Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

Huh, I would have thought it too Maoist for him :)

I like A Film Like Any Other most... just give me the rawest shit from that period. Tout Va Bien is imo the only real keeper from 68-72 (actually I'd throw Le Gai Savoir in there)

Loved him touching his face so much lmfao

GODARD NO!!! pic.twitter.com/zrjmWEDud3

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) April 7, 2020

i saw The Image Book the other day and loved it, what else has he done in the last 40 years that measures up

'Histoire(s) du Cinema' and 'Nouvelle Vague' and 'Goodbye to Language' aaaaaaaand that's it, I think

ok cool haha

JLG par JLG

don't listen to fred about anything

i will listen to all of you

(but, thanks!)

Hey, I love a lot of it, but at the level of The Image Book? Very little is

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-world 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)

― mark s, Sunday, 26 January 2020 17:37 (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

― mark s, Sunday, 26 January 2020 17:40 (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah if you like The Image Book his Histoire(s) du Cinéma is the only equal really. ~5 hours, thoroughly brilliant, though I like The Image Book more for its severity and concision.

Also check out all his millennial era shorts... Origins of the 21st Century, The Old Place, Je Vous Salue Sarajevo, and Liberté et patrie are all great and all "sampled" in The Image Book.

Maybe I'm in the minority but imo it's pretty thin gruel post-1980. For Ever Mozart, First Name Carmen, Hail Mary, In Praise of Love, Goodbye to Language, Film Socialisme... BOOOOOORING! but they have their moments. specifically all of the impressionistic experimental video work.

xp

His 'second wave' in the eighties was boring (except for Passion) but I like In Praise of Love as well. The colors in part two are insane!

So many hot and steamy wrong takes. His Eighties run was fantastic for the most part. Nineties as well.

It's the '60s run that sucked!

Jestin' obviously. Godard reminds me of what someone said about Prince once, that there are few artists whose fans disagree so much about what his best and worst efforts are.

Film Socialisme > King Lear > Contempt

I haven't seen King Lear but yeah Contempt is overrated

Love the second half of In Praise of Love, i.e. all the stuff he included in The Image Book

Every Man for Himself stands out though, I don't think he made a movie like that before or since.

i saw king lear when it came out (1987, packed showing at the london film festival) and didn't really get it but remember being struck by the sound detail, which just seemed amazing compared to any other film

saw it again at an nft godard season maybe three years back (chair alph will recall): found it easier to follow but less remarkable, and i guess the world of cinema sound has by now long caught up with late-80s godard, bcz i could no longer hear that element, or anyway why i thought it. it was full of lots of small things i enjoyed which i thought would have stuck with me from my earlier watch (but i'd totally forgotten) as well as some things i now felt confidently enough a lol cineaste to be mildly irritated by

probably i need to see it again to calibrate properly: i don't think actually his gift is in bringing his mind to the canonic classics of literature tho

pic.twitter.com/K7xlQvX9Xr

— Frederik Bojer Bové (@FBBove) March 23, 2020

That's a tweet I did about how Godard worked with sound in the late eighties and how it blew the mind of Wim Wenders. And now I've just doxxed myself. Sigh.

In the last forty years its been fascinating to see him in his essayistic work (begun in the 70s) and try to reboot his classic 60s work.

Hella Pour Moi is probbaly the best of the latter effort with Depardieu (mostly he often just can't quite get the actors, it seems to me) so in the main its mostly his essayistic work like JLG/JLG, Histoire(s), Image book, and Goodbye to Language has that fscinating use of 3D.

Really like to see Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, King Lear - there is a lot to discover. Plenty that measures up, in some ways he is a rare artist that went further onto other planes and places when he left the scene that made him - and it should've killed him!

"Fantastisk, Frederik"

i'm too flibbertigibbet to put the work in really -- or anyway the time -- but i'd like to see someone write abt JLG soup-to-nuts who's a sound-based critic rather than an image-based one, bcz it feels under-explored from that angle. i've seen it touched on at sight and sound now and then, but generally in passing and never at the hands-on level i imagine he's working

alph when was the nft jlg season?

Really like to see Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, King Lear

Saw King Lear during the single solitary week it played the Swiss Centre cinema complex in London, lone gone now but back in the day a weird cluster of screens showing mainly art house fare - the lobby looked like the foyer of a tiny hotel. At the time it was owned by Cannon, who of course funded King Lear. I guess it's fallen down some copyright/ownership black hole.

