Category: Jean-Luc Godard
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French Film: Texts and Contexts – Hayward and Vincendeau, 1990
Michele Lagny, “The feeling gaze: Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938)” – The essay traces some of the context of the film’s release, particularly the way it was somewhat ordained to be a “three-star” film, what with it being an adaptation of a Zola novel, directed by Renoir (hot off of La Grande Illusion), and starring Jean…
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Viewing Log: September 2013 (Vol. I)
Le Jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1939) – A nice little essay by Maureen Turim grounds aspects of the film in a theoretical and critical framework, although she doesn’t delve into psychoanalysis as much as she claims she will at the outset. Or if she uses psychoanalytic categories such as repetition, determinism, and something…
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Viewing Log: August 2013, Vol. I
Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it as simply mise-en-scene, but this is to be expected from 1930s poetic realism. Everything about this is “classic,” exactly what defines the “golden age” of…
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Viewing Log: January 2013
Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) – Other than obligatory and ubiquitous clips, have probably only sat through Breathless twice. What can you say about it that hasn’t already been said ad nauseum? Watch it and you’ll be struck by how deliberately iconic it wants to be. It’s iconic in the secondary sense, for the most part,…
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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…
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Aria: Cinema Plays with Opera
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…
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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.…
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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…
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Alphaville
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…
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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…
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Masculin féminin
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…
Precious Bodily Fluids 