An Acidemic Godard Reader

Over the years I've written a lot about old Godard, and a few have written for Acidemic on him as well. Read then this curated complete collection, and weep with hilarious wonder!

Acidemic
2 or 3 Ways Godard Taught Us How to Speak and Live, by John Bredin
The Love of Antagonism in Le Mepris, by Todd McGowan
One Plus One: En Gros Plan, by Suzanne Verderber
Postcards from Hell – Sympathy for the Devil, Godard, and the Dangers of Signification, by Erich Kuersten
The Accidental Brecht (or how to take the fun out of Godard), by Erich Kuersten

An Accidental Brecht or “How to take the Fun out of Godard” 

(Les Carabiners - Fox Lorber DVD commentary review:

(Bright Lights film Journal 2/5/07)

"...Part of this trouble I believe lies with the vanguard cinema studies professors. Bloodied from their battles with musty-tweeded literature professors over the worthiness of “pop culture” as a field of study, they seek to deaden the levity of their material, assuming that dourness and authority go hand in hand.

Cinema writers who are deep and entertaining at the same time–Robin Wood, Kim Newman, David Thomson, etc. tend to be British. The French have their own problems but, like Godard, are funny intrinsically (as long as they don’t try to be, in other words, as long as they keep it deadpan). It seems to be endemic to the U.S., that most intellectually insecure of nations, to mistake earnestness with importance. "(more)

MADE IN USA: Someone left a Maoist in the Rain

(7/09)

What Godard is chronicling here, then, perhaps, maybe, probably not, is the evolution of B-movie convention from The Big Sleep to Easy Rider. The exact second you realize that the hot blond waif sitting in the background at the bar looks a bit like a really young Marianne Faithful (above), she suddenly starts singing "As Tears Go By" - not lip syncing, but singing right there, a capella, trilling her voice gently and feeling every word of the song, expressing some longing we have no idea about but the mood of wistful sadness overwhelms the film in a summer of love tsunami, before it's even begun, only to resume its dry sand babbling even before she finishes the song. Compared to this bit of subdued emotionalism from a rising starlet of British rock royalty, the ensuing G. Marxist wordplay between Leaud and the bartender suddenly seems tired, yesterday's model. There's a new sincerity in town and it's cool to have feelings, or at any rate it's cool if you're Marianne Faithful. Karina, instead, is trying on the outfit of a bitchy too-cool-for-modernism contemporary diva (the host instead of the contestant on Europe's Next Top Model) for size. She's not about to pick up a flower and take off her shoes just because the other kids are doing it. So instead she just freezes from the knees down and looks at the floral arrangements like a penniless, starving lotus eater. 

(more)

Hell is a Postcard from Heaven

(2009, Issue #8) Trying to watch some of the extras on the Criterion DVD of Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (1965), I found a very interesting documentary: a "celebration" of Godard's films which opens on long shots of a Parisian souvenir store's postcard rack, then close-ups of postcards on display for Godard's various early movies, the ones with iconic starlets particularly: Breathless, Le Mepris and, of course Pierrot itself. You might say, ah, oui, la femme, monsieur, so what? But Godard would know so what... indeed. The purpose of this documentarian's montage was, sadly, not to create a post-modern mirror echoing Godard's own frequent use of postcards, book stalls, and magazine covers in his films as illustrations of--among other things--the way the press caters to humanity's base desires in an effort to suppress genuine change and revolution--but to canonize Godard and his "easy, early, sexy" films, to attach iconic markers to his terrain so the bourgeoisie don't get lost in the thicket and start running for the exits. I'm reminded of Godard's phrase about the bourgeoisie seeing a Roger Vadim movie that's supposed to be Shakespeare and being very excited that they finally 'get' the immortal bard now that he's all tarted up as it were: "This is Shakespeare? But this is marvelous!" (more)

Oh Woe is Me (1993, Godard)

(2/28/09 - Bright Lights)

"Godard wants the youth of Paris to be mad as hell and ready to fight for causes, but he no longer believes in the causes themselves, or in causes at all, except in that fighting for them is “good for the youth” of which he is no longer part. But he’s glad they associate him with causes, because his cold old bones are warmed by their political fire; but that’s all, as soon as they leave his side to chase the next rainbow, he’s back to smoking and reading the script. This is the adult Godard; he’s switched from angry to fond of anger; emotion of any strength can be fire in which to forge liberation of the self; one can’t free a society that is nothing but shackles by definition. Always it’s back to the one, not creating as Lacan said, “new masters,” via championing some explicitly rendered social cause. For Godard, all actions and points of order fade fast in the lapping waves, so focus on the waves or go down with the ship. A new idea is already coming into focus as the next one is cast off; hold onto the last wave too long and you wind up bedraggled on the shore of Dour Daddy Dogma. (more) 

