by ·Comments Off on Every Man For Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard)

“Paul Godard” (Jacques Dutronc of a couple Zulawski films) leaves his hotel and is offered anal sex by the valet, my second JLG movie in a row to address that topic. Then he’s making weird incest jokes with the soccer coach of his daughter (actually Alain Tanner’s daughter), and the movie will stay perverse until the end. After Numero Deux we’re back to scripted domestic dramas with lovely photography, though Amy Taubin ties these two together, “both films dealing with the failure of intimacy and with marriage as hell, particularly for women.”

Divided into sections, also following TV producer Nathalie Baye (a Truffaut regular) and prostitute Isabelle Huppert (who’d just starred in a Chabrol). Marguerite Duras is an offscreen presence in the beginning. The “Slow Motion” segment (this whole film was known as Slow Motion in England) is post-production slow-mo, sequential freeze-frames. At the end we get nice payoffs for Paul’s annoying behavior and the movie’s big disruptive music which had seemed to bother the characters, as he gets hit by a car (in slow motion, of course) then his daughter and ex walk past the musicians playing the movie’s soundtrack.

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Scenario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979)

The rare making-of to come out before the feature, JLG explaining his intentions for the movie they hadn’t shot yet. He speaks of wishing to write vertically on a typewriter instead of horizontally. The two women move in opposite directions, Huppert in the direction of meaning, while the man tries to fly above it all… explains his philosophy of superimposition and dissolves, which I only half followed, and of slow motion which mostly makes sense. I wondered with his idea of the music being secretly diegetic if he’d seen Noroit and Duelle. Says he compared lighting notes with Wim Wenders, who I think was working on Hammett. He plans for a scene where Denise will go into a forest “and in the forest she’d run into Werner Herzog… who will introduce, with typical German madness, the world that lies behind things… Perhaps all this isn’t very clear.”

by ·Comments Off on Numéro Deux (1975, Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard in a dim room with a videocamera on him and a monitor, so he appears twice from different angles, talking an awful lot, but the main thing I remember is how he thinks puns are useful and wishes people took them more seriously.

Female narrator suggests what this film might be about while we see three TV screens and a dark figure in front DJing with tape reels.

TV monitor split-screens with bird sounds mixed with the dialogue.

Kinda turns into a family story and a sex-ed movie. “I sometimes look at my cock. That isn’t cinema, though.”

Amy Taubin calls it “a vitriolic indictment of the sexual politics of the nuclear family” and says it’s the first Godard feature in which Miéville’s influence is evident. In Everything is Cinema, Richard Brody says Godard had accepted a commission to make a Breathless follow-up, hence the title, and says the finished film “has the unpleasant aspect of a medical document.”

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 8: Plot & Narrative (Godard/Brakhage/Myers)

Three films from “The Destruction of Plot and Narrative” section of the Vogel.

There is an unbroken evolution towards vertical rather than horizontal explorations – investigations of atmosphere and states of being rather than the unfolding of fabricated plots … art once again returns to poetry and the significance of poetic truth … The elegant characters created by the older masters of world literature, the “full” explanations of human behavior, the delineations of the characters’ past, are replaced by dimly-perceived personages whose actions and motives remain ultimately as unclear as they are in real life: we are all enmeshed in knowledge of others or self that is forever incomplete, forever tinged with ambiguity.

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Akran (1969, Richard Myers)

Clips in slow-mo with freeze-frames of… well, if I start listing all the footage sources, I’ll never stop. An Aaron Eckhart-type guy lying in a bed that’s rolling through a park is a memorable image. Entire scenes are constructed from stills, but out of order. Gives the impression of a normal narrative about an attractive young couple who get married, the rushes then handed to a team of maniacs who hated the film but were contractually obligated to turn in a feature-length edit.

Some kind of malicious Marclay-like tape manipulations on the soundtrack. The sound occasionally corresponds to the image, but when people speak we never hear them, instead we hear a cut-up interview about having sex with the devil. Shocker when there’s a sound-synced monologue a half hour in – an older guy who, in keeping with the rest of the film, starts repeating himself. Later, an overlapping montage of monologues may cause insanity in the viewer. A poor moviewatcher myself, an art unappreciator, whenever the audio got too extremely harsh I’d skip ahead a couple minutes.

