421 Pierrot le fou

[Jun-Dai]

I'll definitely have to give Pierrot another chance. I had just come from watching Vivre sa vie twice, Band of Outsiders, and Alphaville (all films I still love) when I plunged into the fucks lorber edition of this film, and I was so annoyed that I turned it off halfway through and got drunk. I don't actually remember too much, other than some guns and something about a "thigh line". Anyways, it left such a bad taste that I haven't tried it again. However, it's been about 8 years, and watching it on a CC Blu-ray is about as good a chance I'll get to see it, short of catching it in the theater. After all, I really didn't like A Woman is a Woman when I saw it on DVD (though I didn't have quite as strong a reaction), I actually enjoyed it in theater a couple years later. What was for me an unpleasant and hateful sense of style in a stretched and off-color transfer became, well, at least quaint in its theatrical version.

[Noiretirc]

blah blah blah fucks lorber blah blah blah.

Ha ha ha...I'm half kidding. What the hell? I greatly admire my FL La Dolce Vita. But I digress.

I've seen Pierrot at least 6 times in the last 6 months, and I adore it. Get drunk before viewing. That helps.

(Half kidding again.)

It's very strange how "presentation" matters little to me. I have a $29 dvd player, an old tv, and I still do not understand what BluRay can do for me, or King Kong 33. And yet, the Art burts through....it defies / rises above the gadgetry, or lack thereof......

There must be a thread on this.

[Jun-Dai]

Generally I'd agree. Films that look good on Blu-ray will only look a little less-good on DVD, but are pretty easily appreciable on either format. The context of being in a movie theater with a hundred other people generally makes a bigger difference in the experience of a film than the superior format of 35mm.

That said, if a film is campy to the point that it is in danger of being ugly, or it is self-conscious to the point that it is in danger of being grating, or slow to the point that it is danger of being tedious, then anything that interferes with my ability to engage with the film can send me over the edge. That's why I generally make a special effort to watch really slow films in the theater, where I'm more inclined to be absorbed into the film. In the case of A Woman is a Woman, I found the film to be ugly and awkward when I watched it on DVD, but in the theater it crossed over to something that, while not exactly sublime, was at least enjoyable and interesting. I think the same might be true of Pierrot (and there may be other reasons why I'd like it now and didn't then), and I'm willing to give it another chance.

But yes, normally the difference between a bad VHS and a CC Blu-ray isn't going to be the difference between me liking the film and not liking it, although in the case of Playtime and bad, cropped VHS tape of a 16mm print => 70mm, it may go a long way towards me understanding the film.

[feihong]

Generally blu-ray offers much more filmic depth-of-field. It hasn't been a common complaint amongst home video enthusiasts, since with VHS we had hardly any depth at all. But a 1080p television with a blu-ray player offers great 3-dimensional depth that a DVD almost never matches. Of course, it benefits some filmmakers more than others. Johnnie To movies depend quite a bit on depth to delineate purpose and meaning, and the blu-rays communicate that far better than the standard DVDs. Shinji Aoyama is another filmmaker who uses depth-of field as part of his cinematic language - whenever and if ever his films make it to HD they will probably appreciate quite a bit upon viewing. John Carpenter as well; lots of bits in Halloween only work with a proper sense of depth. One totally maligned by DVD releases is Paradjanov, whose films employ depth in the way in which a painter might. Probably Kurosawa movies will be less impacted in this sense, with all the telephoto photography. For me the depth tends to add clarity to the storytelling - I think a lot of filmmakers interested in so-called "pure cinema" tend to use depth as a source of formal expression. It comes out great on blu.

[Dr. Geek]

I finished watching Pierret le fou a while ago. The film starts, interestingly enough, with Godard satirizing consumer culture and Samuel Fuller's cameo regarding the definition of cinema. Outside of that and the little Vietnam play (which had me laughing), this film absolutely bored me. I've read the history of the film as it relates to Godard's relationship with Anna Karina, along with his foray into more political motivated works. Even this background knowledge did little to stop the boredom, the lack of feeling. No emotions were elicited; though that just may have been Godard's goal with Pierret le fou. If so, he succeeded. Congratulations, Godard, in making me not give a poop about your films.

The great Godard project is officially over.

[Michael Kerpan]

Congratulations, Godard, in making me not give a poop about your films.

The great Godard project is officially over.

Thanks for sharing.

[GringoTex]

No emotions were elicited; though that just may have been Godard's goal with Pierret le fou.

This was definitely not Godard's goal.

