Cinemania

2011-09-13T20:03:00.000-07:00

13 Assassins (Japan, 2011, T. Miike)

Ben said:The Seven Samurai meets Barry Lyndon plus six more samurai. I reference the Kubrick picture because it seemed to me that the evening interiors at the start of 13 Assassins were naturally lit by flickering paper lanterns. Looked cool. Wiki tells me that I shouldn't reference the Kurosaw picture, however, because 13 Assassins is a remake of the 1963 b/w film of the same name by Eiichi Kudo. Kudos to the makers of 13 Assassins, then, for carrying forward the Jidaigeki genre. It's an epic affair with all the right moves; the shocking depiction of the villian's perverse cruelty, the vestiges of honor adhering to the fantastically odds-against crew, the unrelenting carnage choreographed down to the cue to create the illusion of mayhem, and the ultimate sacrifices made on behalf of duty to the highest principles.

That the tale is based on some actual historical facts provides the suggestion that the large budget devoted to the authentic period set and costumes is itself for a worthy educational cause. Conversly, but towards the same end, the blessing of the mission by the participation of an initially silly but ultimately transcendent spirit is just enough metaphysical window-dressing to give the story a flavour of noble gravitas. Throw in a few morsals of democratic lip-service and the always politically correct plea for peace, 13 Assassins comes off as a thoughtful man's action movie.

But truly, all the style and whatever substance is just an excuse for violent hero worship, idolatry for the elite core of special forces, reverence for the myth of the aristocratic action figure. Cowboy crap. A footnote to Homer that just keeps on getting recycled in increasingly nihilistic Western culture that clearly has its own traditions on the Eastern side. Hummnn... guess it's ruling class ideology with universal application... Will we ever go beyond this cult of the killer to create a socialist society? Meanwhile, I am compelled yet again to quote Spain Rodriguez, the underground cartoonist during the 60s who had previously run with a bike gang: "Ten guys can kick the shit outta anyone." Do the math. 200 can kick the shit outta 13.

And Dan:Not only is Takashi Miike is a filmmaker of great productivity, pumping out between two and four feature films a year for the past decade plus, as well as helming a number of tv series in his native Japan, but of great range and diversity as well. Miike first showed up on my radar about ten years ago, with the twin cinematic killers of Audition (an unforgettably grisly horror film) and Dead or Alive (a wild and audacious crime thriller), and while I have not kept up with all his work (who could, with that sort of output?) it is clear that Miike's wildly divergent tastes have continue to inform his work. Who other than Miike would produce films as bizarre as Ichi the Killer, a horrific tale about a Joker-type serial killer and The Happiness of the Katakuris, a musical comedy that superficially resembles The Sound of Music, while featuring claymation puppets committing acts of violence on unsuspecting uvulae?

Coming on the heels of such wildly varied fare, I have to note that, technical prowess, impressive set design (not to mention set pieces) aside, 13 Assassins is a mild disappointment. Not because Miike shows any slippage skill-wise (see my aside above), but rather because he is apparently so reverent of the samurai genre that he decides to play the whole thing pretty much completely straight, right across the board. Don't get me wrong, I found the film wonderfully rousing, and, unlike so many contemporary action films, which rely more upon confusion than clarity to keep the audience off kilter and befuddled, 13 Assassins is lucidly storyboarded, composed and edited. Action directors on this side of the ocean could do worse than to study and imitate Miike's techniques.

However, what I wouldn't have given to see Miike shake himself loose of the conventions of the genre, in order to challenge himself and the audience with the same sort of daring and audacity as he showed in the films mentioned above. I wish he had considered, for example (as Ben does, by channelling Spain Rodriguez) the implausibility of victory given the ridiculous lop-sided scenario, or considered developing the story in such a way that we might have been able to see (and made unsettled or shaken by) contemporary political parallels. Instead, Miike plays it by the age-old rules, and the result, while undeniably entertaining, is unexpectedly tame, at least by Miike standards._________________And here is the trailer for 13 Assassins:

2011-08-26T20:21:00.000-07:00

Wasp (2005, UK, Andrea Arnold)

Dan,

OK. So I'm trying to catch up on all the things you've sent me. So I click on this link. And the minute the thing starts playing, I know I've made a mistake. Because it's a beautiful sunny day. And I don't want to watch a movie right now, not even a short one. I want to finish my email, shut off my machine and get out in the sunshine. But the thing is still playing. And the energy coming off of it is immediately powerful. A disturbing, menacing energy that makes me even more want to shut the thing off and go outside. But it's just too powerful. And now here I am, having watched the whole film.

Excellent. Just excellent. Made me cry when, after exploding in understandable but still unjust rage at the oldest daughter, she manages to bring the devastated girl into the group hug. And then the relief I felt, verily, the gratitude to the film-maker, for the denouement; the family finally getting supper, that must have been paid for by the man, and he saying that she should let him step into her place so they can talk.

All of this emotion that came out of me at the end of the film is a testament to the tremendous tension the director was able to build up beforehand. It's an outstandingly excellent piece of short-story telling, benefitting from the compression effect that can only be achieved by a shorter rather than a longer narrative.

The impact of this compressed form is very well crafted cinematically, most especially in the tight story-boarding and lean editing, but also by certain cinematography choices; especially close-ups and jittery camera fixtures which make everything feel trapped and unstable at the same time. You just know something is going to go horribly wrong. But when it happens, it is credible, unsensational, and all the more serious and terrible for it.

The characters are not complex as such but their situation is, very fucking complex, and this situation conditioning the characters makes them complex by association. In short, all of the psychological depth comes from the sociological context. In other words - realism! The class consciousness informing the whole story is front and centre and beside this, the hardball feminism has only one toe not as much in the spotlight.

Excellent, just excellent. Andrea Arnold. I'll have to remember that name.

And Dan:

I concur on all fronts, and so have little to add. The film had me from the get-go, and held me by the throat throughout. Thank God for that restorative ending though, because if any of those kids had been harmed, I would have had to do something unspeakable to the mother. Turns out that her redemption was mine as well.

Wasp won the Academy Award for best short film in 2005. Every once in awhile, the Academy gets one right.

And you'd better remember that name all right, as she is the director of Red Road, Arnold's bloody good feature film debut. I lent this to you on Wednesday night, and look forward to our opportunity to discuss it soon.

Wasp is available on Youtube, but to make life a little easier for one and all, I've embed both parts below:

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2011-08-26T16:04:00.000-07:00

It Might Get Loud (USA, 2008, David Guggenheim)

And then Ben said:

It might've gotten louder as far as I'm concerned. I enjoyed It Might Get Loud but the film doesn't really deliver the goods. Ostensibly a document of a summit meeting of three well respected and highly influential guitar players from three different generations, the meeting happens but the three hardly reach the summit together. There is actually very little footage of the three of them in the same room and even less of them making music together in it. What little music they do make together is fine enough but it's not an especially inspired session.

Had they been given a chance to hang out together for a while without the cameras focused on them, jam a bit, rehearse this and that, get to know each other as people a little too, have a beer away from the bright lights and the film crew... But it is all too obvious that none of this took place. It's not that they appear tense as individuals or out of sorts as musicians. It's that they simply have not had any time to work up to the point of hitting the massive groove.

Why there is so little footage of the three of them together is a mystery, but the rest of the film tracks them as independent artists, providing impressionistic snapshots of their respective biographies and aesthetic principles. All of this is loosly organized around an even more vague Platonic idea of what it means to be a guitar player. I suppose this is supposed to become evident by way of synergistic connections, themselves achieved by the editing. I can't say this big picture ever came into view for me.

Still, there are some lovely moments in the film simply due to the high profile reputations of the three musicians. Watching The Edge and Jack White both grin from ear to ear as Jimmy Page stands four feet in front of them and starts cranking out Whole Lotta Love for their personal edification, you have to grin from ear to ear yourself. Plus there is some very cool archival footage, heartfelt introspection and some wistful nostalgia that seems deserved. The film definitely has a heart. What it's lacking is real guts, that place deep down where the music comes from.

The trailer:

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2011-08-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

Invictus (USA, 2009, Clint Eastwood

And so Ben sez:

I'm not into sports in a big way and I'm generally wary of patriotism. The supposedly sublimated violence of the former often fuels the organized xenophobia of the latter. Militant supporters on the sidelines are in a recreational dress rehersal for war. On the other hand, sometimes the aggression inherent in athletic confrontation is indeed sublimated into healthy competition and mutual respect. Assessed politically, it becomes a question of whether sports and patriotism can affirm domestic unity and international solidarity at the same time. It's not impossible but it's so rare, one could be forgiven for reckoning the challenge was to square the circle.

Such a miracle of geomtery was the 1995 Rugby World Cup hosted and won by South Africa. Invictus tells the tale in the standard Hollywood way. A bit too much sappy music. All the rough edges sanded off the characters. All the realistic complexity of the situation erased in order to present a super-simplified, feel-good story about the triumph of the underdog team and by association their fans. The significance of this is not trivial in this particular super-simplified, feel-good story because it happens to be true. All of the drama in the film rests on the post-Aparthied reconcilliation potential of the event. Invictus - based on the book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation - well, the book title says it all.

Unfortunately, all of the drama of the film resting on what is all said by that book title is not enough drama. The rough edges are so sanded off of Mandela, the film amounts to hagiography. Personally, I'm so desperate for honorable political leadership, genuine statesmanship, I'm prepared to let this go. Name even one other person alive today with the ethical gravitas of Nelson Mandela. Fine then. Morgan Freeman strides through the film as Moses in a business suit and I can dig it. It's the two-dimensionality of the rest of the characters that drags Invictus down dramatically. In erasing all the realistic complexity, the film gives nobody anything interesting to say or do. There are no interpersonal conflicts, there's no dramatic tension. Especially lacking is tension among the members of the team. There's a bit of superficial grumbling but nothing that enters substantively into the historical context. A bit more is explored by way of the security staff on detail to protect the president, but not enough to really raise the dramatic stakes. Alas, not unlike a Disney picture for kids, all that is left is the drama of the sports competition itself.

But here's where the nonfiction of the story turns inward on the film in a terribly disappointing way. The outcome of the historical rugby match is known in advance. Where's the drama in that? I suppose the sheer physicality of the game, the action down on the ground, might have been enough to generate some theatrics. But this doesn't come off in Invictus. I don't know if the problem has to do with the cinematography or the choreography of the play or something intrinsic to rugby that makes it less dramatically photogenic than other sports. I don't know. But whatever the source of the failure, the failure is palpable. Watching the victory game is just not the viseral thrill it absolutely must be, what with everything riding on it.

Of course, in reality, there was much less riding on winning the cup in the end and much more riding on the mere fact of hosting the competition in the first place, as Wikipedia explains:

The 1995 Rugby World Cup was the third Rugby World Cup. It was hosted and won by South Africa, and had the distinction of being the first Rugby World Cup in which every match was held in one country.The World Cup was the first major sporting event to take place in South Africa following the end of apartheid. It was also the first in which the South African national team was allowed to compete; the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB, now the International Rugby Board) had only allowed the readmittance of South Africa to international rugby in 1992, following negotiations to end apartheid.

Meanwhile, 15 years later, it remains all too easy to shoot the shanty town scenes on location. In observing this, I must also take note of the best line of dialogue in the film. It is spoken by the black maid of the parents of the captain of the rugby team. He has just informed his family that he has been instructed to meet with the president. The maid speaks up. Tells him to tell "Madiba" that the buses are too expensive.

The trailer:

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2011-08-23T20:12:00.000-07:00

Between the Folds (USA, 2008, Vanessa Gould)

Ben:

The brevity and modesty of this film are essential to it's efficacy as both an entertaining and educational documentary. For the reputation of it's subject matter is also that of something small and unprepossessing. That origami is actually something massive and marvelous is made evident by the soft-spoken and less-is-more power of this film. And just as the film makes the viewer reconsider any prejudices that might be held about origami, reflecting on the film itself, the viewer realizes that it too turned out to be something more than expected.

This is a lot of fancy talk to say that Between The Folds handed my ignorant ass back to me on a plate. I popped the disc into the machine with a patronizing attitude; you know, origami is a quaint craft for kids. The film immediately gripped my attention with it's philosophic sensitivity, held my attention with it's aesthetic sophistication and ultimately made me pay proper attention to the nearly miraculous creations these people make from a single sheet of paper.

And as if it isn't enough to produce from a two-dimensional medium a three-dimensional form with exacting detail, one of the origami practitioners (origamist?) achieves motion conducive structures that actually lend themselves to dynamic reconfigurations. Yet the fragility of the structure only allows a limited window for this. I predict the emergence of origami performance art that by material necessity is as singular as the wiping away of a sand mandala by a Tibetian monk.

Conceptually what I found most profound was the nondichotomization of art and science. The most passionate origami artist must enter into mathematized technique and the most logical origami scientist must enter into the emotional core of creativity. And on a very personal note, it breaks my heart that I cannot share this film with my dead dad. One of his favorite metaphors for the dialectical interpenetration of opposites within a whole was what he called "the pizza fold;" i.e., moving dough folding over on itself.

If nothing else, I have been humbled by this film. The advanced origami displayed requires folds hundreds and hundreds of times over, in some cases, reaching into the thousands. The most I can manage every now and then is to play the one record I own by the Ben Folds Five.

And Dan:

Because Bevin had previously sent me some links to the work of some of the artists featured in this documentary, I was not surprised by the quality of the artistry involved in the origami. That said, I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work of the documentarian, Vanessa Gould (her first film, as far as I can tell), who does a terrific job of conveying the mathematics and aesthetics of origami, while also digging into the philosophical issues presented by the (sometimes faux) dichotomy of the two.

I fully expected the film to be a straight forward fawning over the increasingly intricate and technically sophisticated work being done on the field of origami, and the film fulfills expectations in the opening scenes. However, it quickly moves past such pedestrial considerations--I mean, how excited can you get over the devotion to increasing the fold count? It's no different than getting a hard on over Cameron's advancement in the field of 3-D CGI--and onto the more engaging questions, such as what is the relationship between technique and artistry? And is more necessarily better, or is there a point where the mathematics takes over and the aesthetic consideration are swamped by a quest for complexity?

Here is where the film really took off for me, particularly when the artists in the field examine the need to move into more philosophical directions, such as studying the evolution of the two dimensional material into a three dimensional artistic statement, or the development of an artistry of motion out of the static. Gould's film is evocative and intelligent, just like her subject matter, and she is smart enough to let the artists do the heavy philosophical lifting, turning her abstract inquery into concrete reality before our eyes.

Then Ben:

And some of the stuff they make is incredible man!

And Dan:

It most certainly is. That said, after being dazzled by the increasing sophistication of the designs, I was completely knocked out by the guy who showed us the many beautiful things that could come out of a single fold. It was like reading William Carlos Williams after perusing some T.S. Eliot.; the film got me thinking about bigger aesthetic questions without being pedantic.

The trailer:

2011-08-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

The Raven/Le Corbeau (France, 1943, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Just this week I watched and reviewed Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009) and in my review I referred to Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery (1948). Now I am commenting on Henri-Georges Clouzot's film, Le Corbeau (1943) - which another reviewer has called a "distant cousin" to The White Ribbon [see: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-white-ribbon/4460] - and which makes me think of Shirley Jackson yet again; this time, her short story, The Possibility of Evil (1965). I categorized The White Ribbon as a "poison-in-the-well" piece [see: http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/02/poisoned-well-of-truth-the-white-ribbon/]. Others may or may not find this categorization convincing, but there can be no debate that Le Corbeau is a poison-in-the-pen piece.

As with Jackson's story, the plot has to do with an individual anonymously sending hateful gossip to all and sundry in town in order to satisfy what can only be a nefarious purpose. The crucial difference between the story and the film, however, is that the audience knows from the outset who the culprit is in the former but only finds out at the very end of the film.
Jackson's is a critical character study the lays bare a sociopath who perversely sees herself as a righteous pillar of the community. Clouzot's is a whodunit mystery that would be trite if not for it's penetrating investigation of parochial hypocrisy and the dark underbelly of those next door neighbors we thought were nice... but little did we know.

Hence, in Jackson's story, the expose necessarily ends with the corrupter getting hers in the end. This happens in Clouzot's film too but only instrumentally for the narrative. Thematically it's all about how all of us have dirty little secrets. And the best exchange of dialogue in the film reveals that our dirtiest secret isn't so little. You know that line we draw between good and evil so we can claim to walk straight on the side of good? Uh-huh. Total bullshit.
Not to take this too seriously though. Le Corbeau may be far from trite but it is just as far from profound. The cynicism coming off of the thing is mostly for show. It's an exercise in style that draws heavily on American noir. There are some wonderful passages of cinematography that achieve this feeling within a provincial French town, which is cool in it's own right. One that especially stood out for me is the nurse/nun wearing a flowing black habit and veil, running away from vigilantes in broad daylight against white-washed walls of old stone. The Raven indeed.

Meanwhile, the film satisfies another noir requirement, a dark sense of humor delivered by way of hard-boiled dialogue. For all the suspense and unwholesome interactions, I found myself laughing along the way and I do believe Le Corbeau should be appreciated as a form of satire. To call it a "distant cousin" to Haneke's The White Ribbon, well, the distance is very, very great; my own middle-man references to Shirley Jackson notwithstanding. I'll not pursue this further except to say that Haneke appears to have adopted Kubrick's title as the intellectual Ice Man of cinema... minus the sense of humor.

And Dan:

Context is key to fully appreciate the greatness of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau. Shot in the first year of the Nazi occupation of France under the watchful eye of German-controlled Vichy France, and by logical extension, the film industry, through Continental-Films (who understood the value of movies as propaganda better than they?), Clouzot’s film had to walk quite a tightrope in order to escape the censor’s scissors. Not only that, it had to withstand the attacks of French patriots who viewed Clouzot’s willingness to work with the German controlled film institute as proof that he was in the first rank of collaborators: A man who had sold his soul to the Devil just so he could continue to make movies.

But Le Corbeau ain’t just any old film. This taut, tightly wound 91m film is a despairing and morally complex look at the things that damaged people living in a dangerous time will do. That it is a thinly-veiled examination of the many difficulties of living in Vichy France is the common wisdom today, though that allegorical aspect of the film seems to have initially slipped past the folks at Continental-Film who okayed the film and the censors who allowed its release. So there’s some interesting meta-criticism going on w/r/t the film, in that folks wonder about the morality of taking money from the Nazis, while making a final product that is essentially anti-Nazi. ‘Tis a real head scratcher, that one. But, in the end, for any film of this sort to succeed, it must work at both literal AND allegorical level, and Le Corbeau most certainly does that.

Our attention throughout the film is focused on Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Freznay), a secretive, curt and stolid man who claims that all he seeks from this life is peace, though we’re not initially sure what torments him, or from what he is trying to escape. He is first seen washing blood from his hands (is he Pilate? Macbeth? Why all this guilt?) after performing an apparently shady operation where the mother is saved, while the unborn child is not. That we don’t know him, yet are quick to pass judgment is one of the many preconceptions that will be used against us later.

Published over two decades years after the release of Le Corbeau, Shirley Jackon’s terrific short story The Possibility of Evil appears to have been inspired by Clouzot’s film. Both are built around the same premise, an anonymous citizen is writing poisonous letters attacking the townspeople’s misdeeds, in the hope that it will lead them to correct the error of the ways. Instead, in both story and film it creates a climate of paranoia and dis-ease that spreads like a virus, infecting everyone in it path. At first, the townspeople try to ferret out the epistle-writer, but soon grow frustrated with that, and instead turn their paranoid concerns to the most prominent victim of these insidious attacks, Dr. Germain. Complicating our reaction to these events, as the persistent victim of many of these smears, Germain is not a particularly appealing hero. He is cool and aloof, detached and even a little arrogant. And the charges made against him may have merit: Germain just might be guilty. And we just might cheer his fall.

When cracks begin to appear in Germain’s veneer, he turns to his landlord’s sister, the promiscuous Denise (Ginette Leclerc), for comfort. While she cannot promise eternal rest for all that troubles him, a few hours of oblivion is better than nothing. As is almost always the case with Clouzot, the film seethes with sexual tension. Germain is attracted to both Denise and Laura, a nurse’s sister who helps out in the hospital. The young and lovely Laura happens to be married to an elderly Dr. Vorzot, (Piere Larquey) is playing a cat-like role in the film, toying with the minds of the citizenry, though most fascinated by the mysterious Germain. while watching in the wings is Denise’s Lolita-like 14 ½ year old niece Rolande (Liliane Maigne), who is clearly smitten w/ the good doctor herself.

