Film Socialisme
Why would anyone view this movie? As it happens, lots of fine reasons are happy to present themselves, including the incredible Kurosawa-like colors, the inexplicable humor and absurdity, the presence of singer Patti Smith, the freedom of expression that feels like an ocean in the center of Nebraska, and the attempt to keep track of the number of deliberate cinematic errors. The latter issue in particular cracks me up and here's why: The errors only appear to be errors. I've read where director Jean-Luc Godard was trying to say something about the limitations of video. As a member of the viewing audience, I'm not certain I care all that much about the motives of the director. What I care about is what the film suggests on a subjective level. What Film Socialisme suggests is less limitations than possibilities. For instance, there are a couple scenes that appear in the cruise ship disco that give the appearance of having been shot with the video feature of a cell phone, with the sound being volume distorted and the visuals being grossly overexposed, both presumably technical deficiencies--except it works because the freaky colors and crumbled sounds evoke the feeling of being there better than all the expensive lenses and filters and digital transfers ever could do.
And sound is a crucial element of this movie. An off-screen conversation plays through the left speaker while an on-screen monologue relays through the right, and all of this comes into balance with the ocean roar blaring beneath the hull in perfectly leveled stereo. The effect is that the viewer's senses are treated as if he or she is right there on the ship.
A few words should be mentioned about the dialogue and the subtitles. First, French is not the only language spoken in this movie. For instance, I especially enjoyed the scene where the woman says goodbye in Russian ("Dasvidania") and the old man replies "Heil Hitler." Second, the subtitles are incomplete on purpose. That's part of the fun. If you take the thing too seriously, you'll become frustrated fast. The idea is that you are on a cruise ship (this one, by the way, sunk in the Mediterranean in January of this year) and part of what happens is that you only catch certain disparate snatches of speech. Technical inadequacies are just a part of life.
And sound is a crucial element of this movie. An off-screen conversation plays through the left speaker while an on-screen monologue relays through the right, and all of this comes into balance with the ocean roar blaring beneath the hull in perfectly leveled stereo. The effect is that the viewer's senses are treated as if he or she is right there on the ship.
A few words should be mentioned about the dialogue and the subtitles. First, French is not the only language spoken in this movie. For instance, I especially enjoyed the scene where the woman says goodbye in Russian ("Dasvidania") and the old man replies "Heil Hitler." Second, the subtitles are incomplete on purpose. That's part of the fun. If you take the thing too seriously, you'll become frustrated fast. The idea is that you are on a cruise ship (this one, by the way, sunk in the Mediterranean in January of this year) and part of what happens is that you only catch certain disparate snatches of speech. Technical inadequacies are just a part of life.
Two in the Wave
Two in the Wave (2010) sings the song of friendship gone adrift. The two friends, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, were the front line of what has become known as the French New Wave in Cinema beginning around late 1957 and ending, if it ever did, around 1973 when Godard and Truffaut exchanged some frank and unpleasant letters calling one another out for various betrayals of talent.
The dissolution of a working partnership (the best example of which is Breathless, which was co-written by the two men, these cinematic Lennon and McCartney) feels bitter even now as we watch Emmanuel Laurent's documentary draw us in on the revolutionary aesthetics of two men who began as film critics and ended up the lenses of their generation.
Here is what the film's own website has to say about the two prominent figures:
Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930, François Truffaut two years later, and they met for the love of the cinema. They wrote in the same magazines, the Cahiers du cinema and Arts. When the cadet became filmmaker, with the 400 Blows, which triumphed at Cannes in 1959, he helped his protege to go to the achievement, offering him his scenario already entitled Breathless. Throughout the 1960s, they shook the elbows.
That blurb is accurate. But it does not convey just how much fun you may have as you connect with either or both or neither of these monumental characters. Truffaut was always burning for the story, the story, yes, give me biography or autobiography, merci! Godard, contrariwise, saw himself as a man of the people, a man of the street, and with the Paris riots of May 1968, Godard recognized the role of art in politics.
As their friendship/partnership strains under the weight of this difference of emphasis, they compete for the attention of actors, for awards, for analysis, for everything, in the process making some wonderful movies and a certain share of slop.
You do not have to be a film aficionado to enjoy this motion picture. You do not necessarily need to know who the two men are. It is enough, I suspect, to care about the mutual engagement these two geniuses experienced: a love of movies.
The dissolution of a working partnership (the best example of which is Breathless, which was co-written by the two men, these cinematic Lennon and McCartney) feels bitter even now as we watch Emmanuel Laurent's documentary draw us in on the revolutionary aesthetics of two men who began as film critics and ended up the lenses of their generation.
Here is what the film's own website has to say about the two prominent figures:
Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930, François Truffaut two years later, and they met for the love of the cinema. They wrote in the same magazines, the Cahiers du cinema and Arts. When the cadet became filmmaker, with the 400 Blows, which triumphed at Cannes in 1959, he helped his protege to go to the achievement, offering him his scenario already entitled Breathless. Throughout the 1960s, they shook the elbows.
That blurb is accurate. But it does not convey just how much fun you may have as you connect with either or both or neither of these monumental characters. Truffaut was always burning for the story, the story, yes, give me biography or autobiography, merci! Godard, contrariwise, saw himself as a man of the people, a man of the street, and with the Paris riots of May 1968, Godard recognized the role of art in politics.
As their friendship/partnership strains under the weight of this difference of emphasis, they compete for the attention of actors, for awards, for analysis, for everything, in the process making some wonderful movies and a certain share of slop.
You do not have to be a film aficionado to enjoy this motion picture. You do not necessarily need to know who the two men are. It is enough, I suspect, to care about the mutual engagement these two geniuses experienced: a love of movies.
Godard in America
In some ways people may find it difficult to sympathize with the political views of an artist, even though that artist's ideological aspirations seldom seem to ripple the social current, at least minus a few initial snickers. When a half-decent actor such as Ronald Reagan or his son Arnold Schwarzenegger elect to rule the country of California, the populace collectively shrugs and says to itself that, all in all, the world could do worse. But just let the Dixie Chicks or Pierre Perret or even Rio Reiser make a disparaging comment about the right of leaders to invoke the privileges of war and look out helter skelter.
