Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

I had no idea Juliet Berto died in 1990 at the age of 40. Bummer.

Some Cahiers lists from Godard:

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ejohnson/critics/godard.html

I bought Histoire, looking forward to watching it

I took it up to the counter for rental yesterday, but postponed when they had Three Women; I'm going to get it when I return the Altman.

all D-V projects: http://ubu.com/film/dziga_vertov.html

nice one thx

i forget how deeeeeep ubuweb goes

while we're crushing

http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs3/1450604_o.gif

most beautiful woman of all time probably

anna karina vs catherine deneuve

Anna Karina = classic babe for ILM dudes

seeing that scene for the first time was like a deep & expansive cinematic ~moment~ for me

I'd give a slight edge to Monica Vitti over either. I got through the first two parts of Histoires, quite absorbed by it, and the disc started acting up--I'll have to return it unfinished. Never got to the really sentimental parts that were my favourite the first time I saw it.

I'd do an arty film babe poll if it wasn't such a bad idea.

which film is that gif from again?

^^Le petit soldat

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.”

- Werner Herzog

“… his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin. But what’s so admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves — a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium — which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.”

- Orson Welles

“I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (1966), was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”

-Ingmar Bergman

You could basically make a poll of the swipes Bergman took at other directors.

Bergman was Challops-y before it was cool.

"But what’s so admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves — a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium — which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.”

- Orson Welles

No idea where OW was seeing this. If anything Godard's LOVE for cinema is what spurred him on to question and "play" with it is a medium. The other two guys - ehh.

Herzog and Bergman are great without a doubt but i think JLG just went over Herzog's head. I wouldn't consider Godard a fake intellectual - the man seems to know his stuff re: literature, music, politics. And Bergman - always miserable.

really jay vee? isn't that like NEW WAVE reduced to a sentence?

i would say an anarchistic contempt for the machinery of movies is what makes something like pierrot le fou work

course all of those new wave techniques are now part of the machinery of movies

not sure why but basically i give zero shits what any film director thinks of any other director

herzog is echt deutsch romantisches lieder which is why he "hates" JLG (ie same reason he vocally hates continental philosophy) and i doubt very much herzog is doing anything but trolling there

Captain Jay Vee, the important part of Welles' quote for me is questioning the validity of JLG's ideas.

when i saw herzog talk in LA someone asked him about the connection between schopenhauer and fitzcarraldo and herzog gave this brutally short reply where he said he didn't give a shit about any philosophy let alone schopenhauer whom he thought was particularly lame, and that he thought the tradition of continental cultural crit was basically petty nonsense for a class of small-minded pseudointellectual who cannot approach ART on ART's LEVEL.

it's funny i was just about to post “cinema is lies at 24 frames per second in the service of truth" which turns out to be haneke, not godard! i always thought godard said that, based on how i, uh, read my favorite works of his.

I bought a used copy of Richard Brody's book yesterday. I looked at it for five minutes, not sure if it was the one I'd already read, which thankfully turned out to be Colin MacCabe's.

Brody's book is interesting. I disagreed with a number of assessments and conclusions he made throughout, but I didn't know a lot about the background of Godard and what he was doing so it was worth the time for me. Enjoyable enough, at any rate.

cinema is lies at 24 frames per second = godard's old aphorism, more or less
in the service of truth = haneke's lutheran moralist appendage

Curious what year that Welles quote is from. Was period Godard was he referring to? Pre DV or during? Just curious...

"What period Godard"

The Welles quote is from the Bogdanovich book.

Herzog and Bergman are great without a doubt but i think JLG just went over Herzog's head. I wouldn't consider Godard a fake intellectual - the man seems to know his stuff re: literature, music, politics.

― Loo Reading (Capitaine Jay Vee), Monday, August 27, 2012 3:18 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

im sure he was talking about godard's movies

the best ever godard burn belongs to amateurist re: The Dreamers

Bertolucci: 'The Dreamers': Fucking Classic

xxpost to Alfred: So 70s I'm guessing. If Welles was perhaps referring to the DV films I could see where he was not accepting Godard's (and Gorin's by default?) underlying messages or themes as particularly deep. But I'm only assuming those are the films he was referring to. And as far as the contempt for cinema line: I still don't buy it. The quote implies - to me - a hatred of all movies and their making as fuel for Godard's fire and that just doesn't read to me as plausible with an avowed cinema lover like JLG - and the rest of the Cahiers crew.

Also - Welles dealt out so much bs in those (awesome) Bogdanovich interviews that it seems at times he was just spouting off sh*t just to get that ascot out of his face.

I think contempt is a good description for the way he treats the artifice of cinema. Which I always found kind of adolescent.

Sure, Capitaine, but Welles' evaluations of filmmakers are mostly spot on!

did/does godard really have any explicit one-sided line on the truth or lie of cinema? the line 'cinema is truth at 24 frames per second' is from le petit soldat, i guess it's bazinian and i guess godard could be being a bit ironic by feeding it to one of his characters, but i don't know if that's a lineage he broke with completely.

i don't think that's it so much as just healthy disregard for formal conventions that welles was engaging with? feels like reading a lot into his quote.

" a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium" = healthy disregard? Seems a little more than that, no? Don't think I'm reading more than what's there.

not everyone thinks anarchism or nihilism such a bad thing. welles?

esp in the context of 68 or whatever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN3uTy8NI78

this scene. Then you see the truth has two faces. i think this is genuinely how he sees it, a very simple analogy. cinema as the modulation of visibility, the grammar of film in its ordering of images in relation to each other is the production of truth, relationality, politics. Its not that when he says 'cinema is truth at 24 frames per second' he is being ironic, but rather there is no metaphysical category of truth, no a priori transcendental essence that can be made manifest. rather truth is a production, the derivation of whatever set of legitimising procedures - like a doctors examination, a court case, a forensic report, cinema can make things true, anna karina in a dark cinema. I like him way more than bergman. "his films are boring" what a fucking boring thing to say. godard always seems ignited by something, agitated by it. right from the beginning, a bout de souffle, that itching surface. the romance is stitched together from american movies but its still real, as much as anything else at least.

One of the interesting things about the Bergman diss is that JLG was a big cheerleader for him during his critic days, saying upon the premiere of (IIRC) The Seventh Seal that Bergman was now the world's greatest director.

i don't think that's it so much as just healthy disregard for formal conventions that welles was engaging with? feels like reading a lot into his quote.

― the late great, Tuesday, 28 August 2012 03:43 (10 hours ago) Permalink

I think seeing Godard's work as having a "disregard for formal conventions" is kind of missing the point -- it's not about casting tradition aside, but laying bare the illusion, cinema that points to its own tools of manipulation, etc.

nah i'm not missing the point, i agree with you entirely, that's what i was getting at w.o using so many words

there's nuff JLG that isn't as hard-line marxist as you make him out to sound though

Which of these should I hunt down first: Le Gai Savoir or Numero Deux?

LGS

gen speaking chron order is the way to go