Clouzot fills the frame with moody imagery. There is the titular raven, of course, but the film also has a predominance of darkness in the lengthening shadows and the many characters who wear black dress. The contrast between light and dark/good and evil typically reflecting this post-Expressionist pre-film noir symbolism is best exemplified by the verbal face off between the sarcastic and seemingly omnipresent psychiatrist Vorzet and the frustrated and angry Germain while a lamp swings on a pendulum between ‘em. Clouzot’s influence in moments like this was obviously great. Not only did Hitchcock admire him, but the great Orson Welles used similar tactics in Touch of Evil, a full 15 years later.

The moral complexity of this film’s approach is thoroughly modern. Some of Le Corbeau’s wicked comic undertones are quietly slipped into the film, particularly in the scenes involving psychiatrist Vorzot. He is a clever and insightful cynic whose running commentary on the story is always good for a chuckle. While some of Clouzot’s targets are more subtlely attacked, such as the petit-bourgeois values of the townspeople (Denise dismisses Germain as pathetic because he’ll never rise above his narrow bourgeois mentality) much of Le Corbeau is about taking on much larger targets. Clouzot is obviously concerned about the effects on a society of living in a culture of informants and collaborators, and he is not afraid of also incriminating the audience as well as his film's characters. This is a town full of tiny monsters, each willing to betray his neighbour if it’ll bring him a little peace and quiet, a little refuge from life’s storm. Only in a Clouzot film would the sole figures of empathy and hope be such terribly damaged females; the limping Denise and the distraught but vengeful mother of an apparent suicide. But neither is heroic in any conventional sense, as both suffer from physical and emotional wounds that cause them terrible grief and leave them virtual pariahs in their community. This may be a restorative ending, but it is not without its victims and its open wounds.

Using secret informants to rule by fear was clearly a tactic the Germans found useful in Vichy France, so it isn't too surprising that once it was released, Clouzot’s film was deemed too dangerous, and soon shelved by the Nazis. Ironically, it wasn’t just the right wing who attacked it, but the communists as well. They viewed the film’s portrayal of the townspeople as too cynical, and lacking the appropriate sort of heroic values they wanted associated with the average Joe and Josephine fighting the good fight in wartime France. Equally disturbing to many on the left was the notion that Clouzot took money and resources from the Germans in order to produce films while the Nazi’s were simultaneously slaughtering thousands of innocent people all over Europe. In the end, while Clouzot was attacked as a collaborator for choosing to work with the Nazi-controlled Continental-Films, that didn’t stop him from making a film that the Nazis would soon realize was subversive, and which now stands tall above and beyond the criticisms of the day, as a biting comment on the degenerative effects of using vicious and paranoid practices to bind together in fear any society of people.

Then Ben:

I think that my review proves yours. The conditions under which it was made and the circumstance in which it was originally screened - this is indeed the key to fully appreciating Le Corbeau. While I continue to feel that the film is not endogenously profound, the exogenous factors you observe have taken my sorry ass to school with respect to the clandestine communications it portrays. I absorbed from the film a general philosophic - and therefore, not especially deep - investigation about people in general passing information and disinformation. But of course, it makes all the difference in the world who is saying what to whom behind what cloak in occupied France. Are you an informant or working for the resistance? More than just sinister gossip, the poison coming from the pen in Le Corbeau is thematically intended for some and not others operating underground. In short, it's political. Clearly, I was unaware. And I have to think now that the reviewer who called The White Ribbon a "distant cousin" to Le Corbeau was not so unaware, although I still maintain that these cousins are too distant to kiss.

Meanwhile, is it necessary to know that On The Waterfront is Kazan's rationalization for personally cooperating with HUAC in order to fully appreciate that film? I am sincerely asking this question. I suppose any answer would ultimately boil down to a definition of "appreciate" in this context.

And Dan:

I don't think it is essential in the case of On the Waterfront, because there is so much greatness in the rest of the film (casting, cinematography, set designs, editing and so on) that it can stand on its own two feet. First time I saw the film as a teenager I had only the very vaguest appreciation of the film's political context, and I was knocked out by it. Knowing now what I didn't know then, I am naturally less impressed by the film.

The Trailer for Le Corbeau:

2011-08-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

The Pawnbroker (USA, 1964, Sidney Lumet)

Somewhere between the Taxi Driver New York of Martin Scorsese, the Annie Hall New York of Woody Allen and the Do The Right Thing New York of Spike Lee is a good beginning suggestion of the New York that came into my mind as an adolescent visiting relatives there and eventually living there for a year. In short, the mid 70s to early 80s. Although I have been to New York many times since then, that time continues to constitute my frame of reference. It is relative to this that Sidney Lumet's work from the 60s is so fascinating for me. I am engaged by that-New-York-then for what about it was and what about it was not to become the New York of my frame of reference.

I have caught near-the-end bits of The Pawnbroker on the TV twice over the years, but I of these I remembered only the authentically New York setting when I put the disc in the machine last week. The atmosphere of the film is indeed genuine. Lumet is nothing if not a socially conscious realist. But I was also impressed by how much cinemantic style is present. The performances are ultra-naturalistic. Stieger turns in a characterization that rightfully established him as one of the leading method players on the scene, and the rest are solid too. Yet, there is no shortage of obvious blocking and tracking to achieve clearly pre-conceived mis en scene results. Throw in the tight cutting to indicate instantaneous flashbacks and the sometimes too-effective soundtrack by Quincy Jones and the whole thing really knocked me out for it's artistry as much as for it's on-location grit.

Thematically, as cautious as I am in 2011 about any Holocaust facts becoming the ideological property of Zionist ideology in general and Israeli policy legitimations in particular, the dramatic power of the story of a camp survivor who is psychologically damanged past any kind of humanistic repair is beyond reproach. This is especially the case considering that The Pawnbroker was made in 1965, two decades after the end of WWII when the topic of Holocaust survival was only just beginning to be addressed in the mainstream. Perhaps this explains why the film enters into its topic with a pretty high degree moralistic restraint. It makes its point with narrative economy and emotional sophistication in a socially complex contemporary context. Not just the acting, the screenplay is damn good.

Looking at it from a post Spike-Lee perspective, The Pawnbroker displays a white, liberal fear of portraying blacks specifically in any sort of negative light. So there are certain multi-cultural social groupings in the film that are a little bit bogus. On the other hand, there are individual depictions across all the races that are remarkably progressive for their diverse inclusion and veracity. Over all, The Pawnbroker stands today as one of the great pieces of New York neo-realism, and I use the latter category precisely to suggest that the American development in the 60s probably best represented by Lumet is coming out of certain fundamentals of the Italian development in the 40s.

A famous clip from the Pawnbroker:

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2011-08-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

Zorba the Greek (UK/USA/Greece, 1964, Mihalis Kakogiannis)

Ben begins (and middles and ends):

My categorization of Zorba the Greek as a comedy enabled me to critically observe what I took to be a tourist worldview. The latter might seem an unwarranted interpretation on my part considering that the film was based on a book by a man from Crete, the setting of the story, and directed by a man from neighboring Cyprus. Opps!

In my defense, I introduced the point about a tourist worldview in the context of suggesting why the film was a big hit in the USA when it was released and has been a perennial favorite ever since. This noted, it is true that I ascribed a tourist worldview not just to this audience but to the film itself. Clearly, this is mistaken insofar as tourists are by definition visiting outsiders, whereas the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, and director, Micheal Cacoyannis, are definitely indigenous insiders. Duh!

This leaves my assertion that the film employs a city-slicker negative stereotype about rural society. In my estimation, this does not require retraction. But it does need to be refined further given the fact that the creators of the book/(film) are drawing on first-hand, concrete knowledge of Cretan culture specifically. So it would appear to follow from this that they are not imposing a stereotype.

Yet the fact remains that the Cretan village is shown to be populated by, as I said, "dull-witted peasants out for the sort of retribution that only the most ignorant tribalists could practice." The degree to which it is appropriate to label this a city-slicker point of view depends on the extent to which it appears ideologically cliche that such backwardness is necessarily to be found out in the provincial boonies. To generalize along this line is in effect the same as imposing a negative stereotype about rural society, which just happens to be Cretan in this case.

Be this as it may; again, what remains is the depiction and I presently feel that my previous treatment of it was inadequate. I indicated that I found it difficult to reconcile the tragic elements in Zorba with it being a comedy overall. It looks to me in retrospect that my observation of this comedic primacy prevented me from better assessing the meaning of the tragic elements. The pathos that is featured does more than merely display the moral shortcomings of the two protagonists. It also, and even more so, makes obvious that the local Cretans are indeed "ethical cretins."

I quote myself to indicate that I perceived at least that much before. But what I wish to add here is that this negative depiction is not the outsiders insult I took it to be. It is rather an insiders critique. I referred to the character of the Greek played by Quinn as well-traveled and therefore enlightened. This is something of an exaggeration. But it is correct enough. And it is hardly a big interpretive leap to recognize that Zorba best represents the perspective of the author (and by association, the director). Zorba provides a critique of Cretan small town life by a once-insider who migrated to Athens to study law, Paris to study philosophy, the Soviet Union to observe the revolution, Spain to observe the republican movement, and elsewhere before dying in Germany and being buried in the capital city of Crete, (thank you Wiki).

Clearly, Kazantzakis addresses his rural upbringing in his homeland not as a bourgeois, jet-set snob but rather as a socialist-inclined citizen personally concerned with the development of his countrymen. At the same time, he is religiously informed and this in connection with his political orientation brings us to the real object of his critique; the dominant organized power in the society - the church.

There are two cursory moments in which a policeman appears in the film but so much on the periphery of the scene as to be entirely insignificant. The only institution of authority to receive attention in Zorba is the church. While this observation is focused, the critique entailed in it is askance, as befitting a comedy. In all instances of this sideways attack, however, the church is plainly revealed to be utterly useless with respect to providing moral leadership in the community.

If the villagers are ethical cretins still stuck in Old Testament-style tribal backwardness, it is because the church completely fails to advance the true Gospel of Jesus. Appropriately enough, the original meaning of the word cretin was literally Christian; as in, still recognized by Jesus as one of his followers despite not having enough human intellect to be faithful on purpose. For the true Gospel is not superficially intellectual but deeply emotional. The spiritual core of faith is love. This has to do with the Passion of the Christ through which individuals must find love; for each other, for life, for God.

Hence, the live-life-to-the fullest theme running through Zorba is an expression of Humanist Christianity. All of the sage lessons the Greek teaches to the Brit about the necessity of passion amount to rejection of theology as such. To get at this ironically, the cretin - the non-intellectual lover of the sheer existence of everything- is the real Christian according to the film.

Wiki informs me that by one vote Kazantzakis lost the 1957 Nobel Prize to Camus. The two are certainly peers. Unlike the gloomy Algerian, the uplifting Cretan is no atheist but his religious temperament is existentialist through and through. Some time after the publication of Zorba, he was officially condemned by the Greek Orthodox Church, (as in the next decade he would be more immediately by the Roman Catholic Church following the publication of The Last Temptation of Christ). Clearly, the patriarchs of the eastern church saw the critique in Zorba that I initially missed when I failed to make sense of the pathos in the comedy.

Not that the critique of the church in Zorba isn't sometimes blatantly humorous. The portrayal of the order of monks in town is pointedly satirical. In one scene, Zorba fools them into believing that some water has actually turned into wine. Upon the basis of this supposed miracle, he ingratiates himself among them to his later commercial advantage. In the action climax of the film, they are funny like Eric Idle is as a nun on the run. While timbers - pretty much stolen off their property - come tumbling towards them in a mess of collapsed engineering, the monks' flight is hilarious. They are, then, buffoons on the margins of the town who are hopeless non-starters when it comes to improving the moral fiber of the people. And speaking of being a once-insider, Kazantzakis himself took a shot at being a monk. That lasted six months. Say no more.

But the serious critique in Zorba attends the tragic elements in the story. When Zorba's lover is dying, she takes a cross from the drawer of her nightstand and clasps it for salvation. After she has died and all around her corpse the crones plunder her luxurious possessions, part of their hatred for her is explained as stemming from her being the wrong kind of Christian. It is said that as a westerner she literally holds the cross incorrectly according to the eastern church. The schismatic cleavage of the church is a striking indication of the lack of love in the ecclesiastical institution as a whole, displaying its incapability of providing moral guidance for the children of Christ.

This is driven home most dramatically in the murder scene of the widow. Rather than attend the funeral service being conducted by the priest inside, much of the community congregates outside in the churchyard. They skip church in order to bar the widow entrance to the service so they can collectively get on with the business of killing her. To say that the clergy proves ineffectual while this is going on is a gross understatement. No attempt is made to stop this tribal "justice." The priest is no doubt utterly oblivious that his parish is elsewhere committing murder while he mechanically goes through the motions of performing a corporate function. The Brit - who is no small catalyst in the mob's action against the widow - is disgracefully impotent when it comes to intervening on her behalf. Zorba comes close to saving her but his efforts prove futile in the end, revealing the limitations of his passion. Only the church had the power to provide the proper leadership, to make the crowd choose compassion, to offer loving forgiveness like Jesus would do. In this capacity, Zorba exposes the church to be null and void.

In my original review of the film, I saw in it an outsider's point of view. I was right about this but in a confused way. What Kazantzakis is outside is not Crete but rather the church. This is well symbolized by the material fact of him being buried, Wiki reports, "on the wall surrounding the city of Heriklion near the Chania Gate, because the Orthodox Church ruled out his being buried in a cemetery." In his lifetime, he responded to the religious conservatives who excommunicated him: ""You gave me a curse, Holy fathers, I give you a blessing: may your conscience be as clear as mine and may you be as moral and religious as I," (Wiki, of course).

But what about the status of women in the film? That they are mostly invisible is easy to explain as an accurate reflection of the male-dominated culture at the time, especially considering that the book came out in 1946. On the other hand, they are not absolutely invisible. They are shown (as are children) at the beginning of the film when the protagonists first show up. They are also shown at the end of the film, out in the fields working. And perhaps similarly in other bits I cannot recall.

More germane to the question, Monica has brought to my attention that they are present - albeit as a minority - during the terrible execution of the widow. So much for the potential sisterhood I found absent before. Besides, the widow is like an orthodox Jew insofar as she refuses to assimilate just as much as she is ostracized.

As for Zorba's lover, I have already touched on her alien standing as a French Catholic. Recall her relative class position as the sole entrepreneurial proprietor in town and there's no chance for the likes of her receiving solidarity and support from the locals, female locals included. The upshot of all this is that I find myself unable to substantiate my feminist objection to Zorba.

Nevertheless, I continue to be bothered in this regard. I adhere to the impression that the two love interests in the story are at bottom plot devices and not worthwhile personalities in their own right. This is not to suggest that they are crudely objectified. Yet it is to say that their subjective human agency is not allowed to fully articulate itself.
While there is nothing necessarily misogynist about homo-eroticism, and while the homo-eroticism in the story is far from explicit, I wonder if I am detecting a sexist strain in Kazantzakis' theologically infused existentialism. One thing is definite, Zorba's benign heterosexual masculinity manifests itself in a tender but patronizing macho manner. But as I have only seen Cacoyannis' film and not read Kazantzakis' book, I feel it would be intellectually irresponsible of me to venture further on this topic.

Zorba's Famous Dance:

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2011-08-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

Waste Land (UK/Brazil, 2010, Lucy Walker, Karen Harley, Joao Jardim)

Ben begins:

Could the title be any more misleading? Fuck Facebook and the movie about it. This film is the real social network. This film is not about garbage at all. It is not about a dump at all. It is about human dignity. At its most essential core and therefore in its most profound expression. And just as essentially and profoundly a part of this, it is about community. Deep and serious social solidarity. Jesus Christ - it's about love.

Yet, this love is not the mealy-mouthed, Sunday sermon sort. It is the all-through-the-work-week, class conscious sort. I do not have to elaborate on this, develop arguments to advance it as a thesis, provide evidence from the film to support the observation - for it is absolutely obvious throughout the film, on bold display from start to finish, saturating the screen non-stop from each and every pore of the document.

Waste Land is soulful. "Soul," not as: that which might get to heaven by the grace of God. No, "soul," as in: of the people, by the people and for the people; here, now and most of all, tomorrow. The achievement in the present that the film shows is truly inspiring. It delivers a promise for the future. This is not just your run-of-the-mill human interest story at the end of the evening news, a smear of feel-good icing on top of the nihilistic cake served up by the media to keep everyone "informed," that is, personally terrified, socially alienated and politically lame. No. Waste Land gives hope.

Did I make my kids watch Waste Land? You know I did. It's authentically educational. I believe it should be required viewing in high school social studies classes; for its ethical heart, to be sure, but more concretely how this heart beats in practice. The film is powerful for its activism, its cross-culturalism and its penetrating insight into the work and meaning of recycling. It is the latter which compels me to say that Waste Land should be required viewing in high school art classes as well.

There is a direct line from the anti-bourgeois, anti-nationalist, anti-colonialist anarcho-radical aspirations of Dadaism to Waste Land. But unlike so many post-Dada developments informed by it, Waste Land does not take that first fateful individualistic step that mostly tends to existential absurdity and despairing irony. In the film, recycling is a collective act in more than one sense of the word "collective". The associated labour process that reclaims materials previously designated as useless non-property entails the re-appropriation of these materials as useful. What is more, this transformation is from stuff not having use-value as privately owned property to stuff having use-value as collectively owned property. At the level of use-value, then, the art work is socialist property.

What about the exchange-value of this new property, is it also collectively owned? The film does not explicitly address the ownership of the artworks created by the associated producers once they get commodified. It is probably fair to assume that the originator and leader of the project, Vic Muniz, holds the copyrights. But he certainly incorporates his fellow artistic workers in a profit-sharing scheme. Over all, the political economy of the project is tending towards socialism if not there yet. It's one hell of an excellent social democratic cooperative.

Admittedly, unlike the class consciousness obviously beating in the ethical heart of Waste Land, this take on the political economy of the project it documents is an ideological interpretation on my part. In case my interpretation is found to be forced, compare Waste Land to another recently released documentary about public art, Exit Through the Gift Shop. Of course, Exit is not a real documentary at all. It is a faux-doc. Even so, it packs a considerable punch of punk politics.

Or does it? In my estimation, at the end of the day Exit is yet another footnote to Warhol and Warhol is ultimately part of the problem and not part of the solution; i.e., he's a prophet for profit by way of the reduction of art to advertising. Exit certainly tweaks the art establishment for colonizing street art for yet another sector of the big bucks art market. But as the full title ironically confesses, the buck stops there and so does the critique. Banksy hides solitary in the shadows in order to laugh all the way to the bank, see?

Vic Muniz, exactly opposite, gives something back, eh? He steps out of the gallery in order to step right back in, united with other people, people who would otherwise never make it in there. Not in a million years. The guy is a mensch. He remembers where he came from, he respects his roots, he returns to give something back. Yet he ends up taking as much as he gives. He employs, he enlightens, he empowers and he also eliminates some economic poverty. But damn if those dump-diggers don't raise his consciousness too and enable him to make art he could never make on his own. Not in a million years.

And Dan:

The Waste Land of the title is Jardim Gramacho, the "Garbage Garden," world's largest garbage dump, and the setting for one of the most touching ruminations on relationship between art, artist, subject and society that I've ever seen.

Vic Muniz, the artist--well, one of the artists--at the center of this film's action, had the luck and good grace as a young man growing up in Brazil to get shot in the leg by someone with enough money to allow Muniz to flee his troubled life in the homeland and head to America. It is there that he eventually became a successful artist, and one day decide to return to his roots. As Waste Land begins, Muniz is planning to head back to Brazil to start his next art project, where he wants to transform garbage into art.

And if this was only a film about this project, it would be a fine film indeed. But it is so much more than that.

Returning to Rio, Muniz goes exactly where one might expect an artist looking for garbage to go, the aforementioned Jardim Gramacho. Here we meet the pickers, or catadores, the men and women who make a living sifting through this city of refuse in order to glean valuable recyclables, and reclaim them, all for the equivalent of about $20 a day. It turns out that the wretched refuse of the world, who make their living out of what others reject, are anything but. The pickers do more that just find value where others see trash, they build an entire community out of it. This is, it turns out, not just a great story about how these people take care of the environment, but also how they take care of each other, how they build a real community out of other's waste.

And if this was only a film about this group of fascinating people, it would be a fine film indeed. But it is so more than that.

