Word: godard
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...JEAN-LUC GODARD'S recent tour was a showpiece for America's critical and political intelligence. Look, he thinks he's a revolutionary yet no worker understands his films, the national magazines said. Look, he thinks he's a revolutionary yet he can't reach the masses, the leftist newspapers said. Aw, he's just another French intellectual. Aww, he's bourgeois. Carl Oglesby summed it all up. He walked out of Lowell Lecture Hall while Godard was speaking. "He's escapist," Carl said...
...like Godard's kind of stuff over here in America. We say: let's reach the people, let's get the people on the streets. So when we Americans make movies with radical points of view, we aim to reach the masses. Make it so they can understand it, we say. Well, what do they understand? Oh, Grapes of Wrath. Salt of the Earth. On the Waterfront, Catch 22, Or, Hunger: U. S. A. Maybe, Newsreel, Sure, it looks like Hollywood. Sure it looks like CBS. But then Hollywood and CBS reach a lot of people...
...Godard's "political" films address themselves to the formal convergence of CBS and Newsreel. He argues that such affinities are by no means coincidental, but instead arise from an identical purpose-the mere conveyance of information. Godard says it's not what you know, but how you come to know it; not information, but the way you process it, Regardless of its source-CBS or its Newsreel counterpart-information is "neutrally" transmitted to the same society, where the images are analyzed according to the same set of assumptions. You can't tell a picture of a peasant in a Newsreel...
Through confusing academic discourse Rohmer leaves you with a murky residue, what Godard has called "a fabric of contradictions" between consciousness and action. Like See You At Mao, Ma Nuit Chez Mand is about "finding the right line" through the chaos, be it political or moral. Both films, however, resist solutions as well. How complete a human clarity is possible remains always questionable. With all his worrying about how to live, about his personal beliefs and his clear conscience, Jean-Louis fails to make an important human perception about the connection between Maud and Francoise, which his scientific outlook...
...should he have become a revolutionary? His humanitarianism will allow nothing less. Godard's films of 1969 combine all these necessities of his character. Made for analysis by fellow cadres more than for propaganda, they are rigorously theatrical attempts to recreate sounds and images so that film can someday become really revolutionary. In them the problem of "reality" has become quite distinct. Maybe after the revolution, when language and image have been freed, Godard will begin to know things as they really...