Word: godard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...GODARD then offers and rejects some solutions. After a period of wandering slaughter in which the political basis of their situation ("From the French Revolution to weekends with De Gaulle") is made explicit, the couple encounters two third world revolutionaries. The ensuing lecture on guerrilla warfare is intercut with shots of a wild intellectual who had earlier attacked them for being so bourgeois. The point becomes yet clearer when they are captured by the Liberation Front of Seineet-Oise, a bunch of kids freaked out by bourgeois society. Like the heroes of La Chinoise, they are naive revolutionaries and senseless...
...Godard's particular fondness for the films of Nicholas Ray indicates a concern for modern settings in which the characters hold an insecure place. As Godard's or Ray's films proceed, their characters discover more and more about their settings, which are colored by their perceptions--yet finally stand as independent entities. The characters, neither controlling nor controlled by their physical setting, have to solve their problems independently--this is no fatalistic cinema--but the meaning of the film is created in the characters' reactions to, and actions within, their setting...
...Godard further made the subject of each film work as its method. Thus Pierrot le Fou is a romance (subject) realized in flowing colors, soaring music, and a hero whose journey through this setting is the motive and organizing force of the drama (method). Individual alienation becomes the method of Breathless through a hero who conducts a very detached investigation of his surroundings. Weekend's subject is general alienation in a capitalist society, and its method is to follow characters through a bourgeois countryside. But these characters, being alienated themselves, have no serious moral responses to the terrible events they...
...afire after she declares "End the daily murder! Cover flowers with flames!" In this sequence--as in sequences where they ignore a figure reading Rousseau, and interrupt a beautiful rendition of a Mozart sonata--the characters are merely destroying the cultural background of their bourgeois society. The beauty of Godard's compositions and camera motions in these sequences in undermined by their violent, petty responses, which begin to pull the film apart. In Godard's other films such scenes give the characters an opportunity to express and develop their sensibilities; here they attack the historical culture on which such sensibilities...
...feeling of helplessness results. Without sensibility, Godard's characters cannot 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...