[HerrSchreck]

I finished watching Pierret le fou a while ago. The film starts, interestingly enough, with Godard satirizing consumer culture and Samuel Fuller's cameo regarding the definition of cinema. Outside of that and the little Vietnam play (which had me laughing), this film absolutely bored me. I've read the history of the film as it relates to Godard's relationship with Anna Karina, along with his foray into more political motivated works. Even this background knowledge did little to stop the boredom, the lack of feeling. No emotions were elicited; though that just may have been Godard's goal with Pierret le fou. If so, he succeeded. Congratulations, Godard, in making me not give a poop about your films.

The great Godard project is officially over.

Don't worry-- you're far from alone in the world.

[Murdoch]

I guess I'll never understand how anyone could not like Godard, although I've always preferred his work after the 60s so I'm in a somewhat rare opinion of him.

[Tom Hagen]

Oh I can quite clearly understand why people don't like a filmmaker whose signature artistic device is Brechtian alienation . . .

[HerrSchreck]

Oh I can quite clearly understand why people don't like a filmmaker whose signature artistic device is Brechtian alienation . . .

Has nothing to do with it-- "Brechtian alienation" as you call it, or rather the self-reflexive style of filmmaking that you're really referencing here is never a problem for me. It's a filmmaking skill issue. Godard's cinema is primarily a series of ideas-- ideas seeking desperately to be new ideas, breakthrough ideas, cute ideas, deep ideas, ideas that seek to solve the nature of mankinds problems, ideas that wail and scream, ideas about women, sex, commodity, etc-- that to me would be better off on the page. His cinema almost always fails as Cinema for me. I just don't see him as a talented filmmaker-- it always registers as the work of an amateur who skipped the ABC's and tried to go straight for innovation.. but he's no Welles, EPstein or Mamoulian.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I don't want to open old wounds HerrS, but I don't see how you can be familiar with films like Contempt, Helas pour moi, Prenom: Carmen, Pierrot and Nouvelle vague and still claim that Godard is not a technically masterful filmmaker. To me it seems there is a contradiction in claiming it's a question of talent, but then pointing to a lack of technical skill and knowledge, "the ABC's", as the problem, when talent and technical proficiency are two very different things.

[HerrSchreck]

Attempting to wrench the conversation on a particular boxing of verbiage is not going to take the conversation forward, but to a very unfortunate curb. What is talent? Someone once said "Talent is doing easily what other people have to work at to achieve; genius is doing easily what talented people have to work to achieve." Now there are absolutely talents that are not cultivated, and every art form requires a set of skills, however inborn, that need to be polished and cultivated. Natural ability needs to be put into live practice so that it can meet the various utilities and the world itself in realtime. Talent can be squandered by the route of overconfidence and laziness. A man may have enormous talent for engineering, but unless he hits the books about the chemistry, fuels, gravity, atmosphere etc, he's not going to get a rocket up into the air. In point of fact, an individual will not even discover whether or not he HAS talent in the first place until he attempts to get in the game and come into contact with those skills that are required for development of a particular conceit.

I fail to see the descriptive misfire you're alleging. Godard to me behaves as a man who believes he's got immense filmmaking talent, attempting to put into motion various conceits that he-- this is just my view dude-- does not have the skills to pull off. To me his films don't stand the test of time-- they represent the worst excesses of his time and place, a certain silliness of doing things for their own sake that read to me as attention grabbing, and cutesines.

I fail to see when or where talent and skill became mutually exclusive. For example Michael Jordan was an immensely talented basketball player-- and this is evident to us in the astronomical level of skill resident in his game. To me, the basketball equivalent of Godard is a guy who believes he's got an enormous amount of talent, trying to pull of threes and stop and go layups left and right because of that belief... but he just doesn't have the extreme skills that a major talent would provide, and the ball is slipping out of his hands, he's tripping and falling, arcing the ball over the backboard into someone's popcorn knocking soda everywhere, stumbling into the MSG camera man and limping off the field, etc.

[Tribe]

To me, the basketball equivalent of Godard is a guy who believes he's got an enormous amount of talent, trying to pull of threes and stop and go layups left and right because of that belief... but he just doesn't have the extreme skills that a major talent would provide, and the ball is slipping out of his hands, he's tripping and falling, arcing the ball over the backboard into someone's popcorn knocking soda everywhere, stumbling into the MSG camera man and limping off the field, etc.

You must be referring to Stephon Marbury.

