JLG

Jean-Luc Godard’s collaboration with a museum comes at a point in his œuvre when his work is not reaching the size of audience enjoyed by his early films, whilst his name has never been so frequently evoked and celebrated. This apparent contradiction can be partly explained by the fact that the combination within a single film of a critical dimension and a capacity for entertainment has become less and less accepted. À bout de souffle (1960), Le Mépris (1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965) achieved a perfect blend of theoretical power and spectacular lyricism.

In the past the filmmaker has devoted considerable attention to reflecting on the conditions of a film’s production by disrupting spectatorial investment through techniques such as narrative rupture, looks to camera, interrupted music, non-linearity of events and so on. He has also frequently represented the cinematic ‘machine’ and deprived the viewer of illusion, while nonetheless retaining a certain lyricism. Similarly, the sudden breaks to which he subjects his borrowed musical extracts serve to defer, if not prevent, the formation of his characters.

Collage(s) de France was a response to something for which the filmmaker had often been reproached: not telling a story. One day he jokingly recalled how he used to be reprimanded as a child (‘Don’t tell stories’), whereas in his work as a filmmaker he is now asked by producers to tell them. In fact he has always sought a balance between fiction and ethical gesture.

- According to JLG

LALANNE: The HADOPI law, for example, or the matter of prosecuting downloads, or the property of images...

GODARD: I'm against HADOPI, of course. There's no intellectual property. I'm against estates, for example. That the children of an artist might enjoy the rights of their parents' body of work, why not, until they come of age. But afterward — I see no evidence that Ravel's children are getting their hands on the rights for the Boléro...

LALANNE: You don't claim any rights over the images that any artists might be lifting from your films?

GODARD: Of course not. Besides, people are doing it, putting them up on the Internet, and for the most part they don't look very good... But I don't have the feeling that they're taking something away from me. I don't have the Internet. Anne-Marie [Miéville, his partner, and a filmmaker —JML] uses it. But in my film, there are images that come from the Internet, like those images of the two cats together.

LALANNE: The second-to-last quotation in the film is: "If the law is unjust, justice proceeds past the law..."

GODARD: It ties back in with the right of the author. Every DVD starts off with a title from the FBI criminalizing copies. I went for Pascal. But you might take something else away from that phrase. You might think about Roman Polanski's arrest, for example.

LALANNE: Is the idea of accomplishing a body of work, one which life granted you the time to complete, a matter that weighs upon you?

GODARD: No. I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts... I've towed the line a lot. You know, the most difficult thing is to tell a friend that what he's done isn't very good. I can't do it. Rohmer was brave enough to tell me at the time of the Cahiers that my critique of Strangers on a Train was bad. Rivette could say it too. And we paid a lot of attention to what Rivette thought. As for François Truffaut, he didn't forgive me for thinking his films were worthless. He also suffered from not ending up finding my films as worthless as I thought his own were.

LALANNE: Do you really think that Truffaut's films are worthless?

GODARD: No, not worthless... Not any more than anything else... Not any more than Chabrol's... But that wasn't the cinema we were dreaming of.

LALANNE: Posterity, leaving a trace behind — does this concern you?

GODARD: No, not at all.

LALANNE: But has it weighed upon you even for an instant?

GODARD: Never.

LALANNE: I have a hard time believing that. You can't make Pierrot le fou without having the urge to create a masterpiece, to be the champion of the world, to take your place in history forever...

GODARD: Maybe you're right. I had to stake that claim in my early works. I came back down to earth pretty quickly.

LALANNE: Do you think about your death?

GODARD: Yes, inevitably. With health problems... You end up being a lot more introspective than you used to be. Life changes. In any case, I've made a break with the social life for a long time now. I'd really like to take tennis back up again, which I had to stop due to knee-problems. When you get old, childhood starts coming back. It's good. And no, I don't get particularly distressed about dying.

LALANNE: You seem pretty detached...

GODARD: Mais au contraire! I'm very attached! [laughs] And further on this topic: Anne-Marie told me the other day that if she ever ends up outliving me, she'd write on my tombstone: "Au contraire..."

- Les Inrocks

Longas horas submergida em tudo o que é JLG (JLG e não Jean-Luc Godard).