Because it turns out that Muniz has more in mind than a simple conversion project. He chooses as his subject matter not just the garbage in the world's largest dump, but the pickers of this dump as well. He hangs out with the people who work in one of the world's most foul places, and he gets to know them, and the world they have built for themselves. Waste Land begins to build its not insignificant emotional power throughout this portion of the film, as the wonderful humanity of catadores like Tiao and Suelem takes centre stage. Then and only then does he enlist their aid in the construction of his art projects, crafting artistic statements that reveal not only the character of the individual in question, but also placing each of those individuals in an artistic lineage that connects them to figures and forces of socio-political and historical significance.

And because Waste Land a film about all of this and more, it is a great film indeed. What begins as an interesting experiment, turning garbage into art, becomes a sociological study of the transformative power of art on people, and of people on the art and the artist. Waste Land shows us how people can be bound together through work and art, not only to each other, but also to their larger socio-political and historical legacy. It is a film about the ways humanity and beauty can be found, thrive even, in the most challenging and unlikely places, when people have the resolve, and the love, to make it so. Most importantly perhaps, is the fact that Waste Land is a real treasure, the sort of heartwarming and life affirming study of people, lacking in both sentimentality and cynicism, that uplifts the audience and elevates the art form.

Waste Land's trailer is below

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2011-08-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

Marwencol (USA, 2010, Jeff Malmberg)

Ben Begins (and ends):

Hogancamp's camp is full of Hogan's Heroes. Sure, I say this to make the pun, but not just to make the pun. Indeed, had the pun been my top priority, I would not have capitalized the word "Heroes" to indicate a proper noun. A lower case spelling would signal that the heroes were merely those of Mark Hogencamp, the significance of which is entirely personal for him, privately idiosyncratic. Quite the opposite, the characters who animate his doll house truly are Hogan's Heroes, which I now italicize to make it that much more plain that I am alluding to the TV show.

Point being, the artist is tapping into what is unquestionably the default historical narrative of the modern American patriotic psyche. WWII is THE Good War, THE Just Cause of all just causes, used to justify all subsequent war-making, however obliquely - or not. The cultural centrality and ideological resilience of this narrative is perhaps best demonstrated by the remarkably diverse versions of it, especially comedic. From Ernst Lubitsch to Mel Brooks to Quentin Tarantino, with the lesser likes of Hogan's Heroes thrown in too, clearly; ironic ridicule is as effective as any other approach when it comes to having the Nazis symbolize Pure Evil.

The artistically fascinating aspect of Hogancamp's doll house is that his particular appropriation of this societal devil incarnate or Platonic ideal of national sin is communicated through a media that is screaming out kitch, but the episodes of Hogan's Heroes he storyboards and photographs are dead serious. A working-class folk artist, it is reasonable to speculate that Hogancamp's educational exposure to sophisticated treatments of the WWII narrative has been minimal. Be this as it may, his use of GI Joe action figures and Barbie dolls reflects his very modest economic means when it comes to procuring the necessary material supplies for his artistic expression. That he is able to overcome the popular perception of these objects as automatically signifying nothing more than toys for kids - without a trace of irony - is of itself testament to the power of sincerity in art.

The degree to which this sincerity of itself is enough to establish the merit of Hogancamp's art could be a matter of debate. This is to suggest that it seems unlikely anyone could grasp it's profundity without having background information about the man's biography. It might be possible to uphold as a corollary of the art-for-art's-sake rule that any circumstances surrounding the art's creation should be disregarded. In the case of Hogancamp specifically, however, this corollary should itself be disregarded because in the first place it is beyond debate that he is not creating art for art's sake.

It is a hackneyed metaphor to hold that an artist's work is for him a form of personal therapy but on this occasion it is literally true. The real story of Hogancamp's life is absolutely essential to know in order to properly appreciate his art. Hell, it's absolutely essential to know to respect him as a person, an outstandingly courageous, inspiring human being. In his way, Mark Hogencamp is the heroic equal of Aron Ralston, who has recently and deservedly been celebrated in the film 127 Hours.

I liked that film alright, but in my estimation, Marwencol is far superior. What most impresses me about it as a documentary is the way it paces its deliverance of the facts. The film immediately intrigued me and made me sympathetic to its subject. Yet it refrained from asking and answering certain questions at the outset, instead waiting until the best possible moment to reveal crucial information. We are told at the beginning about the brutal attack Hogancamp experienced, the brain damage he suffered and how the doll house came about as a self-help program to restore mental faculties, manual dexterity and... next thing you know - we're entering the fantasy world itself and becoming enchanted by it.

Even so, it soon becomes a curiousity. OK, we get the theraputic purpose of the form of the project, but what about its content? What's with the particulars of Hogancamp's fantasy land? The documentary speaks to this just in time. It is made clear that Hogancamp requires not merely an escapist retreat in which to feel secure but also a make-believe world where he can dramatize his revenge. He must have for himself a zone wherein it is absolutely impossible to be sceptical about the bad guys being bad. They must be Pure Evil. That's right, Nazis. Hence, Hogencamp's unconscious but easily understandable need for a WWII scenario.

In order for the audience to be morally comfortable enough to allow this, though, we need to return to the scene of the crime. It is vital that we overcome whatever reservations we may have about Hogancamp casting his assailants as Nazis. Otherwise, any distain we might feel for the fetishistically perverse impulses of the artist will obstruct our connection with him as an artist and possibly even as a victim in need of his therapy. In short, it has to be explained to us why Hogancamp was savagely beaten to near death outside the bar that night.

Hence, the film eventually reveals his alcoholism and his transvestism, in that order, and the result is a documentary that is ultimately a very moving statement about sexual identity, repressive violence and art that is for a fuck of alot more than it's own sake! On every conceivable level, Mark Hogencamp is right to cast his bad guys as Nazis. While only a bit of sensitivity is required to realize that homosexuality and transvestism are not the same thing, such sensitivity would not have been displayed by those busy gasing gays in the ovens along with Jews, Gypsies, Communists...

Close to the end of Marwenecol, after receiving enough encouragement, when the artist finally wears a pair of his women's shoes to his gallery show - I cried. Even more than what this indicated about his own healing process, I was emotionally overtain by the moment as a political act. As for his own healing process, the film-maker saves the best for last. In a meta-statement that would make the director of Sherlock Jr. proud, we are shown the dolls of the dolls. We see Hogancamp manipulating the now big doll of himself, manipulating the new little doll of himself, being filmed in a documentary about the referent of the referent that is the actual man. You'd think that artifice upon artifice would constitute a further retreat from reality. But dialectically, the exact opposite is happening. Not as some ironic twist either. By allowing his emerging post-trauma experience into his pretend kingdom, the man is reconstituting his self-consciousness, reclaiming the dignity of his whole mind, recovering his soul. This is incontrovertibly confirmed we we see him bringing in to the picture his post-post-trauma experience.

It's easy to by cynical about individuals who have triumphed over adversity. I've seen footage of Aron Ralston mountain climbing with his prosthetic device and he makes it look like an advantage over an organic limb. Plus the business he generates as a motivational speaker ain't too shabby. Along this line it could be said that the five guys who almost killed Mark Hogencamp did him a favour. Beating he took, best thing ever happened to him. Got him over the booze and out of the closet. Made him a minor celebrity on the way to being a pretty rich man.

Personally, I do not believe in Pure Evil. But nor do I believe in God and the ultimate Goodness of His Plan for all us, including the torturous path of the fate assigned to particular persons. So I'm having none of any kind of grossly deterministic consequentialism, the cynical sort included. If I had been trapped in Aron Ralston's spot, I would have died there. And if I had been in Mark Hogencamp's shoes outside the bar that night, I would not be standing here today in his shoes again, ladies footware this time around. I say it once more, these men are authentic heroes. No wonder all of his real life friends from around town are honored to be incorporated into Hogencamp's camp. I would feel just as flattered to be one of Hogen's heroes, as any heroism assigned to me could only be fictional.

And Dan:

Such a thorough review, and so thoroughly reflects my thoughts on the film that I have little to add beyond this very minor quibble. Sometimes the filmmakers engage in a bit of narrative sleight of hand, withholding information from the audience in order to have their "tada!" moments, suddenly springing key developments upon the audience in a rather unnecessarily manipulative way.

Still, as I said, I minor quibble given the overall quality of this film. I love Hogancamp, and I love this movie.

The trailer for Marwencol:

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2011-08-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Fish Tank (UK, 2009, Andrea Arnold)

And, for a change of pace, Dan:

Fish Tank is about, and told through the eyes of Mia (Katie Jarvis, in a stellar debut), a hard-bitten, angry 15 year-old girl with vaguely-formed dreams of being a dancer, but whose life is rife with so much pain, bitterness and disappointment that such hopes are either kept secret or held at arm's length, for fear of suffering even

more disillusionment. Behind the bravado, there is a sensitivity and vulnerability that comes out in quieter moments, but which determinedly refuses to let other see. Mia carries this broil of emotions on her sleeve, the smallest provocation away from exploding in acts of verbal and/or physical violence.

The story takes place in the dilapidated housing projects of Essex. Yes, this is another fine British film where the degraded urban landscape matches well the grim lives of the characters who populate it. Here is where we will find Mia, who lives with her little sister and her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareling), who is of an age that suggests she was about Mia's age when giving birth to her elder daughter, and of such dubious character that she spends most of the movie boozing with and bedding men. Wareling gives a brave performance in Fish Tank, somehow managing to imbue her off-putting character with enough humanity to keep her just on the right side of monstrous. When Joanne brings home a seemingly decent chap named Conor (Michael Fassbender, who is predictably great) whose attentiveness extends beyond his sexual interest in Joanne, the movie enters an even more troubling phase. At first, Conor's kindness makes Mia wary, but eventually he wears down her reserve and distrust, leading both Conor and Mia into some challenging territory. To say more would be edging towards plot spoiler-ville, but suffice to say that as things get complicated, the film's central relationships become explosive.

Writer/director Andrea Arnold (Red Road, 2006) utilizes a rigorously naturalistic style, signified by some stark symbolism (a chained up horse, a fish out of water), ample use of hand held camerawork, a gritty location shoot and an unblinking lack of sentimentality, all of which reminds us of the work of her countrymen and antecedents, Lynne Ramsay, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Fish Tank is dire, but there are moments of hope, which lead to a moderately upbeat ending that some may accuse of being falsely uplifting, except that any thoughtful anticipation of what happens next should reveal that any optimism at this moment should be, at best, tentative.

Fish Tank is a very strong effort at every level, and should signal great things to come for all involved.

Then Ben:

Bloody good movie. Started to write a review and couldn't get into it, for reasons unknown to me. Lots of things might be said, including comparisons to Sweet Sixteen, Rat Catcher and Winter's Bone, all bloody good themselves and I believe Fish Tank deserves to be counted among them. All I can manage to say beyond this is that the complete lack of sensationalism and the very emotionally challenging committment to character complexity makes Fish Tank a very solid work of realism. I was seriously affected by it, really hit me in the guts. I didn't even recognize Fassbender until my family pointed out to me after the fact that it was the same actor as the guy who played Bobby Sands in Hunger. Monica tells me the guys is rocketing to the A list, got a bunch of splashy product in the can. But he is two for two in my book.

Last thought, it was no surprise to read in the credits that Fish Tank was written and directed by a woman. The female POV informing the film is beyond some liberal lip-service to abstract feminist platitudes. It enters into the lived concreteness of the opportunity-less working-class just hovering above lumpen-proletarianization as it pertains specifically to the circumstance of women.

Bloody good movie.

Fish Tank's trailer:

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2011-08-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

Barney's Version (Canada, 2011, Richard Lewis)

Ben Begins:

There's lots to like about Barney's Version but not enough to make it worth caring about. Monica read the novel back when it came out but remembers it well enough to inform me that a big weakness of the film is its plot downgrading of the murder mystery and concentration on the love story. Apparently the book balances the two of these very well.

What is more - and this is probably the heart of the matter - Richler's stylistic achievement was to accurately and movingly present the voice of a narrator speaking with Alzheimers disease. So the protagonist's "version" is emotionally fascinating and ethically problematic, the historical facts coming as they do from a sympathetic but unreliable source of information. Clearly, the film does not even begin to capture this artistry.

It also has to be said - and I hate to have to say it because I really respect his work here and elsewhere - Giamatti is not right for the role. This might seem to be because he is not a Jew. Monica expressed this view. It is not my view, however, and I appreciate that the actor did not adopt stereotypical schtick mannerisms and cliche Yiddish expressions to sell himself as Hebrew.

In fact, he creates a real, complex person and not some stock figure and this shows yet again what a fine character actor he is. Yet, the portrayal fails to deliver that special spark. Sex appeal, charisma, charming wit; whatever it is, it's missing. So unlike Dreyfuss as Duddy, Giamatti as Barney is just not attractive enough to care about, really care about. This undermines the whole show.

Had a few good laughs, nonetheless, and I couldn't help enjoying Hoffman, who does have that special something - duh! - that just makes him light up the screen effortlessly.

And Dan:

I had a slightly more positive reaction to the film, as I both enjoyed the film and cared enough about the people in it to recommend it. However, before digging into the areas of our disagreement, let me get our areas on concurrence on record. The film doesn't quite pull off the transition of the titular character from cogent narrator to dementia victim. And so, while I felt for Giamatti's character (and enjoyed Giamatti's performance, and felt he was up to the challenge, which you felt was lacking because the man lacks the charisma or sex appeal to make him believably appealing), the nuanced sense of Richler's engagement of the whole narrative (un)reliability question does not come through on screen. Rather, we are presented with two aspects of the story--the pre- and post-Alzheimer's figure--as if there were a clear demarcation between the two, instead of a gradual movement from one to the other, which should necessarily cast into doubt much of what we have come to assume is a factual, if necessarily subjective, version of events. As you say, we like Barney, but can we trust him? The film doesn't really grapple much with these sorts of ambiguities, and is lesser for it.

That said, I really dug the way that Barney's story played out on screen, largely because the actors in question, particularly Giamatti and Hoffman, were so much fun, and they were tied to a narrative that never flagged. Indeed, there is sometimes such a feeling of narrative propulsion, that you'd wish that the director Lewis would apply the breaks from time to time so that we could sit with some of the finer moments in the film. Also, while you think that the downgrading of the murder mystery may have been a weakness in the film, all I can say is that any storyline that ends with a twist straight out of an urban legend is one that I could do with less, not more of.

All said, Barney's Version may have suffered from a few flaws do to its overly ambitious scope and underdeveloped narrative nuance, but overall I found it a satisfying experience.

Here's the trailer for Barney's Version:

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2011-08-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

The Idiot (Japan, 1951, Akira Kurosawa)

Ben Begins (and ends):

The denouement for both the main character and another was so abrupt and perplexing, I made Monica do some reseach on her handheld device. An explanation she was unable to locate, but she came upon this general assessment at the site, Criterion Confessions, with which I must agree:

"The Idiot (166 min. - 1951): The passionate labor of love Kurosawa made after the breakthrough Rashomon, this adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's nineteenth-century novel is a strange mess. Grasping for something lyrical, Kurosawa ends up clutching at a narrative that often slips through his fingers. Transferring the story into his time and his country, he creates a fable for a world whose morals have gone off-center. It's just that the film itself is off-center, too. Despite moments of intense brilliance, The Idiot is scattered and almost too narrow in its structure. Perhaps the director's original four-and-a-half hour cut had far fewer gaps in it, but the final studio version feels riddled with holes.

Kameda (Masayuki Mori) is an epileptic whose lifelong illness and the trauma he suffered in the war have made his mind a tad bit soft. Newly released from a prison camp, where he narrowly escaped execution, he goes to live with his uncle (Takashi Shimura again) in Sapporo, hoping to find some peace and quiet to recharge. Once there, however, his brutal honesty disrupts the social order of the town. His absence of malice and his pure moral thinking, providing a skewed Christ-like example, call attention to the townspeople's own bad behavior. Attracted to the town harlot, Taeko (a smoldering Setsuko Hara), as a healer is attracted to a wound, he becomes embroiled in criss-crossing love lives. Kameda's greatest rival is also his first civilian friend, the primal rich boy Akama (Mifune). As the two wage a mental battle for Taeko's hard, Kameda is also drawn to the more chilling but caring Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga).

The Idiot is essentially a long string of talking-heads sequences that, despite being elegantly framed by Kurosawa's cinematic eye, tend to all run on longer than seems necessary. Motivation switches on a dime, and the story takes the long way around to get anywhere it's going. Yet, as I said, individual scenes can be amazing, and all of the performances are remarkable. The power of the actors kept me glued to the screen, and the marvel of seeing a great auteur digging deep for something meaningful makes The Idiot worth sitting through. Its goals may be mightier than what Kurosawa could get on film, but there is something fascinating about watching him try."

Or could it be that the film was simply butchered? I suspect not. But even so, Wiki provides information that makes it reasonable to wonder:

"Originally intended to be a two-part film with a running time of 265 minutes, the film was severely cut at the request of the studio, against Kurosawa's wishes, after a single poorly-received screening of the full-length version. When the re-edited version was also deemed too long by the studio, Kurosawa sardonically suggested the film be cut lengthwise instead. According to Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, there are no existing prints of the original 265-minute version. Kurosawa would return to Shochiku forty years later to make Rhapsody in August, and, according to Alex Cox, is said to have searched the Shochiku archives for the original cut of the film to no avail."

Here's a glimpse of The Idiot':

2011-08-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

Kes (United Kingdom, 1969, Ken Loach)

Ben Begins:

Having just watched 12 Godard films in a row, it was quite a queer sensation to look at a Loach. Oddly enough, at first I felt that the Englishman was abnormally naturalistic, prosaically true to life when he should be jump cutting my head off and blasting my face with intertitles. It didn't take too long, however, before I was drawn into the mundane facts of the matter, in all their power. (Mind you, I could have used subtitles, so thick did I find the dialect.)

KES is a bloody good movie. It's impressive how fully formed Loach was early on. I'm not familiar enough with his work to say, but I suspect that there is little absent from KES that appears in his subsequent output. The performances he draws from unknown "actors" are remarkably affecting. * These he presents with an unflinching bare-knuckle candor, in bare-bones proletarian environments, not one spoonful of fairy-tale frosting to be had. It takes a strong back to carry the weight of what Loach loads on the film-goer. Nothing fancy. Just very, very sad facts.

What a heartbreaking story. On the other hand, as Frank Zappa sings: "Broken hearts are for assholes." If a person's heart is broken by the tragedy of KES, that person is probably missing the point. There was never any hope. Brief moments of human contact not brutal for a change. Flickers of compassion that allow folks to drop their guard for an interval. But never any actual optimism, a sense that progress is being made, that's there a decent chance for happiness. No. It's tough going all the way and plays out accordingly. This is, of course, to the credit of the film and I presume the novel upon which it is based.

It is because Loach so respects the working-class lives he presents that he is able to show the complexity of simple people. The protagonist of KES is terribly sympathetic. He proves to be more intelligent that anyone suspected but even more, he finds within himself an ability to nurture and honor another living being without ever having been so nurtured and honored himself. Yet the isolation he experiences is not simply due to the cruelty of others. The lad is intellectually and socially dim-witted to the point of being off-putting. And everyone around him is just as much a person whom we can fault and forgive.

With this in mind, the portrayal of the British educational system and by extension the whole welfare state is clearly critical in the film, but not dogmatically. The teachers and the occupational case worker are not unreasonable, not just sadists out to inflict punishment and humiliation. Those of us who work as teachers today would do well to be honest with ourselves when speculating how we might have conducted ourselves in this vocation back in 1969, out in some English county organized around a mine.

* FROM WIKI: Loach makes great efforts to help the actors express themselves naturally and honestly. He believes that shooting in order, from first scene to last, helps the actors to find a response to their circumstances. Many actors in his films are often not given the full script at the beginning of a shoot, but rather they experience the story just as a fictional character might do. He will often give actors their scenes a couple of days in advance so they can learn their lines, but they still won't know what comes after that. If a scene involves shock or surprise for a character, the actor might not know what is about to happen. In Kes the boy actor, discovering the dead bird at the end, believed Loach had killed the bird, which he had become fond of during the filming (the crew used a dead bird found elsewhere). What is more, in the scene where Mr Gryce is searching the schoolboys, the small first year holding everybody else's cigarettes was under the impression that he was to give the headmaster a note and leave the office. Subsequently, when he is searched and found to be "a right little cigarette factory", he is caned alongside the other boys; hence, his look of shock and tears of pain are real.

Monica believes this is exploitative. I'm thinking about it. Tarkovsky was really tough on those horses in Rublev too...

And Dan:

As many socially conscious filmmakers had before him--perhaps, most famously, Sidney Lumet in America--Ken Loach got his start in television, honing his craft in this medium at a time when many programs were broadcast live, requiring the cast and crew to be particularly well-prepared and capable. This allowed Loach to ply his trade on the run, and develop skills that would transfer well to the sort of low budget film-making that soon would be his future.

