[ni'k]

http://movie-critics.ew.com/2010/05/...ilm-at-cannes/

Years ago at Cannes, I attended a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and ended up walking out after 20 minutes — not because I didn’t like the film, but because it was being shown in French without English subtitles. Since most of what I saw consisted of narration, and I barely speak a word of French (in high school, I seemed to know less of the language each year I studied it), it seemed altogether pointless to stay. I assumed, at the time, and naively, that I’d mistakenly wandered into some special category of screening intended for the foreign press. Actually, the movie had only just been completed, and it was being shown without subtitles because Godard had approved it that way. He can be a stubbornly perverse purist and devoted anti-communicator (especially when it comes to Americans). With Godard, though, nothing is simple. This year at Cannes, I saw Film Socialisme, his latest tract/poem/experiment/avant meditation, and this time, too, the French in the movie was spoken without a full translation. But at the bottom of the screen, throughout the film, there appear clusters of words, in English only, that aren’t so much subtitles as slogans and pensées, displayed in cutting counterpoint to the images. (This time, you were out of luck if you didn’t speak English.) Film Socialisme has obscure moments, but it’s (literally) easy to read. That may be because Godard, at 79, has something scaldingly urgent to say, even if it isn’t pretty.
The first half of the movie presents scenes on a cruise ship, which Godard treats just like the spaceship in WALL-E — as a giant, floating metaphor for our passivity and corruption. There are striking, abrasive, raggedly degraded video shots of people dancing in the ship’s disco (the music is distorted into scrapes so that it sounds like electronic torture with a beat); these shots suggest that our entertainment escapes have become a form of madness. Godard presents the passengers on the ship as clueless zombies and happy pawns, and his images have some of the primary-color narcotic sharpness one remembers from Pierrot le Fou (1965) and One Plus One (1968). At the same time, the words and phrases at the bottom of the screen offer an ongoing haiku analysis of our current condition: words like “today bastards sincere” or “aids tool for killing blacks.” Then there are the oversize headlines that really spell things out, like this one: “Palestine: Access Denied.” At one point, the screen flashes (untranslated) Arabic letters in white with Hebrew letters in blood-red superimposed on top of them. Richard Brody, in his magisterial 2008 Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, has acknowledged the filmmaker’s creeping anti-Semitism, and watching Film Socialisme, you don’t need a translation to know what Godard is really saying: that Israel, with regard to the Palestinians, isn’t just in violation — but, rather, that it is a violation.
He’s still cryptic about it, of course, and he lumps Israel in with other “antisocialist” regimes, hectoring the whole world for its litany of injustice. With his leftist-nihilist agitprop laid over an increasingly fractured and depersonalized underground-film vocabulary, Godard is now a strange hybrid — Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky. Late in the movie, he gets some montage going that’s like a deconstructed music video, and you feel the surging pull of his power as a filmmaker. But you also feel one of the key motivations behind his obliqueness, his splintered-cinema techniques: If Jean-Luc Godard actually came right out and said what he was thinking, in all its off-putting extremity and even ugliness, he might knock himself right off his pedestal.


__________________________________________________ __


if we ignore all the time the writer wastes equating criticism of israel with anti semitism, the rest sounds promising.


i know we talked about this before a lot, so it can have its own thread.

[atsonicpark]

Well, Godard's never made a truely bad film in my opinion. Though Detective comes close, that's IT. And at last count, I've seen 55 of his films. I'm just missing some of the shorts...

Notre Musique was a masterpiece, and this looks in the vein of that... I can't wait!

[ni'k]

i added you on facebook.

my friend pestered me to get it, thenwhen i did added a load of people. but it just makes me realise how nearly everyone i know in real life is a fucking idiot.

then i thought, what if, for once, i actually told the truth, and didn't pretend i didn't think they were utter fucking morons.

i might even try it.

[Derek]

I'm gonna add you also cause I'm a cock.

