Brandon's movie memory

Onscreen text, much talk about the workers, pictures of Hitler and holocaust, calm voiceover and mentions of may 68. Yup, it’s a post-60′s Godard film, alright. Here he takes his textual analysis to new heights, obsessing over the word AND (or ET). It manages a level of interest similar to Tout va bien, significantly higher than Letter to Jane.

No onscreen credits (at least on my copy). The last Godard-Gorin collaboration, Mieville taking over for Gorin. Once again they speak within the film about its own creation and intent.

“In 1970 this film was called Victory. In 1974 it is called Here and Elsewhere.” Looks like Victory was a Palestinian propaganda movie. “Here” they stage scenes of a family watching television, and filmmakers displaying stills one by one before a camera. Lots of talk about the nature and meaning of images. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

Rosenbaum:

Jean-Luc Godard’s short feature about the PLO was initially shot with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the Middle East in 1970, but when he edited the footage with Anne-Marie Mieville several years later, many of the soldiers that had been filmed were dead. Reflecting on this fact, as well as on the problems of recording history and of making political statements on film, Godard and Mieville produced a thoughtful and provocative essay on the subject. Coming after the mainly arid reaches of Godard’s “Dziga Vertov Group” period (roughly 1968-1973), when his efforts were largely directed toward severing his relation with commercial filmmaking and toward forging new ways to “make films politically,” this film assimilates many of the lessons he learned without the posturing and masochism that marred much of his earlier work. The results are a rare form of lucidity and purity.

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Ici et Ailleurs DVD

“The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror.”

Godard’s last fiction film (released just a few months after La Chinoise) before May ’68 and the Dziga Vertov Group. It’s an anarchist romp, following an unlikeable couple (who secretly hate each other) on a weekend drive to the girl’s parents’ house to ensure that she gets her inheritance, really an excuse for a series of extended scenes (sometimes using minutes-long shots) of politics and absurdity, all with a bright red/white/blue color scheme that aims to make the film look like an advertisement.

Corinne freaks out:

Before the trip: time out for Corinne (Mireille Darc of some spy movies and commercials) to tell a long, erotic story in a darkened room. I don’t know whether that’s her travel partner Roland in the scene with her – there’s some business I barely got at the beginning where each of them secretly has another partner. Anyway, her story involves a threesome with a married couple featuring a saucer of milk.
“Is this true, or a nightmare?”
“I don’t know.”

Next: the celebrated traffic jam shot, as boorish couple Corinne and Roland (Jean Yanne, star of some Chabrol films) slowly move from left to right, past honking cars stuck in traffic, traveling in the oncoming lane to get ahead. There are cars parked backwards and upside down, a sailboat, animals, a tanker truck, all sorts of absurdity, at the end of which the relieved couple speeds past the huge multiple-fatalities accident that caused it all.

Class Warfare: rich girl (Juliet Berto, a Godard regular before she was a Rivette regular) and peasant tractor driver are in an accident, and she’s just furious that her boyfriend was killed. Corinne and Roland try not to get involved, finally speed away, rich and poor uniting in cursing them (“dirty jews!”).

Faux-tographe:

Almost to her parents’ house, when they pick up a hitchhiker whose boyfriend (Daniel Pommereulle, lead guy’s vacationing buddy in La Collectionneuse) hijacks their car (acting like a lion tamer) and makes them turn around. I already can’t remember what they talk about, but after a bloody car crash, a cool edit causes a hundred sheep to suddenly appear.

Jean-Pierre Leaud is wandering through a field as Saint Just, preaching politics from a book, speaking into the camera more than he’s speaking to the characters. In the next scene he’s a completely different character, a camera-unaware fellow in a phone booth. Roland steals Leaud’s car, and the quest continues.

In a forest now, trying to get directions from Tom Thumb (Yves Alfonso of Made in USA) and Emily Bronte (Blandine Jeanson of La Chinoise), who stick to their fantasy script despite the increasingly violent demands from Roland. Finally he sets Emily on fire.

