Quickies, Vol. XXI

Une Femme Mariée (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) – Have read it said that this one empowers women, but that’s about the most superficial, narrative-prejudicial sort of reading one can imagine. Do not the first umpteen shots in the film so fracture the female body that the rest of the film can only be seen through that violent lens? This is Vivre sa vie but less coherent, less worked through. The woman is either mother or whore, sometimes both, but never neither. The headshots alone create either the most uncomfortable viewing experience or the most obliviously pleasurable. She is so framed, so polished, so posed, so (sigh) objectified, and JLG knows it all too well. This is apparently the point, and one that he never seemed to tire of making in the same basic way so repeatedly.

"I'm Tom Jane."

Under Suspicion (dir. Stephen Hopkins, 2000) – Pretty much the worst. You can be a nihilist, but you still have to mean something.

The Rescuers (dir. Wolfgang Reitherman et al., 1977) – Not much to report. Fun in places, perhaps stands out by virtue of being Disney, being animated, and not being a musical in the usual Disney sense.

The Rescuers Down Under (dir. Hendel Butoy & Mike Gabriel, 1990) – They say, the first fully totally digitally animated film made. The opening shot alone is worth one’s viewing. After that, the first 15 minutes or so are alone worth one’s viewing. The animators are clearly having fun here, exploiting their new computers to maximum effect, and it’s pure visual pleasure. Sure, you miss the little pencil imperfections from The Jungle Book and Robin Hood, but this is a new breed of Disney, and one that works well. Ensemble of characters that maintains the spirit of the good ones and opened a brief, great period of Disney films that has now been overtaken by Pixar/Disney.

The Awful Truth (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937) – A predictable (but that’s the point, right?) bit of classic code-era Hollywood fare. It creates the initial impression of raciness, suggesting divorce, but then comes full circle and celebrates raciness within its boundaries, not unlike It Happened One Night. So, like The Philadelphia Story but not as good. Cary Grant & Irene Dunne click together almost as well as Grant and Jean Arthur, but Ralph Bellamy does well to offer some Southern, masculine flare.

Eight Miles High (dir. Achim Bornhak, 2007) – A German biopic on the infamous groupie Uschi Obermaier. A major problem with many biopics is the impression that the filmmakers don’t need to defend their content on the basis of it being a “true story.” This seems to be one of the problems here. Just because it “happened” doesn’t make it film-worthy. And in some cases, a particularly interesting true story doesn’t make for a great film. Eh.

Aria: Cinema Plays with Opera

Roeg

Aria is one of the better-known omnibus films from the 80s, a strange period of film history that almost brought together the likes of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Derek Jarman, and Nicholas Roeg. Minus Welles, Fellini, and Allen, and plus a few others, Aria was constructed with relatively broad formal freedom but strikingly narrow thematic content. Perhaps predictably, many of these segments are very operatic indeed, paired as each of them is with a piece or two from Verdi, Puccini, and others. Considering the caliber of the filmmakers participating, it is surprising how tethered many of the shorts are to traditional operatic content. Jarman’s contribution may experiment most with the wedding of cinema with opera, offering a montage of images somewhat liberated from narrative confines and thereby allowing such a short piece to stand on its own. Roeg’s attempt to integrate narrative (from a classical source, no less) into into such strict temporal constraints results in a rushed product, something that defines neither opera nor cinema; but maybe this was his intention?

Godard

Godard is right at home here, especially following his 80s fare like Passion and First Name: Carmen. In this decade more than ever before, Godard was preoccupied with the fusing of image and sound, in the vein of Renaissance art and music. This means that he’s obsessed with the human form, male and female bodies. Historically, this creates something curiously hybrid. While classical opera may have to do with bodies, Godard’s style is decidedly closer to that of pre-Classical painting, with uncovered figures posing still in order to be admired or, better, worshiped. Godard’s use of male bodies juxtaposing the females here fits nicely into his standard approach to bodies along with everything else: exchange of commodities. The transaction doesn’t take place in the segment; the problem is an imbalance of supply with demand, a Marxist cliché that Godard is only too glad to inject into a series of films supposedly just about art and love. Such pretense is beneath him, effecting what may in fact be the most (retrospectively) comical episode of the bunch, even next to the straightforwardly funny segment with Buck Henry and Beverly D’Angelo.

Temple

Opera is in many ways a romantic medium, in both its form and content. While this probably shouldn’t be debated, Aria fascinates by its general failure to expand on the basic, proverbial romance. Exceptions have been noted above, but tongue-in-cheek and slapstick stand only on their relation to what they mock. It seems that only Derek Jarman’s episode in Aria really does justice to romantic form and narrative while experimenting successfully with a new attempt to blur the classical with the contemporary.