Granted, this repulsion of ideology tends to only puke up at the left or, in a few cases, at the right, when the work of the reactionary signals just how horribly amateurish it is, and here I am thinking of things like The Ground Floor production of The Tea Party Movie (2009), an unmitigated piece of subhuman detritus, if such a thing ever existed. The objections take on an overtone of intolerance gone berserk, with such non sequiturs offered as , "Shut up and sing."
Things have not always been quite so lame. The time was when a nice man named Ralph Thanhauser decided it would be a Nietzsche-is-Peachy idea to document the coming to America of cinema gods Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, or in short, the Dziga Vertov Group that had been formed in Paris in 1968, a fascinating cooperative bent on making political films. And indeed they did, nine of them in all. The topic, more or less, of Godard in America (1970), is that Godard and Gorin came to the states to gain financing for a movie they planned about Palestine. The issue of the Israeli presence in the Middle East gets equated with workers struggles everywhere and Godard even mentions in the film that the beauty of Chinese communism is that instead of having one thousand books that you must read to approximate the truth, with Mao you only need one. He was evidently serious.
A story is told that Jean-Luc met with Elliott Gould to discuss the possibility of the Frenchman directing my all-time favorite film (or certainly one of my favorites) Little Murders. Even though I suspect the result would have been a vastly different movie, it is possible to recognize touches of Godard in the final product issued by director Alan Arkin. So the idea of making a film drawing parallels between Chinese peasants and the members of the Palestine Liberation Organization isn't that absurd in context.
Very well. We have skirted this issue over half a page of type and seem to be no closer to getting to the point, not a little unlike a certain French director whose name has appeared in this essay a time or two. The point actually being made here--if one must be made--is that there is no particular reason to care that Godard shared philosophical ground with the Chinese communists, certainly no more than it should concern us that the director was heavily influenced by Sartre and Camus, or by his own admittedly bourgeois upbringing, one that he claims paled when compared to the bourgeois culture of Hollywood. It doesn't matter if the man comes out in favor of rotten beef. What matters is whether he can make his meanings to mean something through his craft and art. Godard's work is very conceptually-based and audiences must be ready for something a bit more engaging than car chases and explosions. In the forty-four minute documentary Godard in America, it is hard to resist the cleverness and passion that the director brings to his storyboards, just as it is exciting to watch him lecture on the importance of sound in movies, versus, say, images.
Does it please me that a Marxist filmmaker makes modern movies? Of course. Does it delight me that such an intellectual fellow should be something of an icon for such a long time? Yes, indeed. Do either of these things actually make much difference in the enjoyment of the films? Not a bit. It is a fact that the propaganda effect to which movies or statues or hazelnut pies are put remains, in my mind at least, a given. The only differences are that some artists fool themselves into thinking they are above such politicking while a larger number fool the rest of us into thinking they respect us too much to attempt this kind of manipulation. One cannot escape it. Joy to the man or woman who comes out and says, in so many words, "The experiences of my life up to this moment are what have influenced the predisposition I have taken with what you are about to perceive. Good luck."
A person can despise the Nazis and have glorious dreams of machine-gunning Hitler in the movie theater and still admit the success Reni Riefenstahl experienced with Triumph of the Will. Godard in America is neither Triumph nor triumph. It is, however, a fascinating look at a man who was in the throes of pissing off nearly everyone who liked him in order to keep his art in sync with his philosophical principles. You know, just the way the Dixie Chicks did.
Granted, this repulsion of ideology tends to only puke up at the left or, in a few cases, at the right, when the work of the reactionary signals just how horribly amateurish it is, and here I am thinking of things like The Ground Floor production of The Tea Party Movie (2009), an unmitigated piece of subhuman detritus, if such a thing ever existed. The objections take on an overtone of intolerance gone berserk, with such non sequiturs offered as , "Shut up and sing."
Things have not always been quite so lame. The time was when a nice man named Ralph Thanhauser decided it would be a Nietzsche-is-Peachy idea to document the coming to America of cinema gods Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, or in short, the Dziga Vertov Group that had been formed in Paris in 1968, a fascinating cooperative bent on making political films. And indeed they did, nine of them in all. The topic, more or less, of Godard in America (1970), is that Godard and Gorin came to the states to gain financing for a movie they planned about Palestine. The issue of the Israeli presence in the Middle East gets equated with workers struggles everywhere and Godard even mentions in the film that the beauty of Chinese communism is that instead of having one thousand books that you must read to approximate the truth, with Mao you only need one. He was evidently serious.
A story is told that Jean-Luc met with Elliott Gould to discuss the possibility of the Frenchman directing my all-time favorite film (or certainly one of my favorites) Little Murders. Even though I suspect the result would have been a vastly different movie, it is possible to recognize touches of Godard in the final product issued by director Alan Arkin. So the idea of making a film drawing parallels between Chinese peasants and the members of the Palestine Liberation Organization isn't that absurd in context.
Very well. We have skirted this issue over half a page of type and seem to be no closer to getting to the point, not a little unlike a certain French director whose name has appeared in this essay a time or two. The point actually being made here--if one must be made--is that there is no particular reason to care that Godard shared philosophical ground with the Chinese communists, certainly no more than it should concern us that the director was heavily influenced by Sartre and Camus, or by his own admittedly bourgeois upbringing, one that he claims paled when compared to the bourgeois culture of Hollywood. It doesn't matter if the man comes out in favor of rotten beef. What matters is whether he can make his meanings to mean something through his craft and art. Godard's work is very conceptually-based and audiences must be ready for something a bit more engaging than car chases and explosions. In the forty-four minute documentary Godard in America, it is hard to resist the cleverness and passion that the director brings to his storyboards, just as it is exciting to watch him lecture on the importance of sound in movies, versus, say, images.