"No Continuity - No Interest:" Re-Visiting Godard's PASSION

(2/4/08)

Here's what I mean: you see a knight on a horse trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden--thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: will you see this chick being abducted? Will you see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense. You fear and hate the knight and want to save the maiden, without even knowing the story (maybe she's a demon in disguise, who knows?) Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera, and the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman then she goes climbing up into the lighting rigging so the knight can't reach her, so he dismounts and goes to have a smoke.


There's two ways you can react to all that: one is to be angry or frustrated, to think you are "missing" something. Are they filming a movie within a movie here, or is this real? Why is she still running if she's not on camera? Who's filming this second movie about making the movie? The other is to grasp the ambiguity, the modern art/Zen response Godard is creating, and thus to laugh at your own predisposition to get so absorbed into narrative that you fight its cessation. For this second response, you are freed by realizing that the meltdown between the film and the film-within-the-film is intended to provide this response. Can you let go of your expectations, your obsessive need for character arcs, story lines, and dramatic resolution? If you can, you begin to see the ways film tricks you. Can you stand to watch stock characters and cliche types get melted down into meaninglessness? Will this technique frustrate you beyond endurance, or set you free from your steel trap mind? (more)

Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE (1963)

(4/2010)

With an artsy self-reflexive intellectual like Godard, prostitution will naturally function as a metaphor for cinema. Indeed, everything will, you point out. Prostitution, if I may return to that point, is a particularly apt metaphor for the cinema, counters JLG. This DP is Coutard's why camera leers over Karina's shoulder, sympathizing with her sadness, even as it causes the sadnesses it sympathizes with through the very nature of sympathizing. N/Ever sure what's an act and what isn't--is she just drawing us in to ask if she can borrow 2,000 francs?--in a meta way, it's even true that her character's dreams of being a film star are realized, right there in the act of being in the movie you are now witnessing, and yet even that is not enough - and it's your fault for by then you are only half-paying attention. Paying full attention would be impossible. Godard is forcing us to realize how our own hunger for cinematic beauty is itself responsible for the problems of exploitation and sexual commodification we wring our hands over at the bourgeois benefit. This is how we destroy the characters we love, our eye and its receptivity to light is the real monster here. But whereas the similarly distant Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion reacts to the encroachment of our gaze with delusional homicidal madness, Karina's prostitute just watches our watching, almost bemused, as her freedom and life are crushed up in the jaws of the Other's tepid desire. We might enjoy standing the gaze of millions, but she could give a shit. Sure she'll hide her tobacco-stained teeth if you ask, but she won't care if you see them either. If she did care, Godard's whole house of intellectual cards would collapse. (more)

Bertolt Brecht vs.The Aliens: PRENOM: CARMEN 

(Divinorum Psychonauticus, 2011; Acidemic #8)

There's a scene in First Name: Carmen (1983), for example, a violent shoot-out between sexy young terrorist bank robbers and French police is going on in a big hotel wherein elderly residents, ensconced in their favorite lobby and top floor armchairs, read newspapers, oblivious or at any rate barely concerned about the deliberately fake-seeming violence. They react to the bloodshed the way tolerant grandparents might react to their grandchildren running through the living room with toy guns. Ah, but are they supposed to be toy guns, JL? Which realm of belief are we on-- the cops and robbers side[narrative immersion], or the elderly hotel guests for whom it's either young people making a movie, acting out May 68-style agitprop theater, or really killing each other and what--if anything--is the difference in the long run? Banks have always made the best spots for plays about bank robbing wherein even the cops don't know if their bullets and targets are real. (more)

It's here, it's mindbending, it's Acidemic #8

This issue: Brecht-Godard-Wood, linked circlets connecting the search for freedom through 'dislodging' cinematic signifiers and turning bare soundstages into ghost ships and surrealist basements. This year's stellar line-up batted down the plate and strewn orchids on the grave of logic.

