Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

in general cahiers was very pro mainstream cinema! tho it was also re-orienting what the actual mainstream actually was

Mainstream American cinema sure, mainstream French cinema tho? Bit skeptical of that claim.

it just struck me also that all the nonsense about "influence" and heirs/successors is part and parcel of the more reactionary reading of auteur theory lol: it tidies film-making into a hugely simplified and handily singleton-aggrandising structure which is quite false

Influence is frequently used within the context of genres, countries and industries - "the influence of spaghetti westerns on Japanese samurai cinema" and such - that largely bypasses any auteurist claims I'd say.

did godard try to overthrow this structure? now and then maybe, much of the time probably not (as a shorthand it also benefits archivists and getting stuff funded benefits from personal branding as well as promoting it)

Of possible interest in this context:

"I find it useless to keep offering the public the 'auteur'" -- Jean-Luc Godard pic.twitter.com/XxatiRhzMj

— biblioklept (@biblioklept) September 13, 2022

"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."

All of them had an "American cinema" (or Hitch) thing with a twist. I haven't seen Breathless in a long time but I didn't feel it was more unconventional than Truffaut.

JLG went further and further away from them but he was still picking on an American pulp genre and attempting that twist up to "Made in USA"?

And then he had periods with no kind of normal film career.

They were all huge US cinema geeks yeah but I think Godard was more blatant in wanting to add that twist you mention - even with A Bout De Suffle the jump cuts and digressive conversations, as well as the use of music make it harder to approach than Truffaut imo, tho yeah it's the most accessible Godard for sure. With the others the twist was as much about cultural context and sensibilities I think.

Influence is frequently used within the context of genres, countries and industries - "the influence of spaghetti westerns on Japanese samurai cinema"

never to say anything concrete or consequential tho (bcz it always just smooshes wildly different elements together and enforces generalisations that require you to overlook differences and also reasons) -- it's a pretend and a mystical machinery which we invoke when want not to think abt how making a film (or a whatever) works

it's just an extremely bad dumb word, stop using it: work out what you actually mean and say that instead! use good writing instead of bad writing!

it just struck me also that all the nonsense about "influence" and heirs/successors is part and parcel of the more reactionary reading of auteur theory lol: it tidies film-making into a hugely simplified and handily singleton-aggrandising structure which is quite false

You're taking this word, influence, something that clearly exists--I believe famous books have been written about how troublesome it can be for people who create art--and trying to minimize it or write it out of existence because it offends your sensibilities.

You know, I contributed to A Hidden Landscape, and you're giving me a hard time here. I want my money back.

I wish you luck in influencing writers not to use it in their work going forward.

xpost

i've read those books! harold bloom makes it an agon -- a problem, a fight, a fear -- as a way to dig into interesting and concrete detail of how poems connect to each other!

his map of the connectivities he favours is super-weird mind you

sorry clemenza, i don't mean to give you a hard time (and thank you for yr contribution) -- i like that you're explaining godard to ppl who never heard of him and hunting for better ways to do it. mainly when ppl use this word i am trying to say "ok what do you mean by it" and yes i then get a little goad-y and impatient when all i get is swerving and "shut up! everyone knows what it is! i will never be concrete!"

reynolds played the "haha good luck influencing ppl" on me on twitter a while back which i took this up with him: the word he was actually looking for was "persuading" of course but smooshing ever is the order of the day in this conversation

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

Truffaut adapting Henry James, Rohmer calling a film series "Six Moral Tales." Bogdanovich a (slight) stateside example.

(xpost) We're not that far apart here. It's just an entry point, and yes, you then go on to figure out how those influences were transformed and made new. Seeing Godard as just a checklist of Ford and Ray and Renoir, etc., wouldn't be very interesting or illuminating.

Schrader on Godard. pic.twitter.com/I1ldtpSgFO

— The Film Stage 📽 (@TheFilmStage) September 14, 2022

Show business is snow business.

Benning on Godard pic.twitter.com/9YiJkuWoSC

— Diego Cepeda (@untrenoculto) September 13, 2022

I heard the same thing about his scripts elsewhere.

Which films should I watch and in what order to find about Godard as a director? Under consideration: Weekend, Vivre sa vie, Pierrot le fou, La Chinoise, ...

The middle two there are probably as good as anything as introductions, from what I've seen. Masculin, feminin and Breathless up there too.

If you watch Weekend first, you may jump out the window after the Bronte sequence.

By all means watch it, but maybe fourth after PLF, Breathless, Masculin, Vivre sa vie, and Band of Outsiders.

(guess my math was wrong lol)

I've seen Breathless but should probably watch it again. Are there any American or French films I should watch before or after Breathless? Please disregard this question if irrelevant. Was Elevator to the Gallows influenced by Breathless? (sorry mark s) Will watch others suggested ...

if you watch la chinoise first think of it as an affectionate but alsoquite sardonic portrait of the very extremely on-line

except these people wear such pretty clothes

Elevator To The Gallows came a year or two before Breathless.

Yes, I was just fact checking and about to report.