Does it please me that a Marxist filmmaker makes modern movies? Of course. Does it delight me that such an intellectual fellow should be something of an icon for such a long time? Yes, indeed. Do either of these things actually make much difference in the enjoyment of the films? Not a bit. It is a fact that the propaganda effect to which movies or statues or hazelnut pies are put remains, in my mind at least, a given. The only differences are that some artists fool themselves into thinking they are above such politicking while a larger number fool the rest of us into thinking they respect us too much to attempt this kind of manipulation. One cannot escape it. Joy to the man or woman who comes out and says, in so many words, "The experiences of my life up to this moment are what have influenced the predisposition I have taken with what you are about to perceive. Good luck."
A person can despise the Nazis and have glorious dreams of machine-gunning Hitler in the movie theater and still admit the success Reni Riefenstahl experienced with Triumph of the Will. Godard in America is neither Triumph nor triumph. It is, however, a fascinating look at a man who was in the throes of pissing off nearly everyone who liked him in order to keep his art in sync with his philosophical principles. You know, just the way the Dixie Chicks did.
Breathless
Speaking of Truffaut, he had an interesting idea for a movie that later was made into Breathless (1960), but it took the equally brilliant Jean-Luc Godard to write the screenplay and bring it to the world. A lot of people who write for magazines with the word "cinema" in the title say that Breathless was the first movie in what became the French New Wave. That's probably correct. But the big news is that the tense little comedy (that's what I call it, okay? A tense little comedy) holds up every bit as well as the day it was finally released after years of being banned in Italy because it was too dirty. Anyone who's ever seen Sasha Grey in action will wonder what all the fuss was about, and yet I have to tell you that Jean Seberg, with that tantalizing page-girl haircut and slightly too thick thighs just about makes me want to snigger at the Playboy Channel and strip nekked doing a freeze-frame on the remote every time I see her in the sack with Jean-Paul Belmondo. The latter actor plays Michel, a genuinely weird young car thief who kills a policeman while fleeing and with all the casualness of a summer day in Paris hooks up with Patricia (Seberg), imagining himself as Bogart and so out of touch with reality that he doesn't even get upset when Pat turns him in.
The plot of this film isn't the point, though. The point is the way the film was made, with shots of empty streets becoming filled with people, with the actor's reactions to puzzling tragedies (as when a stranger falls dead out of a car onto the street), and, as you will note once you see the movie, the long hold shot on Seberg in the last few seconds of the picture.
The plot of this film isn't the point, though. The point is the way the film was made, with shots of empty streets becoming filled with people, with the actor's reactions to puzzling tragedies (as when a stranger falls dead out of a car onto the street), and, as you will note once you see the movie, the long hold shot on Seberg in the last few seconds of the picture.
A Woman is a Woman
Because I live for laughs, I love the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, even when he isn't necessarily being funny. His third feature and second release was A Woman is a Woman, or Une Femme est Une Femme(1961). He claimed this was a tribute to American musical comedies. In a sense, that is accurate, very much in the way "The Daily Show" is a news broadcast. This movie is, above all else, playful.
Angela (Anna Karina, in real life) plays at being a stripper at the Zodiac. This character plays at most everything, including her love for cooking, dance, theater, the movie she is in--everything, it seems, except her sudden desire to conceive a child within the next twenty-four hours. Her boyfriend, Emile (Jean Claude Brialy) feels that a child would add far more amusement to his life than he could handle. He enjoys being a curmudgeon too much to want to have a kid around, something foreshadowed early on as he scorns two young boys at a newsstand who want to see something sexier. He suggests that maybe she would like to beget a child with his friend Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Alfred thinks this is a mighty fine idea, an observation that causes Emile to change his mind. Angela is undecided, as befits a girl who hasn't much practice at being serious.
Even though there are many gut laugh moments in A Woman is a Woman, the onscreen commentary is often grim, as when we see a message saying that because Angela and Emile are in love, they must remain unhappy. Godard gives forth with a lot of such commentary, right from the start, and there's a genuine sexiness that this adds to the film, a movie that must have had them reeling in Peoria with the occasional shots of naked ladies.
Everything about this film is inventive, from the way the actors play to the camera to the inside jokes, such as when Alfred mentions that he is in a hurry because Godard's movie Breathless is on TV and he doesn't want to miss it, or when the same character walks out of a bar, spies actress Jeanne Moreau and asks her how Jules et Jim is coming along, a reference to a film at that time being directed by friend and occasional rival Francois Truffaut. There is also an hilarious break in an argument to allow two police officers to enter the apartment because a terrorist has detonated a bomb somewhere. A Woman is a Woman is packed with snappy humor of this sort. Yet it would be a mistake to see this as a mere imitation or homage to musical comedy. For one thing, the music is used solidly as a joke in that it builds up mock-melodrama and then abruptly halts as if ordered to do so by a manic drill sergeant. For another, there is the very real reality of Angela and Emile pretending to be angry with one another over dinner and then having the joke backfire on them, leading to genuine mutual disgust.
Nevertheless, Godard's use of cinematic color arrangements and poignant camera work during the argument scenes insists that he is reminding the audience that the act of playing can be just as bitter as seriousness can be amusing.
Even without a knowledge of all the references made in this film and without any comprehension of the French New Wave, an audience is still free to enjoy A Woman is a Woman because this movie not only holds up, it circumnavigates history, as anyone who's ever dated a stripper can attest. Besides, any movie where two of the principals argue with one another by pointing to book titles for their lines is a fine movie indeed.
Angela (Anna Karina, in real life) plays at being a stripper at the Zodiac. This character plays at most everything, including her love for cooking, dance, theater, the movie she is in--everything, it seems, except her sudden desire to conceive a child within the next twenty-four hours. Her boyfriend, Emile (Jean Claude Brialy) feels that a child would add far more amusement to his life than he could handle. He enjoys being a curmudgeon too much to want to have a kid around, something foreshadowed early on as he scorns two young boys at a newsstand who want to see something sexier. He suggests that maybe she would like to beget a child with his friend Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Alfred thinks this is a mighty fine idea, an observation that causes Emile to change his mind. Angela is undecided, as befits a girl who hasn't much practice at being serious.
