tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45082759482525357042024-02-08T11:53:38.431-08:00La Nouvelle Vague (The French New Wave)Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-20828442788095368062008-12-11T08:18:00.000-08:002008-12-13T12:23:19.106-08:00Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde: The Marriage of Technique and ThemeThe opportunity to see <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Arthur</span> Penn's BONNIE & CLYDE in an unadulterated and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">contiguous</span> form (that is without censorship and commercial interruptions) brought forth the ability to see certain striking cinematic stylistics and risk taking performances. I was particularly taken with the opening shot and the opening sequence of the film. After the opening credit montage of what appeared to be <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">authentic</span> snapshots of the real Bonnie and Clyde there is a magnificently complex opening shot that begins with a close up of Bonnie (Faye <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Dunaway</span></span>) applying red lipstick to her lips. The shot then shifts into a close up of Bonnie's face and then pulls back to reveal that we are looking at her face as reflected in a mirror. This opening shot, although seemingly a simplistic affair, actually required two focus pulls, a short pan and a zoom out all of which had to be perfectly timed with the rhythm of Bonnie's movements. It is interesting from a technical point of view because of the high degree of difficultly of getting the rhythms of the camera movement and the rhythms of the body of the actor to synchronize so that there wouldn't be any distracting distortions of focus or detail. Here, Penn and his cinematographer Burnett <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Guffey</span></span> (The Harder They Fall - 1956) are establishing the fact that this film will not settle for an easy way out of specific details that other traditional Hollywood films would do. The technical <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">dexterity</span> and determination has a thematic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">corollary</span> in the overall design of the picture; that is that Bonnie & Clyde will attempt something different and will go boldly and frankly towards that difference in its presentation of the sexual and violent nature of its story. Where other Hollywood 'professionals' and those from the old guard would have easily simplified this opening shot by turning it into a single medium close up of Bonnie in the mirror- Penn and his cinematographer (and by <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">extension</span>, Warren <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Beatty</span></span> as producer and Dede Allen as editor) chose to announce the boldness of the entire film with a boldly complicated opening shot. In short, their technique is signifying their theme conceptualization of the story. If we move beyond the technique of the opening shot we find that there is a sexual suggestiveness which has Bonnie's lips in full close up with red lipstick as if she were kissing all of the male members of the audience; the shot establishes a raw and rare intimacy between actor and spectator in a non-pornographic film. For as the opening shot melds into the opening scene we discover that Bonnie is nude and alone in her bedroom. The opening sequence becomes a dance (or rather a stripped tease) between the naked Bonnie and the observing camera. Every edit to a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">different</span> camera position <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">entices</span> the male audience member with the notion that he might see Bonnie's naked breasts, a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">wisp</span> of pubic hair, her buttocks, etc... Yet, Bonnie remains elusive, turning her body away from the camera just before it gets to its next position so that "the goods" are kept just out of our eye's reach. Her to-be-looked-at ness, to borrow the phrase from Laura Mulvey, is a window through which we might see the entire film. When she looks out of the window, part of the window frame bars us from seeing her breasts, frustrating our desire, but igniting the hope that the next camera shot will give "it" to us. The reverse camera shot from Clyde's perspective when he looks up at Bonnie in the window-proxies our desires to Clyde, because unlike us the audience members whose view is controlled by the camera, Clyde is free to see all of Bonnie. He can see her nudity, her pubic area, her breasts; he can see all of the goods and thus Clyde becomes the proxy of audience male desire. This is an important <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">transference</span> for the film since Clyde's sexual dysfunction later in the film further frustrates those males who might want Clyde to slide into Bonnie for their own sake. But, it is not that Clyde is sexually dysfunctional, but rather that Clyde is a virgin. He is a virgin adult male and this is what makes <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Beatty's</span></span> performance of the virgin adult male all the more shocking since he would have been climbing up to the height of his stardom as a "Hollywood Hunk" at the time of the film's production and release. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Beatty</span></span> played against his own growing star persona with his portrayal of the adult male virgin in Clyde Barrow. In deference to Mulvey, Beatty also presents his to-be-looked-at-ness in his demeanor, style of dress, the archetiture of his upper body which is on display when he is in his wife-beater tee-shirt and although he is not disrobed to the degree of Dunaway, we have to acknowledge that the female spectator was also given a raw and imtimate -albeit psychological- look at masculinity. Clyde's virginity is confirmed for us after he and Bonnie finally do make love and Clyde asks her, in a moment of post-coital giddiness, if this is the way," you're supposed to feel after," it. Here we realize that Clyde has never had sexual intercourse before and their previous sexual attempts were <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">masturbatory</span> instead of penetration. Such a dramatization of male sexual inexperience is theme that had never been touched on before in American cinema. In fact, Mike Nichols, The Graduate which was to come out in January 1968, six months after Bonnie & Clyde follows a theme of male sexual inexperience, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">humiliation</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">disturbance</span> that would continue through John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). So I admire this film both for its visual technique which announced its boldness and distinction from previous traditional Hollywood cinematic techniques as well as the film's overall boldness in its presentation of male sexual inexperience in an era of increasing sexual freedom.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-68119624004466814102008-12-03T08:54:00.001-08:002008-12-04T16:24:58.804-08:00The Negative Vision and Post-War Pessimism in Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKENDAs the words," End of cinema," melds into the "Visa <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">de</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Controle</span>" official stamp of approval for exportable French films at the end of Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Luc</span> Godard's WEEKEND (1967) one is left to contemplate the bitter taste of Godard's deliberately negative vision of life in France and western culture twenty-plus years after WWII. Godard seems here to be the first in a line of European art film directors to create a negative '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">magum</span> opus'; a nihilistic and deliberately harsh view of the world. Following Godard a few years later was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Antonioni's</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ZABRISKIE</span> POINT (1970) with its student protests and those unforgettably beautiful <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">stylistized</span> explosions shot at incredible speeds in wide screen <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">panavision</span> to capture the details of the girl Daria's view of the destruction of bourgeois materialism. Several years later was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Pasolini's</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">SALO</span> (1975) which was another negative, brutal and harsh view of the world. And following <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Pasolini</span> several years later was Robert <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Bresson's</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">L'ARGENT</span> (1983) yet another view of a world reduced to money, materialism, murder and mayhem. Was it the promises of a humanism unfulfilled after the horrors of WWII that seemed to fuel these director's negative statements; these self-consciously determined pessimistic views of the world? It is particularly curious when we look at the early work of these directors and see a romantic, spiritually uplifting, or rebounding humanism and then we come to these darker films- some of them are even final films like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Pasolini's</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">SALO</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Bresson's</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">L'ARGENT</span>. Yet with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Bresson</span> at least we can see that his pessimism developed by degrees starting with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">MOUCHETTE</span> (1967) and increasing with each subsequent film, but with Godard, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Pasolini</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Antonioni</span> this negative vision is so sudden, so startling that one often looks for external biographical information as a means for explaining why their films turned so horrifically negative. With <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Pasolini</span> one is quick to identify the marriage of his beloved <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Nineto</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Davoli</span> and the impossibility of own romantic fulfillment at the impetus for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">SALO</span>. Although we find that this would be only one contributing factor and certainly is not satisfactory for explaining <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">SALO</span> or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Pasolini's</span> intentions with that film. For <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Antonioni</span> we have little biographical information to attribute to his negative vision, but instead that he had come to America as an explorer and what he found was already extant in the youth, the culture and the times. A similar method informs <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Bresson's</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">L'ARGENT</span> in that he was merely capturing the changes that he had noticed in contemporary 1983 as compared with his immediate post-war experiences. Society was changing and not for the better. Yet with Godard and WEEKEND one is quick to use his divorce from Anna Karina as an impetus for his dark vision. If PIERROT LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">FOU</span> was "the last romantic couple" as he suggested in many interviews, then WEEKEND is a deliberate inversion of PIERROT LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">FOU</span> with a husband and wife on the run- but not for adventure, not to escape the constraints of bourgeois conformity and materialism- but instead the couple is on the run as a plot to secure and get insurance money from a relative before they die. There is even a subplot that involves the husband plotting to get rid of the wife and the wife plotting to get rid of the husband after they have received the insurance money. What makes WEEKEND so disturbing is that it is relentless in its view of society governed, controlled and manipulated by money and materials. People are merely soul-less automatons, arguing and fighting with each other over tiny bumps and dings to their cars, blood curdling screams after an accident not for the loss of life, but for the loss of a designer handbag. Emotions are displaced onto materials. People are identified by the designer clothes they wear or the cars they drive. The class struggle is reduced to the hurling of insults back and forth after a car accident between a farmer and a young bourgeois couple as static and disinterested witnesses look on without intervention. Make no mistake about it, WEEKEND is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">reducio</span> ad <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">absurdism</span>. Interestingly, unlike Ferdinand and Marianne in PIERROT LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">FOU</span> who tell stories to finance their poetic and wild adventures across the land, in WEEKEND Corinne (Mirelle <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Darc</span>) and Roland (Jean <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Yanne</span>) have stories told to them, stories that don't interest them, stories that don't tell them anything that they want to know. They are read passages from French Revolutionary manifestos, the parable of the pebble, passages from Aime <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Cesaire's</span> anti-<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Colonialist</span> poem, a discourse on Mozart and Modern music, nothing interests them except money and they'll stop at nothing to get it. Even after the two have lost their way and joined a cannibalistic cult in the woods WEEKEND continues its assault on Modernity, civilization. And yet unlike <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">Pasolini's</span> intentionally irredeemable <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">SALO</span>- there is something that redeems Godard's negative vision- a certain something in Godard's soul that could not be suppressed even for this his most negative film: his wicked humor. WEEKEND is a very funny film with punchlines as much visual as they are in dialogue drawn at the very end of Godard's episodes. Consider the Anal-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">yse</span> sequence where Corinne goes into explicit detail about a three way sexual experience (eggs, masturbation and all) and at the end of it the psychoanalyst (her lover) asks her to stop talking and "work him up"- as if he wasn't worked up enough already! The hilarious "scenes from Parisian Life" sequence among the kid with bow, Corinne, Roland and the kid's mother after he bumps her car. It's like something out of a farce they way they fight and insult one another. Every episode in WEEKEND is staged like a Jacques <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">Tati</span> film gone mad! Is it a coincidence that both WEEKEND and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">Tati's</span> PLAYTIME were filmed in 1967? In Tati's PLAYTIME we watch as Mr. Hulot (Tati's Everyman Francais) is both amazed and disturbed by the so-called modern transformations of consumer society with its plastic chairs and impersonal rapidity. We, the audience, are placed in the position of a bemused Mr. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">Hulot</span> in Godard's WEEKEND- but this isn't playtime- its a nightmare with jokes thrown in. And isn't there something so delicious about the ending of WEEKEND where the wife eats the freshly cooked meat as the cult leader explains that it is the flesh of," a couple of English tourists and a little bit of your husband for flavor"! Quickly, Corinne tells the cook to save her some more of the meat for later. In WEEKEND Godard presents his most pessimistic view of the finality of post-war society having abandoned its humanism in favor of materialism, consumerism and capitalism, but he lets us in on the joke. Bon anniversaire, Jean-Luc!Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-9003888778828302092008-12-01T11:30:00.001-08:002008-12-02T08:56:13.346-08:00Two or Three Things I Know About Him: The Misogynistic Tendencies in Godard's 60's Films?We have been avoiding it like an 800 pound gorilla in the screening room. Although many of us (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Cineit</span></span></span>, Two Weeks from Everywhere, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Tlog</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Bitle</span></span></span>) have glibly acknowledged the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">misogynistic</span> tendencies in some of the Godard films we have been watching, we have not been willing to openly discuss the issue at length with honesty and clarity. I have already noted that in BREATHLESS the issue of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">misogyny</span> is <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">inextricably</span> linked to Godard's use of the "Femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Fatale</span></span></span>" of film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">noir</span></span></span> and the portrait of the late 50's/early 60's woman's search for independence from patriarchal-<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">familial</span> oppression. Ambitious women were forced to choose between their love lives and their careers, much the same way as today's women find themselves making the same choices <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">albeit</span> without such fatal consequences. Patricia in BREATHLESS snitched on Michel for reasons of 'common sense', rationality and the fact that she had surmised from that long intimate apartment scene with him that their love and his life would not last very long. Patricia made the decision any woman in her position would have had to make: Michel had to be sacrificed if she wanted to go on living- independently. In Godard's subsequent film, LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">PETIT</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">SOLDAT</span></span></span> with Anna Karina we do not see this 'femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">fatale</span></span></span>' motif used as the Karina's character of Veronica is caught in the web of French government and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">FLN</span></span></span> spying and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">counter spying</span>. If fact, her death (by torture no doubt) is held off-screen, sparing us the details and the sentimentality. But with LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">CARABINIERS</span></span></span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">UNE</span></span></span> FEMME EST <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">UNE</span></span></span> FEMME and continuing through to CONTEMPT and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">MASCULIN</span></span></span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">FEMININ</span></span></span> women occupy a tenuous position in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Godardian</span></span></span> cinematic world. Under Godard's gaze the woman has three faces as 1) a victim of male patriarchy ( Nana in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">VIVRE</span></span></span> SA VIE or the 'Seductresses 3rd class in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">ALPHAVILLE</span></span>), 2) a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">nouvelle</span></span></span> femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">fatale</span></span></span> placing her ambition above her relationship with a man (as BREATHLESS, MASCULINE/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">FEMININ</span></span></span>) or 3) the cause or the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">insigator</span></span></span> of bourgeois ideals, materialism, artistic and moral vacuity (as Venus and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Cleopatre</span> in LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">CARABINIERS</span>, Camille in LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">MEPRIS</span></span></span> (Contempt) or Juliette in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">DEUX</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">OU</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">TROIS</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">CHOSES</span></span></span> QUE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">JE</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">SAIS</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">D'ELLE</span></span></span> (Two