SHE “It’s rotten of us, isn’t it? We’ve no right to burn even a philosopher”
HE “Can’t you see they’re only imaginary characters?”
SHE “Why is she crying, then?”
HE “No idea. Let’s go.”
SHE: “We’re little more than that ourselves.”

The movie has been self-aware before, and will be again (a passing car asks if they’re in a film or reality). In the forest they walk past “the Italian actors in the co-production.”

“What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people.”

I lost track of what happened to Leaud’s car, but now they’re hitching rides with trucks. One stops for another extended scene where pianist Paul Gégauff (a screenwriter for Chabrol, Rohmer and Clement) talks about music and plays some Mozart while the couple sits bored in the courtyard.

The music turns very dramatic as they ride with a couple of garbage men (Laszlo Szabo of Passion and Made in USA, and Omar Diop of La Chinoise). Corinne and Roland haul trash as the men eat sandwiches and speak at length, alternately about revolution in Africa and guerrilla race warfare in the west.

Finally home, they kill Corinne’s mom, put her in a car (of course) and set it on fire. It’s a brief scene, showing that the movie has little interest in its makeshift plot-motivator.

But wait, it’s not over. They’re abducted by a machine gun-toting cannibal liberation front (feat. Juliet Berto again) led by Jean-Pierre Kalfon, star of L’Amour Fou. Corinne fits in better than Roland, ends up eating him. End of cinema.

D. Sterritt’s commentary makes me weary with his wall-to-wall sportscaster style, but says some good stuff, that the movie is satirizing consumerism and the manufactured product, the visuals pop-art influenced, the scenes all clearly planned out (not random/improv as some critics suggested). DP Raoul Coutard says: “The driving force behind this film, irrespective of wanting to be innovative in cinema, was to annoy the hell out of the producer.”

M. Asch

The camera is so distant as to almost parody its satiric coolness — from the couple’s balcony, it looks down to the parking lot to see the antlike drivers of a red and a blue-and-white car beat each other savagely after a minor collision. Godard is undisguised in his disgust for what you could call the automotive insulation of contemporary life — a subtle running joke, if you can call it that, is the way that every screaming breakdown ends with Darc and Yanne back in the front seats like nothing happened.

J Hoberman:

Dramatizing homicidal conflict in the context of inexplicable, matter-of-fact social disaster, Godard’s unrelenting, consistently inventive farrago of grim humor, revolutionary rhetoric, coolly staged hysteria, and universal aggression is pure ’68, an art-house analog to its contemporary, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and one of four new releases forbidden to Catholics by the National Legion of Decency. The Legion condemned a movie; Godard condemned the civilized world.
…
Even before Weekend opened in New York, Godard condemned his previous work and even repudiated the medium that nourished him. He briefly abandoned filmmaking — by the time he returned, the revolution was over. Godard has made some first-rate movies since Weekend … But after Weekend, he would never again command an audience, let alone a generation.

Jean Eustache was in the movie – who was he?

Lots of onscreen text and people talking for ages – signs of Godardian things to come.

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Weekend (PAL DVD)

Oh whoops – I planned to watch Weekend first, to go from the end of Godard’s beloved 60′s period, skip over his purely political post-May-’68 work with Gorin as the Dziga Vertov Group, and resume with Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane. But I forgot, and watched this before Weekend. No matter, probably. But as I’d heard, the Godard of the 60′s never returned after ’68. This is so similar to his 60′s movies, despite the bright pop color, the custom-built sets, meta-movie voiceover, married-couple storyline and (especially) major stars. No, it’s as talky as The Owl’s Legacy.

Long-Distance Singer Yves Montand and newly-oscar-winning Jane Fonda were both known to be politically-engaged, and both were hugely popular at the time, so it was perfect casting for Godard and Gorin – plus an opportunity for them to gripe about Montand’s previous “problematic” political films. But G & G really want to polemicize at length, so they note in the voiceover that the stars were cast and given a jaded love story out of commercial necessity.

