Director: Jean-Luc Godard

[Dave//Eksvplot]

Just announced: Every Man for Himself coming out on Criterion.

[Redline]

Every Man for Himself

More hooker action!

[sulfur)addict]

Frustratingly French

Disagree. Breathless could've easily been called An American In Paris had that title not already been taken.

I think his attitude is French as hell, but for a culture obsessed with its own history and stuffiness, he was surely looking forward and embracing the more worldly youth movements.

Truffaut's films are the ridiculously French ones. I think Godard once called him the "ghost of Jean Vigo," which is both spot-on and a really high compliment.


If you managed to make it through Le Mepris without wanting to blow your brains out in frustration, try Jacques Tati's films. He'll try your patience and deliver in spades, leaving all the psychosexual garbage out of it.

[Angus Jung]

GOD FUCK CONTEMPT.

Contempt is great. Doesn't have the poetry of emo music so I can see why you wouldn't dig it, but great nonetheless.

[Dave//Eksvplot]

Hahaha.

[sulfur)addict]

GOD FUCK CONTEMPT.

Contempt is great. Doesn't have the poetry of emo music so I can see why you wouldn't dig it, but great nonetheless.

Would not read a book of poetry by Godard.

Have read/enjoyed poetry by Daniel Higgs and Jonathan Vance.

My enjoyment of emo music does not make Contempt any less of a sneering, self-knowingly slow and dull experience.

Also Brigitte Bardot is une vache raciste.

[madmanmunt]

Whoa! And I thought my dislike of Heart of the Congos was iconoclastic.

[Dave//Eksvplot]

Have read/enjoyed poetry by Daniel Higgs and Jonathan Vance.

I have no idea who Jonathan Vance is, but something like The Doomsday Bonnet is definitely not emo, if that's what you're referring to.

[sulfur)addict]

Have read/enjoyed poetry by Daniel Higgs and Jonathan Vance.

I have no idea who Jonathan Vance is, but something like The Doomsday Bonnet is definitely not emo, if that's what you're referring to.

Singer from Moss Icon. I bought his book Tulip Has A Room and received a handwritten note of thanks and an invitation to a poetry thing in New York. Shame I was in a lackluster collegiate program at the time. Nice guy!

I don't know what "emo poetry" is. I have no love for the term "emo" past it's usage to describe bands that I like. And I know of plenty of punk bands with good to great poets as singers who are classified as "emo." And I know that the punk largely rejected poetry before a band like Husker Du was writing their feelings into songs, which was . . . embarrassing. So the emo bands that followed in Zen Arcade's wake provide a huge jump in lyrical acrobatics. I'm not the one who brought that discussion into this thread and I wonder if someone has me confused for a simpleton who thinks that post-Schwarzenbach emo music is more poetic than bitchy. Whatever.

Forgot a few things:

- FM Andy Cohen has a fascination with Godard that comes up in his lyrics often enough. The song "Contempt" is much better than the movie.

- I cannot stand Anna Karina's acting 90% of the time.

- Godard seems to have a problem framing a shot. Or maybe it's not in how he frames it, but more in the lines of delivering something visually stimulating past a car chase. Off the top of my head, the only time I can recall being really excited by what his camera was showing is in the introduction of Pierrot le Fou. Or the brief arty, deconstructed "ballet" scenes in Alphaville. Maybe it's in his choice of cinematographers? I've always thought of his movies more in lines of thinking films, and I think he's leagues behind even his own colleagues such as Varda.

- That said, I've often referred to a backtracking shot with an actor walking towards the camera down a hall (think the opening to Alphaville) as the "Godard shot."

- I had a classmate in a film class who was adamant in calling him "God-urd." Everyone else would pronounce it correctly. I've often wondered if he thought we were being precocious or something.

- At times I find him irritating and self-important behind his camera lens, but ultimately I think he's delivered some fantastic films.

[Dave//Eksvplot]

Raoul Coutard (great D.P.) did most of the cinematography on the films you're talking about. I think his shots in a film like Pierrot Le Fou are some of the most memorable from that era. The colors alone are evocative of a time and place that'll never be recaptured. And many people have tried. Just looking at the insert booklet that accompanies the Criterion reissue of it gives me a positive feeling. The film is a one-of-a-kind amalgam of various ideas, skits, genre signposts, literary and pop culture references, and feelings--all wrapped up in a "doomed lovers on the run"/gun running story. In Cinemascope. There's more to it than that -- for one, it says something about relationships and their alleged potential to drain creative energy -- but even if it's not a uniformly successful effort it is, at the very least, memorable.

