Jean-Luc Godard

[domino harvey]

HL on the File on Thelma Jordon (Robert Siodmak 1950) (and in true Godard fashion, it's really 80% about another movie!)

Since starting work in Hollywood, Robert Siodmak has been the most famous of the outsiders who stage films of terror. But the flowers of terror here are the tricks under which rhetoric hides. The brutal elegance of his mise en scène once gave us only the black and beautiful smiles of Ava Gardner’s snow white face. The Great Sinner offered us the first Dostoevsky girl of cinema - Natasha the diamond, beautiful and breathtaking - and showed how morality triumphed over aesthetics in the auteur. However, the original title testified to the great sin of obeying rhetoric. Each of the actors is sinful, for their gestures compose with a language in front of which obedience is only the hasty advantage of a forthcoming loss. I like to see the definition of romanticism: each work contains its own commentary. Each character behaves at the sole benefit of the contempt which terrorizes him.

In his latest film, Robert Siodmak, aristocrat of mise en scène, hides his icy sentences under a scarf of crime. He imposes on the photographer the same style of dreary images, cast gray with a slight revulsion for the actors including the always beautiful Barbara Stanwyck, a little shark with a belly covered in silver.

Translation notes:

“The original title” refers to the Great Sinner, as the French title was Passion fatale

“Each work contains its own commentary” is a reference to Albert Béguin’s position in L’Âme romantique et le rêve, essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française. Godard’s lead-up comment is awkwardly worded, but accurate to the original French (as I understand it, at least).

Where I've gone with "aristocrat," Godard uses the word “Junker” to describe Siodmak’s staging. Google tells me that this is a German word designating nobility, here presumably used as a play on Siodmak’s country of origin.

Godard uses the word “argent” in the last line, but I believe he wants the reader to associate this with the less common usage of “silver” (like coinage) to complete his “gray” imagery trifecta. But at least this is word play I get!

Bumping this because Godard shines more light on how he sees the word “junker” in his rather spurious defense of supporting a win for… Marie le Pen

[hearthesilence]

Well, that was massively disillusioning.

This is actually a familiar sentiment I've heard from quite a few people throwing their support behind he-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016. Not complete strangers - mainly older individuals I know or close to people I know very well, all of whom should've known better - but their attitude was that government or "the system" was broken/not working/not doing enough, so let's "shake" things up, as if violent disruption in general was somehow a great idea that cancelled out any concerns over specific horrendous policies (or concerns of incompetence, mendacity, dishonesty, etc.) Perhaps age does have something to do it, but I would've expected better from Godard.

[Mr Sausage]

I don’t know Godard as well as some, but his statements above, tho’ pathetic, were not surprising. He may well be a great artist, but he has never struck me as someone with any real capacity for political thought. His politics have always come across as either muddled and poorly thought out or tediously doctrinaire. And now he’s adopted the apocalyptic/millenarianist stance that defined a lot of the 2016 support for Trump, with a dash of ennui in the mix. A desire to sweep everything away because the current set up is boring—and you may be sure there’s an implicit feeling that whatever the negative repercussions, they won’t affect Godard directly if at all.

Godard, truly the next Wittgenstein, ends by treating a lame dinner table joke as tho’ it were a serious observation about language’s relation to reality, like that one republican pundit who insisted that of course Bernie Madoff swindled people—his name sounds like ‘made off’!

He’s in his 90s, sure, but none of this sounds out of character. It’s what happens when people long attracted to provocation and the energy of modern enthusiasms grow old. They fall into reactionary junk because they can’t see how essentially fungible their long time political motivations really are.

[kubelkind]

Not sure what to make of these remarks except to point out that the Le Monde interview being referenced here is from 2014, which isn't obvious from the wordpress.

[Walter Kurtz]

I absolutely love 60's Godard as well as 70's Carmen, Mary and Passion. But JLG is just another old white dude who's pissed off because he's old in a world where it is hipper to be young... and pissed off that his whiteness doesn't have the cachet it used to have. JLG is just one example of millions who have extensive knowledge in one field of expertise... and almost zero knowledge of anything else.

[Walter Kurtz]

However I still await the 4K release of Les Carabiniers!

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

I absolutely love 60's Godard as well as 70's Carmen, Mary and Passion. But JLG is just another old white dude who's pissed off because he's old in a world where it is hipper to be young... and pissed off that his whiteness doesn't have the cachet it used to have. JLG is just one example of millions who have extensive knowledge in one field of expertise... and almost zero knowledge of anything else.

I put this to JLG who said that he would be ecstatic if that's all there was to be pissed off about and as far as Walter Kurtz's privileged insight into his own motivation was concerned he merely shrugged and said Mistah Kurtz he dead .....from the neck up.

[pistolwink]

FWIW making provocative, spur-of-the-moment, and sometimes asinine political statements is pretty much what Godard has been doing for 60 years. He's a brilliant filmmaker, and I find many of his films beautiful and moving, but I'm convinced the only reason critics and scholars take his politics so seriously is because, in his films at least, they are clouded in such dense and fetching obscurity. From time to time he opens his mouth and reveals that there's less there than meets the eye (and ear).