Enter Kes, the his second feature film, is an adaptation of Barry Hines' novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, wherein Hines recounts the medieval practice of attributing categories of birds to human social classes. So, emperors should own eagles, peregrine falcons are for princes and kestrels are for knaves, the working classes.

Clearly in Kes we are meant to see that the film's protagonist, a plucky and appealing Yorkshire teenager named Billy (David Bradley gives a remarkably sincere and convincingly naturalistic performance), is the bird that he captures and trains. Like the kestrel, Billy is constantly being manipulated, trained, herded, and eventually, it is implied, broken by the system that he bucks so hard against. Also, like the bird, Billy does have (a very few) people in his life who have his best interests at heart, even if they are too limited or flawed to make his life measurably better. And, in an interesting mirroring effect, those involved in the "training" of the boy, such as his teachers (an empathetic Colin Welland, who is the only trained actor in the cast, and bullying Brian Glover are terrific in very different roles), his principal (an at his wit's end Bob Bowes, in an excellent cameo), his employer and even even the employment counselor, are much like Billy themselves. That is, they are generally speaking well-intentioned, yet ultimately ill-equipped for the job.

Billy is a loner, partly due to familial circumstance, which sees him often left to his own devices by his carousing mother (Lynne Perrie) and brutish brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher), and partly due to his own social ineptitude, which leads to predictable scenes of bullying by a larger, fierce classmate. Billy may gain our respect by refusing to back down, but the boy is, despite his pluck, as in most matters, in well over his head. The fight between the two ends, symbolically and appropriately, with the two wrestling on a huge pile of coal, something that will figure large in each boy's future, it would seem.

Throughout, Billy's central source of joy, of escape is in this relationship with the bird. He doesn't see larger patterns, a macro-cosmic metaphor at play. He is simply at play, being a kid, indulging a passion. The rest of the time, Billy is simply trying to survive the attempts of the adult world and its systems of control to force him into the life everyone in Yorkshire is born for, life in The Pits.

Yet, we are trained by conventional cinema to hope that the boy will find an escape hatch, an elevator to the stars that will allow him to escape the inevitable plunge into mines. After all, Billy is an appealing figure, a tough little terrier who refuses to buckle under any sort of pressure, a kid with a passion, and the will (if not the intelligence) to see things through. And therein lies the grim truth of Kes. While we want to cheer for Billy, the film makes it plain that, despite his many positive attributes, he simply does not have the wit or wisdom to rise above the tremendous limitations of his circumstance. When Billy is ultimately betrayed not by an agent of the system that has been trying with only moderate effectiveness to batter and bully him into submission, but by his own brother, we see just what a bleak world it is when you betray and are betrayed by your own kith and kin.

The film's naturalism is essential to its effectiveness. Kes has an elegiac feel largely because it refuses to indulge in the sort of standard liberal cyn-ematic sentimentalism that is typical of such treatment of the working poor. Instead, Loach and his cinematographer Chris Menges opt for a realistic, grainy, rough documentary look, which makes us in the audience feel as though we are voyeurs, bearing witness to what Godard had famously proclaimed cinema to be: truth 24 times a second.

While Mike Leigh has arguably surpassed Loach as the best practitioner of British social realism with a left wing bent, there is little doubt that, without the prior success of Loach, which all began with this great film, Leigh would have had a much harder slog of it getting financing for his particular brand of social realism. Regardless, there is little doubt that Kes is a terrific film, an honest and unvarnished look at the life of working people, that has been rightly identified by the British Film Institute as one of the top ten films that you should see by the age of 14.

And now here's the original trailer for Kes:

2011-08-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

Wrapping things up once and for all ("About bloody time." "I can hear you, you know") I give you Ben Livant's term paper on Godard 101. Enjoy.

***

DIALECTIC OF REFLEXIVITY:

GODARD'S SECOND TRACK AS A NEW MODE OF REALISM

The truth must not only be the truth, it must be told.

- Fidel Castro

There's no reason for viewers to trust anybody! It's television!

- David Simon

Cinema is truth 24 frames per second.

- Jean-Luc Godard

Godard is influential. Perhaps incalculably influential. What he is not is imitated. Borrowed from, yes. Ripped off even. (And it serves him right). Here and there, this scene, that technique - for sure. But not one of his New Wave films as a whole is imitated, even as a parody, because it is not possible to imitate one of his films as a whole.

This is because the holism of the work appears to be so tenuous in the first place. How a Godard film hangs together is a question that invariably comes up during the watching of it. As he famously commented himself: "A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in that order." This raises sloppiness to a point of high principle.

And yet, it does hang together. A tale is told, sort of in spite of itself. For within any one of his films, the director himself transgresses whatever code of narrative conduct that film relies upon and perpetuates. If this sounds like a contradiction, that's because it is. Even if Godard had not evolved towards the political position of Marxism, he was from the start philosophically disposed to a dialectical treatment of his chosen medium. He embraces contradiction.

Probably the most obvious manifestation of this is the way in which he copies all sort of genres and distorts them at the same time, adopts all kinds of conventions and twists them out of shape as he does so. But as we move through the eight years of his New Wave period, the cumulative accomplishment of his own cinematic rhetoric in the context of his increasingly politicized attention to current events causes him to craft his films as internal interrogations of themselves.

It is this self-dialogical quality that makes them unfit for imitation, especially according to any sort of formulaic reproduction process driven by mass marketing. And the extrapolation of this, just as impossible to imitate is Godard's exploration of different approaches from one film to the next. Yes, there are topics and tactics that come up repeatedly, sending a strong signal of an absolutely unique style, an auteur identity. But this must be discerned from within his voracious appetite for self-destruction, as it were. That is, his ongoing obligation to himself to find new ways to do things, commercial constraints (and budgetary limitations) be damned.

As with any true artist, then, Godard's first responsibility is to the conversation he is having with himself. What I am emphasizing about this artistically sincere conversation in his case is how schizophrenic it is. I don't mean this literally, of course, but there is to each of his works an almost split-personality. Almost. This is due to the film-maker simultaneously making the film and "reviewing" it (re-viewing it) as he does.

Analogous to the independent sound track that must by synchronized to the reel of moving pictures, Godard runs a second conceptual track that makes an intellectual object of the film in order to tease it, challenge it, criticize it. The upshot of this is that

he is the first to distrust the epistemological status or truth-value of the artifact he is presently producing. Dialectically, his distrust promotes our trust in his artifact.

***

Godard synchronizes this second track in very un-synchronized ways. In fact, his main tendency is unmercifully to obstruct his own film and make it struggle to carry on. This involves all sorts of interruptions of the story, digressions away from the main character, exposures of the actor, distractions framed into the image, anti-sequential edits and the list could go on.

It is correct that he is often non-linear and likes to put together pastiche in order to advance juxtaposition and oxymoron, sometimes to the point of absurdity. But to observe this and take it on its own as a satisfactory explanation is a superficial aesthetic understanding in my estimation. As strange as a Godard film can get, most of the strangeness is for me evidence of Godard's second track organically interwoven with the otherwise straight-forward aspects of the film.

I can understand how this second track might spoil the movie for certain viewers. It's definitely occurring at a level of abstraction that demands viewer participation contra the passive, easily empathetic entertainment a lot of folks expect when they pay for a ticket. It calls for an entirely different leap of faith from the one usually demanded of an audience out to enjoy a fiction.

Rather than the classic literary/theatrical suspension of disbelief originally theorized by Coleridge, Godard is clearly Brechtian and means to provide the viewer with a demystified opportunity to engage intellectually with the fiction as a fiction. The leap of faith attending this is the notion that entertainment can endure such self-witnessing, especially since Godard is often so analytical and apathetic. Does the second track actually add to the enjoyment of the film?

Well, I like it. For the most part, anyway. But I do have to acknowledge that there are always parts of every Godard film that are boring and/or irritating. The interruptions and digressions and distractions sometimes stall everything. The making of the movie an object to be inspected by itself kind of cancels the movie momentarily. There is a breakdown of momentum - remarkable, considering the frenetic pace at which things sometimes move - as the cumulative weight of the second track threatens to undermine the motion of the motion pictures.

***

I think, ultimately, assessment of the second track must address the very purpose of the film in the first place. Is it just an excuse for itself or something more? Personally, whenever I was able to look at one of Godard's films and see it as something more than an excuse for itself, I was that much more positively captivated by Godard's second track. My ranking of his films reflects my feeling about this, when it seemed to me that the medium was not the totality of the message. However, my fuddy-duddy concern for what used to be called content is beside the point.

The point is to recognize the method in Godard's madness, to find the unified forest among his many trees that otherwise stand alone as so many novelty-acts. Admittedly, he has a rapacious taste for variety. There is a strong anything-goes creativity that often includes the kitchen sink (kitsch-in-synch). But Godard does not get bogged down in difference for difference sake. His avant garde expressions are always tempered by a traditional commitment to communication and a respect for popular accessibility.

It is not just his reliance on pulp literary tropes, film noir types and so on that make his movies experientially available to the general public. Much more fundamentally, his new cinema syntax is essentially intelligible for a mass audience, especially the young. It is not an arcane dialect that speaks only to cinema intellectuals in command of the esoteric grammar. There is nothing of the idiosyncratic symbolism and baffling metaphysical mysticism of Tarkovsky's Mirror, for example, or the anti-syntactical serial entrapment and mechanistic surrealism of Resnais' Marienbad, for another.

Godard is weird, but he's not THAT weird. Alternative? Yes. But not for an elite, for the mainstream. In short, he's pop. What is more, it strikes me as reasonable to grasp his seemingly disparate weirdness as being all of a piece in keeping with his popular orientation. I see it as a barrage of variegated approaches to the second track, which is for me the essence of Godard's original cinematic genius. It is his unwavering dedication to providing ongoing recapitulation of the second track for a mass audience that makes him truly unique, impossible to imitate.

***

No doubt, what I am calling Godard's second track has generated no small amount of discussion among film theorists according to the category of reflexivity. This is as it should be. That is, depending on how this reflexivity is understood.

I'll bet my bottom dollar that a fair few fashionable Ph.D. dissertations have favorably identified it as pre-postmodern. Granted, it is difficult to avoid describing what Godard is doing in terms of a deconstruction of a text's discursive grounds.

More conservative types, conversely, who maintain that there is nothing new under the sun, are probably quick to point out that there is no shortage of precedents in painting, literature, theater and cinema too when it comes to giving asides, making meta-statements, breaking the fourth wall and what-not; as in, the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

I find both camps equally unattractive. I am not inclined to make Godard the unwitting poster boy for Derrida in advance just as he was grappling with Althusser and tending towards Mao. His reflexivity is not an utterly indeterminate utterance without any referents for his references.

Nor am I prepared to demote Godard to a mere footnote to the footlights that Shakespeare occasionally gave his characters license directly to address. His reflexivity is not a perfectly determinate speech act with an unambiguous correspondence between words and what they stand for.

I prefer instead to argue further that Godard's reflexivity is a dialectical contradiction of self-reference that does not posit himself as its referent. It posits instead the world in which his characters are situated. He refers to himself in order to situate himself in exactly the same reel world in which his characters are situated. But as he is, of course, in the real world, his characters in the reel world reciprocally take on real world status by his association with them; "virtually," if you must.

My thesis is that Godard is best appreciated as the founder of a new mode of realism.

This goes "beyond the didactic dogma of the Soviet realism, the Italian neo-realist synthesis of journalism and melodrama and the French cinema verite, somehow incorporating an almost hallucinogenic [private] disorientation into what would otherwise be prosaic [public] visions." (6/29/2011 11:55).

***

I am especially concerned to forestall the strong pull to interpret Godard's self-referential reflexivity in a one-sided way that reduces it to a sign of self-consciousness. This is a tendency that implicitly rests on disregarding the internal dynamics of the reflexivity in order to demarcate the second track and the rest of the film. This takes far too literally that the film is "reviewing" (re-viewing) itself. According to this, the second track is at best a running editorial commentary rather than moving in and through the organically interwoven whole.

To be sure, it is because the holism of the work appears to be so tenuous in the first place that there is such a strong pull to reduce Godard's reflexivity to self-consciousness. The variegations of the second track can come off as pretty glaring subjective "interjections" after all. But what exactly is interjecting what? For the purposes of conceptual exposition I speak heuristically of a "second track" but of course, there is actually no second track. There is no such discrete entity. Really, there is the whole movie. There is a single oscillator, one subject-object Gestalt, vibrating figure-ground reversals for 90 minutes.

I am prepared to accept interpretations of Godard's art as expressions of auto-ethnography. But in my estimation, any non-dialectical split between a supposedly primary narrative and the second track invites the opinion that Godard allows navel-gazing to trump story-telling; an ego obsessively spiraling in on itself in ever deeper spins of subjectivity. The reduction of his reflexivity to self-consciousness is an idealist error that runs the risk of rendering Godard's art little more than narcissism unto solipsism.

If we truly respect the internal dynamic of his reflexivity, however, we instead observe that the second track draws our attention to what empiricism calls the external world by way of what the Freudian paradigm calls a reality principle. Godard definitely looks at himself but not in order to look inward. The dialectic is, in looking at himself, he makes us look outward.

As it is not literally the case that Godard runs a second track, perhaps it will be helpful to pick up a cue from the conservative types who have long noticed reflexivity in the device of a-play-within-a-play; i.e., the play-within-the-play is the thing wherein Shakespeare catches the conscience of Hamlet.

The-movie-within-the-movie is a less heuristic conception than the second track because there actually is a discrete, secondary cinematic entity within the primary film containing it. Yet in being contained by the primary film, the secondary film within is not simply subsumed but dialectically works upon its container. Robert Eberwein - attending to Godard not at all but rather Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels - provides a succinct explication of the realism at work generally in any movie-within-a-movie.

It is as if the film within a film alters the ontological status of the characters in the main film by foregrounding them in our consciousness […] Next to an illusionary filmed image within the narrative, the characters in the diegesis become, for the moment, more real: it is as if the film within a film thrusts the primary characters out from the screen toward the audience, (emphasis added, quoted by Adrian Danks: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-articles/the-film-we-had- imagined/).

I am saying the same thing about Godard's primary characters that Eberwein is saying about Sturges', but from the exact opposite direction. It is in secondary relation not to an illusionary filmed image but rather to the very real presence of the film-maker himself that the ontological status of the primary characters is foregrounded in our consciousness. Understood as a movie-within-a-movie, then, the argument here is that Godard' second track of self-referential reflexivity is such that his characters in the main track diegesis become more real.

Our macrocosmic understanding of the second track as a movie-within-a-movie is made all the more attractive here by the microcosmic observation that occasionally it literally is the case that Godard shows his characters watching a film. Naturally, in these cases, Eberwein's insight into how the illusionary filmed image works on the main film is valid in the way he formulates it. Nonetheless, such instances are at the same time happening in the larger context of the second track.

That the primary characters watch films not made by Godard himself should not suggest to us that the reflexivity involved is not self-referential with respect to the film they are in that is made by Godard. While it might be fun to chase this in a circle, my intention is to spiral out of the semiotic twister, land on my thesis and hold about the microcosmic movie-within-a-movie that it all the more fortifies the realism of Godard's situated characters in the macrocosmic movie-within-a-movie.

***

In tracking the second track this way we are apprehending it as what the old Germans would have called a logic. But to complete the case I am making about Godard founding a new mode of realism, it is now necessary to locate Godard's logic within his developmental trajectory over the historic course of the New Wave period. Remembering what was going on in the world during the 1960s is absolutely essential to this theory of Godard's reflexivity.

For it is an incontrovertible fact that the film-maker evolved away from purely stylistic concerns to thematic issues, that he became steadily more devoted to current events in the real world about which he conducted ideological inquiry. Whatever his reputation as a story-teller, there could be no doubt that this was no navel-gazer. Hey, the works of his New Wave period were nothing if not immediately topical and provocatively opinionated about the contemporary state of affairs.

And yet, this growing politicization featured not the decrease but the increase of self-reference. With his own catalog growing, the director could fashion intertextual quotations on the basis of his own previous work instead of Howard Hawks or whomever. Even more significant than such internal allusion, he grew more brazen in putting himself in his artifacts, not as a reel persona but as a real person, most especially as a non-omniscient narrator who is situated outside but not "above" the fiction. Eventually, in one film, The Chinese, even this outsider position is compromised by the director literally turning the camera on himself.

So the dialectical development was increasing self-reference but decreasing introspection. Look at me is not back to me. It is the exact opposite: Look at me - see the world! His films became ever more strident about not being merely excuses for themselves. And yet again, with this came a growing risk. The second track more and more give the impression that the logic was on the verge of back-firing, that at any moment the whole film might devolve into a self-referential parade of home-recreational, junk-movie footage; threatening to present the director's artifact as the work of a poser full of coffee-table philosophizing, sociological tourism and dime-store political theory.

To say that Godard's art did not for the most part back-fire in this way is to take a stand on what his pop orientation was all for. It is to choose sides between the establishment of the mainstream and the counter-culture challenging this establishment and daring to take over the mainstream.

If it is correct that Godard was in the vanguard of the popular counter-culture - and I believe it is most definitely correct - then any attempt to make sense of his art must first recognize to what it was counter. To highlight what was most negatively conditioning Godard's art as the 1960s progressed, I propose that we need to pay attention not to what he was watching but rather to what he was not watching. Not movies. Television.

***

Let me dial in on this more precisely. No doubt, Godard was watching television. Perhaps plenty of it. Hell, he may have even done some directing for TV for all I know, although I very much doubt it. No matter. For what he was not doing in general was finding television remotely palatable; aesthetically, politically and epistemologically.

In retrospect, film critics and other film-makers love to recognize all Godard's quotes and allusions to previous movies. That he perhaps drew just as much from literature - from current trashy fiction to classic egghead tracts, from narrative source material to dramatic templates - this is left for sorting by the wing of the humanities department more literary (less illiterate?[Herzog]). Meanwhile, not other films, (and certainly not books) but an entirely other media was consolidating the most general hold over the mental life of the populace at that time. It is exactly against this growing entrenchment of TV that Godard's art is struggling.

And I do mean struggling. The cultural hegemony of television was still nascent at the beginning of the decade but was a fait accompli as it came to a close. French culture was not as fully absorbed by television as was American, but the saturation of TV into Godard's homeland was complete enough; all the more insidious to the extent that it imported and/or reproduced the American model with respect to either corporate agendas or state indoctrination.

In the 1960s, the expanding manipulation of society by either commercial or government television networks made it plain to any radical that this was THE cultural force with which one had to reckon. It was the sound of Edward Bernays plus vision, radio and now moving pictures piped directly to the individually-isolated constant consumer/sometime voter. This media management of the masses is the dominant cognitive field or central communicative circumstance for Godard's art and to which his films run counter. How artistically to forge political resistance to the consent that was steadily being manufactured as promised by Walter Lippmann was the question.

In fact, television proved to offer challenges to its masters. By the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the anti-war demonstrators would chant for the TV cameras as the cops swung their clubs: "The whole world is watching!" Clearly, public relations was a double-edged sword. Godard was not conducting public relations - at least not before May 1968 - but throughout the decade prior to this he was increasingly waging a war for hearts and minds nonetheless.

Again, he's weird, but he's not THAT weird. Whether using techniques of TV against itself or introducing baldly TV-unfriendly strategies, Godard's second track demonstrated in no uncertain terms that his movies were alternatives to television. Hey kids, switch off the tube and watch this instead!

Notice from Breathless through to Week End, not once does Godard show people watching television. If memory serves, there are only two instances of television appearing in his cinema from 1959 to 1967. A television briefly appears as part of a living room set in A Married Woman - and the thing isn't even turned on, never mind being watched. In 2 Or 3 Things, there are three verbal references to television and a television store (retail/repair?) appears in the background at one point. Viewed from within an interior, through a window and across the street, a television is visible in the store window - and the thing isn't even turned on, never mind being watched. It is as if his whole New Wave purpose is to portray a world without TV. More precisely, a world with TV, but never turned on, never watched.

***

I will fine tune this. It was Hollywood that was commercially threatened by the advent of television with respect to dramatic/comedic programming; that is, fiction. For the increasingly politicized Godard, however, the contest was not crudely economic but rather cultural in the deepest and fullest sense of the term; and the principal ideological issue was not the overtly fictional but rather the ostensibly realistic on television. Godard was engaged in a battle against the false realism of TV on two fronts. The evening news and advertising.

The evening news and advertising are the epitome of phoney realism, albeit in completely opposite ways. The claim of the news to realism is its explicit stock and trade, hardly requiring repetition. Supposedly pure facts unfettered by opinion delivered by neutral professional journalists with nary a spin doctor on staff, etc.