[accatone]

CONNEY ISLANDS finest! Starbury - The DREAM TAKER, ANKLE BREAKER...or was that AI? Open wounds, indeed-but thinking about AI shakin' the shit outta MJ at the freethrow line...the comparison between JLG(!) and Schrecks masters sounds quite cool! I am always for the underdog

[accatone]

PS: as far as "this" highly subjective issue has been talked about countless times i have no bad feelings putting this ad absurdum....

[Mr Sheldrake]

....To me his films don't stand the test of time...

I saw most of Godard's 60s stuff in NYC theaters upon their original US release, usually with few in attendance, and when there was a crowd, many headed for the exits long before the maestro had concluded his laborious shenanigans. Most contemporary audiences would have agreed with Shrek's basketball analogy.

And here we are 40 years later, and Godard DVDs are coming out of the woodwork, even Made in the USA, generating interest and discussion far beyond anything I would have ever imagined. By contrast, Truffaut was enormously popular with the artsy crowd - Jules and Jim always seemed to be playing somewhere- but outside of 400 Blows, Truffaut seems to be somewhat forgotten.

As for me, when I first saw Contempt, like the film's producer, I wished there was a bit more of Bardot's bottom to relieve the boredom. Nowadays, hardly a month goes by I don't feel the need to revisit the movie, if only to reaffirm my love of cinema, and for alot more as well.

[colinr0380]

Sorry I'm afraid Pierrot Le Fou and the late 60s Godards (other than Weekend) are films I have not yet gotten to, but on the subject of the films not standing the test of time, I think it was Robert Stam in his commentary for Contempt who points out the way that Godard sometimes even specifically dates his films (i.e. having Palance say "this isn't 1933, this is 1963" to Piccoli). This is part of what I like so much about Godard - that he doesn't pretend that his films, and even his ideas, will not date over time. Though as as a by product that dating makes them interesting to revisit for a contemporary viewer, or at least it does for me.

[Sloper]

Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie are the only Godard films I’ve derived any enjoyment from, while I found Contempt, Pierrot le Fou and (especially) Weekend to be almost unendurably bad. Not trying to stir things up here, but I’m honestly puzzled as to how Godard fans can draw such sharp distinctions between the quality of, say, Pierrot and Weekend, since the two films seem virtually indistinguishable to me.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to go out and find, and sit through, every single one of Godard’s films; while on one level they bore me to tears, on another level I can’t wait to see the rest of them. What fascinates me, I think, is the very fact that an artist like Godard can have had such a successful career, and been taken seriously by so many people – critics and members of this forum whose tastes and opinions I respect, and often share – despite having made these plot-less, inept films. Murdoch and FerdinandGriffon may be mystified at how Godard can not be regarded as, to some degree, a ‘masterful filmmaker’, but I genuinely don’t see how anyone gets any conventional form of entertainment out of these things.

They’re not ‘good films’ by any normal aesthetic standards. I know many will disagree with that, but to my eye there’s just so little in the way of beauty, intrigue, characterisation, etc in these films. Even when they feature some piece of technically impressive camerawork, like the innumerable attention-seeking back-and-forths and up-and-downs and side-to-sides in Vivre Sa Vie, or the much-lauded tracking shot in Weekend, these shots seem to defy the normal pleasures to be got out of such moments of spectacle, either because the camera moves with all the intelligence and sense of purpose of a stuck record, or (in Weekend) because no compelling action is being staged in front of the camera to make the tracking shot worthwhile; that shot is about as impressive as a ‘phantom ride’ movie from the 1890s. Or at least it would be, if it had been made in the 1890s.

These are films that demand that we (or at least I) suspend normal aesthetic values; unlike most bad films, they make me think very hard about why they are bad, what makes them bad, and what Godard was trying to do by making them so very bad. I sit through them with my jaw hanging down, half in horror, half in awe. As I’ve already said, this is mostly to do with the reverence accorded to Godard by his audience: aside from wanting to find whatever it is that I’m missing out on, I’m also just intrigued that such un-enjoyable films can inspire such love and enthusiasm. For art like this to achieve some level of success in media such as literature, painting, sculpture, etc, kind of makes sense, but for films that are equivalent to those piles of bricks and graffitoed urinals and lights going on and off in Tate Modern, and which so often (again, to my eye) boil down to nothing more stimulating than the incessantly repeated question, ‘what is art?’, to prove so popular, and to continue getting made at such expense and on such a scale, is phenomenal.

