Word: godard
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...should all have guessed what was happening when Abbey Road and the Get Back tapes showed that they just weren't working too hard anymore together. You have to work in rock and roll. The Stones work. You saw the amused awe Godard felt at the intensity and seriousness of the Stones in a recording studio...
...GODARD said to an interviewer in 1961, "My three films all have, at bottom, the same subject. I take an individual who has an idea, and who tries to go to the end of his idea." His films have always been pieces of criticism, visual essays about ideas and culture in a declining West. He was never interested in making "good art." That notion of finely wrought and finished work was itself the legacy of a moribund sensibility...
...this might be pretentious and boring if Godard were not so inventive and terrifying. Others have explored decadence and the death of the Old World sensibility, but no one has related that death so graphically to the automobile. What better symbol for modern culture? As we calmly drive our cars on the highway, does it occur to us that our own life and death is almost completely out of our hands? That at any moment we might perish because somebody on the other side of the road is watching the sunset, or hits an oil-slick, or is just crazy...
...something always happens to Godard in the middle of his films. He seems to get bored and self-conscious. But even bored and self-conscious Godard is worth seeing- it just becomes that much more difficult to separate the profound from the trivial. In an interesting sequence called "All About Eve" an interviewer harasses a mournful woman (played by Anna Wiazemsky) with questions Godard feels obligated to ask himself in the middle of every film: "Do you think culture is order? Is a man of culture as far from an artist as a historian from a man of action...
...Sympathy for the Devil has its problems, particularly in the second half, but it also contains flashes of intellectual and visual brilliance. Perhaps we can forgive Godard his unease about being a revolutionary who makes films and feeds on the movement he supports. Just as we can forgive the Stones for feeding on black music. If it weren't for Godard and the Stones, how would we know ourselves...