[Calvin]

A new 4K restoration of Notre Musique will be premiering as part of Berlinale Classics.

[dekadetia]

A new 4K restoration of Notre Musique will be premiering as part of Berlinale Classics.

This is a pleasant surprise! Notre Musique doesn't seem to get the attention of other late Godard; it's my favorite of his post-2000 films and an eventual blu ray would be terrific.

[domino harvey]

I think the prologue of the film is the best and most coherent and powerful iteration of Godard’s late period essay collage filmmaking

[Noiretirc]

The Berlin Film Festival will feature Le livre d’image as a living projection on 40 screens, and maybe some wild boars:

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/01/jean- ... 234694424/

[jsteffe]

I think the prologue of the film is the best and most coherent and powerful iteration of Godard’s late period essay collage filmmaking

I agree. In fact I think it's one of the best pieces of filmmaking of the last twenty years.

[Walter Kurtz]

I think the prologue of the film is the best and most coherent and powerful iteration of Godard’s late period essay collage filmmaking

I agree. In fact I think it's one of the best pieces of filmmaking of the last twenty years.

Godard’s brief Hell section of Musique was indeed an effective piece of work, the best section of the film, and maybe the best thing he’s done this century.

But this sort of thing was done far better almost thirty years earlier.

Better because of the combination of sublime irony - and more powerful emotion – which is tough to achieve at the very same time. A four and a half minute piece of transcendent filmmaking so superb the director – a foreign director – was nominated for an academy award by our director’s branch.

The best four minutes of political filmmaking I've ever seen.

A link (rather terrible quality, however) for the few remaining people on this planet who haven’t seen it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx2GoEV ... or4u2andme

But then again it doesn’t really matter does it? Fucktards like Putin still want to slaughter people. Puddinghead carrots like Trump still want to get on their knees to fellate him.

It never ends.

[domino harvey]

Jean-Luc Godard's cameo in Raoul Levy's 1966 the Defector

[DarkImbecile]

Molly Ringwald on shooting King Lear in The New Yorker

[accatone]

Received Gaumonts Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du cinéma and Soigne ta Droite yesterday. The former has only hoh french subs, but the latter has engl. ones on the main feature and on the bonus Lettre à Freddy Buache. There is also Meetin' WA and some short interviews (no subs). I would also recommand the new Nicole Brenez book on/about JLG - very interesting. In one of the "special issues" of last September (Le Monde, Libé … can`t remember - maybe even Cahiers) it was noted that some kind of publication was in the works for 2023 incl. interviews with Aragno, Battagia ie the close collaborators. Any update is much appreciated.

[diamonds]

Short film Funny Wars rumored to premiere at Cannes

[FrauBlucher]

This thread made me think that Domino has been MIA for a while

[hearthesilence]

Tregenza gave a great Q&A tonight and several times he referred everyone to this interview he gave for The Film Stage...

Sharing this here as well because the interview goes into his relationship with Godard in great detail. Very much worth reading. There's a incredible story where Godard invites Tregenza to Paris, a trip that nearly leads to Tregenza's death had Godard not intervened with a second phone call.

Tregenza also has the best description of Godard's personality with regards to his relationships with people. It does bring to mind D A Pennebaker's experience working with Godard when he abruptly abandoned their film right before post-production, leaving Pennebaker to cut something together in order to deliver a film and avoid a contractual violation with a distributor. It also brings to mind Anna Karina's Q&A at Film Forum, her last in NYC before she passed away, when she was asked why she divorced Godard. According to Karina, he was never around - for example, he would say "I'm going out for cigarettes," then not come home, and then call a day later from someplace like Sweden because he was hanging out with Ingmar Bergman or some other filmmaker.

[accatone]

But then there is a photo in LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE (no*585, Les derniers jours de Jean-Luc Godard) that shows „les deux billets de cinema sur lesquels JLG declare son amour pour Anna Karina, conservé par son (JLGs) ami Roland Tolmatchoff a Geneve.“. On the first one is written (in JLGs kaligrafie) „anna“, the second one says „j‘aime“ - what a desperate cinephil romantic ;-}

[Noiretirc]

This thread made me think that Domino has been MIA for a while

I was worried that he'd never recover from the 2022 S+S Poll, but he's still posting here and there.

[domino harvey]

New work exploring books quoted in Godard films, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard, coming later this year (and co-edited by my former professor, who was obsessed with books shown in films)

[barbarella satyricon]

...

[Bebert]

Teaser for Godard's Phony Wars

Jean-Luc Godard often transformed his synopses into aesthetic programs. Drôles de guerres follows in this tradition and will remain as the ultimate gesture of cinema, which he accompanies with the following text: “No longer trusting the billions of diktats of the alphabet to give back their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a true language by returning to the places of past shootings, while taking into account the present stories.”