The claim of advertising to realism is, conversely, implicit and operates not on the rational faculties but instead on the emotional side. Regardless of the various psychological angles employed, all advertising makes a claim to realism insofar as it informs the potential customer of his supposedly authentic desires and delivers the promise of genuine satisfaction.

These, then, are the twin towers of TV's simulacrum, screen-tested in favour of the capitalist system. Godard's art in the 60s is a kind of shock therapy for minds newly and naively in the stranglehold of the bogus positivism of the news and the fake utopian directives of advertising. The illusory objectivity of television that dopes the viewer alone at home is countered by Godard's cinema through the placement of his own subjectivity within fiction that reveals itself to be fiction and in so doing, exposes reality.

Godard was also a brilliant publicist, with an adman's talent for reducing ideas to captions... What Godard had grasped was that film didn't have to pretend to be real... It is tempting to brand Godard as a sophisticated high-class soap, a product based on a tailored understanding of market and media,

(Chris Petit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/09/film.jeanlucgodard? INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487).

Petit - no doubt, not just petit in name but actually with respect to his bourgeois sensibility - does not want to give in to the temptation to brand Godard this way because to do so would be to tarnish the obviously high-brow aspects of the director's art with low-brow credentials. But one more time folks. Godard is pop! This is what makes his art politically dangerous, a genuinely radical alternative to the culture delivered by television.

It is only reactionary historiography today, however innocently exacted, that refuses to highlight this radical danger, by wrongly thinking that Godard's art is unrealistic because it does not pretend to be real. In so doing, it cordons off the pop of New Wave as a purely stylistic concern and turns Godard himself into a figure as safe for the system as Andy Warhol. I hold, conversely, that Godard's freaky-deaky yet fundamentally fathomable imaginary constructs served to critically expose the reality of the day.

What is more, so unlike television, this reality was exposed to groups of people out on the town for an evening of cultural recreation... philosophic debate... political argument... For the experience of cinema was still a public cultural experience generating a socialnexus with potential for ideological resistance. Many in Godard's audience will indeed go from talk to action in 1968. "Godard [was] staking a claim for cinema as the Media of The People," (7/14/2011 5:25), especially as he came to draw a degree of inspiration from the Cultural Revolution going on in China.

***

Today as movie houses are fractured into multi-screen display factories barely economically viable themselves since VCR, DVD, internet downloading, streaming, and all the rest of it viewed on individual Dick Tracy wristwatches, the status of the cinema as a site of political mobilization stands to us as some sort of ghostly republicanism set in a long antiquated Greek amphitheatre.

Radical cinema? Never mind the cinema! The television networks that consolidated their hold over the culture by the end of the 60s are themselves now relatively emaciated media powers, analogous today to newspapers when the wireless showed up. That these television networks, radio stations and newspaper chains even survive today is only as sectors of global media conglomerates with advancing monopolistic reach. Yet, a bit of historical consciousness is all that is needed to remember the ocean of television that was flooding everything for the first time back in the day. The New Wave did not turn back the tide. Yet, some water flowed counter.

Radical cinema? Never mind the cinema today, however excellent some of it is. The New Wave is still new, still radical. Even those who mistakenly like to think of themselves as apolitical in their art-for-art's-sake aesthetic interpretations of Godard have to admit that he is just as fresh today as he ever was, just as modern in this so-called postmodern era.

But for those of us inclined to radical politics, Godard was already fighting against coca-colonization. The Big Macification of the world today is exponentially off the chart for which he had compiled data in the 60s. So we need that ancient amphitheatre now more than ever. Good news. Godard's art is not in ruins. It stands! Hey kids, turn off that internet re-run of what was already a lie in 1968 and watch Godard instead. Damn straight!

***

Picasso said that art is the lie that tells the truth. Godard deals this out in spades. As I attempted to elaborate convincingly above, the main mechanism operating in his art is a second track of reflexivity that dialectically draws our attention to the world by making us notice the emperor crafting his own clothes.

For all the sometimes excessive imposition of his subjective style, Godard is not a dandy preoccupied by his own artifice. Quite the contrary, he is an objectivist who manages to heighten our focus on the facts of the matter by exposing his own presence as one of those facts. He brings reality into view by way of his fictions. The film focuses on it's "filmsy" (see: 7/14/2011 5:02), and forthwith finds facts facing fiction fractiously.

Hence, dialectically, not in spite of but rather because of all of the wild and wacky fabrications, there is always to a Godard film a documentary quality. It must have been noted by many others that Godard's New Wave films stand as a testament to those times. They somehow document the reality of that moment in history. The very thing that is the most far-fetched according to "normal" movies, his second track, is the thing that brings us back to earth, overturns the illusion of film, tells the truth. That's realism.

2011-08-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

Godard 101: The Final Rankings

Here are our final (?) rankings (with links, for your pleasure) for the films that made up the syllabus of Godard 101, the unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben Livant and I took on the works of Monsieur Godard in his initial, formative and most fecund filmmaking period of 1959-1969, wherein he made 15 of the most fascinating and influential films in the history of cinema. Some very close calls for both of us, but I feel pretty safe in speaking for Ben when I say that of the fifteen films in this series, all have value, and that the top handful of Godard films are as good as any filmmaker's. And he ain't done yet; the train keeps a rollin'. The man is a titan.

Ben’s Ranking	Dan’s Ranking
1. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her	1. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
2. Alphaville	2. To Live Her Live (Vivre Sa Vie)
3. To LIve Her Live (Vivre Sa Vie)	3. Band of Outsiders
4. Band of Outsiders	4. Alphaville
5. The Chinese (La Chinoise)	5. Week End
6. Week End	6. The Chinese (La Chinoise)
7. Crazy Pete (Pierrot le Fou)	7. Crazy Pete (Pierrot le Fou)
8. The Riflemen (Les Carabiniers)	8. Breathless
9. Breathless	9. The Riflemen (Les Carabiniers)
10. A Woman is a Woman	10. A Woman is a Woman
11. The LIttle Soldier (Le Petit Soldat)	11. Masculine Feminine
12. Masculine Feminine	12. The Little Soldier (Le Petit Soldat)
13. A Married Woman: Fragments Shot in 1964 in Black and White	13. A Married Woman: Fragments Shot in 1964 in Black and White
14. Made in USA	14. Contempt
15. Contempt	15. Made in USA

2011-08-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here. First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman and The Riflemen. Then Ben returned, and we took a look at Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Feminin and the last Godard-Karina collaboration, Made in USA. We followed this up with our review of what we consider the best of all Godard films from this period, Two or Things I Know About Her, and the followup to his masterpiece, a little scene but essential Godard called The Chinese. Rounding out the syllabus, is the final of the fifteen films Godard made in this, the most fertile period of his impressive career, a film that boldly proclaims that it is the End of Cinema. Godard 101 bids you adieu with the arrival of...

Week End (France, 1967, Godard)

Ben Begins:

Well, I suppose there are blacker black comedies. But when you throw in the weirdness factor, the comedy in Week End is very black indeed. If I may craft a tag line from sources both anterior and posterior, it's Mad Max or Death Race 2000 as chanelled by Hieronymus Bosch.

That is, Bosch with a near pathological hatred for the middle class myth of freedom in the automobile. Week End is a full frontal attack on the French bourgeois take about getting your kicks on Route 66. There are test-drive harbingers of this in Crazy Pete, about which I could not refrain from calling slightly surreal and even Felliniesque. But Week End is sort of Satyricon. Satyricon not eight days a week, only on the week end, but a descent into hell nonetheless.

It's hell not below ground, on the surface, street level, the pavement. And in full daylight too. All the better to watch as the world goes from merely anti-social scrappiness to full-on anarcho-barbaric cannibalism. By the end of the film, The Lord of the Flies is looking like peace, order and good government. Of course, the most famous scene is earlier on when we're still being subjected to merely anti-social scrappiness, albeit with an already perverse degeneration of basic human decency. I have in mind the nearly 10 minute long continuing shot of the traffic jam on the rural road. Very cool. But this time out I was up to speed on the literary source material, "The Southern Thruway," one of the best short stories I have ever read.

As for the full-on anarcho-barbarism that ultimately arrives, go figure, but this is when the comedy really refuses to be misunderstood. It is so horrifically over the top yet cheesy in the extreme, the joke is made to measure for the critique of the lifestyle sold in every car commercial; and by association, the whole get-away-to-the-good-time-party culture of greed. If I found it necessary to speak of surrealism when reviewing Crazy Pete, about Week End I have to say that it is most comprehensible to me as a work of dadaism.

I won't go so far as to say the Week End is a weak end to the first phase of his career, but after being so knocked out by both Two or Three Things I Know About Her and The Chinese, in my estimation it is lesser Godard. I will give it the back-handed compliment of an elitist, though. It is certainly the more popular picture. I say this even without knowing how the films fared at the box office upon release or how the critics judged them then or judge them now. Week End is much less intellectually verbose and features a fair amount of action-packed excitement. Plus it includes what is by far and away the most sexually titilating scene in a Godard movie so far. And even though the film is grim to the nth degree, alas, nihilism sells.

In regard to this, it cannot be overlooked that Week End is a very mean-spirited film. We can see in retrospect that compared to the authentically uncertain and complex self-examination of his previous two outings, Godard finished 1967 by picking what for him was an easy target. Having travelled so far from the apolitical, purely aesthetic shape-shifting of Breathless in 1959, eight tumultuous years later he not only believes he knows who his political enemies are - he's out to get them.

In Week End, violence is no longer a topic for theoretical discussion. The film is a kind of revenge fantasy. For every bomb dropped on the Vietnamese, there is in Week End a burning luxury vehicle built by the same military-industrial complex (including it's European satellites) that builds the bomber planes and tanks. If what's good for General Motors is good for America,Week End yells loud and clear that it's NOT good for General Motors. The crazy hippies-gone-ghoul out in the woods skinning everything alive are nothing more than the New Left self-destructing; torching this Cadillac owner and that Citroen owner in stupid sectarian Robin Hood bands of outsiders, when they should be getting together and burning down the system.

And Dan:

"You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world[...] You say you've got a real solution. Well, we'd all love to see the plan."

Remember that train ride in The Chinese? Veronique is confronted by her philosopher professor, who wants to know what she has planned after committing the murderous acts that will shut down the country's universities, and she confesses that she has no idea what would happen next, but that it was necessary to start from scratch, regardless. And remember that Godard was feeding these lines to the actress through a hidden ear piece?
--"What's the point of killing people if you don't know what to do next?"
--"What we do next is not my work."
--"You don't care."
--"No, I don't [...] I'm only a worker producing a revolution."

Well, Week End is Godard's answer to this revolutionary myopia. Godard has made a film for those who are completely unconcerned with the consequences, and just want to tear this mother down. Be careful what you wish for, he seems to be arguing, because if you want a revolution, but are ill-prepared for the outcome, don't you know that you can count me out. Whereas I sometimes felt like I was trapped in a closet in The Chinese, Godard kicks the door in with Week End. While we spend most of Godard's last two movies (along with Two or Three Things I Know About Her) in the abstract realm of philosophical rumination, with Week End, Godard takes us out of the musty world of ideas, and into the vigorous universe of action. You know all those things these characters have been talking about? Let's see what happens when they turn them into deeds.

Luis Bunuel's Exterminating Angel (1962) appears to have been a key cinematic influence as well, as a character appears early on who goes by the name of Bunuel's film title, while in both films, the decadent mores of the bourgeoisie are stripped away to reveal the essential savagery of this social class. In Week End, the central characters are Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mirelle Darc), a middle class couple with a plan. It is hard to believe that there is a more despicable cinematic couple than these two, as the movie begins with each planning the other's murder, as well as that of Corinne's ailing father, should he not come through with the inheritance they both covet (and plan to share with their lovers.) So, with these various highly dubious goals in mind, they hit the road for the weekend, and the moral decadence at display in the leads will soon be reflected in the series of disturbing scenes that will confront us on their trip into the French countryside.

From the looks of things on the motorway, everyone else in France is planning a similar weekend road trip. If there's one thing that Godard hates nearly as much as the petit bourgeoisie, it is the cars they drive. Every other scene is of one sort of vehicular carnage or another. And the film's most famous scene--the eight minute long tracking shot of a traffic jam--rightly sends up the whole matter of our romance with the automobile. Shocking contrast between the pettiness of the bored and annoyed drivers, who toss balls, play board games, and tootle their horns with vigor, and the dreadful bloodiness of the accident that we finally get to see has caused the delay.

Our bored, amoral, social climbing, avaricious, materialistic protagonists go forth into this disintegrating society, a Gallic apocalypse. A series of increasingly bizarre and disturbing scenes of social breakdown greet them, and they could not care one whit. They fiddle while Rome burns. And while he saves his most cutting critique for the bourgeois characters whose vile actions dominate the film, Godard refuses to spare the rod, as pretty much every aspect of French society is represented here, and all are deeply flawed; French society, Godard implies, is damaged beyond repair.

The incidents our "heroes" encounter become increasingly nightmarish, ranging from torture to rape, murder and ultimately cannibalism; so too does their complete indifference to the horror, which adds a distinctive layer of grimness to the comedy. (Or is that vice versa?) This supposedly civilized couple journeys through a barbaric landscape, not only unaltered by the experience, but in their single-minded selfishness, greedily and cruelly contributing to it. Everyone we meet has become so desensitized to the carnage that the film is daring you to feel anything for anybody. And what has caused this alienation from all human emotion? Godard allows some wiggle room for interpretation, but it is hard to escape the implication that our love affair for the automobile, fed by the advertising industry, and reinforced by popular culture that fetishizes it in songs, movies and television, is the primary culprit.

However, once Roland and Corinne move away from the highways and automobiles, and into the woods, things do not get any better, and it is clearly his conclusion that people are rotten to the core. Not only do they meet deeply flawed representatives of a variety of social classes, they even run into fictional characters like Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte (poor dear!) as well as a travelling piano salesman who delivers a lecture on how all modern music derives from Mozart; things do not end well for any of them. Now, we may have lost our humanity to a plethora of external causes, but that seems besides to the point to Godard. There is no escaping the fact that the species that produced Mozart and The Beatles is the same one that has created the barbarism on display here, and that the latter will overwhelm the former. And while we may get plenty of laughs out of the bizarre scenarios, particularly early on in the film, when the stakes are considerably lower (fender benders and tennis rackets) cynicism and despair ultimately rule the day. Laugh, Godard suggests, at your own risk.

Yet, despite the awful, gruesome deeds, we are left on the outside, unattached to the people who suffer. Godard always keeps us at a distance from the characters. Not just by making them so despicable, but also through standard Godardian techniques--shooting in long shot, so characters are literally far away, or when in medium or close shot, under lighting the scene so that characters faces are hard to make out. We are not to get emotionally attached. The purpose of this film is to provoke thought, not feelings. Not only does he want us to wonder why these characters are so cold and inhuman, he wants us to wonder why WE are as well.

In another scene, Godard uses a similar technique for an entirely different purpose. He films one character, while the other delivers a long political harangue. Why? As always, Godard wants us to pay attention to the words. For one, he wants us to listen to the content of the rant, and not get distracted by the visuals. But while Roland and Corinne are a captive audience, they are not moved to change their lives in any way. Godard's cynicism is profound. This film is an attempt to rile up the complacent, to incite the content, to unsettle and disturb the self-satisfied. Furthermore, while the off screen character rants, the on screen character eats, and the lead characters collect garbage and complain that they're hungry. Consumerism rears its ugly yet amusing head yet again in another Godard flick.

Week End is something of a relief for those who found Godard's previous films too heady and claustrophobic, as there is a clearer traditional narrative momentum, as well as a darkly and appealingly perverse humour that runs throughout the film. However, in the end, despite the delight that can be found in the film's wonderful irreverence, Week End has a bleakness and hopelessness that is hard to shake. Godard does not appear to believe that we have it in us to create a better world, that when stripped back to our essence, we are self-serving and ultimately destructive. Godard begins the film by announcing via his trademark inter-titles that Week End is "a film found on a scrape heap." Cynics and haters will wonder if that's where it should have stayed. While I really dig an awful lot of things about the film, and feel that it's rage is certainly justifiable, Week End is ultimately a bit too bleak for my tastes. Uncompromisingly cynical and completely unforgiving, Week End is a satire so black, you couldn't see hope if it was dancing in front of your eyes carrying sparklers and singing La Marseillaise.

Indeed

And now I give you the rightly (in)famous traffic jam tracking shot, in all of its uncut 8 minutes of glory:

2011-08-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here. First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman and The Riflemen. Then Ben returned, and we took a look at Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Feminin and the last Godard-Karina collaboration, Made in USA. We followed this up with our review of what we consider the best of all Godard films from this period, Two or Things I Know About Her. Today, we have the followup to his masterpiece, a damned fine piece of filmmaking in its own right...

The Chinese (France, 1967, Godard)

Ben Begins:

Even if Godard had made nothing before and nothing after The Chinese, The Chinese would hold an important place in the history of cinema simply for the predictive power of the thing.

"Feels like a trial run for the May 1968 revolution. See it by any means necessary!" - Time Out New York

"Amazing! Like a speed freak's anticipatory vision of the political horrors to come!" - Pauline Kael

"Given that the film was made in March 1967 — one year before violent student protest became a manifest social reality in France — La Chinoise is now regarded as an uncannily prescient and insightful examination of the New Left activism during those years." - Wiki

All of these blubs are correct but observations of 20/20 hindsight, regardless of when they were written. I prefer this dialectical twist: The Chinese is an a priori documentary. By "a priori," I do not mean here a conceptual ideal or abstract principle applied by Godard for a proscriptive purpose. For all his sympathies towards the would-be revolutionaries depicted, Godard just as much has his reservations, to put it mildly. So, he isn't promoting a model. What he is doing is capturing in advance what is actually going to develop, documenting a happening before it happens. The blubs make this point but what I am attempting to add is that unlike the writers of the blurbs on the outside of the movement, Godard was enough inside of it to predict in his art the real world events to come.

To say that he is ambiguous about this emergence is to miss the point, I believe. To analyse The Chinese according to the relative weights of his sympathies and his reservations would be to undermine precisely the objective "documentary" value I am at pains to highlight. That the characters in the film are fictitious, that the movie is entirely staged, that it is yet again a piece of celluloid theatre; all of this is made patently obvious - yet the credibility of the characters, the plausibility of their conduct, the core reality within the blatent artifice... finally the New Wave produces a New Realism. Going beyond the didactic dogma of the Soviet realism, the Italian neo-realist synthesis of journalism and melodrama and the French cinema verite, somehow incorporating an almost hallucinogenic disorientation into what would otherwise be prosaic visions... well, I just can't confidently wrap my mind around how the guy tells the truth.

To be sure, he does so with a strong element of autobiography. It is valid to interpret his oeuvre in terms of self ethnography. Not just because he literally includes himself in voice-overs, inter-titles even on screen, and most of all, by feeding lines to his improvising actors. But more substantively, because his films function as opinionated reviews of previous films. Yet even more substantively, his films increasingly function as politicized critiques of themselves in the larger cultural context. I made much of this in my review ofTwo or Three Things I Know About Her, so I won't pursue this further with respect to The Chinese. Suffice to say that the director is very heart-on-sleeve in 2 OR 3 whereas he is bordering on bitterly ironic - in advance, in advance, that's the amazing thing! - in The Chinese. I found the philosophic doubt of the former more emotionally moving than the political skepticism of the latter. On the other hand, the tough-mindedness and cutting humour ofThe Chinese makes it a more fully realized work intellectually. Indeed, for Godard it has a lean-mean-fighting-machine quality hitherto unseen. The man is satirizing his best friends. On this score, I am grateful to Wiki for explaining to me that the film is based on Dostoyevsky's The Possessed.

And speaking of tossing bombs at the Tsar, I might approach all of this under the heading of the topic that I raised at the start of GODARD 101 after seeing Breathless: the status of violence. There is no action in The Chinese. It's all talk. Mostly interiors. And mostly in one apartment at that, the residential cell of the communist cell. But all the talk turns on violence, eventually in the most explicit and extremist terms. We are at the crossroads with the film-maker. There are a number of truly brilliant lines about the relationship between politics and art, doctrine and image, action and representation. And as always, Godard breaks the fourth wall and turns the camera on the actor instead of the character as well as on the technical crew and ultimately on the audience itself. But at the end of the day, what The Chinese speaks to are the real wars going on that in 1968 will break out into open battles in the streets of Prague, Paris, Chicago. Neither a vicarious simiulacrum nor an art-mock dress rehersal, The Chinese is the weatherman that people still needed to know which way the wind was blowing.