or Three Things I Know About Her). Interestingly, in CONTEMPT Paul blames his artistic vacuity on Camille. He claims that he got the apartment and wants to provide (presumably) the bourgeois ideals for Camille. Yet in the film Camille makes it a point of saying how fondly she remembers when Paul was just a writer and the two of them lived in a small apartment with nothing. Thus, it was Paul who was reaching for the bourgeois ideals, but when he failed or had a crisis of conscious he would blame Camille. He did this by asking," Do you like the apartment?" Goading her into agreeing so that he might absolve himself for having sold his integrity to someone like the sleazy American producer Jeremy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Pokosch</span></span></span>. In Two or Three Things, Godard seems to be again placing the onus of blame for bourgeois materialism on the female, in the sense that it is the woman who prostitutes herself to afford the luxuries beyond her or her husband's means. More than this, because the male characters in Two or Three Things concern themselves with politics and current events, Juliette's shopping, prostituting and general empty existence is all the more unfavorably juxtaposed with the men's activities. It is as if Godard could not acknowledge that there were men who were also 'buying' into the bourgeois ideals of the new consumer society. Juliette was not alone in wanting these ideals of consumer society. Although he whispers his observations about the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Gaullist</span></span></span> regime's changes to "Elle: The Paris region" his film only shows us a gender partitioned view of these changes. So although Godard alternates his presentation of the female throughout his 60's films there is a preponderance of criticism leveled at the female for being the instigator or the cause of the blind acceptance of bourgeois ideals and materialism. Such criticism is problematic only in so far as it excludes the man from the pursuit of these ideals or allows the man to blame the woman for his pursuit as Paul tried to do in CONTEMPT. Perhaps these tendencies are not so much <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">misogynistic</span> as they are <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">chauvinistic</span> in that we are given only one gender as the object of the critique. Yet with WEEKEND Godard seems to change again and allow the man to share some of the blame, so that it might be more prudent to say that Godard constantly alternates the relationship of gender to materialism and bourgeois ideals in such a way that one film cannot contain or express the whole of his criticism. Considering the fact that Karina in Godard's last film with her, MADE IN THE USA played a gun-wielding "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">bogart</span>-like" character it would seem that we have to accept the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">chauvinism</span> of the previous films as expressions of the era in which the films were made. Just as one as to accept the explicit racism in John Ford's THE SEARCHERS as an expression of the racism inherent in American society in the 1950's so also might we see those <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">chauvinistic</span> tendencies in Godard's work of the 1960's as reflective of French society at that time.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-68722158997318487452008-11-22T11:22:00.000-08:002008-11-28T11:18:50.064-08:00Associational Narrative Form in Godard's MASCULIN/FEMININMy initial reaction to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">MASCULIN</span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">FEMININ</span> after the screening was one of perplexity and stupefaction. I thought that the film was," all over the place," and lacked a certain thematic unity that could be discerned in all of Godard's previous films no matter how far he might have digressed from the plot. But my previous post on the elided scene of Paul's death has now caused me to re-examine <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">MASCULIN</span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">FEMININ</span> (Henceforth simply M/F) after wrestling with the film in my head for several hours last night. <strong>Now</strong> I believe that what Godard has accomplished within M/F is the exploration and expansion of a new type of cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">narrational</span> form that I call: associational narrative form. It is called associational because the concept is similar to Sergei Eisenstein's theory of association montage, but practiced not at the level of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">justapositioning</span> of shots, but instead at the level of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">mise</span>-en-scene and the juxtaposition of dramatic actions within a scene. Eisenstein described association montage as the combination of shots as means of creating," chains of psychological associations... As a means for pointing up a situation emotionally." (1) He uses an example from his film STRIKE to illustrate the concept: In STRIKE," the montage of the killing of the workers is actually a cross montage of this carnage with the butchering of a bull in an abattoir. Though the subjects are different, "butchering" is the associative link. This made for a powerful emotional intensification of the scene." (ibid) Despite critic Andre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Bazin's</span> vehemence against montage and his oversimplification of Eisenstein's concepts we have seen this form of associative montage before in the opening of Charlie Chaplin's MODERN TIMES (e.g. workers and sheep) and of course Francis Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW (e.g. The butchering of Colonel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Kurtz</span> and the slaughtering of a water buffalo). In both instances there is a powerful intensification of emotion wrought from the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">justaposition</span> of the different, yet associatively similar shots. In MODERN TIMES there is the emotion of humor elicited from the juxtaposition and of course in APOCALYPSE NOW there is the emotion of 'horror'. But knowing that Godard and the other New Wave directors were all put in a rather precarious position <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">vis</span>-a-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">vis</span> montage and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Bazin's</span> "democratic" <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">mise</span>-en-scene there was a concerted effort to find new ways of cinematic expression without resorting to Soviet-style montage aesthetics or repeating the deep focus <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">mise</span>-en-scene of Welles and Renoir. Of all the French New Wave directors we know that Godard explored and experimented the most within these two parameters, adapting and changing his style with almost reckless abandon; opening new stylistic door ways and seeming to dare anyone to go through them. M/F presents us with another one of these <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">sytlistic</span> doorways by applying the notion of association montage to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">mise</span>-en-scene and dispensing with classical cinematic narrative.<br />Quickly, in Classical cinematic narrative form every scene has a direct causal relationship to the preceding scene that endorses the purposive conveyance of dramatic information; that is, there is the deliberate organization of dramatic information from the end of one scene through to the next scene rather like Stanislavsky's concept of the "spine" of the play. In fact, this purposive conveyance follows from the tradition of the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Elizabethan</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">theatrical</span> tradition where dramatic action was both physically unified under the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">proscenium</span> arch and thematically <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">unified</span> via the causal relationship of scenes and Acts to one another. For instance, Act 1: Scene 1 of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Shakespeare's</span> Macbeth introduces the three witches who <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">announce</span> that they will meet again to," meet with Macbeth," thereby establishing a causal relationship and dramatic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">purposiveness</span> to Scene 2 which describes Macbeth's military achievements on behalf of the king. Thus, each scene has a direct causal relationship to the next via the movement of dramatic material within one scene that builds on that initial movement- gaining in momentum through various scenes and Acts until the climax: the showdown with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Macduff</span> and the beheading of Macbeth.<br />It is my contention that what Godard has done in M/F is that he has dispensed with that form of classical cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">narrational</span> form which was borrowed from the theatre that I have previously described and he has created a full length associational narrative form; a narrative form where the causal relationship of purposive dramatic action from scene to scene has been muted in favor of presenting a juxtaposition of various dramatic actions within a scene that involves a rich interplay between the principal characters and background characters that the story is not following in contiguity. For instance, in the opening cafe scene where Paul (Jean-Pierre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Leaud</span>) introduces himself to Madeleine (Chantal Goya) and the two discuss a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">mutual</span> friend, the scene changes from a series of perpendicular counter-shots to a wide angle reverse shot of the cafe which has Madeleine and Paul balanced on opposite sides of the frame in the foreground and another couple with a child seated together at table in the background. (2) The husband and wife are in great emotional distress and the sound of Paul and Madeleine's conversation is muted as the background sound of the husband and wife's argument in brought forward on the soundtrack. This is a deliberate inversion of what is known as the point of audition where," the choice was between a [sound] recording that <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">duplicated</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">the</span> camera position, so that the volume given the dialogue would change as the picture cut, say, from a close up to a full shot, and one that would insist on the independence of the audio from the pictures, keeping the microphone close to the mouths of the characters even when they were seen from far away." (3) In the case of this opening scene in M/F Godard has chosen to increase the volume of characters who are the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">furthest</span> away from the camera and decrease the volume of the main characters who are in the foreground of the shot. It is in this way that the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">mise</span>-en-scene is being split into two planes of dramatic space instead of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">using</span> two different shots (e.g. one of Paul and Madeleine and another of the the couple). The scene continues with the husband angrily leaving out of the cafe with the child and the wife going back to the table for her purse. She pulls out a gun and rushes outside of the cafe and shoots him in the back. He falls dead. She throws the gun down and runs away with the child. Here we are given two different dramatic events that are not organized by a plot, but instead have been associated together via <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">mise</span>-en-scene, camera placement, and soundtrack emphasis. The beginning of one relationship between a young couple is juxtaposed with the destruction of the relationship of an older couple. By associating the two circumstances via <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">mise</span>-en-scene instead of montage the spectator is forced into a different relationship with the film. The spectator cannot look for classical purposive dramatic action within a scene, but must now re-orientate themselves to a form of narration where different circumstances are divided within the frame and contrasted with each other. Associational narration form in M/F as the duel effect of 1) forcing a comparison and contrast between the two circumstances which expands the narration from that of simply a set of characters to the relationship between a set of characters and their environment; and 2) introduces a higher degree of fatalism within the film as the associations build up resonances that seem to impinge upon the characters by the film's end.<br />This associational narrative form had also been practiced <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">briefly</span> in earlier French New Wave films. In Agnes <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Varda's</span> CLEO <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">de</span> 5 a 7, the first cafe sequence (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Chapitre</span> 2: Angele <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">de</span> 17h:08 a 17h:13) where Cleo meets with her personal assistant Angele and is upset over her tarot card reading and her impending cancer test results. When she finally calms down and orders a coffee, she drinks it as Angele engages in a discussion <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">with</span> the cafe manager off-screen. The camera moves in closer to frame Cleo as she drinks on the right hand side of the image and on the left side of the image we can see a couple at another table behind her breaking up. The effect is much the same as in Godard's M/F but here Cleo's anxiety is compared with her assistant who doesn't think the situation is that grave and her anxiety is contrasted with the couple whose love is falling apart. Cleo relationship to her environment is emphasized between the sound of her assistant telling a story and the sound and image of the couple breaking up next to her. The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">mise</span>-en-scene has been split in two on the image track and in three on the sound track. There is a fatalism increased in these associations that eventually resonate within the character as the film reaches its finale. Thus, via camera placement and the emphasis of sound (first on the assistant's voice and then on the dialogue between the couple) associational narration juxtaposes <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">mise</span>-en-scene to break up the causal relationship of classical narration. Godard explored associative narration in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">VIVRE</span> SA VIE (the machine gun fire in a cafe as well as Karina observing a happy couple at a table next to her) and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">UNE</span> FEMME <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">MARIEE</span> (as Charlotte overhears two young girls discussing sex and boys behind her at a cafe). Yet in M/F Godard pushed this narrative form to the forefront by using the technique beyond simple cafe scenes. The scene on the Metro which <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">quotes</span> Leroy Jones' THE DUTCHMAN is played out as Paul looks on at the two black men and the white girl. Also when a man threatens Paul with a knife and then uses it to kill himself or when Robert distracts a military chauffeur while Paul paints an anti-Vietnam slogan on his car. Each one of these examples does not have a direct causal relationship to the scenes which proceed them but instead builds up a chain of associations that cannot be resolved until the end of the film.<br />The true meaning of associational narrative form is not found in the sequential order of the narrative where scenes build upon previous scenes, but instead the meaning is suspended until the final scene or final actions or circumstances that we witness happening to the principal characters. Only at the finale of an associational narrative does the spectator have the opportunity to fully assess the meaning of the various dramatic juxtapositions. During the film one only encounters the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">startling</span> effect of the juxtapositions as when the man stabs himself in front of Paul in M/F, but after the final scene one can recognize both the associational structure and discern its meaning which is usually (but not always) a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">pre</span>-figuration of the fate of the principal characters. In M/F it is the theme of murder and/or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">pre</span>-determined suicide that prefigures Paul's murder or suicide at the end of the film. The narcissism of a pop-star is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">pre</span>-figured in Madeleine by Bridget <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">Bardot</span> learning her lines for a play in the cafe scene as well as the interview with a consumer product scene. Thus, associational narration is a process of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">pre</span>-figuring the fate of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">principal</span> characters via the observed fates of background characters; it is a process whose meaning or thematic associations are not fully revealed until the finale of the film.<br /><div align="left">Finally, another important feature of the associational narrative is episodic construction or the use of scenes as independent episodes that fade out or cut to black and stand separated from the preceding or following scenes as self-contained narrative units. We see an episodic construction in Cleo <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">de</span> 5 a 7, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">Vivre</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">sa</span> Vie, and in M/F. Episodic construction is yet another means to insure that the film's scenes are not to be read as having a direct causal relationship to preceding or following scenes since the episodes can begin and end arbitrary to the plot and don't have to adhere to a strictly contiguous linear temporal order. I believe Godard employed this strategy in M/F as a means of finding a balance between <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">Bazinian</span> aesthetics and the significance of montage to cinematic expression. We know that Godard was at pains to reconcile his allegiance to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_58">Bazinian</span> aesthetic notions of long take and democratization of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_59">mise</span>-en-scene with his knowledge of montage as an important <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_60">syntactical</span> function of cinematic expression. His ideas about associational narration can be seen germinating as early as 1956 in his article, Montage My Fine Care, which he wrote for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_61">Cahiers</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_62">du</span> Cinema. In the article Godard states that," if direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both: but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time... talking of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_63">mise</span>-en scene automatically implies montage." (4) Here we can see that Godard realized the importance of montage and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_64">mise</span>-en-scene as expressive tools of cinematic narration and that he could effectively alternate between the two <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_65">principles</span> by emphasizing one or the other within a single film. Associational narration is attempt to practice montage at the level of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_66">mise</span>-en-scene by juxtaposing different dramatic events between the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_67">principal</span> characters and the background characters within a single scene. Instead of cutting to various shots, aspects of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_68">mise</span>-en-scene are "enlarged" (e.g. the use of sound in M/F or the use of titles in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_69">Une</span> Femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_70">Mariee</span>) to create the juxtaposition in a unified field of view. The murder or suicide of Paul at the end of M/F forces the spectator to see these juxtapositions as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_71">pre</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_72">figurations</span> of the final circumstances of a principal character whose fate is that of death.