Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

In Coeurs Azema doesn't help matters but the whimsy starts from the script.

Think there was probably more change in Resnais than JLG.

Saw "Adieu..." today. Some fantastic technical stuff here - love the mixing of "palettes" throughout but it's JLG being JLG as he has been for the last 15 or so years? The metaphors a little more heavy handed than usual i thought (the whole forest=woman's bush=WORLD thing) but maybe he thought it was time to "dumb it down" a bit for the populace? Still dense, though and a hell of a lovely ride. No one can frame a shot like this man.

Well, Histoire(s) du Cinema was begun more than 25 years ago.

True. Forgot the time frame for Histoire(s)...

yeah i like his latest phase begins some time in the early 90s, after "nouvelle vague"--that last film seems like the last film he made in a certain "80s" mode, although "woe is me" is kind of a transition work maybe.

Goodbye to Language cinematographer Fabrice Aragno on his collaboration with JLG

He begins alone on videotape—he does not use computers, he edits in HDCAM, which means he can’t go back and insert a shot later. When he wants to insert something, he overlaps the images. When you edit in 35mm, you can anticipate what the final film will look like. In video, you see a TV, so there isn’t the same rapport. So Jean-Luc separates the images he’s editing from the editing console. He arranges the screen perpendicular to the console so that there’s nothing between him and the image. He has to turn away to make the edit. He decides edits very quickly. After he’s seen all the footage, he uses small thumbnails from photocopied or printed images of each scene, and makes books, gluing each image to a page. He also shot a lot of images himself with a small Sony camera filming his dog. There were four years of images. He gave me all of them, and I made a catalogue of still frames of each shot and gave them to him on DVD. Each week, he would get five or 10 minutes edited and show it to me and [assistant director] Jean-Paul Battaggia and ask for our reaction.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/fabrice-aragno-interview

so, i saw this. it's even more narratively opaque than his other recent films. maybe the most opaque feature he's made. and some of the "themes" are broached so elliptically or fleetingly that i think a familiarity with those recent films might be necessary to make the slightest sense of them. but on a moment to moment level this is full of mind-boggling things, an even headier mix of jarring juxtapositions and lyricism than i had been expecting. and the use of 3-D is just a treat, to put it bluntly--he achieves all kinds of effects, some startling, some just kind of fetching. just a simple godardian image of someone seated in front of a big-screen television becomes especially inviting and fascinating because of the odd way the depth cues are presented.

i won't pretend that seeing this movie was all about "pleasure," because it can be pretty difficult and irritating in spots. i def. hope to see it again soon, since even thinking about it a day later i'm piecing some things together that bewildered me while in the theater.

also, the dog! he's really pretty (i had thought it would be a she).

childless couples with dogs might find the 2nd half of this film strangely resonant despite the opacity.

I thought Roxy meant a she but of course i can think of at least a couple American showbiz men who were named Roxy. I keep my eyes averted from canine genitals.

hard to do during this film. he doesn't exactly linger on them but they're right there, in your face so to speak. at one point roxy does take a shit, but there's a lot of human pooping too, mostly conveyed via sound.

so if that's the sort of thing you like etc.

The small narrative moments in the new one have all sort of weird echoes of his 60s films - shootings in the street à la Vivre Sa Vie, the disintegration of a relationship à la Contempt - and it's def his most 'red' film since Pierrot Le Fou.

At some point you hear the phrase "the word for world is forest", which I know as an Ursula K. Le Guin title - an unexpected thing for JLG to be referencing.

My first 3D film. Sometimes the effect was crystal clear and I was impressed; other times, because of my poor eyesight, I thought “this format is not for me.” (There were some superimpositions I couldn’t process.) I contemplated taking the glasses off at about the halfway mark but didn’t.

What did I get out of this? Honestly, not a whole lot. “I’m here to say no”—that resonated. Godard’s no--which basically amounts to the very existence of this film--isn’t the only no out there, but his does seem a little more authoritative than others.

Lots of beautiful images, and part of me wishes Godard would just succumb to that impulse and make a postcard-pretty mood piece (like, I don’t know, what I always assumed Elvira Madigan would be like). The Lightbox guy who spoke briefly before the film said late Godard was only interested in questions, not answers. I’m all for that, but I wasn’t even sure of the questions here. (When I leave a Godard film befuddled, I always think of something Manny Farber wrote: “no other filmmaker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.” It wasn’t a compliment.) I just don’t know if you can get inside someone else’s head via fragmentary aphorisms and quotations--or, speaking only for myself, if it’s worth the effort. The Godard films I’ve finally started to connect with the past decade (My Life to Live, Masculin Féminin, 2 or 3 Things, Band of Outsiders), I experience something much more direct; lines like “nostalgia for the present” speak to wherever I’m at now. Except for maybe the line I quoted above, I didn’t feel any such connection with Goodbye to Language.

The guy who spoke beforehand was plugging an informal film-talk in the lounge after the film. I wanted to go, but--mundane everyday life intervenes--I was kind of trying to avoid somebody and skipped it.

i appreciate the honest reaction :)

supposedly, as in nouvelle vague, every line spoken in this film is some kind of citation. of course, like most, i only picked up on some these, notably ones from godard's earlier films (the line "let's begin by beginning"--commencons par commencons--is also in nouvelle vague).

Well, I appreciate that you didn't respond sarcastically. I assumed someone would.