What even happens in the movie… definitely some dreams, some politics, probably a semi-story of newlyweds hitting the town, fucking and fighting. Escalates somehow to blindfolded executions, gas masks, a mob attacking a car. Ends on a long still of bus passengers – I feel like that’s a callback to a scene I’ve already forgotten.

A lifelong Ohioan, Myers was teaching at Kent State when the cops killed those kids.

Vogel:

Described by the director as an “anxious allegory and chilling album of nostalgia,” its penetrating monomania is unexpectedly – subversively – realized to be a statement about America today: the alienation and atomization of technological consumer society is reflected in the very style of the film.

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A Married Woman (1964, Jean-Luc Godard)

A round-haired girl lays naked in bed – she’s Charlotte (Macha Méril, murdered psychic of Deep Red), with a plain-looking guy (Bernard Noël of Roger Vadim’s La Ronde remake). They love each other, but she’s married to someone else (Philippe Leroy of Le Trou, Monocle Guy of The Night Porter). Very unusually for a French chick, she won’t show us her boobs. Lovely shots of legs and hands though, fading out and into the next one, before they stand up and semi-normal scenes proceed. But JLG isn’t here to make a normal love triangle movie, and after we see her with both guys for a half hour, it proceeds to numbered interview segments, the husband then wife explaining their philosophies to unseen/unheard interviewer.

Vogel:

The “plot” of Une Femme Mariée – twenty-four hours with a woman between husband and a lover – is… merely a pretext for vertical, in-depth explorations of values, atmospheres, textures; of relationships, lies, ignorance of self, sex-as-communication. For audiences brought up on Hollywood, the style, tempo, and content of the film is maddening … Alienation is caused in the love scenes by fragmentation and in the interview scenes by the use of real time. This prevents conventional identification with the protagonists, rather compelling the viewer, in Brechtian manner, to ponder the social ramifications of the action.

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Anticipation of the Night (1958, Stan Brakhage)

Silent film, so I asked the AI chatbot what music the late Brakhage intended me to play while watching, and it said selections from Thumbscrew’s Never Is Enough, which coincidentally I just bought on half-price sale. I played six of the CD’s 9 songs, treating them like chapters of the film.

“Camp Easy”
Light filtering through glass indoors, intercut with wild swinging camera among nighttime street lights, a silhouette figure opens the door and goes on a trip. Suburbs through a car window, but cutting back and forth to the house.

“Never Is Enough”
The figure returns home, tumbles through the yard, sees a rainbow in the garden hose spray, just as I did 15 minutes ago. Awesome transition through color fields to the night streets as the camera walks into a bush, as if the night hides inside the shrubbery. With all the quick intercutting to the dark scenes I’m starting to make sense of the title. The music gets amped when a baby is sighted in the grass, filmed in constant motion and way too close, of course.

“Emojis Have Consequences”
There’s not much to see in the night scenes – I can’t tell the moon from the streetlights. This must be one of Stan’s films about seeing, how the world was seen before we understood what we saw? An orange color field then the night scenes pick up when we visit an amusement park, the camera panning fast as children whip from left to right, then the camera-eye gets onto the ride.

“Fractured Sanity”
More rides, beginning with the ferris wheel, then a chill merry-go-round for younger kids, showing how the young riders and the surrounding lights look from each ride, Mary Halvorson’s pinging guitar helping greatly with the blurry nighttime feeling. We leave the park and examine some lit-up atrium from the dark distance, in a series of precision movements.

“Unsung Procession”
Driving, trees rush overhead, flash glimpses of a deer, of children in bed, the lighting and music both more blue than before. Wow, the kids are dreaming a water bird, flapping and preening, filmed in zoomed-in fragments, or all at once but defocused.

“Scam Likely”
Is the sun rising or has he wheeled a giant lamp into the sleeping kids’ room? I think the latter. Still intercutting to the nighttime trees, and now a bear instead of the bird. Flashing between night and dawn as the music gets more loopy, then firmly into morning, the silhouette person hanging disturbingly from a rope in the tree.