Even though there are many gut laugh moments in A Woman is a Woman, the onscreen commentary is often grim, as when we see a message saying that because Angela and Emile are in love, they must remain unhappy. Godard gives forth with a lot of such commentary, right from the start, and there's a genuine sexiness that this adds to the film, a movie that must have had them reeling in Peoria with the occasional shots of naked ladies.
Everything about this film is inventive, from the way the actors play to the camera to the inside jokes, such as when Alfred mentions that he is in a hurry because Godard's movie Breathless is on TV and he doesn't want to miss it, or when the same character walks out of a bar, spies actress Jeanne Moreau and asks her how Jules et Jim is coming along, a reference to a film at that time being directed by friend and occasional rival Francois Truffaut. There is also an hilarious break in an argument to allow two police officers to enter the apartment because a terrorist has detonated a bomb somewhere. A Woman is a Woman is packed with snappy humor of this sort. Yet it would be a mistake to see this as a mere imitation or homage to musical comedy. For one thing, the music is used solidly as a joke in that it builds up mock-melodrama and then abruptly halts as if ordered to do so by a manic drill sergeant. For another, there is the very real reality of Angela and Emile pretending to be angry with one another over dinner and then having the joke backfire on them, leading to genuine mutual disgust.
Nevertheless, Godard's use of cinematic color arrangements and poignant camera work during the argument scenes insists that he is reminding the audience that the act of playing can be just as bitter as seriousness can be amusing.
Even without a knowledge of all the references made in this film and without any comprehension of the French New Wave, an audience is still free to enjoy A Woman is a Woman because this movie not only holds up, it circumnavigates history, as anyone who's ever dated a stripper can attest. Besides, any movie where two of the principals argue with one another by pointing to book titles for their lines is a fine movie indeed.
Masculin Feminin
You'd have to go a long way to find a negative review of the Jean-Luc Godard movie Masculin Feminin (1966)--and rightly so. About the closest thing to harsh I could locate was by one critic who decided the movie title needed some type of punctuation between the two gender identifiers and went on at some length as to the presumed significance of the ampersand, dash, and comma, suggesting that just possibly this individual had not quite gotten around to watching the movie in question.
If so, that's most unfortunate because Godard has certainly done it again, meaning by "it" (in case the aforementioned critic is listening, or even reading) that this is surely another masterpiece, an overused word but one that we cannot tire of using when it comes to French art films such as Masculin Feminin.
This is very much a teenager movie, if by such a sobriquet we mean a film made for and by sophisticated novices whose lives have been specifically influenced by precisely this very type of movie, a form of self-reference that defies comparison. Or as Paul, our doomed hero opined, "We'd often go to the movies. We'd shiver as the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed. More often we'd be disappointed. The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old. It saddened us. It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted to live." Well, of course. That's what films do, isn't it? They provide an alternative reality that we recognize as false and yet we feel a desperate craving to climb inside the film can and live out a life that removes us from the angry stupidity of our day to day existences. And then the hero goes off and dies. What a gyp! we scream as the credits role.
After watching Masculin Feminin last evening I immediately reached for a tape of a "Late Show with Tom Snyder" broadcast from 1996 wherein Tom was interviewing Quentin Tarantino. At some point they got to talking about the filmmaker's responsibility to the audience and the acclaimed director of (then) Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction mentioned that audiences are bright enough to know the difference between the reality on the movie screen and the reality of their own lives. I would like to believe this is true but I think I know better. As if to disprove what Tarantino had said, a caller phoned in to ask what had been in the briefcase--a reference to Pulp Fiction. I'd always assumed the answer was Marsellus's soul, but the writer/director surprised me by saying that the answer was whatever you imagined it to be, that he had intended the "solution" to be unique to the individual viewer, thereby allowing each person to have his or her own movie. I laughed out loud. What nonsense. The man is entitled to his own explanation, of course. Still, his answer implies that everything he had said earlier about the reality of the screen experience was an out-and-out lie.
The reason I bring this up is that Tarantino went on during the interview to mention that his influences were a combination of European art films and exploitation pictures. Well, sure. You don't make a movie as brilliant as those mentioned and Inglourious Basterds (the latter sharing some inspiration from the 1978 Fred Williamson flick with a similar title) without being influenced by precisely those two movements.
The next thing I did was to find a Dick Cavett interview with Godard from 1980. Early in the exchange, Cavett asked the director if he'd ever thought about the idea that women were more simpatico with his movies than were men. Godard said, sure. He knew it. Had I been sitting there, I would have responded that you don't land a beauty like Anna Karina without knowing something more about women than the average guy does. Godard, naturally, is made of better stuff than me.
It's all connected, the three visuals I watched last evening. The movie was certainly the best part, but it led inexorably to the other two. One watches Godard's movie and falls into something of a trance as the hollow and beautiful Chantal Goya, as Madeleine, drives the more cerebral yet inept Paul, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud (whom we recall as Antoine Doinel from a series of Francois Truffaut movies), out of his mind and into the street. Paul is a political radical of sorts, spray painting "Peace in Vietnam" on embassy vehicles and conning limousines into taking his dates for rides. What he really thinks he wants is to have a nice shallow girlfriend who will hang on his every word and still respect him in the morning. What Madeleine wants is to be a famous recording star and her record is so tinny and empty you have no doubt that she'll get exactly what she wants.
We are less certain of Paul. Madeleine's girlfriends all think of him in one way or another, but because they're interested in him he can't be bothered, even when they're in the same bed.
