justeleblanc wrote:And I actually don't think every pre 68 film is a masterpiece. It seems that his more genre-oriented works (I'd hate to use "generic" there) are the weakest. I def don't want to start an uproar when I say this, but Woman is a Woman, Alphaville, and Made in U.S.A., while good in concept, fail to deliver as much. Same goes for Le Petit soldat and Les Caribiniers, though I would argue that even conceptually those films are on the weaker side.
I think you're right that Godard's more genre-oriented work in his earliest years was not his most challenging -- although films like
A Woman is a Woman and
Le Petit Soldat and
Bande a parte have a real strong appeal for me, so I certainly wouldn't call them "weak". They also provide a very strong basis on which his later work has built -- namely, the subversion of cinematic expectations and the subtle introduction of political and social material into the skeletons of genre-derived plots and characters. I'd argue that this has remained Godard's dominant way of working virtually throughout his career (with the possible exception of the immediate post-68 years with Gorin and D-V-Gruppe), although over the years the genre components have shrunk while the politics and commentary has grown. I'd also have trouble grouping
Alphaville in with those other films, since for me that is one of the strongest of his early films, a perfect use of a genre setting to tell a truly subversive story. The ideas of the film -- love and individuality in opposition to the State -- continue to drive Godard's work today.
In fact, just tonight I finally watched
Eloge de l'amour as I continue to work my way through Godard's 90s ouevre. And in the film he repeats the idea (also quoted in
De l'origine du XXIe siecle) that the State is the opposite of love -- thus echoing all the way back to
Alphaville nearly 40 years later.
As for
Eloge as a whole, it was disjointed and exceedingly episodic, and occasionally all but entirely incoherent -- but as always filled with intriguing ideas, striking images, and wonderful thought-provoking passages. There was less concern for narrative in this film than in virtually any other Godard I've encountered, and this is a director who's frequently been accused of using his characters as cardboard cutouts to deliver his philosophy and politics. Nowhere does that criticism more true than here.
Much has been made of the film's anti-Americanism, and the attacks on Spielberg do seem incredibly mean-spirited (not that I have any love for Spielberg or
Schindler's List). But I also wonder if Godard isn't subtly questioning this kind of attitude at the same time as he's espousing it. In one early scene, after a woman expresses some anti-American sentiment, a man nearby asks (and I'm paraphrasing) "And what of your parents in 1944? And your grandparents in 1918?"
In another scene, Edgar makes some excellent points about the American film industry when he criticizes the coverage of
Titantic, which focused on the money it made rather than its content. But when asked whether he'd seen the film to comment on it himself, he's forced to admit he hasn't. In short, I don't think the film's message about America is quite as simplistic as it sometimes seems, although it's easy to miss these nuances as compared to the more obvious criticisms of America. The questioning of America's sense of history is certainly fair, and I think an intelligent explanation for this country's seeming lack of concern for world affairs and willingness to repeat the past's mistakes. Anyway, definitely not one of Godard's strongest works, although certainly worth seeing and thinking about, as always.
