Water Music
Carmen, the opera by Georges Bizet, is a story of love, jealousy, and murder. Bizet died of a heart attack when he was just thirty-seven. He wrote beautiful music. His L'Arlesienne is one of the most exquisite pieces of music I've ever heard. I compare him to Jean-Luc Godard in that the filmmaker is drawn often to classics. Bizet, like Godard, was regarded by critics in his time as an artist making odd moves; a youthful experimenter, perhaps. Godard, by the time he made Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen) in 1983, was fifty-two years old with thirty feature films to his credit. So much experience at conceiving and crafting films should lead one to expect a movie harking back to a nineteenth century story to nevertheless be more Godardian than anything else.
My second viewing of this movie (I saw it many years ago on a rented VHS cassette the first time) brought me closer to feeling it, with a library DVD this time, the colors, picture, and sound possessing a clarity I missed years ago. Godard's ever-complicated sound design (grown more complicated in passing time) makes the movie a rich experience. He intercuts rehearsals of a string quartet practicing Beethoven with the main action of the film. This use of incidental music reflects a device used in several Jacques Rivette films. Since Godard and Rivette were film critics together in the 1950s and as far as I know were friends for a long time, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Godard borrowed this method from Rivette.
It's also typical that Godard loosely used the plot of Bizet's opera, but doesn't have any of Bizet's music in the film. This kind of conceit can irritate critics, as when Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Medea put the great opera singer Maria Callas in the title role but didn't have her sing. My own view of this kind of practice, in Godard's case, for instance, includes the sense that it isn't necessary to make a Carmen movie with Bizet's score. The skeleton of the original plot suffices as a framework around which to put the movie. Godard's haphazard use of sources resembles Shakespeare's borrowings from histories and tales he had access to. Godard doesn't really give a shit about adhering to faithful adaptations of works, whether they're detective novels (The Jugger by Richard Stark serving as the very loose basis of Made in USA) or Shakespearean tragedy (King Lear).
Godard's purpose is cinema, playing with its materials. He appears in his Carmen as Jeannot, Carmen's uncle. A nutty filmmaker who does his utmost to get another week's stay in a mental hospital. He's referred to as having made numerous films, but he stopped--apparently, the changing film industry of the 1970s and 1980s has stifled him. In this vein, the film reads at the end, "In memoriam, small movies."
The cinema world by this point had gone blockbuster. From what I've read about him, Godard sees directors like Steven Spielberg as hacks. His hatred of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is evident in Éloge de l'amour.
Carmen (gorgeous Maruschka Detmers in her first film) is part of a group making a film. They rob a bank to obtain funds, she falls in love with a bank guard who later becomes jealous of her interest in the would-be film's director, and the bank guard kills her. Carmen, the original Bizet story, stripped to its essence.
Considering the amount of time spent on Detmers and her nude body, her soft-featured beautiful face all photographed apparently with a sense of showing the sheer beauty of a young woman, the movie fixates on Carmen, with side antics like police chases, moments in restaurants, hotel rooms, the mental hospital, waves crashing on shore, Paris at night, traffic, all of it interspersed with the Beethoven string quartet rehearsals. It might seem sloppy, but my second viewing showed me that the whole thrust of the film is musical, the images flowing as the music and sounds do. If Bizet's opera is about a fascinating Gypsy woman, one is drawn to her story as one is drawn to Detmers' Carmen. We then follow her relationships with her eccentric uncle and with the bank guard. These entanglements (the plot) lead to the final stroke of death, giving way to the caption, "In memoriam, small movies."
Since Godard still makes movies, has made them steadily since 1983, the "small movies" death hasn't affected him. The caption refers, perhaps, to the general trend in popular cinema since the 1970s, when big moneymakers became the standard by which films received judgment. This tendency polluted cinematic possibilities for a while, ultimately quashing the honest, tough, gritty '70s American dramas, but independent cinema in America rose high and still fills a need for entertainment not entirely guided by the regulations of capitalistic art. The only big budget film Godard ever made, Contempt from 1963 and starring the expensive Brigitte Bardot, also happens to be the greatest film I've ever seen. That experience, in spite of the result, soured him on making expensive films.
With a film like Prénom Carmen, for all its quirky strangeness, we can see a filmmaker following his artistic instincts, unwilling to compromise with commercial cinematic interests. Even now, thirty-four years after the film came out, it's avant-garde; this trait can be seen in every Godard movie I've ever watched, proving to me that some rare artists are simply, always, ahead of their time.