In the Defining Moments book Fred Camper calls it Brakhage’s first major masterpiece, and says it is not one of the child’s-eye films:

Quite the contrary, it opens with a man’s shadow falling across the frame … we observe his travels as he tries to establish some connection to the world. But except for some brief bursts of light poetry, such as flickering shadows on the wall, the film is largely a depiction of abject failure … the mechanical movements of the [amusement park] rides are the severest versions of the almost mechanical repeating motions through which the camera depicts most of the film’s world, trapping all in the kinds of fixed movements and mechanical rhythms that Brakhage’s later work largely overcame.

by ·Comments Off on The Image Book (2018) and Jean-Luc Godard shorts

Stereo sound hard-panning left and right, songs cutting in and out, incomplete subtitles, footage warped and effected, recolored, switching to the wrong aspect ratios on purpose, speed-adjusted and frame-by-framed, interlacing, watermarks. He’s taking the “I invented the jump-cut” thing a little far, with an entire movie of technical errors.

Vertigo, Salo, L’Atalante, Alphaville, The Flowers of St. Francis, Freaks. Testament of Orpheus matched with Die Nibelungen. The Rules of the Game rabbit hunt. Paintings and late-era Scott Walker.

Doc footage of horrors to people and animals. Obviously there’s a point to distorting and mutating the film footage and in flipping between fictional and actual atrocities. “This is the law of destruction of the living. Every being must be sacrificed,” says gravel-voiced JLG, or at least that’s what the subtitles tell us he’s saying.

The nature of art and war are covered, briefly. Focus on Russia, trains, physical film apparatus, the Muslim world. Named/numbered chapters, but I’m not sure they help anything. Politically, he seems to be in a terrible mood.

You do eventually drift into its rhythm, or its lack of rhythm. Towards the end it feels like he might start telling us a coherent story about a would-be conqueror named Sheik Ben Kadem (“but the world wasn’t as simple as his dream” sounds like Adam Curtis) illustrated by the jumble of sources he’s been establishing… alas, JLG is just reading scraps from a 1980’s novel, and the subtitles lose interest in following him.

It’s such a homemade UFO, I’d believe you if you told me he made it alone in a weekend, or that it took many years with a team of researchers.

Blake Williams:

These are films that ignite every interpretative impulse in our brains without satisfying our desires to be passive, unproductive viewers; they do not give clarity or any obvious avenues through the deluge of information, even if they make us feel as though, were we smarter, more knowledgable, bilingual cinephiles, we would be able to do just that. It’s in this way that Godard’s films also invite us to improve ourselves, something I think very few other artists achieve.

Will Sloan:

Many years ago, Godard attempted to create a style of cinema that could inspire revolutionary change. At this point, he seems to not only regard such a thing as impossible, but also regards cinema as a tool of violence and colonialism. In the film’s longest and most lucid section, he argues for the Arab World as a lost paradise hurt by western intervention, and cinema as a tool of oppression (in his narration, he says something along the lines of “all representation is violence”). He doesn’t seem to draw a distinction between classical Hollywood cinema, news footage, Blu-Rays, and amateur cell phone video — he suggests they have all basically been flattened into the same thing.

Michael Sicinski:

In his comparison of war footage and fictional violence, Godard posits the old problem: which representation is the original, and what inspired what? The connections are pre-cognitive and deeply intuitive, posed as questions, and (like so much in late Godard) recall Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. How have images — both “cursed” and “blessed,” in the current parlance — dipped and ducked into the unconscious across the ages, forming something like a universal art history?

