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...GODARD then offers and rejects some solutions. After a period of wandering slaughter in which the political basis of their situation ("From the French Revolution to weekends with De Gaulle") is made explicit, the couple encounters two third world revolutionaries. The ensuing lecture on guerrilla warfare is intercut with shots of a wild intellectual who had earlier attacked them for being so bourgeois. The point becomes yet clearer when they are captured by the Liberation Front of Seineet-Oise, a bunch of kids freaked out by bourgeois society. Like the heroes of La Chinoise, they are naive revolutionaries and senseless...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

...afire after she declares "End the daily murder! Cover flowers with flames!" In this sequence--as in sequences where they ignore a figure reading Rousseau, and interrupt a beautiful rendition of a Mozart sonata--the characters are merely destroying the cultural background of their bourgeois society. The beauty of Godard's compositions and camera motions in these sequences in undermined by their violent, petty responses, which begin to pull the film apart. In Godard's other films such scenes give the characters an opportunity to express and develop their sensibilities; here they attack the historical culture on which such sensibilities...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

...feeling of helplessness results. Without sensibility, Godard's characters cannot possibly cope with their setting; the relation between them and a generally vicious society (filled with burning automobiles and corpses) becomes one of simple conflict. The setting assumes a more independent existence and begins to attack the audience directly, without the characters' mediation. Shocking events come to rule the film, so that it becomes far more singly directed, far less ambiguous, than Godard's earlier movies. And it becomes less personal. With no complexity possible in the meeting of characters and environment through their sensibilities, idealism is slaughtered, characters lose...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

Bourgeois society, having destroyed their sensibilities, must also be blamed for destroying a cinema whose method and meaning depended on those sensibilities. The violent attacks on the audience through presenting raw events, the meaninglessness of characters' actions, the blatant anti-capitalist propoganda of Weekend do not show Godard committing cinematic suicide. His integration of subject matter and approach demand this treatment. To critics who see Weekend as the end of the line, one must mention Les Carabiniers, a film that uses moral imbeciles in just the same way to attack war. Its events are as senseless and brutal; its plot...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

...turtleneck (a cop?) and sports car, he is played for a sexy and rich youth-figure who is persecuted by Vaughan, an evil representative of the Rotten Police Structure. Whatever McQueen does, the picture condones. His bumbling unfortunately amounts to virtual murder--to which his reaction are entirely visceral. Godard at least criticizes his terrorists; this one is rewarded, and the audience is expected to love him for his incompetence as much as the film. At its end, after he has managed to kill off the last man connected with his case, the film has the effrontery to play...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

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