Film Socialisme

Taking reading and movie-watching literally
Summer used to be the time people caught up on the reading they had always meant to do. In Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth parodied the ritual pulling out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace around the pool or on the beach. Roth observed an ideal situation—not beach fiction but great fiction on the beach—that should inspire movie lovers as well.

With the increased availability of movies in various delivery formats following their initial theatrical runs, when people simple don’t have the time to get out to theaters, summer relaxation offers the opportunity to catch up.

Thanks to tablets and smart phones, this summer’s reading doesn’t have to be limited to Tolstoy, Robert Caro or those James Brown and Nile Rodgers biographies; summer reading ideal can include movies, too, especially movies where you literally need to read—the subtitles.

Conversation Piece
Burt Lancaster stars in Luchino Visconti’s quasi-autobiographical story of an dying professor assessing his appetite for life when a greedy, narcissistic family invades his estate. Many of the themes Visconti explored in his film version of Mann’s Death in Venice are re-examined in this mostly interior-set film, which goes both deeper yet lighter. It‘s a wise man’s view of sexual folly unlike any other.
Each close-up of each ravishing face (Lancaster, Helmut Berger, Silvana Mangano) is worth several pages of great prose. Visconti‘s 1974 masterpiece is one of the New York Film Festival premieres left out of this year’s NYFF retrospective. It’s rarely shown, but this new DVD offers it in an aspect ratio that preserves its widescreen beauty. (Raro Video)

Film Socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard turns the ends of both film and of socialism as we know it into a provocation, going into the bold cinematic and political territory of the present as no other filmmaker can. This film contains some of Godard’s most perplexing yet charming études: two parent and child sequences—one jazz, one classical—that symbolize cultural and spiritual indoctrination.
Godard plays with the idea of a “readable text” by creating special subtitles in “Navajo English” that poetically fracture language into verbal codes. Simultaneously analyzing people, the world and the media between them, he teases sound and image. The visual experiments confirm Godard’s pitch-perfect compositional and color skills. An opening sequence aboard a cruise ship symbolizes the state of the world, afloat/adrift between new media and old means of conveyance. Prophetically, the ship is named Costa Concordia. (Kino Lorber)

Going Places
Bertrand Blier’s debut comedy is as outrageous now as it was back in 1974. Newly released on DVD, it shames contemporary sex comedies as timid and juvenile expressions of sex and romance. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, at their physical peaks, portray a pair of louts who roam a small town looking for sexual release at the expense of available women (or each other, if the mood hits).This contemporary surrealist sex farce is perched between erotic daydream and pre-Viagra nightmare. Blier tests social conventions as well as the fragile if bodacious male ego—especially when the unarousable Miou-Miou achieves fulfillment the alpha male duo cannot provide. Going Places shocks, amuses and makes you think. (Kino Lorber)

The Clowns
Fellini’s examination of the circus and clown tradition pays tribute to conventions of comedy and caricature that are at the core of his “serious” films. This rarely shown documentary offers a trove of the “Felliniesque”—from outrageous faces and acrobatic movement to universal pathos. It also predates what came to be thought of as the “mockumentary,” through Fellini’s ingenious way of making his documentary investigation as absorbing and fascinating as a fully scripted drama. Instead of mocking narrative convention, Fellini expands the storytelling boundaries of filmmaking, all the time expressing his unique sensibility. Not just for fans of Fellini but for cinema and performing arts enthusiasts, too. (Raro Video)

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos
For cineastes, this is the year’s worthiest documentary, a look back at the twin careers of great cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs. These Hungarian immigrants came to the U.S. in the 1960s, bringing New Wave experiments with natural lighting and mobile cameras that changed the look of American cinema. Between them, Zsigmond and Kovacs shot most of the best and important films of the 1970s’ American Renaissance period—McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Easy Rider, Paper Moon, Five Easy Pieces, Nickelodeon, Shampoo, The Deer Hunter and more.

Actually, there are no subtitles to read here, but director James Chressanthis brings the cross-cultural art movie experience closer through the personalities and creativity of these major artists. (Cinema Libre Studio)

In 1967, one year before the historic Left uprisings of May 1968, Godard produced a pair of prophetic masterpieces (La Chinoise and Weekend) as if to provide cognitive, and aesthetic, sustenance for the coming revolution. So perfect was their historical tie in that, at their American premier—during the 1968 New York Film Festival—they were advertised with the slogan “Imagination is seizing power,” as a nod to the previous May’s insurrection. 

