Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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.

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

^^TCM Tribute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx_08cambjA

JLG cameo at 00:24.

That was the idea of comparing him to the Beatles or Elvis--no assembly required. But it's an incomplete comparison because of the disconnect in commercial success. So no, I won't compare JLG to the Velvet Underground for a grade 7 class (although again, I think that's a perfect comparison); it'd be meaningless.

He came to Innis College around the time of Every Man for Himself and spoke to a roomful of maybe 50-100 film students. He was drolly funny--there's a six-part Dick Cavett interview on YouTube that's similar to what I saw. As I've said before, I just did not come close to appreciating this experience at the time.

Even the most culturally-literate 7th-grader can't really conceptualize what it means for someone to be regarded as a leading figure in film for sixty years; one doesn't want to come across as pompous, but at a certain point it comes down to saying, "trust me, this was important". Obviously it would be different in a post-secondary film class.

You do what you can to make that happen.

Influence or inspiration (or just cheap quotation)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSFwVv_2RN4

Watching that TCM video my brain turned into a wikiquote generator:
New York Herald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!
Il arrive que la réalité soit trop complexe pour la transmission orale.
I think Penelope has been unfaithful.

“We were just four kids in Ireland, but when we saw Brigitte Bardot in the altogether in Contempt- sorry I mean Dear Brigitte!- we knew right away etc.”

xps love Rip Torn getting arrested at the end of that Guerrilla Gig.

Scott Walker! A man every seventh grader must know and love.

I wonder if a good way of explaining him to kids would be to show them some of the weirder edits and smash cuts from the earlier, more glamorous movies. That stuff still seems pretty fresh and transgressive compared to how normie Netflix shows look now, with the bonus of often being quite silly and funny

He was the Ed Sheeran of his day.

I'll show them the Band of Outsiders dance for sure (and may even try to squeeze in Hal Hartley's great tribute).

stills from Jean-Luc Goddard’s ‘Here and Elsewhere’ (1976). pic.twitter.com/BZqxP3SwOf

— Nihal | نهال (@NotNihal) September 13, 2022

Here is a report, which doesn't mention his financial position.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/13/jean-luc-godard-chose-to-end-life-through-assisted-dying-lawyer-confirms

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2022/sep/13/jean-luc-godard-dead-breathless-bardot-french-new-wave

This write-up was poor but it did name Une Femme Mariée as his best film, which it isn't, though it's my favourite of the New Wave rush, pre-67.

For those who read French Libération has published an excellent nearly 30 page memorial edition today.

Nice.

Here is Brody's write-up.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jean-luc-godard-was-cinemas-north-star

My uni library has the Brody bio. Guess I found my weekend reading.

I'll show them the Band of Outsiders dance for sure

Hopefully this doesn't lead your students to believe he was the inventor of TikTok.