Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

4K restoration of Alphaville out today via KL. One of his best.

has anyone revisited The Image Book?

I may rewatch today.

I watched his eighties 'mainstream' films recently, and didn't really like them that much, but then also rewatched Nouvelle Vague from 1990. Really think that's a late period masterpiece.

Pretty crazy to think that next year that will be placed right in the middle of his filmography chronologically.

Le Petit Soldat out via CC in January

https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/films/115ae4fd0c45ee3c0f4e8197fd03460b/fjf2hnzHjxa8CGOapu7tdA2W8EhLAq_large.jpg

one of the few pre-68 Godard movies sampled in The Image Book... only others are Les Carabiniers, Alphaville, and Weekend.

Cinématheque has posted on their FB that Anna Karina has passed.

RIP

Ooof. Her face and her presence was something special. Have too many coming-of-movie-age memories attached. Forever totally crushing on her. She was and is spectacular. RIP.

OTM, RIP Anna ;_;

RIP

:(

RIP :(

https://medium.com/the-hairpin/jean-luc-godard-and-anna-karina-7be806f58124

https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/image047%20(6).jpg?bwg=1547295987

https://i1.wp.com/vaguevisages.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/anna-karina-pierrot-le-fou.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo4hPTIXY4E

💔

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard on their wedding day, photographed by Agnès Varda. pic.twitter.com/AEYeMDG5n1

— Film at Lincoln Center (@FilmLinc) December 15, 2019

nice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul5beWXDa7c

^love that one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTx3GK3jQps

sleepily watching le mépris bewitched by its gorgeous colour, not really following the four languages it's in lol -- i'll rewatch tomorrow before it leaves MUBI when i'm less sleepy i think

it goes off MUBI tonight so there's no immediate inexpensive way to test this but i feel like i could just rewatch le mépris forever purely for the light and the colour

also i thought i had laura mulvey's bfi book on it, unread as i hadn't seen the film, but now that i have it turns out i don't

I know Mulvey wrote an essay on Contempt, but I don't think there's a BFI book on it by her (or by anyone)? I could be wrong...

its non-existence definitively explains why i don't own it

i wonder if the essay ran in S&S?

Le Petit Soldat out now on Criterion. Very good, and reminded me of a post upthread, about how Godard's 60s films each have their own counterpart later on: Vivre sa Vie to Masculin Feminin, Breathless to Pierrot le Fou, Contempt to Weekend... and yeah, Le Petit Soldat is absolutely the counterpart to Alphaville (which is much better, imo one of only three stole cold classics of his pre-68 run).

Rewatched Every Man for Himself fairly recently and man is that one a real outlier. Nothing before or after feels as remotely 'real' as that movie. I can't believe he went from that to garbage like First Name Carmen and Detective. Not a fan of Hail Mary either.

The real gem of that run is Passion.

Hail Mary is wonderful but, yeah, Detective and Prenom:Carmen feel completely made-up-while-shooting. Same goes for the Jane Birkin one but that one has a wonderful sequence with Les Rita Mitsouko in the studio that saves it for me.

I haven't been able to see Passion, and as with many Catholic / Jesus movies, Hail Mary has more to offer others than me. There is a GREAT short on the new Carmen disc called "Changer d'image," a 10 min short from the early 80s that presages Histoires, etc.

JLG's 60s run has some very strong use of colour, when he decides to use it.

funnily enough watching clockers reminded me of JLG's way with colour, spike's colourways are not dissimilar

JLG's 60s run has some very strong use of colour, when he decides to use it.

Overdoes it a bit in "Pierrot le Fou" tbh.

This is the one I wanted to re-watch from his 60s run that's available on mubi rn. And I don't think I've seen Made in USA.

Overdoes everything a bit in "Pierrot le Fou" tbf.

Don't think it's ever possible to overdo colour in movies tbh!

Wonder if those rich deep reds and blues were partly related to certain kinds of film stocks in use in the 1960s - you see the same kind of vibrancy in things like Bava's Blood and Black Lace, for example:

http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/27230834/blue-red-godard.png

http://americancinemathequecalendar.com/sites/default/files/stills_events_390_240/blood_and_black_lace_390.jpg?1500947885

kickstarter to colorise à bout de souffle

Heh, made me realisethat all the production stills I've seen from a bout de soufflé's are in black and white as well.