Jarman

Quickies, Vol. XII

Unfaithfully Yours (dir. Preston Sturges, 1948) – Another Stanford Theatre gem. Sturges tops the  So-Embarrassed-I-Don’t-Know-Their-Stuff List. This was a fortuitous screening, since after viewing The Hudsucker Proxy, with all its Capra influences, I was reminded that Capra is dwarfed in the Coens’ oeuvre by the influence of Sturges, who is far more grotesque, straight-up morbid. Rex Harrison’s character Sir Alfred is appropriately cast as a British immigrant symphony conductor on the other side of the Atlantic. This keeps him aloof and snooty (would the Palo Alto locals have noticed this?), and the perfect man to fill the role of the conductor. He orchestrates not only the strings, horns, and percussion, of course, but various plans of offing his wife. At the latter he’s not so good, as is apparent from the bumbling failure of materializing such an idealistic plan. The banter here is apparently not as sharp as earlier Sturges, but the scenes are staged quite effectively. The perpetual, symphonic musical soundtrack keeps us within Alfred’s mind, whether we enter his mind’s eye (literally) to imagine along with him how he might respond to the alleged infidelity, or we’re accompanying him around town and back home as he flubs his own investigation and role as executioner at every turn. Sturges is surely a cynic, though the Coens take his cynicism to new levels. The happy ending of this film is decidedly forced. Probably wouldn’t have been released without it, though.

Broken Embraces (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) – Phew. More to come here, to be sure. Film deserves more than one viewing, easily, before making any kind of analysis, to say nothing of assessment or judgment. A recent Film Quarterly article has been helpful, but thesis work now prevents me from interacting with it. In a word, this one’s beautiful, somehow supreme, very 8½, of course. There is something compelling and simply honest about films that deal with sight. Without it, there’s no cinema, right? Hard not to think of Pan’s Labyrinth in this sense, another beauty from another Spanish-speaking filmmaker. Also, Penelope is one tough chica.

Days of Heaven (dir. Terrence Malick, 1978) – If you’ve read this far, you should have arrived at the conclusion that this has been an excellent week (so far) for films. Malick is a visual poet perhaps up there with the best of them. Plenty of people think so, but this is my first taste of Malick aside from a high school viewing of The Thin Red Line. Really didn’t get it then, but looking forward to giving it an “enlightened” look. Wish this first one had been Badlands, but that’ll come soon enough. This is a very tight, image-driven epic, but less a “slice of life” than a whole pie. It’s round and full and rich, gorgeous and sad. It might be more biblical than anything else, in terms of adjectives anyway. If you’re familiar with Genesis, especially, it’s hard not to think of Cain & Abel, Abraham & Sarah, Lot & Sodom. Then there’s Ruth, although post-Genesis. But it’s “biblical” not only in terms of narrative elements (and narration, too?), but in terms of the form itself. If some of those OT books had been “written” with images, they might have looked a lot like this. Such a broad scope but with every frame and element maximized, it’s so much bigger than its size. Needs another viewing, next time on Criterion blu-ray.

Where Eagles Dare (dir. Brian G. Hutton, 1968) – A classic, pure spectacle. The Alistair MacLean novels lend themselves well to cinema, with others like The Guns of Navarone, Bear Island, and Ice Station Zebra also a pleasure to watch. This one heroizes the Brits via Richard Burton, but the token inclusion of Clint Eastwood as the gun-ready American lieutenant makes it as well-rounded as necessary for a film of this sort. Pacing is steady, working consistently toward a final climax through so many little climaxes. It’s hard not to like this one. Even the ladies, who use their gifts to the Allied advantage, show competence and agency despite soft spots for Mr. Ladies’ Man Richard Burton himself.

Vivre sa vie (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) – A rather cursory viewing, one that demands thought and attention. Danger here is to see simply “Godard” instead of something unique, which it seems to be. The French is typically translated as “My Life to Live,” which is fitting, since Karina’s character insists on her own agency/responsibility within the narrative. How Godard’s camera, editing, etc. deny her agency while acknowledging something like subjectivity is worthy of note. He seems to be at his most vicious here, casting his then-wife as the female character who is rather “bound” for prostitution and death. She’s just the image, at first unreachable, then, once gotten, cast into the gutter. Godard is honest if nothing else. At one point he employs a rapid-fire cutting sequence overlaid with a machine gun sound effect. His camera is his weapon, the look as fatal as can be. She wants to be looked at, but it doesn’t go so well to get what you want. Inclusion of Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait” may be as overt as Godard ever gets about his own murderous kind of authorship.

Two Or Three Things I Know About Her

This one from Godard must be famous and noteworthy in large part because it concentrates Godard’s style and themes into a very typical (for Godard) narrative (or lack thereof) without the distraction of an Anna Karina, a Jean-Paul Belmondo, or a Jean-Pierre Leaud. Marx and Coca-Cola are everywhere here. The cuts are more jagged than ever and the colors more beautiful. Godard moves into a more abstract mode than usual, using construction sites, buildings, mirrors, and of course women like Picasso used cubes.