Once again, cinema and history are in sync: this time at the dawn of the Occupy Wall Street (or 99%) Movement, with Film Forum’s timely screening of Weekend in New York; about a mile north of the protest’s epicenter in Zucotti Park. Godard’s searing and absurdist critique of bourgeois values—symbolized by the film’s most famous scene: a surreal and carnivalesque 8 minute traffic jam (complete with singing children, a sailboat, and a llama) that’s caused by the sportive, celebratory viewing of a bloody car wreck—remains as startlingly subversive as ever. Weekend offers proof of art’s continued essential role in naming brutalities and injustices in our social order; shattering silences that pave the way for repair.

My recent encounter with Weekend was deeply enhanced—brought into vivid relief—by my awareness of the boldly resurging Left (that Occupy Wall Street represents) now exploding in glorious, colorful pockets of drum banging protest in NYC; and beginning to spread throughout the world. It also felt like a great validation for Godard: whose radical Left leanings, which once got him ostracized, might now be viewed as prescient. As well, it’s a timely reminder that a cultural Left ought to accompany, and strengthen, a political Left. Though this idea is nothing new, of course, an argument can be made for the vital need to re-educate a generation raised on fluffy corporate media, and de-politicized in dumbed down school systems denuded of art, history, and philosophy; where high stakes testing reduces students to robotic drones who are taught to hate learning, or, if the real truth be told, are never introduced to the notion of authentic learning in the first place. That would be too dangerous!

Godard, who might have easily followed his great commercial success with Breathless in 1960 by churning out less politically jarring (i.e. popular) work, chose the more difficult moral high ground by allowing his politics to shape his emerging aesthetics. This alienated him from his one time close friend François Truffaut, who Godard accused of being a sellout, and it also put him front and center during France’s tumultuous May ‘68. Richard Brody, who wrote the definitive biography of Godard, devotes a whole chapter to a brilliant, near novelistic rendering of this almost-revolution—which Godard took full gleeful participation in. Hopefully, more American artists (including filmmakers) will follow the example of Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon and Russell Simmons and get involved in what theOccupied Wall Street Journal, in its premier headline, called “The Most Important Thing in the World.”

Bio

The author is a writer whose previous essays have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, NY Press, and Evergreen Review. He also has a weekly TV show, the Public Voice Salon (a progressive dialogue on culture, politics, and the critical issues of our time) that airs on Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

Thirty years ago, Every Man For Himself was hailed as Jean-Luc Godard’s comeback. So its revival this week at Film Forum should be viewed as the same. After the confounding, insincere semi-honor from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a recent front page smear in the New York Times, it is good—and necessary—to contemplate Every Man For Himself and renew our understanding that Godard matters. We need to know more than ever why he is one of the true giants of filmmaking and, perhaps, one of the last thinking, emotionally-engaged humanists.

Jacques Dutronc thinking about Isabelle Huppert.

The desperation expressed by the title Every Man For Himself is felt by three Swiss citizens: Denise (Nathalie Baye), an itinerant novelist who bikes between jobs; Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute exploring her options; and Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a director at the crossroads between film and video and wavering between fatherhood, an ex-wife and his disenchanted mistress. Each character crosses borders from what they know to searching for the uncertain satisfaction they desire—in love, work and life.

Godard’s French title Sauve Qui Peut/La Vie translates as “Save the Man Who’s Afraid/Life,” contrasting panic and possibility, anxiety and hope. He made the film after a decade in the “wilderness”—creating video experiments that explored his own political consciousness and documenting the social realities of contemporary Europe. This return to cinema demonstrated Godard’s new-found aesthetic: In Every Man For Himself he is more inventive and idiosyncratically witty than ever (though without the glamorous 1960s romanticism that critics prefer, forgetting that Godard was always rigorously conscientious). But here, his imagery acquires a fresh, grave elegance (cosmic nature, not pop art, takes prominence) while staying radically committed to deconstructing movie narrative. Even in the same year as Raging Bull, Melvin and Howard, Dressed to Kill and The Long Riders it was still the freshest, most thrilling movie to behold. Thus, the movie remains as startlingly beautiful—and challenging—as it was 30 years ago.

The film’s British release title is Slow Motion, referring to Godard’s occasional emphasis on retarding the action into increments, especially images of Denise biking across borders through the exquisitely peaceful Swiss countryside (critic Andrew Sarris likened the technique to “instant replay” of sports events). Godard draws attention to what he called “the emotion in motion,” never taking cinema’s visual pleasure and complexity for granted. One motif is highlighting the “invisible” use of background music, even, at a key moment, showing the source of an especially emotive orchestral theme.