A obra actual de Godard e a sua tendência para descontruir a realidade e tudo o que já fez durante a Nouvelle Vague é algo que, de facto, não deve ser levado de ânimo leve. Requere uma análise, um estudo, acima de tudo um pensamento crítico, e se de início, desabituados a estas imagens provocadoras que criticam a contemporaneidade, nos sentimos confusos perante esta "novidade", quando nos damos ao trabalho de ver além do evidente, apercebemo-nos da sua clareza assertiva e pessimista. Mais do que isso, numa altura em que atentados à liberdade surgem sob a capa do respeito dos direitos de autor (que pouco remetem para os autores) é crucial ler e reflectir sobre o que diz Godard, quem um dia afirmou, tomando uma posição tipicamente extremista, "Le droit d'auter? L'auter n'a que des droits".

Para quem está interessado em ver mais das suas reflexões, estão aqui alguns vídeos que fazem parte de um pack intitulado Morceaux de conversations avec Jean-Luc Godard.

Woody Allen para uma noite calma. É impossível ouvir Diane Keaton a cantar e não sentir um imediato sentimento de tranquilidade.

Agora nada sabia melhor do que um bocadinho de Gershwin e uma dose de nostalgia enternecedora. Oh Woody.

Witty Bits

do the madison!

Para dançar como Arthur, Odile e Franz.

Jazz up you lingerie!

Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright Public Domain Works

They claimed that re-copyrighting public works would breach the speech rights of those who are now using those works without needing a license. There are millions of decades-old works at issue. Some of the well-known ones include H.G. Wells’ Things to Come; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the musical compositions of Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky.

In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito said the legislation goes against the theory of copyright and “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.” Copyright, they noted, was part of the Constitution to promote the arts and sciences.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Lawrence Golan, told the high court that it will not longer be able to perform Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf, or Shostakovich’s Symphony 14, Cello Concerto because of licensing fees.

O artigo completo aqui.

Jarmusch & Waits

(poster polaco de Night on Earth)

Night on Earth, é, para mim, um filme de Jarmusch e Tom Waits. Já no post anterior falei da importância da musica de Maurice Jaubert nos filmes de Jean Vigo, e agora falo de Waits e Jarmusch.

Em Night on Earth a música surge sempre no momento certo, servindo de contraponto para uma situação burlesca ou amargurada. Se Jaubert ajuda Vigo a estabelecer um diálogo com o público, Waits, nesta viagem, ajuda, nos momentos certos, a estabelecer o estado de espírito que nos vai guiar. A música que surge durante o filme é sempre a mesma, e no meio de histórias cómicas ou tocantes, Waits relembra que It's a sad and beautiful world (já se dizia em Down by Law).

Wim Wenders and a Leica.

Hommages à Jean Vigo

Agora o que eu gostava mesmo era encontrar as bandas sonoras que Maurice Jaubert fez para Jean Vigo, tão (mas tão) essenciais tanto em Zero de Conduite como em L'Atalante. Parece que se perderam no tempo, mas à falta disso acho que me vou contentar com isto ou isto.

Mesmo diante de um tema relativamente pobre, Vigo preserva uma certa pureza, um modo directo de apreender o tema do filme tal como é - sem nenhuma "orquestração" ao modo de Ruttman ou Vertov, para disfarçar a magreza do tema, e sem intelectualismo gratuito.

- John M. Smith

Como em 9 minutos Jean Vigo nos leva para as profundezas de uma piscina, que mais parecem as profundezas do mar, para observar a simplicidade e graciosidade dos movimentos de um nadador no seu meio natural, e no meio natural de Vigo, a água. 

A montagem que em À Propos de Nice é usada para mostrar a pobreza e os problemas da pequena cidade de Nice, estabelecendo um diálogo com o público somente através da música e da imagem, em Taris ou La Natation evidencia a delicadeza duma realidade tornada em sonho, onde a água é daquilo que os sonhos são feitos.

O idealismo e a sensibilidade de Vigo guiam-no na concretização do seu mundo de sonhos, onde um diálogo rico e honesto é estabelecido por meio da sua mestria técnica e sua "pureza", tudo "sem intelectualismo gratuito".

Vigo, Truffaut, Vigo, Cocteau.

Vigo et Truffaut

A infância oprimida e libertária.

Vigo et Cocteau, les deux Jeans

A magia e a transfiguração da realidade pelo sonho.

Da magia de Buñuel passo para a de Vigo, o poeta e o mágico dos sonhos.

A magnificiência visual faz o milagre e a poesia de Vigo. E no entanto, em meio a esta fotogenia, a esta transfiguração do real ele consegue, não se sabe como, criar uma fotogenia do diálogo, dando às palavras, sem que estas percam o seu sentido, um valor sonoro.

- Henri Langlois

The logic of Un Chien Andalou is the logic of dreams.