Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

do u not recognize that a jew, and a film lover, and a GODARD lover such as myself, might be upset by him saying this shit?

sorry, i didn't mean racist, i meant ANTI-SEMITIC [sic]

xp

I don't really care if JLG is anti-semitic or not, btw. Same way I don't care that Heidegger was a nazi.

Great artists are mostly fucking self-absorbed assholes. Deal.

To be totally transparent, Morbs, I DO find homophobia in classic hip-hop problematic. In not-classic hip-hop, it's merely convenient.

I don't really care if JLG is anti-semitic or not, btw. Same way I don't care that Heidegger was a nazi.
--Gukbe

i care abt this wrt heidegger than the othets but for reasons i disagree w/ in theory

I don't really care if JLG is anti-semitic or not, btw. Same way I don't care that Heidegger was a nazi.

― Gukbe, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 1:37 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

http://i655.photobucket.com/albums/uu275/leonardo_ARG/seinfeld.gif

Go review some fucking FOOD.

^^^ meme potential?

jews being 'for commerce' -- idk, how complex is this, really? in the new film someone apparently explains how 'goldberg' means 'gold mountain'. european conservatives, and sympathizers like eliot, often associated jews with commerce, usury, greed, which threatened to disrupt the 'stable' 'homogenous' pre-capitalist society they wanted back [via nazism].

this meme's relevance to the foundation of hollywood is slight. the founders of a massive business enterprise were pro-commerce? woooow.

that "for commerce" quote is the most incriminating imo

Dunno, thought he meant that everyone is looking in the same direction, which is commerce.

Even so, it's hardly shocking, controversial, or new to say that the Hollywood moguls were interested mostly in commerce as opposed to, say, art, or diversity etc... They quite famously clamped down on director's who went over-budget or made difficult films (Von Stroheim, Wellman in the early days, more and more etc etc) that didn't sell or that they didn't think would sell to the audience.

I've not seen Film Socialisme, so I'm only going on that interview. While it is annoying and yes, art-smart crap in places, I don't think it's particularly anti-semitic. Especially when the point in the end there seems to be that if you say anything like "Hollywood Jews were interested in money" then you get called anti-semitic?

I do however understand that it's a sensitive topic, and if he is painting Hollywood Jews as obsessed with money because they're Jews, then I see that as a problem.

no, when you say "THE JEWS" stand for commerce or made a deal with the mafia or whatever, that's anti-semitic. classic, old school, fuckin' ugly and venal anti-semitism.

i really cannot tell if you are trolling tbh

but the question is referring to the Hollywood Jews (i.e. the moguls). to start off a question with that reference to his film and then quickly asking a question about 'all jews' is definitely straight up trolling on the part of the interviewer.

This area gets murky though.

xp you're right s1ocki, but on that point it might also be worth figuring out in which language the interview was done, how it was translated etc etc. I'm not trying to bail JLG out at any cost but the subtleties of definite/indefinite articles sometimes get lost in translation.

when i have a mo im gonna scare up the french interview and report back

paying attention to interviews is a bad habit of music fans/writers. If it's not in the work, it doesn't matter.

I don't like Godard's answer on the etymology of "anti-Semitism" either, but at this point I get the feeling his only goal in interviews is to fuck w/ the questioner.

don't you post links to interviews all the time?

i mean i kind of agree but i'm not using his comments to judge "film socialisme"

it is simply a case of somebody saying some hateful shit and me having an emotional reaction to it, sorry i'm not some detached aesthete robot

Again, I've not seen the film, so it could be violently anti-semitic and I'd have no idea. Not trolling btw, I asked for a specific interpretation of the diversity/commerce line last night. I get the impression I'm totally misunderstanding what he meant by 'diversity'.

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/ich_werde_nicht_gern_mit_picasso_verglichen__er_malte_zu_viele_teller_1.8293071.html

^ original interview. unfortunately in german not french.

don't you post links to interviews all the time?

yeah, sure. I read stuff that doesn't matter a lot. (ie, in the end, it doesn't matter to judging the art if it's extrinsic)

I detest Mel Gibson and am sort of intrigued to see this Jodie Foster film he stars in.

that movie looks so bad, like the most generic "lars and the real girl" indie dramedy

What's your stake in this, Morbs? Godard has pretty much always been indefensible as a human being.