Recent reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s essay “The Cinema of Poetry” assists this viewing. Pasolini uses Godard, Antonioni, and Bertolucci as examples of the poetic in cinema. He chooses these three precisely for their stylistic differences, demonstrating that the idea of cinematic poetry is formal rather than stylistic; a multiplicity of styles can be categorized within this broader mode or form. Pasolini describes Godard as neglecting or breaking all the rules and thereby creating a visual poetry. This sort of poetry, Pasolini maintains, is inherently pre-verbal and not unique to Godard (only Godard’s stylistic version of it is unique to him). It’s imagistic by its very nature and semiotically primal. The cinematic artist uses a medium unlike that of the verbal poet. Images do not have the same semiotic basis as does the written word. “Stylemes,” as he puts it (units of style), are not tied to a dictionary dictating their objective meaning like words are. This being said, Pasolini was also a poet of words and so acknowledges that there is also an historico-subjective nature of words. This is called “diachronic” language, the sort that is added to and develops over time. So in the same way that a poet like Shakespeare added definitions to the English dictionary, a visual poet like Godard adds images to a cinematic dictionary. Certain kinds of images now mean (or can mean) something different thanks to Godard’s work.

So, a level of abstraction, paired with the idea of Godard as a cinematic poet, may together indicate a sort of free-form poetry here. We all know the kind of verbal poetry that makes little or no sense without a sense of context and some definitions. Though it’s hard to be exactly sure what Godard is up to in every frame of his films, keeping the above in mind is helpful. We know that Godard is concerned with capitalist consumer culture and is neo-Marxist in political/economic orientation. We know he loves to play with the idea of objectifying women, which for him includes actually objectifying them. We know he’s both serious and playful, adamant in his critiques but at least has enough perspective to critique with glee. So much is impersonal in this film, despite the pretense of persons. They feel like pawns for Godard’s agenda, but perhaps they’re only as personal/personable as Godard himself.

The director was not (and is not) a humanist. He’s more concerned with ideas and, whether ironically or most fittingly, materials, things, stuff. Morality is a non-idea to him, as everything is reduced to its pragmatic value. This may be an irony of Marxism (whether neo- or orthodox): ideas and things are decommodified only to be recommodified. Their cash value is exchanged (oh, dirty word) for use value, which is ultimately inseparable from and just a new version of exchange value. But I digress.

Whatever the “value” of Godard’s values, Pasolini does offer a helpful framework or lens by which to understand the style and form of Godard’s early films. Best of all, Pasolini does justice to authorial intent. Poetic cinema as a concept keeps the films in their original context while also allowing for universal understandings of them. It’s on par with calling a poet’s writing “poetry,” or noting at the poetic elements in an author’s prose.

In addition to Pasolini’s meta-look at Godard, Amy Taubin offers some helpful thoughts specific to 2 or 3 Things I know about Her (or Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, or 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) here at Criterion. A number of ideas she only suggests, for want of space, but they get one’s brain going in to the Godardian vein. She mentions the whispering narration, which is certainly Godard whether or not its his literal voice. Reminds one of Alphaville, the voiceover to which is quite a bit more cynical/satirical than it is here, and it contrasts strikingly with that film’s voice by being a whisper rather than a robotic monotone. Taubin notes that here, the whisper brings the viewer into an intimate space with Godard, whose voiceover nonetheless indicates a power he has over the spectator by exercising the right to inform the images with verbal ideas. Then there’s the fact that the film’s female protagonist, Juliette, is a housewife who offers herself as a prostitute by day in order to pay the bills once her husband and children return home from work and school. Her body is used, Taubin observes, in a similar way to the city under construction. Ignored in its essence, the city/woman is changed in order to suit the needs of others; but it/she passively obliges for the greater good. This is one of the “2 or 3 things” the viewer knows about Juliette; the fact isn’t that we know only very little about her but that what we do know is incriminating. What better than cinema do we have to spy and expand our useless or deconstructive knowledge of things and people?

Alphaville

Menage e trois

Alphaville appears to be the apex of Godard’s imagination and ideology, if not its synthesis. It is, along with so many of his 60s films, a cinematic excuse to spout various pensées that cohesively tie with the theme of the film and even the form, but appear to be little more than spontaneous bullet points uttered by Alpha 60, the sinister stand-in for Godard himself. Toying with film noir and the image of Bogart as usual, Alphaville takes anti-capitalist economics and pseudo-socialist politics to what may be their logical ends: a dystopic world in a parallel universe, totalitarian through its frighteningly perfect rationality. It almost appears as if Godard is lamenting in advance an embrace of ideology void of the affections. Society is not greater than love, but love begets the perfect society. Melodrama may be employed here tongue-in-cheek, along with every other genre Godard enlists, but we have learned that when Godard is least serious he is most earnest.