[ni'k]

i just had this moment of clarity and thought "what would my life be like if i didn't pretend to like these people and keep my mouth shut when they talked crap and joined in with their crap in order to be their friends."

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by ni'k

i just had this moment of clarity and thought "what would my life be like if i didn't pretend to like these people and keep my mouth shut when they talked crap and joined in with their crap in order to be their friends."

you'd have no friends

[ni'k]

like their comes a certain point when you realise "this mong is not listening as i try to do my best to politely and reasonably explain why voting for the bnp is not a good idea" or "this fuckmong does not care who any of these bands i am talking about are, because they are not slipknot, and challenge at levels beyond dumb" or "lord monglintard here is not going to appreciate me, anything i have to say, or my personality, because his idea of wit is making fart noises and saying meh and he thinks biffy cylro are an intelligent band".

once when i was told "you just think your better than all of us" i wanted to scream "I FUCKING HOPE SO AND WOULD TRY MY VERY HARDEST TO MAKE THAT THE CASE!"

[ni'k]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

you'd have no friends

yeah exactly but it would be a happy zero.

[ni'k]

i should just approach each one of them and say "i am a stuck up faggot who likes to read books and when you join facebook groups about how "when i was your age freddos were 10p" and "lets get holy diver to no.1 in honour of cancer" and "dont you live it when your drunk and you loose your phone lol" i want to die inside because i realise my life is empty of RL companions that i can respect in anyway."

[ni'k]

most of the time they talk about "emos r faggots lols" "here man lend me a feg" "here hav u evar herd of bill hicks haha wut a legend man" but like 5 of them are in an emo band! maybe im out of touch, but i heard it, and its emo! i guess im not down with the kids anymoar.

"here man we wer sniffin aerosols all nite it wuz class laik here man come out to fuck for a drink with us here man do you want to waste ur life with us here man lets drink and smoke in this small town forever till we all die dont be such a faggot come out to fuck laik come out for a fuckin party laik"

"here man have u seen zietgiest man fuckin rite man. here man have u herd of david icke man fuckin hell man see george bush man theres this video man he's a fuckin reptilian man seriosuly no joke laik look it up laik"

"here man have u seen fight club fuckin class man. man who wants to watch this shite with all the fuckin subtitles. here man do u read terry pratchett fuckin rite man its sweet laik u shud read it laik u'd love it man"

"here man wuts yur favourite band iron maiden or fagtallica lol fagtallica suck man lol"

and the funniest thing is that they are all majorly depressed. "man i dont know what to do im so depressed" wtf do you expect you spend your time watching come dine with me, friends and gavin and stacey of course your gonna be fucking depressed. you actively pride your self in how stupid you are and how ignorant you wish to remain. you watch all that shit and then when it doesnt make you feel happy you think there must be something wrong with you and you go get drunk.

"man dontn be a dick laik dont be all stuck up laik nickleback have some good songs man"

[Keeping It Simple]

Am I the only one who thinks Ni'k's self-absorbed, sanctimonious, spittle-flecked diatribes are SO pathological, he should be sectioned?

[ni'k]

then come try to section me. i can beat you to death with a shovel and tell them the voices told me to do it, i'll be out in no time.

it would almost be worth it if i didn't know you could never show up because you are an overweight 35 year old sex offender whose too busy spending all his time searching for the personal details of female syg'ers so he can skulk around their rubbish bins and use their crusty hardened tampons as a dildo to fuck himself in the urethra with.

