Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x36mi2d

I watched VIVRE SA VIE for the 2nd time last weekend, and in fact wrote a note on it here:
https://reelingatall.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/vivre-sa-vie-1962/

Mulvey and MacCabe edited a book on LE MEPRIS - I have a copy signed by both of them.

probably that's what i had in mind then -- i was at S&S when maccabe was for a while an affable bigwig there (until alan parker put an end to such nonsense) and laura m had an office across the corridor from the magazine

the maccabe book on godard that i read while researching my if…. book (which i'm guessing was "godard: a portrait of the artist at seventy" since he was 70 in 2000, tho amazon indicates a more recent publication date, 2014, perhaps of a revised edition?) was NOT THAT GREAT tbh, a masterclass in treating avant-garde innovation as a justifying value in itself, taking care to keep up with godard's line at any moment, but very much seeming to believe that beyond that there's no more to say. in other words -- this being a mode i encountered often at the wire and become exhausted by -- an intricate celebration of the contents of the ever-shifting manifesto that nevertheless sold the target of its uncritical love dismayingly short :(

godard's sympathy for the devil was on tv last week (london live, Freeview ch8) and was 2 hours of variously the stones in the studio rehearsing said song, some people reading out black power leaflets, a bookshop selling girly books populated by people doing Nazi salutes, some woman in a garden answering yes/no questions. it was odd.

no anna karina tributes on any channels here that I've seen 8(

the maccabe book on godard that i read while researching my if…. book

an intricate celebration of the contents of the ever-shifting manifesto that nevertheless sold the target of its uncritical love dismayingly short :(

I kinda really like Sympathy for the Devil / One Plus One. I see it as portraits of people - including Godard himself - trying to find the next step af 68. The touching thing is that Rolling Stones pretty clearly finds it, and makes a masterpiece while we watches, but nobody else does. Godard least of all. I do find his following fumbling decades very interesting.

Yes, it's good!

i've not seen about half of them but (including one plus one) but the period from la chinoise (1967) to numero deux (1975) is probably actually my favourite: he's swapped out "the girl, the gun" (american cinema's primary language) and swapped in "a third-marxist student's notion of revolutionary ideology, the gun" and is falling dizzily in and out of amused lust with the latter as the relationships go awry (exactly as they did with "the girl" in every one pre-chinoise) -- all the while basically inventing ultraleft-shitposting-on-twitter as cinema's coming language (which no one takes him up on) (until twitter)

"third-marxist" = "third-world marxist"

also "basically inventing" = "largely stealing off of debord" as debord never ever stopped huffily pointing out lol

It's very odd that London Live would show such a film.

Books:
MacCabe wrote one with a chapter with Mulvey, c.1980
MacCabe's biography is c.2005
LE MEPRIS by MacCabe / Mulvey is 2012

didn't know abt the MacCabe/Mulvey volume - the only thing I can find online is this -

https://www.bookdepository.com/Godards-Contempt-Colin-Maccabe/9781444339314

- is that what you're talking abt, pinfox?

I think I've related elsewhere on ILX that the one time I saw Godard interviewed in person was at the NFT w/ Maccabe moderating - JLG was NOT playing ball that evening, making for a pretty awkward hour or so. Maccabe's BFI classic on Performance is one of the best in the series, imho.

mark s, thank you for that great post about 67-75 JLG, which might well be my favourite era too (tho some things from that period are still pretty fugitive in any legit form - but then that's part of the appeal/mystique, always) - i only really 'lived' the very tail end of this kind of ultraleft shitposting, so witnessing the early 'high' phase of the vanguard moment - enacted on film! - is incredibly intoxicating, almost like a glimpse of an alternate world, but also there's a melancholy feeling from viewing in hindsight, and knowing the way things have gone. Sometimes - especially the bomb building sequence in (iirc) British Sounds - the rhetoric is frightening/provoking, still.

It's very odd that London Live would show such a film.

I know, right? Non-BBC/ITV/Sky TV is feeling the crunch from on demand services so strongly these days that any niche audience they can capture gets a shot, I think.

Somebody told me this just the other day - that London Live show lots of obscure old British films. This would suit me as I get half my film viewing from TV. But this particular JLG film is still an odd choice.

Ward Fowler: yes, that's the volume. CM and LM co-taught a course on LE MEPRIS for a time at the London Consortium and the volume arises from that.

I have a feeling that Sympathy for the Devil / One Plus One has fallen out of copyright - The Sunday Times gave away a free DVD of it a few years ago - which would explain its appeal to a low-cost TV station like London Live.

BBC/ITV/Channel 4/Sky TV are never going to show a Godard film these days, certainly not one from the late 60s.

(xp) Bingo.

I think London live does screen arthouse with London/groovy 60s theme..iirc pretty sure they've screened Antonioni, Polanski films set in London..

Talking Pictures has.

Yeah Tom, that's why I excluded those stations.

I've seen LondonLive show lots of the sort of films you catch on BFI Flipside blu-rays, which yeah is more London-related and also nowhere near Godard in sensibilities. But there's a lot of overlap between fans of grindhouse and arthouse.

TalkingPicturesTV has also shown Herzog's Nosferatu!