Eternal, circuitous despotism

First Name: Carmen

Another work from Godard; this one comes after Passion, and clearly follows its style and themes. This time, however, narrative elements are stolen from Godard’s own Pierrot Le Fou, but Godard doesn’t bother to surprise the spectator with a fundamentally different conclusion. It would probably aid a viewing of this film to be familiar with the opera Carmen, on which it is at some level based. The choice of source material is fitting, based on Godard’s obsession with music at this point in his career. Always playing tricks on his audience by blurring the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music, in the 80s Godard was making films that were explicitly operatic and in some ways also paintings. (See Passion in particular.) For example, not every movie has an opening music credit going to “Ludwig v. Beethoven,” as we have in First Name: Carmen.

The string ensemble which gives First Name: Carmen its Beethovian soundtrack is depicted throughout the narrative failing at interpreting the music according to the ideals of its conductor. Fittingly, the musicians are shown variously decapitated and otherwise physically fractured. Musicians do tend to be reduced to the sum of their parts, while composers encapsulate a monolithic idea of genius or vision. Carmen’s violinist counterpart is played by the actress who will later play the main character in Godard’s Hail Mary, retroactively giving her a melancholic beauty that befits her tempered struggle to do justice to the sheet music in front of her. The musicians eventually break into the diegesis, only to end up on the sore end of a cinematic hoax within the film. The hoax combines Pierrot Le Fou with Bande à part, a bunch of bored youngsters with nothing better to do than try to swindle the better-off bourgeois. And how better to do it in a Godard film than for the would-be thieves to use film as the shroud disguising their heist plan. Appropriately, the rapscallions in First Name: Carmen have no political bent to their escapades, as they did in Bande à part. Has Godard outgrown his political naivete, or does this film simply reflect the (relatively) apolitical 80s versus the politically fiery 60s?

There is abstraction of an objectival and, for lack of a better term, a panoramic sort. Human characters are given no priority in the frame over things. At times the stationary frame implies a hidden camera, especially in the characters’ shared hotel room. This implies a spying, a voyeurism that corresponds to the self-reflexivity of Godard’s films. The camera is fixed in the hotel room somewhere between Ozu’s tatami level and a more conventional “Western” height. Hands-off is the idea; the camera is as apathetic as the characters are pathetic. Somehow, in this way the camera gives the frame itself an objectival status. As that which surrounds or encapsulates the mis-en-scene, the frame likewise becomes an object with little more priority than an abstracted or discarded item within or just outside the frame. The visual is liked to the aural; just as characters and objects move into and outside of the frame, so the soundtrack (musical and otherwise) is in and out of the audience’s experience. Further, objects within the frame are drained of visual uniqueness. Constantly in First Name: Carmen, human figures monochromatically fuse with their surroundings. Almost never does the human stand out from the non-human. Are the people non-human or do the things surrounding them have a human-like status?

The other, “panoramic,” abstraction at times looks positively like Tarkovsky, particularly when landscapes are being used, and especially those that combine the elements of earth and water. It gives the land a look of destruction, an unnatural condition, as if it has been pulverized by man and is now left simply to “be” in all its destroyed beauty and beautiful destruction as the object of a huge gaze. Godard’s consistent painting-style of filming (see not only Passion but scenes in Pierrot Le Fou with characters set against a blank backdrop) clashes with these depth shots. Juxtaposed with the sky (in all its two-dimensionality), these landscapes are distinctly three-dimensional, unlike any other shots in the film.

Godard plays a version of himself in the film, a slightly-nuts film director who fakes illness to extend his hospital stay. His character’s mental instability seems to find its referent both in Godard himself (the actual director of the film First Name: Carmen) as well as the proverbial “film director,” that meta-idea that Godard has as much a right to mock as anyone else ever has. Godard’s films throughout his career implicate film and filmmaking as something at least borderline criminal. So when he and the film crew are fooled while trying to film (within the film), the director’s obliviousness to what is happening indirectly implicates the act of filmmaking, putting it on the same level as armed robbery. It would also seem to imply the ignorance of intellectuals. Navel-gazing may help create thoughtful films, but it leads to an absent-mindedness that makes one unaware of the most obvious facts.

Masculin féminin

Looking at different things

Along with his fellow Cahiers du Cinema critics, Jean-Luc Godard argued that being a film “auteur” meant that your films must have the imprint of your own distinct style of filmmaking. Despite the ideological problems with auteur theory, at least the Cahiers crew can be applauded for their consistency with this position in their own works. That is to say, one cannot watch Mascuilin féminin without seeing Godard’s own fingerprints all over it. It has a toned-down style from Breathless (fewer jump-cuts, etc.), and it testifies well to Godard’s transition from more character-driven films like Bande à part and Pierrot le Fou to a more overt political film like Week End. Of course, nothing is black-and-white in Godard’s world, and so even the idea of a “transition” in his cinematic styles is oversimplified. (E.g., Alphaville preceded Masculin féminin but resembles the later Week End more than, say, Pierrot le Fou.)