[ni'k]

Two days after ducking out of his scheduled press conference, Jean-Luc Godard continues to haunt the wings of the Cannes Palais. There is little hope of arriving at a consensus over his latest (and reputedly last) film. Some say Film Socialism is an eccentric masterpiece; others that it's an eccentric mess. File me in the latter camp. My sense is that old age has soured Godard: he has grown so disdainful of his audience, and society in general, that he can barely be bothered to invite us in anymore. Again, I fear I was duped by the title. Isn't "socialism" about inclusivity, about pulling together and meeting as equals? Film Socialism has no interest in that. It is Godard's arrogant repudiation of the world around him; a burst of lofty non-communication. Crucially, the subtitles are rendered in what he has described as "Navajo English", a kind of semiotic sloganeering that strips out the verbs and teeters on the verge of nonsense. "Spacial form egoism. Empire or tourism." I'm betting the film makes a little more sense in the original French. But only a little.
So anyway, that was Film Socialism with its Navajo English. Some like. Don't like. Morning cloudy. Coffee or juice. Raoul!





hooray! now that obligatory guardian douche has given us his 2 cents you KNOW its gonna be great. if there was any doubt in your mind that this film is going to excellent there can't be anymore, because this guy hates it.

[atsonicpark]

Well, late-period Godard has constantly, always gotten bad reviews from everyone but the French press; the same French press who recognize Slow Motion (his best film), Keep Your Right Up!, In Praise of Love, Oh Woe Is Me, Hail Mary, Notre Musique, etc. as absolute breathtaking works of IMPORTANT art.

I think the big thing is, a lot of critics just flat-out don't understand Godard's work and they usually spend half the review writing a few of the technical processes behind the work, or the history of Godard, or talk about whatever Godard's got going on in his personal life.. rather than reflect on the film itself.

[ni'k]

yeah. see when i first saw le weekend it was bought on dvd on a whim, not knowing what it was. but i read that late period godard was supposedly crap. i read a review of in praise of love that made it seem so awful and bland, like this was just some old has been doing a sad vanity project. so i didnt check out much beyond le weekend and whatever of the earlier works i could find on dvd.

but BAD reviews are what i look for now! if the right idiot writes a bad review of something you know its gonna be great. especially in the guardian.

[Keeping It Simple]

Originally Posted by ni'k

then come try to section me. i can beat you to death with a shovel and tell them the voices told me to do it, i'll be out in no time.

it would almost be worth it if i didn't know you could never show up because you are an overweight 35 year old sex offender whose too busy spending all his time searching for the personal details of female syg'ers so he can skulk around their rubbish bins and use their crusty hardened tampons as a dildo to fuck himself in the urethra with.

Thanks for justifying my point you're a deranged sociopath who needs to be detained under section 4 of the Mental Health Act.

[ni'k]

scooter, are you still under the assumption anyone is going to give you the privilege of feeding your trolling by trying to engage with one of your attempts to troll us down with you into your own depressive spiral of oblivion? hopefully thats been clarified for you now. you just get insulted.

now that thats been said i wont say it again. if there was anyone on this board stupid enough to find what you say remotely non fucktarded then they wouldn't count. the rest of us are not impressed by any of it. we will just insult you, and every attempt you make at dragging us down into a troll battle will be ignored. its not like you are actually ripping on people. you are just being ripped on. when you try to rip on someone here, it always fails, because everyone knows you are the board troll, and so even if the insult was funny, which is impossible for you, noone would be impressed by it our respect your bullying skills. we just insult you and ignore everything else.

you speak in the language of a daily mail columnist. only you fail at it. at something which itself is one of the highest insults know to man. your trying to do a kind of smug middle english wit, but fail at the wit part. its just nasty, in an unappealing way, not in an nasty insulting kind of way. its just fucking stupid. you can't even suceed in the pathetic style of insult you're going for. its like you want to be quentin letts and pull of that kind of self assured english common sense twattery that only a fucking dead mind would find assuring, but you are failing at it. its supposed to be bitingly sharp and spiteful, and have the effect of finishing off the persons line of thought like the best one liners can, making you look smart in the process, in the way that you have turned around what someone was saying into a put down that also makes you look superior to them. but you can't even do it. yet you keep trying, like some idiot using what he thinks is a clever line against everyone that noone has told him doesn't make sense yet. you have 2 variations on it, one is the "pile on the adjectives" approach, like your "self absorbed, sanctimonious, spittle flecked" line at me, and the other is the "your clearly a loonie leftie/deranged sociopath/etc," one. it doesn't work. ever. it's not remotely intelligent. it just makes you look like a parrot who has discovered 2 lines that it thinks spouting endless variants of makes it look clever. you sound like a complete arseburger and have done since you came here. your mind is not functioning well. you desperately need to use it better, or to have some kind of personality breakdown, so you can make some peace with yourself and stop coming across like both a total cunt and a sad loser to everybody.