(xp London Live also showed about 100 second-string Ealing movies but has now devolved into Norman Wisdom films. there was also a handy string of old Punk documentaries. the thing i find odd is all the london gangster / football hooligan films they show at night, not a very pro-london choice)

Godard, pas à bout de souffle au temps du Covid-19 https://t.co/cep2BU2wcL via @libe

— Julien Gester (@juliengester) April 8, 2020

Why is Jean-luc Godard dressed as Wallace? pic.twitter.com/GfzmJMj3A5

— Andrew Power (@andrewpower_) April 7, 2020

Great anecdote during that interview was JLG saying - and my understanding may be off but my French is pretty ok - Rivette planned on making "Bande des Quatre" with JLG, Duras and the Straubs as leads but Duras refused when she learned the Straubs were involved ! Huh?!?

Also - never saw JLG smile as much before as in this interview. Bless him.

There is a Dziga Vertov retro on Mubi Denmark. Do the rest of you have that as well? They are more interesting than good, but I do have a soft spot for a film like The Wind From the East.

I remember bumping into your mate, xyzzz, at a screening of The Wind From the East!

Huh, I would have thought it too Maoist for him :)

I like A Film Like Any Other most... just give me the rawest shit from that period. Tout Va Bien is imo the only real keeper from 68-72 (actually I'd throw Le Gai Savoir in there)

Loved him touching his face so much lmfao

GODARD NO!!! pic.twitter.com/zrjmWEDud3

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) April 7, 2020

i saw The Image Book the other day and loved it, what else has he done in the last 40 years that measures up

'Histoire(s) du Cinema' and 'Nouvelle Vague' and 'Goodbye to Language' aaaaaaaand that's it, I think

ok cool haha

JLG par JLG

don't listen to fred about anything

i will listen to all of you

(but, thanks!)

Hey, I love a lot of it, but at the level of The Image Book? Very little is

i've not seen about half of them but (including one plus one) but the period from la chinoise (1967) to numero deux (1975) is probably actually my favourite: he's swapped out "the girl, the gun" (american cinema's primary language) and swapped in "a third-world marxist student's notion of revolutionary ideology, the gun" and is falling dizzily in and out of amused lust with the latter as the relationships go awry (exactly as they did with "the girl" in every one pre-chinoise) -- all the while basically inventing ultraleft-shitposting-on-twitter as cinema's coming language (which no one takes him up on) (until twitter)

― mark s, Sunday, 26 January 2020 17:37 (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

also "basically inventing" = "largely stealing off of debord" as debord never ever stopped huffily pointing out lol

― mark s, Sunday, 26 January 2020 17:40 (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah if you like The Image Book his Histoire(s) du Cinéma is the only equal really. ~5 hours, thoroughly brilliant, though I like The Image Book more for its severity and concision.

Also check out all his millennial era shorts... Origins of the 21st Century, The Old Place, Je Vous Salue Sarajevo, and Liberté et patrie are all great and all "sampled" in The Image Book.

Maybe I'm in the minority but imo it's pretty thin gruel post-1980. For Ever Mozart, First Name Carmen, Hail Mary, In Praise of Love, Goodbye to Language, Film Socialisme... BOOOOOORING! but they have their moments. specifically all of the impressionistic experimental video work.

xp

His 'second wave' in the eighties was boring (except for Passion) but I like In Praise of Love as well. The colors in part two are insane!

So many hot and steamy wrong takes. His Eighties run was fantastic for the most part. Nineties as well.

It's the '60s run that sucked!

Jestin' obviously. Godard reminds me of what someone said about Prince once, that there are few artists whose fans disagree so much about what his best and worst efforts are.

Film Socialisme > King Lear > Contempt

I haven't seen King Lear but yeah Contempt is overrated

Love the second half of In Praise of Love, i.e. all the stuff he included in The Image Book

Every Man for Himself stands out though, I don't think he made a movie like that before or since.

i saw king lear when it came out (1987, packed showing at the london film festival) and didn't really get it but remember being struck by the sound detail, which just seemed amazing compared to any other film

saw it again at an nft godard season maybe three years back (chair alph will recall): found it easier to follow but less remarkable, and i guess the world of cinema sound has by now long caught up with late-80s godard, bcz i could no longer hear that element, or anyway why i thought it. it was full of lots of small things i enjoyed which i thought would have stuck with me from my earlier watch (but i'd totally forgotten) as well as some things i now felt confidently enough a lol cineaste to be mildly irritated by

probably i need to see it again to calibrate properly: i don't think actually his gift is in bringing his mind to the canonic classics of literature tho

pic.twitter.com/K7xlQvX9Xr

— Frederik Bojer Bové (@FBBove) March 23, 2020

That's a tweet I did about how Godard worked with sound in the late eighties and how it blew the mind of Wim Wenders. And now I've just doxxed myself. Sigh.

In the last forty years its been fascinating to see him in his essayistic work (begun in the 70s) and try to reboot his classic 60s work.

Hella Pour Moi is probbaly the best of the latter effort with Depardieu (mostly he often just can't quite get the actors, it seems to me) so in the main its mostly his essayistic work like JLG/JLG, Histoire(s), Image book, and Goodbye to Language has that fscinating use of 3D.

Really like to see Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, King Lear - there is a lot to discover. Plenty that measures up, in some ways he is a rare artist that went further onto other planes and places when he left the scene that made him - and it should've killed him!

"Fantastisk, Frederik"

i'm too flibbertigibbet to put the work in really -- or anyway the time -- but i'd like to see someone write abt JLG soup-to-nuts who's a sound-based critic rather than an image-based one, bcz it feels under-explored from that angle. i've seen it touched on at sight and sound now and then, but generally in passing and never at the hands-on level i imagine he's working

alph when was the nft jlg season?