Political activity

That these characters are “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola” is evident from the outset, as Godard depicts the new generation that would give birth to MTV and instant gratification. Unhappy with political circumstances and proposed solutions, their cynicism is only outdone by their apathy. Their simultaneous embrace/rejection of established capitalist norms is rendered humorous in the scene when Paul and Madeleine’s roommate pick up Madeleine from her v0cal recording session. Outside the studio’s front door, a reporter descends upon Madeleine to interview her about her growing popularity. Madeleine reflexively addresses Paul as her “driver” and orders him to bring her the car. Paul, of course, is not the driver, and there is no car. As with other Godardian protagonists, Paul has no real occupation, in the common sense of the term. One is sure that he would be repulsed at the suggestion that he should be anything other than a café-frequenting freelance writer who probably rarely gets anything published. Yet, he is uncontrollably attracted to Madeleine and her strange drive for career and wealth.

The film’s numerous pop culture references range from those probably so subtle that only the film’s immediate contemporaries could get them, to the self-referential: Madeleine’s rhetorical question to Paul at one point, to the effect of, “Who do you think you are? Pierrot le fou?” Godard’s poking fun at Bergman films (The Silence?) is quite fun. Most interesting about the scene is Paul’s unexpected response to the eroticism of “Bergman’s” film: running up to the projection room, deeply annoyed at the flawed aspect ratio. This example runs parallel to Paul’s unspoken admission early on when Madeleine “interviews” him. While he pressures her to go out with him, she asks whether “going out” with him entails going to bed with him. Paul simply stares back at her blankly, not so much as if she has figured him out, but truly confused at the distinction she has drawn. This dry view of sex, over and above love, shows its true colors when the scenes in the “Bergman” film still aren’t enough for Paul; he must go gripe about the medium, as he is bored with the content.

"What's the difference?"

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Passion

Opening abstract image

Auteur theory has been more or less discredited, on account of the highly collaborative nature of film and their prescribed value, above all else, as cultural artifacts. The critique isn’t unfair, but honest common sense should always play a role in such discussions. Without it, self-congratulatory navel-gazing and arbitrary boundary-marking will inevitably obscure even the shadow of truth. Movies are certainly the work of more than one person. However, the industry has always been set up, at least to an extent, to give a lot of power to the individual director. A director getting hired on by a studio even serves as an acknowledgment by the studio that they like his/her style and want to work with it. Jean-Luc Godard helped invent auteur theory before he starting making films. The suffering industry in France in the late 50s and following, along with his and the other New Waver’s reputation as critics, gave them a lot of freedom to pursue their own projects. Beyond that, even Godard’s relatively few commercial successes gave him nearly limitless freedom in the latter half of his career to do whatever he wanted. Put that together with being a major proponent of the notion of auteur, and you have in a film like Passion a work of a singular director.

Early scene reminiscent of Weekend

As expected, Passion works with a lot of similar themes from Godard’s previous films. The Marxist critique of capitalism is always present, though not as overtly here as in Weekend and Pierrot Le Fou. Still, corporate trademarks make background appearances on billboards, cars, and pinball machines. Scenes in the film production studio as well as the film set itself subtley convey Godard’s annoyance with capitalism and its deleterious effect on art. The studio owner’s rampant coughing and the chaos in both settings corresponds with that of the constant car wrecks in Weekend. The fusion of painting, music, and cinema is explored here in depth. The film within the film (also called Passion) is a re-staging of various paintings and frescoes from the likes of Rembrandt and Delacroix. The soundtrack includes repetitive selections from the Requiems of Mozart and Fauré. The inclusion of art from largely Christian artists is curious, but it seems to tie in with the suggestive title of Passion and other allusions to Christian imagery.

Godard was supposedly shooting for the “inside” of the image in Passion. The camera swirls in and around the reconstructed scenes from the aforementioned paintings, even as it moves in past the diegetic cameras in extreme close-ups of the stationary players. The film begins with a disjoint between word and image, giving priority to abstract imagery with a brief voiceover stating the film is not “the truth,” not “the opposite of truth,” but “an imagination,” “the thoroughly calculated approximation of verisimilitude.” This wordy and heady opening juxtaposes with the rest of the film and is as much meant to throw a verbal bone to the audience as to demonstrate the futility of doing so. Soon after this refrain, we see characters talking, but the words we hear are not in sync with their mouths. The priority of image over word is seen in the rest of the film as the director within is unable to choreograph his actors and stage hands to his satisfaction. He is constantly being asked for a “story” and refuses to give one, as he is preoccupied with image over narrative, exactly like his real counterpart in Godard.

The object watching herself...

...unwilling object forced to watch.

