Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 7:25 pm 
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Difficult watching

Godard is nearly eighty now, but Clint Eastwood is six months older; and of course festival-goers know Manuel de Olivera has just completed a film at nearly the age of 102, which the Variety review calls "an especially accomplished example of the helmer's favorite theme of impossible love expressed in precise, comic terms." Yet there is a weariness in Godard's work we don't feel in the work of the other two directors, perhaps because Godard is an avant-gardist, and nothing ages like the radical, and pessimism tires out the pessimist. Another reason is that Godard doesn't work by conventional full-bore filmmaker's means; his work still has a DIY quality; he does a lot of it himself. This time he is working entirely in video. Unlike David Lynch, whose Inland Empire is all shot with the same non-professional camera, Godard, and three other cameramen, used a range of cameras from professional HD that produced pristine images of a luxury cruise ship in bright gleaming color to a cell phone that yielded harsh blurs when flashed on the big screen. This according to Amy Taubin, whose article about Film Socialisme for Film Comment was written in connection with the New York Film Festival presentation.

It is easy enough to point out, as Taubin does, that the film is divided into three parts like a sonata with a fast movement, a longer, slower one, and a faster final one shorter than the first. The first, as Taubin puts it, "takes place on a huge ocean liner cruising the Mediterranean, with brief side trips in various ports of call." "Takes place" is one way of describing it; I'd have said simply "was shot." Due to the extreme fragmentation and shortness of the edits, there isn't much sense of anything "taking place." Nor are the non-ship moments identifiably "ports of call," though that makes sense of it. The second section focuses on, let's say, a house and nearby gas station in the south of France. The last "movement" goes back over the Mediterranean capitals of western civilization alluded to in the first, but this time making much use of archival footage of atrocities -- something Godard has done before, I believe in his 2004 Notre musique.

The first part is full of gnomic utterances, and everything is in fragments, in a variety of languages, mostly French with German next, also including some Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and a dash of Latin and Greek. References are made to various writers and thinkers, and there's a guy on board the ship who gives a lecture on geometry to an empty hall. Sometimes the dialogue fits the image, often not. Along with this are "subtitles" in English, mostly just for the French, in what Godard whimsically calls "Navaho." They are just a few words out of the sentence spoken in the film. Most of the French is comprehensible, not that together it makes much sense, but reading the "Navaho" subtitles could only distract you. Words are often run together, as in “nocures noblood” and “Digdeep Communist archives." If Godard is trying to illustrate the failure to communicate, he succeeds in not communicating.

The second part is a bit more coherent, but also visually less interesting. It focuses on a family called Martin, made up of the parents, a boy of ten, and a teenage girl. They have a donkey and llama tethered at the gas station. The wife decides to run for local office and a medic crew shows up. Tauabin theorizes that this section is about Godard as a little boy,and says that's confirmed by the boy's doing a copy of a Renoir painting. Here the images are less "flashy," without all the shifting of formats and with longer more stationary shots.

As almost anybody who writes about this film cannot fail to say, we watch it first of all because it's by Godard, who is one of the French masters of that fertile period of the late 1950's and 1960's, and whose Breathless one can still watch with pleasure, and, if one knows if from its first appearance, with nostalgia. (One can watch plenty of his other films too, up to 1970, when he parted company with the larger art house audience.) In his discussion of Film Socialisme on his blog "Deep Focus," Todd McCarthy comments that in contrast to other film artists, particularly French ones (he mentions Truffaut) who stayed close to the warm openness of Renoir, Godard is, or has turned, mean-spirited, linking himself with those whose anti-Americanism in his view is part of their anti-humanism -- the "same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This, McCarthy thinks, is borne out by Godard's recent failure to appear at Cannes to discuss his latest work. As an innovator who contributed to new film language in his time of creative flowering, Godard also can be compared, McCarthy suggests, to James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses and short stories are triumphs, but whose Finnegans Wake descends into what can be seen as a stubborn, hermetic, ivory tower elitism -- "l'art pour l'art," art for the chosen few. There are always "die-hard Godardians," McCarthy goes on, happy to be included in that chosen few, but McCarthy says that at Cannes none of them could be of much help with Film Socialisme. Amy Toubin's article is a description, not an explanation or a justification. At the New York Film Festival the resident Godardian was New Yorker film writer Richard Brody, who has written a 720-page tome on the director, Everything Is Cinema.

Any careful observer can describe the contents. Devotes can say what cinephiles like to say when they can make no sense of a film, that they "need to see it again." And a Godard film like this one can add luster to a film festival, the way a literature buff might add tone to his shelves by displaying a copy of Finnegans Wake. Parts of Finnegans Wake are lovely to listen to, notably the long "Anna Livia Plurabelle" monologue, which I used to listen to a record of Joyce reading when I was young. And Finnegans Wake, though nearly impenetrable, is coherent and has "skeleton keys" that explain it. For a film buff, it's worth while to watch at least some of Film Socialisme; Amy Taubin's applying the adjective "ravishing" to the film makes some sense, if referring to the look of some of the HD segments, and their occasional effective contrast with the rough video. But for most of us, time is spent better watching films that make more coherent use of their documentary footage, their image and sound than this bulletin from Godard's dotage.

Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010. Planned in France as VOD. Recommended for Godardians. I am sorry now that I did not refer to French criticism of the film, which was generally favorable, rather than relying on a few English discussions. But what I wrote above is true to my viewing experience, and I am not of the opinion that a film that is repulsive or opaque will open up its secrets if I "need to see it again." Again I am in agreement with Todd McCarthy on this point.

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