Jean Luc-Godard

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What has been gained in access to information and communication during the Digital Age more than makes up for anything lost. But there have been losses. Process helps determine outcome, and the speed of digital removes significant time from effort. And precision means there are fewer errors and accidents, those things that birth genius. If method is faster, is the result naturally speeded up as well? From Richard Brody’s 2000 New Yorker profile of Jean-Luc Godard:

I began by asking him about his most recently released feature film, For Ever Mozart, from 1996, a bitter fantasy about art and mourning. In it, three young French people with lofty ideas but idle hands take off for Sarajevo to put on a play and are killed in Bosnia by paramilitary thugs. One of the victims is the daughter of an old French director who has been stalled in his work; in his grief, he finds the will to create.

Typically, Godard was not satisfied with the film. ‘It wasn’t very good,’ he said. ‘The actors aren’t good enough, and things remained too theoretical.’ Godard’s complaint about his movie led to a complaint about young actors today: that even unknowns, inundated with media hype, comport themselves like stars and are ‘less available’ to direction: ‘They think they know what to do, by the fact that they’ve been chosen. They have no doubt. Doubt no longer exists today. With digital, doubt no longer exists.’

This abrupt switch from the sociological to the technological is typical of Godard’s conversation: his sentences, like his films, are always soaring into abstractions, or breaking off, pivoting on an instant of silence to change direction. ‘With digital, there is no past,’ he continued. ‘I’m reluctant to edit on these new so-called ‘virtual’ machines, these digital things, because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no past. In other words, if you want to see the previous shot, O.K., you do this’—he tapped the table like a button—’and you see it at once. It doesn’t take any time to get there, the time to unspool in reverse, the time to go backward. You’re there right away. So there’s an entire time that no longer exists, that has been suppressed. And that’s why films are much more mediocre, because time no longer exists.'”

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The third and final Jane Fonda post this week: A 1972 cine-essay about a photo of the actress visiting Vietnam, as analyzed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had co-directed her in Tout va bien. This post-script is more successful than the film that it sprang from.



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There’s a full version online of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968/72 collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. Filmed originally as 1 A.M. (as in “One American Movie”), it was planned as Godard’s understanding of U.S. culture during the Vietnam age. (Though perhaps “misunderstanding” would be the more accurate term.) The project went uncompleted, was shelved and later reedited by Pennebaker into 1 P.M. (as in “One Parallel Movie”). A fascinating failure, the film features Rip Torn, Jefferson Airplane, Eldridge Cleaver and Tom Hayden, among others. (Thanks Dangerous Minds.)

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Jean-Luc Godard on TV’s creeping influence on film. From Room 666, 1982.

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World War II ended in 1945, but the battle waged on for Jean-Luc Godard, who saw the Allied victory affording America with the opportunity for post-war cultural imperialism. That dynamic courses beneath the surface of Godard’s Contempt, a bitter but ingenious CinemaScope drama that ranks as one of the very best films from Godard’s amazing string of masterpieces during the 1960s.

An adaptation of Ghosts at Noon, Alberto Moravia’s novel of matrimonial discord, Contempt takes place on the set of a tortured film production in Italy. Fritz Lang, playing a version of himself, has been hired to make a big-screen adaptation of the Odyssey by Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), a crass, uncultured vulgarian with a god complex. Disatisfied with the art film that Lang has turned in, Prokosch summons playwright Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) for rewrites to Cinecittà Studios, the once-vibrant center of Italian cinema that is now little more than a soundstage ghost town. Paul brings with him his gorgeous wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), and it’s immediately clear that the producer has designs on his new employee’s wife.

Despite Prokosch’s wolfish reputation, Paul leaves his wife alone with his boss for an extended spell. And in that period, the marriage is permanently wounded. It’s never clear what’s happened between the producer and Camille during their time together, but she turns cold to Paul afterwards. When her husband repeats the same irresponsible (opportunistic?) act again, there’s no chance for reconciliation. Not knowing Paul’s intentions or what has actually occurred between Prokosch and Camille turns the film into a painful frustration dream. It does more than hurt–it also haunts.

But no matter how painful the marriage coming undone is, it isn’t the greatest loss to the director. He is more concerned with cultural loss, what he sees as the domination of the world film industry by the U.S., which was mirrored by Godard’s own battles with American producer Joseph Levine, who wanted his director to get Bardot to bare as much of her heavenly body as possible to ensure big box office.

When Prokosch is warned in one scene that it will be difficult to bend Lang’s will to his own, since, after all, the director defied Goebbels in 1943, he spits back: “This isn’t 1943. It’s 1963. And he’ll direct what he’s told.” And instantly one troubled film production is transformed into a metaphor for an international power struggle.•

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The most unlikely and politicized Schick ad ever. (Thanks Open Culture.)

Another Jean-Luc Godard post:

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