Unwitting pawns in Godard and Gorin’s political agenda:

Boss Caprioli:

Opens with JLG’s most cinematic-illusion-shattering move yet, close-ups on all the checks he’s cutting for the film’s stars, technicians, sets and so on. The juicy center of the film (shot in nice loooong shots, many of them motionless) consists mainly of dudes giving long speeches about union labor, class divisions, the political system.

“Under a calm surface, everything’s changing. Everything’s changing within every class. And She and He, swept up in it, also change.” Yves is a formerly-idealistic filmmaker (“a screenwriter during the New Wave”), now doing commercial work. Jane is a radio news reporter, and the two are at a factory office when the workers hold a major strike and lock the boss in his office for five days. So we get interviews with the boss (Vittorio Caprioli of Il Generale della Rovere): “the glaring injustices of Marx’ and Engels’ day are over,” and the shop steward: “our salaries haven’t kept up with increasing production, and even less with corporate profits.” It’s weird for a leftist, pro-workers movie that I can easily find who played the company manager, but not which actor played Stacquet the shop steward.

Some business in a supermarket that I didn’t understand because I wasn’t paying close attention anymore, but the long back-and-forth dolly shot reminded me of the factory scene in Manufactured Landscapes. Yves and Jane at their day jobs. Scenes of the factory in operation, of struggle in the streets. A token love-story-resolution ending in a cafe, which seems extraneous even as a joke, since the couple never got any development.

Great cross-section of the factory offices:

Yves, disillusioned:

From an interview with a wide-eyed bathrobe-clad Godard: “It’s quite striking. When workers are interviewed [on TV], these people are given 15 brief seconds when they haven’t opened their mouths all year. We give them 15 seconds, or even three minutes, to speak. ‘What do you think of the strike? What do you think of your lot in life?’ Who can answer when he’s had his mouth sewn shut?”

Letter To Jane (1972)

An hour-long photo-essay posed as a letter to Jane Fonda, analyzing a newspaper photo of her in Vietnam talking (or, as Godard & Gorin rightly point out, listening) to some unidentified men. She’d visited the country after the filming of Tout Va Bien but before its release, starting the ridiculous “Hanoi Jane” controversy, during which the press took the actions of a movie star more seriously than the war itself.

Godard and Gorin take turns narrating (in English), and each takes pains to avoid any interest in their voice, so the movie becomes a didactic lullaby. I got bored almost immediately.

See also: Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice and Farocki’s Workers Leaving The Factory

Excerpt from a J. Rosenbaum article, graciously explaining what the film was about:

The first text, read by Huillet, is an excerpt from a letter written by Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky describing the impoverished state of the French peasantry on the eve of the French Revolution … we see the various places in France that are described as they appear today … The second part of the film, roughly twice as long, uses a more recent Marxist text about the Egyptian peasants’ resistance to the English occupation prior to the “petit-bourgeois” revolution of Neguib in 1952 – a more journalistic text by Mahmoud Hussein, author of Class Struggles in Egypt. In both sections, it is suggested that the peasants revolt too soon and succeed too late. Once again, the locations cited in the text are filmed by Straub-Huillet … the sites of revolutionary struggle, again mainly rural.

I wish I’d read that right before watching, instead of afterward. But even if I completely missed the filmmakers’ intentions until I researched it later on, I did enjoy the movie. It’s peaceful to watch, and I had fun trying to compare it to other films. I considered Chantal Akerman (From The Other Side) and even Michael Snow (La Region Centrale), but I slowly realized it’s a huge influence on Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind.

After the two long sections, it ends with stock footage and a radio announcer, again bringing to mind Profit Motive with its street-march finale.

Near the beginning, the camera whirls around a traffic circle while we hear something about revolution (get it? circle? revolution?) and the bourgeoisie, then on to other towns and cities. “Out of 130 families there are 60 which are impoverished.” Much space between blocks of narration, giving me time to attempt understanding of the directors’ politics. The narration itself is sometimes not much help – I wish they’d have checked to see if John Hurt had a couple free hours instead of recording it themselves.