If through the issue you notice very little Godard, know this: Godard is in all things whether we speak of him or no. There is no going straight from Brecht to Wood. I tried. But my own understanding of film studies comes roundabout through Godard's dedication to Monogram Pictures (whose Return of the Ape Man is discussed) at the start of Breathless. 

Ed Wood by Mick Baltes

Also in this mighty issue: Peter K. Tyson decodes the Brechtian intertexutality of Fassbinder's Lola; teenage Molly Marie Wright rages against the empty-headed CGI of the Total Recall remake vs. the paravegan grandeur of Troll 2. Intertextual frisson erupts as Thomas Duke challenges Roger Ebert's perception of 'flaws' in Edgar G. Ulmer's poverty row classic Detour; Chris Stengl exhumes Pauline Kael's 'lost' review of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and I lament the dryness of David Sterritt's Les Carabiniers commentary track. Film historian David Del Valle discusses the joys and inaccuracies of Tim Burton's Ed Wood while acclaimed Nuyorican poet Tracie Morris expresses her misgivings over Burton's Dark Shadows and praises the original 1,000+ episode TV show. We get insightful probes into the basement surrealism of both Val Letwon's The Ghost Ship (from Ethan Spigland), and Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (from Budd Wilkins). Gregory Cwik discusses metatextual threads in horror via Cabin in the Woods, and I through Halloween.... and through the valley of the shallows of Brecht, we shall find Woodsy depth.

And we learn how Godard's Prénom Carmen explains the truth about UFOs, for, as the great Eros would say, "you didn't actually think you were the only inhabited planet in the universe? How can any race be so stupid?"

And check out Memento Mori, the staggeringly detailed historical action figure comic by our cover artist, Mick Baltes.

In the Oui Small Hours: SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

A brilliant but troubling film that gets both better and worse with repeat viewings, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958) is cited by Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a screenwriter-for-hire in Godard's 1963 CONTEMPT. Paul's in the bathtub but wearing his hat nonetheless, "like Dean Mar-Tan in Sum Cah-eem Ran-Neeng." Dean never takes his hat off either, you see.

One of those small town hypocrisy critiques that were very popular after WW2, it's based on the novel of the same name by the hot bestseller author of the moment, James Jones, who also gave the world such great titles as FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and THE THIN RED LINE. SOME is almost like the sequel to those films (I've not read the books), a 'post-war vet butting heads with his hypocritical small hometown' novel, with a little sex in it. It's hard to imagine now, when American soldiers are expected to be saintly family-style Christians, but after the Second World War those brave boys wanted to get home and get laid, drunk, and...have some pals pour him onto a bus out of town, where he wakes up from a stupor and groggily tries to find his wallet. He mainly wants to drink, sleep for the first time without 40 guys in the room, and, well, get laid and drunk. Depending on where they were from (and where they served) they found provincial small town morals from the post-code 1930s awaiting them at home--curfews, old lady gossip, bars that close at midnight, and they had to get out, stat, and lo, they could because they knew how to build quick easy housing and there were a lot of unemployed guys eager to do so. And lo! The suburbs began, and lo, a plethora of books and movies savaging--with a glee I heartily approve of--the American small town moral hypocrisy that was left behind (PEYTON PLACE, etc.)

But SOME CAME RUNNING has an extra shot of venom as a chaser; a mean hangover hovers over all the actors, dragging things down after a transcendent opening stretch. It begins with Sinatra arriving by bus in the early, early dawn, now fairly hungover, realizing he needs to sending off the floozy (Shirley MacLaine) he picked up back in Chicago or wherever he's coming from, before word or her gets out with the roster of hypocritical small town types he's there to unnerve. The prodigal son come home to rattle the chains binding his upstanding banker brother (Arthur Kennedy), his shrewish country club wife (Leora Dana), a schoolmarm inhibitionist who knows his earlier writing (Martha Hyer), and a sexually precocious millionaire's daughter (Betty Lou Keim) he has little interest in. The irony is, he judges them even more harshly than they in turn judge the sexually active, hard-drinking rififi of their small Indiana town, such as Dean Martin, the coolest cat in the movie except he's a misogynist who calls girls 'pigs.' Between these camps Frank Sinatra's oscillates. But does a finger pointing at a finger pointing make a right? His seething disdain for "the literary crowd" who admire his past novels butts uneasily against his sense of superiority; he'd rather hang with people who either dislike him or he dislikes, so he can stay snide and removed. Personally I don't know any writers who would feel that way and be worth a damn; it smacks of a kind of rude fakeness on pair with Agnes' monotonal nonstop bourgeois country club social calendar babble, brilliantly accented by Kennedy as her lap dog husband.