<br /></div><div align="center"><br /><strong>NOTES</strong> </div><div align="left"><br />(1) Page 57, FILM FORM, Sergei Eisenstein. Harvest. New York. 1949<br />(2) Godard is again here deliberately avoiding the use of a standard shot reverse-shot sequence by shooting Madeleine in a straight on medium shot and Paul from a side angle medium shot of his profile.<br />(3) Page203, FILM PRODUCTION THEORY, Jean-Pierre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_73">Geuens</span>, State University of New York Press, Albany. 2000.</div><div align="left">(4) Page 39, Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_74">Da</span> Capo, New York 1972.</div>Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-18670214865333785712008-11-21T08:52:00.000-08:002008-11-22T11:22:22.646-08:00The Evil Behind a Pretty Face: Godard's MASCULIN/FEMININThere are many events within Godard's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">MASCULIN</span></span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">FEMININ</span></span> that are intended to shock the viewer: 1) the murder of a husband by a distraught wife; 2) the self-<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">immolation</span> of a Vietnam war <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">protester</span>; 2) the two homosexuals kissing in a movie theatre; 3) the use of Leroy Jones dialogue from his play DUTCHMEN on the train; 4) The man who stabs himself in the abdomen- but by far, in my opinion, the most shocking event within <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">MASCULIN</span></span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">FEMININ</span></span> occurs not only off-screen but in a scene cut out from the film: the death of the main character Paul (Jean-Pierre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Leaud</span></span>). In the final interview scene with Paul's emerging pop singer girlfriend, Madeleine (Chantal Goya) we get the tail end of a description of Paul's 'accidental death' from falling out of a high rise apartment while trying to take photos (presumably of Madeleine) by Catherine-Isabelle. When she leaves the room, Madeleine is brought in and quickly says that what Catherine had said about the way Paul died was correct. She had nothing more to add. When she was questioned about her <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">pregnancy</span> and what she was going to do she mentions that Catherine had told her about using a curtain rod (presumably to inflict an abortion) and the camera holds Madeleine's sweet and beautiful countenance for a few silent moments before fading to black. The End. What is shocking here is that doesn't seem truthful that Paul died this way... One gets the feeling from the emotionless delivery of the cold facts that both Catherine and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Madeliene</span></span> were lying to cover up for something sinister. In fact, because Godard does not show us this death scene (as he had been so careful to show us in his previous films) the truth of the interview is held in desperate <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">ambivalence</span> from our knowledge of the Paul character whom we have followed throughout the film up until that point. Was Paul led out to the balcony under some pretense and pushed? But why and by whom? If there was something sinister about Paul's demise, then we have only our previous observations of the main characters to drawn on. The fact that during an interview earlier in the film between Paul and Madeleine we learn that Madeleine would consider her self to be the "center of the world" and her constant narcissism in front of the mirror says more about the motivations for her involvement with Paul's death than could be explained with standard Hollywood exposition. That Madeleine and Paul's relationship had been <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">deteriorating</span> in the last third of the film along with ascension of her career brings us back to the independent woman who thwarts the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">patriarchal</span> structure by 'getting rid of the man in her life' as in BREATHLESS. Again this is a different presentation of the 'femme-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">fatale</span></span>' that had been previously understood from film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">noir</span></span>. In film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">noir</span></span> the female is somehow involved in the criminal activity of the man and has to 'throw him over' so to speak to enrich her self; greed becomes a significant motivation for the classic femme-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">fatale</span></span>. (See: Wilder's Double Indemnity, for instance) But in Godard's (re)-presentation of the femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">fatale</span></span> her reasons for 'throwing the man over' have to do with her <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Independence</span> in the modern world, her ambition to become something in real life that causes the man to become a burden. In BREATHLESS Patricia (as a new femme-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">fatale</span></span>) wanted to become a journalist. But in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">MASCULIN</span></span>/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">FEMININ</span></span> isn't it true that Madeleine wanted to be a pop singer more than anything, even love itself? Of course, I am making more of this speculation than could perhaps be discerned from the film itself, but the coldness, the almost clinical discussion of the fact of Paul's demise by the friend of his girlfriend and then his girlfriend who adds nothing personal to her witnessing his death makes the film end on a note of circumspection that itself cannot be denied. That Madeleine would contemplate using a curtain rod to abort their child now that he is gone betrays something 'ghastly' in her personality and something hideous emerging in the youth culture at that time: blinding ambition. The gender roles that were being investigated in Godard's film reveals how the changing roles of women literally destroy the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">preeminence</span> of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">patriarchy</span> by destroying the man; he is not rescued, he is not mourned he is simply dispatched without emotion. It is interesting that both BREATHLESS and MASCULIN/FEMININ have final shots of a woman's face; a face that was perhaps rightly described by feminist critic Laura Mulvey as," The Janus Face of the Female in the films of Jean-Luc Godard." Man <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">might've</span> learned how to kill without emotion on the battlefield, but women learned how to kill a man at home without emotion also.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-19048498062484585452008-11-20T08:10:00.000-08:002008-11-27T08:25:57.035-08:00Godard/Meta-Narrative/Pierrot Le FouAnother viewing of Godard's Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Fou</span></span> (1965) has finally allowed me to be able to articulate what has fascinated me so much with this particular Godard film. I have been fascinated with Godard's strategy of meta-narration. The concept of meta-narration is simple enough to explain, it is narration about the act of narration. Meta-narration is analogous to the use of a meta-language. For instance when you learn a foreign language often times you have to have the foreign language explained to you in your native language. If you were learning French some French terms and concepts would have to be explained to you in English. Thus, English would be the meta-language used to explain the object-language (French) to you.(1) Godard practices this technique at the level of narration in Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Fou</span></span>. He creates fantastic sequences where the characters Pierrot/Ferdinand (Jean-Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Belmondo</span></span>) and Marianne (Anna Karina) speak about what their characters are doing, will do or have done so that the (object) story becomes divorced from the images that we see and the sounds that we hear. It is with this strategy of meta-narration that Godard is able to detach the cinema from its slavish devotion to communicating a story in a linear sequential order. More than this, it is by deliberately limiting what we can see on the screen that Godard expands what we can hear on screen and conversely it is by limiting what we can hear on screen that Godard expands what we can see on screen. Nowhere is this strategy better demonstrated than in the "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">C'est</span></span> Moi, Marianne" sequence of the film; a sequence that has always captivated my cinematic imagination from the first time I encountered it. The Meta-Narration begins with Marianne and Ferdinand speaking off screen about their characters:<br /><em>Marianne: Marianne tells a story about...</em><br /><em>Ferdinand: Ferdinand.</em><br /><em>M: A story...</em><br /><em>F: Complicated.</em><br /><em>M: I knew some people...</em><br /><em>F: It's just like during the Algerian war.</em><br /><em>M: I will explain everything to you.</em><br /><em>F: Waking from a terrible dream. Frank had the Keys?</em><br /><em>M: I'll explain everything to you.</em><br /><em>F: You were lovers?</em><br /><em>M: I'll explain everything to you.</em><br /><em>F: Did he make love to you?</em><br /><em>M: I'll explain everything to you. A story.</em><br /><em>F: Complicated.</em><br /><em>M: ... leave very quickly.</em><br /><em>F:... waking from a bad dream.</em><br /><em>M: I know some people.</em><br /><em>F: Politics.</em><br /><em>M: An organisation.</em><br /><em>F: Go away.</em><br /><em>M: Gun-running.</em><br /><em>F: In silence... in silence.... in silence.</em><br /><em>M: It's me, Marianne.</em><br /><em>F: He Kissed you.</em><br /><em>M: A story.</em><br /><em>F: Complicated.</em><br /><em>M: I knew some people.</em><br /><em>F: You were lovers.</em><br /><em>M: Using my apartment.</em><br /><em>F: It was like during the Algerian War.</em><br /><em>M: I have a brother.</em><br /><em>F: Waking from a bad dream.</em><br /><em>M: Leave in a hurry... leave in a hurry... leave in a hurry.</em> (2)<br />We hear this Meta-Narration, that is characters talking about themselves as characters in a story, telling each other bits and pieces of each other's story. One should note the non-linearity of the dialogue. The repetitions (a la <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Robbe</span></span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Grillet</span></span> and Alain <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Resnais</span></span>) of narrative information that tell the past and present <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">simultaneously</span>. Yet, the images on the screen show us another set of events from a marvelously constricted point of view. In fact, the images on screen are silent (that is have no <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">diegetic</span></span> sound as the voices are heard over it). What we see (or don't see but can understand) is that within Marianne's apartment a man has been murdered with a pair of scissors in the back of his neck. His body is laying on the bed and has been there for some time. We see Ferdinand walk into the room and we see Marianne reacting to someone coming in the door that is out of our view. She runs and hides behind a open <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">refrigerator</span> door while Ferdinand runs back into another room (out of our view). When the man enters the room (it is Frank whom we know from a previous scene) we see Ferdinand come back into the room as Frank sits on the bed (where the corpse was, but has now been removed presumably by Ferdinand). Frank looks <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">surprised</span> to see Ferdinand and then Marianne appears and distracts him as Ferdinand cracks him on the head with a champagne bottle. As Ferdinand drags Franks body out of the room, Marianne grabs a gun and begins looking out over the patio for an escape route. Then, through a series of startling and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">exhilarating</span> jump cuts that jump forwards and backwards in temporal order we see the two climb down from the apartment and escape. My words don't do justice to the way these actions were presented because it is all done <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">cinematically</span></span> by use of a tracking shot with the camera placed outside on the patio looking through the windows. The camera tracks forwards, backwards, pans left and right and in so doing it obscures just as many actions as it reveals. What this series of camera movements force us to do as spectators is to become involved in the telling of the story we are only partially seeing on screen. <em>Did Ferdinand remove the corpse from the bed? He <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">must've</span></span> because Frank sat on the bed without noticing the corpse. Who is going to hit Frank with the champagne bottle? The two characters exchange the bottle a couple of times before striking him with it</em>. And again we must remember that the soundtrack carries the off-screen voices of the previous dialogue along with Antoine <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Duchamel's</span></span> ominous and tragic music score weaving in and out along with the "silent" actions on screen. Thus, here by use of Meta-narration Godard was able to reveal the polygamous nature of cinematic narration; that is image can tell us (and not tell us) acts of narration that can be divorced from what the soundtrack can tell us (and not tell us) about acts of narration.<br />This Meta-narrative <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">technique</span> was perhaps first explored <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">cinematically</span></span> by Alain <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Resnais</span></span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Duras</span></span> in Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) where we have a character recounting events in her past that we can see but that are not always anchored to what we are seeing. The technique was again explored in Truffaut's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Tirez</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">sur</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">le</span></span> Pianist (Shoot The Piano Player- 1960) and later tentatively by Godard in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Une</span></span> Femme est <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Une</span></span> Femme, but here in Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Fou</span></span> Godard expanded his use of the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">technique</span> and made it the driving force behind his "lovers on the run" narrative. By emphasizing a meta-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">narrational</span> strategy in Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Fou</span>, Godard was shifting the cinematic emphasis of traditional narrative representation. Specifically, by using meta-narration at points in the story where most classical Hollywood directors would dramatize the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">expositional</span> events (e.g. the escape of Marianne & Ferdinand or showing the police investigating their trail) Godard could place greater cinematic emphasis on the "fantastic" adventures within the story rather than the strictures of the plot. With Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Fou</span>, Godard had the best of both worlds: the playful cinematic dynamism of an adventure story with "the last romantic couple" along with the fatalistic trajectory of a "lovers on the run" plot that unified the disparate comedy and the multiple allusions to poetry, painting, literature and previous films within the adventures.<br /><div align="center">Notes </div>(1) This use of a meta-language is also used in symbolic logic where one has a meta-language used to describe a parenthetical object language: (A v ~B) Cf. page 136 in The Logic Course: The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Bluestorm</span> Textbook by Steven <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">DeHaven</span>, Tempest Media Inc., Calgary. 2001<br />(2) Classic Film Scripts: Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Luc</span></span> Godard, Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Fou</span></span>Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-39340144280924148902008-11-11T17:53:00.000-08:002008-11-11T18:28:45.171-08:00The 'Soft' self-reflexivity of Truffaut's La Nuit Americaine (Day For Night)It all seems so bizarre... Critics have often thought that Truffaut's La Nuit Americaine was a minor film. Even though the film won the academy award for best foriegn film in 1973, there is something missing; something not quite right about the film. I believe that I can emphatically say what is not quite right about this film: It is a film that reveals that Truffaut had become what he had so despised in his article," A Certain Tendency in French Cinema." Here he is in this film, playing a film director named, Ferrent, but making an out of date classical mise-en-scene un-new wave highly theatrical film called, Je Vous Presente Pamela. It is so mockingly self-ironic as to not be funny at all- more like pathetic. One of the reasons I believe the film lacks inspiration is that the most undeveloped character within the film is, THE DIRECTOR. Let me say that again, the very reason the film lacks inspiration is that the most underdeveloped character within it is, THE AUTEUR. Truffaut deliberately downplayed the emotional commitment of the director character (perhaps to spare himself any pointed criticism) and in so doing he reduced the director to a simple manager. A person whom people ask what to do next or where should this go. He hid himself within the film and in so doing obscured the purpose of the entire effort. Sure it was mildly interesting to watch the cast and crew (play) with each other, but there is so much more to making a film. In fact, has it not been said that a film doesn't really become a film until it is edited. Directors are sometimes tyrants. They sometimes have affairs with their leading ladies. More often than not they hate their leading ladies (e.g. Polanski and Dunaway) or there is a male cast member with whom they go toe to toe (e.g. Herzog and Kinski). And that Truffaut doesn't even include scenes between himself and his cinematographer (he's worked with some of the best, Coutard, Roeg) or his music composer (he's worked in close collaboration with some of the best, Herrmann, Delerue)- or even show the troubles directors have with producers (most in this film were aimicably resolved- not so in real life) is in a phrase a bunch of romanticized crap. In many ways, Truffaut was revealing what he had become: a hack. He says over and over in the film how he lowers his expectations as a film is being produced up until the point that he just wants the production to be finished in any way possible and this my dear friends is "Hack talk". For if you aren't even inspired during the production of your film, how are you ever going to be inspired during the post-production? So yes, it all seems so bizarre here is one of cinemas greatest champions of the auteur theory making a film about making a film where the director is nothing more than a beleagured "manager" shelpping his way through an uninspired project with little emotion and even less inspiration. Perhaps that's why the George Delerue music plays over those books about, Hitchcock, Godard, Welles, Bresson, Dreyer that Truffaut's character had ordered, he knew who the real auteurs were and that he was losing touch with what he loved the most.