Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

'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..)

I'm open to getting something wherever I can. I can still dismiss or leave aside the essayists too.

How many supporting actress votes do you think Roxy Miéville will get in critics polls?

Geoffrey O'Brien, also not interested in 'splainin':

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/03/tree-fire-water-godard/

That was a bitch? Such a husky performance!

lol

i gotta be honest, i'm 200% more excited to see this b/c of the dog

really wanted to pet her several times

like most misanthropes, you're sentimental about dogs, huh?

i pet humans too

Geoffrey O'Brien, also not interested in 'splainin':

Yeah, why do any work when you can just admire the 'sensuousness'?

I liked the write-up, and so want to see it - but it did feel like anyone who had three or four 60s Godard and went straight to this would 'get'. The collage and overload of information, showing off the reading (quotation but no actual evidence of that much engagement or understanding w/a text, 'cuz that's for suckers). But in 3-D.

i did not understand your post

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.

stopped reading

didn't know Peter Biskind blogged

dont you have some horrendous pop music to champion?

^^ the child of Seinfeld and Diet Mountain Dew

v little exposure to either

more like SCTV and Royal Crown Cola

otoh I'd use this summation, despite my quibbles, in a film class:

Let’s put it this way, once and for all. It’s not that hard, really. Right at the beginning, Godard saw movies for what they were—a visionary apparatus for transforming and reexamining reality that had been coopted by corporations and turned into a commodified system of signs, a drug, a soma made up of glamour, narrative tension and placating resolutions. That’s what a mainstream movie functionally was: a formulaic emotional machine built toward a reassuring end. So like any good Brechtian, he began, in Breathless (1960), by adopting a rote genre plot-line and then for all orthodox intents and purposes ruining it, disrupting the diegesis and creating a self-conscious “movie-movie” world that was as charmingly realistic as it was obviously fake. Godard knew right away that the capitalistic form of movies—the shape of their narratives, always resolving and satisfying—was a lie. This transcendent lantern-light was being defined, by profit, as being an enveloping cataract of reassuring answers, like a bullshit religion. So, he decided his movies would not be answers, but questions. Experiments.

next week one of our art houses will host this and the new Resnais as a double feech, so I'm excited.