Re: Godard and sound - I wonder if Michel Chion has written on this topic?

The use of sound in The Image Book is totally lost at home w/o a surround sound system--I saw it 3 times in a small theater and in the last 40 minutes he completely expands the stereo field, iirc most of the first half of the movie is essentially mono or simple stereo. By the end, there's different shit coming out of every speaker.

Didn't like Goodbye to Language but I watched at home w/o 3D glasses

He's always had a knack for memorable sound effects, too. I've been tempted to steal the gunshot sound from Masculin Feminin and the one from Ici et Ailleurs (which is featured in The Image Book).

Nouvelle Vague his most accomplished of the recent ones imo and no way in hell will I waste my time streaming/DVD-ing those films again. A heater with a sharp sound system, I'd recommend, if you can get it.

er I meant Notre Musique.

alph when was the nft jlg season?

― mark s, Wednesday, 8 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It was about three years ago, maybe a bit more than that.

Never watched it but I used to listen to the soundtrack to nouvelle vague quite a lot (xpost to ecm thread!)

That's a great musique concrete work in and of itself. Sorta.

Notre Musique just sailed by me, just like Helas Pour Moi.
Desperately seeking JLG/JLG, Nouvelle Vague, and Germany Year 90 Nine Zero...

I remember Helas Pour Moi having really amazing theater sound.

I remember bumping into your mate, xyzzz, at a screening of The Wind From the East!

I was at this screening too!

Dumb movie tbh, what surprised me about La Chinoise was that I'd seen it dismissed as JLG going full maoist and humourless but it's not that at all, much of it is a satire of student politics and he's questioning himself all the way through. This one felt like what ppl accuse La Chionise of being, just a hectoring polemic by a dude who's pretty bad at politics. So much yelling at the Soviet Union for wanting to avoid nuclear war, he's like a maoist version of a UK reporter harassing Corbyn about Trident. Glauber Rocha wasted, too.

mark s's original shitposter theory is seductive but I think by this point JLG was taking himself far more seriously than any twitter dirtbag, and not in the troll-y way that his more recent persona has

A lot of what you say is 100% otm, but Glauber Rocha singing Gal Costa is good not bad.

i think he briefly took himself super-seriously yes, but everyone did for a season or two then, it was a terrible time (for mainly external reasons tbf to radical youth): the issue is how quickly he re-emerged to be funny abt it. and i don't think it lasted very long before his underlying quickness of multiple contradictory response got him quite sly abt late 60s ultra-political earnestness

(not least bcz A: french maoists were the WORST so B: some of JLG's self-seriousness was almost certainly protective rhetoric adopted after harangues at self-crit sessions -- can you justify your work!!?? -- and of course C: he had already in his pre-pol phase noted that "youth" as a sacred characteristic leads to terrible outcomes which are combination tragic and hilarious)

your Debord comment upthread made me chuckle cos when i was watching Image Book recently i kept thinking of parallels to the movie of Society of the Spectacle

tbf the 60s in france was like a bad ilx thread, locked by the mods* after 204857309847510938 posts

*de gaulle

That could be a double-bill xp

surely it has already been one

I have a soft spot for Sympathy for the Devil, the weird Rolling Stones doc that kinda becomes a meditation on how to find a new path forward. The film sequences not about Rolling Stones are kinda abysmal, but also sorta touching in the way they are grasping for something new but just never finds anything. Especially when a group of Black Panthers shows up, after the death of Martin Luther King. It does take it to a different level. And it is lucky for Godard that the Rolling Stones ends up finding a very new and brilliant sound, even if Godard ended up struggling for basically twenty years after that.

Here and Elsewhere and Numero Deux sure was the look of a struggling artist.

"I've been tempted to steal the gunshot sound from Masculin Feminin"

haha i actually used this for a video project when i was in college

I also remember liking Notre Musique but I'm damned if I can remember a thing about it now. True for most Godard movies from the last 30 years. (Goodbye To Language's split 3D shot aside.)

might fuck around and rewatch a godard or two on amazon prime later

idk I don't go to a Godard film to remember stuff about it after. He's mostly dabbling at coherence.

Yeah the pleasure is mainly in the moment, at least as far back as Weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3FP_zV4BqQ

Auto translate for English is... manageable

Full interview with subtitles now up:

https://vimeo.com/411300705