What is a Movie?
Jean-Luc Godard, born in 1930, still active as a filmmaker, has made movies of many kinds: narrative, revolutionary, experimental, comical, dramatic, some would include the adjective, "boring."
Indeed, I heard American playwright David Mamet quote Godard's famous remark that a movie should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. Mamet then added, "That's why his movies are so boring."
I don't find them boring. I've watched many of them, some multiple times. What happens often for me is that a new experience of a Godard film produces in my mind a sense of not grasping the gist; of missing meanings both overall and particular, yet, I remain trusting of Godard's artistry, his freshness as an experimentalist which makes even his most difficult films fascinating, if at times "boring," while I struggle to figure out what I'm experiencing.
I had the chance to see one of his more difficult movies, British Sounds, from 1969. At that time, European television stations, like London Weekend Television (which produced British Sounds), were offering deals to filmmakers to direct short made-for-television movies with political subject matter. Godard's fifty-two minute film would have fit into a one hour time slot had LWT aired it, but the project, though completed, eventually was released theatrically and now is on Vimeo and DVD.
It's curious how such a strange and irritating film from another era can end up as a shiny DVD in a boxed set along with other strange and irritating Godard films he made then and into the early 1970s, when his concept of narrative cinema treated that respected old product as a dead thing.
British Sounds may seem dead to some, its long-winded left-wing Communist- and Feminist-inspired narration inviting viewers to not watch it, especially not listen to it, for the soundtrack is truly grating to the ears. The narrative voices quoting from The Communist Manifesto and British Feminist Sheila Rowbotham's writings, possess a monotonous driving tone, like watching cement being poured on an endless film loop. Rowbotham's narration in her educated English voice is accompanied by a sequence showing a nude young woman walking from room to room in a house, and then talking on the telephone. Her nudity has no sexuality attached to it; it's a blank moment of a person (who happens to not be wearing clothes) in a blank setting (someone's house, the staircase, railing on the upper floor, two open doors and two rooms we can't see--the ones visited by the woman).
If this sounds like boring material for a film, it is. The other five sequences, left-wing workmen sitting in a room discussing their jobs, radical students composing alternate revolutionary lyrics for the Beatles' song, "Hello Goodbye," a bloody arm (Godard's, with Godard's actual blood) grasping a red flag, an MG auto production line, and a man apparently on black and white TV denouncing the Left in the most bloodthirsty terms, all have a jarring sense of not matching up in terms of sound and image.
The man haranguing the Left, for instance, is a young somewhat homely man seated at a desk, delivering a commentary replete with honest but gleefully told evaluations of what Western societies were then doing to the Third World. He advocates exterminating unionists, immigrants--he praises the U.S. for its treatment of Vietnam. Cutaway images in color show various often bucolic and placid British scenes of farmers and suburban life. On the face of it, there seems no relation between what the young man is saying and what we're seeing on the screen. For myself, who finds weird things interesting, this was the most entertaining and funniest part of the film. The young man is so honest about wanting to see the enemies of Fascist Capitalism annihilated that it makes me want to hear our own modern politicians and America Firsters speak so candidly, thus revealing their true natures.
The lack of logical relation between image and sound in British Sounds points to Godard's attempt to disarrange our own ideas about what a movie is. The film's first part is an aural assault on the ears, the camera tracking slowly to the right in the car factory. We see MG sports cars in varying stages of development, the rivet guns screaming, the overall sound distracting to the point that it's tempting to not even see the process of these machines being made, the nuts and bolts part of the creation of a sexy car, a vehicle that the men making them would have a hard time buying. The sequence goes on for about eleven minutes, a tracking shot unlike any other by a director who has never been someone to make films the easy way.
In the mid-1970s, Godard returned to making more "conventional" films, although his work has continued to be challenging, as he's gone increasingly in the direction of making poetic cinema.
British Sounds has the feel of a musician's desire to write a noisy song that makes the ears hurt, because the subject matter of what it is to be a worker, a woman, a youthful person yearning for a better world, is so everlastingly painful and fraught with obstacles.
