Word: godards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...formal analysis of cinema tells him that such direct embodiment is impossible, and he acknowledges this twice. First, and more gently, come the three successive times when Leaud tells Berto: "If you want to see the world, close your eyes, Rosemunde." Godard cuts to shots of Parisians on the sidewalk: within a film, seeing the real can only be an act of imagination, that is of closing your eyes. Second, at the end of the film Berto declares: "This [the film] was not and never will be, because this IS." It never has actually existed and never will...
...this reality that we must criticize carefully. Only then will film become the scientific tool of analysis Godard needs so he can reach sure knowledge of the real. His desperation for experiences of the real will not let him accept delays; but on the other hand his rationalism will not let him follow a shoddy line of analysis. Le Gai Savoir, far from being a crude propaganda film, absolutely refuses to move beyond the separate and minimal truths about film that it reveals. This refusal kept him from adopting a "correct" line before 1969; since then it has made...
...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...