Word: godard
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...JUST A FEW months ago Jean-Luc Godard leaned into the future to answer a criticism of his past...
...Samantha. The films themselves ranged from underground polemics to sleek Hollywood productions. Jean-Luc Godard, in the epicenter of the revolution as always, offered West Wind, written in part by Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The film has its practical side: there are detailed descriptions of how to make gasoline bombs, fuses and timers. From the other side of the Atlantic came M.A.S.H., Woodstock, and a film still unreleased in the U.S., The Strawberry Statement...
...Jean-Luc Godard faces off with rock, drugs and the black revolution in Sympathy for the Devil; the result is pretty much a stalemate. The film is fragmented, delirious and didactic, sometimes to the point of stupor. But it displays the incontestable energy and stylistic daring that have made Godard the cinema's foremost pop essayist...
Raunchy Liturgy. For years, Godard's films have been essentially free-association essays. Recently he has become less interested in culture than in politics. Films like Le Gai Savoir, for example, are basically director's monologues, with actors as mouthpieces and the audience made mute witness to sometimes incoherent polemics. Sympathy for the Devil is a kind of transitional work, an attempt, albeit unsuccessful, to blend aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Unfortunately, Godard's symbolism is shopworn. The automobile graveyard as a symbol of Decadent Culture is as much a cliche of the New Cinema as riding...
...usual with Godard, many of the images-like a climactic one of the bloody corpse of Eve Democracy being borne aloft on a camera crane -are crazily beautiful, and the photography is impeccable. Godard makes films quickly and cheaply. If they lack consistent intellectual quality, they possess a vigorous timeliness. Godard is like a manic eclectic, rebounding from issue to issue, composing a body of work that in years to come may look like nothing so much as a cracked mirror of our time...