Vic Neptune
Jean-Luc Godard, born in 1930, still active as a filmmaker, has made movies of many kinds: narrative, revolutionary, experimental, comical, dramatic, some would include the adjective, "boring."
Indeed, I heard American playwright David Mamet quote Godard's famous remark that a movie should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. Mamet then added, "That's why his movies are so boring."
I don't find them boring. I've watched many of them, some multiple times. What happens often for me is that a new experience of a Godard film produces in my mind a sense of not grasping the gist; of missing meanings both overall and particular, yet, I remain trusting of Godard's artistry, his freshness as an experimentalist which makes even his most difficult films fascinating, if at times "boring," while I struggle to figure out what I'm experiencing.
I had the chance to see one of his more difficult movies, British Sounds, from 1969. At that time, European television stations, like London Weekend Television (which produced British Sounds), were offering deals to filmmakers to direct short made-for-television movies with political subject matter. Godard's fifty-two minute film would have fit into a one hour time slot had LWT aired it, but the project, though completed, eventually was released theatrically and now is on Vimeo and DVD.
It's curious how such a strange and irritating film from another era can end up as a shiny DVD in a boxed set along with other strange and irritating Godard films he made then and into the early 1970s, when his concept of narrative cinema treated that respected old product as a dead thing.
British Sounds may seem dead to some, its long-winded left-wing Communist- and Feminist-inspired narration inviting viewers to not watch it, especially not listen to it, for the soundtrack is truly grating to the ears. The narrative voices quoting from The Communist Manifesto and British Feminist Sheila Rowbotham's writings, possess a monotonous driving tone, like watching cement being poured on an endless film loop. Rowbotham's narration in her educated English voice is accompanied by a sequence showing a nude young woman walking from room to room in a house, and then talking on the telephone. Her nudity has no sexuality attached to it; it's a blank moment of a person (who happens to not be wearing clothes) in a blank setting (someone's house, the staircase, railing on the upper floor, two open doors and two rooms we can't see--the ones visited by the woman).
If this sounds like boring material for a film, it is. The other five sequences, left-wing workmen sitting in a room discussing their jobs, radical students composing alternate revolutionary lyrics for the Beatles' song, "Hello Goodbye," a bloody arm (Godard's, with Godard's actual blood) grasping a red flag, an MG auto production line, and a man apparently on black and white TV denouncing the Left in the most bloodthirsty terms, all have a jarring sense of not matching up in terms of sound and image.
The man haranguing the Left, for instance, is a young somewhat homely man seated at a desk, delivering a commentary replete with honest but gleefully told evaluations of what Western societies were then doing to the Third World. He advocates exterminating unionists, immigrants--he praises the U.S. for its treatment of Vietnam. Cutaway images in color show various often bucolic and placid British scenes of farmers and suburban life. On the face of it, there seems no relation between what the young man is saying and what we're seeing on the screen. For myself, who finds weird things interesting, this was the most entertaining and funniest part of the film. The young man is so honest about wanting to see the enemies of Fascist Capitalism annihilated that it makes me want to hear our own modern politicians and America Firsters speak so candidly, thus revealing their true natures.
The lack of logical relation between image and sound in British Sounds points to Godard's attempt to disarrange our own ideas about what a movie is. The film's first part is an aural assault on the ears, the camera tracking slowly to the right in the car factory. We see MG sports cars in varying stages of development, the rivet guns screaming, the overall sound distracting to the point that it's tempting to not even see the process of these machines being made, the nuts and bolts part of the creation of a sexy car, a vehicle that the men making them would have a hard time buying. The sequence goes on for about eleven minutes, a tracking shot unlike any other by a director who has never been someone to make films the easy way.
In the mid-1970s, Godard returned to making more "conventional" films, although his work has continued to be challenging, as he's gone increasingly in the direction of making poetic cinema.
British Sounds has the feel of a musician's desire to write a noisy song that makes the ears hurt, because the subject matter of what it is to be a worker, a woman, a youthful person yearning for a better world, is so everlastingly painful and fraught with obstacles.
Vic Neptune
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