Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

He gave Eustache some leftover film ends from something - Masculin Féminin, maybe- for Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, no? Believe JPL used to ferry them personally iirc

Didn’t JPL say he preferred working with JLG to FT? Don’t know where I read that though

He did like that one April Fools’ Xanadu bit though.

Just taking stock of how much this man's work has practically changed my DNA over the years...just "Histoires du cinéma" alone. Or the challenging beauty of "Vivre sa vie", "Le Mépris/Contempt", "Pierrot Le Fou", "The Image Book", "Notre Musique", "JLG/JLG" and "Germany 1990" ...on and on...

That's heartbreaking if he was indeed living in poverty. What a world.

Really. I was feeling awful waking up to this news, before these details emerged.

When Akerman committed suicide that came from the grief of her mother's death and years of mental health issues.

He (and Anne-Marie Miéville, presumably) owned a house containing a state-of-the-art video studio, I have trouble believing he was down to his last pennies.

Ugh. Just now reading that stuff.

It's an ongoing story but from the tweets he was in poverty and from that decided to end it. Hopefully we'll have a clearer picture in the coming days.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 13, 2022 11:44 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was already strangely gutted by the news before I heard this aspect.

This is all very bizarre to me, because I don't think I ever took JLG seriously--his earliest work probably was groundbreaking to the generation that saw it when it was new. But by the time I started seeing these films there was such a cult around the filmmaker that I assumed their sacred cow had to be standing on a lot of BS.

I was going to go out tonight, but probably I'll stay in and watch the Criterion Channel--if they haven't already pulled together a tribute to JLG, there'll be one later today.

I’d like to think it is considerably different from Akerman but who knows, yet.

xxxpost He's had his home editing suite in Rolle for years but just about all his productions going back to at least Film Socialisme have been semi or fully handmade affairs. Goodbye To Language was made using jerry-rigged iphones to create the (amazing) 3D effects, for example. I don't really think he was rolling in Euros.

He (and Anne-Marie Miéville, presumably) owned a house containing a state-of-the-art video studio, I have trouble believing he was down to his last pennies.

― Halfway there but for you, Tuesday, September 13, 2022 12:01 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Poverty is always relative. Do we know if he was working on anything in the last couple of years? If he was idle during the pandemic, that could have contributed to a notion that he could not get the strength together to go on living.

xpost(unintentional pun there with Rolle/rolling but I think he would've appreciated it somehow)

As with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, the fact that he's totally full of shit doesn't diminish the work in the slightest. Trickster god kinda thing.

mark s you should def watch Death's Glamour, Luc Moullet's film about Luc Moullet faking his own death in the hopes that it will revive his career. But then Jean Luc Godard dies (eerily prescient) and overshadows him.

Is there a good essay around addressing his alleged anti-Semitism? I remember the chatter when the Academy awarded him an honorary Oscar.

There's quite a lot of information in Richard Brody's biography.

That's right. Thanks.

https://t.co/nbFVJuJpDv pic.twitter.com/nqsGLkvBue

— vanguardism but it looks like sneakers (@motelabyss) September 13, 2022

extreme poverty stuff seems like bullshit to me. the man was very old and wanted to go out on his own terms.

blah blah films romanticizing capital blah blah murders countless millions of people blah blah

rip

Alain Delon and Françoise Hardy have also said they want assisted suicide. French boomers really leading the way on breaking that taboo.

Has Brigitte Bardot responded yet?

Always found it cute and oddly endearing that his wives/long-term partners all had variations of the same first name: Hanne/Anna; Anne; and finally Anne-Marie.

Yes, have though something similar. Mary's mother.

Il y a quelque chose pas très catholique

Clumsy but serious question: in terms of influence, what is his (pop) musical equivalent? I'm going to spend 10 minutes talking about him and showing a couple of clips to a grade 7 class tomorrow. I thought of Elvis or the Beatles, then wondered if that was overstating it. But if you look at a Marvel film today, he's probably there somewhere in terms of technique, even if filtered through four or five other directors.

Eno

i mean what if its louis armstrong

T A R Z A N !
C O C A C O L A !
L A R R Y F I N E !

Overstrike hard to see there :(

Armstrong not bad, but maybe Miles instead.

Eno seems like a good one: his influence everywhere, even if someone influenced by him fifth-hand doesn't even realize it.

Now: can you give me someone on the charts right now that will help me explain Eno, even before I get to Godard?

He himself said he saw parallels between himself and Dylan.

James brown?

Il y a quelque chose pas très catholique

He was from a Protestant family.

Well there you go then.

Gotta be Dylan, they were both massively influential and changed what was considered "good" in their respective fields. Although once they entered "difficult" periods Dylan emerged from his while Godard remained fringe.

I think his influence is more of the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed variety. Always a hipster fixture, prone to disappearing up his own ass periodically, absorbed consciously or not into the DNA of much of what came after.

as is (or used to be) well known on ilx i consider "influence" to be an extremely dumb word which shd be pensioned off as literally useless so i would begin by asking clemenza what exacfly he hopes to teach his students by invoking it -- because that's amlost certainly a better way to answer the question being asked

clemenza, when you've done these retrospectives for your classes, are there any figures you've introduced to the kids who really seemed to catch their attention? Or had the opposite reaction? The closest thing I can remember in my classes is a French teacher playing us "Amsterdam" by Jacques Brel.

“Influence” a problematic word, I agree.

Now: can you give me someone on the charts right now that will help me explain Eno, even before I get to Godard?

― clemenza,

lol I haven't had a sense of "the charts right now" since, uh, 1982. Would Radiohead matter to them as an intermediate step?

What you're trying to do, Mark S., is give them a tangible connection to someone whose films--and the clips I will show--would probably not engage very many of them on their own. If you preface the clips with some sense of the scope of his influence, they may be more receptive.

I don't see anything wrong at all with the concept of influence.

I think the Velvet Underground is probably perfect: massive influence, virtually no commercial success of his own.

Their memories tend to extend back a few months, I find; I've got Radiohead in this album-cover art assignment and I have, and they are always greeted with blank stares.

I don't even know why I grew weary of the word "influence." Maybe I prefer a slightly different construction, "they drew upon" rather than "they were influenced by." But maybe mark will laugh at my formulation.

Just don't care for statements like "They influenced everyone from The Soup Dragons to The Squirrel Nut Zippers" for some strange reason.

Or, inspired as opposed to influenced. "Inspired by" is, I'll concede, much more meaningful than "influenced by," which often leads in the direction of, I don't know, Crazy Cavan.

tangible connection to films is a good thing to draw their attention to and will doubtless be interesting for them

but i don't entirely understand how invoking eno or the VU as being a figure of "similar influence" helps this task (since in terms of demonstrating tangible links anything they did isn't similar, and is possibly a confusing distraction planting misleading seeds of consonance?)

(doubly so if you also have to spend time explaining who eno or the VU are, as seems p likely in this context)

They're the Jean-Luc Godard of rock music.