Word: filming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such dialogue-this one occurred last week-reflects the state of the contemporary film. In the U.S., movies are known by their titles or their stars. Overseas, the director is becoming the star. There may always be the Catherine Deneuves and Marcello Mastroiannis who are billed above the titles of their films. But increasingly the actor in Europe has become less important than the man who calls the shots. When France's Jean-Luc Godard makes a film, the title is virtually irrelevant. Satyricon is the official name of a forthcoming fantasy about the sexual excesses of ancient Rome...
...possibly cope with their setting; the relation between them and a generally vicious society (filled with burning automobiles and corpses) becomes one of simple conflict. The setting assumes a more independent existence and begins to attack the audience directly, without the characters' mediation. Shocking events come to rule the film, so that it becomes far more singly directed, far less ambiguous, than Godard's earlier movies. And it becomes less personal. With no complexity possible in the meeting of characters and environment through their sensibilities, idealism is slaughtered, characters lose their humanity--and society becomes unrelievedly anti-human...
...presenting raw events, the meaninglessness of characters' actions, the blatant anti-capitalist propoganda of Weekend do not show Godard committing cinematic suicide. His integration of subject matter and approach demand this treatment. To critics who see Weekend as the end of the line, one must mention Les Carabiniers, a film that uses moral imbeciles in just the same way to attack war. Its events are as senseless and brutal; its plot as much as skeleton device that barely holds the film together (the characters' journey through alien rural setting becomes very boring); its characters as much figures for the camera...
Bullitt's action-suspense plot is to overloaded with references to political authority's abuse and free action's virtue that one must take this, rather than its ostensible police-protection plot, as the film's subject. Steve McQueen plays a detective lieutenant whose chief shields him from an ambitious politician (Robert Vaughan, played for a straight heavy). The script puts McQueen's responsibility for his job in personal terms--his relations to his chief, battles with his own conscience, personal conduct...
...Rotten Police Structure. Whatever McQueen does, the picture condones. His bumbling unfortunately amounts to virtual murder--to which his reaction are entirely visceral. Godard at least criticizes his terrorists; this one is rewarded, and the audience is expected to love him for his incompetence as much as the film. At its end, after he has managed to kill off the last man connected with his case, the film has the effrontery to play him for an existential hero at odds with an unfriendly world. Weekend, deprived of its central motor and direction of characters' sensibility, may well be "wandering...