Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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

As something of an experiment, I would think Boyhood was relevant.

Maybe. It's a bad metric. Hmmm how relevant to film is this film

How can you say GtL is not in dialogue with film? It quotes so many, Casablanca, By the Bluest of Seas. And one of the languages it interogates is obviously film-language. It throws cinematic grammar out of the window and attempts to reinvent it. So many shots in GtL is doing foundational research in how to construct space with 3D. How to create depth in a new way. So many shots that questions the normal role of the viewer of a film, places us in situations and from vantage points we don't normally look.

Like, I don't think 'relevance to film' is a metric to judge whether a film is good or bad. I'm just saying, if we're considering how relevant the films of Godard is today, then we should consider that his latest is prob the most relevant film of the year.

It's also really funny.

That sounds uneccesarily loaded Frederik - its a pretty unique looking film. I wouldn't say a lot more than that.

I love the title of the film: doesn't Goodbye to Language in a way summarize JLG's relationship with text? JLG never goes in deep, merely scrapes away the odd random line like a twitter bot account. Also sees everything in a very visual way, narrative always gets in the way. That would be the death for almost anybody else trying to make a film.

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.

― Insane Prince of False Binaries (Gukbe), Sunday, 19 April 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Half of one and half of the other.

I've seen Nouvelle Vague for a first and second time. And wow, that is really one of the best. The soundtrack, which was released on ECM, with dialogue and all, is an amazing collage, and the imagery is constantly beautiful. And while he became more and more punkishly experimental later on, with use of handheld and cheap video/digital, here the whole thing is filled with stately tracking shots, which balances nicely with the overwhelming montage on the soundtrack, and the almost violent cutting in general, which constantly leaves a scene on an action beat. Searchsearchseach.

85 today

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/12/03/jean_luc_godard_s_birthday_a_supercut_of_homages_to_the_director_video.html

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-godard-85

Full on BFI season in the new year. Catch some of that good 70s militant etc etc.

i think enjoying or really getting much out of his stuff beyond its obvious aesthetic appeal might be quite dependent on your understanding of film/history - a lot of it feels like you had to be there, maaaan. saying that, i do love pierrot le fou, made in usa, 2 or 3 things, weekend, just for the feeling they give you of being in love with cinema, with filmmaking, and making you want to be a filmmaker yourself - theres a kind of delight in moviemaking, in creativity, that you dont get from many other directors, except maybe scorsese and QT.

breathless actually still feels thoroughly modern, in the sense of it being amoral and empty. cant imagine how that must have felt in 1960. a married woman i think is brilliant to look at but cant tell if this influenced a million perfume ads, or perfume advertisments influenced how godard shot it. from seeing some of the bfi screenings, i actually find i love a lot of his short films more than some of the features - Anticipation ou l’amour en l’an 2000 is so brilliant. and the short doc about building the damn, Opération béton is also great. would love to see more of what the bfi are showing but not sure how much the 70s stuff i can take after being at work all day!

The 70s is what I'm looking forward to, its for people who have been exploited by waged labour all day!

QT is awful. #alwaysOpinions

im seeing Le Gai savoir and Un Film comme les autres. Any others that will make me believe JLG feels the pain of the waged labourer? I'm not sitting through the Stones one again :|

re: QT, well yes, but the early stuff, and even the miserably shlocky later stuff still has that sort of energy that you might get from goodfellas or breathless. that sort of directorial prowess, its just that its employed in the service of boneheaded fun rather than trying to be clever as he was doing with pulp fiction. i think this is the area where QT could really do with picking up JLG's influence again, though he seems to think he has 'outgrown' him now, which is a bit weird, as if anything, QT seems to be regressing....

re: QT, the energy is in the scripts and the energy the cast can bring out of them. That's all I've got, and all I'm given.

Its not that Godard feels the pain - but his eyes and ears are alive to what's going on. "Le Gai Savoir" is my favourite of his these days! Was thinking of catching - but at the weekend screening, as waged labour is dragging me down.

One I want to see that I have not is "Lotte in Italia".

From the 80s I want to see "King Lear" but I won't be around.

It was nice to catch "Le Mepris" (one of his 2x 60s works I hadn't seen). Handled the Bardot situation well, the running around for half hour or so in the flat over the romantic music that Godard turns into pure relationship ennui was A++

Vent d'Est any good?

the score in le mepris almost makes the whole film for me. didnt like it as much as when i saw it as a teenager (though prob as i saw it straight after work), and found the 'print' (as much as you can call dcp a 'new digital print') to be quite average looking (romney was praising it in his observer review, but it didnt look that much better than the dvd i first saw it on). maybe its just that the existing prints are poor quality to begin with, but the colours didnt seem quite as vivid as hoped for.