And Dan:

“C’est du chinois” = “It’s all Greek to me.”

Jean-Luc Godard's The Chinese, his confident, brash and assertive, followup to the more tentative, questioning, ruminative Two or Three things I Know About Her, might (like many of Godard's films) best be described as a theatrical documentary. The world that the characters inhabit in this film is a striking monument of Godardian artifice that is, at the same time, so finely tuned into the political reality of the day that it would accurately anticipate the social upheaval that would unfold in France within a year. Indeed, many have heralded Godard for his ability in 1967 to so accurately predict the student riots of '68. However, rather than evidence that Godard was some sort of modern day Nostradamus, what his anticipation showed was that he had his nimble finger on the pulse of the political scene of the time, showing familiarity with the various forms of left wing politics, and specifically, understanding of its hold upon a specific type of youthful enthusiast; it certainly did not hurt that he was dating Anne Wiazemsky at the time (and would soon marry her.)

More importantly, Godard's fifteenth feature film in eight short years is an incisive portrayal of the young people struggling to understand their revolutionary cause, and convert ideas into action. The Chinese is the next logical step in the political development of the youthful characters who roamed around Parisian coffee houses looking for some meaning in the midst of their, and society's, mid-60s uncertainty in Masculin Feminin. Ultimately, romantic interests were more important to the randy young men than political activism; however, the worm has turned in The Chinese, and love, while present, is of secondary concern to both the characters and the audience. Instead, theoretical discourses about revolution dominate the proceedings.

Although Godard clearly shares many of the left wing ideas being bandied about in The Chinese, this film is no fawning tribute to the cause. Godard often uses humour very effectively to reveal the myopia and contradictions within the movement and its believers. The young rebels can be funny in their own right, as their kitschy skits and playful use of toy weapons as props (which mirror their youthful naivete) might indicate, but Godard pokes fun at their foibles as well, as his use of various media of pop art--visual and musical--indicate how thinly held and ineptly understood many of the ideas are that these young radicals are bandying about. Nevermind the mess they make when they take up real weapons and try to put these ideas into action.

For all its stylistic flourishes (and they are plentiful), the movie plays out like an unlikely reality series pilot. Call it Mao's Big Brother . The apartment is nicely upholstered, so middle class sensibilities won't be offended, while left wing slogans abound on the walls, and hundreds of copies of Mao's Little Red Book are littered around the place. There's even a love interest, in the form of the attractive couple Guillame (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and Veronique (Wiazemsky) to keep the romantics engaged. There is conflict, as these radicals bicker amongst themselves, but more importantly challenge the powers that be. And, as mentioned, it is funny. Godard gets much of his humour out of the situation, as we watch five privileged French bourgeois students trying to figure out how to lead a Maoist/peasant revolt. Further, the fractious divisions within the radical movements has Pythonesque undertones; the squabbles between the Marxist-Leninsts factions anticipating the absurd hairsplitting between the People's Judean Front and the People's Front of Judea by well over a decade.

In the film, Godard captures his heroes youthful sincerity and earnestness well. Godard's preferred form of examination, which allows him to expose the character's naivete and dogmatism, is the Socratic interrogation. Sometimes you can hear Godard peppering the actor swith questions; which they will sometime answer in character, and sometimes not. Godard almost casually reveals the cinematic artifice, turning one camera on another, so we can see that this is all taking place in the reel world. In a further bit of meta-filmmaking, Godard asks the actor Leaud a series of questions that provide a distant and ironic echo to another question and answer session that Leaud took part in eight years previous with Francois Truffault that ended up making the final cut of 400 Blows, and for almost the exact opposite effect. In Truffault's film, the scene is a slice of cinema verite, blended seamlessly into the narrative. In The Chinese, the scene is a faux documentary moment wedged into this Godardian drama, purposefully interrupting whatever narrative flow there may have been in order to point out that we are watching a movie, with actors, director, cameraman and various crew members involved in the creation of this and every cinematic moment. Yes, he seems to be saying, this is a movie, and this is the same actor you saw in 400 Blows. So whatever you do, do not get caught up in the story, or get too emotionally invested in these characters. This is all a construct intended to make you think about what it all means; consequently, the film has, like many of Godard's films, a decidedly off-kiltered docu-drama sensibility.

By feeding lines to the actors via earphones as the scene is being recorded, Godard creates a sort of non-acting that serves his purpose well. Again, it creates audience detachment, as lines cannot be read with much tone/inflection, since the actors don't have time to give the words much of either. So, instead of getting caught up in the emotions behind the words, we are encouraged to think about their meaning. Intellect reigns over emotion.

The film feels nearly hermetically sealed at points, so trapped are we and they in the setting: most scenes take place in the bourgeois apartment that the revolutionaries are borrowing while one of their parents is out of town. For all the talk of revolution, the radical theorists rarely leave the apartment, choosing instead to talk, banter, lecture, challenge, question, shout, recite, and study the ideas of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist thinkers. And within the apartment, all does not follow the ideal course of egalitarianism, as Juliette seems confined to do all the domestic tasks, while prostituting herself (a recurrent trope in Godard's films) to help make ends meet. As one young rebel intones, in an amusing riff on Dostoyevsky, because Marxist-Leninism exists, all is permitted.This includes anti-Marxists practices, it appears. These youngsters are clearly much more comfortable talking about revolution than actually living, fomenting or participating in it.

Perhaps the movie's most memorable scene moves us outside of the apartment and onto a train. The scene takes us back to the penultimate scene in To Live her Life, and convo between Nana and a linguist professor in the diner. This time the academic in question is Francis Jeanson, a well known and controversial French intellectual (and the actress Wiazemsky's real philosophy teacher), and his dialogue with Veronique highlights key issues in the film. It is a visually elegant scene, with much more muted tones than in the apartment, which is painted in the primary colors (particularly the red, white and blue that Godard returns to so often in his films), reflecting the more nuanced tone of the conversation here. Jeanson tries (unsuccessfully) to talk Veronique, the girl with a metaphorical gun, off the ledge of revolutionary violence while the countryside of rural France passes by, and they argue about the future of the revolution. History is marching forward, like this train. However, the big difference here is this: history has show us where this train is going. Veronique, however, does not have this knowledge. When Jeanson confronts her with what to do after inciting murderous violence in order to close down the universities, she admits to having no answers. The ideas have spurred excitement in Veronique and her colleagues, which creates the possibility of action, and the hope for some sort of change, so as to wash away the failures of the current system; these are the impulse, she maintains. Change cannot occur without this impulse. And even if we have no idea of what will happen after we smash the system, change has to be better than maintaining the status quo.

Doesn't it?

The Chinese is a provocative, surprisingly even-handed look at the attractions and limitations of radical movements for both young and old alike. Godard gives us plenty to chew on in The Chinese, one of his lesser seen, but nonetheless essential films.

Here is the film's trailer:

2011-08-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here. First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman and The Riflemen. Then Ben returned, and we took a look at Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Feminin and the last Godard-Karina collaboration, Made in USA. Next up: the film that Ben and I both agree is the best of the diverse lot that make up the Godard 101 syllabus. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (France, 1967, Godard)

Ben Begins:

Going in to GODARD 101, of the two or three things I knew about him, this title was one of them. Had I heard of it years ago, as a kid, not so long after it came out, discussed by the same radical university types sitting in our living room that showed me Alphaville up at the student union? Or did the title - catchy in its own right - stick with me after just recently re-reading that J. Hoberman's Harper's review of a Godard bio, which put GODARD 101 in the curriculum for me in the first place? Doesn't matter either way. Because both ways signal the greatness of 2 OR 3. If that self-professed revolutionary milieu was chewing over the film back in the day, they were right to. And if Hoberman continues to hold to this day that it is an outstanding cinematic work, he is right to.

2 OR 3 is "The Portrait of the Artist as an Activist; "unto, "The Portrait of the Activist as (Just) an Artist". Godard is critically interrogating his own agency as a whole. The activist is being held inactive politically, so the artist is at least active about this artistically. Not surprisingly, gone is the cute self-citation as a mocking replication of the history of movie-making, the circular signification of prior significations without concern for an original reality prior to the image. Now, there's an almost traditional need for a reliable epistemological framework. And just as old-fashioned, there's a near desperate frustration with uncertainty about how to begin getting a handle on this. For no amount of sophisticated entertainment can provide what is required by the contemporary situation.

The auto-declarative anguish of the director is all the more pronounced for him expressing it in terms of political outrage that is itself excruciatingly hamstrung by introspective philosophic doubt. The latter is often addressed by way of monological inquiries that just about junk entirely any pretense of artistic artifice. Yet, they never stop being aesthetic objects presentedmis-en-scene. The film gives the impression that the director is bursting at the seams to produce a work of non-fictional agit-prop, but cannot allow himself to engage in direct propagandistic communication. So he continues to craft a movie as he knows how to do. Except now the deconstructive approach to what constitues a "movie" is being determined not as a formal game but instead as a necessity of content. There, I said it. The sense of political urgency about the state of the real world is driving 2 OR 3, however embodied in a theatrically staged statement on celluloid.

Simply in terms of the topic, 2 OR 3 is a companion piece for To Live Her Life insofar as it also follows a prostitute. Whereas the former plainly showed a story of downward mobility, however, the latter depicts a scenario about maintaining a middle class standard of living and the modern lifestyle according to consumerism. Related to this - and for the first time in a Godard film - attention is given to nuclear family life, with parts of no trivial import assigned to children, including heavily-loaded lines spoken by one of them. The upshot of this is that prostitution is generalized onto the society as a totality, not as a metaphor but as a literal model of capitalist culture. This comes off as anti-American, especially with respect to the imperialist project in Vietnam, but the critique is clearly aimed at the very ethos of the system.

How the film makes the impression it does, I wish I could say. For all of it's excessively egg-headed soul-searching at a sometimes remarkably abstact level of discourse, it is somehow staggeringly poetic. For all of it's sheer intellectual wordiness, not to be confused with dramatic dialogue, the visual compositions and juxtapositions are absolutely essential elements of the meandering symposium, and they have genuine beauty. In this department it doesn't hurt that the camera is often pointed at a good-looking woman, of which there are more than two or three in 2 OR 3. This should not suggest that the film has an exploitational sexist gaze - no wait... it has precisely this; but simultaneously as it does, it exposes the illegitimacy of this, shows it to be exactly the prostitution general to the culture that is reducing all social relations to shopping and all communication to advertising.

On the technical side, just as in Alphaville it is a stroke of genius that the voice of the computer is some guy with phony vocal cords, in 2 OR 3 the director supplies - as he so often does in his films - voice-over comments, but this time he does it differently and the difference makes all the difference, eh? He whispers. Fucking brilliant. The effect is off the chart. He sounds like a person worried that the CIA is tapping the phone, as well as a guy afraid of his own voice at full volume, as if hearing his throughts objectified so bare would just be too much to bear.

This is the first Godard film I have seen that I believe I will have to see again. Not because I enjoyed it more than all of the others. Far from it. There is a quality about it that prevents me from feeling attracted to 2 OR 3, honestly, a terrible dullness. Yet, this very sensibility strikes me as a marker of numbness, of a false passivity in the face of not knowing how to break through the alienation of urban cubicles, from the blocks of apartments to the TV sets in each cell or even just yet another booth in a diner. Of not knowing how to photograph an image with a meaning that can be trusted and acted upon. Of not knowing how to stop the napalm. Maybe it's just the fits and starts of GODARD 101 that make me cautious now, but I strongly suspect that 2 OR 3 is the real deal, profound art.

And Dan:

Clouds in my coffee? That's just the tip of the iceberg. I can see clearly now, as Two or Three Things has shown me God(ard) in a cup of coffee. Or is that Solaris? Just as we both flashed on Bela Tarr while watching The Riflemen, I could not help but see Tarkovsky's futuristic wish-delivery system in that devilish cup of java. What have we here? A lyrical Godard? A champion of the finding the glorious in the everyday image? Searching for the profound in the seemingly prosaic? Perhaps. Or is Godard pondering the efficacy of the image, trying to determine if there is any more truth in the concrete than in the abstract? Whether looking at a bank of fluttering of leaves as they tremble under the gaze of Godard's curious camera, or into the Hadean ashes that flare up at the tip of a newly-lit cigarette, of this there is little doubt. With Two or Three Things I Know About Her, we are witnessing a development in Godard's art that is at once a great leap forward and, at the same time, a completely natural outgrowth of his previous work. However, no matter how you look at it, Two or Three Things I Know About Her is the most significant and damned impressive of Godard's films of this remarkably fertile period (1959-1967.)

One the one hand, it would be easy to make a list of the familiar tropes that run throughout the film, including the love of mirroring shots, long conversations in cafes, usually between a male and a female, often about sex, abstract voice over narration, vivid technicolour palette (reds, whites, blues predominate, which also happen to appear on the French and American flags) within an anamorphic widescreen format, the use of comic book elements to representative the cartoonish aspects of modern life, digressions that alternate between fascinating and soporific, and while there is no girl with a gun, we do get a tot with toy machine gun, if that counts for anything. Godard is nothing if not persistent in his consistency.

That said, I think we can safely say that Godard is ready to put the rigors of conventional narrative cinema in his rear view mirror. To call the plot of this film elusive is to lavish it with praise. In fact, the emptiness of the narrative could be more than a ploy, it could be a reflection of the emptiness of these people's lives. Nothing much happens because these people are nothing much. And yet, they are, because they represent so much of what is wrong with our world, or more specifically, the capitalist world through which which so many of us make our way. What there is of a story makes it clear that Godard views life under this system as oppressive. We are all prostituting ourselves to stay afloat in this sea of consumerism, dehumanized, fragmented and commodified by advertising, pop culture, and the crushing economic demands of a life always kept just slightly out of reach. The sight of two prostitutes parading before a client wearing only airline flight bags over their heads captures just about all we need to know about these themes in Godard's work.

In trying to dig more deeply into the film, it could be instructive to study the title for clues as to Godard's intent. The "her" in question most obviously points to the character of Juliette, and the actress (Marina Vlady) who plays her. Juliette is a middle class wife and mother of two and occasional prostitute who moves through this day in her life, usually in character, only to sometimes break the fourth wall to comment on life, either as herself, or her character, or both? The objective pronoun in the title is also the city of Paris, as images of Juliette are constantly either juxtaposed with those of suburban renewal, while other times they share the screen, with Juliette often marginalized or dwarfed by the modern and dehumanizing suburban high rise developments that mark her home. Finally, it is also entirely possible that the titular figure is the capitalist system that comes under such virulent attack throughout the film. All of this is familiar as well, for Godard has used these techniques and examined these themes in earlier films. Yet, there so much more to the film that is breaking new ground for Godard.

And perhaps not coincidentally, we see real evidence of humility in Godard's film, with some of the best proof of this being found in his voice over narration, and not just in the content itself, which is rife with a quiet and honest inquisitiveness, but in the style itself. Certainly, the hushed whisper bespeaks an Orwellian paranoia that he could be under surveillance, but more interestingly, it also registers with the audience a key movement towards a certain uncharacteristic but at the same time equally exciting timidity in the face of the grand ideas he is exploring and the large questions he is posing.

Yet, this Godard is no metaphysical man, no hippy dippy tripped out Carlos Castenada. The Godard at the helm of 2 or 3 Things is the same angry man, the same rawly-formed radical vigorously attacking all that he sees wrong with the world, and the human systems operating within it. He's still fueled by the same frustration with capitalist practices, American foreign policy in Vietnam, and our increasing enslavement to consumer culture (among many other things.) Images of napalm victims and injured soldiers are alternated with those of Parisian suburban renewal and they act to show us the consequences of these practices in France, as people are herded into anonymous industrial-looking cookie cutter housing complexes, while the aforementioned dwarfing of characters within these shots reinforces such impressions.

The film's famous final images of a series of consumer products arranged around a field is equally informative, for in a world where advertising is king, name brand products are the architecture of our lives. Just as Paris is being torn down and rebuilt in the image of the contemporary capitalist society, so too are our lives overrun by consumer products.

Among the many reasons that Two or Three Things is so fascinating is the appearance of a newly vulnerable Godard, a more openly curious artist who is asking questions without being certain he has any answers. As he inquires, he is uncertain, and truly opening himself up to the world, a world of wonders and wondering. And in this wandering, Godard is becoming intoxicated with the world and its possibilities. Godard is probing areas that are both familiar and novel. As has been the case throughout his career, Godard remains determined to examine the language of sound and image in order to more fully develop a system of cinematic art and communication to rival the great art forms of centuries past. If language is the house that man built, Godard wants to get in on the ground floor of the 20th century's great contribution. And he is increasingly determined to apply this new formalism to his evolving political radicalism. Simply put, in Two or Three Things, Godard is trying his damnedest to figure out how he can use cinema to serve the cause.

And for the first time, revolution is on the table as more than just a passing thought. Comradeship emerges, as the narrator (Godard) refers to some characters as brother and sister, while another character, Juliette's son, shares a dream he had about two twins walking hand in hand who turned out to be North and South Vietnam, then later writes about importance of friendship and camaraderie between boys and girls. Knowing Godard's own chauvinistic tendencies, this (and other conversations between characters) reveal a man who seems to be reassessing his gender politics, while also becoming more actively committed to his earlier political radicalization.

Damned fine film, the pinnacle of Godard's art (to this point, at least). I am eager to watch it again.

Then Ben:

"What have we here? A lyrical Godard? A champion of the finding of the glorious in the everyday image? Searching for the profound in the seemingly prosaic? Perhaps. Or is Godard pondering the efficacy of the image, trying to determine if there is any more truth in the concrete than in the abstract?"

I think you are right to emphasize the lyrical impulse in this film. I said it is "staggeringly poetic." And I think you are right to emphasize the candid longing for truth. I said "there's an almost traditional need for a reliable epistemological framework."

But with respect to the efficacy of the image, I do not think Godard is grappling with a contest between the concrete and the abstract. His openly lyrical investigation is at the same time his most intellectually penetrating inquiry. The pursuit is of the image as efficacious both in lyrical concreteness and ideational abstraction. The director's desire is to do with cinematic imagery what Blake does with words in this poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Yeah, well, good luck with that Jean-Luc. 2 Or 3 Things is nothing if not a testament to his feeling of failure in this regard. So you do well in acknowleding his explicit modesty - how's that for a dialectical oxymoron? - his extroverted display of his deepest insecurity.

Is it too much of an ad hominem speculation to say the the director is questioning his right to make a movie given the state of the world? That his overwhelming sense of political responsibility is forcing him to seach for an Acrchimedean point on solid philosophic ground, only to find himself a mere artist who expresses himself with images that are obviously illusory - how's that for a dialectical oxymoron? - images that must somehow represent reality so viewers can actually take action to change the world? For you also do well in acknowledging that 2 Or 3 Things is nothing if not a call to revolution. Not with a bang. With a whimper. But a call even so.

In On The Jewish Question, Marx regards The Jew as the epitome of The Bourgeois; not the essential social relation of capital accumulation, just the most fully formed personification of it. For this, he has often been regarded as anti-Semitic. I believe this objection is wrong. It is wrong because of a failure to forge a dialectic between the abstract essence and the concrete epitome.

Having established this, I can now say analogously that Godard forges such a dialectic in 2 or 3 Things. The Woman is the epitome of the prostitute whose essence is wage-slavery. The Woman is the epitome of the housewife whose essence is consumerism. The Woman is just the most fully formed personification of the social relations of the capitalist system. Naturally, I extend the analogy completely and maintain that it would be wrong to see any sort of male sexism in this. On the contrary, I see in it a feminist perspective that is not just compatible with the anti-capitalist critique, the perspective is intrinsic to this critique.

Harbingers of this feminist anti-capitalism are at work in To Live Her Life and A Married Woman, and I believe I made gestures towards this point in our discussions of those two films. On the other hand, Masculine, Feminine is infected with male chauvinism, and provides only the most cursory and trivial opposition to capitalism. In our discussion of that film, I went so far as to suggest that the latter was caused by the former. Godard is a politicized intellectual but he is not a political theoretician. He is an artist. He cannot abstractly go to essence in a direct way. He must deal with it indirectly by concretely dealing with what he takes to be the epitome.

He is so an artist. Ultimately, the two or three things Godard knows in 2 or 3 Things are not about her but about himself. The film is a Catholic confessional. The darkened theatre is the confessional booth, we in the audience are the priest, and the screen is the screen, from behind which the director directs his confession to us:

I have made movies that have started a revolution in cinema but I do not know how to make movies that will will start a revolution in the world. If you thought I was your leader, think again. The times they are a-changin' but this is another side of Bob Dylan. I'm just a guy with a movie camera. If you look back with open eyes, you will see I was always honest about this. What is to be done? You tell me.

