Word: godard
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...Images: Solanas develops social contradictions by means fundamentally different from those of the other major theorists of the militant cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, who phrases this problem as the necessity to build simple, anti-realist images in order to build a purely dialectical and coherent political analysis. La Hora de los Hornos builds its dialectic in the editing of "found" images, pre-existing appearances (documentary footage, his own and that of others, also stills, paintings, commercials, etc.) that expose contradiction by their relation to each other...
...Sounds: As both branches of the militant cinema agree, images do not speak for themselves. Sounds-which Godard has called "the oppressed track" in the cinema of Nixon Paramount-serve as a force of equal importance as images in dialectical analysis, through linking facts and context. Except in a few direct interviews Solanas maintains a tension between images and sounds such that comprehension develops along parallel and contradictory lines of struggling ideas. The gestaltist impulse to force correspondences produces irony and consequently a sense of the film's materialist superstructure...
...Against the Ideology of Real Life: Godard attacks the problem of our potential acceptance of reactionary propaganda by questioning the ontology of each individual image in order to reveal the hidden ideology of every element-lurking bourgeois assumptions that give aid and comfort to the maintainers of the ruling order. In other words he exercises dialectically all unexamined values from his cinematic vocabulary. "Realistic" cinema becomes his most formidable enemy: metaphysical defender of "the ideology of real life." universalist, humanist justifier of the present politico-economic system, mystifier of the historical alternatives open to the oppressed. So when he presents...
...culturally)? Do they eliminate "outmoded consciousness" and clarify "changing social relations" rooted in material conditions? Or do they merely reflect changing intellectual consciousness operating in isolation from social relations altogether? These are important questions for the Cultural Revolution to consider, which I won't try to answer now for Godard and Robbe-Grillet, Instead, I want to talk about Susan Sontag, who unites certain elements of the two, and examine her answers apparent in Duet for Cannibals...
Susan Sontag combines many of the principles of Godard and Robbe-Grillet, and circumvents their problems of alienating the audience with new forms by using old forms subversively in order to destroy our acceptance of them. The film is dialectical in the sense that it starts speaking to us where we are right now, in our present state of outmoded emotional and intellectual consciousness (and not in some futuristic state when we may actually be interested in Robbe-Grillet's descriptions of objects), in order to take us in, to wreck that corrupt humanist tranquillity in which we once thought...