Notes I took:
- colonialist readings of Egyptian history
- Peasant revolts vs. French occupiers
- A couple of revolts are put down, old power prevails
- Narration is directly giving us information, but so slowly
- Second narrator is better
- Ferocious repression in Egypt
- Imprisonment, military rounding people up and searching them

At least now I understand the long horizontal-pan establishing shot in Manfred Blank’s documentary that I watched with Class Relations – it’s a reference to this movie.

The longest-held static shot:

After around ninety-five minutes, the camera follows a man with a donkey cart – the first time it’s followed any living thing all movie.

“But it is the reformist petit bourgoise forces sprung from the army who took the initiative of the coup d’etet of 1952″

“And from 1955 to 1967 the mass movement would be dismantled and (courted?) by a new ruling (caste?) inheriting all the vices of the old and betraying the national dignity which had served its ascension.”

More from Rosenbaum – this is excellent:
“The very slow pans, according to Dave Kehr, always move in the same direction as the wind, and it is largely the sense one has of the film’s profound attentiveness to the material world that makes the film so singular a documentary – calling to mind the three living quotations cited by Straub before the screening of the film at the Collective for Living Cinema on April 30, 1983:”

D. W. Griffith at the end of his life: “What modern movies lack is the wind in the trees.”

Rosa Luxembourg: “The fate of insects is not less important than the revolution.”

Cézanne, who painted Mont Saint-Victoire again and again: “Look at this mountain, once it was fire.”

I have no words.

Often I just don’t know what is happening. A title card says “the commisars”, now people are marching with guns, groups are handing scraps of paper to a man who’s collecting them on his bayonet, then a title says “To the telephone office!” What did all those things mean?

It was all very important at the time, a film portrayal of recent political upset and revolution, but with my lack of background in Russian history, most of the movie seems a blur of dates and places and crowds, the significance of most scenes lost, and very few of the alarmingly great compositions of other Eisenstein films. There’s some of the dramatic editing of course – when the crowd is fired upon it seems like single-frame edits, unreal. I don’t think Trotsky comes off well in the end. At least I managed to get used to the unnecessary sound effects all over the DVD.

Buy from Amazon:
October DVD

Funny how I’ve never watched this until now, and everyone else has. Even Katy has seen it more than once. So, moments that seem fresh to me are probably way over-discussed to everyone else. I mentioned the movie to Steve and he says “that sailor sure smashed the hell out of that plate, eh,” referring to one of my favorite bits, a decisive moment of minor rebellion which Eisenstein shows repeatedly, from multiple angles, like an explosion in a Die Hard movie.

Due to unrest over spoiled food, the ship’s captain decides to hang a bunch of crew members – a bad move, since the others have been simmering rage againt their superiors, and choose this moment to mutiny, their leader Vakulinchuk shouting “brothers!” as a rally cry – a shout that will be repeated at the end, when the other battleships descending on Potemkin, presumably to quash the rebellion, choose to join it instead. Before that, the State is shown as brutally repressive, mowing down innocent civilians (children! mothers!) pitilessly on the steps of Odessa, where the ship lands and becomes a heroic symbol to the locals.

An imagined, phantom hanging:

Such an impressive piece of filmmaking and propaganda for the working man, it was banned in Britain and France for fear of sparking revolution. I watched the restored high-def version and was glad to discover that it’s a vibrant, brilliant movie, not the dusty old piece of film history I feared it might be. The movement and editing are rightly acclaimed, but the photography of individual shots is spectacular as well – compares very favorably to those gorgeously-lit Sternberg films I’ve been watching, only this was shot on location.