For this and other reasons, Minelli gives us little reason we should care about this boozehound "writer" played by Sinatra, especially if he needs a Dogville's worth of hypocrites just to look knightly by comparison. His brother may be a henpecked phony, but isn't even that better than just sulking over the fact that the one girl in town trying to hold onto her virginity won't put out on the first date? Frank, why are you hanging out with these people? You don't need that grief. Pick a class and stick with it, or else stop posturing. If your brother wants to marry a rich shrew and put his kid brother in an orphanage, just never return. Coming back never seems to register as a necessity, 

But again, luckily (for the most part) there's Dean Martin, an insouciant gambler who befriends Sinatra since he's good at poker. Even indoors or in the presence of a lady, Dino never takes off his hat, inspiring Michel Piccoli to do the same five years later in the aforementioned CONTEMPT. I don't mention that film just to sound snooty. In fact, it's worth comparing the two films as both are about smarmy writers: Piccoli's character is actually a lot more like Sinatra's bitter brooder than Dino's breezy gambler, but all of them coast along on a river of women whom they disdain, while pursue things they don't actually want: Michel never 'gets' why Bardot suddenly feels contempt for him, but he's felt it for her right along; Frankie never 'gets' why he must snap at anyone who suggests he's a good writer, while at the same time anointing his hotel room with artfully uncracked copies of Steinbeck. And like it or not, MacLaine is his girlfriend, the teacher doesn't even like him, though for Frank that means you're engaged. That's the reality of it. Uncertain men wind up with the girls who grab them and not the ones they hesitantly reach for like a stranger's ringing phone.

That's why the best scenes in SCR are the earliest: Frank alone, drinking in the wee hours of the morning in a hotel room, effortless evoking his cool Vegas stature with the bellboy while checking into the nowhere town's shabby Main street hotel as the sun cups up. Minnelli's brilliance shines through in these scenes: Frank alone in a room with a bottle and a window as the sun comes up.  It's a feeling some of us know well. It feels in those precious solitary cracking dawn moments. Suddenly it's like the world is yours, serene and sublime and empty, and you get to fall asleep when everyone else is waking up, which is a joyous thing.

But then, when you wake up, around lunch time, the street below is a bustling and honking and glaring sunshine nightmare.  Frank tries to be a good sport--it's only when he's around the phony country club types his veneer gets sour--but he won't leave them alone, so he's sour all the time.

Dean Martin, by contrast, is a breezy nonchalant rogue with no need for validation or labels like 'writer' (though I abhor his term 'pig' to describe his women). As such he may be an inspiration for both Sinatra's and Piccoli's onscreen characters but neither Martin or Sinatra are French enough to swallow the pill all the way. Sinatra just expects Martin to give up drinking since it's 'doctor's orders' - in real life I don't think either James Jones, Sinatra, or Godard for that matter, would expect Martin to do anything but be true to his bad boozy self, to the unwilling-to-slow-the-momentum Jake Gideon-style end, even if that end is mere weeks away. And Michel's writer in CONTEMPT never seems to realize he can just say no to Palance's egomaniacal American, regardless of the check amount. If he could do that, then Stumpy could take the bottle away. 

Still we stick around, because Martin and Sinatra have laid-back chemistry in their macho backroom poker sessions. It's worth it just for that. Is anything more uniquely poetic and American than Sinatra with his tie loosened, nursing a tumbler of blended whiskey and a cigarette while bluffing a high stakes hand? Or Dean with his morning cup of bourbon to which he gingerly adds a dash coffee? The score by Elmer Bernstein is boozily thunderous and makes ugly Americana into something that still has depth and tear-stained class even as it wallows in overwrought emotions that only Sirk or Almodovar can really make fly. Walking away from this movie you may feel, as I do, frustrated and annoyed. It's the same frustration and annoyance I used to feel every time I went home to Bridgewater, NJ,with nothing to do but drive around and brood and make up excuses to my mom for my boozy, cigarette smells and staying up to the oui oui hours. Packed with that Minnelli eye for detail, it's never the same movie twice, but then again, neither are you.