For the cineaste who read film books, recent article from BFI on their top 5 film books:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/...ks_topfive.php
Anyway, there were positive for Godard's film "Film Socialism" as well:
Owen Glieberman:
Cannes: Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Film Socialisme’ has his avant dazzle, but it isn’t pretty if you read between the lines.
Years ago at Cannes, I attended a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and ended up walking out after 20 minutes — not because I didn’t like the film, but because it was being shown in French without English subtitles. Since most of what I saw consisted of narration, and I barely speak a word of French (in high school, I seemed to know less of the language each year I studied it), it seemed altogether pointless to stay. I assumed, at the time, and naively, that I’d mistakenly wandered into some special category of screening intended for the foreign press. Actually, the movie had only just been completed, and it was being shown without subtitles because Godard had approved it that way. He can be a stubbornly perverse purist and devoted anti-communicator (especially when it comes to Americans).
With Godard, though, nothing is simple. This year at Cannes, I saw Film Socialisme, his latest tract/poem/experiment/avant meditation, and this time, too, the French in the movie was spoken without a full translation. But at the bottom of the screen, throughout the film, there appear clusters of words, in English only, that aren’t so much subtitles as slogans and pensées, displayed in cutting counterpoint to the images. (This time, you were out of luck if you didn’t speak English.) Film Socialisme has obscure moments, but it’s (literally) easy to read. That may be because Godard, at 79, has something scaldingly urgent to say, even if it isn’t pretty.
The first half of the movie presents scenes on a cruise ship, which Godard treats just like the spaceship in WALL-E — as a giant, floating metaphor for our passivity and corruption. There are striking, abrasive, raggedly degraded video shots of people dancing in the ship’s disco (the music is distorted into scrapes so that it sounds like electronic torture with a beat); these shots suggest that our entertainment escapes have become a form of madness. Godard presents the passengers on the ship as clueless zombies and happy pawns, and his images have some of the primary-color narcotic sharpness one remembers from Pierrot le Fou (1965) and One Plus One (1968). At the same time, the words and phrases at the bottom of the screen offer an ongoing haiku analysis of our current condition: words like “today bastards sincere” or “aids tool for killing blacks.” Then there are the oversize headlines that really spell things out, like this one: “Palestine: Access Denied.” At one point, the screen flashes (untranslated) Arabic letters in white with Hebrew letters in blood-red superimposed on top of them. Richard Brody, in his magisterial 2008 Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, has acknowledged the filmmaker’s creeping anti-Semitism, and watching Film Socialisme, you don’t need a translation to know what Godard is really saying: that Israel, with regard to the Palestinians, isn’t just in violation — but, rather, that it is a violation.
He’s still cryptic about it, of course, and he lumps Israel in with other “antisocialist” regimes, hectoring the whole world for its litany of injustice. With his leftist-nihilist agitprop laid over an increasingly fractured and depersonalized underground-film vocabulary, Godard is now a strange hybrid — Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky. Late in the movie, he gets some montage going that’s like a deconstructed music video, and you feel the surging pull of his power as a filmmaker. But you also feel one of the key motivations behind his obliqueness, his splintered-cinema techniques: If Jean-Luc Godard actually came right out and said what he was thinking, in all its off-putting extremity and even ugliness, he might knock himself right off his pedestal."
NYTimes Manhola Dargis
CANNES, France — If I am remembering clearly – and my head is filled with so many densely layered words and images, it is hard to unpack them – the first image in “Film Socialism,” the new movie by Jean-Luc Godard, is of two red-headed parrots, side by side on a tree limb. The parrots are among a handful of animals that appear in the movie, which had its press premiere Monday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, and includes a pair of hilariously talkative cats (whose meows are, in turn, parroted by a young woman watching them on a laptop), as well as a llama and a mule. Surrounding these animals is a menagerie of talking, quoting, babbling human beings speaking in French, German, Russian, English and Arabic, among other tongues.
