Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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.

got 10/10, but i have to admit that i guessed on #1 and #8 and got lucky

5/10, but guessed on most of them.

7/10--missed 1/6/8. Guessed on 5/6/8/9. I like my title for #6 better than his.

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.

OTM. The bit with Jack Palance and the film cans was great. Fritz Lang was even better than I thought he'd be.

extended scene was basically an argument he had with Karina recently, just played out with Bardot in a Karina wig.

7/10. :(

Lang is wonderful in "Le Mepris". He's actually touching,

Having finished 1000+ pages of the Cornelius Cardew biography AND just sat through 100 minutes of "Le Vent d'Est", I've just about had it up to here with Marxism-Leninism.

I love Godard. Possibly my favorite living filmmaker. Yet I stll cannot get through most of his Dziga Vertove era stuff. Life's too short.

I thought Vladimir and Rosa was a lot of fun - the tennis game is classic Godard drawing the energy from slapstick. It did lack some things that make cinema cinema but Godard has always been dispensing away with that from the v beginning.

I've been enjoying - whenever I can - the Godard season at the Southbank. Towards the end of the 60s, in Weekend, he ends by saying "End of Cinema" and I think its possibly one of the key moments for JLG - looking back at the work since then, its as if he has put his foot down. I had watched Numero Deux and Ici at Aullieurs before but seeing a couple more from the Vertov period and more of his later video work from the 70s onwards there is a deepening sense that he wanted to take what he learned by making cinema into television and video, then feed that back as cinema features. Its clear he leant a lot from the Left Bank cinema work of Resnais, Varda and Marker. I've been far keener to see that than revist rubbish like Eloge d'Amour or to check that film he made with Gerard Depardieu. So while he didn't totally put his foot down - in my head it does explain why a lot of his films from 1980 onwards (when he went back to cinema) were ho-hum and nowhere near as exciting as the video, TV and essay work. Of course there are exceptions: Goodbye to Language and I'll want to see King Lear but they have other dimensions to that (Godard using new tech like 3D, Cannon film$ as his mostly sole engagement with the American cinema he was so in love with and maddened by). The essays contain reminders of the look and feel of those celebrated 60s films. Last Saturday I saw JLG/JLG: A Self-Portrait, which is actually different enough from a biography (even more different from anything that straightforward, as JLG never plays it straight). One scene is of Godard walking around this gorgeous bit of lakeside then jotting down some aphorism (which I can't recall right now) in his notebook and thinking that this is pretty much the working method in a lot of his films - he just makes and improvises on the spot from a vast reservoir of skimmed knowledge, which gives his films a disjointed feel with lots of exciting and boring parts colliding and splintering away.

(Its often shot very well, he really has the visual language so right when but only when he wants to: Film Like any Other being a case in point - its so overdone as guerilla filmmaking (although at least there is a reason not to show the faces of the participants in that they are militants and not simply a game of hide-and-seek with the viewer!))

In JLG/JLG he makes the most of his apartment - at first sorta empty then a tracking shot of his bookcase. Picks something, quotes another to a politician's speech on television. Many people seem to think there are ideas in his films without saying what they are, and maybe that's because there aren't many apart from visual ones that can't be extracted to language (another thing for Godard), he is great at collage and if anything a big subject of his seems to be of a failure of ideas. Culture and books (and certainly films) don't solve anything. They may get at things though. In the end, you don't get closer to Godard the personality apart from what makes his mind and art run - again its self-portrait, not biography. I also saw Comment Ca va (from the late 70s) and it certainly was on the way back to a more full on narrative - but was full of essayisms and comments on a photograph taken at protests in Portugal (the Salazar deal) which starred his partner. Her face wasn't shown at all throughout - which again is a reminder of the times when he would film Karina from the back (but never for long as Godard's camera almost always looked at Karina with love). But here these tendancies are exaggerated.

I am watching one of the last screenings - his Histoire(s) Du Cinema - tomorrow.

Great post! I really should take a dive into the seventies work. If you haven't seen HdC before, you're in for a treat.

I will say though, as I've said before, that Nouvelle Vague is great even though it's cinema-cinema. But it might be where his tv/video stuff combines with film the most. Also, the soundtrack is experimental and groundbreaking.

Comment Ca Va was really great btw - this with Numero Deux and Ici et Aullieurs makes for very substantial work, like he merged his 60s cinema with the politics of Vertov - compare the way he comments on the photograph in Letter to Jane vs the photo in Comment Ca Va and its like Night and Day. Perhaps because the latter is er more elliptical, but from a first watch there is far more going on.

Also - love to get a comp of his short films sometime. Some of these have been screened and were really good. xp

Yeah I've not seen HdC before. Can't wait.

Most of his sdtracks are amazing, his ear is second to none. Godard is an architect of soundscapes.

Yeah, really. And HdC and Nouvelle Vague are his most major works in this field. They were the first ones to be released on cd, dialogue and all, by ECM. You don't want to miss anything of HdC, but if you get tired, close your eyes for a second and just enjoy the sound. I've read a story that Wim Winders asked him how he did it and was shocked by the answer. It's mixed on 24 tracks.

'At the editing table, I first look at the image without any song. Then I let the sound run without any images. It's only after that that I put the two together, the way it was shot. Sometimes I have a feeling that something isn't right in a scene - but perhaps it would work with different sound. Then, for instance, I'll replace the dialogue with the sound of a dog barking. Or I'll try it with a sonata. I'll fiddle around with it until I'm satisfied.

I watched HdC on my computer once and took about a 100 screen caps. So many great image/text/voiceover juxtapositions. I totally did not pay as much attention to the soundtrack as I should have apparently. Looking forward to a rewatch.

Coming back from this and jotting down a few bits:

- I'd say the visual connections were undermined by his views on cinema, but there wasn't a lot of JLG in nakedly hectoring mode, and as a fan of modern classical the obsession w/death of an artform is always a live issue - then again "art is created from the fire" and that business (and Godard sorta tries to justify the rhetoric at one point - so you are reminded this is an old, not young, man making a film). Renewal is always around the corner.

- Plenty of risks taken: as soon as his appreciation of post-war Italian cinema was done there was that song played - really something you'd hear in an Italian restaurant - and it seemed to go on forever. Ballsy, edge of your seat stuff (also Rome, Open City was THE film wasn't it? Seemed to act as a moral centre in Godard's arguments)

- I came to a realisation that painting/visual art often got lost in the question of what film is? Photography and just making it new with the camera is the thing with cinema. Godard forces you to look again. Painting stacked upon painting.

Overall it was so good to see a video art piece taken and developed into this total cinema. It still needs it.

I'd say most of his best films were made after 1967. But he wasn't able to take many with him, so that's a whole area to explore.

Yeah, the italian song is amazing, prob the best sequence, def the one that stands out clearest in my mind. It's this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Q0O2CIzXs

Rome, Open City might be the moral center, but what I've begun thinking is that Stromboli/Journey to Italy really is the artistic center. The way Rossellini films Bergman, on the volcano, at pompeii, is the start of a completely new filmic psychology.

er dunno a few ppl were doing things in a similar ballpark. Also there is plenty of artistry in Rome, Open City too but because of what it represents for that generation its used by Godard in a specific way.

tx for the song, will listen later.