Godard, the 60s and 1968.

Following this one, the most recent entry on May 68 has fallen off the page. Reflections on that particular 40th anniversary will likely subside and the series 1968: An International Perspective wraps tomorrow; but Godard's 60s rolls on at Film Forum through June 5. Hence the tweak in the entry title.

"A major contradiction of Jean-Luc Godard's 60s films is that for all their difficulty, abrasiveness, unconventionality, and 'distance,' they are largely pleasurable works," blogs Reverse Shot's mjr. But not all of them. "Universally trashed by critics and audiences alike upon its release, Les Carabiniers still hasn't been successfully rescued or rediscovered in recent years. What caused it to be so rejected then and forgotten now?" This one's "ripe for reevaluation."

Updated through 5/19.

"Jean-Luc Godard was a relative latecomer to the 'conceptualist cinema' of the 1950s and 60s, but his post-Pierrot productions experimented with text in a variety of novel ways," writes Gleb Sidorkin in the Tisch Film Review. "Godard's background in text-based practice and his reasons for bringing them into the visual space of the film theater was similar to the conceptual artists. A former critic for Cahiers du Cinema, Godard largely continued his critical practice in the film medium. Thus the division of labor between image-producers and those that used text to comment critically upon those images was, in cinema as in visual art, overcome by the new Godardian man and his camera-pen."

Online listening tip. Richard Brody talks about his new book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Once again in PopMatters, Marco Lanzagorta argues that folks really ought to see those 1968 movies Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.

Updates, 5/15: "So much discourse sees Jean-Luc Godard's Week End (1967) as the end of something the director started eight years earlier with Breathless, and the film's final title 'End of Film/End of Cinema' probably does nothing to discourage this interpretation," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "But I see Week End not as a conclusion but as a beginning, a look forward to the 'film' films Godard would return to with Tout va bien (1972), but perhaps even more directly to the director's so-called official return to film, 1979's Every Man for Himself."

"Today, the Godard legend - that radical filmmaking could also be hip and romantic - has become mere admiration of form," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Critics and directors ignore that even his most politically strident movies always probed the human spiritual condition."

"May 1968: 40 Years Later." A symposium of sorts in City Journal.

Update, 5/17: Dave McDougall: "May 17, 1968."

Updates, 5/18: Weekend, "in which a sparring bourgeois couple head out of the city for a few days and end up reinvented amidst a Marxist cannibalistic maelstrom pushes the bounds of all those categories usually in play in the 'Great Film' selection process: good taste, palatable daring, the touch of an author," blogs Reverse Shot's clarencecarter. "Weekend has none of these things, yet somehow it's been, correctly, labeled amongst Godard's best films. People actually claim to like it."

Updates, 5/19: Around 68 is a film series running at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through the end of the month.

"Ronald Bergan explained last week how Godard embodied the spirit of May 68, managing to 'go beyond film, beyond image into the other arts and into politics,'" blogs Daniel Tapper at the Guardian. "With the "art meets politics" rhetoric in full swing this week, I decided to go to see a film that aimed to bypass art entirely, preferring instead to openly incite violence in an unashamedly propagandist way. The film was the 1968 documentary The Hour of the Furnaces, co-directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. This Third Cinema classic was supposed to be an alternative to European art film, which the Grupo Cine Liberacion argued was too focused on the individual expression of the auteur director."

"In Le Gai savoir, Jean-Luc Godard begins to integrate his formal concerns with his political ones, taking up the role of teacher and building a case for the historical necessity of revolution," writes Dave McDougall in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Le Gai savoir is a sort of sequel to La Chinoise, in that it represents the next logical stage in the development (and increasing militancy) of JLG as a filmmaker."

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2008 1:04 PM