And also like Godard, the director in the film is incapable of not objectifying women, even if he has alterior motives for his mis-en-scene. It’s been noted (particularly by James Roy MacBean; “Filming the Inside of His Own Head: Godard’s Cerebral Passion,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1, 16-24) that Godard’s Marxist egalitarianism always critiques the objectification of women even as he never escapes from doing so himself. Having his cake and eating it too, Godard always succumbs to the sadistic act of watching even as he condemns the male gaze that converts the woman into an idea, a commodity. Not only are women used as props (commonly referred to as “extras”), but they are shot with their backs to the camera or looking away from it, and most often with men in the superior position of power in relation to them. One of the main female props for the film within the film is “deaf and dumb,” not only deprived of a voice but incapable of following the verbal orders of the male director. In this way, her inability to obey the patriarchal voice boils her down even more to her true value. She is only as good as her physical form.

Props

Incidentally, Godard considered this film of his a “sin.” His fascinating inability to avoid religious concepts once again raises questions about the nature of this project. However, he attributed the sinful nature of Passion to his breaking of cinematic laws; namely, that the word must always precede the image. In another bit of Christian allusion, MacBean reads or reads into Godard to interpret the law as something like, “In the beginning was the Word,” or, “Thou shalt not make any graven images.” Godard taps into an interesting and almost hypocritical facet of cinema: that for its “essence” as imagistic, the word always has the priority. By reversing the formulation, Godard felt that he had sinned. Here the critique of capitalism rears itself again. Characters in the film rarely speak; they are spoken for. We are given the image, the picture, the painting, and then the other offers words as interpretation.

Merging of work and pleasure

Objectified

Pietá?

Bande à part

Few would argue with that

Jean-Luc Godard created Bande à part in the middle of his most well-documented period of filmmaking, which is the period when he was most self-conscious about filmmaking in his films. These days Bande à part has become its own caricature, a snippet of the French New Wave that is relatively easy to access while still keeping with Godard’s trademark styles: jump cuts, Godard-ian characters (is there a better term?), a “plot” subservient to the whims of the characters and the director, and admissions within the film that it is, in fact, a film. Above all else, Bande à part is a seemingly effortless jaunt on the part of Godard and his actors into whatever strikes their collective fancies; behind the appearance, however, is an extremely well-choreographed film with an immovable structure. The famous dance scene serves as a small example of the overall film. The characters “decide” to dance, get up, and start dancing. Then follows a remarkably long take of the three characters dancing in complete unison, down to the smallest wrist flips. Perhaps this is a dance that was very common in 1960s France, one everyone would have known. Regardless, it reflects that the characters are actually in complete synch despite appearances. Watching Bande à part gives one the desire to throw caution to the wind, hook up with one’s best friends, and do as much or as little as feels good. At the same time, however, the viewer is struck by the careful flow of this film and its movement toward a deliberate climax.

Known in the US as Band of Outsiders, the French title seems to retain the meaning behind the words even when untranslated. That, and it’s a bit more poetic. As this film seems to fit well between Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou, it would seem that Jean-Paul Belmondo were missing here. However, Belmondo would have alienated the other male character by his strong presence. The two men in Bande à part stand as opposites to one another. Especially in this regard, the recent film Bandits presently comes to mind as a sort of remake (though obviously inferior). In that film, Billy Bob Thornton plays a paranoid but sensitive man while Bruce Willis is the more classic tough guy. Cate Blanchett can’t decide which one she likes better as they rob as many banks on the West Coast as they can. Another (relatively) recent film that is easy to recall while viewing Bande à part is Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket. Though clearly different in many ways, Anderson’s style can be partially attributed to Godard’s. Though he abides by many Hollywood conventions, Godard’s camera work, from its framing to its movement, can be observed in Anderson’s films. Further, Bottle Rocket is a story of a small group of friends trying to pull off a “big” heist, which of course isn’t very big from the audience’s perspective. Once they try to execute their plan, some peripheral associates turn out to be pulling a fast one on them. This is essentially the same narrative as Bande à part, at least in a general summary.

The literature out there on Bande à part is quite disappointing. Presumably this has to do with the accessibility of this film, whereas many other of Godard’s works have been pondered over more thoroughly. The original review in the 1964 Film Quarterly (by Norm Fruchter) not only barely skims the surface of the film’s themes, but it gets the simple facts wrong. For example, it states that Odile runs off with Artur in the end rather than Franz. Daryl Chin, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, does well to observe that the Louvre race in Bande à part portrays the characters’ contempt for the established art of the past as they not only ignore the famous paintings and busts, but their running past them shows disrespect and apathy for such things and that which they represent (Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 1-12). It seems that Godard had been accused, prior to this film, for an over-adherence to artistic norms, and he included the famous Louvre scene in order to show his critics just how much he stuck with the art establishment. Chin also notes that while the film has a noir-like narrative structure, very little else about the film abides by those conventions. The music, alternating between lightness and gravity, is self-effacing and another example of the film’s consciousness of itself as a film. In addition, most of the lighting is natural, and while most of the scenes are filmed outdoors, even the indoor scenes are mostly shot against brightly-lit white walls.

