Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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.

Oh, Rome Open City is artistically great, no doubt, and neorealism in HdC really is a moral rebirth of film, where Rome Open City is central. But I still think Stromboli and Journey in Italy are the more important films, artistically, and no, I don't think anyone else achieved what Bergman and Rossellini did at the time. But that's more mine opinion than it is Godards.

Sorry, derail probably. I just really love that volcano scene.

So do I but that isn't to say its the beginning of a "new filmic psychology" as such. Dreyer was getting up to a lot of similar things too around the same time.

One other thing about this film and looking at the result of the German elections is that whole thing around "Europe is fucked" seems just as - if not more - true now than ever. A lot of issues in his films are just as alive and vital.

The BFI could've curated Godard, made a version of him, instead of screening everything. But that probably wouldn't have been my version. So glad I saw JLG/JLG before Historie(s).. too, they really complement each other.

Anna Karina is in NY; I know Virginia Plain is excited

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-anna-karina-in-new-york

Just realised the AFI Silver Spring is playing Made in USA but at 9:15 tonight and I have work in the morning.

From the film writer Adrian Martin's Facebook:

Surely the one good, positive thing about the bizarre news that Michel Hazanavicius (of all people) will make an 'affectionate satire' based on Anne Wiazemsky's 2015 memoir of living through the heady days of 1967 and 1968 alongside her husband Jean-Luc Godard (to be incarnated by Louis Garrel! How will his Dad allow that??) is this: it'll prevent JLG from going into retirement, as he will need to make at least 2 or 3 more things in fulminating response to it !!!!!

haha Louis as JLG is glamming up to an absurd degree

otm x1000

JLG was kind of handsome in his day, but not in the sultry manner of Louis Garrel

A nice coincidence: shared today on the MUBI Facebook page, Anne Wiazemsky, JLG, Pier Paolo Pasolini

https://scontent.fman2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13178683_10154136780687387_1300715048745089153_n.jpg?oh=40b7837f800000100b7add388ca36707&oe=57B071F2

https://goo.gl/maps/Br8tefDbPG32

I prefer Rue Vielle du Temple.

Thought revive would be about nice Mubi article about AK

RIP Anne Wiazemsky

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5006-the-daily-anne-wiazemsky-1947-2017

Always thought it was kinda funny that Godard's three most significant others all had first names that were variations on "Ann".

A baker's dozen, n'est-ce pas?

Seven Godard's on Mubi US right now. Well six, now that Pierrot Le Fou, which I finally watched properly, has left. And I guess sixth, Contempt, is coming at the end of the month and then In Praise of Love, I think, in January. Jerry Lewis particularly obvioue is Pierrot. Had not known that his original idea before Alphaville was apparently to film Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, but he realized he would never have the budget he needed for a generation spaceship story.

Should do the capitalization in the French style, Pierrot le fou.

Ah, another antecedent of Alphaville was a plan to film I Am Legend.

I saw 1 PM last weekend, famously unfinished by JLG, but he's in quite a lot of it. I'd say it's both search and destroy. Richard Brody:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/one-p-m-all-day

https://vimeo.com/86071508

full version (low-quality) on Ubuweb

http://www.ubu.com/film/godard_pennebaker.html

ICYMI, New Yorkers, gallery exhibit closes Sunday

http://miguelabreugallery.com/exhibitions/memories-of-utopia/

http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/%E2%80%9Cmemories-of-utopia-jean-luc-godard%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98collages-de-france%E2%80%99-models%E2%80%9D/

just saw Goodbye to Language for the second time. I think it's interesting, but it's definitely made for a small audience

“Aragno said that he and Godard did not want to use 3D as a typical special effect or gimmick. Instead, they wished to use it "to express new things."“

I wish I had seen it in 3D

The Image Book... Sadlol. Nobody told me there would be large swathes without sound, and I'm still not entirely sure it wasn't a mistake. Much slower than usual, most of it the same thing he's done in decades, but a lot of the stuff about the arab world was kinda touching.

Had my first contact with JLG as a film critic - the booklet for the MoC edition of <i>Man Of The West</i> has an essay he wrote back in the day - and jeez. There's one interesting description of the camera work at a pivotal scene but everything else is just grasping hyperbole, comparisons with High Art made with the sole intention of having the reader take this western seriously and a bunch of filler...dunno if it's a good example of his criticism, but based on this I'm glad he turned to directing, there's examples of film criticism in his movies that work better than this.

Cool, we're getting The Image Book in February.

Still digesting it myself. I felt it a step back in many ways from "Adieu À Language", which I think is a late career masterpiece, while still being a very impressive elaboration on his "Histoire(s) du Cinéma" approach to essay film/Godardian rant. The Arab Cinema section was compelling while feeling somewhat naive, if that makes sense.

Jah Bless the Old Maître for still doing his thing, though.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/01/26/godards-conflagration-of-images/

watched Alphaville last night, really liked it a lot

a 2018 interview

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/jean-luc-godard-2018-words-like-ants

Great interview. Thanks for the link.

I noticed while reading that JLG's old way of rarely answering questions directly, usually by veering off into word play or tangential responses, seems to be a thing of the past. His answers here are pretty clear and straightforward and he also comes across less pessimistic than interviews of the last 10-15 years. Interesting.

I was entirely pulled in by Image Book

I've written a few times on here about the long road I've taken with Godard: befuddled at 18, started to like certain films through my late 20s and into my 30s, found at least a couple I loved in my 40s, enjoy talking about him with grade-school students as much as I do almost anybody. I found parts of Histoire(s) du cinéma very moving, and plan to see it again in time. The point being, I'm open to anything new. I found The Image Book to be a depressing ordeal, though. It took me right back to being 18 again, the feeling that someone had gone to great cryptic lengths to make sure I knew that his understanding of the world would never be available to someone like me. I'm sure that's not intentional, but that's what it felt like, and that's a terrible place from which to make art.

I'm sure this art wasn't made from that place.

It isn't intentional, sorry you felt shut out. I felt opened up and challenged and humbled, and that I wanted to take someone to see it so we could talk and exchange ideas afterwards.

That's definitely the film I was hoping for (and a good description of how I felt after Histoire(s) du cinéma). The friend I saw it with seemed to be similarly at a loss, so the post-film conversation was rather disjointed.

It helps to do a little research w/ late Godard, before or after. I certainly didn't get all the historical allusions re the Arab world.

I did recognize the final footage as the scene from Ophuls' Le Plaisir where an old man dances himself to death.

I did not, but watched the film afterwards, and it's so perfect. If that's the last thing Godard ever puts out, and old man trying to stay young, but killing himself doing it, there's a great pathos to that.

Are there that many historical allusions? A lot of it is from the same novel. I took a lot of it to be Godard realizing that he wasn't the right person to speak on these subjects anymore.

I wasn't very good at spotting the film clips--Johnny Guitar, Kiss Me Deadly, Un Chien Andalou, Elephant, Jaws, a handful more. I thought maybe he distorted or bleached out a few.

a lot of them are degraded video, yeah

a few are clips he's used before ("say you love me" from JG)

rented Made in U.S.A. and Keep Your Right Up, excited to watch them, particularly the latter - haven't seen any Godard past 1980 besides his segment in Aria.