summary of godard by colin mccabe pt 4
meat n potatoes
the failure of One from the Heart. vittorio storaro started working
with godard but they broke up. godard called raoul coutard, who'd been
inactive for 10 yrs. coutard wanted to help and expected a warm
welcome but an unshaven godard said he couldn't hire the best people
so settled for coutard instead.
2. Passion is godard's most beautiful and greatest work according to
mccabe. it examines the failure of political experimentation that
occupied godard's life for more than a decade.
3. modernism rejected traditional art as too elitist and exclusionary,
and mass entertainment as too limiting in its genres and forms. they
proclaimed democracy of culture but only as formulated by themselves.
4. passion was godard's abandonment of politics. godard compared
politics as narcotics for radicals. passion dealt with the theme of
masculin sexuality at a deadend. it ended with sodomy as a metaphor
for finding a new passage in life.
5. passion was a total flop. coutard saw a new godard. in the 60s
godard was sometimes assholy but also apologetic. during the shooting
of passion, godard was assholy with no remorse and took pleasure in
his bad temper.
6. isabelle adjani was hired for Prenom Carmen. adjani arrived on the
set and thought coutard was a hack cinematographer and wouldn't make
her look beautiful enough and so quit the film. it was a very
lowbudget movie. the movie says real sexuality will kill you. but
subliminated sexuality as in art will keep you alive. coutard thought
it was godard's best.
7. godard was an asshole on the set. the actress didn't want to go
nude but godard bullied her into it.
8. after carmen, godard made films at his own pace(except for
'detective'). he no longer followed a fixed budget or schedule. he
asked for a certain budget and pocketed much of it to finance other
projects or invest in equipment.
9. for Aria, godard was not pleased with what he did so he spent his
own money to reshoot the whole thing. the producer was much pleased.
10. Hail Mary is based on a lacanian book argued for a nonsexual
metaphorical idea of fatherhood.
11. godard asked Channel 4(of britain) for money to make hail mary.
they agreed to give some and also commissioned a documentary and they
got 'soft and hard', about godard and mielville's personal life.
12. godard kept no books in his bedroom.
13. in 1978, godard took on a lecture series at montreal university
which was supposed to have been taught by henri langlois who died. it
was on the history of cinema.
14. godard's major work after hail mary ws historie du cinema, which
juxtaposed movie history, political history, personal history. it
relied heavily on montage. godard thought montage was cinema's most
crucial discovery. (montaigne and montage).
15. godard wanted to show that cinema permeates everything, that
cinema has created unique artistic expression, that it has basically
been men filming women. also, cinema is a systems of signs we must
play with. a new way of presenting history and letting us make sense
of history on our own.
16. in one scene godard shows liz taylor and then the auschwitz. it
means film is to blame for the holocaust for not showing reality
honestly. it also means beneath taylor's skin there is a skull, like
those of the dead at auschwitz.
17. in 1995, Channel 4 wanted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of
the invention of cinema. in the 80s Channel 4 had been 'creative'. in
the 1990s, however, due to competition from satellite tv and
thatcher's policies, the producer and the consumer took over while the
artist had to play a subservient role. tavernier was asked to make a
50 min film on french film history and he declined. so it was up to
godard to represent france. producer thought godard was
incomprhensible.
18. the problem was partly one of copyright. film quotes have to be
cleared and aksing for permission is often expensive. mccabe thinks
copyright stinks. he thinks, for example, since the rolling stones
made enough money off 'satisfaction', it should now belong to the
public domain. so godard didn't use film clips he didn't own himself.
19. mieville became a director in her own right and had a clearer mind
than the increasingly befuddling godard.
20. she made a movie set in greece with a woman playing socrates on
why the strong dominate the weak on political and personal level. in
the other segment, godard reads from arendt's origins of
totalitarianism. the message is oppression begins and ends with us,
all of us. mccabe says arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism remains
the single most important work of political philosophy in the 20th
century.
21. British film institute and MOMA comissioned a work from godard and
melvielle to discuss philsophy, cinema, history, personal life, etc.
mccabe worked on the contract and he thinks the resultant work 'old
place' is their finest video essay.
22. old place is obsessed with death. death in movies, death of the
20th century, approaching death of godard, etc. it accepts death as a
reality. it's elegiac than tragic.
23. historie du cinema is like joyce's finnegan's wake. it tries to
tell everything thru montage, all of history, all of personal life,
all of the moment and eternity. it's available in book, video, and cd
format.
24. lacan was interested in finnegan's wake. he had a theory about
what distinguishes a neuro from a psycho having something to do with
oedipal complex and a boy being a boy and girl being a girl or
whatever.
