebiri.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/movie-review-goodbye-to-language.html

That's another thing I liked about it.

A second set of notes from Bordwell:

As far as I can tell, Godard hasn’t used the converging-lens method to create 3D during shooting. Instead of “toeing-in” his cameras, he set them so that the lenses are strictly parallel. He and his DP Fabrice Aragno apparently relied on software to generate the startling 3D we see onscreen....

To get a positive sense of what he’s doing, we need to understand what the conventional rules are intended to achieve. Consider just two purposes.

1. 3D, the rules assume, ought to serve the same function as framing, lighting, sound, and other techniques do: to guide us to salient story points. A shot should be easy to read. When 3D isn’t just serving to awe us with special effects, it has the workaday purpose of advancing our understanding of the story. So, for instance, 3D should use selective focus to make sure that only one figure stands out, while everything else blurs gracefully.

But 3D allows Godard to present the space of a shot as discomfitingly as he presents his scenes (elliptical, they are) and his narrative (zigzag and laconic, it is). As in traditional deep-focus cinematography, we’re invited to notice more than the main subject of a shot, but here those piled-up planes have an extra presence, and our eye is invited to explore them.

2. According to the rules, 3D ought to be relatively realistic. Traditional cinema presents itself as a window onto the story world, and 3D practitioners have spoken of the frame as the “stereo window.” People and objects should recede gently away from that surface, into the depth behind the screen. But Adieu au langage gives us a beautiful slatted chair, neither fully in our lap nor fully integrated into the fictional space. It juts out and dominates the composition, partly blocking the main action–a husband bent on violence hustling out of his car.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/11/02/say-hello-to-goodby-to-language/

Michael Atkinson on all the harrumphing headscratching / dismissals:

"You’d think they hadn’t ever heard of Godard. You’d think they’d never heard of modernism, or postmodernism, or understood even remotely what those things were. Never saw a New Wave film, or anything older, really, than Star Wars. Never contemplated the idea that maybe movies don’t have to be holistic narrative immersions, but sometimes, if only occasionally, they can be something else. Never dreamt that they, as moviegoers and film reviewers, should ever want anything more than to be perfectly passive, drugged into a dreamy, manipulated stupor, during a cinematic experience....

The smarter voices have tried to nod in the master's direction, but end up with vague or shrugging declarations, praising the film while admitting that they don't actually get it.... A.O. Scott, no slouch generally, windily maintains that Godard 'seems to divide the world into skeptics and worshipers, with not much middle ground,' hardly bothering to make a case as to what a middle ground would look like, or why the 'skeptics' (as if Godard is a conspiracy theorist) are simply moviegoers that do not or will not consider anything out of the structural mainstream. Godard's one of those artists, Scott says, who 'tend to confound easy distinctions between genius and trickery, and to marshal armies of exegetes in what may be the futile enterprise of figuring out what they mean. If you try, especially on a first viewing, to crack its code or plumb its depths, you are likely to pass a frustrated hour and 10 minutes.' If Scott thinks Godard's films may in fact be meaningless, shouldn't he say that, and shouldn't he also consider that code-cracked 'meaning' is exactly the traditional literature-class quantity that Godard has been working against for over half a century?"

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/godards-goodbye

i love late godard but that atkinson blog is so pompous and humorless, he sounds just about as dumb as some of the critics he calls out for being ignoramuses.

it's the kind of snobbery that i imagine people who don't "get" late godard imagine that all of those who *do* like it are guilty of.

esp. the dumb "reading" of AO Scott whereby Scott's suggestion that you set aside trying to figure out what the film "means" is tantamount to him alleging that the film is meaningless (or that he just doesn't have the chops to figure out it). bordwell basically recommends something similar, and no one would accuse him of not being up to the challenge.

I'm not sure how long Scott would have us "set aside" meaning though. Til 30 minutes after it's over?

There were four people in front of me at Lincoln Center, probably early 30s, 2m & 2f, and they were kind of giggling "Whoa huh?" when it's over. "Have you seen any Godard before?" one of the guys asked, and one of the women said yes, "but not like this." (So I'd guess maybe Breathless and Contempt.) Now if they don't immerse themselves in some essays or other late Godards, how are they gonna try to find meaning in it later on?

why does the NY Post even have their idiot review the film at all?

not sure if "meaning" is the beginning and ending of one's engagement w/ a film like this, although it's certainly an important part

i think there's something to be said for kind of surrendering to the audiovisual flow of a godard film, that doesn't mean you can't engage with its Ideas or story, but if you work too strenuously to figure out those things during the projection you'll probably be frustrated. for me things like First name Carmen, Hail Mary, even Notre musique are primarily sensuous experiences.

and those ones have /relatively/ straightforward narratives compared to the more recent stuff

not sure if "meaning" is the beginning and ending of one's engagement w/ a film like this, although it's certainly an important part

RIght. I liked this one a lot more than other recent Godard because "experience" is in the driver's seat.

Which I don't remember being the case with Notre Musique but I would watch it again to find out.

I don't hold to a strict, exclusive demarcation between meaning and experience -- I assume that's what your quotes are for too, so i get it.

(unless it's all "experience" which doesn't transport me)

There were four people in front of me at Lincoln Center, probably early 30s, 2m & 2f, and they were kind of giggling "Whoa huh?" when it's over. "Have you seen any Godard before?" one of the guys asked, and one of the women said yes, "but not like this." (So I'd guess maybe Breathless and Contempt.) Now if they don't immerse themselves in some essays or other late Godards, how are they gonna try to find meaning in it later on?

Well it could be most of the 60s work, which isn't like what JLG is doing now.

Even so why shouldn't the "meaning" be contained in the film itself? I am suspicious of having to read essays to get something (and it appears some of the essayists are struggling anyway..)