Clever as ever, Godard got back into 35mm cinema in 1980, announcing an intense, if somber, flowering of his aesthetic curiosity. His exquisite, openly spiritual films made after this one (Passion, Detective, Hail, Mary, King Lear, Prenom: Carmen and the capstone Nouvelle Vague in 1990) now look like cinema’s last epiphany before video’s take-over. Godard, always a student excited by the poetics of popular art, was responding to cinematic breakthroughs he had missed during his “wilderness” sojourn. In a 1980 interview with Jonathan Cott, Godard praised the slow motion death sequence in DePalma’s 1978 The Fury, and Every Man For Himself repeatedly pays homage to Marguerite Duras’ 1977 Le Camion, emulating its hypnotic shots of trucks and cars on eerily quiet roads. Through these citations, Godard pursued the essence of cinema as the recording of life.

In a scene where Paul (his sardonic alter ego) resists giving a classroom lecture, a formula scrawled on the blackboard proposes CINEMA + VIDEO, CAIN + ABEL. It seemed waggish at the time, but now looks prophetic. Every Man For Himself warns how changing morality and human relations are reflected in artistic technique and modes of communication (long before The Social Network). The infamous scene of Isabelle’s participation in an orgy with a businessman and his lackey plays out the decadent development. Not just a spoof on cruel, brutal, naked capitalist exploitation, this twilight daisy chain also seems to have predicted the upcoming Reagan revolution and particularly its deceptive afterglow—Bill Clinton’s Oval Office debauchery.

During this sequence, Huppert’s impassive face gives the illusion of coolness, but she also conveys Godard’s contemplative manner—observing chaos with humane forbearance. This is wisdom Godard earned from the unsettling exploration of political fractiousness in movies like the 1975 Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs)—the one carelessly cited by the New York Times as an example of Godard’s bigotry. Typically brilliant, Godard looks on politics as expressions of human will. Here and Elsewhere is not, in the end, about Palestine or Israel, it’s about Complication. “Very soon you don’t know what to make of the film,” Godard narrates. “Very soon the contradictions explode including you.” He pursues a circle of meaning: images become history, reflection, consequences, politics, humanity.

Maybe Godard is under attack after all these years because his principled filmmaking has always been an attack on the tyranny of bourgeois culture. But get this straight: Here and Elsewhere’s title refers to a spiritual exchange and state of being: Compassion. Godard works in the highest humanist tradition, which is why the current smear campaign against him won’t succeed. See Every Man For Himself: Save the Artist Who Feels/Life.
_
Every Man For Himself
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
At Film Forum Nov. 12-25
Runtime: 87 min.

László Szabó (left), Claude Bouillon and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A.

Amidst self-conscious film references, Paula suspects “fiction overtakes reality” as when she walks through a cinema and is dwarfed by huge, Rosenquist-like movie posters, or enters a blooming garden and muses, “It’s the kind of day to take out a camera and make a color movie”—evoking a scene from Mailer’s An American Dream and prefiguring Godard’s nature etudes in Nouvelle Vague (1990). The imagery, editing and sound design keep one aesthetically alert as in Antonioni’s revolutionary Red Desert, only Godard situates Paula’s crisis in the political world of 1960s assassinations from Ben Barka to JFK—using cartoon-panels depicting violence as visual onomatopoeia—pondering its spiritual effect.
During Paula’s café discussion on language, the young pop star Marianne Faithfull appears reciting her mid-1960s hit “As Tears Go By.” After 42 years, this sound/image of fragile innocence evokes the epoch’s poignant, soon-to-be-lost yearning. It’s astounding that Godard places it in a montage that corresponds to Altman’s “I’m Easy” montage in Nashville.
Made in U.S.A. is a tonic experience; its style is both vibrant and severe like Godard’s 1985 Detective. But it’s also Godard’s most soulful movie. Karina’s declaration “Whatever I do, I cannot shirk my responsibility to others. I place at the center of my existence, a benchmark: ethics” summarizes beliefs that contemporary film artists from Fincher to Van Sant to P.T. Anderson have lost. Paula’s political disclosures are not merely accusatory; her compassion would shock today’s liberals: “The Right and the Left are the same. We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves.” As a grad student that moved me greatly, but I didn’t know then that Godard was a prophet.

–

Made in the U.S.A.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, At Film Forum Jan. 9-22
Running Time: 86 min.

–