Lawrence Garcia:

If, as Godard intones early on, pledging allegiance to the ideas of Swiss cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont, man’s condition is indeed “to think with hands,” then what happens when cinema subverts or displaces that tactile state? When a hand becomes, as in Godard’s famed aphorism, “not a just image, but just an image”? When real violence becomes conflated with the violence of representation? In a choice that will strike some as crass at best, and exploitative at worst, Godard continually rhymes the two, in one instance placing gruesome footage of ISIS throwing bloodied bodies into the water against the scene in Vertigo (1958) in which Scottie rescues Madeleine from the San Francisco Bay. The ultimate point that Godard arrives at here, though, is fairly direct: which is that cinema—even revolutionary, politically minded cinema—has not clarified, but obscured the reality of the Holocaust and other attendant horrors, and instead contributed to a larger confusion, an effective “flattening” of reality. (That the clenched fist of revolution is here traded in for a raised index finger is instructive.)

Sam C. Mac:

The Image Book ends with another display of madness that would be a more than appropriate sendoff for the French New Wave figurehead’s restless career. Taken from Max Ophüls’s Le Plaisir, it’s a sequence of a man dancing and spinning around furiously until, finally, he falls down. This moment also serves as a canny reminder that, whatever effort it takes to understand the exact nature of the work that Godard is doing here, he’s also exerting that effort with us—and he seems to mind not at all if he collapses in the process.

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As a memorial screening, I watched one JLG short film per decade…

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Une Femme Coquette (1955)

Agnès writes a letter to a friend to confess cheating on her husband, having witnessed a discreet prostitute picking up men from the street and wondering if she’d have the courage to do the same. The woman is portrayed as complicated, and the men (including JLG himself) as impulsive dickbrains. The filmmakers bring Guy de Maupassant’s apartment-balcony story outdoors, showing off Geneva parks, bridges and birds. Ten years later, Masculin Féminin was sold as an adaptation of the same story before being completely rewritten.

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Montparnasse-Levallois (1965)

From the Paris vu par anthology, which people say is quite good overall but I’ll watch the rest some other time. In very mobile long takes, Monica comes to her bf’s metalworking studio to tell him about a delicate mixup: she’s sent two telegrams to her two men and mixed up the addresses. He doesn’t buy it and kicks her out, so she runs to her other metalworker bf’s place. Both guys are caught up in their work and don’t stop to listen to her. Seems she didn’t mix up the addresses after all, and Roger also kicks her out. Some tech issues here, a bad post-dub, but cute.

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Schick (1971)

Brief, noisy apartment scene, filmed mostly from behind the actors, to sell aftershave. You can’t tell a whole lot from my unsubbed copy but apparently that’s Juliet Berto and they’re arguing about Palestine, haha. Don’t know whether this aired, but it made some quick cash for the Dziga-Vertov Group.

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Puissance de la parole (1988)

The Power of Speech is the opposite of Goodbye to Language. Filmmaking apparatus, overlapping hypnotized dialogue, a bitter post-breakup conversation transmitted through 1980’s phones and satellites. Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan songs, used less abruptly than in the later features.

Strobing edits (cutting between sky/water/volcano looks cool) and space-age philosophy. I’ve always liked movies where two people speak abstractly at the shore. A couple of Rivettian ghosts on the beach: Warok and a Gang of Four lead. “No thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result.”

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L’enfance de l’Art (1993, w/ Mieville)

A woman reads to a boy, a book about revolt and revolution, while violent battles and children’s games go on around them. Nice string music, an action scene, a bazooka.

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Liberty and Homeland (2002, w/ Miéville)

I did not realize Godard had a 9/11 film, or that he ever used dub music in his work. Male and female narrators go off about France and art, finally settling on a story of a (fictional) painter. Blending sources with different aspect ratios, extremely enhancing the colors – it was all there 20 years ago.

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Remerciements de JLG (2015)

Godard totters home muttering in scraps and quotes, falls down, and delivers a speech from the floor about cinema and the lack of it, gets up to his desk and talks politics and poetry – all this in five minutes.

by ·Comments Off on Goodbye to Language (2014, Jean-Luc Godard)

Shots seem indifferently framed, scenes make no sense, the cameras seem low-grade… but his films are far-between now, and this showed up on best-of-decade lists, and in particular the experimental/avant-garde/art list I’ve been following… and Godard has spent more time than anyone thinking about the moving image, so even if I’m not especially entertained, there must be something here.

