Sight & Sound. June 05.

In Michael Witt's interview with Jean-Luc Godard in the new issue of Sight & Sound, we see Notre Musique as a collection of entry points into the oeuvre as well as Godard's concerns of the last decade or two. One tempting snippet would be his thoughts on how he'd commit suicide, but let's go with this one:

One needs a camera to see certain things. The majority of films today are filmed without using the camera as an investigative tool - instead of drawing on this analytical power during filming, people substitute a great mass of explanation: "I meant to do this. I meant to do that." Whereas a scientist or chemist who uses a microscope needs that microscope. And when Hawks filmed Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, he needed a camera to do it. He wasn't writing a book.

Oddly enough, segueing into Jonathan Romney's piece on Jerry Lewis is easy:

France's high-brow Jerryphilia has long been a standing joke in Anglo-American film circles, and my purpose here isn't to argue that the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Robert Benayoun et al were right. In fact... Lewis' humour is hit-and-miss and hasn't entirely dated well... Yet this cycle of [six] films [made from 1960 through 1964] remains audacious, bizarre, perverse and richly imagined: the product not merely of a strong auteur sensibility, but of one that is agonisingly equivocal about fame and success, and obsessed with problems of mastery, of control and self-control.

Reviews:

• Philip Kemp on Ousmane Sembéne's "unashamedly polemical" Moolaadé.

• Romney on Abbas Kiarostami's Five, "an even more defiant rejection of the conventional superfluities of cinema [than Ten], jettisoning both the spoken word and - apparently - any residue of narrative."

• Kim Newman on Robert Rodriguez's Sin City: "[S]tylization redeems the exercise."

Posted by dwhudson at May 14, 2005 8:44 AM