Godard’s wife, Anna Karina (playing Odile), is often placed against the stark, light backgrounds, as this film is as much a tribute to Godard’s love for her as it is to his love for cinema. (Of course, his love for Karina would not last through Pierrot Le Fou.) The director’s love for his medium in this particular film was itself made into a tribute by Bertolucci in The Dreamers, even including the Louvre racing scene with flashbacks to Bande à part done in Godard-like jump-cuts. Godard’s self-consciousness includes offering his own voice as the narration, giving a summary part-way into the film for those who enter late, and announcing a sequel at the film’s end which will be in Technicolor. As for Odile, a small but telling series of scenes feature her pulling a piece of raw meat out of a refrigerator at the villa where she lives and, later, feeding it to a friend’s pet leopard. Chin identifies Odile’s actions as indicative of her wild character, as she is attracted to the leopard (who has a pet leopard?) and thinks ahead of time of feeding it food desigated for humans. Further, Godard’s method of shooting the scenes and Karina’s acting style both contribute to the overall effect of the film. It’s with a mysterious casualness that Odile pulls the meat out of the fridge and wraps it in a piece of paper. She handles the meat with her bare hand and wipes her hand on a kitchen chair, then running out the door. Perhaps it’s today’s paranoia of germs on raw meat, but Odile’s carelessness leave a modern-day Western viewer wondering how sticky her hand is and how much that kitchen chair will smell in a few hours. When she finally does feed the leopard, she does so in passing, without hardly stopping. The leopard doesn’t seem to want the meat, and Odile’s ambivalence makes the viewer wonder why she would have premeditated to bring meat with her when she cared so little about actually feeding the animal. So Odile’s actions not only convey her wild indifferent nature, but the film’s deliberate and planned structure despite the apparent lack of determination.

From Chin: “[Band of Outsiders] is ‘about’ (as Godard once stated) ‘a girl and a gun.’ Yet Band of Outsiders remains a film which has retained a great hold over the imagination of generations of cineastes. (It’s not for nothing that Quentin Tarantino named his production company ‘A Band Apart,’ a play on the original French title of this film.) Band of Outsiders justified movie love: it made a total devotion to the movies seem like an emotion to be emulated. Truffaut’s Jules and Jim had been one of the first films in which a devotion to culture (in this case, to literature) became the underlying emotion in relationships; Godard took this one step further, and specified the devotion to culture as a devotion to the movies.” This seems so well-put that it deserves to be quoted. But the point applies to more than just films, though Bande à part certainly instills a love for movies in its viewers. In this film, Godard’s characters and the way that he shows them to us allow the viewers to share in their love of liberation. It is ironic that Godard began this phase of his career with the title Breathless, because his films, this one especially, feel like fresh air itself. One wants to forget about responsibilities and fly by the seat of their pants. It’s too bad that Godard had to remind us through his ironically “happy” ending (and the straightforwardly unhappy ending of Pierrot) that such a life is not feasible in this kind of world.

A good essay, including thoughts I didn’t make room for, is here.

Hail Mary

Having only seen Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou so far, Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary was a departure. The film is somewhat infamous for its sacreligious content, re-depicting the pre-Nativity story from the perspective of a modern-day virgin Mary. Pope John Paul II famously said something like, “The film deeply offends the religious sentiments of believers.” It seemed to me fairer to say that it probably offends the religious sentimentality of some Roman Catholics. Many “believers” have no problem thinking of the biblical Mary in very human terms, as Godard depicted her. Certainly the film’s prologue implicitly denies the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, as her parents split up and she visits her father on weekends. Godard said earlier in his career that if he ever did a film about the life of Christ, he would film the parts that the Gospel narratives never recorded; the more mundane aspects of Jesus’ existence. He essentially did this with Mary, omitting the actual birth scene.

The film has some beautiful shots and a good use of darkness to illustrate Mary’s solitude and confusion. Following the birth, there seems to be more light, but perhaps this is incidental. Notes: Mary drawn to apples and eggs, particularly slicing/breaking them. Discusses triangles to some length with her father, and triangular images appear later in the film – trinitarian imagery? Chopin & Mahler music dominates first half of film, Bach & Dvorak second half. Repetition of “At that time” – biblical language. Fascinating contrast of Mary with other female student – one pure, the other not. Differentiation of body/soul discussions – teacher is theoretical and hypocritical, Mary is experiential and sincere. Lots of rippling water – waves appear toward film’s end along with birth. Uncle Gabriel the divine messenger with an edge. Chastity: “To know every possibility without straying.” Lots of nature imagery. “I am a soul imprisoned by a body.”