TBF, Jim McBride did give it a go in the 1980s:

https://i0.wp.com/filmotomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/breathless02.jpg?resize=651%2C361&ssl=1

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x36mi2d

I watched VIVRE SA VIE for the 2nd time last weekend, and in fact wrote a note on it here:
https://reelingatall.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/vivre-sa-vie-1962/

Mulvey and MacCabe edited a book on LE MEPRIS - I have a copy signed by both of them.

probably that's what i had in mind then -- i was at S&S when maccabe was for a while an affable bigwig there (until alan parker put an end to such nonsense) and laura m had an office across the corridor from the magazine

the maccabe book on godard that i read while researching my if…. book (which i'm guessing was "godard: a portrait of the artist at seventy" since he was 70 in 2000, tho amazon indicates a more recent publication date, 2014, perhaps of a revised edition?) was NOT THAT GREAT tbh, a masterclass in treating avant-garde innovation as a justifying value in itself, taking care to keep up with godard's line at any moment, but very much seeming to believe that beyond that there's no more to say. in other words -- this being a mode i encountered often at the wire and become exhausted by -- an intricate celebration of the contents of the ever-shifting manifesto that nevertheless sold the target of its uncritical love dismayingly short :(

godard's sympathy for the devil was on tv last week (london live, Freeview ch8) and was 2 hours of variously the stones in the studio rehearsing said song, some people reading out black power leaflets, a bookshop selling girly books populated by people doing Nazi salutes, some woman in a garden answering yes/no questions. it was odd.

no anna karina tributes on any channels here that I've seen 8(

the maccabe book on godard that i read while researching my if…. book

an intricate celebration of the contents of the ever-shifting manifesto that nevertheless sold the target of its uncritical love dismayingly short :(

I kinda really like Sympathy for the Devil / One Plus One. I see it as portraits of people - including Godard himself - trying to find the next step af 68. The touching thing is that Rolling Stones pretty clearly finds it, and makes a masterpiece while we watches, but nobody else does. Godard least of all. I do find his following fumbling decades very interesting.

Yes, it's good!

i've not seen about half of them but (including one plus one) but the period from la chinoise (1967) to numero deux (1975) is probably actually my favourite: he's swapped out "the girl, the gun" (american cinema's primary language) and swapped in "a third-marxist student's notion of revolutionary ideology, the gun" and is falling dizzily in and out of amused lust with the latter as the relationships go awry (exactly as they did with "the girl" in every one pre-chinoise) -- all the while basically inventing ultraleft-shitposting-on-twitter as cinema's coming language (which no one takes him up on) (until twitter)

"third-marxist" = "third-world marxist"

also "basically inventing" = "largely stealing off of debord" as debord never ever stopped huffily pointing out lol

It's very odd that London Live would show such a film.

Books:
MacCabe wrote one with a chapter with Mulvey, c.1980
MacCabe's biography is c.2005
LE MEPRIS by MacCabe / Mulvey is 2012

didn't know abt the MacCabe/Mulvey volume - the only thing I can find online is this -

https://www.bookdepository.com/Godards-Contempt-Colin-Maccabe/9781444339314

- is that what you're talking abt, pinfox?

I think I've related elsewhere on ILX that the one time I saw Godard interviewed in person was at the NFT w/ Maccabe moderating - JLG was NOT playing ball that evening, making for a pretty awkward hour or so. Maccabe's BFI classic on Performance is one of the best in the series, imho.

mark s, thank you for that great post about 67-75 JLG, which might well be my favourite era too (tho some things from that period are still pretty fugitive in any legit form - but then that's part of the appeal/mystique, always) - i only really 'lived' the very tail end of this kind of ultraleft shitposting, so witnessing the early 'high' phase of the vanguard moment - enacted on film! - is incredibly intoxicating, almost like a glimpse of an alternate world, but also there's a melancholy feeling from viewing in hindsight, and knowing the way things have gone. Sometimes - especially the bomb building sequence in (iirc) British Sounds - the rhetoric is frightening/provoking, still.