Mastroianni plays our director’s stand-in again. Following a hot woman off a train in the middle of nowhere, he stumbles into a hidden hotel hosting a theatrical feminist convention. The women drive him into the night in a crazed caravan until he’s rescued by a dude with plenty of weapons and dogs… sees a telekinetic performance… descends a giant slide while reminiscing about various hot chicks… then the women put him on trial for sexism, ho hum.

No part of this is realistic, all dream-logic. Does it play circus music whenever things get zany? Sure as hell it does. We love Marcello, and Fellini is good at filming beautiful people and things, but it’s a Petrov’s Flu situation.

Look like somebody wanted to remake Resident Evil 6 – this looks more similar to RE6 than any other movie looks to RE6, even other Resident Evil movies, and Milla is even named Alice again. There’s some Monster Hunter thrown in (they are in the wasteland hunting monsters) and some post-apocalyptic Mad Maxisms. I haven’t been going out to the movie theater this year, missing important big-screen pictures like Nickel Boys and The Brutalist and Mickey 17, but prioritized this because I thought it would be… not great exactly, but fun/cool, and I nailed it.

Deep Lore sourced from an early George RR Martin story, Milla plays a cursed(?) magic mind-control witch, hunting a mighty werewolf alongside softie tough-guy Dave Bautista who thinks he’s hiding his werewolf identity from her, at the behest of Queen Amara Okereke (British theater actress), pursued by fanatical church assassin Arly Jover (Blade). Some good train action, including an escape from dangling railcars that doesn’t hold up great against the last Mission Impossible, some good fire, and too many CG snakes. The queen’s rival for control of the people “the patriarch” is Fraser James of Shopping, Anderson’s longest-running actor. Bautista’s girlfriend is Deirdre Mullins of Mandrake, her equally doomed business partner is the Polish Sebastian Stan. I said if this turned out to be good then I’ve gotta watch Pompeii, and I guess I’ve gotta.

Opens with a heist, Peter Fonda collecting money from the manager whose family is held hostage by his partner Deke (biker-movie regular Adam Roarke). Dirty drifter Susan George (Straw Dogs) gets in the way so they take her along. Sheriff Vic Morrow takes this pursuit personally and throws all resources into the chase. Car swappin’, fast drivin’, and drawbridge jumpin’ ensue, up to the requisite ’70s downbeat ending (our group is flattened by a train). Amazing to read that a lab error led to the movie being badly color-shifted for its first 30 years. Hough was mostly a horror guy, made The Legend of Hell House, the Cassavetes Incubus, and a Howling sequel.

Movie is known for its car action but I only gasped at this helicopter:

I had rewatched O Brother and La Samourai the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow. Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, Star Trek-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks of a Bad Movie, but the lead baddie’s babytalk gibberish barking has stuck with me over the years, and “Hellraiser In Space” is one of my favorite genres, and it’s a John Carpenter movie about a group of cops and criminals who come under assault in a precinct, so perhaps it’s actually good? I’m here to tell you that it’s not good.

Natasha “Species” Henstridge becomes team leader after Pam Grier is beheaded, assisted by rookie Jason Statham. The team’s mission before getting derailed by alien assault was to escort dangerous prisoner Ice Cube to a different facility, but of course it becomes necessary for cops and crooks to team up for survival against the invaders – who are not aliens really, but self-mutilating zombie humans a la Return of the Living Dead 3 led by the Marilyn Mansonesque Richard Cetrone (the merman in Cabin in the Woods), possessed by the spirits of the planet’s native inhabitants as a defense against colonizers.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Carpenter goes for an ambitious but not entirely successful mash-up of his earlier works … The film’s otherwise standard action template is given weirdly dreamlike shape through flashback-within-flashback narration and surreal superimpositions, to the point that it feels like a dirge for a type of filmmaking gone out of fashion. Even the KISS-style monster makeup confirms that nothing has changed since the ’80s, the red hell of Martian future just an apocalyptic projection of the capitalist wasteland we’ve been speeding into since the days of Reaganomics.

