Word: weekend
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
NEAR THE END of Weekend a woman is chewing on a bone. "It's that pig," an off-screen voice tells her, adding as an afterthought, "with those English tourists mixed in." "The ones from the Rolls-Royce?" she asks. "There must be some of your husband too," the voice answers. She continues eating with no reaction. The word "fin" appears on the screen, enlarged at once to "fin du conte" and then changed to "fin du cinema." The sequence reveals Godard's awareness that in Weekend he destroyed the only cinema he loves--the American narrative ("conte") film...
...romance (subject) realized in flowing colors, soaring music, and a hero whose journey through this setting is the motive and organizing force of the drama (method). Individual alienation becomes the method of Breathless through a hero who conducts a very detached investigation of his surroundings. Weekend's subject is general alienation in a capitalist society, and its method is to follow characters through a bourgeois countryside. But these characters, being alienated themselves, have no serious moral responses to the terrible events they see. Consequently the film's meaning depends on the audience's reaction to these events and their condemnation...
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...
SOME DIABOLICAL booking agent selected Bullitt's to open in the Central Cinema One, next to Weekend. It shows as clearly as the latter how essential moral sensibility is to honest American films...
...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 him for an existential hero at odds with an unfriendly world. Weekend, deprived of its central motor and direction of characters' sensibility, may well be "wandering in the cosmos." But Bullitt, which betrays sensibility, was certainly "found on the scrap-heap...