I dig the the hand-painted red flag hoisted over the ship. The ship’s crazy-haired priest was portrayed as a villain with a cross he wielded as a weapon, on the side of the power elite against the people. A guy in Odessa tries to use the crowd’s fervor for his own purposes, yells out “smash the Jews” and ends up getting smashed himself, the first casualty on the shores.

Buy from Amazon:
Battleship Potemkin [Blu-ray]

Another splendid Sternberg movie with an Alloy Orchestra score – how Criterion spoils us. It’s hard to fully embrace a movie with the dialogue “From now on you are my prisoner of war… and my prisoner of love.” But once I accepted the melodramatic story elements, this was almost the equal of Sternberg’s great Underworld.

Supposedly based on a real person, Emil Jannings is a powerful Russian general who escapes the country during the 1917 revolution (between this, Potemkin and Mother, Russian revolutions have been coming up often) and scrapes by in the U.S. as a Hollywood extra. This is not portrayed as a glamorous career path – note that The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra was made in the same year. We’re also shown a bunch of resentful bastards at the studio costuming department, as if Sternberg and his writer were out to de-glamorize the movie-making process.

Directed by Michael William Powell:

Back in Russia, General Jannings (after his three great movies with Murnau, so already a star) clashes with young idealist revolutionary William Powell (with perhaps a thicker, less refined mustache than he sports in the Thin Man films). I was glad to see Evelyn Brent (Feathers in Underworld) again, and Sternberg and his photographer light her as ecstatically as before. She’s attached to Powell until taken prisoner by Jannings, eventually warming to him and helping him escape once the tables are turned. Later in Hollywood, Powell plans to shame the former general by casting him in a film that re-enacts his defeat, but the general gets too caught up in his nostalgic fervor and dies of a heart attack. Powell seems to forgive him after that, seeing that they both loved their country, just in different ways – which helps explain Evelyn’s split loyalties as well.

Evelyn Brent, revolutionary:

A. Kaes for Criterion:

Von Sternberg seems to have been fascinated by Jannings’s acting style and persona and did not restrain them in The Last Command. Instead, he used the actor’s histrionic theatricality to explore the power of performance and filmic illusion themselves—a subject he would continue to mine for the rest of his career.

Buy from Amazon:
Three Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg DVD

Dramatizes the 1905 Russian Revolution. Although I didn’t know that until I looked it up after the movie, because I know nothing of history or Russia. Apparently Battleship Potemkin is about a military uprising during the same time, and the 1905 events led to the 1917 revolution which took out the Tsars and formed the Soviet Union. So that’s why the ending, which seems tragic, is filmed as if it’s a great victory.

Full of great editing, a few cool overlapping images. Pudovkin worked under Lev Kuleshov, using his teacher’s montage theories to make grand works of propaganda, “far less ambiguously so than his rival Eisenstein.” I was in the mood for some Russian cinema, thought I’d watch a bunch of early features leading up to Emory’s presentation of I Am Cuba on 35mm, but I got busy, only watched this one and missed Cuba.

Brilliantly tense movie, vaguely similar to the other film called Mother I’ve watched recently in that both mothers try to free their sons from jail, becoming more like their sons along the way. In this one, she is partly responsible for his arrest, revealing a cache of weapons he was hiding after his group’s unionist revolt takes a bad turn. Later, she has turned against the state and teamed with the unionists, marching on the prison to free their comrades. Everyone we liked is dead in the end, but the individual is unimportant anyhow; the movement lives on.

J. Jones:
“The montage effects are different from those of Eisenstein, who believed editing was a way of achieving dissonance, making a jagged cinema of conflict. Pudovkin is more lyrical. His cross-cuts, while dramatic, do not break up but enhance the narrative.”

Also checked out:
Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913, Yevgeni Bauer)

Unfortunately, I found it a dullsville tableau drama, despite minor excitement over a mild camera move or two, a flashback and the presence of such a taboo subject as rape in a silent film. Seems like a good study film for an early-cinema class, but it’s not thrilling my current urge to watch quality Russian cinema. The film’s writer played the rapist, ha.

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Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer (DVD)