Word: godard
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...Godard, the Don Corleone of the French New Wave, speaks a language that is both unfamiliar and seductive. As a university student in Paris in the 1950s, Godard spent his days in dark pockets of Left Bank cinema clubs. He soon began to contribute to Parisian film journals, in which he wrote reviews and articles under the whispery pseudonym Hans Lucas. When his wealthy parents cut off his pocket money, he took to robbery but remained an avid fan of the cinema, even from the depths of a prison cell...
From the late '60s to the '80s Godard was obsessed with the interchangeability of words and images. In his films, Godard abandoned traditional cinematic narrative to explore experimental filmmaking, placing emphasis on words rather than images as tangible visible entities on the screen...
Last week's Thursday night session included Band of Outsiders. A gangster story with a twist, it tells the story of two con-men, Franz and Arthur, and their attempt to work over a young girl, Odile (played by the one and only Anna Karina). One of Godard's lesser known films, it nonetheless embodies the curious mix between word and image, humor and tragic romance, that is so very Godard. Characters are lonely but have no desire to connect to those around them. Awkwardness only occurs within familiar situations. Dialogue is impulsive and witty...
...films, Godard's cinematography is clean and sharply punctuated, fixing on such pop culture images as pinball machines and posters. High and low art are thrown back and forth, and shown to be virtually interchangeable. The Seine is a Corot, and Romeo and Juliet is a tabloid. The three protagonists run madly through the Louvre to try to outdo some sort of world record...
...Godard's deep-voiced narrator even instructs us on how to react and read the images and characters of his film by entering into the film periodically, creating cinematic parentheses. The narrative voice enters, for example, when the three main characters are at a dance club. Odile, Franz and Arthur move across the floor in a beautiful synchrony. In this way we are brought into the mental worlds of the three main characters. Odile wonders whether the men who flank her on either side notice her breasts bobbing beneath her schoolgirl sweater. Arthur imagines kissing Odile. And the ever-slick...