Wittily, perversely, contrastingly, the final words in the movie are “No Comment,” which appear in large English letters like a declaration, bringing this hour and 41 minutes of sights and sounds to an abrupt close. Mr. Godard, 79, was scheduled to appear at a press conference after the screening, but made good on these last words by not showing up. Although the rumor that he would be a no-show had started to circulate before the screening, several dozen journalists trooped to the press room to see if a representative might appear with an explanation or a press release. Nothing. Not even a note. No comment.
According to the French newspaper Libération, Mr. Godard sent a fax to the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, saying that “problems of the Greek type” had prevented him from attending and that he would go to his death for the festival, but not one step more. (“Suite à des problèmes de type grec, je ne pourrai être votre obligé à Cannes. Avec le festival, j’irai jusqu’à la mort, mais je ne ferai pas un pas de plus. Amicalement. Jean-Luc Godard”)
Any new Godard movie is a noteworthy occasion and this screening was packed with an audience primed for difficulties of some kind. On Friday, the British newspaper The Independent, reported that the movie’s English-language subtitles would be in what was characterized as “Navajo English,” to replicate the fractured words spoken by Hollywood-style Indians in westerns (and in “F Troop”): “If a character is saying ‘give me your watch,’ the subtitle will read ‘You, me, watch.’ ” In the 1950s, Mr. Godard worked in the Paris publicity office for Twentieth Century Fox, and knows how to stir things up. (He had already tempted us with a trailer in which the movie appears in hyper fast forward; the complete film can be viewed through Wednesday on the Web site FilmoTV.fr)
My thoughts on the movie – which looks like it was shot in both low-grade video and high-definition digital – are tentative and, for now, brief. It can be divided into three sections, the first set on Mediterranean cruise ship on which the mostly white passengers eat, mingle and gamble. Among the travelers are several men and women, as well as a teenage girl and younger boy, who speak to one another and themselves in various largely untranslated languages. As promised, the English-language subtitles are sparse, with words sometimes joined together or widely spaced: “nocrimes noblood”; “German Jews black”; “impossible story”; “Kamikaze divine wind”; “right of return.” Every so often, Patti Smith appears, singing in a cabin and strolling on deck or below with an acoustic guitar.
The second section is set in and around a small gas station and adjoining house, where two women, a white journalist, perhaps, and a black camera operator, are lurking about the garage owners, a French family of four. (One exterior wall is emblazoned with the name J. J. Martin.) Here, the discussion turns to liberté, égalité and fraternité, and with these ideals, the French revolution is invoked.
The third section turns to different places: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hell As (more on that in a moment), Naples and Barcelona. “Hell As” refers to Hellas, the Greek word for Greece, but might also be a punning reference to the French word for “alas” – hélas – and an earlier Godard film, “Hélas Pour Moi,” which retells the myth of Amphitryon and Alcmene. Along the way, Jews, Hollywood and the Holocaust are referenced.
Clearly, it will take many more viewings of “Film Socialism,” an improvement in my French and many more fully translated subtitles before I can begin to get a tentative grasp on it. Such are the complicated pleasures of Mr. Godard’s work: however private, even hermetic his film language can be, these are works that by virtue of that language’s density, as well as by their visual beauty and intellectual riddles, invite you in (or turn you off). I imagine it will be a while before the movie travels to the United States, but if you want to prepare, I suggest you look at a May 13, 2010, interview with Mr. Godard that includes this quote from the movie: “les Américains ont libéré l’Europe en la rendant dépendante,” which translates as “the Americans liberated Europe in order to make it dependent.”
Peter Burnett:
Tue May 18, 2010 8:55pm EDTCANNES (Hollywood Reporter) – It’s a truism that one doesn’t really “review” a film by the venerable French director Jean-Luc Godard, who turns 80 this year, and whose first, game-changing film, “Breathless,” came out exactly a half-century ago. Merely describing a new Godard offering is in itself a triumph.
Film
“Film Socialisme,” like most of his other essay films, is all over the place and (purposely) impossible to follow, but the master is adept at making you feel that if you don’t understand it, it’s your fault, not his. In any case it’s true that he tosses out more ideas in five minutes than most directors manage to come up with in two hours or in whole careers.