The photos for La Chinoise make me think of APC.

i was a huge fan of une femme est une femme in college, the musical without music aspect of it made it click much more immediately than breathless, though maybe i'd find the gender politics abhorrent now

i saw weekend probably earlier than i should've too but it's a staggering experience so i loved it. made in usa the only early godard that was too obtuse for me, i should rewatch it tho

nobody's mentioned alphaville, so i will.

As someone who didn't connect for years, I'd recommend starting with Band of Outsiders, Masculin Feminin, and Vivre sa vie. They're all very accessible. I'd save the later work for later.

Yes, I should rewatch Alphaville and consider his comment about black and white on that Dick Cavett interview. I vaguely remember a fan and a disembodied voice. Did the French write science fiction? The English seem to have written a lot.

Masculin Féminin has the usual ah-women-are-strange-creatures attitude one gets from these nouvelle vague dudes.

Yeah like a lot of sexist directors Godard gets better than he deserves from his female leads.

Jules Verne wrote some stuff

Rohmer in this period comes off better. The women stare blankly when these men prattle about Jansenism or whatever.

the bits that haunt me, from the ones I've seen, are anna karina looking straight at the camera

am hoping film4 do a tribute season

Went pretty well. I didn't dwell on influence; talked instead about something suggested upthread, how hard it might be for them to understand how central movies were to everything in the '60s and '70s. They were quiet and attentive as the clips played (Band of Outsiders dance, Hal Hartley dance, coffee cup in 2 or 3 Things)--that's a start. With someone like Godard, I'm happy to get even a couple of them talking, and--with a little spoon-feeding--one girl said she could see the universe forming in the coffee cup. Also, later, I played Aaron Judge's two home runs. A well-rounded education.

(I guess in playing the Hal Hartley clip, I did dwell a bit on influence--mostly I just love that scene.)

tbh i think it's cool that kids that age get to learn anything about movies at all

I wish when I was a kid I could have been a student in your class, clemenza

For real. Speaking of cool, are there any academic courses out there about the History of Cool? I feel like Godard would factor into it.

Appreciate that. They'll surprise you sometimes by what you can get them interested in, even 3s and 4s.

(xpost) There's that John Leland book, Hip: The History, but I think it's entirely American-focused.

The '60s were fascinating for the ways American cool got reflected back from all over.

I made these GIFs for the "Three Frames" thread a shocking 17 years ago:

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a280/HansHolbein/01.gif
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a280/HansHolbein/24.gif

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a280/HansHolbein/MF1.gif
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a280/HansHolbein/MF2.gif
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a280/HansHolbein/MF3.gif

I have such vivid memories of my first Godard viewings in the middle of the vast Canadian prairies. One of the better local video stores had Breathless and Contempt, so those were my first two. My university had a 16mm print of Masculin-Feminin and I got to sit in a little booth and watch it on some sort of mini-projection viewing contraption. Later borrowed a VHS of Alphaville from a film professor, but I wasn't allowed to take it home so I sat in an empty classroom and watched it. When it ended I rewound it and watched it again.

there are a couple of later films available to watch in the list ned posted here

Non-Criterion Boutique Home Video Discussion (Kino, Warner Archive, Arrow, Indicator, Vinegar Syndrome, Code Red, etc.)

but now that i try them, neither play for me in the uk, but you might have better luck.

I've watched bad films by JLG but nothing unwatchable, think Lynsey is referring to the Vertov years.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/15/jean-luc-godard-films-french-swiss-died-life

This C4 80s nostalgia is a tad misplaced. His films are far more easily available to most ppl, but so are most things so ppl never get to them?

i have mixed feelings about it: it was kind of great for a few years to just flip a channel into something so extremely texturally different, every conflicting kind of culture arriving through the same aperture (more or less) for free (and you didn't have to leave yr house and rub elbows with weirdo film nerds ugh, this was yr world not theirs)

actually not dissimilar to my idealised imprint of the rock weeklies of the same era (slightly earlier): c4 as the on-screen realisation of the alt listings weekly city limits

but on the other hand i think a lot of jlg's vertov phase is p hard to decode on a small screen in a space full of distractions (including flipping back the channel) and we were nuts to imagine this utopian space wd simply grow more utopian (same with the weeklies: market fragmentation beckoned and the ideal was dissipated)

"I've seen Breathless but should probably watch it again. Are there any American or French films I should watch before or after Breathless?"

The Left Bank stuff (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cleo, several of Marker's films) is a lot better than anything from the nouvelle vague.

a world where the consumer's choice is king puts a shaping frame on everything you decide to seek out

this is why twitter is better than criterion lol

The flipside to our age of availability is that what little is left of the monoculture becomes narrower and narrower, and if you're not already predisposed to seek things out you're unlikely to ever be exposed to them. I certainly have friends from rural areas of Portugal that have stories of catching arthouse films on Portuguese public television and that firing up their curiosity for that stuff.

Re: sexism, heard someone say recently that Godard's 80's work (which I really haven't seen anything of) is much better on this count, partially through being co-scripted by his wife.