you don't even deserve to be told were you are going wrong. you should be banned like all trolls should be. so you can fuck off and kill yourself or make some massive personality changes.

[atsonicpark]

Reviews compiled..



Cristina Nord ( Die Tageszeitung Alemania): 8
Fernando Ganzo (Lumiere, España): 10
Gabe Klinger (The Auteurs Notebook, EE.UU.): 10 (It may be 10, it may be a 0... it doesn't matter. It was moving,
infuriating, liberating, painful, beautiful, ugly. In short, nothing
less than we expect from Godard. Not conventional in the least, as
some suspected, and clearly a work with consistent vision and of an
articulate mind, whatever the detractors will inevitably say)
Emmanuel Burdeau (Mediapart, Francia): 9,5
Sergio Wolf (Director artístico de BAFICI, Argentina): 10 (I vote only this time. Wolf)
Leonardo D'Espósito (Crítica de la Argentina, Argentina): 10
Mark Peranson (Cinema Scope, Canada): [when asked about the film] NO COMMENT
Jaime Pena (El Amante, Cahiers du Cinéma España, España): 10.9 (or 11)
Alejandro G. Calvo (Sensacine.com, España): 9
Olivier Père (Director artístico Festival de Locarno, Francia): 10
Carlo Chatrian (Panoramiques, Duellanti, Italia): 9
Diego Batlle (La Nación, Otros Cines, Argentina): 7
Luciano Monteagudo (Página/12, Argentina): 10
Scott Foundas (Filmlinc, EE.UU): 10
Carlos F. Heredero (Cahiers du Cinéma España, España): 8
Eugenio Renzi (Independencia, Francia): 10
Robert Koehler: (Variety, EE.UU.): 10
Roger Alan Koza (La Voz del Interior, Argentina): 10
Gonzalo de Pedro (Cahiers du Cinéma España, Público, España): 10


Quotes:

New York Times' Manohla Dargis writes — in an ArtsBeat blog entry — that her "thoughts on the movie – which looks like it was shot in both low-grade video and high-definition digital – are tentative and, for now, brief," you can't help but suspect that this is the only sane approach. She does get to work on it, mapping out three sections and offering first impressions of each, but on the whole, she's not rushing to judgement: "Clearly, it will take many more viewings of Film Socialism, an improvement in my French and many more fully translated subtitles before I can begin to get a tentative grasp on it. Such are the complicated pleasures of Mr Godard's work: however private, even hermetic his film language can be, these are works that by virtue of that language's density, as well as by their visual beauty and intellectual riddles, invite you in (or turn you off)."

Ben Kenigsberg in Time Out Chicago: "Film Socialisme is stunning to look at — memorable images include a man lecturing to what appears to be an empty auditorium and a boy in a Soviet shirt conducting a phantom orchestra — but it should be said the movie feels more tossed off than Godard's last two features, In Praise of Love (2001) and Notre Musique (2004), in which it was easier to discern a sense of organization. Like the epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Film Socialisme feels like Godard's personal journal, which would make it both ideal and a tad disappointing if it turns out to be a swan song."

"Rage over historical atrocity and America's effect on Europe have corroded Godard's formal focus," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "At this stage in his career, he expects that we expect him to puzzle us, we expect difficulty. He has traveled so far down the experimental rabbit hole that it's unclear whether the final hour, which is set near a filling station then ends a handful of montages, signals laziness or poetic injustice."