The sound pans, then cuts abruptly, as does the picture. Was that… a fart joke? Yup, and a conversation about pooping later. Really a lot of nudity and flickering televisions. At least one of the nude couples is an affair (“What does your husband do?”). I assumed while watching that the couples in the first half and second half were the same, maybe at different times, but no, the wikis tell me they were “intentionally cast to physically resemble each other.” The four lead actors were not well-known – their recent roles at the time included Woman in tears, Boxing trainer, Hotel receptionist, and French woman #3.

Originally, I put this off because I couldn’t see it in 3D, and maybe I should’ve put it off some more, because THE SHOT is missing in my version.

Beginning of THE SHOT:

A quarter of the movie is Godard taking his dog for a walk. White God came out the same year, so Godard’s dog Roxy had to settle for the Palme Dog runner-up. I’d still like to see Mommy and Mr. Turner and Saint Laurent from that year’s competition, the others not so much.

AO Scott called it “baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.” There’s more writing, and I meant to watch this twice, but who’s got time anymore. I liked it about as much as other Godard features I’ve seen from this century: Notre Musique, In Praise of Love, Film Socialism… but give me Nouvelle Vague any day.

by ·Comments Off on La Chinoise (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

Catching up… I watched this three weeks ago, and the only note I took says:

Unfun intellectual/political word games

Obviously it’s a complicated (if unfun) movie, so a one-line review will not do. This is where my lack of biographical knowledge on Godard (and lack of interest in 1960’s politics) holds me back, because this feels like an escalation of ideas about consumerism and radicalism and societal ills from 2 or 3 Things and Weekend… but it also feels like a parody, its characters deluded comic-book Mao radicals. This doesn’t seem right, since the ideals of our main characters seem similar to Godard’s own, in his later, more boring works.

Feels like we spend forever in the primary-color apartment with young commies Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto (her first year in film) and Anne Wiazemsky (star of Au Hasard Balthazar the year before). But there’s also an assassination attempt, a guy exiled from the group, suicide, some fun self-reflexivity, and an endless train conversation with a philosophy professor. Literature references abound, apparently, and name-dropping of Katy’s favorite theorists.

Played Venice the year Belle de Jour won, tying China is Near for a jury prize.

by ·Comments Off on Band of Outsiders (1964, Jean-Luc Godard)

Anna Karina (between Vivre Sa Vie and Alphaville) tells her classmate Sami Frey (Thérèse Desqueyroux, a couple William Klein movies) that her employer keeps cash in the house. She starts dating Sami’s friend Claude Brasseur (the younger Brasseur in Eyes Without a Face), who hears about the money, and the three plan (barely) a heist. Thanks to Arthur’s big mouth, some armed criminal relative finds out and intercepts them, then Anna and Sami escape following a deadly shootout. But the movie’s not about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about it.

Another rewatch from 2003, a pre-blog year when I watched a ton of movies that I now barely remember. My belly is a table.

by ·Comments Off on Far From Vietnam (1967)

Piecemeal protest doc with surprisingly great location footage and interesting scenes, each one a bit too loud and going on for too long. The pieces are mostly unsigned, but I believe Chris Marker put the project together, and some segments are either identified online, or just very easily guessed (ahem, Resnais). They mention that Joris Ivens shot on location – most everyone else stayed home and used stock footage or filmed protest marches.

“It is in Vietnam that the main question of our time arises: the right of the poor to establish societies based on something else than the interests of the rich.”

Cluster-bomb:

Supposed to be President Johnson:

The Resnais segment is interesting before it wears out its welcome. Bernard Fresson (of a few Resnais films, including a small part in Je t’aime, je t’aime) is playing “writer Claude Ridder” (name of the lead character in Je t’aime, je t’aime played by Claude Rich) while a woman Karen Blanguernon (Rene Clement’s The Deadly Trap) glares from the corner of his office. This segment was written by Jacques Sternberg (Je t’aime, je t’aime, of course), so perhaps Claude Ridder was his standard lead character name, since this Ridder seems too impassioned to be the heartbroken dead soul from the feature. “Ridder” monologues on the war, politics, and his own inability to make change. “A spineless French intellectual articulating excuses for his class’s political apathy,” per the NY Times.