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-64518705678805278052008-11-08T10:56:00.000-08:002008-11-19T09:15:11.727-08:00Godard’s Une Femme Mariée, Pornographie à la Bertold BrectThe opportunity to view Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Luc</span> Godard’s <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">UNE</span> FEMME <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">MARIEE</span> (1964) after many, many years of trying to track down a good copy allowed me to fully comprehend the richness of Godard’s achievement within this film. The story is simple and can be summarized as this: a married woman carries on an affair with an actor. She sees him whenever her husband (a pilot) flies out of town. When he returns they argue over previous arguments. The two share a son from the husband’s previous marriage. She finds out that she is three months pregnant. When her husband flies out of town again she shares a final tryst with her lover in an airport hotel before her lover has to leave out of town for a stage play. As always with Godard the story is never as compelling as the way it is told and in the case of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">UNE</span> FEMME <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">MARIEE</span> never was a tale of <em>tail</em> told so compellingly.<br />What was always and is still the most striking aspect of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">UNE</span> FEMME <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">MARIEE</span> was not its commonplace story, but instead the phenomenal images organized by Godard and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Coutard</span>. The trysts between Charlotte (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Macha</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Meril</span>) and her lover Robert (Bernard Noel) and Charlotte and her husband, Pierre (Philippe Leroy) are presented in a series of ever-increasingly fragmented images. Images that not only partition the body of the woman in the calculated perspective of the observing male, but images that also accentuate her body as a male possession visually and physically. These fragmented images of the female body, the male gaze and the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">male's</span> hands ceaselessly caressing these partitioned areas actually increase the erotic importance of off-screen space in a method that no other film has done since. The very positions of the body of the woman and the hands of the man -or the upper body of the man and the hands of the woman- imply sexual positions and sexual acts that were not being shown explicitly by Godard and indeed could not be shown by Godard at that time. Thus, images of fellatio, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">cunnilingus</span>, anal and vaginal penetration are implied by the severe limiting of what we can see. In some shots, it is impossible to discern with absolute certainty the location of the body off-screen by the relationship of the hands, arms, or legs of the two figures to each other. For instance, in one shot which frames only Charlotte's legs as she lays on the bed, her lover's arm enters the frame perpendicular to the raised position of Charlotte's leg; the perpendicularity of the lover's arm implies that he was either kneeling down at the end of the bed or suspended by some contraption to create this enigmatic image. Other fragmented images clearly imply fellatio and/or <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">cunnilingus</span>, but because of Godard's distancing effects (e.g. no sexual undulation, blank stares into the camera, and the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">statuesque</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">positionings</span> of the characters within a severely constricted frame) the implied sexual act is an afterthought to the incongruous images presented. For example, Godard even plays with these distancing effects by having a medium close up shot of Charlotte looking contemplatively off screen with a finger on her chin. Only after she starts to move and talk, do we realize that it was not her own finger on her chin, but rather the finger of her lover from an off screen position that clearly implies <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">cunnilingus</span>. Thus many of the fragmented images are sexually charged by the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">eroticization</span> of not what is on screen but instead by what the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">synecdotal</span> arrangement of body parts on screen imply about the positions of the whole bodies off-screen. This is pornography by the negation of that which is pornographic. What cannot be shown is still known to the 'enlightened' audience by the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">evidence</span> of things unseen. Godard and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Coutard</span> evoke a certain erotic faith in their images of marital <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">unfaithfulness</span> on the part of the audience who cannot see the (w)hole, but know that it is there. It must have been quite a hilarious irony to both Godard and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Coutard</span> when the French censors (besides changing the name of the film from 'The Married Woman' to 'A Married Woman) forced them to edit out a shot of Charlotte removing her panties (which Godard replaced with a visual pun- the shot of a her husband's plane because in French the word plane means 'shot'), but none of the censors decided to do anything to the bevy of shots that imply a panoply of sexual acts.<br />Yet <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">in spite</span> of the visual and formal <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">brilliance</span> of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">UNE</span> FEMME <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">MARIEE</span> the presentation of a married woman with a lover is more troubling for what Godard leaves <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">off screen</span> about both the husband and the lover. Specifically, we see Charlotte's trysts and we instinctively pass a moral judgment upon her, but the frequent business trips of her husband, as well as the final voyage of her lover all imply that they were also unfaithful. Yet Godard never mentions the infidelity of the husband and the lover. His omission of the unfaithfulness of men no doubt opened him up to charges of male <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">chauvinism</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">misogyny</span>. Although to his credit he has several '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Brectian</span>' interview sequences with the actors where an unheard off-screen voice asks questions about the role of memory, the present, conscience and the relationship between the characters. Most importantly here is a sequence called "Le Theatre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">et</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">L'amour</span>" (the theatre and love). In this interview scene we have Charlotte asking Robert about his real feelings about love. Robert stumbles badly in trying to articulate his thoughts about love while simultaneously hiding his true feelings. That Charlotte is the one mercilessly interrogating him redeems her character by giving her an intelligence that lifts her out of the audience's judgment of her as self-serving and indecisive. Through this interview scene we can infer that she knows that Robert is no better for her than her own husband whose attempts at controlling her are just as painful to her as his frequent absences from her.<br />More troubling than Godard's omission of male infidelity is his thematic disjunction of scenes about Nazi death camp trials being held at <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Auschwitz</span> (where her husband and his <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">acquaintance</span> had just stopped to see before returning home) and the fact that as part of a cover for their final tryst Charlotte and Robert stop in at a cinema to see Alain <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Resnais</span> powerful documentary on the Nazi death camps, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Nuit</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">et</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Brouillard</span> (Night and Fog). Now one could argue that by including the subject of the Nazi death camps in to a film about marital infidelity Godard was drawing a critical comparison to the seriousness of the past (The holocaust) and the frivolity of the present (infidelity), but for whatever reasons this thematic disjunction evokes a sense of the lost consciousness of contemporary post-war French society. This is a theme that Godard would take up again with greater clarity in his next film, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">ALPHAVILLE</span> (1965).<br />In spite of this thematic disjunction, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">UNE</span> FEMME <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">MARIEE</span> is one of my favorite Godard films because of its bold experimentation which pointed out that there are no limits to the expressive power of cinema no matter how much you limit what can be seen.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-80235016380298375602008-11-07T10:42:00.000-08:002008-11-13T17:44:03.649-08:00Logic/Cinematic Grammar/The French New Wave part 1<em>-If A looks at B, then B is the object looked at by A. Therefore, A looks at B.-</em><br /><br /><br />If we can tentatively agree that the Point-of-View shot sequence is the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">ponens</span> of the basic logic of cinematic grammar, one can invite other notions into a general argument about The French New Wave (1959-1968) as a cinematic movement. Namely, that the various <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">idiosyncratic</span> styles of all of those filmmakers associated directly or by circumstance to The French New Wave were filmmakers who deliberately or instinctively defined their cinematic style via their aesthetic relationship to the use of the point-of-view shot sequence. Some filmmakers avoided this basic cinematic grammar to a greater degree than others. For instance the classic point-of-view shot sequence is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">anathematic</span> to the cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">ecriture</span> of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Anges</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Varda</span> (Cleo 5 a 7, Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Bonheur</span>) and Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Luc</span> Godard, whereas it is employed with various disruptions in the work of Francois Truffaut (Les <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Quatre</span> Cent Coups, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Tirez</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Sur</span> Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Pianiste</span>) and Alain <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Resnais</span> (Hiroshima, Mon Amour, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">L'annee</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Derniere</span> a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Marienbad</span>). But the point-of-view shot sequence is absolutely essential to the cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">ecriture</span> of Robert <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Bresson</span> (Pickpocket), Eric <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Rohmer</span> (Ma <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Nuit</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Chez</span> Maude). In these examples we can see that the radical cinematic styles that was to characterize The French New Wave were styles that either sought to find another way to express the basic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">ponens</span> of cinematic logic or sought to express more in adhering to its use. Supporting this argument is the fact that French film critic and founder of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Cahiers</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">du</span> Cinema, Andre <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Bazin</span> had already voiced his disdain for montage and his exalting of the use of long take and 'democratic' <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">mise</span>-en-scene which goes a long way in explaining how important the classic point-of-view shot sequence is to understanding the development of French New Wave cinematic stylistics.<br />Before going any further with this argument let's back up and return to the notion that the point-of-view shot sequence bears a striking resemblance to one of the oldest argumentative forms of logic: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">ponens</span>. In logic the most basic valid conditional argument form is: If A, then B. A, therefore B which is recognized as the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">ponens</span> argument form. In the cinema, the logic of one of the most standardized forms of cinematic grammar can be described as: If a character looks off screen and the next shot is of an object, if the following shot is returned to the same character then that character is looking at that object. The return shot is the shot the sutures the off screen glance as that <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">initial</span> character's point of view within the fiction.(1) We can simplify this editorial procedure as: If A looks at B, then B is the object looked at by A. Therefore, A looked at B. This is a basic cinematic rhetorical form that can be a visual <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">corollary</span> of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">ponens</span> argument form. Its conditionality is accepted as an indicative mode based upon its repetition either within the film or across a wide variety of films throughout history until the present. The evidence is that it is so widely understood by so many people across so many cultures, languages, and other differences.<br />If we can agree that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">ponens</span> is a fundamental characteristic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">feature</span> of mental reasoning, then it stands to reason that the application of this form of mental reasoning would find its way into the rhetorical structure of cinematic grammar. That is, older forms of reasoning that prefigured the cinema would aid and abet the organization of visual and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">auditory</span> material in a narrative. Sergei Eisenstein had already pointed out to us that many aspects of cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">grammar</span> (the rhetorical organization of visual material to transmit a narrative) was prefigured by the 19<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">th</span> century novel. Most importantly, by the internationally known work of Charles Dickens. Eisenstein notes that there is an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">opticality</span> in Dickens that," gives us an image clothed in an excess of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">characteristics</span>." (2) Moreover, he established a link between Dickens <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">opticality</span> and Griffith's narrative strategies that formed the basics of early cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">grammar</span>. I believe that it is the deep underlying rhetorical structure basic to mental reasoning as seen in language (words, sentences) that in turn formed the basis for the ordering of visual and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">auditory </span>material in Classical cinema. This is a point that may have already been addressed by <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">semiologist</span> Christian <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">Metz</span>, but I am only interested in looking at the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">transpositional</span> development of this deep underlying structure from language to cinema.<br />If we start quickly from Ferdinand <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">de</span> Saussure's observation that," No word has a value that can be identified independently of what else there is in its vicinity," we find a form of mental reasoning that is primarily associative; that is, elements communicate via their juxtaposition- their sequential ordering with one another. (3) What can be accepted as true in language finds its <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">corollary</span> in the cinema through images and their juxtaposition- their sequential ordering that communicates a narrative or suggests associations that communicate a narrative. For instance, the Russian Formalists were quick to notice that," the meaning of individual shots gradually becomes clear because of their contiguity and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">sequentially</span>."(4) This observation was confirmed by Lev <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">Kuleshov</span> and the now famous <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">Kuleshov</span> effect where the same shot of an actor's expressionless face was juxtaposed to another shot of an object and depending upon the content of that following shot, audiences inferred what the actor must have been feeling about that object- even though the actor's face had remained the same. This we can understand was an early demonstration of the point-of-view shot sequence and how the arrangement of shots evokes mental associations between the spectator and the images that are ultimately reflected back into the narrative. Thus, it was not the simple symbolic linguistic structure of language (sign/signifier/signified) upon which the cinematic grammar was based, but instead it is based upon associative forms of mental reasoning that becomes a rhetorical structure that can be transposed from the understanding of language to an art form.<br />The point-of-view shot sequence was standardized as a basic form of cinematic grammar by the success of early filmmakers (Porter, Griffith) and the classical Hollywood studio film which was seen and understood internationally. This is what brings us to the establishment of The French New Wave, because we know that after WWII various cine-clubs reopened and the French could finally see all <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">of</span> the American films that had been made during the German Occupation which had banned them. More than this, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">Cinematheque</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">Francaise</span> which was operated by Henri <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_58">Langois</span> was the center of cinematic education that was attended by the various key members of the French New Wave: Godard, Truffaut, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_59">Rohmer</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_60">Charbol</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_61">Varda</span>... <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_62">et</span> all. Having exposed themselves to the standardized techniques of cinematic grammar via the Hollywood studio system in the b-films they championed by directors who deviated from that standardized grammar as much as they could, it was inevitable that to find their own cinematic voices they would have to 'rebel' as much as possible from the standard. Think of those decidedly different films like Nicholas Ray's opening <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_63">heliocopter</span> shot in They Live By Night or Welles' deep focus and anti-montage strategies in Citizen Kane and we can see the seeds of rebellion being s(h)own to those young critics who would soon become young filmmakers.<br />Thus, the point-of-view shot sequence was a standard of cinematic grammar through which French filmmakers could choose to avoid, utilize sparingly or adhere to strictly to develop their own cinematic '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_64">ecriture</span>' and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_65">discernible</span> style. We can discern the importance of the discussion of the point-of-view shot sequence (or the shot/reverse shot) in French film culture via French film theorist, Jean <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_66">Mitry's</span> statement that," the shot/reverse shot technique lends it self to misuse for the fact that it provides easy solutions." (5) The easiest solution to finding a way to organize visual material is to use the standard rhetorical form -the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_67">modus</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_68">ponens</span> of cinematic grammar: the point-of-view shot sequence to communicate a narrative. But to establish an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_69">auteurist</span> style in such a way as to separate oneself from the herd and be an artist is by finding other ways and means of communicating that narrative by breaking or reformulating that cinematic grammar. Wasn't that the real mission, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_70">summa</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_71">bonna</span> of the movement we romanticize as The French New Wave?