Word: ests
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...est...
ANDREW SARRIS, who should know, calls Godard "the most self-conscious film-maker in the world." In Vent de L'est, a 1969 film which opened at the Festival, Godard passes from self-consciousness to militant solipsism. The movie is, first, about capitalism, colonialism, and exploitation. It is a Western, set at the Alcoa plant just outside of Dodge City. Almost numbingly didactic, the film catalogues the niceties of repression, as Godard's troupe performs a classic ballet; a strike occurs; a delegate to management is chosen; active minorities speak up; an assembly is followed by repression; an active strike...
...selves dictated by the convictions (whims) of the director. It becomes impossible to make a movie about repression, for any movie is repression. The auto-critique, the attenuated scenes of actors applying make-up, the unmoving shots held for four minutes at a time, transform Vent de L'est from movie into "movie": it details Godard-once again-confronting his form, denouncing its inadequacies, and translating the whole process into story...
That story, though, is excruciatingly boring. Godard never said he was interested in entertaining; now, it appears, he disdains even deception. When his early movies dealt with film, even tangentially, they did so with provocative wit and a serene, pungent charm. Vent de L'est, however, says at its audience, Your bourgeois concern for my movie is as contemptible as my regard for medium. "Realism," Godard once said, "is never exactly the truth, and the realism of cinema is obligatorily faked." In Vent de L'est, even the lies are faked, and the incessant, didactic narrators are finally...
...leading lady, leading lady, I've always wanted to be a Broadway leading lady: The rootin' tootin'est Annie or a madcap Mame or Dolly, That sad and funny girl Fanny, Nelly Forbush or unsinkable Molly...