Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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

Discovered via last night's Mrs. America (also used in Killing Eve, evidently--I must not have noticed).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ntMc2Fbq4

^^From a TV Musical written by and costarring Serge Gainsbourg!

...and Marianne Faithfull does a Serge tune and it’s all wonderful.

I'm amazed at the brevity of this Wikipedia entry for what I consider a major film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tout_Va_Bien

Watched it again last night and enjoyed it more than ever.

I agree pinefox, a major film - things like that long tracking shot through the supermarket seem incredibly 'modern' in terms of slow cinema technique, used in service of an 'outdated' Maoist discourse. Combined with the fact the Godard films of this era are now easy to see in lovingly restored archival editions - so they look freshly shot even while showing us the recent past - the effect is pleasingly disconnecting and disconcerting, true dialectic achieved.

yes, a major film, and the supermarket scene is spectacular (and in more than one sense)

Definitely the best of his ultra radical period, everything else he did with Gorin approaches unwatchable. Letter to Jane would be fine if the first 35 minutes were cut.

I think I prefer ici et ailleurs

Me too, I forgot about that one w/r/t Gorin because it was released so many years after their split. Ici et Ailleurs is imo the best thing he made in the 1970s.

Numero Deux is okay

My impression was that TOUT VA BIEN was considered the 'return' to something (commercial cinema?) *after* the ultra-radical period.

(I have always thought that only with JLG could this film be considered a return to the mainstream rather than a wild departure from it.)

But I haven't seen the ultra-radical films except, when I was 16, LE GAI SAVOIR.

Still haven't seen LETTRE A JANE, ICI ET AILLEURS, let alone BRITISH SOUNDS or even the Stones picture. Should I?

Feels like since about 1967, p much every new Godard is claimed (by someone or other) to be a return to the mainstream/narrative cinema etc. SLOW MOTION is the one that I thought was especially promoted as 'Godard's back' (when in fact, with all the video effects, it's one of his more 'experimental' films despite a certain narrative coherence).

FWIW, I don't think the difference between TOUT VA BIEN and BRITISH SOUNDS is all that much and if you appreciated the former you would also find things to appreciate in the other Dziga Vertov Group films. This box set from Arrow is exemplary:

https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/jean-luc-godard-jean-pierre-gorin-five-films-1968-1971-dual-format/FCD1511

I have difficulty remembering them tbh but they're definitely worth watching.

"Feels like since about 1967, p much every new Godard is claimed (by someone or other) to be a return to the mainstream/narrative cinema etc"

Really? I think it's pretty much standard to dismiss everything post-weekend up to 1980 as somehow transitional/something to be ashamed of. Then yes you get films that seem to look back to the new wave years. Except he actually would still be making the essay films he was developing in the 70s (which is what he was actually doing) alongside broken narratives with actors.

Ward: yes, I just saw the existence of that box set yesterday. Now keen to get it some time!