<br /><br /><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><strong>Notes</strong></div>(1) See Daniel Dayan's "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema" in Bill Nichols Movies & Methods Vol. 1<br />(2) See "Dickens, Griffith and Film Today" in Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form Vol. 1<br />(3) Page 114, Ferdinand <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_72">de</span> Saussure's Course in General Linguistics<br />(4) Page 15, Formalist Film Theory by Herbert Eagle, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1981.<br />(5) Page 62, Jean <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_73">Mitry's</span> The Aesthetics & Psychology of the Cinema.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-56425125838261392742008-11-04T16:58:00.001-08:002008-11-13T16:31:52.110-08:00Le Mepris- Marriage is a bitch!Those of us who love the work of Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Luc</span> Godard are often in love more with what he does with the camera, sound, music and editing than we are with the actual dramatic storyline within his films. The dazzling tracking shots, severely constricted camera angles, rapid editing, long takes, and all of the disruptive cinematic techniques that we expect from the French New Wave, but are embodied within the work of Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Luc</span> Godard over several decades. Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Mepris</span> (Contempt -1963) presents us with multiple dramatic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">story lines</span> presented as a self-reflexive document of a film about a film being produced. It is one of Godard's most supreme narrative achievements of his 1960's period. This complex story of a marriage in self-destruct mode carries within it Godard's most mature <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">vivisection</span> of the relationship of man to woman and woman to man seen from multiple perspectives. The classical perspective of man and woman is between the characters of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Odysseus</span> and Penelope in the version of the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Odyssey</span> being filmed within the film by Fritz Lang. The modern perspective is between Paul (Michel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Piccoli</span>) and Camille (Bridget <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Bardot</span>). When disappointed American film producer Jerry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Prokosh</span> (Jack <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Palance</span>) hires French screenwriter Paul Javal to come to Italy and re-write scenes for his film of the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Odyssey, </span>Jerry introduces a theory about the relationship between <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Odysseus</span> and Penelope. He says," I think Penelope has been unfaithful." This modern change to Homer's text causes great discussion between Jerry, Fritz Lang and Paul. It is an attempt to bring an ancient text into modernity by violating the meaning and original design of the work. As Fritz Lang angrily told Paul," <em>You either do Homer's <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Odyssey</span> or you do nothing at all!"</em> This attempt to bring The <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Odyssey</span> into modernity by violating it is revealing of the changing roles of women and men in the sixties as juxtaposed to men and women (as property) in ancient times. Thus, when we get our intimate look at the 'real' relationship between Paul and Camille we are witnessing the emotional torment that these changing roles were exerting upon a marriage. Watching Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Mepris</span> is like watching a train wreck in slow motion with the beautiful music of George <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Delerue</span> consecrating the wreckage with blissful and yearning stings; a dirge for a marriage destroyed by modern times.<br />At the heart of Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Mepris</span> is a dangerous game being played by a man and a woman upon each other. It started like this: Film producer Jerry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Prokoch</span> had heard that Paul's wife was beautiful and when he meets her he decides to take her back to his chateau in his two seater red sports car. When he <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">asks</span> if he can take her there, Paul says yes even though Camille does not like Jerry and doesn't want to go. From this moment, their marriage was doomed. Here Camille wants Paul to act <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">chivalrously</span> and protect her from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Prokoch</span>. She wants him to 'keep her close' to him by refusing to let Jerry drive her to the chateau without Paul. She wants Paul to treat her like his property; to play the old role of husband, owner, protector, provider. On the other hand, Paul, it seems, felt that if she truly loved him what did he have to fear for letting her go with Jerry to his chateau? After all, he was coming there by taxi and would arrive just a few minutes after them. Should Paul have really been worried that his wife would cheat on him with a sleazy American producer? If she really loved him what did he have to fear? Should Camille really have made such a big deal because Paul wouldn't do what she wanted him to do? Are not these the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">hypothetical</span> questions that <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">under grid</span> every marriage in one way or another? Does not every woman want her freedom, but also to rattle the chains of her indentured heart in a relationship? Is not a man expected in some way to act like a man from the days of yore- up until a designated point? From that moment, that moment when Paul did not play the white knight- Camille lost respect for her husband and she tormented him <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">exquisitely</span> in that long, slow motion, domestic scene in their apartment. Paul pretends like he doesn't know why Camille is acting so bizarre. By the time he <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">asks</span> her," Was if because I sent you with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Prokosh</span> that day," it is too late. Indeed, Paul sends her off with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Prokosh</span> again when they are in Capri. Here, Camille makes sure to kiss Jerry so that Paul can see them. She has upped the ante, so to speak. But so has Paul, for earlier he had been caught patting the script girl/translator on the ass by Camille. The great power <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">struggle</span> between husband and wife plays out against the production of an epic film. In the apartment when Paul slaps Camille he does so because he knows she is making fun of him; he knows that he has lost her respect. But when Paul tries to man-handle her again, Camille strikes back him with a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">fusillade</span> of blows about the head and chest. Before they go to Capri, Paul takes a gun with him. Things had gotten ugly. This power play is based upon what a woman expects from a man; she expects him to understand her whims and oblige them. Was Camille asking for the moon? No. She just didn't want to go with Jerry and she expected Paul to pick up on this and keep her close to him. It was a test of faith on both of their parts. Paul trusted her not to be unfaithful. A test that Paul failed and later Camille would <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">intentionally</span> flunk with <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">disastrous</span> results. These type of of games are played even today between men and women. Women want to be independent, feminist, but they still expect a man to be <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">chivalrous</span> and oblige their whims. But <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">chivalry</span> in and of itself requires that the women not be independent nor feminist; it requires that she submit to the will of the man. Oh sure there can be a kind of pragmatic truce between the two positions but one would have to know how to alternate (be <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">chivalrous</span> and allow her independence, be independent and allow him to feel <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">chivalrous</span>) but such a position is only temporary. There comes a point where it is either/or and not both. The marriage between Paul and Camille could not withstand the test.<br />One has to wonder how did Godard, whose previous dramatic work in male and female relationships was more juvenile and fetishistic (e.g. the child like questions in Breathless or the photo-interrogation in Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Petit</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Soldat</span>), how did Godard know about this type of mature interrelationship between man and woman. Clearly, Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Mepris</span> has many affinities with the real life relationship between Godard and Anna Karina. The choice to make more <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">commercial</span> films to support the bourgeois lifestyle that marriage strongly makes one conform towards was clearly weighing upon Godard in real life. That Godard had sent Karina off into the hands of another producer (the theatre) in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Rivette's</span> production of La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">Religiouse</span> as he prepared to do Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">Carabiniers</span> and Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">Mepris</span> tells us something about where this self-destruction of a marriage was born. Many have noted that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">Piccoli</span> as Paul wore a hat that was extremely similar to Godard's own hat. In fact during the Capri sequence when Fritz Lang is filming on the boat one can see Godard playing Fritz Lang's assistant director wearing almost exactly the same hat as Paul passes by him. In fact, if we consider a little more of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">Prokosh</span> and Paul's theory of the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">Odyssey</span> we find that both think that <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">Odysseus</span> stayed away from Penelope on a ten year journey because he was fed up with marriage; fed up with the bourgeois comfort and confines that closed him off from the world. That Godard went away to Italy to shoot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">Mepris</span> (without Karina) reveals the source of the fictional detail, isn't it tantalizing to think? Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">Mepris</span> shows more than any of Godard's work one of the themes that was do linger through Pierrot Le <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">Fou</span> and even Weekend: Marriage is a bitch. One has to know how to play the game and adjust when it changes, sadly Paul and Camille/ Godard and Katrina could not.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-4578819834619980842008-11-03T05:25:00.000-08:002009-05-16T05:23:13.194-07:00LES CARABINIERS: An Absurdist Anti-War FilmOne is held hostage by Jean-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">Luc</span> Godard's LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> which presents itself as an <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdist</span> anti-war parable, but eventually reveals itself to be an unremittingly grim story of the futility of conquest, brutishness, and self-delusion. The two main male characters are the atavistic Michel-Ange (Albert <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-error">Juross</span>) and the not-so-bright Ulysses (<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">Marino</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">Mase</span>). Both are seduced by two military officers into believing that by serving in the King's army they will be <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">intitled</span> to the riches of the countries they conquer. The two pillagers leave their equally mentally challenged wives, Cleopatra (Catherine <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-error">Ribero</span>) and Venus (Genevieve <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-error">Galea</span>) and embark on a world wind military campaign (via stock war footage) sending postcards of their exploits back to their wives. Along the way, Michel-Ange lifts up woman's skirts with the end of his rifle, both of them participate in various executions, and Michel-Ange sees a film for the first time and attempts to enter the screen. He succeeds only in tearing down the screen and not entering into the image of a woman taking a bath. When the two return home, they return with all their spoils of victory: Postcards with images of the world's treasures great and small (from the Pyramids to an American convertible). Dissatisfied by the postcards (which they are told are their deeds to their treasures) Michel-Ange and Ulysses track down the military officer who seduced them into joining the army and demand their loot. They are informed that the King has signed a treaty with his enemies. The two are told to wait in a room and then both are summarily shot off-screen. The End.<br />Now we know from our exposure to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdism</span> in the theatre that characters in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdist</span> works are usually reduced to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-error">charicature</span> and that the circumstances in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdist</span> work is often circular and reduced to the barest dramatic reflexes, but there is something quite altogether disturbing in LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> that makes this <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdist</span> work <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">extremely</span> distasteful to even the most jaundiced eye.(1) It has something to do with the reasoning that is presented as the basis for war (all wars as the reductionism of <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdism</span> implies). LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_17" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> presents theft and appropriation as the basis for all wars past and present. Godard recognizes this parable-like quality of his work in an interview defending the film from his many detractors in 1962," I assumed I had to explain to children not only what war is, but what all wars have been from the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_18" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">barbarian</span> invasions to Korea and Algeria..."(2) It is perhaps an inarguable fact that many wars are fought for some kind of appropriation of land and materials or 'the treasures of the world', one need only think of the oil in Iraq to entertain this conclusion. Certainly the atavistic and primitive characters within LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_19" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> lay bare this ulterior motive of war and make our <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_20" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">scrutiny</span> of it a distasteful look at man's basest instincts and his cruelest folly. LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_21" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> makes explicit the point that no war is justifiable by the film's consistent demonstration of the meaninglessness of war whether through the various executions within the film (whose reasons are not explained) or the various writings that Michel-Ange and Ulysses send back to their wives which comment on death, violence and tragedy without emotion<strong>. <em>But the question LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_22" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> forces the viewers held hostage to its perspective to ask is whether or not such a generalization about all wars is true or <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_23" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">relevant</span></em></strong><em>?</em> Are all wars fought for the appropriation of treasure? I am inclined to say no and that this is an oversimplification to give all wars the appearance of absurdity instead of finding the absurdity within a particular war. (e.g. Joseph Heller/Mike Nichols CATCH-22 or the 'ant-hill' in Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson's PATHS OF GLORY) In fact, the dropping of atomic weapons upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 changed war from its ancient starting point of appropriation and transformed war into ideological conflicts as demonstrated by the Cold War, the Korean War, the Franco-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_24" class="blsp-spelling-error">Indochine</span> War, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War and our current war against terrorism. Although land and materials certainly are a part of the reasoning for wars in general, after 1945 ideology plays a greater role in the reasoning for war. Thus, LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_25" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> is an <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_26" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdist</span> anti-war film that was already 20 years too late when in it was released in 1963. Much of the blame for this lateness cannot be solely put on Godard for he served merely as a '<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_27" class="blsp-spelling-error">metteur</span>-en-scene' for this film as he explained in a 1968 interview: "...it was the only time I really had a script. I mean, a full script. It was not written by me, but by Roberto <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_28" class="blsp-spelling-error">Rossellini</span> from a play by <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_29" class="blsp-spelling-error">Benjamino</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_30" class="blsp-spelling-error">Joppolo</span>. <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_31" class="blsp-spelling-error">Rossellini</span> did quite a lot of work on it and after that I had just to shoot and nothing more..." (3) These comments explain several things about the film, most importantly its <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_32" class="blsp-spelling-error">neo</span>-realist visual style (documentary footage, exteriors, non-professional actors), its explicit <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_33" class="blsp-spelling-error">absurdist</span> tendencies (circular dialogue, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_34" class="blsp-spelling-error">charcicatures</span>, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_35" class="blsp-spelling-error">brutalism</span>)and also why LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_36" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> is such a departure for Godard since we can reasonably assume that he made no changes to the script and worked on the film as if it were a commission rather than an <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_37" class="blsp-spelling-error">auteurist</span> statement. Godard thought that the film was misunderstood from the vehemence of the criticism he was <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_38" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">receiving</span> about it at the time of its release (See: Godard on Godard, edited by Tom Milne, pages 196-200), but I believe the criticism was just and accurate because the source material for the work <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_39" class="blsp-spelling-error">Benjamino</span> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_40" class="blsp-spelling-error">Joppolo's</span> (1906-1963) operetta<em> I</em> <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_41" class="blsp-spelling-error"><em>Carabinieri</em></span> (1945) had not been properly updated and adapted by <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_42" class="blsp-spelling-error">Rossellini</span>. The film coming as it did just after the French-Algerian war and the start of the escalation of the American-Vietnam war could only appear as a slap in the face to every war veteran or audience member who knew that the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_43" class="blsp-spelling-error">reasonings</span> behind wars at that time had changed. <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_44" class="blsp-spelling-error">Joppolo's</span> work, completed in 1945, was a critique of all wars prior to the atomic bomb, it simply could not stand as a generalization about all wars subsequent to 1945 without major revisions; major revisions that <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_45" class="blsp-spelling-error">Rossellini</span> did not successfully execute nor did Godard bother to re-write as was his custom on any other film he would make. I believe Godard's <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_46" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">reverence</span> for <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_47" class="blsp-spelling-error">Rossellini</span> is what kept him from changing the text and that this indecision is what contributed to what one writer glibly described as his,' pitiful farce' about war. It was as clear then in 1962 as it is now that wars are fought for more than just appropriation. Thus LES <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_48" class="blsp-spelling-error">CARABINIERS</span> fails as a parable and becomes a less visually interesting <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_49" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">didactic</span> tract against war than even some of Godard's more explicitly militant work from the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_50" class="blsp-spelling-error">Dziga</span>-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_51" class="blsp-spelling-error">Vertov</span> group.