Vic Neptune
Carmen, the opera by Georges Bizet, is a story of love, jealousy, and murder. Bizet died of a heart attack when he was just thirty-seven. He wrote beautiful music. His L'Arlesienne is one of the most exquisite pieces of music I've ever heard. I compare him to Jean-Luc Godard in that the filmmaker is drawn often to classics. Bizet, like Godard, was regarded by critics in his time as an artist making odd moves; a youthful experimenter, perhaps. Godard, by the time he made Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen) in 1983, was fifty-two years old with thirty feature films to his credit. So much experience at conceiving and crafting films should lead one to expect a movie harking back to a nineteenth century story to nevertheless be more Godardian than anything else.
My second viewing of this movie (I saw it many years ago on a rented VHS cassette the first time) brought me closer to feeling it, with a library DVD this time, the colors, picture, and sound possessing a clarity I missed years ago. Godard's ever-complicated sound design (grown more complicated in passing time) makes the movie a rich experience. He intercuts rehearsals of a string quartet practicing Beethoven with the main action of the film. This use of incidental music reflects a device used in several Jacques Rivette films. Since Godard and Rivette were film critics together in the 1950s and as far as I know were friends for a long time, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Godard borrowed this method from Rivette.
It's also typical that Godard loosely used the plot of Bizet's opera, but doesn't have any of Bizet's music in the film. This kind of conceit can irritate critics, as when Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Medea put the great opera singer Maria Callas in the title role but didn't have her sing. My own view of this kind of practice, in Godard's case, for instance, includes the sense that it isn't necessary to make a Carmen movie with Bizet's score. The skeleton of the original plot suffices as a framework around which to put the movie. Godard's haphazard use of sources resembles Shakespeare's borrowings from histories and tales he had access to. Godard doesn't really give a shit about adhering to faithful adaptations of works, whether they're detective novels (The Jugger by Richard Stark serving as the very loose basis of Made in USA) or Shakespearean tragedy (King Lear).
Godard's purpose is cinema, playing with its materials. He appears in his Carmen as Jeannot, Carmen's uncle. A nutty filmmaker who does his utmost to get another week's stay in a mental hospital. He's referred to as having made numerous films, but he stopped--apparently, the changing film industry of the 1970s and 1980s has stifled him. In this vein, the film reads at the end, "In memoriam, small movies."
The cinema world by this point had gone blockbuster. From what I've read about him, Godard sees directors like Steven Spielberg as hacks. His hatred of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is evident in Éloge de l'amour.
Carmen (gorgeous Maruschka Detmers in her first film) is part of a group making a film. They rob a bank to obtain funds, she falls in love with a bank guard who later becomes jealous of her interest in the would-be film's director, and the bank guard kills her. Carmen, the original Bizet story, stripped to its essence.
Considering the amount of time spent on Detmers and her nude body, her soft-featured beautiful face all photographed apparently with a sense of showing the sheer beauty of a young woman, the movie fixates on Carmen, with side antics like police chases, moments in restaurants, hotel rooms, the mental hospital, waves crashing on shore, Paris at night, traffic, all of it interspersed with the Beethoven string quartet rehearsals. It might seem sloppy, but my second viewing showed me that the whole thrust of the film is musical, the images flowing as the music and sounds do. If Bizet's opera is about a fascinating Gypsy woman, one is drawn to her story as one is drawn to Detmers' Carmen. We then follow her relationships with her eccentric uncle and with the bank guard. These entanglements (the plot) lead to the final stroke of death, giving way to the caption, "In memoriam, small movies."
Since Godard still makes movies, has made them steadily since 1983, the "small movies" death hasn't affected him. The caption refers, perhaps, to the general trend in popular cinema since the 1970s, when big moneymakers became the standard by which films received judgment. This tendency polluted cinematic possibilities for a while, ultimately quashing the honest, tough, gritty '70s American dramas, but independent cinema in America rose high and still fills a need for entertainment not entirely guided by the regulations of capitalistic art. The only big budget film Godard ever made, Contempt from 1963 and starring the expensive Brigitte Bardot, also happens to be the greatest film I've ever seen. That experience, in spite of the result, soured him on making expensive films.
With a film like Prénom Carmen, for all its quirky strangeness, we can see a filmmaker following his artistic instincts, unwilling to compromise with commercial cinematic interests. Even now, thirty-four years after the film came out, it's avant-garde; this trait can be seen in every Godard movie I've ever watched, proving to me that some rare artists are simply, always, ahead of their time.
Vic Neptune
Comments
Post a Comment