Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

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.

The Image Book - is there a better last film?

Rewatching the first two parts of Histoire(s) du Cinéma today was like having a mental orgasm

Watched Alphaville for the millionth time because I watched Vivre Sa Vie every other day last summer, those are my favorite of the 60-67 run

So much amazing work from Breathless to The Image Book, a living legend who refused to become a relic and never did

Fassbinder was Godard's only heir. No one succeeded him. Who could possibly succeed Jean-Luc Godard now?

But I can't be that depressed, it isn't tragic. The man ended his final film with the words: "and even if nothing would be as we had hoped / it would change nothing of our hopes / they would remain a necessary utopia." He lived a beautiful life. He had the flower of his dreams. He was that man. And he invited us in, always.

I think Cecil Taylor is a much closer match to Godard, just based on the fact that both of them were game changers in their respective fields, and neither of them ever compromised their art by working with U2.

Reading the write-ups it's quite something to see how people like Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer were very much assimilated into the rest of the industry.* And how JLG resisted that and went on to do other things. He took the politics of his time, and even maybe some of those critiques from Situationists and went into something else. That's what most journalistic write-ups will struggle with.

* Rivette was inventive in a singular way, so you can see something very different in his films.

i was thinking about Weekend as a response to that Situ piece last night

there's the quote from Story of the Eye at the beginning of the movie that seems more than coincidental

In Emilie Bickerton's excellent A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma, it's Rivette who comes across of the most 'left' of all the Cahiers mob, which was something of a surprise to me, just based on the films.

Godard was a right winger to start off with - as was Truffaut - but mostly in an epater les bourgeois way.

Yes Truffaut apparently regularly excised the more 'provocative' elements in Jean-Marie Straub's contributions to CDC.

cahiers wasn't considered a left journal compared to the left bank film ppl (marker, varda, etc)

in the mid-60s this got decisively complicated: the students were agitating after 65, the french left split into factions pro and con the student revolt, the pcf was increasingly (correctly) considered the reactionary and not-with-it wing and individual film-makers tended to make politico-cultural alliances per their skillset and pre-existing focus

from 67-ish godard was a channer with quasi-left characteristics (the greatest ever to do it)

i was thinking about Weekend as a response to that Situ piece last night

― seo layer (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 14 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

That's probably the one to really re-watch, where his film career is kinda collapsing but he's finding other things in the wreck.

As far as musical equivalents: Charlie Parker. Kind of came out of nowhere, didn't really spend too much time emulating his forebears but instead decided to tear merde up on his own terms. Influenced generations afterwards if not technically then conceptually( yeah, I said the "I" word).

also the soviets and the chinese were no longer buddies, which enabled a lot of symbolic side-taking and vanguardist jostling, very little of it connected to actual real-world politics imo

Rohmer was meant to be the most conservative of the nouvelle vague. Rivette deposed him at Cahiers because of this, although Rohmer still appeared, as an expert on Balzac!, in Out One some years later.

seems like there's a big tension here between conservative = which candidate you vote for vs conservative = pays attention to the art of the past, cares about it, curates it, takes lessons from it but doesn't (necessarily) imitate it

is "let's do balzac properly" a conservative or a radical impulse? godard sent a lot of time in film archives!

this is what king lear is about (especially the rubber dinosaurs)

another fave

"Fassbinder was Godard's only heir. No one succeeded him. Who could possibly succeed Jean-Luc Godard now?"

I think Akerman succeeded him. Also with a more consistently great filmography but there isn't a lot in it.

can't remember which Cahiers writer it was or if i'm conflating a bunch of things but "stagey tableaux of scenes from Balzac is bad cinema/bad Balzac" was an early NV manifesto point iirc

Influence or inspiration (or just cheap quotation)?

None of the above surely - Baumbach I'm sure digs Godard but the point of that scene is the character being unable to relate to his own life in any way that isn't the cultural reference points he's based his self-esteem on; a Kevin Smith whose obsessions happen to be highbrow cinema and literature instead of comic books.

Reading the write-ups it's quite something to see how people like Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer were very much assimilated into the rest of the industry.

Don't know if this was so much about Godard "resisting" as it was about the filmmakers you cite being quite compatible with mainstream cinema from the get-go. Tirez Sur Le Pianiste aside (which always felt like Truffaut doing Godard to me) the late 50's/early 60's stuff I've seen by Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer is always quite narratively conventional in ways that Godard never was, even from the get-go. Not disputing that it must have seemed quite radical at its time, but as far as wanting a story with beginning, middle and end those three usually take care of that.