<br /><div align="center">NOTES</div>(1) The figures in pairs was a standard feature of most absurdist work. (e.g. Estragon & Vladmir in Beckett's Waiting For Godot, Ben & Gus in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, Valet & Garcin, Estelle & Inez in Sarte's No Exit). In film one is reminded of the titular nomadic pair of male characters in Roman Polanski's Two Men and A Wardrobe or the master and servant in Joesph Losey and Harold Pinter's The Servant.<br />(2) Page 197, Godard on Godard, Trans/ed. Tom Milne, Da Capo, 1972, New York.<br />(3) Page 35, Jean-Luc Godard Interviews, ed. David Sterritt, University of Mississippi, 1998, Jackson.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-29580722511707395282008-10-31T07:57:00.000-07:002008-10-31T08:26:55.141-07:00Godard's Banned Film (The film we should have seen)Throughout this course on French New Wave cinema we have mentioned Godard's banned second film, LE PETIT SOLDAT (1960- The Little Solider) a number of times in discussion of the work of various new wave directors as well as Godard's own work. Well, I for one would like to state that Godard's LE PETIT SOLDAT is a major achievement in his career and stands as an amazing testament to vargaries of terrorism and the pecularities of torture. Those of us who have read about LE PETIT SOLDAT know little more than those who have never heard of this film. We know that it is about FLN and the Algerian war crisis that was rocking France during the late fifties and sixties. We know that the film was banned upon its release and was only shown three years later in 1963 after Godard had completed several other films. We know that this is the first film to feature his soon-to-be wife, Anna Karina, the star of his major work in the 1960's. And we know that the film features torture, but various writers including but not limited to Richard Neupert dismiss the film as a 'dull grey' work where Godard cannot decide which side of the issue of terrorism and the Algerian conflict he agrees with. But none of these writers ever discuss the amazing detexity and fluidity of the camera and editing in this film. (Although this was noted by biographer Colin MacCabe in his book on Godard) For those who might have been looking for how Godard would advance the formal practices of the New Wave after BREATHLESS, LE PETIT SOLDAT is a dazzling display of where Godard was going to go. The aggressive opening sequence of the film is crammed with all of the techniques one associates with the New Wave including, jump cuts, swish pans, rapid editing, elliptical scenes, narration and the dead pan humor which was so typical of Godard. More than this, LE PETIT SOLDAT gives us a chilling portrait of terrorism, counter-terrorism and the arbitrary and brutal nature of such actions. The film is even more relevent today as America practices counter-terrorist techniques of using torture to extract information. The film is startlingly vivid even in its plaintative black & white style. The film also presents a motif that Godard would return to again and again in his work: that of the 'secret agent' or the person living a double life. This occurs in ALPHAVILLE and in PEIRROT LE FOU where characters are involved in some kind of intrigue that has a diasterous effect in the story. It is unfortunate that some critics would want Godard to choose a side when his main concern is the effect of politics upon an individual (a theme he would also return to again and again). The final open ended shot of the film really sends a chill down my spine as I realized how easy it is to commit a terrorist act and recede into the background of normality. I urge everyone to see LE PETIT SOLDAT because even though my initial reaction to the film was lukewarm, upon seeing it a second and third time, I realize that it was one of Godard's most daring works of the 1960's and it deserves a new appreciation.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-8814690433313896942008-10-22T09:13:00.000-07:002008-10-23T08:12:49.016-07:00My Least Favorite Godard FilmJean-Luc Godard's third film Une Femme est Une Femme which featured his wife Anna Karina was released as his second film since Le Petit Soldat was banned by the French government for its depiction of torture (a secret that the French had been using brutal torture tactics in the Algerian war was not to be exposed for years to come). Une Femme est Une Femme was described by Godard himself as a musical comedy or rather a comedy that uses music as part of its expressive means of making comedy. It is my least favorite Godard film even though the film displays many of the cinema"tics" that make Godard one of the greatest and most interesting filmmakers of the La Nouvelle Vague. What exactly is wrong with Une Femme est Une Femme? The cinematography by Raoul Coutard is in color and top notch. The performances by Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Brialy are finely tuned and alternately hilarious and dramatic. Various sequences are comedic highpoints such as when Belmondo (Frederic) and a man he owes money to curse at each other (in jump cuts) as they cross the street, the domestic scenes between Brialy (Emile) and Karina (Angela) continue the New Wave tradition of torturously romantic intimate relationships, the strip club scenes are alternately repulsive and attractive and feature many of Godard's convention breaking editoral strategies- so what exactly is wrong with Une Femme est Une Femme? I believe that it is the story's premise that ultimately deflates Godard's cinematic souffle. Angela, a part time strip club performer, suddenly decides that she wants to have a baby -out of the blue- and when her live in boyfriend Emile is less than excited about the idea she asks his friend Frederic if he would oblige her request. Now granted, Godard is sending up the usually thin premises that most musical comedies as a genre are based upon, but here the immature nature of all three of his main characters are too weak to sustain such a "mature" idea as having a child. It seems strange to request from one of our most notoriously anti-narrative filmmakers that his story should be more plausible, but perhaps it is not so much the story as it is the characters that should be more plausible. Angela has no real motivation to be a mother (she's not married to Emile, they barely make enough money to live together, both still engage in various flings with other people). The premise of Une Femme est Une Femme is too implausible to sustain all of Godard efforts. It is this immaturity within his characters that make such a mature gesture of wanting a child seem contrived. It is too easy to dismiss Une Femme est Une Femme as <em><strong>un cadeau pour sa femme</strong></em> that is as Godard's gift to his beautiful new bride and to that extent it is simply a gift in color to Anna Karina and nothing more. As their real life relationship began to grow in its complexity, so also did Godard's films, from Vivre sa Vie onward through to CONTEMPT (a film more about their marriage even though Karina is not in it). It might also be interesting to speculate here that the impetus for the premise of the story within Une Femme est Une Femme is the fact that Karina had been nagging Godard to have a child in real life as well as creating a film that would showcase his wife's star potential. Colin McCabe in his recent biography, Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy reveals that Karina had a miscarriage that resulted in the birth of a stillborn child that left her infertile inbetween- Une Femme est Une Femme and Godard and Karina's masterpiece, Vivre sa Vie. So the speculation as to the impetus for the story premise in Une Femme est Une Femme has some credence in my opinion given these real life events. Godard has always excelled when he is connected to an equally ambitious female (e.g. Anna Karina, Bridget Bardot, Anna Wiazemsky, Anne-Marie Mieville) and although Une Femme est Une Femme might be considered an interesting failure by some (myself included) it's critical and commercial failure upon the time of its release also points out the sevrity of the backlash against the New Wave in France at the time. It should be noted that Une Femme est Une Femme won awards at the Venice Film Festival and not at Cannes, just as Truffaut's second film, Tirez sur la Pianiste, was also a critical and commerical failure in France. But whereas Tirez sur la Pianiste is a re-discovered masterpiece because of the complexity of its narration and characterization, I don't know if we can consider Godard's Une Femme est Une Femme a masterpiece for such complexities are missing within it. I will close here by saying that I think that the actual second film by Godard, Le Petit Soldat is the real re-discovered masterpiece by Godard, despite the rather tepid overview given of the film in a recent book on the New Wave by Richard Neupert; Le Petit Soldat is an important film in Godard's career and a masterpiece of style, characterization and political counterpoint. The banning of Godard's second film and the critical and commerical trashing of Truffaut's second film are in my opinion symptomatic of a larger cultural backlash against the New Wave in France by those of the old guard. More on this later...Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-1659016916069880642008-10-16T16:42:00.001-07:002008-10-16T17:19:43.395-07:00Jules & Jim, but not meContrary to the popular saying, the third time is not, I repeat, not the charm as far as it concerns Francois Truffaut's beloved film, JULES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">et</span> JIM, and myself. JULES & JIM reveals a decades long friendship between the German-born Jules (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Oskar</span> Werner) and his <span style="font-size:+0;">bff</span> French-born Jim (Henri Serre). Intervening in that friendship is a woman, Catherine (Jeanne <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Moreau</span>) who eventually marries Jules and has his child, but then begins sleeping with Jim- with the blessing of Jules who doesn't want to lose Catherine completely. This emotionally torturous menage-a-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">trois</span> is made all the more difficult because Truffaut 'emotionally retards' the Jules character and creates an idyllic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">scenerio</span> that betrays real human emotions. Even if we <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">concede</span> that Jules was so deeply in love with Catherine and so deeply in friendship with Jim that he would condone their love affair, the emotional torment that Catherine sends Jules through time and time again (e.g. various affairs and adventures with mutual friends, disappearances for months at a time) would drive even the most devoted man to madness. Yet, in keeping with a thematic trait I noticed in all of Truffaut's work (from the short film LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">MISTONS</span> through LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">QUATRE</span> CENT COUPS (The 400 Hundred Blows) and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">TIREZ</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">SUR</span> LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">PIANISTE</span> -Shoot the Piano Player) Truffaut's male characters are emotionally stunted individuals who are either unwilling or unable make the leap into maturity as it concerns their relationships with the women in their lives. While this thematic trait was endearing in his films of adolescence like LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">MISTONS</span> and certainly in his masterpiece LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">QUATRE</span> CENT COUPS it reaches its apex in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">TIREZ</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">SUR</span> LE <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">PIANISTE</span>. After <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">TIREZ</span> this thematic trait becomes a disturbing form of masochistic torture that pushes the story within his films into a 'no-man's land' of emotional incredulity. What I mean by that specifically is that in JULES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">et</span> JIM the breakdown of the menage-a-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">trois</span> is inevitably going to be based on jealousy. Jealousy is a real human emotion; it cannot be avoided. It can be concluded but it cannot be avoided. The real conflict within JULES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">et</span> JIM is within the character of Jules, himself. He is either unwilling or unable to come to terms with his emotional <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">dependancy</span> upon Catherine no matter how much she <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">humilates</span> him. This emotional stunting of the Jules character is what inevitably makes us judge him as pathetic. An alternate way to have saved this story and the character would have been to include an emotionally explicit scene with all three of the characters in bed together. Unfortunately as we have it JULES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">et</span> JIM is a flawed work of insufferable timidity and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">masochicism</span>. At the end of the film Jules has nothing but his memories to live with and I'm sure he would have a difficult time with the guilt. Were it not for Raoul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Coutard's</span> transcendent cinematography (the film is littered with extraordinary visual sequences composed with dynamism far beyond when it was made) and the seductive music of Georges <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Delerue</span> I don't think I could have sat through this film a third time. After his characters go beyond adolescence I just don't believe that Truffaut could ever hit the right emotional note... and yet maybe in giving us such a sustained portrait of male emotional stunting he was both confessing to us and warning us. Perhaps I will see this film a fourth time.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-13550122816330608982008-10-13T18:07:00.000-07:002008-10-14T07:11:30.658-07:00On Eric Rohmer and his Antitheticism<em><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:85%;">"I should be much more frightened of being wrong and finding out that the Christian religion was true than of being wrong in believing it to be true." - Pascal, Pensees</span></em><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></em><br />If the films of Claude Charbol are considered less New Wave because of the downright nastiness and unsentimental presentation of his characters, then the work of Eric Rohmer might also be considered less New Wave because of the serious crisises of consciousness, spirit and intellect through which he presents his characters. To put it succinctly, Charbol is that unsentimental antithesis of the sentimental Truffaut as Rohmer is the less humorous antithesis of the humorous Godard. One could be tempted to pursue this contrast between Rohmer and Godard further if one were to note that both filmmakers have quoted the work of Blaise Pascal. Rohmer quotes Pascal in Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Mauds- 1969) and Godard quotes him much later in his controversial Je Vous Salute Marie (Hail Mary -1985). But where Godard places the discussion of Pascal's wager over shots of a character struggling with a Rubic's Cube, Rohmer emphatically demonstrates a real life crisis that is aided and abetted by Pascal's wager. In My Night at Maud's Rohmer gives us the character of Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who believes that his destiny is predetermined but nonetheless finds chance distracting him at every turn. This overtly religious work was perhaps too pious to be considered "new wave" and featured none of the "pop" cinematic tricks associated with the movements two most popular directors, Godard and Truffaut. For instance, there are no jump cuts, no direct addresses to the camera, no blurring the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music (in fact there is no non-diegetic music at all in Maud's). But there are some important similarities. For instance there is a magnificent use of location shooting and natural light in My Night at Maud's. The cinematography is by the great Nestor Almendros and it should be no surprise that both he and Rohmer take advantage of the winter setting by placing one of the films most emotional scenes outside in the snow at the top of a hill overlooking the town below. What may account for Rohmer's informal separation from the New Wave is that he was critically at odds with Godard and Truffaut since his days has editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema after Andre Bazin passed away. "Rohmer's role at Cahiers began to deteriorate as Rivette, Doniol-Valcroze, and Truffaut in particular began to pressure him to open up the critical range of the journal. His refusals surprised them... at one point while trying to stop his inevitable ouster, he actually began sleeping in his office at Cahiers to defend his position by physically occupying the premises." ( 251, Neupert) In the end, Rohmer was forced out. His lack of critical innovation can be found in the almost Bressonian presentation of his films, but his mature thematic vision (he was much older than Truffaut and the others) is what actually sets him apart from the New Wave. His concerns were of a much more mature nature; a nature that had Truffaut had lived longer might've have also become his own. Thus, we might say that Rohmer was New Wave for an older generation of moviegoers. His thematic concerns of religion, morality, conscience and chance were certainly thematic preoccupations that would not become of interest to Truffaut or Godard until their later years. His style is not one of faddish acceptance of what might superficially be defined as New Wave. The lack of the use of jump cuts should not be our only defining criteria for whether or not a filmmaker was New Wave. Our judgment has to reside in the fact that these critics turned auteurs each established a discernible style and thematic preoccupation that prior to Cahiers du Cinema had not been thought of as artistic expression.