Lee Marshall in Screen: "Perhaps Jean-Luc Godard's least narrative production, this occasionally amusing, rarely thought-provoking and ultimately wearing reflection on civilization, language, democracy and llamas seems stuck in a 1960s timewarp, unable to renew the language of a filmmaker who has lost his urgency when compared to many of today's video artists."

"I have not the slightest doubt it will all be explained by some of his defenders, or should I say disciples," blogs Roger Ebert. "Although a commenter on my blog recently made sarcastic remarks about such a shameless liberal as me basking on the Riviera and drinking in Godard's socialism, there is nothing in the film to offend the most rabid Tea Party communicant, who would be hard-pressed to say what, if anything, the film has to say about socialism."

Melissa Anderson for Artforum: "The director returns to the topics that have dominated his film essays for at least twenty years: Israel and Palestine ('staying Haifa / right of return'), the Holocaust, the death of Europe, war. Film Socialisme may, however, be the first Godard work with LOL cats. But probably not the last."

By Peter Bradshaw

"Mischievous and mysterious at all times, Jean-Luc Godard presented Cannes with his latest and possibly even last work, Film Socialism, playing in the Un Certain Regard category: it's a complex fragmented poem of a movie, flashing up on to the screen images, sequences, archive-reel material and, as ever with this film-maker, gnomic slogans and phrases, here in bold, sans-serif capitals, white on black. Flouting the traditional conventions of character and storytelling more thoroughly than in recent work such as Our Music or In Praise of Love, Godard was more than ever concerned with ideas. Perhaps it is absurd to demand of him a moral, or a guiding aesthetic, but as far as one could be divined, it came down to one idealistic statement: "Les idées nous séparent; les rêves nous rapprochent (Ideas divide us; dreams bring us together)".

Film Socialism is indeed like an uncertainly remembered dream. Its first section appears to take place on a cruise ship: various disjointed sequences follow one another; then we shift to a family-owned petrol station somewhere in France. A confrontation between French and German passengers appears to resonate with disputes and tensions within the family; archive film shows searing images from the second world war, from Israel and Palestine, from the modern-day Odessa Steps. On paper, these elements sound exasperating, baffling and banal – and that's certainly how they were received by some. But I found their confrontational quality, and the bold juxtapositions, very resonant. Godard himself did not appear, having sent his apologies from his Swiss home. We have to hope that the 79-year-old is not very sick. Cannes, and cinema, would be duller and dumber without him."

By Xan Brooks

"Two days after ducking out of his scheduled press conference, Jean-Luc Godard continues to haunt the wings of the Cannes Palais. There is little hope of arriving at a consensus over his latest (and reputedly last) film. Some say Film Socialism is an eccentric masterpiece; others that it's an eccentric mess. File me in the latter camp. My sense is that old age has soured Godard: he has grown so disdainful of his audience, and society in general, that he can barely be bothered to invite us in anymore. Again, I fear I was duped by the title. Isn't "socialism" about inclusivity, about pulling together and meeting as equals? Film Socialism has no interest in that. It is Godard's arrogant repudiation of the world around him; a burst of lofty non-communication. Crucially, the subtitles are rendered in what he has described as "Navajo English", a kind of semiotic sloganeering that strips out the verbs and teeters on the verge of nonsense. "Spacial form egoism. Empire or tourism." I'm betting the film makes a little more sense in the original French. But only a little.

So anyway, that was Film Socialism with its Navajo English. Some like. Don't like."