25. godard began to show interest in religion but not like born agains
like dylan. godard's attitude was much like a Time Magazine headline
"god is dead, marx is dead, and i'm not feeling too good myself'.
godard was interested in the phenomenon on belief but not the content
of belief.
26. historie du cinema makes posthumous peace with truffaut. when
truffaut was first diagnosed with brain cancer, godard said that's
what happens when you read too many bad books. by 1988, he admitted he
began to miss truffaut. and in historie du cinema, truffaut is dealt
with for some length, though mostly focusing on his criticism, which
godard thought was france's unique contribution to cinematic culture.
27. the final segment of historie du cinema is about women, godard
himself, and france. godard honors the loves of his life--karina,
wiazemsky, melville. he feels himself lucky to have done what he done
and to have lived in france. it also condemns modern france as a
'totally and permanently' corrupt society.
28. the last lines of histoire goes like this: 'if a man if a man
travelled across paradise in a dream and received a flower as proof of
his passage and on awakening he found that flower in his hands what is
to be said i was that man'.
29. in 1997, alan parker was appointed by labor government to be
chairman of BFI. alan parker loathed the BFI and effectively
dismantled its production system. mccabe lost financial clout and
godard told him that they probably wouldn't work on projects together
in the future. mccabe saw godard on video screen at cannes. elgoe de
l'amour was being shown at the fest.
30. in 1995, godard was given the adorno prize. in 1998, the cesar for
his role in the new wave. godard accepted the awards graciously and
emotionally.
31. godard's film company Sonimage had to change its name because
another company claimed prior rights.
32. in the past godard had been a grump at the cannes festival, just
going along with the charade. but when he arrived with eloge dela
amour, he was a different guy. he seemed at ease.
33. mccabe says because godard doesn't believe in the narrative and
has little use for traditional acting, his films are far from the
greatest narrative feature films of the 20th century. but he's the
greatest film essayist and one of the great french poets. philippe
sollers, when asked about godard's poetry by mccabe, disagreed and
thought mccabe a demented boob.
33. godard had been at the cutting edge of film technology, using
lightweight cameras, video.. but godard completed ignored, even
dismissed, the digital technology. he proudly joked that he was not on
bill clinton's internet superhighway. film and video were tools of an
artisan which godard championed. digital was for the engineer geek
working for megacorps.
34. godard was anti-american since the vietnam war. he thought
american culture destroyed a sense of history, continuity, personal
memory, where the personal had become a commodity. godard declined a
1995 award by the NY film critics' circle for 9 reasons, main reason
being america had given us spielberg whose film schindler's list was
an obscenity.
35. mccabe disagrees and thinks schindler has some merit in recalling
the horror and making us remember. but he says spielberg's films are
'generally execrable'. he says saving private ryan reduced normandy
landing to a matter of saving a single life was thereby contemptuous
of history(of course, spielberg's point in focusing on ryan was to
show that every soldier fallen in combat was a ryan also, that in a
way, we were all trying to save single lives, military and civilian,
from the nazi butchers). spielberg has 'prostituted genuine talent'.
(i dunno myself. i'd rather watch jaws or raiders than dziga vertov
films. gimme a ho over a grumpy bitch anyday).
36. mccabe, however, thinks godard's antiamericanism has turned into
america-phobia, an inability to see anything good about america.
mccabe lists great american cultural products like the simpsons, three
king, and the fight club which makes me wonder if mccabe has any right
to call spielberg's films as execrable. (if saving private ryan sucks
because of its reduction of normandy invasion into search for ryan,
isn't three kings even worse for reducing the gulf war into a kind of
smarmy good, bad, and the ugly-ish hunt for gold? and its
sanctimonious presentation of shiites has proven to be total bullshit.
we get rid of hussein and try to give them freedom and all they want
is to establish some male-chauvanist, medievalist theocracy. i say
hussein didn't kill enough of those shitheads. god bless hussein, at
least the hussein that butchered shitheads.)
37. eloge d amour 'indulges in the crudest kind of chauvanism, which
opposes the honest french to the perfidious anglo-saxons.' (since
hollywood has a strong jewish element, shouldn't it be
judeo-anglo-saxons? and sony has a stake in hollywood, how about
japano-judeo-anglo-saxons? and since black artists and audiences
significantly shape mass tastes--i think rap is bigger than barbershop
singing--shouldn't it be afro-japano-judeo-anglo-saxons?)
38. chabrol said of godard 'for jean-luc to be happy there must be
something crooked in the deal'. godard made a deal on napkin with
golan and earlier in the 70s, came up with weird shit with bukowski.
39. godard was an avid reader of norman mailer. mailer was supposed to
write and star in king lear which wasn't based on shakespeare at all.
mccabe says the soundtrack for king lear is a masterpiece.