But it’s also true that Godard films are much less fun to actually watch than they are to argue about afterward. Hence, theatrical possibilities seem limited, outside of Godard’s home territory of intellectual Europe, but ancillary sales could be robust. He is, after all, Jean-Luc Godard. He is iconic.
“Film Socialisme” is being touted as a “symphony in three movements,” which accords well with Godard’s continuing interest in the expressive, non-linguistic power of music, and in the complex relations between sound and image. The first section-which is by far the best-is set mostly on a cruise ship, by means of which JLG gets to indulge in his favorite activity, attacking the clueless bourgeoisie. The juxtaposition of gorgeous images of the sea with the banalities of life on the ship (e.g., the mass that is being celebrated for the Italian Catholics on board) is priceless and takes little ingenuity to comprehend.
The second part concerns “Our Europe,” in which some children pose impossible-to-answer, non-sequitur questions to their parents. It is much less coherent and even, at times, rather simple-minded. The final section revisits the places of “Our Humanities,” including Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas (Greece), Naples, and Barcelona. Here the method is that of the felicitous juxtaposition of sound and image that occupied part one.
Throughout, JLG employs the startling capitals, in a variety of striking colors, that have become his trademark way of mixing the written text with the visual image, thereby confounding the two. These take on a rhythmic life of their own, as when multiple visual changes are rung upon the phrases “Les Choses” (the things) and “Comme ca” (like that). By far the most fascinating novelty, however, is Godard’s decision to employ two and three word summaries of various lines of the French dialogue in the English subtitles rather than trying to faithfully capture the entirety of each and every gnomic utterance. This is a brilliant technique that actually focuses us on the essentials and is a lot easier for overwhelmed viewers to negotiate.
Languages are piled on top of each other, tricks are played with multiple soundtracks that vie for supremacy (a technique that goes back at least to “A Woman Is a Woman,” made in 1961), clips from classic movies flash by to briefly illuminate obscure points of an unspoken argument, the digital image threatens at times to break down into illegible pixels (whether by accident or design is anyone’s guess), discourses are purposely confused (as when Godard points out that Hollywood is the “Mecca” of cinema and founded by Jews), the off-screen space is brilliantly used to comment on what we do see, quotations from thinkers as disparate as La Rochefoucauld and Jacques Derrida are invoked, and so on.
In short, another film experience by Jean-Luc Godard.
The Guardian
Mischievous and mysterious at all times, Jean-Luc Godard presented Cannes with his latest and possibly even last work, Film Socialism, playing in the Un Certain Regard category: it’s a complex fragmented poem of a movie, flashing up on to the screen images, sequences, archive-reel material and, as ever with this film-maker, gnomic slogans and phrases, here in bold, sans-serif capitals, white on black. Flouting the traditional conventions of character and storytelling more thoroughly than in recent work such as Our Music or In Praise of Love, Godard was more than ever concerned with ideas. Perhaps it is absurd to demand of him a moral, or a guiding aesthetic, but as far as one could be divined, it came down to one idealistic statement: “Les idées nous séparent; les rêves nous rapprochent (Ideas divide us; dreams bring us together)”.
Film Socialism is indeed like an uncertainly remembered dream. Its first section appears to take place on a cruise ship: various disjointed sequences follow one another; then we shift to a family-owned petrol station somewhere in France. A confrontation between French and German passengers appears to resonate with disputes and tensions within the family; archive film shows searing images from the second world war, from Israel and Palestine, from the modern-day Odessa Steps. On paper, these elements sound exasperating, baffling and banal – and that’s certainly how they were received by some. But I found their confrontational quality, and the bold juxtapositions, very resonant. Godard himself did not appear, having sent his apologies from his Swiss home. We have to hope that the 79-year-old is not very sick. Cannes, and cinema, would be duller and dumber without him
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A lot of people had the same problems with Days of Heaven so seems Criterion need to step up their quality control during production IMO.
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