It's totally fine if you're not into any of these movies, but I think they take chances and something like Pierrot has a lot of affect for a film that draws an inordinate amount of attention to its being a construction. I buy it basically.

By the by, Karina was also good enough for Fassbinder. I like her acting.

[NewDarkAge]

Frustratingly French

Disagree. Breathless could've easily been called An American In Paris had that title not already been taken.

I think his attitude is French as hell, but for a culture obsessed with its own history and stuffiness, he was surely looking forward and embracing the more worldly youth movements.

Truffaut's films are the ridiculously French ones. I think Godard once called him the "ghost of Jean Vigo," which is both spot-on and a really high compliment.


If you managed to make it through Le Mepris without wanting to blow your brains out in frustration, try Jacques Tati's films. He'll try your patience and deliver in spades, leaving all the psychosexual garbage out of it.

The attitude is what I mean. He takes these things from America and elsewhere and presents them in such a quintessentially French way. If it's not too much of a stereotype, I would suggest that even his stubbornness is pretty French.

[Me Again]

Just saw Every Man For Himself for the first time. It's one of his best films, late-period or otherwise. Kind of a lark in some ways, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but it's a solid work of art with its own internal logic.

It was a blessing in disguise that Godard wasn't able shoot it on high-end digital at the time, as he'd originally hoped, because the new transfer of the 35mm they shot it on looks wonderful.

Apparently it was booed by many after its premiere at Cannes and originally garnered a lot of negative reviews in the press. So the producer waited two months and then personally contacted all the naysayer critics, telling them Godard re-edited the film while taking their comments into consideration. They arranged a screening prior to its theatrical run and showed the exact same cut and lo and behold all of the critics who'd originally trashed it changed their tune and said it was great.

[Me Again]

Godard cinematographer Raoul Coutard died yesterday, at age 92. Obit here.

He worked on many memorable, truly great movies...things that are in my DNA now, things you've probably seen and enjoyed too if you dig the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Garrel, Costa-Gavras, etc.

He was one of the greats as far as D.P.s go.

R.I.P.

[Zorg]

That is pretty narrow representation of Godard's assumed misogony. You can pretty much expect that everything from him is a regurgitated homage/critique of American films. Including the sexual attitudes. He is famous for his "girl and a gun" theory. If you dig just slightly deeper, things get pretty abstract in a hurry. The male stereotypes are not exactly flattering.

[Me Again]

Janeway, have you seen the ironically titled Every Man For Himself? Great movie. He paints men as real heels in that, while if anything the female leads are the ones who have more "autonomy," dignity, and decency.

[Me Again]

New film about Godard, Redoubtable, starring Louis Garrel as the director, playing at Cannes soon.

http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdeta ... did=328915

Michel Hazanavicius has made an extremely inventive, well-honed and off-the-wall film about a crisis-ridden Jean-Luc Godard, as seen through the eyes of his partner

Redoubtable: The soap bubbles of the Revolution

“Stop telling me I’m Jean-Luc Godard. I’m not Jean-Luc Godard. I’m only pretending; I’m an actor playing Jean-Luc Godard.” When one attempts to paint the portrait of a myth, particularly when one is a filmmaker trying to depict the multifaceted and complex figure who was the paradoxical standard bearer of the French New Wave, and who later became the master of putting up smokescreens and making subliminal connections, it’s vastly preferable to distance oneself, rather than attack the commander-in-chief (or, to his detractors, the reclusive, incomprehensible oracle) head on. But the agile Michel Hazanavicius has chosen to use a more roundabout, cheerful and playful way to do just that with Redoubtable [+], which has been revealed in competition at the 70th Cannes Film Festival.