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-34263396620680937122008-10-07T09:07:00.000-07:002008-10-14T09:25:14.174-07:00Anges Varda's and the Subjective Documentary TechniqueAnges Varda is the only woman filmmaker identified with the French New Wave and her willingness in her landmark film, Cleo From 5 to 7 to break conventional editing rules, blur the distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic music, use non-professional actors and shoot on location makes her work an achievement no less worthy than those of the men we usually associate with the French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Charbol, etc). What concerns me the most in her film Cleo From 5 to 7 is Varda's technique of creating what she called a "subjective documentary". What sounds like an oxymoron in the art of cinema, since a documentary is supposed to maintain an objective distance from its subject matter, is really the breaking of classical Hollywood editoral convention to give us a glimpse of "reality" behind the thin viel of fiction. Let me explain, in several sequences of the film Cleo, Varda tampers with the editoral convention of the point of view shot (also known as the shot/reverse shot or the system of suture). Normally, in a classical narrative film we have Shot A of a character glancing off screen, Shot B of an object or another character and then a return to Shot A of the previous character whom we are now certain was the controller of the point-of-view. The gap between Shot A and Shot B has been effectively, sutured by the return to Shot A and the transferring of these editioral actions to the fiction. (See Daniel Dayan's The Tudor Code in Bill Nichols Movies & Methods for more detailed discussion of this technique) This is a convention that is so specific to the cinema that it is rarely mis-understood. In Cleo, Varda tampers with this tried and true system by shifting the placement of her camera in the "subjective" shots of the system. For instance, in the famous Cafe Dome sequence of the film, Cleo (Corinne Marchand) a pop-singer who is awaiting the results of a cancer biopsy, goes into a cafe and plays one of her songs on a jukebox to gauge the reactions of the audience. As she walks around the cafe with dark shades on we are given a furious montage of shots of the patrons, workers and bystanders who are too engrossed in their own situations to listen or care about the song on the jukebox. Varda tampers with the point-of-view system by shifting the camera placement on the people Cleo is supposed to be observing. The camera shot in a conventional film is usually matched with the 'eye-line' or notional glance of the character looking, but in this sequence the camera is in positions that do not and cannot match the position of Cleo's glance which is obscured by her dark sunglasses. The effect of this 'tampering' with the standard shot/reverse shot is to "objectify" the camera by seperating it ever so slightly from the character. It is in this seperation from the fictional character to captured cinema verite that Varda is able to create her subjective documentaries. By modifying the shots of what Cleo could be looking at we get a 'documentary-like' presentation of contemporary life in Paris circa 1962 when the film was made. In the cafe sequence we get all types of conversation, from the Algerian war (a risque subject at the time) to relationships ending. By seperating the subjective shot from the fictional character Varda is able to incorporate more of "reality" into her fiction by capturing events and moments that were happening right during the shooting. For example, the Frog man sequence where Celo walks into a crowd of people watching a man make a spectacle of himself by eating live frogs in the street is pure cinema verite (the capturing of real "non-staged" events by the camera) that she has intergrated into her fiction by simply "loosening" the conventional form of a point of view shot. There are many instances within the film that prepares us for this technique, especially when Varda cuts to a moving shot and then cuts to Cleo who is walking which forces us to make the fictional connection that the first shot is Cleo point of view. In effect we have Shot B and then Shot A rather than the usual Shot A, Shot B, then return to Shot A that forms the point-of-view shot. This loosening of the formal struture is announced to us immediately in the first scene after the Tarot card reading. When Celo flees the psychic in fear and pain over the reading of her future she walks down several flights of stairs in stunning sequence of jump cuts and seperated point-of-view shots that render the experience cinematically rather than 'realistically' or conventionally. Varda's subjective documentary technique rests on her ability to separate the conventional structure of the point-of-view system and incorporate 'objective' shots of real life into the fiction. Varda is able to have it both ways: she is able to create and sustain a fictional character while simultaneously adding in bits and pieces of 'reality' that comment, contradict or reveal the politics and circumstances of the culture that surrounds the making of the film.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-53311841469378083652008-09-23T17:18:00.000-07:002008-10-14T09:33:33.097-07:00The Resnaisian Revolution- HIROSHIMA, MON AMOURIn viewing Alain <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Resnais</span>' celebrated 1959 first feature, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, after many, many years I have a chance now to give it a certain <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">scrutiny</span> that allows me to see why this film is a masterpiece- a revolutionary masterpiece. I believe that the non-linear cinematic narrative began with this film. It is rare that we can find a film that is an inaugural point for a 'cine-genre' (i.e. a genre specific to the cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">art form)</span>, but I believe that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Resnais</span>' HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR is just such a film. It is a film that reveals that dramatic '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">temporality</span>' or the actual historical time represented in a story is arbitrary to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">shyzhet</span> or the organization of the shots that tell a story. In classical Hollywood cinema the switching to the represented 'past tense' which in turn highlights and defines the represented 'present tense' was heavily coded by the use of the 'blurry lap dissolve shot' and music (usually harp glissandos) that noted the transition. A character could narrate the events of the past while the spectator is shown these past events without getting lost in the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">transition</span> to and from past and present tense. Parallel editing was a precursor to the coding of past and present tense in that the filmmakers (Porter, Griffith, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Eisenstein</span> and others) could suspend one narrative thread while showing another narrative thread that would eventually be reconciled in the finale of the story. For instance, the house fire and the firemen racing from the firehouse to the house on fire. These cuts needed no musical <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">transition</span> or blurry lap dissolves for the story context allowed the viewer to reasonably assume that the two narrative threads were somehow interrelated. Yet, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Resnais</span> in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR dismisses the use of lap dissolves and music to signify the transition from past to present. Moreover, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Resnais</span> uses several different tools of conventional cinematic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">grammar</span> to construct a non-linear narrative where dramatic time is arbitrary to narrative time. These tools of cinematic grammar can be catalogued as such: the graphic match cut, the point of view shot, the voice over and finally the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">intertexual</span> use of documentary and re-staged historical footage. As this item I am writing here is too <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">brief</span> to consider all of these tools I will concentrate on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Resnais'</span> use of two of the most recognizable: the graphic match cut and the point of view shot. A match cut was most often used in classical Hollywood cinema to make the actions in two different shots appear continuous. The match cut was a cut that was made on the action and was a standard tool of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">continuity</span> editing and basic cinematographic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">grammar</span>. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Resnais</span> takes this idea of a match cut and uses it to establish a compositional similarity between shots of two different time periods as well as a similarity between two similar actions in two different time periods. Because <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Resnais</span> used this type of cutting to match actions or compositions that are similar in the narrative material that represented the past and the material that represented the present the non-linear narrative could now be free to develop without the restrictions of having to signify through music, dissolve or intertitle what is now the past and what is now the present. The first significant graphic match of temporal <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">discontinuity</span> occurs when the French woman looks at her Japanese lover on the bed where they have just made love. He is lying on his stomach with his right arm extended outward from his body. The next shot is of a man whom she loved (a German solider who died 14 years ago) lying fully clothed in the same position on the ground after having been shot. Although it is impossible at this point in the narrative to know who this man is, the sudden cut to a shot of another man in a different time period laying in the same position is the beginning of non-linearity in narrative cinematic discourse. For the representation of past and present are no longer dependent upon theatrical or musical cues, but instead can be represented <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">cinematically</span> via montage at the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">filmmaker's</span> thematic discretion. The second tool of non-linearity is found in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Resnais</span> use of the point-of-view shot which is yet another standard device of classical Hollywood representation. Here, the shot of a character looking is juxtaposed with another shot of an object and then a return shot of the character. This system of suture as it was described by Dayan many years ago, is disrupted by <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Resnais</span> for he uses the point of view shot to intertwine the past within the present. During the French woman's recounting of her love affair with a German soldier during WWII <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Resnais</span> cuts to shots of the woman riding her bike and the various meetings of the two lovers. Suddenly he cuts back to the French woman and her Japanese lover and the two of them are looking off-screen as if they were spectators to the events that had just transpired. As if just as we, the audience, were watching the images of the past, so were they the characters themselves. The use of off-screen glances and a shot of an object is standard cinematic grammar that establishes a character's point-of-view, but in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR the object being looked at is a fictional representation of the past. The object being looked at by the two characters in the present are the two characters in the past. By use of the graphic match and the point-of-view system <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Resnais</span> was able to find a new way to represent the past in the present tense of a narrative without recourse to the conventional codes of cinematic grammar that defined past from present. More than this, by using the conventional tools unconventionally <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Resnais</span> was able to go from past to present with an astonishing fluidity that had never been seen before and was advanced upon in his next film, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">L'ANNEE</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">DERNIERE</span> A <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">MARIENBAD</span>. I believe that HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR was revolutionary because of these advances in cinematic grammar that propelled the cinema into a new non-linear mode of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">temporal representation</span>.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-41761017156183671522008-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:002008-10-14T09:39:30.084-07:00Some Methods of BressonIn his book, Notes on the Cinematographer, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Bresson</span> states," Flatten my images (as if ironing them) without attenuating them." (pg.11) This statement at first appears too cryptic to be of any use until one sees and becomes intimately <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">familiar</span> with any of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Bresson's</span> works. For it seems that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Bresson</span> had carefully developed a method of "flattening" his images (or rather reducing the expressive nature of a shot) so that when his images are <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">juxtaposed</span> next to one another via montage meanings can be communicated to the audience with precision. How is this flattening done? I believe <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Bresson</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">achieves</span> this "flattening" by his <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">consistent</span> and unerring use of a 50mm lens while shooting his films and a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">consistent</span> and unerring control of costuming. On the first point, it was widely known and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Bresson</span> had mentioned in numerous interviews that he only used a 50mm lens when shooting. (Cf, Robert <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Bresson</span> by James <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Quandt</span>) Why? Because he believed, and rightly so, that the 50mm lens (also called a 'normal lens') approximates the view of the human eye. This standard lens has one important function in cinematography," with a normal lens, objects appear as they would to the naked eye, in terms of size and proportion." (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Laytin</span>, Creative Camera Control, pg. 21) By using a lens that approximates the view of the human eye <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Bresson</span> deliberately 'retards' the expressive potential of a shot by forcing its depth of field and the relationship of objects and space to remain consistent with the human eye. Unlike, say <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Antonioni's</span> use of the telephoto lens in the opening sequences of THE RED DESERT which flatten objects and space by collapsing foreground, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">middleground</span> and background or the deep focus cinematography of Gregg <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Toland</span> which exaggerates the details by keeping all of the different 'grounds' in focus (CITIZEN KANE, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES) the shot in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Bresson's</span> work is deliberately <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">restricted</span> to the 'normal' view of the human eye so that he might better be able to use montage (or editing) to precisely control the meaning of his shots via the cinematic grammar through which they are juxtaposed. An example of this precise control of the shot can be found in PICKPOCKET during the scene when Michel is confronted by a man who demands his wallet (<em>portefeuille</em>) back at the exit of the Metro. The medium shot begins from a low angle on the feet and legs of the passengers as they ascend the stairs out of the station. The camera pans slightly to catch the feet of a man that stop and turn about in front of another pair of man's feet abruptly. The camera then tilts up quickly to capture the man facing whom we now see is Michel just as he demands his wallet back. Here the narrative information of the shot has been carefully reduced (only shots of anonymous feet and legs) so that when the camera tilts up we are given just enough visual information to move the narative forward on a precise detail. Our intitial disorientation with the shot (who are these people? Where is Michel?) is answered for us by two precise movements of the camera (pan/tilt) and thus the expressive potential of the shot is reduced in the effort to retain artistic control over its meaning. On the second point, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Bresson's</span> characters usually wear the same costume throughout the entire film or for unusually long amounts of narrative time. In his early films- particularly, A MAN ESCAPED, since the main character was in a German prisoner of war camp this restriction of a character to a single costume had a plausible story context. In later films, though, this restriction of a character to a single costume had seemed to develop for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Bresson</span> a significance beyond simple story context. For instance, in PICKPOCKET, Michel wears the same suit for the entire length of the film. In fact all of the characters wear the exact same costumes in spite of the notation of lengthy passages of time. Why? I believe this restriction of costume was one of the methods through which <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Bresson</span> controlled and limited the expressive potential of the shot; the meaning of a shot is 'flatten' because with the character wearing the same costume throughout the film there is less external or rather, extraneous '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">mise</span>-en-scene' to distract the eye. We can recognize our 'hero' and his supporting cast immediately from their surroundings. Another reason for this restriction of costume is that it encourages the spectator to concentrate on the internal nature of a character rather than the external characteristics; external characteristics which were <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">superfluous</span> to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Bresson</span>. If a character is constantly changing costumes throughout a film, although it may be plausible in the story context, it encourages the spectator to constantly 're-judge' the character in light of his new apparel and keeps our eye attuned to the external characteristics of man rather than his internal nature. (One should easily see why the story of King Arthur's knights would appeal to him since the characters in Lancelot du Lac are most always seen in their 'shining' armour.) It is through these specific methods that I believe <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Bresson</span> achieved the 'flattening' of the image he so desired so that he could control the meaning of his images and sounds via montage rather than within the shot as a completely expressed whole.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-12296383599461389132008-09-16T17:26:00.000-07:002008-09-16T17:55:21.561-07:00BREATHLESS- A Second TimeI feel it necessary to post my thoughts here about Jean-luc Godard's BREATHLESS because my earlier post was concerned with the characters and not the form and structure of the film. Although most writers mention Godard's use of the Jump Cut in BREATHLESS and other filmmakers of the French New Wave little is understood about the purpose of these 'jump cuts' other than the shock value such cuts had to audiences and critics at the time. I believe that Godard uses the jump cut both for its radical 'dejunctive' power (it violates the continuity rules of so called 'films of quality' that Truffaut despised in his article, A Certain Tendency of French Cinema) and for various pratical narrative purposes. If we consider the early scene of Michel driving from Marseilles to Paris in a stolen car we can note two important things: 1) the jump cuts here functions to accelerate the narrative; to compress the length of time where Michel is driving and talking to the audience. 2) Here in this scene the jump cut is used to startling effect as Michel is captured in various poses and thoughts like a cubist painting. The jump cuts here both compress time and destroys the temporal continuity without disturbing our sense of a unity of space. Later in the film, Godard and his cinematographer Coutard, create carefully controlled tracking shots that function as well timed sequence shots (e.g. when Michel goes to visit his friend at the travel agency). The camera literally waltzes around the characters and the space forwards and backwards in long takes (that is without a cut). But at the end of the long takes there is a jump cut, when actors appear in different positions from their positions at the end of the long take. Here we can also note two things: 1) the jump cuts at the end of the long take sequences were quite possibly motivated by the fact that the film inside the camera had reached its end and the camera had to be reloaded. Thus, the jump cuts at the end of long takes are not motived by a need to compress time, but instead by a need to maintain 'story' continuity. 