40. mccabe thinks eloge d'lamour is a great work but he can't abide by
its antiamericanism. mccabe: 'if anti-semitism has been well described
as the socialism of fools, then anti-americanism is the radicalism of
idiots.'
41. godard in his youth took his inspiration from american film.
later, he identified with the resistance and read on history and
religion, etc. in this way, i guess he is a maoist to the end, if not
ideologically than in personal life, as mao spent his last yrs reading
up on ancient history and ruminating on political philosophy than
grappling with reality.
42. says mccabe: 'one could argue that godard's commitment to, and
respect for, the image are critical to the planet's future because any
optimistic perspective must include genuine attempts to transform our
audiovisiual media into areal sources of information, attempts for
which godrd's lessons are crucial.... efforts in the 20th century to
link avant garde art to a progressive politics have all been dismal
failures..' on watching godards's films: 'we are all, like the dog
returning to its vomit, condemned to repeat within a sadly limited
repertory. but the work never failed to intrigue, to illuminate, and
to inform. much of it is extremely difficult to obtain. much of it
requires repeated viewings before it begins to yield its treasure.
some of it is very uneven. but the worst is never less than
intelligent, and the best is the best there is.' or, maybe this is
why the godard really despises the anglos: asskissing dweebs.
fin
monsieurblob
i'm not surprised. i vaguely remember he belongs to the screen and
sight and sound crowd. if thats true, just look at how he points to
the simpsons, three kings and fight club. thats no celebration of
america. those products criticise america. maccabe cheats and wants us
to think he's celebrating america coz says american products that
criticse america are good all deep down he's condemning america but in
a much more cowardly way.
if we dont like godards antiamericanism in eloge of amour and i dont,
i'll do one of two things: 1, not take it seriously 2, celebrate a
patriotic american product.
there are two extremes here. 1. celebrating an american patriotic
product (pearl harbour, endless fascist war films...) only loonies do
weird stuff like that 2. celebrating american products that criticize
america. the second is a cowardly approach
> 37. eloge d amour 'indulges in the crudest kind of chauvanism, which
> opposes the honest french to the perfidious anglo-saxons.' (since
> hollywood has a strong jewish element, shouldn't it be
> judeo-anglo-saxons? and sony has a stake in hollywood, how about
> japano-judeo-anglo-saxons? and since black artists and audiences
> significantly shape mass tastes--i think rap is bigger than barbershop
> singing--shouldn't it be afro-japano-judeo-anglo-saxons?)
>
> 38. chabrol said of godard 'for jean-luc to be happy there must be
> something crooked in the deal'. godard made a deal on napkin with
> golan and earlier in the 70s, came up with weird shit with bukowski.
>
> 39. godard was an avid reader of norman mailer. mailer was supposed to
> write and star in king lear which wasn't based on shakespeare at all.
> mccabe says the soundtrack for king lear is a masterpiece.
>
> 40. mccabe thinks eloge d'lamour is a great work but he can't abide by
> its antiamericanism. mccabe: 'if anti-semitism has been well described
> as the socialism of fools, then anti-americanism is the radicalism of
> idiots.'
>
> 41. godard in his youth took his inspiration from american film.
> later, he identified with the resistance and read on history and
> religion, etc. in this way, i guess he is a maoist to the end, if not
> ideologically than in personal life, as mao spent his last yrs reading
> up on ancient history and ruminating on political philosophy than
> grappling with reality.
?
>
> 42. says mccabe: 'one could argue that godard's commitment to, and
> respect for, the image are critical to the planet's future because any
> optimistic perspective must include genuine attempts to transform our
> audiovisiual media into areal sources of information, attempts for
> which godrd's lessons are crucial.... efforts in the 20th century to
> link avant garde art to a progressive politics have all been dismal
> failures..' on watching godards's films: 'we are all, like the dog
> returning to its vomit, condemned to repeat within a sadly limited
> repertory. but the work never failed to intrigue, to illuminate, and
> to inform. much of it is extremely difficult to obtain. much of it
> requires repeated viewings before it begins to yield its treasure.
> some of it is very uneven. but the worst is never less than
> intelligent, and the best is the best there is.' or, maybe this is
> why the godard really despises the anglos: asskissing dweebs.
>
> fin
lol!
maccabe has his place in the bfi or whatever and he wants to protect
it. thats all it probably is about. but then again i havent read him
too much.
i havent given many ppl much of a chance now that i think of it, but
thats all prolly in good cause. look at the way rosenbaum defends a.i.
its disgusting. its a condemnation of being-spielberg. he appreciates
spielberg rejecting spielberg. he thinks spielberg is condemning
himself for being such a flaky sod.
i dont need to read anymore maccabe or rosenbaum. with a couple of
articles i already become familiar with he or she's mechanics and know
what to expect.
thus i cant even remember what it was i read of maccabe. i just
remember him being absolute shite