December 29, 2017No Comments

Masculin Feminin – Jean Luc Godard – 1966

Masculin Féminin was made at a time when JLG was shooting two feature films per year. A year earlier, in 1965, he did Pierrot le Fou, a year later, Weekend. Both masterpieces. So the film in question here must be seen in this context, of one lengthy uninterrupted interaction/conversation between JLG and Cinema itself.   

October 27, 2016No Comments

Une femme est une femme, Jean-Luc Godard, 1961

JLG’s most playful film ever, made on the wave of the previously released Breathless, at a time when, as someone put it, he was both in lust after Anna Karina, his fresh wife and the “power” of cinema.

The film is filled with formal gags, music goes on and off at odd times keeping you alert at all times, colour matches between props and characters abound, characters are constantly changing their mood and direction, borrowing a lot from absurd theatre, but in a joyous almost silly way.

Still feels fresh as fuck after more than 50 years!

May 3, 2016No Comments

Le Mepris, Jean Luc Godard, 1963

Since I am sharing life with a Cannes Film Festival freshly selected woman director, and since I will be joining her to Cannes this year, as a silly piece of simultaneously under and overdressed accessory, seeing the film on which the festival’s latest poster is based remains my only chance of hiding a conversation starter up my sleeve. 

Le Mépris (Contempt / Disprețul) couldn’t have had a better title. Godard is clearly mocking my Cannes thrills. 

Yes, as usual, it’s a film about films. Can’t get any more clear than that from it’s first frame, when the film’s credits are narrated by a voice over (who’s even delivering a quote from A.Bazin to fantastic disconcerting effect), while a camera tracks in towards the audience. The effect is brilliant. BUT. It’s also a film whose key to understanding lays almost completely outside it, in its wild tales of production springing from the ideological war between Godard as the Artist and B.Bardot and the film’s producers as the Sell-outs. 

In an almost sadistic fashion, Godard wanted to make a big-budget star-led film just so he can make the complete opposite, an endless commentary on, as he puts it, “the story of castaways of the Western world…who one day reach a mysterious island, whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery.”

  • It’s a film where Fritz Lang acts as himself, a film director. (Lang, at the time, was apparently half blind). Meta!
  • After main shooting ended, Godard was forced by producers to shoot and insert extra scenes showing nude instances of Bardot.
  • Mirroring to some extent a couple’s subjective time experience from the bedroom scene in his previous Breathless, there’s a 34 minute scene between Bardot and her character’s husband, the tormented screenwriter.
  • sadistic use of same music theme over and over, at times to the detriment of dialogue that goes under, makes the case for the ceaseless attack on your poor suspended disbelief. 
  • a performer sings on a stage, and four characters talk from time to time. The song performed is cut abruptly, enough to let the character say a line, only to be resumed immediately after.

So yeah, I’m game, I’ll be hard, I’ll engage people directly on the Western world’s mysterious lack of mystery. But then I’ll just have me some of that naked bodies on display out there, be it art or not.

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