Color Film (1971, Standish Lawder)

A reminder that experimental film is actually fun to watch. We re-read the chapter on minimalist/structuralist film in the Vogel, then watch “a fine example of pure minimal cinema,” expecting the camera to just be facing a wall or something, and instead I get a blast of color and movement set to a raucous Zappa song.


Eisenbahn (1967, Lutz Mommartz)

Not fun but surely hypnotic, facing square out a train window. Occasional edits, and light obstructions when we can clearly see the cameraperson’s reflection, but I’m not dedicated enough to get a still frame of those.


Naissant (1964, Stephen Dwoskin)

The same length as the train movie, both of them bringing to mind Vogel’s comment “there is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety” Funny to watch this the day after Je Tu Il Elle, as it’s a long wordless focus on a seemingly troubled dark-haired girl sitting in bed. No bag of sugar or letter writing, and this movie stays closer to her face and cuts far more often. The girl is Beverly Grant, a major underground actress who was in Flaming Creatures the year before.

Vogel also points to Kiss and Sleep by Warhol, but instead let’s watch more Dwoskin (I’ve only previously seen his Dirty).


Soliloquy (1969, Stephen Dwoskin)

Almost a remake of Naissant but this time we see mostly her hands, and we hear her thoughts in voiceover. She’s divorced, depressed. “I wish I were pretty.”


Moment (1968, Stephen Dwoskin)

Close-up with no editing this time. Another dark-haired girl, smoking and masturbating. Who needs Warhol, anyway? The soundtrack is some kind of horrible industrial howl.

Interesting tone in this movie, a perfect-crime hijack-ransom plot pulled off by a crack criminal team, but instead of no-nonsense city police on the other side of the phone line we get a droll workplace drama starring Walter Matthau as lead transit cop, a sickly coward mayor (Lee Wallace, who’d also play the mayor in Batman), and timely jokes on camera-toting Japanese tourists and women in the workplace.

Robert Shaw (Robin and Marian‘s sheriff) is the lead baddie, serious about his deadlines and their consequences, and on his team is the ex-train operator who knows the system, the loose cannon, and the guy without a strong personality. The city scrambles to come up with the money, which it does in time to save almost all the hostages, then Matthau turns to preventing the color-coded criminals’ escape. One is killed by a cop, the other by his own men, and the leader third-rails himself to avoid capture. They track the final guy (Martin Balsam, later of Mitchell!) by looking through the records of fired train operators, recognizing the sick criminal during an apartment interview by his sneeze, previously heard over the intercom, and I ask you, is this the final shot of a serious crime movie?

Some of the most daredevil action ever filmed, with the all-time flimsiest setup (the cops say drug smuggling is out of hand, requiring some kind of “super cop,” so Jackie Chan is called in). Maggie is left behind to be annoying alone, while Jackie springs a criminal from prison to gain his trust, then Michelle Yeoh pretends to be Jackie’s sister and saves their asses when they get busted while undercover. It’s a 1992 action movie, which means there are bazookas, and really too many things get blown up. But damn, Yeoh jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train.

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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.”


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.


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.


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.

Barbara Hershey, who also appears in two (but not all) of Scorsese’s movies where someone gets crucified, sees her cropduster daddy die then hits the Depression-era road. She and family friend Von (Bernie Casey of The Man Who Fell to Earth, In the Mouth of Madness) and railworker Bill (David Carradine, whose dad plays a railroad bigwig) meet up in various places and get into hijinks. Good performances, especially in the second half, and some sharp editing, but this is more a Roger Corman period adventure story than anything else.

Bertha caught between two Carradines:

The cops and strikebreakers in this are real pieces of shit. She meets a moneyman called Rake, she shoots a guy who calls everyone he dislikes a red, and she jailbreaks her friends… there’s a nice classic car wreck off a cliff, another gets smashed by a train, there are some shotgun murders, and Bertha and friends become professional bank robbers. She’s freed from a whorehouse by Von, but both guys finally get busted.

Von taking care of business:

Strikebreaker on the left would become a Scorsese regular, mustache guy would disappear.