I was reading the New York review--quoted above, I think--and apparently those superimpositions that lost me had nothing to do with my eyesight:

In the film’s boldest visual experiment, a seemingly normal shot of two people is pulled in two directions, as one person walks away and one of the shots follows them, while the other stays put, and we try to stay focused on both. It feels like our eyes are literally being pulled apart.

Yes--they were extremely disorienting.

Found Numéro deux to be quite an ordeal. In context, "Time for school, kids" was pretty great, and I'd get a glimmer of something now and again, a certain weariness, maybe. It was banned in Ontario in the '70s; I'd never endorse that kind of thing, but I could at least see why.

Jim Hoberman introduced and hung around for a Q&A afterwards ("Not a Q&A," he said beforehand, as he climbed off the stage, "a discussion--I don't understand this any more than you will"). He was so lucid, and so accessible, that I almost wanted to see it again right away. Almost.

I'm not sure if this is behind a paywall, but there's a great discussion of Histoire(s) du Cinema and Michael Witt's recent book at NLR:http://newleftreview.org/II/89/emilie-bickerton-a-bonfire-of-art

Can't get it to work. But Witt's book is recommended.

Hoberman enthused about this book:

https://www.caboosebooks.net/sites/default/files/caboose_History_of_Cinema_20140227_Cover_Front_RGB_Site.jpg?1400071781

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/jean-luc-godard-would-like-a-word-with-the-national-society-of-film-critics-20150107

http://d1oi7t5trwfj5d.cloudfront.net/64/1e/131735f542788869767285b13fbb/jlg.jpeg

For those who have seen lots of films on 3-D. Is this the best looking one of them all? I haven't seen that many to tell.

One of my reacitons to this film was 'I must see more films on 3-D'!

If my eyes can make it that is - i had a very slight ache on the right hand side.

Apparently when asked "why did you make a movie in 3D?" at an interview, Godard responded with something like "To show how useless it is"

this 3D film looks pretty much nothing like any other 3D film that i can think of

found this so repulsive i had to walk out.

Rewatched it yesterday. So good.

he is so irrelevant and dull. i'll save the energy i need to care about convolescents for people who are closed to me.

close

Haven't seen his latest, but JLG has done pretty well at staying relevant and interesting. Rare thing for a filmmaker in his mid 80s.

He was really only good in in 30s though.

At least, those are the films that he'll be remembered for, probably

Some of us will always rep for much of the later work.

(Xpost) Popular equals good then?

Not trolling but...

I love most Godard ( skipping the Dziga Vertov period stuff) and will defend it passionately if necessary and I think what he's doing NOW is possibly his most fluid and forward thinking stuff. The 60s are long gone...

Well, I really mean more than popular.. I'm also speaking to his contributions to the art and maybe even to the films' coherence, although that's a trickier one to prove. I do appreciate some of the later work also; in fact I'm one of those who runs out to see almost everything he puts out. He has maintained his different-ness all these years, I'll give him that. Maybe it's wrong to be so sweeping, but I am skeptically curious about how this recent work will resonate 5-10 years from now

I think his work from 10-20 years ago resonate plenty.

When filmmakers today claim to be influenced by Godard it always seems to be '60s Godard they mean. Are there people in the field who are starting from '80s or '90s Godard?

lol, i did not want to watch this last night. maybe i never liked godard much. i thought i liked pierrot le fou 10 years ago. i found the political/theoretical thinking in the half of this i saw very dated and sexist in a way that reminded me of a john updike novel or something. the main reason i walked out though was that the 3d was giving me a headache. also i thought it was remarkably ugly. also i may have found it slightly insufferable to be in the midst of 300 fairly well-off self-congratulating chardonnay liberals humming hawing and chuckling profoundly at every half-baked self-serving oedipal tumidity presented by the master.

Man I liked this film a lot but if anyone wants to call an old French man irrelevant I'm not going to stand in the way because they are almost certainly correct

What filmmaker is that relevant, and in what sense? Godard is clearly coming up with something new. Some relevance..

mattresslessness - but you were in the midst of the 300 insufferables (that's a lot btw, were you hallucinating this?) Just because you walked a bit earlier doesn't excuse you - according to your post you are part of the problem.

i wish matt p was slightly insufferable

an old SWISS man

"irrelevant" in THIS fucking world? if so what a blessing

ooooh MICHAEL MANN the Jesus of Relevancy

It is too soon to say if Godard's Maoist period will stand the test of time

Maoism is due for a revival surely? All ironically done of course..

I have actually seen directors talk about taking inspiration from the maoist films. The Alumbramento collective from Brazil did a film called Road to Ythaca which played a lot with Wind from the East. I think the 90-00 stuff is more inspiring to visual artists and people like that. But I do think it's kinda influential, and I'd be really surprised if there aren't filmmakers looking at Goodbye to Language and thinking about what tricks to copy.

Maoism is due for a revival surely? All ironically done of course..

I've only seen La Chinoise once, some years ago, and this was before I knew how sincere Godard was as a Maoist, but I assumed it was ironic when I saw it.

Come to think of it, Goodbye to Language is pretty undisputably the most relevant film of 2014, right? I mean, of relevance to film. What else is even in competition?

Sorry for picking up matts use of "relevant" will reiterate that I really liked gtl & agree that it is doing something different (or "new", if you prefer) & wouldn't really reach for "relevance" myself one way or the other

Come on tho, most relevant to film? How isn't that completely nonsensical?

I mean if anything it's less relevant to film than most, it isn't really in dialogue with the other films out there except as a reproof, which isn't really its primary aim