It’s the academic in me that makes me want to see more Godard, and I suspect that’s the key to what he’s doing. This is just my ignorant sophomore’s take on a director I know very little about, but it strikes me that these are films designed to make people think, and talk, and write, rather than to feel or enjoy (pace GringoTex, and others).

And for what it’s worth, I’m a huge Antonioni fan, but can still understand why, for instance, Ingmar Bergman said he had no technical ability (‘time will bear witness to that’), or why Orson Welles, no less, said he couldn’t understand why Antonioni kept shots going so long after the action had finished. Tom Hagen is clearly right on this one – any artist so hell-bent on alienation (both the infliction and exposure thereof) is bound, in fact is asking, to be disliked by an awful lot of people.

Anyway, I'll try and try again. If nothing else, it's character-building.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think anyone could be as self-consciously playful and experimental and allusive with film form as Godard without first having a firm practical grasp of all the elements of filmmaking.

[Sloper]

I don't know, Welles managed it - after three hours with Greg Toland.

[knives]

I don't think anyone could be as self-consciously playful and experimental and allusive with film form as Godard without first having a firm practical grasp of all the elements of filmmaking.

I think that's why HerrS is making the distinction between skill and talent. Godard may grasp the concepts, but can he use that knowledge to form something that can be considered good? Personally I think Godard is good when he's not jerking off the critics.

[Murdoch]

I find it interesting how Godard is always boiled down to his output during the 60s - perhaps due to the large availability of those films and the canonized nature of his early features like Breathless - when I've always been much more compelled by films like Hail Mary and Helas pour moi. Godard's 60s films seem more like an artist struggling with his political and social ideas, and attempting to translate those ideas into film, while his later work demonstrates a much greater restraint and maturity.

I've always regarded the 60s films as a precursor to a great career, simply one aspect of a filmmaker who has worked across decades. I, for the most part, see Breathless as merely Godard's launching point, it's never been a film I've particularly enjoyed - certain scenes yes, but overall the film never fully meshed for me. And his films during the 60s were hit-and-miss with me, but I never failed to find something of interest in them, especially the ones that Godard has said he loathes. I still have a few more to watch, however.

But Pierrot I fully enjoy; its characters are so far removed from reality that the rest of the film removes itself as well, everything is reduced to its most absurd form: at the party the guests are simply walking advertisements, Marianne is childish and distant (the most expression between Ferdinand and Marianne occurs in the beginning when they are both in the car saying how they are touching and kissing each other, but never actually doing it, and during the song-and-dance where the characters conform to the words they sing, but afterward immediately split as if the song were something necessary for the film and once that obligation has been met they can once again part), and it all ends with the lead losing his love and killing himself accidentally - or rather regrets his soon-to-be explosive suicide and sarcastically mocks his approaching death as he desperately tries to put out the fuse. The film plays with the lovers-on-the-run genre in such a bizarre, nihilistic manner that it's next to impossible to view any of those films like Bonnie and Clyde or Gun Crazy with any degree of seriousness. The two lovers express little to no affection for one another, they destroy and ridicule everything they come across, and then they die. Not that I expect this to win anyone over, but with the reappearance of the thread I felt the need to post my thoughts on the film, something that makes me want to view it again.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think anyone could be as self-consciously playful and experimental and allusive with film form as Godard without first having a firm practical grasp of all the elements of filmmaking.

I think that's why HerrS is making the distinction between skill and talent. Godard may grasp the concepts, but can he use that knowledge to form something that can be considered good? Personally I think Godard is good when he's not jerking off the critics.

I said "practical grasp," tho'. No one could make Contempt, or Breathless, or Pierrot le Fou with solely a conceptual grasp of filmmaking. You cannot play with a language unless you are competant with its traditional forms.

I can see no point in discussing the distinction between skill and talent (as tho' anyone could find it useful).

[Sloper]

The film plays with the lovers-on-the-run genre in such a bizarre, nihilistic manner that it's next to impossible to view any of those films like Bonnie and Clyde or Gun Crazy with any degree of seriousness.

Really? My impression was that Bonnie and Clyde was heavily influenced by the New Wave. In any case, it's far from being a straightforwardly serious film: in fact, to my knowledge it's the best film ever made about the comic/pathetic/tragic distance between idealism (or myth) and reality. It's an amazing film, exploring thoroughly and intricately this quite profound theme, yet managing at the same time to be entertaining in all the ways a work of art can be entertaining. And for sheer nihilism, in this case Bonnie and Clyde's ending beats Pierrot hands down (though I guess Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty might disagree).