However, what could have veered towards an exquisite, bizarre, supremely inventive cinematic oddity that is nevertheless fairly low-key in the grand Cannes landscape, given that the Oscar-winning director of The Artist [+] is so adept at reconstructing and taking pleasure in playing with atmospheres, is not at all, thanks to his initial decision to adapt the novel Un an après by Anne Wiazemsky, who shared Godard’s life from 1967-1970. The film’s point of view is therefore the simultaneously lovestruck and lucid gaze that this young Philosophy student turns towards her illustrious partner, which allows the movie to sketch out the myriad facets of a glamorised creator in the midst of crisis and, at the same time, a simple man in a relationship. And its success is made all the sweeter by the "soap bubble" style (in the proper, joyful sense of the term) of the mise-en-scène, which alleviates all of the weighty seriousness that a more conventional approach would have entailed. And this is precisely how Hazanavicus manages to make his gamble of offering a Godard-like freedom to the whole pay off – in other words, it’s the best way to pay an offbeat, affectionate and caustic tribute to such an emblematic figure in the history of cinema.

“All artists should die aged 33, before they become old farts. And I was about to turn 37.” As the film kicks off, Godard (played by Louis Garrel, a perfect fit for the role) has just shot La Chinoise and moved in with 19-year-old Anne (the excellent Stacy Martin), whom he is about to marry. Revolutionary by nature and displaying a serenity that is but skin deep, the renowned filmmaker is interested only "in what other people don’t do" and forms a very contrasting couple with his partner, who prefers nudity and life’s little pleasures to the ideological and existential complexities that soon make Godard’s blood boil with the events of May 1968. This radicalisation on every level (demonstrations at the Cannes Film Festival, via heated general meetings in the Sorbonne and a clear spike in the aggressiveness of the filmmaker’s character, who is obsessed with constantly taking an opposing view) will at one point be overcome by requited love...

Completely unbridled in terms of creativity, and teeming with a plethora of great ideas that are clear for all to see, all the while maintaining a firm grip on the rudder, Redoubtable is an extremely charming film. It also demonstrates to the sceptical not only that Michel Hazanavicius is an ultra-gifted craftsman revisiting the classics, whom certain people would like to confine to this role, but that he is also an artist with a very personal brand of finesse and is an expert in double-talk.

Produced by La Classe Américaine and Les Compagnons du Cinéma, Redoubtable will be distributed in France by StudioCanal from 13 September. Its international sales are managed by Wild Bunch.

[Redline]

Every Man for Himself

More hooker action!

Week End! Crazy tragic Jane Seberg! Soundracks on ECM Records! What's not to like?

Not Crap.

phpBB [media]

[Me Again]

FWIW, Breathless doesn't rank very high on my list of favorite Godard films.

Would even go so far as to say it's vastly overrated even if it's influential and "important" in the context of film history and/or Godard's evolution.

Every Man For Himself
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
JLG/JLG...
Pierrot Le Fou
A Married Woman
Masculine Feminine
All the Boys Are Named Patrick
Alphaville

...those are the films that come to mind, off the top of my head, when I want to think fondly of Godard's output.

[Me Again]

Should have known well ahead of time that this...

New film about Godard, Redoubtable, starring Louis Garrel as the director, playing at Cannes soon.

http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdeta ... did=328915

....wouldn't be that great. I give it maybe two out of five stars. It looked nice and wasn't the worst sit, but after it was over it felt like a disservice to Godard more than anything else. A rather superficial and ultimately unnecessary movie.

Of all the reviews I've read of the film (most of them panning it), this one from the NYT seems the most accurate: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/movi ... eview.html

Had I read such reviews beforehand I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Hazanavicius was out of his depth and dropped the ball. Godard Mon Amour = Meh


As a side note, I enjoy movies a lot, when they're good or great, probably more than a lot of people. But I dislike this tendency of film producers trying to turn damn near every good book or noteworthy figure's personal life arc into a dramatized movie or tv show. All too many of these projects are ill-conceived, and even those that don't initially seem like inherently bad ideas rarely live up to their potential.

Does everything have to exist in dramatized movie form in for it to be "real" for us? Does the fact that we can make a movie about something mean we should? Do the people making such movies even care about any of these issues, or are they just, predictably, opportunists? I find too many biopics to be shallow "Cliff's Notes"-grade depictions of far more complex people. For every Edvard Munch, there's a lot of chaff and much of these seem like a waste of time and resources.

[Wood Goblin]

My second-least favorite major filmmaker, down there with Antonioni.

For the most part, I get what people like about him. I’m just deaf to it.

The exception is Contempt, which I’m convinced nobody actually, sincerely likes. I’m pretty sure I’ve sat through that dog twice, though I can’t be sure. Maybe it just felt like I sat through it twice. In any case, when “fans” of this movie praise the cinematography, what I hear is, “You guys look like you were having fun up there on stage!”