One of the funniest scenes in the movie takes place when Paul (out of camera frame) interviews a young woman named "Miss 19." She's won some kind of beauty contest and strives to be extremely apolitical despite her opinion that the word "reactionary" means someone who reacts against the status quo and she just can't stand yes-men. This twit doesn't know Charles de Gaulle from Amy Vanderbilt and likes it exactly that way. Yet we see her checking Paul out with her eyes and we hear his voice thinking about giving in and ravaging this nitwit just because he can even though we know he'd make a mess of it.
These are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, as the screen informs us about halfway through the movie. That's correct, of course. Mate anti-capitalism with consumerism and these are pretty much the people you'd get: exciting, beautiful, sexual and stupid. Somebody, naturally, will have to die so that someone else can step on his body on the way up.
If so, that's most unfortunate because Godard has certainly done it again, meaning by "it" (in case the aforementioned critic is listening, or even reading) that this is surely another masterpiece, an overused word but one that we cannot tire of using when it comes to French art films such as Masculin Feminin.
This is very much a teenager movie, if by such a sobriquet we mean a film made for and by sophisticated novices whose lives have been specifically influenced by precisely this very type of movie, a form of self-reference that defies comparison. Or as Paul, our doomed hero opined, "We'd often go to the movies. We'd shiver as the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed. More often we'd be disappointed. The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old. It saddened us. It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted to live." Well, of course. That's what films do, isn't it? They provide an alternative reality that we recognize as false and yet we feel a desperate craving to climb inside the film can and live out a life that removes us from the angry stupidity of our day to day existences. And then the hero goes off and dies. What a gyp! we scream as the credits role.
After watching Masculin Feminin last evening I immediately reached for a tape of a "Late Show with Tom Snyder" broadcast from 1996 wherein Tom was interviewing Quentin Tarantino. At some point they got to talking about the filmmaker's responsibility to the audience and the acclaimed director of (then) Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction mentioned that audiences are bright enough to know the difference between the reality on the movie screen and the reality of their own lives. I would like to believe this is true but I think I know better. As if to disprove what Tarantino had said, a caller phoned in to ask what had been in the briefcase--a reference to Pulp Fiction. I'd always assumed the answer was Marsellus's soul, but the writer/director surprised me by saying that the answer was whatever you imagined it to be, that he had intended the "solution" to be unique to the individual viewer, thereby allowing each person to have his or her own movie. I laughed out loud. What nonsense. The man is entitled to his own explanation, of course. Still, his answer implies that everything he had said earlier about the reality of the screen experience was an out-and-out lie.
The reason I bring this up is that Tarantino went on during the interview to mention that his influences were a combination of European art films and exploitation pictures. Well, sure. You don't make a movie as brilliant as those mentioned and Inglourious Basterds (the latter sharing some inspiration from the 1978 Fred Williamson flick with a similar title) without being influenced by precisely those two movements.
The next thing I did was to find a Dick Cavett interview with Godard from 1980. Early in the exchange, Cavett asked the director if he'd ever thought about the idea that women were more simpatico with his movies than were men. Godard said, sure. He knew it. Had I been sitting there, I would have responded that you don't land a beauty like Anna Karina without knowing something more about women than the average guy does. Godard, naturally, is made of better stuff than me.
It's all connected, the three visuals I watched last evening. The movie was certainly the best part, but it led inexorably to the other two. One watches Godard's movie and falls into something of a trance as the hollow and beautiful Chantal Goya, as Madeleine, drives the more cerebral yet inept Paul, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud (whom we recall as Antoine Doinel from a series of Francois Truffaut movies), out of his mind and into the street. Paul is a political radical of sorts, spray painting "Peace in Vietnam" on embassy vehicles and conning limousines into taking his dates for rides. What he really thinks he wants is to have a nice shallow girlfriend who will hang on his every word and still respect him in the morning. What Madeleine wants is to be a famous recording star and her record is so tinny and empty you have no doubt that she'll get exactly what she wants.
We are less certain of Paul. Madeleine's girlfriends all think of him in one way or another, but because they're interested in him he can't be bothered, even when they're in the same bed.
One of the funniest scenes in the movie takes place when Paul (out of camera frame) interviews a young woman named "Miss 19." She's won some kind of beauty contest and strives to be extremely apolitical despite her opinion that the word "reactionary" means someone who reacts against the status quo and she just can't stand yes-men. This twit doesn't know Charles de Gaulle from Amy Vanderbilt and likes it exactly that way. Yet we see her checking Paul out with her eyes and we hear his voice thinking about giving in and ravaging this nitwit just because he can even though we know he'd make a mess of it.
These are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, as the screen informs us about halfway through the movie. That's correct, of course. Mate anti-capitalism with consumerism and these are pretty much the people you'd get: exciting, beautiful, sexual and stupid. Somebody, naturally, will have to die so that someone else can step on his body on the way up.
Two or Three Things I Know About Godard
I was watching film director Jean-Luc Godard on the "Dick Cavett Show," a replay from 1980. Aside from Cavett being what I thought was uncharacteristically critical of someone clearly his superior, the discussion nevertheless fascinated me because of what Godard kept trying to communicate about the harmlessness of images in movies.
From a purely literal perspective, the director's observation is quite correct. Sit in a theater, close your eyes, face the screen, stuff your face with popcorn, and nothing happening in that movie will do you any harm. Extrapolating a bit, it's probably reasonable that the images on the screen themselves can specifically hurt no one. The violence is either documentary, staged, or both. The sex, however gratuitous, is either an act void of love, or an act containing some affection. But suppose one of the two people on that screen is your spouse and you are not the other person. The image in question, while not physically harming anyone, could certainly indirectly strike a person a mortal blow. On the other hand, perhaps the person in the movie only resembles your spouse. The effect may still be troublesome due to the psychological symbolic interactionism or phenomenological elements of the experience. So, even if we take Godard's idea completely to heart, I think that any artist--and especially a film-maker--is responsible for discovering his or her own way of dancing between self-censorship and moral responsibility.
