Word: godard
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...film, first of all, is composed entirely of video images--brief episodes rendered first on television consoles and then pieced together on the larger film screen. One explanation for this new technique is simple; Godard has recently converted almost entirely to video, and reportedly is now working on projects for French television. But this hodgepodge of video images may also be intended to symbolize the various forms of fragmentation that have dashed Godard's hopes for revolution--demoralizing factionalism within the French Far Left, the retreat of '60s youth into isolated, workaday middle-class existences, the proliferation of complexly interwoven...
...film begins with a discursive monologue from Godard himself. He stands in a room filled with his own movie equipment, and leans over a video console that beams forth his face, like a T.V. newscaster's. Making movies has become like factory work for Godard, he admits, saying, "Now there are only machines. I am the boss, but I am also the worker...There are other factories: in Los Angeles, called Fox and Metro, in Moscow, in Algeria..." He then fills the screen with the flashbacks to May '68 and Vietnam. But the news footage, like Godard's revolutionary zeal...
...rest of the film is made of cinema verite sequences from the lives of a couple close to Godard's age, now trapped in the hell of a stultifying middle-class existence. The wife protests that her husband's work has come between them. He putters about the house listless and bored; she can no longer arouse him sexually. The wife complains about her constipation to the kids. When the husband discovers that she has been unfaithful, he punishes her by sodomizing her. During the punishment, they realize that their daughter has been watching. They talk about it complacently. They...
...Godard means what he says about this being a film "of in front and behind; in front are the children and behind is the government," he never makes clear what he wants us to think about the effects of this couple's alienation on their children. Still, all the inferences are depressing. In one sequence, the mother and daughter frolic around in the family's living room at noon-time--the elder wearing nothing but an untied robe and the younger in underwear--while the son plays with his lunch in the kitchen and holds his head in boredom...
...THIRTYISH middle-classes are not the only ones who can no longer make sense of their lives. Godard does a brief series of sequences on women's loneliness, and their victimization by inherently violent male sexuality. He follows with several monologues from an older man, presumably the father of either the husband or the wife. A former Communist Party member who once transported party tracts to distribute in Buenos Aires, he, too, has lost faith in historical inevitabilities. After recounting his tales of party adventures, he shrugs: "it was crazy, but that's history." Later, sitting behind a table with...