Morbs is saying that most artists are indefensible as a human being.

*human beings

I don't really see how that cliche is germane here since no one is really using this against his work.

great. more jaded received wisdom.

xp

I don't have a stake here. It's obvious to me Godard is a muddled thinker at best and at worst a, yes, anti-Semite.

*an

not sure if "an" is necessary there, that is an interesting conundrum

But how is he as a filmmaker?

the last Godard I liked a little was Notre Musique.

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/ich_werde_nicht_gern_mit_picasso_verglichen__er_malte_zu_viele_teller_1.8293071.html

^ original interview. unfortunately in german not french.

― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:20 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

this reads pretty much the same in german as it does in english, so I don't think the perceived anti-semitism is a translation to english issue.

I'm guessing the original interview was done in french (unless JLG speaks fluent german, I have no idea really), so maybe there was some mistranslation there.

There's a well-known quote from Godard where he says that, as much as he despised John Wayne politically, the moment near the end of The Searchers where Wayne lifts up Natalie Wood and says "Let's go home, Debbie" made him love Wayne. Seems like you're having more or less the same discussion on Godard himself.

The other day someone said to me, upon realizing that I was Jewish, "oh you've got nothing to worry about then, you'll do fine HERE" HERE being Hollywood I suppose. It was not Godard, just some woman I was talking to at the AFI festival.

And I'm about to graduate - how do I get my resume to be more "Jewish"?

I don't really see how that cliche is germane here since no one is really using this against his work.

They are, bacause they've made a thread about his films about this topic, and I imagine it will be the dominant topic on this thread until he dies. See also Polanski's film thread since the week he was seized.

what a lowering of the discourse it is to discuss an interview a filmmaker gave to a newspaper

Perhaps we should have a thread for "bad celebrity personalities," and "Roger Ailes slams the White House" links could go there too to save a lot of fucking time

i mean considering the amount of bullshit you spew on threads about movies you haven't even seen, the charge of dishonouring the thread topic or whatever it is you think we did here is really fucking rich dude xp

yes, what a lowering of the discourse it is to discuss two sentences in an interview nonstop for 3 days

xp

the amount of bullshit you spew on threads about movies you haven't even seen

^ILX's version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

actually, we were discussing several paragraphs, for about half an hour, before you barged in and insulted me using my real name for no fucking reason at all

what you "were" doing is past, what you "are" doing is probably about 500 more posts on this single issue.

I'm sorry, I thought I sufficiently googleproofed your name. And don't forget to friend me.

haha

i believe a good reason we're still talking about it is because you're also, still talking about it

okay so this is not an allegation I make often, or one that I particularly like to make, but: you have got to be pretty damn sensitive — or deliberately uncharitable in your interpretation (i.e. the person upthread going 'wah wah godard said jews can't be doctors, doesn't he know there were tons of jewish doctors in vienna' just no, shut the fuck up), or just bored and looking for a high-profile witch-hunt — to get butthurt about this.

we are not talking about a gibson- or richards-esque freakout revealing a white-hot core of hatred at the heart of a seemingly normal human being.
we are talking about a notoriously anti-hollywood dude, saying some shit in an interview about the jews who founded hollywood which, while maybe not a 100% accurate reflection of the historical truth, is also hardly an elders-of-zion-level crazy paranoid distortion of said truth.

I'm maybe even willing to defend his "ah but what does 'anti-semite' even mean???" dodge, because I think at a certain point one has a right to question what, exactly, his self-appointed prosecutors have put him on trial for, in whose name, and what they're trying to prove by it.

but I mean tbperfectlyh, I don't know what the hell kind of non-'anti-semitic' answer you can give to a question like "are the jews for diversity?" — "oh yeah, those dudes love diversity! it's cuz their rootless cosmopolitanism has deprived them of any authentic sense of cultural belonging, so now they find themselves drawn, like moths to a flame, by whatever's most appealing in all the other real cultures!" so I guess maybe I blame the interviewer.

and the stuff about blacks seems like even more of a non-issue... or is anyone here going to seriously dispute either the existence or the wrongheadedness of the "hey, look, now y'all have the same opportunities to spend money on shit that we do! everything's groovy!" ideology?

guess gukbe's on his lunch break