In The Chinese, he does let a few different factions tell him. Fortunately, he has recovered his sense of humour by this point and comes pretty close to replying: But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

Meantime, the two or three things I think I know about 2 Or 3 Things may be errors in the extreme. But of this I am certain. Of the 1959-1967 New Wave, 2 Or 3 is not 2 or 3. It is #1 with me.

And Dan:

I see that I need to more clear and/or precise. I agree that Godard is not "grappling with a contest between the concrete and the abstract" so much as he is playing around with it, and even at some times exalting in it. I thought that the sometimes jarring juxtapositions and the even more fascinating super-impositions of abstract ideas over concrete images were a continued (hardly the first time he's done it, but this is by far the most effectively) attempt by Godard to play around with and even stretch the medium, exploring the possibility of cinema as not just a form of communication and art, but as a way into radical discussion and (tentative) action. And now that I've seen The Chinese, I can see that he is also clearly interested in the limitations of such a discussion.

One of the things I'm interested in exploring with 2 or 3 Things is Godard's apparent about face on the whole question of gender politics. As you note, his politics in Masculin Feminin (and A Married Woman, for that matter) are riddled with chauvinism, while in 2 or 3 Things, the female characters are not only much more clearly the victim of the system, but also the more alert to the cruelty and injustice of this world. [a sidebar: here we have another sexless Godard film, this one featuring prostitution prominently; however, the sexlessness is not just due to Godard's squeamishness. It is also expressing a truth--when you turn sex into a commodity, there is not longer anything sexy about it]. And while To Live Her Life is more conscientiously neutral on the issue of women's place in the world, this is the first film that seems to clearly take up the women's position. Sure, prostitution is a metaphor in this film, but it is also on objective truth: many middle class women were resorting to prostitution in order to make ends meet (apparently one of the inspirations for making this film was the revelation of this fact in a magazine article.) When it comes to advertising and the commodification and dehumanization of people, women--particularly in the 50s and 60s, when they were more likely to be homemakers, and put in charge of all matters domestic--are on the front lines, as they are the ones whose roles are defined by their ability to sort through all the ads to get the best deals. There has got to have a soul crushing, deadening effect. And rather than wag his finger and mutter tut-tut as he does in A Married Woman, he digs a little deeper in 2 or 3 Things, and has a rather more open minded response to the difficult position of the female in this system.

Voici le trailer:

2011-07-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here. First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman and The Riflemen. Then Ben returned, and we took a look at Pierrot le Fou and Masculin Feminin. Now it is time for us to bear witness to the end of the Godard-Karina collaboration with...

Made in USA (France, 1966, Godard)

Ben Begins:

... oxygen, this little bird needs oxygen. Do not enter this mine shaft, my coal miner comrade, the air is so bad, it was all I could do to fly to the exit and come out alive. Honestly, nearly died of boredom.

Monica found this NY Times review from back in the day: "Better seen twice if at all." (What a great line. A deliciously dialectical dis.) I have no intention of seeing it twice and I will come straight out and recommend that you see it not at all. It's not bad in the offensive way Contempt is bad. Almost worse. It's just so much nothing. On any level. With the exception of a couple killer lines that I will share with you after this sentence is done, I can think of not one thing about Made in USA that helped me keep my eyes and ears open as it played before me. Here are the two killer lines: One: "It's a political movie, which means it's Walt Disney with blood." Two: "I think advertising is fascism."

Since he hit the ground running in 1959, Godard is celebrated for changing the grammar of cinema. InMade in USA, he recycles himself in the most slap-dash way, turning what was before aesthetically radical into tired signature devices. Might be crowd pleasers for the die-hard fans who want a New Wave guru to idolize, but it borders on a sylistic dogma in my estimation. As I hope my reviews have emphasized, Godard's critical interrogation of genres and conventions are rescued from being obnoxious insofar as they are obstreperous, when they have that edge. Made in USA does not have that edge. I said he was treading water with Masculine, Feminine. Well, he's floating on dinghy with Made in USA.

And it's clear why. The politics are coming on regular now in bare-knuckle rabbit punches. He repeatedly interjects the proceedings with strident, provocative statements. Perhaps I should not say "interject," for the whole movie feels like an excuse for the New Left hot button-pushing. Problem is, the New Wave button-board Godard has built for himself cannot accomodate his new-found need to infuse his art with determinate ideological values. I have no idea what his style becomes after 1968 (or 1988, or 2008, for that matter). But already in 1966, his aesthetic as a whole communicative methodology is sagging under the weight of his emerging political world-view.

Made in USA is yet another twist on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe archetype. Anna Karina gets to play the tough detective this time. The setting is the very near future, with cursory casting of "Robert MacNamara" and "Dick Nixon" as this bad guy or that corpse. It's all very non-linear and cryptic, with all sorts of narrative mystery due to truncated dialogue and editorial obstinance when it comes to basic coherence. There is also precious little excitment, wit or anything else to suggest that Made in USAwasn't made in three minutes. I am confident that a coterie of postmodern revisionists will these days sing the praises of this film. But it's shitty movie, plain and simple.

And Dan:

Based solely upon your Godard 101 rankings, I can intuit that we are on the same page here. I don't have much to say about the film, but what I do say will not be nice. Made in USA probably seemed like a great idea at the time--why not have some fun parodying your favourite film genre?--but in the end, the film just sits there like a three day old dead fish, stinking up the joint.

Godard is a film noir junkie, and his adoration fills many of the frames of his best films, including Breathless, Alphaville and Little Soldier. So it is quite reasonable, given Godard's track record for breaking new ground in film, that he would attempt something novel with the genre. With Made in USA, Godard decides to take many of the conventions of the genre and invert them, so that we can stare at what is essentially a photo negative of a film noir. Godard exploits a fundamental principle of parody, which aims to turn the sublime into the ridiculous, by contrasting our expectations with the alternative reality of what we see on the screen. So, instead of filming in 4:3 aspect ratio in murky black and white, Godard gives us garish technicolour in all its widescreen glory. Instead of putting a hard bitten and grizzled male detective in the lead, Godard gives us the young and lovely Anna Karina, thereby fulfilling his own dictum "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." Instead of a driving around corrosive, night time urban setting, the characters spend most of their time walking around a bucolic, daytime French countryside. At pretty much every turn, Godard confounds expectation.

However, while I applaud the premise, I must give a raspberry to the execution. The film takes the premise for an interesting 15 minute short, and tries to turn it into a 90 minute feature, and stretch marks are evident in almost every scene, which, lacking any sort of narrative focus, play out languidly. In Godard's quest to emulate the narrative quirkiness of one of his favourite noirs, Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep, he has created a film that has pretty much no narrative coherence, and while you might be able to get away with that in a film awash with other admirable qualities, Made in USA is not that film. Even Godard's favourite tropes are not well served. At one point, Karina notes that "advertising is a form of fascism" after having discussed how this story would be different if it were a Disney film, then standing infront of a Disney poster for one of the film's many dull jokes. This sort of nail on the head humour lacks the sort of wit and playfulness we have come to expect of Godard's more engaging efforts. "Tis a sad way to bid farewell to the Godard-Karina collaboration, but bid it adieu I must. So long, Anna. You will be missed, though not for this film.

Anyway, I see no purpose in flailing this dead horse, or sniffing this dead mackerel, any longer. Let's bury this sucker so I can move onto what I hope is a far more deserving film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

Rather than offering up the trailer, I'm giving you the scene of Marianne Faithful singing As Tears Go By:

2011-07-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

The problem with reviewing an intellectual like Godard (is there another intellectual "like Godard?") is that he beats you to the presses when it comes time for a tag line. For Masculine, Feminine, he himself says of it during it - in the form of an intertitle, no less: "This film could be called the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." Yup.

From my point of you, what is interesting about this is that the director seems to be a tad stroppy about the children's prioritization of Coca-Cola over Marx. This is to say thatMasculine, Feminine is the first film in which Godard deals directly with ideological stances in relation to the US campaign in Vietnam, the current political reputation of the French Communist Party, the continuing presence of de Gaulle and so on. He also focuses pointedly at the incipient sexual revolution, especially as it was being facilitated by the new technologies of contraception. There is even a bit with two men making out in a bathroom stall. Would have raised more than an eyebrow in '66.

I wish I could say that all of this rich sociology makes for a facinating movie, but I must announce that Masculine, Feminine looks to me to be the first time Godard is treading water. I do not doubt that in it's own day, it was a telling snapshot of the state of the republic from the perspective of the younger set. Wiki informs me that it was banned for persons under 18 in France, which rankled Godard no end because that was exactly his target audience for the film. It shows. Watching it today, as a 50 year-old fat fart, I couldn't help feel that it was sorta like an episode of Friends, if you know what I mean.

Be this as it may, Masculine, Feminine has really helped with respect to my tracking of Godard's depictions of violence. There is very little of it, but what there is has improved verismillitude. That it is shown in the context of a movie-within-a-movie is neither here nor there at this stage of GODARD 101. What is significant, however, is that it is presented in connection with sexual conduct. Obviously, the mixture of hostility and eroticism is meant by Godard to be problematic, but what I realized is that this is the first time he has shown some actual sexual activity beyond a few kisses thrown into the conversation.

While I think my original speculation is beginning to pan out that Godard's treatment of violence is growing increasingly realistic as he becomes more overtly politicized, I now notice with a more Freudian eye that for all his attention to interpersonal heterosexual relationships and dialogue about true love spoken by lovers who fail to be true - where's the sex? There has been some suggestion of it from time to time, in rude language and morning-after shots. And yes, he has to deal with the same censorship by the distributors as the next film-maker. But even so. Things never even get lubricated, eh? Perhaps the handling of violence is as awkward and bothersome as it is because of the continuum between violence and eroticism in the first place, that murky pit wherein the excessively intellectual Godard is not artistically at home.

And speaking of sexuality, and remembering my promise to stay in touch with a feminist sensibility throughout GODARD 101, the portayal of women in Masculine, Feminine is pretty despicable. It was darn crappy in a Woman is a Woman, but this could be forgiven insofar as it was so cadidly parodic of the cliche sexism attending the genre being twiddled. Besides, even if Godard does offend the Sisterhood with that movie, To Live Her Life the next year does outstanding damage control; like I said in my review before, the female existential protagonist is given her dignity, neither to blame nor a victim. In Masculine, Feminine though, well, the chicks are basically bimbos. It's irritating, to put it mildly.

In fact, the whole film is rather irritating. Again, I concede that it has the merit of an almost documentary record of the Parisian scene for post-highschool/not-in-university types at that point in history. But it's a lot of talking heads with no story to speak of and just as little to look at cinematographically. Kind of a relief, to tell the truth. Guy was switching it up so fast and furious, my head was starting to swim. Or should I simply say that after Alphaville - a small masterpiece that can still send a shiver down my back today -Masculine, Feminine has not aged well?

And Dan:

Having not read your review for details, but having seen that you rank Masculine Feminine quite low on your Godard 101 master list, it looks to me like we have something of a disagreement brewing about the value of this cinematic work of art. And I don't use the term 'art' lightly here, because I am convinced that MF rightly deserves this ascription. Flawed though it is by some stunt casting in a key role, and a rather unfortunately typical and unforgiving attitude towards women, MF still stands as a stark and compelling portrait of confused Parisian youth in the tumultuous mid-60s.

There is much about this film that I did admire, but I will start by discussing a significant grievance. MF makes a great show of it's political radicalism in scenes that sometimes walk a thin between amusingly ineffectual and mildly invigorating, but there is little doubt that the film's gender politics are reactionary. Godard's attitude towards the female characters is derogatory at best, as they generally come off as politically disengaged, socially self-involved, and hopelessly materialistic. And his casting of Chantal Goya in the pivotal role of Madeleine does not help matters, and her range of expressions is extremely limited, making almost anything that comes out of her mouth sound either vapid or unconvincing. Or both. This is certainly a problem, and Godard's misogyny an ongoing concern, but thankfully, neither is a fatal flaw. There's just too much here to enjoy.

Truffault's discovery/proxy Jean-Paul Leard (400 Blows) plays Paul, a disaffected youth who is not quite equal parts feigned cynic and disguised romantic. Leard imbues the part with an appropriate combination of earnestness, arrogance, sincerity and vulnerability that is usually appealing but sometimes off-putting. Paul, what we might call a hipster today, has just finished his mandatory military service, and now he is a bit of a French cliche, a 21 year old angst-riddled young man sipping his cappuccino in a Parisian cafe while coolly flipping cigarettes Belmondo-style into his mouth, and writing his political manifesto. The lad is politically engaged, at least at a simplistic activist level, and his leather patch radicalism, while more theoretical than actual, at least points to the character's well-meaningness.

Still, while Paul spends considerable time mouthing the words of a radical--hell, sometimes he even scrawls them on walls--but truth be known, he is more of a yearning lover than a burning revolutionary. When his prospective girlfriend, the aspiring pop star Madeleine (played by Goya, a real life pop star--in Japan, at least) asks Paul what is his centre, he struggles for an answer, before finally arriving at his decision: love. But love proves frustratingly illusory for Paul, whereas Madeleine, the film's poster child for the emergent "me generation" chooses: herself. This self-centredness proves her saviour, while Paul's romanticism proves his downfall.

Working for the first time with cinematographer Willy Kurant, Godard at first eschews the sort of eye-catching camerawork that we have come to expect in his collaboration with Roaul Coutard, choosing instead to settle the camera in unusual positions, often focusing on the listener rather than the speaker, encouraging us to experience the film through their ears, while focusing on their reactions. As the film settles in, Kurant is given more challenges, including one particularly impressive tracking shot through a pool hall/cafe that accentuates Paul's inability to find any place that he feels comfortable. Kurant's choice of raw film stock is also noteworthy, as the grays are mostly washed out of the mix in MF, giving the film a documentary style cinema verite appearance, while also making the film more of an authentic black and white experience, suiting not only the tone of the film, but the attitude of its youthful cast, who characteristically swing from one emotional extreme to another.

However, it is in the audio realm that Godard continues some of the bold experimentation that has marked his development as a formalist. Other than continuing the naturalism of his earlier films, and allowing ambient noise to not only creep into, but sometimes obscure snippets of dialogue, MF shows other interesting innovations in the use of sound. For instance, in the aforementioned scene where Paul and Madeleine meet, the camera shifts position part way through the conversation to reveal an agitated couple in the background. While continuing to foreground Paul and Madeleine, Godard shifts the audio focus away from the young leads, and allows us to listen to their argument, which eventually spills out onto the street in a shocking act of violence. In fact, throughout the film the audience is put in a similar position, eavesdropping on other's conversation, mirroring the one of Alfred Hitchcock's favourite tropes, filmgoing as voyeurism. However, unlike the psycho-sexual deviance of Hitch, the audio innovations in MF allow us to become part of a community of voices, most of which are exploring the film's key dynamic, the gender divide in the youth culture.

This sea of voices is presented mostly in naturalistic ways, as we get a snapshot of mid-60s Paris locations, bars, coffee shops, arcades, recording booths, bedrooms and cinemas, as we observe people conversing on all matter of subjects. But one of Godard's favourite techniques for teasing information out of characters is the interrogation scene, which he deploys several times in the film, whether in a formal setting (Paul interviewing Miss 19, or the police detective questioning Madeleine and Catherine) or an informal one (Paul grilling Madeleine as she grooms herself in front of a mirror). The crime is modern society, and everyone is a suspect.

To be more specific, the crime as Godard sees it is pop culture and its influence on a youthful population trying desperately to find their footing, a hint of some meaning, in this world. Paul in particular (though he is not alone) is adrift, with no mooring, moving from one job to another, one interest to another, one person to another, searching for a centre, settling on Madeleine, but it (she) cannot hold.

MF is a film about children trying to become adults in a society in transition, but finding the requisite real life examples of adulthood lacking--there are very few adults on screen, and those that are do not offer much to emulate-- finding their models in the (mostly pop) culture around them--music, movies, and advertising in particular. Godard recognizes that his work in film has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as he has Madeleine and Paul reference Belmondo's romantic free spirited antics in Pierrot Le Fou when they attempt to be as free spirited and romantic as Belmondo, whose Breathless-level ultra-coolness Paul has been mimicking throughout, with both his cigarette flip and his thumb across the lip gestures, themselves imitations of Hollywood hipsters. In Paul's desperate attempt to be both grown up and cool--at least two degrees of separation from the source material.

MF is a film about young people set adrift in an uncertain, violent consumerist world of pop cultural influences without the social and intellectual mooring necessary to find their way through the morass. They move from one job to another, one interest to another, one person to another, looking for a centre, but it cannot hold.

Then Ben:

We definitely saw the same film. We just don't feel the same way about it. I reckon this says more about the difference between us than anything else. You seem to take each film as it comes with no pre-conceived notion about why it comes. I take each film as a stage in a developmental trajectory that we know will come to a head in 1968.

Your attention to the formal construction of Masculine, Feminine aside - (I like your awareness of the audio disjunction, this picks up a thread we haven't unraveled further since I tugged at this yarn ball in my review ofA Woman is a Woman) - the political attitude informing the film you feel delivers "a stark and compelling portrait of confused Parisian youth in the tumultuous mid-60s." What these French city kids are especially confused by, you indicate a number of times, is the pop culture conditioning their consciousness.

I do not disagree with the latter. Indeed, in my final term paper for GODARD 101 I develop this position at length with an eye to something in this pop culture you have not noticed, at least not precisely in terms of media sources. Nevermind that now, however. What presently separates us is your appreciation of Godard's political attutude in Masculine, Feminine. What you find stark and compelling, I find a tad stroppy; as in: "the director seems to be a tad stroppy about the children's prioritization of Coca-Cola over Marx."

I believe you have yet to see The Chinese, so I will not speak of it in any detail. Still, I trust nothing will be spoiled for you by me asserting that Masculine, Feminine (early 1966) is best appreciated as a stepping stone to The Chinese (1967). Considering I had not yet seen The Chinese when I reviewedMasculine, Feminine, my irritation with the film was the result of my unwitting anticipation of the more fully realized work that would come. "The tumultuous mid-60s" is right and Godard's transition in the year 1966 is pivitol.

All of this is to admit that I was a tad stroppy with Godard for being ONLY a tad stroppy with the kids' infatuation with fatuous consumerism while striking radical chic poses. There is a connection between their political pretentions and their romantic preoccupations that ultimately rests on their sexual immaturity. And on this, we really must bring the male chauvinism of the picture more centrally into it. Both of us are offended by this sexism but do not seriously criticise it insofar as we partition off the matter from the rest of our discussion of the film. But I now insist that it is at the very center of what makes Masculine, Feminine a wanna-be political statement that fails to materialize in the radical direction Godard tries to point it.

Am I too hard on the film from the perspective of the films that will follow it? Well, yes and no. It's a hell of a lot better thanMade in USA, as my review of that film indicates, but pretty much a throw-away compared to the uber-masterpiece of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which the director allows himself to confront absolute philosophic doubt, after which he is able to commit to The Revolution in The Chinese, albeit with a healthy dose of political scepticism.

I suppose my irritation with Masculine, Feminine could be regarded as misplaced by countering that the film should be understood as a kind of documentary. After all, both of us touch on this quality of the film. I actually think there is a case to be made that all of Godard's New Wave movies - even the most fantastic and surreal - have a kind of documentary quality, but I do not mean to pursue this case now. My present point is that the documentary quality of Masculine, Feminine does not for me convincingly counter my irritation with it.

By the way, this documentary is not without its fantastic/surreal/what-to-call-it-? moments. Can you please explain to me the significance of the pinball arcade scene wherein a stranger stabs himself in front of the protagonist? I mean - what? (!) This doesn't come out of just left field. It comes out of another ball park altogether.

And Dan:

I reckon what you are referring to that I have not unpacked Godard and pop culture-wise is the awareness that characters have in many of his films that they are themselves instances of pop art themselves. Hence the films constantly have the characters breaking the fourth wall, reminding us that we are watching a movie, that these are actors performing roles that have been created by someone else (Godard) and to be thinking about what this all means in relation to ourselves. Godard doesn't want us to ever get so "lost" in the film that we forget this very important fact, because he wants us to be constantly aware of, examining and questioning the relationship between audience and the (pop) art we are viewing.