Pierrot Le Fou

Jean-Luc Godard might be a genius. Certainly he’s an artistic genius, but he might also be an unqualified genius. Before Pierrot Le Fou, I had only seen Breathless, which he apparently regretted in a number of ways. But this one has a style unto itself that demands notice. The French New Wave had a look and feel that made people think that the filmmakers simply threw anything up on the screen that came into their heads, regardless of meaning. And I think that blurs the real distinction that exists between French New Wave and avant-garde. If there are films that encapsulate both, then the exceptions prove the rule. Godard was deliberate and incredibly structured with Pierrot, beginning with Ferdinand’s symmetrical placement among the bookstands, identifying him with his dreams. The early bathtub scene with his daughter (dressed in blue, matching the towels, each an accessory of his life) has him explaining Velasquez’s need to reinvent himself and his work midway through his career, setting the stage for Godard’s own reinvention that is this film. When one looks into Godard’s personal life for context, one sees that he just experienced a difficult divorce (with none other than Anna Karina, the actress from this film), causing him to doubt his future work.

The question “What is cinema?” is answered: “Like a battleground, love, hate, action, violence…in a word, emotions.” The party that Ferdinand attends before finally giving up on his boring life of wife and daughter is depicted in flat, symmetrical scenes using strongly-colored gels. The colors are chiefly primaries, and each shot is taken from the same distance, emulating paintings of figures’ top halves while standing against walls discussing products and sounding uncannily like commercials: deodorant, cars, hairspray, etc. The topless women are lost in the wash of the walls and colors, as the bored men stand nearby. Ferdinand, who is seen in nearly none of the shots, seems to be the point of view of these shots.

Godard carefully composes the early scene of Ferdinand and Marianne driving at night with a dark background and swirling primary colors. The lights are similar to passing streetlights, but they have a surreal element to them. Godard divides the scene into a series of shots: Marianne alone, then Ferdinand alone, then both of them, twice through. This scene transitions to a shot of Marianne in bright, outdoor lighting on a boat in bright red and blue colors, signifying a re-genesis of their life together.

In the apartment, we have a twisted musical: Marianne wanders around the rooms singing; we see a bloody corpse on the floor; her bright blue bathrobe shows continuity with her previous scene on the boat in blue; Ferdinand sits in bed ambivalently, smoking, cynical, bored; she continues singing with an imaginary soundtrack playing in the background (we hear it and apparently she hears it, but he doesn’t); she sings of “love with no tomorrow.” She teases Ferdinand, but to no effect.

Then there is a flashback to a murder. The music dies as Marianne strikes her victim on the head with a bottle, which is emphasized with narration: “Silence. Silence.” Following this is a fast-cut montage. The soundtrack orchestration ends when Ferdinand shuts off the car at the gas station and Marianne begins her morbid Laurel & Hardy routine with the attendants, ending with a close-up of a billboard: “TOTAL.”

The film portrays Ferdinand (the man) as defined by action, particularly his own. Marianne (the woman) is defined by her relationship to Ferdinand the man. Yet there remains a degree of co-definition. They narrate together, finishing one another’s sentences.

In general the shots are flat, but with an increasing number of diagonal shots. The accident scene when they pretend they are the victims may have been an influence on Antonioni in The Passenger. Very often full paintings from Renoir, Van Gogh, and Velasquez fill the screen. Many images of America appear: the statue of Liberty, Ford, other American cars, travel destinations (Las Vegas), dollars, space race, etc.

Ferdinand violates the fourth wall rule by speaking directly to the audience, even identifying it as such when Marianne asks whom he’s talking to. Their escapades have no apparent reason or rationale, other than giving Marianne respite from her boredom and allowing Ferdinand to read and gather ideas for his upcoming work. Their position while lying down imply further phallocentrism on her part, identification with Ferdinand. Hints that he reciprocates identification with her are later confirmed. Soon after, he drives a tractor with her sitting on the trailer in tow. He walks above her on a plank while she walks below. He jumps down to her. He orders her, examines her, touches her, while reading aloud. They discuss what they want from each other, and she lists feelings while he says “ideas.” While different both of their lists end with the same word: “everything,” which is reminiscent of “TOTAL.”

“Life” becomes a more important theme of the film as it progresses. A close up of fluorescent-lit letters spelling “VIE” (Fr., “life”) turns out to have been a close-up on the middle of the word “RIVIERA,” a destination Marianna lists among othes that she wants to visit. At one point Marianne talks to the camera, saying that she doesn’t care about anything. All she wants is to live. When she goes missing, still the two of them narrate together as before.

Ferdinand’s close-up journaling reveals him turning the French word for “art” into the French word for “death” – art becoming death, an illustration of the inevitability of Ferdinand’s dreams.

Two things I wish I understood better about this one. First, why “Le Fout”? Synonyms for this are used throughout the film: idiot, stupid, fool, etc. I don’t quite see the significance, other than (possibly) Godard’s own self-effacement. Second, Ferdinand’s last-second (yet too late) hesitation before the dynamite explodes. While this reminds us of the scene at the train when he jumps off the tracks at the last second, why does he hesitate and change his mind? Perhaps it’s no more significant than the lack of decisiveness inherent in a character like Ferdinand. Sure would be cool if someone reading this had seen the movie and could comment. No pressure, though.