Word: godards
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Unfortunately, it has become difficult to accept films about fictional characters and their emotions. The integrity of conventional narratives, practically ruined by the likes of Mike Nichols, has been shaken theoretically by Godard and several others. Can dramatic feature films accomplish anything valid? We can't answer definitely until we've thought out the problem on the theoretical level where it's been posed...
...Godard's choreography is concerned more with the dance than the dancers. The middle section of the movie is explicitly about film-his film, the nature of film, the death of film. Godard's cinema collective assembles on screen, and the members discuss what has already gone wrong with the film they are making. Significantly, their criticisms are ideological rather than aesthetic...
...director. It becomes impossible to make a movie about repression, for any movie is repression. The auto-critique, the attenuated scenes of actors applying make-up, the unmoving shots held for four minutes at a time, transform Vent de L'est from movie into "movie": it details Godard-once again-confronting his form, denouncing its inadequacies, and translating the whole process into story...
That story, though, is excruciatingly boring. Godard never said he was interested in entertaining; now, it appears, he disdains even deception. When his early movies dealt with film, even tangentially, they did so with provocative wit and a serene, pungent charm. Vent de L'est, however, says at its audience, Your bourgeois concern for my movie is as contemptible as my regard for medium. "Realism," Godard once said, "is never exactly the truth, and the realism of cinema is obligatorily faked." In Vent de L'est, even the lies are faked, and the incessant, didactic narrators are finally...
...particularly offensive scene occurs toward the close of the movie. The New York Cinetracts Collective (comprised mainly of a group from N. Y. U.) has completed the job of making the documentary, and it has assembled in a Washington, D. C. hotel room to discuss ( a la Godard and a la God knows who else) the ethics of having made a movie instead of responding to the crisis with political action. As they speak, and as the film's audience squirms in unbearable embarrassment, the moviemakers proceed to be mind-bogglingly male chauvinistic, grossly misguided about aesthetics, and ultimately personally...