The 60s, Godard.

"If The Little Soldier was something of a lost and rudely treated film, it bears attention as a thematic precursor to [Jean-Luc Godard's] genuinely anarchic Week-End," writes Roderick Heath. "Like all of Godard's films, there is lying at its core an infuriating conflict—the conflict between intellectual discourse and cinematic sensuality."

"Contrary to prevailing opinion, political films do not begin with Sergei Eisenstein and end with Ken Loach, and it is greatly unfair if not highly delusional to banish all political work of the arts to the doldrums," blogs Daniel Tapper from All Power to the Imagination: 1968 and Its Legacies. "Perhaps a sobering antidote to the reductionist opinions of such pseudo post-modernists would be the documentary Palms by Artur Aristakisyan."

Updated through 6/3.

"As if dared to articulate genre in the fewest shots and with the fewest possible tropes, Godard casually establishes in a matter of seconds that Alphaville is both a work of noir and of science fiction (as if conjoining the two was the most natural thing in the world)," blogs Reverse Shot's eshman.

Also: "Scorsese's on record as labeling Contempt as one of the best movies about moviemaking going, and it is that," writes clarencecarter. "But though the film's very first shot turns the/a camera literally on the audience, what's really at stake here is not movies, but romantic love. Or, more specifically: the idea of romantic love as it has been mediated by the complicity between audiences and the motion picture industry."

Nick Pinkerton in the Voice on Vivre sa Vie: "Star Anna Karina was in the brutal early rounds of marriage to her director, who was never more doting and egghead-condescending than in this showpiece."

Back to Reverse Shot and eshman, this time on Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One): "[A]nyone actually paying attention to what he'd been doing up to and during the period can't have expected a sober, unproblematized documentary recording. Furthermore, this was 1968, and there was simply too much going on outside to spend an entire film stuck inside a recording studio."

Godard's 60s runs at Film Forum in New York through June 5.

Updates, 5/29: "There are many strands to the annus mirabilis of 1968 - the Prague Spring, the Paris barricades, Flower Power - but all involved an uprising against a stifling postwar order," writes Roger Cohen in the New York Times. "In what the author Paul Berman has called 'an incoherent fraternity,' idealism provided what coherence there was.... It's not true that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. Not much emerged unchanged from 1968, even if protest never became revolution."

"Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is a road movie, but one in which the characters move, not through any physical geography, but across the well-traveled terrain of Godard's own cinematic corpus, revisiting key themes and familiar scenarios from the nine feature films that Godard made in the five years preceding Pierrot." Ed Howard.

Updates, 5/30: David Fear in Time Out New York on Vivre sa Vie: "Most of the ingredients of his early period are present: pulp-fiction posturing, quotes from poets and philosophers, puckish formal innovations. The manner in which these elements are presented, however, is the first step toward the cohesive blend of intellectual savviness and emotional resonance Godard would perfect down the road."

Ronald Bergan channels Truffaut.

Updates, 5/31: For the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Rebecca Casati visits the set of Stefan Krohmer's Dutschke, a docudrama about German activist Rudi Dutschke.

"Even though Vivre sa vie may leave its heroine, Nana (Anna Karina), used and dead, crumpled in a heap in the streets, on the heels of forcing her into prostitution, it still may be an even more fitting filmic tribute to the actress behind the role's beauty than the lighter, more palatable A Woman Is a Woman or Band of Outsiders," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot.

Update, 6/1: In Artforum's new film section, Andrew Hultkrans reviews Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard: "What lingers is the realization that Godard, the ultimate auteur, whose oblique cinematic experiments pushed the medium forward and seemed aggressively, at times perversely, sui generis, is far more a receiver and conductor than a generator - a deeply, often insecurely impressionable man who allowed the women and political currents in his life to inspire and guide his every artistic move."

Updates, 6/3: At Cinematical, Christopher Campbell comments on Godard's decision to back out of attending the Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival.

"Because 1968 was such a tumultuous moment there are a lot of 40th anniversaries this year," writes Time's Richard Lacayo. "The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the May uprisings in France, the street battles at the Democratic Convention in Chicago - all of it four decades ago. But I didn't want one other milestone to go by unremarked. It was 40 years ago today that Valerie Solanas walked into the Factory, the Andy Warhol studio in Manhattan, pulled out a gun and shot him." Related: Tom Sutpen.

Posted by dwhudson at May 28, 2008 12:58 PM