I liked what he did with colour filters for the Bardot scene. Even in a "average looking" (and idk what condition this was in) state the colour were bright and vivid enough for me. He is so good with primary colours - like he actually cares.

Vent d'Est any good?

― Narayan Superman (Tom D.), Wednesday, 13 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't remember liking it so much but it took "Here and Elsewhere" to re-orient me to post-60s Godard - so I'd love to revisit as it might be the first of his Maoist work I saw.

he def has the best title sequences of anyone in cinema. cant think of anyone better. except gaspar noe in a contemp sense maybe (though he obv took a few ideas from JLG).

i quite like this assessment of breathless from MOMA, particularly the last two paragraphs -

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2013/07/02/jean-luc-godards-breathless

To give Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé (Breathless) its proper place in film history would require a great deal more space than is available here and, indeed, volumes have already been written on the subject. Roy Armes put it succinctly: “All the rules of conventional film-making are scorned.” Over the past half-century, Godard (now 82) has become, if not our greatest living director, then certainly our most written about. Richard Roud, a Godard admirer, wrote ”For many, he is the most important film-maker of his generation; for others, he is, if not the worst, then the most unbearable…he is admired and detested for the very same reasons.”

A rich kid from Geneva, Godard made several shorts in Paris in the 1950s. He became part of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd of contrarian critics, mentored by André Bazin, who advocated what came to be called auteur theory. Like his colleagues, Godard was heavily influenced by Hollywood genre films. (Breathless is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, producers of such classics as Port of Missing Girls, Black Market Babies, The Ghost Creeps, and Bomba the Jungle Boy.) When Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia (Jean Seberg) go to the movies to hide out from the cops, they choose Budd Boetticher’s Westbound. Paris, especially at night, has probably never looked more scintillating than it does in Breathless. Much of the credit for this must go to cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who photographed almost all of Godard’s and Francois Truffaut’s films in the New Wave glory days of the 1960s.

Although Breathless remains one of Godard’s most accessible films, one can never fully escape the thought that Godard represents the auteur theory gone manic. The in-your-face rule-breaking and fragmentation that the film introduced has been so influential over the past half-century that it has become almost impossible to recall how it was experienced at the time of its release. Now, I must confess to impatience with the seemingly endless trivial banter between Seberg and Belmondo in Seberg’s bedroom. Much of the freshness seems to me to be gone (just like Seberg’s employer, The New York Herald Tribune); the outrageousness and impropriety of the sexuality has become outdated. One can hardly blame Godard for the changes in the cinema and in reality, but one can also never recapture the film’s initial appeal.

On a recent Turner Classic Movies broadcast, Drew Barrymore, who grew up from being E.T.’s playmate to become Little Edie in Grey Gardens, described the Seberg and Belmondo characters as “the coolest people you’ve ever seen.” Of course, Belmondo, in Godard’s hands, is a violent psychopathic murderer, thief, and liar, and Seberg is not much better, whimsically selling him out to the police because she decides she doesn’t really love him. I’m currently reading Anthony Trollope’s mammoth The Way We Live Now, his reawakening to British cynicism and corruption, written on his return from a paradisiacal America in the mid-1870s. Early on, the novelist describes one of his main protagonists, Sir Felix Carbury: “But it cannot be said of him that he had ever loved any one to the extent of denying himself a moment’s gratification on that loved one’s behalf. His heart was a stone. But he was beautiful to look at, ready-witted, and intelligent.”

Has such solipsism become the new “cool”? Perhaps Ms. Barrymore, though, is not too far off the mark. Godard, over the course of the past half-century, has made much of his humanism and concern over social issues, often buying into ultra-leftist arguments. However, suppose the selfishly, ruthlessly “cool” characters of Breathless are self-portraits of the auteur? I hope to explore this in future weeks and subsequent films.

I got the Coutard question wrong:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/quiz-how-well-do-you-know-your-godard

5/10 :-(

same.

wtf, I got 8/10 and I don't even know that much about him. I did get the Coutard question right... but only because I saw the film in question last night.

I saw Le Mepris last weekend at the Curzon Mayfair. The colours looked good to me, and were were helped by a particularly grey outsome that made the locations look particularly exotic.

I found the much praised extended-scene with Piccoli and Bardot a bit laborious tbh, after the initial surpirse that Bardot can act. The film seemed a bit slight comapred to what I was expecting.