If that sounds like much ado about nothing, I would ask you to think about the impact of wit in cinema. Wit is unique in this argument in that while critics are often happy to write about the significance of violence or sex, role manipulation or car chase scenes, stilted dialogue or charming soliloquies, very seldom does anyone find it appropriate to mention that an amusing image may have an impact every bit as permanent as the rhythm of any musical, the punctuation of any choreographed on-screen battle, or the often boring linger of romance. Anyone who has watched Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times will have burned into the memory any of several single images of Chaplin's character haplessly manipulated by the gears of the machine. I defy anyone to watch Duck Soup and not feel slapped against the interior of the brain with the visual recollection of Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly dancing and singing in Freedonia's grand ballroom. The same holds for Woody Allen as Miles Monroe, impersonating a robot inSleeper as he realizes that the room in which he is sitting is the place where the robots are summarily disassembled. In Chaplin's performance, the commentary involved the idea of machines invented by humans turning those humans into malfunctioning machines. For Groucho, the assault was steadfastly against conformity, propriety and order--anarchy for its own sake was the metier. And for Allen, the look on his character's face at the instant of realization is something shared with any child who discovered Santa to be a drunken reprobate, the family doctor to be a quack instants prior to an injection in the tuchis, or the local priest to be a fondler of aquatic fowl.
Therefore I am unable to fully accept the idea that images are harmless. No one would likely remark the opposite: that images are incapable of doing good. When a scene of extreme hilarity or manifest tenderness clings to our own internal playback devices, we may remark that the movie was good, meaning that the craft of making the film did not cancel out whatever symbols and characterizations were woven together, or were bounced off one another, or were overlapped purposefully for our delight. When a film is abjectly bad, or when we decide it is, what we are responding to or reacting against is the morality the director presents to us through a series of images. For one generation that morality may be played out in Friday the 13th; for another it may be the Saw franchise. It may even be the latest Adam Sandler disembowelment of standards of good acting. Regardless of what film we find that offends or disappoints us, to the extent that the film was made by someone competent, our objections will arise--as we discuss them--as extrapolations from whatever is being carried along by the images themselves. Even if it the dialog against which we raise our fists in anger (and even if that dialog occurs with the speakers off-camera), the words are conveyed through a constantly visual medium.
Sometimes there are no words at all. The first time a person watches Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the "intermission" in the movie often encourages the viewer to stare hard into the screen out of concern that something will otherwise be missed. Only later does it dawn that we don't know whether this was an homage to the old days of MGM movies or an opportunity for the film-goer to pause and digest all that has come before.
But let's get back to Godard and the Dick Cavett interview. Here's Cavett, one of the most erudite "talk show" personages of the previous century, host to Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, John Lennon, Jonathon Miller, Orson Welles, Robin Williams, Gore Vidal, and for some reason he decides to use the painfully embarrassing inquisitor device called Some People Have Said. It's the kind of mechanical wussiness that only the upper crust of questioners can use and Cavett used it bountifully. The most egregious example came near the end when he asked Jean-Luc to respond to the suggestion that Some People Have Said that while there are aspects of your movies which are indisputably memorable, it must be admitted that Godard is not a great film-maker. The ex-husband of Anna Karina blinked at the host and, in that melodious yet tinny voice of his, responded, "What?" He had no doubt heard and understood the question. He simply could not trust that his ears were telling him the truth. Perhaps sensing that the audience of young film students might decide that Cavett was expendable, the host rephrased his question a bit and the program ended. If DC had wanted to ask a pertinent question, he might have tried to think up and formulate something more engaging than "Why do Europeans, and particularly the French, so highly praise the work of Jerry Lewis?" Cavett actually asked that question and was not much pleased with the answer he received.
Here's another question: all these years later, why would anyone concern himself with the prattling of an admittedly intelligent yet hopelessly narcissistic TV person posited against a French director whose most celebrated films were released in the 1960s?
As with most of the superficially anecdotal reminiscences I doddle upon in these electronic pages, the reason is that these instances reflect something larger than themselves. Here was a man who, in the process of promoting his then-latest movie, found it important to talk about the very medium in which he worked. Godard (like his cohorts in the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, to name but a few) shared an admiration for directors such as Hawkes and Hitchcock, took a kind of Do It Yourself approach to the process, insisted upon the auteur theory that the film is the work of the director and only the director, and most of the time betrayed a self-consciousness for which, to understate the matter, not everyone at the time was quite prepared to digest. The New Wave (and especially Godard) made movies which are important not only because of their influence (which, come to think of it, is a lousy thing to worry about) but because the films themselves convey strings of images which (whether harmless, helpful, or neither) shake up the viewer's perceptions of the world outside the darkened movie theater. Each and all of the movies I'm about to mention not only hold up to this day, they are inextricably woven into the flag of global art culture, worthy documents and vital as oxygen.
The 400 Blows, Day for Night, Jules and Jim, Masculin Feminin,Alphaville, Breathless, A Woman is a Woman, Claire's Knee, Pauline at the Beach, Elevator to the Gallows, Atlantic City, Cleo from 5 to 7,Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour--My God! At the risk of sounding like some insufferable effete snob, I cannot imagine the supreme agony of living in a world that does not have room for these movies.
I used to think of directors such as Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rohmer, Malle and Resnais as distinct by virtue of their intellects, probably because I am occasionally something of a snob. However, having begun reading a biography of Godard called Everything is Cinema, I have decided that their smarts is only the tracks upon which their train transports a cargo far more precious than brain power. Sensibility is the word I'm thinking. To create the films of these men and women requires that they experience the world in a way that is somewhat different from that of James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and Jon Favreau, yet not necessarily all that different from Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Woody Allen and Francis Coppola. Whether one rebuilds transmissions, designs airplane cockpits, directs motion pictures, or trains crested Amazons to speak, the sensibility to fathom one's own role in the process as if one were standing outside oneself, looking in--sort of an out of body experience and a hyper self-aware one at that--is far more crucial than whatever technical proficiency the creator possesses. Anyone can learn how to work. To work with a manic drive spurred by an awareness of one's own self-determined role in the greater scheme of things is what separates a person such as Jean-Luc Godard from a Dick Cavett.
