Godard taught me how to watch cinema, even as he kept reinventing it | Hacker News Reader

Godard taught me how to watch cinema, even as he kept reinventing it

nytimes.com

61 pointsprismatic9 comments

Godard produced some of the images I will never forget. The fast blueness of the Mediterranean in La Mepris, the absolute car based apocalypse created in Weekend, the lifestyle displayed in Masculin Feminin. The small (and sometimes big) editing connections between image, text and language.

Not that every of his films is wnjoyable, but there is something i his films that stays with you for decades.

30 years ago I first saw Breathless, which was then 30 years old. It’s hard to believe the same time has passed. The film has stayed with me ever since as one of my favourite movies. It had such verve, style, self confidence, and a sense that it already knew it would be revolutionary. Even if Godard had stopped making movies after his first, he’d still be a legend.

I really like Breathless, Le Mépris, and Pierrot Le Fou, this last one less often mentioned, yet super interesting.

But I don't get the trashing of the cinema that existed before Godard, as this article, following so many others, seems to want to do.

Contemporary superhero franchises are trash, certainly (at least to my eyes). But what's wrong with Casablanca (1942) or Double Indemnity (1944) for example?

Why couldn't we have both?

In hindsight this is always easy to say. But film was (and still is) a money-intensive art. And like usual in the arts the people with the vision are not the people the money. When Godard started out there was not a lot of money and infrastructure for the type of films people like him wanted to make. Yet someone like him had to witness that what was in bis eyes utter trash had became budgets he could only dream of.

On top of that his film making was certainly interwoven with the upcoming 68 counter culture and has to be seen as the effort of an generation to break with the existing tradition.

Typically what film makers like him tried to reach was not that all films should be like his, but that there is the chance for something else to exist than cheap, dumb entertainment and that film makers can also try to make actual art with their works without always having to do a target market analysis.

You can have both. The nouvelle vague and new hollywood creators loved the hollywood classics, film noir, westerns etc. They just wanted to create something new.

And the next “new wave” will probably be spearheaded by creators who love superheroes but want to create something new.

Not to contradict your experience, but to state an opposite view, Breathless is one of the worst movies I saw.

I thought La Mepris was plot and dialogue wise a silly movie, but watching it I could feel the hot mediterranean climate so bad that it made me disoriented. Pretty amazing.

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Godard directed one of the most powerful short I've ever seen. Je vous salut Sarajevo (I salut you Sarajevo) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmcNJUC2g7Y

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/watch-jean-luc-godard-1993-docu...

> French auteur Jean-Luc Godard needs no introduction. Starting from the pioneering experiments of the French New Wave in the 1960s, Godard has maintained the momentum of his filmmaking investigations with later works like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book. His works have inspired generations of artists who have fallen in love with his revolutionary approach to the art of cinema.

For this week’s highlighted short film, we have chosen Godard’s 1993 short documentary Je vous salue, Sarajevo. Only two minutes long, it is an incendiary meditation on the brutality of the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica massacre. Through powerful images and devastating commentary, Godard forces the audience to confront humanity’s capacity for inflicting tragedy on the marginalised and the helpless.

Above all else, Je vous salue, Sarajevo is an essay that creates an interesting juxtaposition between silent images of violence and a boisterous commentary on contemporary society. While Godard claimed that he wasn’t familiar with Juan Goytisolo’s work, his Cahier de Sarajevo influenced the short film in many ways and carried a similar momentum as was evident in the film’s cinematic force.

As the narrator of the film, Godard embarks on a remarkable lament: “In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule; cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war.

He adds, “Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes. When it’s time to close the book, I have no regrets. I’ve seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.”

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