Word: godard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...traditional aesthetic criteria, Tout Va Bien probably fails. But indicting Godard on traditional grounds is rather like accusing Lenin of disturbing the peace. If traditional criteria are the only ones, then of course he fails, he intends to fail. There is nothing more to be said. But Godard and Gorin have lavished much ingenuity in puzzling out a new set of criteria, and here the presiding figure is neither Marx nor Mao but Bertolt Brecht...
...GODARD'S PREMISE is simple. He is a militant filmmaker in service of the revolution, and the meaning of his films derives entirely from their participation in the class struggle. But here the Dziga-Vertov group sees a problem where conventional filmmakers see none, and that problem is in the very nature of political art. The method of conventional political films--Costa-Gavras' Z and The Confession, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers -- is to assume that the way to political commitment is through faithful depiction of political reality. So they select an important event and recreate it on screen...
...Godard and the Dziga-Vertovians, that is not permitted. Realism, they insist, is a surrender to reality. It makes criticism impossible; it actually defuses political emotion. It enforces passivity on the spectator who becomes a witness to the class struggle instead of a participant...
...where the conventional film engrosses, the Dziga-Vertov film alienates. In place of entertainment, it offers irritation, in place of subtlety, didacticism. Against the passivity of film as diversion, it seeks to provoke an active and critical response. That is the justification for the irrealism of Godard's plot and characterization, for the constant interruptions of the film's movement, for the ceaseless polemic, for the refusal to let the film come to any satisfactory climax...
...difficulty in all this, I think, is that Godard is a militant filmmaker before he is a militant, and I'm afraid that much of his theory is more personal rationalization than revolutionary program. His critique of conventional political cinema is certainly well-taken, as is his contention that all film form has implicit political content. But that is a symptom, not a cause. The way to attack the problem is not to make isolated films that happen to be ideologically justified and then go unseen...