As for the scene you mention, well, first off, we have to give Godard some props for actually showing some flesh and blood violence, right? Regarding its meaning, I reckon your guess (come to think of it, you didn't make a guess!) is as good as mine. It does foreshadowing later events, of course, but actions should not exist purely as literary devices, they should stand on their own right a well, and the only things I can come up with is the way that the moment (a) plays around with (pop) psychological notion that violence against others is evidence of self-loathing (b) contributes to the feeling of uncontrollable and unpredictable violence that runs throughout the film and represents the mood in Paris at the time, according to Godard (c) presents the idea that this generation of confused youth have a decidedly self-destructive bent.

Now, over to you. What do you have to say about this scene?

Then Ben:

Yeah, come to think of it, I didn't make a guess and still can't make one as good as yours. Not that I find yours all that helpful. I mean, I get your points (a), (b) and (c) - basically one point approached from three different angles for argumentative momentum - but I feel you are too quick to dismiss the literary device of foreshawdowing. I must confess to not remembering the film in detail well enough to fathom what this scene foreshadows. So please tell me what subsequent event or events you have in mind. Honestly, I just could not make head or tail of the self-stabbing in the plot ("plot" that is).

Meanwhile, no, I do not have to give Godard some props for actually showing some flesh and blood violence. At least not for the scene under discussion. I will give him those props for the scene which opens the film. I agree with you that it shows a "shocking act of violence." But the self-stabbing is too bizarre. The lack of communication - not just no verbal exchange , no body language also - made the whole thing for me weird in the extreme. Rather than actual flesh and blood violence, I saw a strange ritualistic act, almost a piece of street theatre.

How this may or may not support your attempt to make sense of the scene is beyond me.

And Dan:

I wish I had more to add to help you with the ritualistic/theatrical angle that you are trying to develop here in support of Godard's inclusion of this scene, but I don't. As for the foreshadowing, well it could be argued that this incomprehensible act foreshadows the future somewhat incomprehensible death of the central character. Was it suicide? Accident? He does say early on in the film that a life without tenderness would lead one to suicide, and Madeleine is not a beacon of affection, so there's that.

Then Ben:

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I completely forgot the plot point that the central character dies at the end. Thank you for reminding me. I guess his death was so incomprehensible I just didn't try to sort out if it was an accident or a suicide in relation to the rest of the film that came prior. As before, your guess is better than mine. If he did kill himself in keeping with his emotional principle, though, this only adds to the stupid sexism of the film; as if the function of a woman is to keep a man alive with her affection. Reminds me of what a female character critically says in a Margaret Atwood novel: When a man says that his woman doesn't understand him, what he means is that she doesn't suck his cock enough. Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.

And Dan:

To be fair to the character, he did not say men would die without tenderness. He suggested that people would die without tenderness. And while that is a foolish and naive notion on a purely physical level, there is truth to it on an emotional level. Something in us dies if, for whatever reason, we are cut off from human affection.

Then Ben:

You are so right. And so wrong.

You are so right that we are finally chewing the meat of the matter with regard to the protagonist. You dig him a fair bit whereas I figure he's mostly a wanker. Clearly, this is behind you liking the film more than I do. In your review you describe the character as "usually appealing but sometimes off-putting." It would appear that I found him sometimes appealing but usually off-putting.

But you are so wrong if you think this is all the meat that matters. I continue to focus also on the women - "meat" indeed in the movie - and I continue to insist that our identification with the protagonist must be restricted by our criticism of the sexism conditioning the film as a whole. In your review you state that "the film's gender politics are reactionary." Yet you keep on partitioning this off from the rest of the film. But come on. It's called Masculine, Feminine, right? I cannot say whether the male chauvinism in the movie is or is not a "fatal flaw," unlike you, who announce that it is not. All I will say (again) is that it "makes Masculine, Feminine a wanna-be political statement that fails to materialize in the radical direction Godard tries to point it."

And since I'm taking you to task on this topic, you go so far as to say that "Godard's misogyny [is] an ongoing concern." There is a difference - which I trust you will agree is significant - between the degrading treatment of women as inferior and the abusive hatred of women as the sexual Other. On behalf of myself and Godard too, the ongoing feminist concern I am bringing to his films is about the former, which I sometimes see in his work, and not the latter, which I never see at all.

Then - Ben

P.S. I realize that this is not meaty, but having travelled from the self-stabbing scene to your suggestion that it foreshadows the death of the protagonist as a possible suicide, I still wonder about the latter and ask you to wonder with me. Like I said before, I didn't notice that he was in so much pain, eh? Did he at any time strike you as even potentially suicidal? I suspect not, considering it was you who introduced the description of his death as "incomprehensible," and rightly so.

And Dan:

No, I did not see a self destructive streak in Paul. At all. So I'd have to go with his death being an accident. Of course, the coolness with which the two young ladies report his death casts some suspicion of the deed upon them. But I doubt that they're capable of murder, except in the most passive aggressive sort of way (withholding sexual affection, knowing that it might make Paul reckless or self-destructive.) Again, though, there is no evidence of this, and so I'm going with accidental death. Seems to me the main reason for Paul's death is so we can have the chilling moment when Madeleine calmly talks about giving herself an abortion with a curtain rod (apparently she wore and earpiece in this scene, and Godard dictated that line to her, which explains her detached demeanor. Undoubtedly exactly what Godard was going for. The bastard.)

You make some strong points regarding the film's central flaw. The key to my ability to continue to appreciate the film while also recognizing the problematic sexual politics is that, in this movie at least, I can understand why these young characters are not yet fully formed enough to realize their essential misogyny. I'm not excusing it, mind you. They're still radicals in theory only, reactionaries in practice (particularly when it comes to women). The lad's lack of sexual experience and confidence that contributes to this conservatism will be addressed over time, you'd have to hope.

However, while this can be explained away as the shortsighted-ness of youth, it does not help us to understand Godard's own myopia. It will be interesting to see, as he becomes increasingly radicalized, if he also becomes aware of his own internal political contradictions on this matter.

And finally, here is the trailer for Masculin Feminin:

2011-07-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Messed up. Was supposed to see Alphaville before this. Honest mistake or Freudian defense mechanism? Hardly matters because Alphaville will definitely be next. And it hardly matters because I've missed from 1963 not just The Little Soldier (ed. note: we took care of that one) but also The Riflemen, another work to deal with war directly; to say nothing of A Married Woman: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White, from... ugh... 1964, (apparently it was shot in b/w, and, by the way, in fragments.) Clearly, I am obsessing. But it really hardly matters because I believe I have seen enough already to start forming a term paper thesis for GODARD 101.

Many years ago I asked my brother about a certain jazz guitar player. He acknowledged a number of excellent things about the player but in conclusion judged his music to be too much about the specifics of the guitar itself and therefore not enough about the essentials of jazz. I feel this way about Godard. He's too much about the potential of film as a medium and not enough about the meaning of life. This objection is meant to go deeper than the ideologically loaded phrase "bourgeois formalism" that I prejudicially brought to GODARD 101 at the outset. And it is meant to go deeper than criticizing the artist for confusing technique-for-technique's-sake with-art-for-art's-sake. Not over-intellectualism. Or even lack of heart. Something void even more primary. At the core, there is a certain soulessness

As delightfully whimsical as most of A Woman is a Womanis, as downright charming as some parts of Band of Outsiders are, as sincerely good humoured as all the films are at certain points - Godard's socio-philosophic disposition is decidedly dark, menacing even. He is entitled to this, of course. But what is beginning to grate on me is his unwillingness/inability to face this directly and deal with it. Hence, my materialist antena picked up a suspect signal from the get-go with respect to his handling of violence and he has consistently subjected it to the most far-fetched and phoney treatments; the action in Crazy Pete being the sort from a comic book, albeit with pages torn and even missing.

Burrowing now to even lower depths of the problem, I've seen six of his films and in all of them without exception, intimate personal relationships that purport to be loving are revealed to be dubious bonds that collapse under the weight of estrangement, deceit and betrayal. Sometimes this is given a comedic spin but even more is a sinister undertow, a sense of dread, perpetual pessimissim. The characters continually doubt themselves and each other, lacking confidence in both their common sense and their ability to discern fact from fiction, right from wrong; not that they generally spend too much time worrying about the latter, ethics are ambivalent with Godard, to say the least.

Now, as I've already indicated, he is allowed to be negative; to posit the universe as ultimately untrustworthy and people as ultimately self-destructive due to inculcated distrust. But I have come to the conclusion that his artistic expression is evasive. Rather than confront the grim reality he is presumably experiencing, he engages in aesthetic tactics that are - I'm going to say it - escapist. He takes flight in the artifice of film as such, building up concentric rings of cinematic citations that relinquish the responsibility of returning to a referent. In other words, it's what will soon enough be called postmodernism.

I liked Crazy Pete a lot. I couldn't take my eyes off it. And I was completely captivated by the chemistry of the actors as well as the wild ride of the story. By now I've figured out that there's b/w Godard down-and-dirty and there's Godard colour-totally-too-much-turned-on, garish on cue. Crazy Pete is a colour outing and makes much of the great outdoors in the process, featuring all sorts of weird eye candy. Yet another tortured romance that runs its fatal course, it's basically a road movie with an outlandish thriller context that stiches together lots of improvised bits with askance shifts that pretty much play as non sequiturs.

Although it is in Band of Outsiders that a tiger incongruously turns up in the middle of Paris, Crazy Petebrings out and waves THE flag of cinematic surrealism - verily, the word "surreal" is spoken in the dialogue and parts of Crazy Pete almost beg to be called Felliniesque - yup, a midget. Well, can't tell if the actor is actually a dwarf, could be a kid with a false moustache. Whatever, a midget. With a machine gun, no less. Does him no good though. Ends up dead in a pool of obviously bogus stage blood, pair of scissors plunged into his neck. And there's lots more besides. Bafflingly beautiful lights reflecting off of the windshield of a moving car at night, a cocktail party perversly documented by way of a kind of negative magic realism, a car wreck laid out in a Madame Tussaud tableau, fireworks, vehicles aflame, trains rushing by...

What for? When do I get to care? I said I liked it alot and I meant it. But what's it all about Alfie? I mentioned Hitchcock way back at Breathless, but that will no longer do if it ever did. Hitch would kill his own mother to make the plot function as a steel trap of suspense. Godard could give a damn. The stakes are not high enough for his characters, Hell, there are no stakes. Shit happens folks. Including, in the case of Crazy Pete, him killing her and then himself. The End. Watch it all happen in brilliantly perplexing ways. And of course, they get to say and do some ultra hip, darn smart and occasionally shocking things along the way.

Indeed, shock value is big part of the project. In Contempt, Bardot's character is goaded by her partner into speaking a list of profanities, including the word "cunt." In 1963! InCrazy Pete, the protagonists do a bit of theatrical busking for a tourist group of American military men on shore leave. They perform a little play in which the US army man attacks the Vietnamese woman, played with near-Nazi ferocity and over-the-top racism respectively. The Yankie sailors applaud with approval. Where to begin? Not just bizarre and rude, it's shocking. In 1965!

My point is that Godard - in 1965, I can't wait for '68 - seems to think shock and critique are the same thing. Crazy Peteis geopolitically topical. One of the characters is connected to an arms merchant and she makes cursory comments about military conflicts in Angola and Yemen. There is talk of the cold war in terms of the space race to colonize the moon. And in addition to the aforementioned, there are ongoing refererences to the war in Vietnam. The film is seriously tuned in to the contemporary situation.

To what end? About what are we supposed to care? One more time: I liked Crazy Pete alot. But I am losing my patience. Just when I go so far as to say about Band of Outsiders that Godard has grown up, Crazy Pete makes me think that I am still being stylistically shocked by the fast and flashy moves of L'enfant terrible. It's counter-culture alright. But the limits are in sight. In the meantime, I am waiting to see if the director will make at least one film without including a moment of voice-over narration, with ersatz explanatory value, just a narcissistic pretense allowing Godard to literally read himself into the movie. Hummnn... maybe that comparison with Hitchcock ain't so off the mark.

And Dan:

Ben, I'm going to write my review, then read yours, and if I have any comment to make on your insights, I'll do so at the end of my review.

Here goes.

By 1965, Pierre le Fou (Crazy Pete) would not be best described as the apogee of Jean-Luc Godard's work in film (I consider Alphaville, Band of Outsiders and Vivre Sa Vie superior movies), but it must be recognized as a culmination of sorts. This will be welcomed with relief by some, and disgruntlement by others. Imagine that you had been waiting for months for one of your favourite musical artists to release a new record, only to find out that what they've released isn't a collection of new songs, but a greatest hits record. To be sure, there are a couple of bonus tracks of previously unreleased material, and they are pretty good. But there's is much about Pierrot that just feels a bit too...familiar.

Consequently, Pierrot's familiarity may breed a little contempt, as one could be excused for wondering if Godard is a significantly different filmmaker from the man who made Breathless five years before. The film is a self conscious mash up of every movie genre that Godard loves, of every movie he has made, of all the artistic references (music, painting, literature) that have influenced or affected him. Godard rakes the coals of his previous films to give a virtuoso performance in self-reference. So much of what we see here is familiar, and I'm not just talking about Godard's leads, Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It's all here, whether your fancy turns to the breakdown of the fourth wall or peculiar and amusing musical interludes, an elliptical plot centred on beautiful young lovers on the run or inter-titles that are alternatively thought-provoking or head scratching.

At the centre of this story, or what there is of one, are Marianne (Karina) and Ferdinand (Belmondo), two one-time lovers who meet again after five years apart and start up where they left off. What that means for Ferdinand is abandoning his bland middle class life, including a wife and the requisite two children, for a bohemian life on the run. And they are on the run because there is a dead man in Marianne's apartment that neither she nor Ferdinand seem too concerned about. In a move typical of so many of Godard's film's, Crazy Pete's heroes race through their cinematic world, but never seem to get anywhere. You can't even complain that they are agents of the plot, for there is so little of that. Ultimately, Ferdinand and Marianne are agents of Godard's cinematic whimsy.

Structurally, the film adopts the form of a picaresque, or a particularly wobbly interpretation of a picaresque, one where Godard's loose-limbed conception of a narrative has scenes bump up against each other that often have only the vaguest of connections to one another. This is one of the film's most appealing qualities, as Godard's command of juxtaposition, as well as his willingness to shift tone on a dime, often adds a strong element of surrealism to the proceedings. And while Godard is not quite up to Bunuel-ian standards, as his surrealism lacks the Spaniard's sharp edge and keen sense of target, it nonetheless keeps the audience off kilter, and contributes to the film's kinetic energy and irreverent tone. Further, Karina and Belmondo are boffo here. There is a potent chemistry between these two actors, and their commitment to this material and each other is clear and enchanting. The sing, laugh, play, fight and dance their way through the film with a level of charm and easy grace that matches Godard's tone and scheme well.

Otherwise, the key concern in the film seems to be a simmering battle of the sexes between the leads, set against some pertinent and pressing contemporary social issues (the Algerian and Vietnam wars being primary among them) as the fugitive lovers wend their way across some picturesque and beautifully photographed French country- and sea-side. The film's only concession to any sort of substance comes from the personal conflicts, as Ferdinand is more artistically and intellectually inclined ("literature before song!"), while Marianne is a more impulsive and sensual beast, dancing her way towards oblivion and breaking into song at the most peculiar times. As for the film's socio-political backdrop, there are Algerian gun runners, and the Vietnam War does make repeated appearances in a variety of media, including a scalding "improvisational" theatrical piece starring Marianne (in yellow face) and Ferdinand (the obnoxious American), but, the theatrical attack notwithstanding, Godard does not deem these matters worth much more than passing mention.

Now there is little doubt that by this point in his career, Godard has command of the tools of his trade. Nearly every frame of this film is an audio-visual treat; clearly, the dude knows how to talk, cinematically speaking. However, after viewing Pierrot, which appears between the delightful Band of Outsiders and the sinister and dystopic Alphaville, the question remains: What is Godard trying to say? He toys with ideas and has a giddy time mocking and yet adoring his favourite genres and cultural icons, points a crooked finger at the goings-on in Vietnam....and yet, what is one to make of it? The tune is gorgeous, but the words are, as of yet, if not indecipherable, at least muddled and lacking focus.

And while the director's considerable skills make the film an awful lot of fun to watch (particularly for his acolytes) Godard's inability to engage his material at a more human level prevents this film (and many of his works) from being more than clever and pretty, hip and droll. Now, if that is as high as you aim (say, if your name starts with a Quentin and ends with a Tarantino) then there are no problems here. It seems, however, that Godard sees himself as something more than a po-mo hipster, and something more of a cine-philosopher. And as such, he owes it to us to be considerably less cagey about what he really believes in. And coming on the heels of Alphaville, a film that hinted at an Orwellian sort of intellectual engagement with his material, and embraces a decidedly un-hip reverence for love as the ultimate socio-political political agent, Pierrot's undeniably highly entertaining energy but ultimately slick post modernism, and it's glib rejection of any sort of hopefulness, rings a little hollow.

Now, going back and reading your review, Ben, I see that we share a similar reaction to the film. I particularly like how you describe the film's action as being "comic book, albeit with pages torn and even missing." I think this fits as a description of much of the film, not just the action. The overall look of the piece, from the colour palette, to the costume design, the settings, the pacing, all have that comic book feel. Even some of the mis-en-scene, such as the art hanging on the walls (a de rigueur move in a Godard film) has a comic book feel. And lastly, the narrative definitely has a comic book feel to it (with pages missing that would connect some of the dots for the more conventionally minded in the audience) full of twists and turns, backstabbing (literal and metaphorical, as well as double (and triple) crosses. Easy to see why this film appeals so much to QT, whose comic book sensibilities are pretty transparent in his own (highly entertaining) films. The key difference is, Tarantino does not have an intellectual's aspirations, so we do not expect more than we get from one of his film's.

Then Ben:

In regard to those pages Godard ripped out of the comic book of this film, we appear to be on the same one of them. You watched Crazy Pete in chronological order; i.e., after Alphaville. Hence, you were in a position to view Crazy Pete as something of a step backward for the film-maker. I mistakenly watched Crazy Pete before Alphaville. Hence, in my review of the later I apologized to Godard for accusing him of escapism in the former. Yet that criticism still stands.

Perhaps the key scene to substantiate this criticism is the torture scene in Crazy Pete. Having now looked at The Little Soldier, I can see that the torture scene in that film is the direct referent for the one in Crazy Pete. Beyond a direct referent really, it's a recapitulation. I believe it was Marx (in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) who said that history repeats itself - the first time as tragedy... the second time as farce. In The Little Soldier, Godard attempted to repeat history with art; that is, realistically show something of the tragedy of the Algerian struggle. In Crazy Pete, he resorts to farce, full-stop.

And I use the term "farce" not just to be consistent with my Marx quotation. Crazy Pete must be counted among Godard's comedies. It is certainly the most puckish piece since A Woman is a Woman. It might not seem this way considering the fun-loving and even upbeat moments in Band of Outsiders. It also might not seem this way considering how unpleasantly odd Crazy Pete tends to be, even when it is at its most sensual and attractive. But in my estimation, the film is a running joke, a series of gags rather malevolent, but nonetheless ironic through and through.

This is the crossroads for Godard. I think you are correct to feel that Crazy Pete is a culmination of sorts for him. It's not that he will lose his sense of humor as he becomes more overtly political. Not conforming to the cliche about strident radicals, Week End is no less ironic than Crazy Pete. But the irony ceases to be the sign of escapist entertainment and becomes instead a satirical weapon for engaged critique.

You mention Tarantino in order to make a negative point and I hear you. I want to make the same negative point, this time by name-dropping David Lynch. You are spot on in labelling the surrealism of Crazy Pete not up to Bunuel (at his best) for lacking "the Spaniard's sharp edge and keen sense of target" and the moody, sometimes quirky, sometimes nasty surrealism of Lynch is the escapist entertainment footnote made safe for Hollywood. More substantively, the scene in Crazy Pete I called "a cocktail party perversly documented by way of a kind of negative magic realism," this made me flash on the mumified sex club in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Speaking of whom, we've observed a number of times already in GODARD 101 that both directors are intellectuals who do not excel at portraying the wetness of violent wounds and sexual orifices. So I am pleased to hear you say that you found the chemistry between the two leads in Crazy Pete potent. Pleased for you, that is. I didn't pick up the scent. Sure, they are sexy enough. I agree with you that the actors are having a hoot, flirting like mad. But the coldness that chills the film as a whole made their relationship for me just another exercise in role playing, of role playng, of role playing; a hall of mirrors with no heat.

Yet, I must repeat, I liked Crazy Pete. I liked it alot. It is bloody entertaining. And Godard is the first to admit in it that it is escapist... which, dialectically enough, makes it that much less escapist. Point being, he knew he was on the verge of something else.

Voici le zany trailer pour Pierre le Fou: