(Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)

Youth in Action #1

Opération 'Béton' (1954)

4th Time Around

Fourth time seeing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her in four years. Second time on 35mm. The print's scratched, and I wonder if it's the one I saw at the Music Box way back when. To my left, a man falls alseep in the first reel and snores loudly; the explosions on the soundtrack wake him up. To my right, a man falls asleep in the middle of the film -- his snoring is quieter, more like hibernation. A full house, but it's a small theater. Before the movie, a young man in a Woody Allen t-shirt tells his girlfriend they should go see Made in USA at 8 instead so they can get seats together. Before the movie, Dan Gorman and I talk Milius' Dillinger. Before the movie, they show a Volkswagen ad, touting "clean diesel" technology, and I think, "This is the right thing to show. Advertising, ideas. That's what we should be thinking about. They've gotta remind us that the world hasn't changed in 40 years."

So what do I notice in the film? The coffee cup's more galaxy-like than ever before, and more embryonic, too. I rediscover Marina Vlady's freckles and how the red lipstick brings them out. I step out towards the end and find myself helping a blind man in the bathroom (he's here for a documentary on Beethoven), missing the image of the cigarette glowing in the dark. I'm surprised that the film feels so complete without it.

The copy of Lafcadio's Adventures on Bouvard and Pecuchet's table is the same edition I have. And I've read Bouvard et Pécuchet now, and understand that while Flaubert had them leave Paris for the country, Godard has them move to the suburbs, where they can continue their urban impracticalities. Godard's gentler, too (Flaubert, describing his plan for the novel in a letter: "I shall vomit over my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me."). As Flaubert began his unfinished novel from the notes gathered in the Dictionary of Received Ideas, so Godard, I imagine, used as the script for his (unfinished as always) film a list of ideas (idées, idées, idées, we're reminded again and again, as if he's flipping back to the cover of that blue spiral-bound notebook).

Godard on ABC

A clip from Breathless--just a few seconds of Jean Seberg selling The New York Herald Tribune in her yellow (gray) sweater--was shown on ABC's Nightline last night; it was a piece on how the French feel that they're losing the Champs-Élysées to American stores. What would Jean-Luc think? The archival film clip is a time-worn device of televised news narrative, a way of subtly tapping the (fictional) collective conscience; there are things we remember mostly through cinema.
Sometimes they are not even things cinema was present for. For example, cinema only came to the concentration camps after they were closed, but it's been atoning for that oversight with a half-century's worth of Holocaust movies whose television-like reliance on pre-established forms imbues the subject with a sort of boring seriousness, the distance of a news item. It's hard for us to feel about it because we've been told how to feel about for so many years, just as its difficult to feel empathy for the people on television. Rather, we process the information and then feel empathy--television language is indirect.

Another interesting juxtaposition (same channel): evening Oprah episode on wunderkinds (an Indian preteen studying to become a doctor, an Austrian girl with a photographic memory, etc.) followed by an advertisement for Harrington Learning Centers, a chain of "educational programs" to help your "underachieving child" get ahead.

Jean-Luc Godard's Trailer for Mouchette

Perhaps the greatest, most hopeful revelation you get from seeing Quatre Nuits d'un Reveur, especially if you've seen a good deal (or all) of Bresson's work beforehand, is his sense of humor--worldly but not misanthropic, it is suprisingly gentle and playful, yet so fitting you feel as though it's a quality you might have missed all along, as if it's been there the whole time under your nose.
Re-examination is the basis of film criticism. Jean-Luc Godard's astounding trailer for Mouchette, which he long denied having made (but finally admitted authorship by including it in a self-curated retrospective of his work) is a passionate defence of Bresson's warmth as well as the kinetic nature of his filmmaking. It jokes about the film's black-and-white austerity and its Georges Bernanos source material ("Sung by Georges," one of the simple, white on black title cards reads) while reinforcing its intensity and potency. It is not as much subversion as suggestion. It is included, along with other, equally informative extras on Criterion's release of Mouchette; it's probably the best effort to humanize Bresson for American audiences anyone's made in a while, considering the fashionability of discussing his "spirituality" by high profile know-nothings like Paul Schrader.