From a purely literal perspective, the director's observation is quite correct. Sit in a theater, close your eyes, face the screen, stuff your face with popcorn, and nothing happening in that movie will do you any harm. Extrapolating a bit, it's probably reasonable that the images on the screen themselves can specifically hurt no one. The violence is either documentary, staged, or both. The sex, however gratuitous, is either an act void of love, or an act containing some affection. But suppose one of the two people on that screen is your spouse and you are not the other person. The image in question, while not physically harming anyone, could certainly indirectly strike a person a mortal blow. On the other hand, perhaps the person in the movie only resembles your spouse. The effect may still be troublesome due to the psychological symbolic interactionism or phenomenological elements of the experience. So, even if we take Godard's idea completely to heart, I think that any artist--and especially a film-maker--is responsible for discovering his or her own way of dancing between self-censorship and moral responsibility.
If that sounds like much ado about nothing, I would ask you to think about the impact of wit in cinema. Wit is unique in this argument in that while critics are often happy to write about the significance of violence or sex, role manipulation or car chase scenes, stilted dialogue or charming soliloquies, very seldom does anyone find it appropriate to mention that an amusing image may have an impact every bit as permanent as the rhythm of any musical, the punctuation of any choreographed on-screen battle, or the often boring linger of romance. Anyone who has watched Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times will have burned into the memory any of several single images of Chaplin's character haplessly manipulated by the gears of the machine. I defy anyone to watch Duck Soup and not feel slapped against the interior of the brain with the visual recollection of Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly dancing and singing in Freedonia's grand ballroom. The same holds for Woody Allen as Miles Monroe, impersonating a robot inSleeper as he realizes that the room in which he is sitting is the place where the robots are summarily disassembled. In Chaplin's performance, the commentary involved the idea of machines invented by humans turning those humans into malfunctioning machines. For Groucho, the assault was steadfastly against conformity, propriety and order--anarchy for its own sake was the metier. And for Allen, the look on his character's face at the instant of realization is something shared with any child who discovered Santa to be a drunken reprobate, the family doctor to be a quack instants prior to an injection in the tuchis, or the local priest to be a fondler of aquatic fowl.
Therefore I am unable to fully accept the idea that images are harmless. No one would likely remark the opposite: that images are incapable of doing good. When a scene of extreme hilarity or manifest tenderness clings to our own internal playback devices, we may remark that the movie was good, meaning that the craft of making the film did not cancel out whatever symbols and characterizations were woven together, or were bounced off one another, or were overlapped purposefully for our delight. When a film is abjectly bad, or when we decide it is, what we are responding to or reacting against is the morality the director presents to us through a series of images. For one generation that morality may be played out in Friday the 13th; for another it may be the Saw franchise. It may even be the latest Adam Sandler disembowelment of standards of good acting. Regardless of what film we find that offends or disappoints us, to the extent that the film was made by someone competent, our objections will arise--as we discuss them--as extrapolations from whatever is being carried along by the images themselves. Even if it the dialog against which we raise our fists in anger (and even if that dialog occurs with the speakers off-camera), the words are conveyed through a constantly visual medium.
Sometimes there are no words at all. The first time a person watches Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the "intermission" in the movie often encourages the viewer to stare hard into the screen out of concern that something will otherwise be missed. Only later does it dawn that we don't know whether this was an homage to the old days of MGM movies or an opportunity for the film-goer to pause and digest all that has come before.
But let's get back to Godard and the Dick Cavett interview. Here's Cavett, one of the most erudite "talk show" personages of the previous century, host to Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, John Lennon, Jonathon Miller, Orson Welles, Robin Williams, Gore Vidal, and for some reason he decides to use the painfully embarrassing inquisitor device called Some People Have Said. It's the kind of mechanical wussiness that only the upper crust of questioners can use and Cavett used it bountifully. The most egregious example came near the end when he asked Jean-Luc to respond to the suggestion that Some People Have Said that while there are aspects of your movies which are indisputably memorable, it must be admitted that Godard is not a great film-maker. The ex-husband of Anna Karina blinked at the host and, in that melodious yet tinny voice of his, responded, "What?" He had no doubt heard and understood the question. He simply could not trust that his ears were telling him the truth. Perhaps sensing that the audience of young film students might decide that Cavett was expendable, the host rephrased his question a bit and the program ended. If DC had wanted to ask a pertinent question, he might have tried to think up and formulate something more engaging than "Why do Europeans, and particularly the French, so highly praise the work of Jerry Lewis?" Cavett actually asked that question and was not much pleased with the answer he received.
Here's another question: all these years later, why would anyone concern himself with the prattling of an admittedly intelligent yet hopelessly narcissistic TV person posited against a French director whose most celebrated films were released in the 1960s?
As with most of the superficially anecdotal reminiscences I doddle upon in these electronic pages, the reason is that these instances reflect something larger than themselves. Here was a man who, in the process of promoting his then-latest movie, found it important to talk about the very medium in which he worked. Godard (like his cohorts in the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, to name but a few) shared an admiration for directors such as Hawkes and Hitchcock, took a kind of Do It Yourself approach to the process, insisted upon the auteur theory that the film is the work of the director and only the director, and most of the time betrayed a self-consciousness for which, to understate the matter, not everyone at the time was quite prepared to digest. The New Wave (and especially Godard) made movies which are important not only because of their influence (which, come to think of it, is a lousy thing to worry about) but because the films themselves convey strings of images which (whether harmless, helpful, or neither) shake up the viewer's perceptions of the world outside the darkened movie theater. Each and all of the movies I'm about to mention not only hold up to this day, they are inextricably woven into the flag of global art culture, worthy documents and vital as oxygen.
The 400 Blows, Day for Night, Jules and Jim, Masculin Feminin,Alphaville, Breathless, A Woman is a Woman, Claire's Knee, Pauline at the Beach, Elevator to the Gallows, Atlantic City, Cleo from 5 to 7,Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour--My God! At the risk of sounding like some insufferable effete snob, I cannot imagine the supreme agony of living in a world that does not have room for these movies.
