Word: mozartism
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This scene, from Jean-Luc Godard's poignant, invigorating For Ever Mozart, lasts only a few seconds--yet it serves as a surreal image, a joke and a requiem. After 40 years, Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 For Ever Mozart and Contempt, his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid, newly restored after long being out of theatrical circulation. So it's time to praise Godard for what he was and still...
Thirty years later, movies are samer than ever--more conservative, more in the thrall of spectacle and sensation. And Godard...is he still around? In fact, he made 15 films in the '80s, nine more in the '90s. A man in Mozart says, "There's no such thing as grownups." Godard, who'll be 67 this year, still has the intellectual energy--the need to know and show everything--of a precocious child...
Contempt is hardly Godard's best or most evocative work, but it exposes his feelings for the seductive lie of movies: that "cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires" (the same line is quoted in For Ever Mozart). A French playwright (Michel Piccoli) is hired for a rewrite job by an American producer (Jack Palance) who has eyes for the writer's sexy wife (Brigitte Bardot). With its polyglot cast and mixed-doubles leering, Contempt gets the Babel and Babylon of filmmaking down perfectly...
...past 30 years. In that trap, as this set proves, he found triumph." CINEMA: "After 40 years," writes Corliss, "Jean-Luc Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 'For Ever Mozart' and 'Contempt,' his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid." Both newly restored after long being out of theatrical circulation, ' the releases "are worth seeing for his encyclopedic wit, the glamour of his imagery, and the doggedness of a man who won?t give up on modernism. Godard keeps searching...
...only problem most people have with Wolfgang Mozart is that he didn't write enough. But recently, Iowa musicologist David Buch unearthed some snippets that were probably written by the maestro shortly before his death at 36. The two passages were part of a collaboration with other composers on longer operas...