By Owen Gleiberman

"The first half of the movie presents scenes on a cruise ship, which Godard treats just like the spaceship in WALL-E — as a giant, floating metaphor for our passivity and corruption. There are striking, abrasive, raggedly degraded video shots of people dancing in the ship’s disco (the music is distorted into scrapes so that it sounds like electronic torture with a beat); these shots suggest that our entertainment escapes have become a form of madness. Godard presents the passengers on the ship as clueless zombies and happy pawns, and his images have some of the primary-color narcotic sharpness one remembers from Pierrot le Fou (1965) and One Plus One (1968). At the same time, the words and phrases at the bottom of the screen offer an ongoing haiku analysis of our current condition: words like “today bastards sincere” or “aids tool for killing blacks.” Then there are the oversize headlines that really spell things out, like this one: “Palestine: Access Denied.” At one point, the screen flashes (untranslated) Arabic letters in white with Hebrew letters in blood-red superimposed on top of them. Richard Brody, in his magisterial 2008 Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, has acknowledged the filmmaker’s creeping anti-Semitism, and watching Film Socialisme, you don’t need a translation to know what Godard is really saying: that Israel, with regard to the Palestinians, isn’t just in violation — but, rather, that it is a violation.

He’s still cryptic about it, of course, and he lumps Israel in with other “antisocialist” regimes, hectoring the whole world for its litany of injustice. With his leftist-nihilist agitprop laid over an increasingly fractured and depersonalized underground-film vocabulary, Godard is now a strange hybrid — Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky. Late in the movie, he gets some montage going that’s like a deconstructed music video, and you feel the surging pull of his power as a filmmaker. But you also feel one of the key motivations behind his obliqueness, his splintered-cinema techniques: If Jean-Luc Godard actually came right out and said what he was thinking, in all its off-putting extremity and even ugliness, he might knock himself right off his pedestal."

[atsonicpark]

By Todd McCarthy

"If one of the elusive subjects of Jean-Luc Godard’s new “Film Socialisme,” is the problem of communication, then the director himself, who was similarly elusive in Cannes yesterday, is part of the problem. This is a film to which I had absolutely no reaction—it didn’t provoke, amuse, stimulate, intrigue, infuriate or challenge me. What we have here is failure to communicate. Had this three-part video essay taken the form of a newspaper or magazine article, I would have tossed it aside and quickly moved on to other things. But because it’s Godard, we have to attempt to come to terms with it and try to explain it even when the director himself declined to attend Cannes for a press conference, at which he would have rebuffed every attempt to probe its meanings anyway; as the final title card at the end of the film proclaims, “No Comment.” When I pressed some die-hard Godardians to defend the film or explicate its potential meanings, no one could do a very good job of it, and the most common and ominous remark I heard among them was, “I really need to see it again.” I don’t. There are absolutely many difficult and dense works that require repeated viewings or readings to reveal their true and full meanings, but even the most daunting of them at least suggest their stature at first exposure and should presumably inspire, rather than intimidate, one to make return visits.

I can argue either side when it comes to Godard. Intellectually, I can extol him as a cinematic James Joyce, as they both playfully expanded the language, structure and form of their chosen arts and achieved sublime works until, increasingly, flying off into rarified realms into which few could accompany them; the proper view, I think, would be that Godard has been in his inscrutable “Finnegan’s Wake” period for some time now. More personally, I have become increasingly convinced that this is not a man whose views on anything do I want to take seriously. I can neither forget nor forgive Godard’s wish, resourcefully noted by Colin MacCabe in his biography of the director, that the Apollo 13 astronauts would die on their imperiled voyage; this was either the most spurious sort of anti-Americanism or genuinely profound anti-humanism, something that puts Godard in the same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Celine. MacCabe’s biography also made note of the child Godard and Anna Karina might have had but was lost to a miscarriage, and in my idle moments during “Film Socialisme” I wondered if Godard would have been any different an artist or thinker had he been a father. Whereas Godard’s one-time comrade-in-art-and-arms and subsequent favorite whipping boy Truffaut adhered to Jean Renoir’s generosity of spirit, Godard has long since become the mean-minded anti-Renoir, someone who can say nothing good about anyone except himself. Like his film, it’s not a worldview that says anything to me at this point."


..........


And, like I said, nearly every reviewer focused on Godard himself, not the film.

[ni'k]

the man addressing an empty auditorium is the philosopher alain badiou.