I used to think of directors such as Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rohmer, Malle and Resnais as distinct by virtue of their intellects, probably because I am occasionally something of a snob. However, having begun reading a biography of Godard called Everything is Cinema, I have decided that their smarts is only the tracks upon which their train transports a cargo far more precious than brain power. Sensibility is the word I'm thinking. To create the films of these men and women requires that they experience the world in a way that is somewhat different from that of James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and Jon Favreau, yet not necessarily all that different from Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Woody Allen and Francis Coppola. Whether one rebuilds transmissions, designs airplane cockpits, directs motion pictures, or trains crested Amazons to speak, the sensibility to fathom one's own role in the process as if one were standing outside oneself, looking in--sort of an out of body experience and a hyper self-aware one at that--is far more crucial than whatever technical proficiency the creator possesses. Anyone can learn how to work. To work with a manic drive spurred by an awareness of one's own self-determined role in the greater scheme of things is what separates a person such as Jean-Luc Godard from a Dick Cavett.
Made in USA
Roger Ebert wrote back in 1969 that it used to really bug him that every time he wrote a glowing review of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, invariably he'd get deluged with hate mail from people who, to be fair, were unprepared for the experience. Being unable to even get anyone to watch one of these movies with me, much less to have someone object to the experience, I can certainly relate to Ebert's chagrin. At least Ebert's readers had the decency to check out Weekend, Contempt, Breathless, and others before rejecting them. In my sad sitch, I can't even get people to so much as wade through a trailer, much less the movie itself. So what hope is there that anyone will be willing to view Made in U.S.A., a Godard movie that even the director's most ardent supporters are less than one hundred percent enthusiastic about?
My failure to convert must be attributable to my writing style. Here I go, often as not, trying to persuade, coerce, regale, advocate for, enhance the experience of, submit for your consideration, and on occasional drop my face into the mud pit and grovel just to get you to promise to try to remember to think about watching a Godard movie, based upon my assurance that doing so will make flowers smell better, spaghetti sauce taste better, fingernails down the small of the back feel better, trips to the dentist filled with less anguish, one-way tickets to the morgue to be less permanent, visits to other galaxies more exuberant, and--in all seriousness--the colors of the day-to-day world more alive, and despite all of this and no doubt more, still you resist in much the way that a psychiatric patient will resist therapy knowing full well the clinician is onto something, but perhaps fearing that getting too close to those repressed ideations will somehow be unpleasant.
Dammit, unearthing those repressed thoughts is supposed to hurt a little bit. How else can we get them out in the air and deal with them?
In the case of Made in U.S.A., of course, there is no discomfort, other than in experiencing something with which you may not already be familiar.
Nevertheless, knowing full well that whatever superlatives I attach to this analysis, the chances are that you'll merely grin at my naivete, I'm going to plunge ahead and encourage you, at great personal risk to my own waning credibility, to see this terrific film. After all, it stars Anna Karina, the director's beautiful ex-wife, wearing all sorts of pop color dresses as she simultaneously impersonates Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, featuring a cast of warmongering characters who go by the names Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon. Actors often known for their romantic acumen show up as slapstick characters, creepy old men get theirs, a writer gets Anna's help writing a book called An Unfinished Novel, the murder victim invariably has his last name edited out of the film with airplanes soaring overhead or by the honking of car horns, the word "liberte" gets machine-gunned repeatedly, and a taxi driver saves the day.
Seriously, anyone who grooves to the Firesign Theatre should love this movie. If that isn't you, then probably you've come to the wrong website, which apparently means almost everyone. But if you get tired of drinking straight cranberry juice and sometimes wonder what it would taste like if someone added some mango, then Made in U.S.A. is definitely for you. It's certainly for me, although not for the Moroccans. Or their embassy.
My failure to convert must be attributable to my writing style. Here I go, often as not, trying to persuade, coerce, regale, advocate for, enhance the experience of, submit for your consideration, and on occasional drop my face into the mud pit and grovel just to get you to promise to try to remember to think about watching a Godard movie, based upon my assurance that doing so will make flowers smell better, spaghetti sauce taste better, fingernails down the small of the back feel better, trips to the dentist filled with less anguish, one-way tickets to the morgue to be less permanent, visits to other galaxies more exuberant, and--in all seriousness--the colors of the day-to-day world more alive, and despite all of this and no doubt more, still you resist in much the way that a psychiatric patient will resist therapy knowing full well the clinician is onto something, but perhaps fearing that getting too close to those repressed ideations will somehow be unpleasant.
Dammit, unearthing those repressed thoughts is supposed to hurt a little bit. How else can we get them out in the air and deal with them?
In the case of Made in U.S.A., of course, there is no discomfort, other than in experiencing something with which you may not already be familiar.
Nevertheless, knowing full well that whatever superlatives I attach to this analysis, the chances are that you'll merely grin at my naivete, I'm going to plunge ahead and encourage you, at great personal risk to my own waning credibility, to see this terrific film. After all, it stars Anna Karina, the director's beautiful ex-wife, wearing all sorts of pop color dresses as she simultaneously impersonates Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, featuring a cast of warmongering characters who go by the names Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon. Actors often known for their romantic acumen show up as slapstick characters, creepy old men get theirs, a writer gets Anna's help writing a book called An Unfinished Novel, the murder victim invariably has his last name edited out of the film with airplanes soaring overhead or by the honking of car horns, the word "liberte" gets machine-gunned repeatedly, and a taxi driver saves the day.
Seriously, anyone who grooves to the Firesign Theatre should love this movie. If that isn't you, then probably you've come to the wrong website, which apparently means almost everyone. But if you get tired of drinking straight cranberry juice and sometimes wonder what it would taste like if someone added some mango, then Made in U.S.A. is definitely for you. It's certainly for me, although not for the Moroccans. Or their embassy.