Next, a history lesson using stock footage, photographs and comics, drawing connections to the Spanish Civil War (the Resnais had mentioned Algeria).

Then Godard, who monologues in front of a giant film camera, talking about the distance, his inability to connect with the war itself, or even the French working class, the focus of so many of his films. Since he can’t film on-location, he inserts Vietnam into his feature films. “I make films. That’s the best I can do for Vietnam. Instead of invading Vietnam with a kind of generosity that makes things unnatural, we let Vietnam invade us.”

After a jaunty music video to a protest song by Tom Paxton, a longer somber voiceover reading the words of Michele Ray who spent three weeks with the Viet Cong, showing her footage before it goes crazy at the end.

“Why We Fight,” in which General Westmoreland explains the official U.S. position on the war, filmed off a TV while someone zooms around and twiddles knobs. Title must be referencing the 1940’s U.S. propaganda film series Why We Fight, which Joris Ivens contributed to.

Anti-napalm rabbi:

Monologue by Fidel Castro, who gives his theories on guerrilla warfare and how this applies to Vietnam. The new wavers seemed to have easy access to Fidel back then.

Ann Uyen, a Vietnamese woman living in Paris discusses Norman Morrison’s setting himself on fire outside the pentagon, and what that meant to her people. “We think that in America there is another war, a people’s war against everything that’s unfair.” Then an interview with Norman’s widow, who seems in sync with Norman’s politics. This was by William Klein.

War protest zombie walk, probably shot by Klein:

Marker’s outro:

In facing this defiance [of the Vietnamese], the choice of rich society is easy: either this society must destroy everything resisting it – but the task may be bigger than its means of destruction – or it will have to transform itself completely – but maybe it’s too much for a society at the peak of its power. If it refuses that option, it will have to sacrifice its reassuring illusions, to accept this war between the poor and the rich as inevitable, and to lose it.

by ·Comments Off on Cinétracts and other Chris Marker shorts

Cinétracts (1968)

I watched a collection containing roughly half of the Cinetracts, an anonymously-directed series of two-to-five-minute shorts. The first few seemed to be protest-photo montages, and I thought watching a bunch of these in a row would be tiresome so I spaced it out over a few weeks. Some are very different though, telling stories/poems with intertitles or scrawling words directly onto the photos, using different forms of movement and speeds of editing. Some use zooms and dissolves, bringing the photos to life, others are simply long takes of photos interspersed with titles, wordplay, pages from books.

Contributors supposedly included Godard, Marker, Resnais, Gorin, Philippe Garrel (same year he made Le Révélateur), Jackie Raynal (editor on half the Six Moral Tales), Jean-Denis Bonan (Jean Rollin’s editor at the time), Gerard Fromanger and Jacques Loiseleux (later cinematographer for Ivens, Pialat and Yves Boisset). Marker was busy – this project overlapped his SLON collective and Groupe Medvedkine.

Gary Elshaw has by far the most useful work on the Cinetracts online, even if it’s only about Godard’s contributions.

The purpose of the Ciné-Tracts, as with most of Godard’s 1968 film projects, was to offer a critically alternative source of ‘news’ or information in contrast to the commercially offered mediums available. … The state censorship of the media throughout the events of May necessitated communication along different lines than had existed before.

Other online writing on these tends to focus on determining which ones Godard made (and they can’t seem to agree).

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Casque Bleu (1995)

Info dump by a cynical Frenchman who acted as a UN peacekeeper during one of the Yugoslav wars. He speaks rapidly in close-up, with occasional title cards for different topics and cutaways to a photo album.

“When you’re in a country at war, armed, and you have orders not to use weapons, in actual fact you are on the side of the aggressor, the one who’s trying to conquer the land.”

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Description of a Struggle (1960)

Watched this again with much improved picture quality and English voiceover. Had been burning to see it again since watching Dan Geva’s Description of a Memory. Still great, but I think I prefer Sunday in Peking. Noticed this time when the voiceover said “bar kokhba,” which is apparently not only the name of a John Zorn music project.