2) The characters who change position at the end of a long take are most often shown at the destination of where they were going during the long take. For instance, when the Cops come into the travel agency to inquire about Michel, there is a jump cut that goes from them entering the establishment to the two characters standing at the counter making their inquiries. Here narrative continuty is maintained at the expense of spatial continuty. There are many examples in BREATHLESS where the jump cut is used to accelerate the narrative (e.g. the conversation between Patricia and her boss in the restaurant) by compressing time and fragmenting the presentation of a character or characters, but also we see the jump cut used as a way to call attention to the ending of a long take sequence shot where there was no physical cutting of the shot but rather a cselection and omitting of objects and actions within the frame. The jump cut and the long take (a signature of Godard's cinematic style) is an artistic sythesis of Bazinian realist aesthetics and Montage editorial effects. In effect, the jump cut and the long take are two forms of montage; the former is a dis-ruption of the shot and the latter is the disruption of the temporal arrangement of actions and objects within the frame. Both the jump cut and the long take/sequence shot are forms of artistic editing. With BREATHLESS Godard succeeds in removing himself from the Bazinian straight jacket of realism and retaining -indeed improving upon- the conceptualization of montage as first articulated by Eisenstein.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-81688648971560931052008-09-16T16:56:00.000-07:002008-09-16T17:21:52.806-07:00Melville's Bob Le FlambeurWhat is most striking about Melville's Bob Le Flambeur are the games of chance upon which the theme and the very plot of the film rests. Life is not presented to us as determined by cause and effect, but instead by the invisible whims of "<em>madame de chance</em>" or lady luck. Bob, the main character, lives his life by a faith in the whims of chance; he lives with a kind of 'blind faith' in the return of good fortune. Though he may have lost nearly everything in his nightly escapades there is a certain optimism in his character that reveals his 'charm' and the charming effect he has on friends, acquaintances and the audience. The 'rebounding' nature of Bob is detailed for us in the opening scenes of the film which catches Bob at a low point in his luck, having lost nearly everything at every game he has played. Yet, miraculously during his early morning wanderings he, by chance, sees a beautiful girl, too young to be out on the street, buying some French fries before she is wisked away by a horny American sailor. It is this chance observation and the meeting between the two later in the film that will bring him good fortune at the price of more bad fortune. It is in this way that the entire film of Bob Le Flambeur is balanced with downs and ups so to speak where a loser's luck changes without any rational cause into a winner- all one has to do, according to Bob's actions, is never take youself out of the game. We see the whims of chance demonstrated for us emphatically by the breathtaking finale of the film. Here, Bob has spent great effort in assembling a crew and borrowing set up money to rob a casino of 800 million francs, but while waiting in the casino for the scheduled time of the heist, he starts winning- and winning big. Fortune has cast its light upon him in such a way that he nearly forgets his own plan (which would have been foiled anyway by various snitches). The film presents us with a curious success- not by man's willful labor (the planning and execution of the heist) but instead it is a success given to the character by chance. Of even greater interest is the way the film ends, not with the unfornature death of Bob's protege, Paulo, but instead with a humorous exchange among Bob, his friend Roger and the Police detective that reveals that Bob will get off from the charges of criminal intent and be allowed to enjoy his fortune. What one comes away from after having seen Melville's BOB LE FLAMBEUR and knowing that he shot this film with the great cinematographer, Henri Decae, intermittantly with sporatic funding- what one comes away with after having seen the film is the consistancy of mood, the sustained measure of the film's pacing, actions, and its tightly composed images. For a film produced under such chaotic circumstances, it is Melville's vision, or rather, the consistancy and the sustaining of his vision that holds this atmospheric essay on chance and fate together. Melville was perhaps the first to show us that criminals can be gentlemen also and that there is a difference between the gangster and the nihilist that was to soon be blurred with Godard's BREATHLESS only a few years later.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-68782545624277861162008-09-15T16:53:00.000-07:002008-09-15T17:12:41.669-07:00Une Nouvelle Femme Fatale: BREATHLESSKnowing, as we do, that Jean-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">luc</span> Godard's first feature length film, A Bout <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">de</span> Souffle (BREATHLESS, 1960) was a revolutionary work of the French New Wave film movement does little to calm the worries of some of today's viewers who are at pains to understand the motivation of Patricia (Jean <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Seberg</span>). It is Patricia who "snitches" on her lover, Michel (Jean-Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Belmondo</span>) and subsequently hastens his death at the hands of the police. What seems like a bizarre turn of events is really a simple inversion of a film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">noir</span>/gangster film convention. Where usually a street-wise and "hard-boiled" male character would escape from a clever femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">fatale</span> or turn her in to the police Godard has simply inverted this convention in a film that has a conventional story told in an unconventional cinematic context. One should remember John Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON with its unforgettable parting lines from Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) to Bridget <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">O'Shaunassy</span> (Mary Astor), which goes something like," If they give you twenty years, I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you by that sweet little neck of yours, I'll always remember you." Here in this traditional film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">noir</span>, Sam Spade turns in the femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">fatale</span>. Moreover, in many other gangster films and film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">noirs</span> that <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">preceded</span> BREATHLESS, the man is most often 'done in' by the femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">fatale</span> as in Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). So it should be no surprise that Patricia's duplicitous nature in BREATHLESS is really only a continuation of the femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">fatale</span> genre convention- albeit without the intricate plot <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">entanglements</span> that so often trapped the doomed couple in the previous films. In fact what we witness in BREATHLESS when Patricia 'snitches' to the police on Michel is her own escape from doom, her difficult, but clever avoidance of a shared tragic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">entanglement</span> with Michel. For he is a man whom she knows will not live long; he is a man whom she knows will destroy her with his 'love' for her. In many ways, BREATHLESS itself is an inversion of a later Godard film, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">PRENOM</span>:CARMEN where the femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">fatale</span> explains to her lover that," if I love you, then that's the end of you." This is entirely the predicament of Patricia who knows that if she accepts Michel love (by way of his offer to run away to Italy) then she will end her own independence as a woman: his love would be then end of her. The femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">fatale</span> in BREATHLESS is a new kind of woman independent and avoiding the traps of previous doomed film <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">noir</span> and gangster film couples. We can surmise that Godard was aware of this new femme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">fatale</span> he was creating when he has Patricia do the same gesture of Bogart as Michel lay dead in the street as if to suggest that she is the one who has come out on top- she has avoided a fate that she would have shared had she accepted Michel's love.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-33974864844731060572008-09-11T08:25:00.000-07:002008-09-11T09:04:35.280-07:00Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Hundred Blows)Perhaps it is time for all of us to realize that Francois Truffaut's Les <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Quatre</span> Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) is <em>the </em>greatest film about vagaries of adolescence ever made. Even if we include in this brief canon of films about adolescence: Michael <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Curtiz's</span> ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938), Luis Bunuel's LOS <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">OLVIDADOS</span> (1950) Rene Clement's LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">JEUX</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">INTERDITS</span>(1952), Nicholas Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), Larry Clark's KIDS (1995), Gus Van <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Sant's</span> ELEPHANT (2003) The 400 Blows ranks at the top of the list because even though it is perhaps the most <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">intimate</span> portrait of male adolescence it is also a searing portrait of adult hypocrisy. What Truffaut seems to capture by centering his film upon the experiences of Antoine <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Doniel</span> is the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">dupicity</span> and eroding empathy of post-war adults towards a generation of children born during or just after World War 2. In effect, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Doniel</span> (the 15 year old actor who stars in the film) is a victim of an adult generation that is constantly sending him the mixed signal of," Do as I say, but not as I do." This mixed signal is particularly <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">discernible</span> regarding the relationship of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Doniel</span> to his mother whom he catches kissing another man while he is playing hooky from school In fact, it is this pivotal event (filmed in just such an off-handed, even casual manner) that becomes a major turning point in the relationship between <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Doniel</span> and his mother as she attempts to emotionally bribe him to keep him from telling her husband and his step-father her secret. Our sympathy and our emotions are tied to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Doniel</span> via the two slaps he receives within the film. The first slap is from his father which is delivered in front all of his schoolmates in class after he has told a lie about his mother having died as an excuse for why he was absent at school. This slap although it is well deserved serves two functions: 1) it shames him in front of his schoolmates and that shame is transferred to the audience as we have all certainly felt that kind of shame even if we have not shared the exact same circumstances and 2) the lie itself was a kind of 'sublimated' loss of feeling between <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Doniel</span> and his mother that is revisited upon him as a slap in the face for having been born. The second slap is from a male attendant at the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">junvile</span> observation center where he has been sent after having been caught stealing a typewriter (machine a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">ecrire</span>) from his father's job. This slap, although it occurs right in front of the other inmates, has less of an emotional effect upon <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Doniel</span> and reveals the 'hardness' of heart that is growing within him. One might ask, is it simply the parents fault for <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">juvenile</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">delinquency</span> as the canon of previously mentioned films might lead one to easily conclude, but I believe and Truffaut is empathic in his dramatic demonstration that this <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">delinquency</span> is born from the child hearing things that he shouldn't hear and seeing things that he shouldn't see. To be specific, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Doniel</span> is always placed in a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">privileged</span> position to hear his parents arguing (at first about their relationship and then about <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Doniel</span>) and later seeing his mother <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">committing</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">adultery</span> and the emotional bribery she tries to use upon to cover it up. Later in the film we find out that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Doniel</span> as also heard (from a conversation between his mother and his Grandmother) that his mother wanted an abortion; that he was not wanted and the effect of all of this <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">privileged</span> information is at the center of the declining experiences of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Doniel</span> and perhaps to a certain extent all delinquents, because this information has an emotional effect that is most often never addressed by adults who blithely believe that children cannot comprehend the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">duplicity</span> of adults. It may be the adult perception of adolescence itself that Truffaut is challenging with his masterpiece, LES <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">QUATRE</span> CENT COUPS.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-39777117020235281532008-09-06T10:54:00.000-07:002008-09-06T11:26:38.560-07:00Henri Decae - Les CousinsAs much as we love to understand the French New Wave as an inaugration and canonization of the director as auteur/artist, we would do well to note also that the French New Wave was an inaugration and canonization of new, adventurous, experimental, courageous and inventive cinematographers. From Henri Decae, Raoul Coutard, Gilsend Cloquet, Pasquali DeSantos and many others, the genius of the French New Wave is inextricably linked to the openness, comraderie and collaboration of the French New Wave cinematographers with the director/ auteurs. What Truffaut might have been raging against in his article," A Certain Tendency in French Cinema," was not just the stilted adapation of literary subject matter, but also the stilted cinematography that incarcerated these adaptations as "cinema of quality" but not a cinema of dynamism. When we look carefully at Henri Decae's work in Claude Charbol's LES COUSINS we should be startled by the purposeful dynamism through which the work is delivered to us in its cinematography. The opening shot of LES COUSINS is of the character of Charles leaving the train station. The shot begins from a high angle and then dollies in to a medium close up which frames Charles' suitcase as he leaves through the station turnstiles. It is the fluidity of movement in this opening shot that is superfluous to the narrative but emphatic in demostrating the subsequent visual style of the film. Decae establishes a certain detachment from characters by moving his camera away from characters to capture their milieu. His camera pans in 360 degrees, dollies and tracks through the apartment and the bar that the characters inhabit to emphasize the 'cinematic context' wherein which this drama unfolds. It is not a static representation of characters in a narrative (a la the cinema of quality) but a dynamic presentation of characters in a the context of the cinematic artform. To move beyond the cinema of quality and get to a 'French New Wave' there had to be two technological advances: lightweight mobile cameras and faster and more sensitive film stocks. Decae takes advantage of both of these advances in LES COUSINS. One has to look in wonder (even today with the poor low light resolution of some digital cameras) how Decae was able to shoot the party sequence where Paul turns out the light and moves through the apartment with only a candlelabra as the single light source. Was there an edit when the lights were turned off to switch to a faster film stock? Did he control the camera's f-stop in sync with the lights as they were switched off? Or was the film stock so flexible that it was able to handle the sudden shift from full electric lighting to candlelight? However the sequence was constructed it was certainly a monumentous showcasing of the dexterity of the faster film stocks that helped to establish the groundbreaking appeal of the French New Wave. Moreover, the camera is constantly moving (circulating) around the apartment in this sequence which suggests that the 'jib' or armature upon which the camera was situated was small enough to fit within the location and smooth enough to make this sequence a testament of French New Wave cinematic dynamism. So when we look at the French New Wave movement we should bear in mind that collaborative spirit between director/auteur and cinematographer that changed our understanding of the cinema as a dynamic artform and not just a medium to record a theatrical performance.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4508275948252535704.post-3971723162489874872008-09-03T09:05:00.000-07:002008-09-03T09:27:13.074-07:00Les MistonsThis first short film by Francois Truffaut is distinguished by 1) his use of a mobile camera; 2) his lyrical obsession with a sensual female; 3) allusions to early cinema; and 4) his use of an adolescent male or group of adolescent males whose emotional development is stunted. In this film we see nearly all of the thematic material that was to preoccupy Truffaut for much of his cinematic oeuvre. Les MISTONS opens with a brauvura sequence of reverse "traveling" shots of a beautiful girl on a bike as she rides her bike to met her boyfriend. These shots are linked together by dissolves that despite the credits that are layered over them, reveal Truffaut's insistence on the "reality" of his location shooting. This sequence is the cinematic equivalent of his polemic "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema." Truffaut's disgust with the contemporary French cinema reliance on in-studio locations, set design and static framing are here destroyed in the opening sequence of shots from this his first film, LES MISTONS. He also alludes to an early film by the Lumiere Brothers," L'arrosseur Arrosse" in a comic sequence that was recreated and inserted within the film. Of greater interest is the 'emotional stunting' of the young male protagonists of the film (the les mistons of the title) who are too young to understand the tribulations of love as the young woman of whom they were so obsessed changes after the death of her boyfriend. This inability to mature emotionally is a signature dramatic theme found in the famous "Antoine Doniel" series of films Truffaut created including his first international success, LES QUATRE CENT COUPS (The 400 Blows), and later in STOLEN KISSES, etc. It would seem that many of Truffaut's films are explorations centered on the theme of characters confronted by a need for emotional maturity after a lyrical moment of splendor. I am thinking now of JULES ET JIM after the death of Jim and Jeanne Moreau's character; how Jules almost 'emotionlessly' walked behind their caskets unable to 'feel' their deaths; unable to emotionally mature, but forced to now out of circumstance. LES MISTONS provides an interesting key into the rest of Truffaut's films.Andre Seewoodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16594959822618661175noreply@blogger.com0