Film socialisme

I get quite excited at the prospect of a new Godard. Not that I see his work as any ultimate example. It's not. But somehow it is in a different milieu to most films you can watch. Like poetry, it's not about the words or images, but the joy that comes from exploring, from original thought. Sound and vision used not to entertain but to seek deeper levels than can be expressed in prose or 'narrative cinema as we know it.' Yet the slew of bad reviews prepared me for the worst. Perhaps age had caught up with the grand master of Nouvelle Vague? Or perhaps Godard was not beyond playing a joke on his audience, just to see what they make of it?

Omens weren't great. A small auditorium and no more than a dozen people there as I walk in. Some obviously by mistake. As they walk out halfway through. But I am already entranced. Wondering if I will be able to see it again in the final screening tomorrow. Looking forward to the DVD so I can stop-start for quotes that send my head spinning like I'm back in my alma mater's philosophy class. A dizzying array of original and masterly techniques. And, like poetry, enough fluidity to offer meanings in ways that suit the individual viewer (persons who walked out excepted).

A warning: there is a 'looking for answers' but no real story. On a difficulty level, this film is much harder than Breathless, Le Mepris, or Vivre Sa Vie. It is warmer and more captivating than Weekend or Made in USA, but only just. Neither does it have the clear expository style of his last most recent well-known movie, Notre Musique. It has three main sections: 1 - scenes on a Mediterranean cruise ship ('Things'), 2 - a European family ('Our Europe'), and 3 - scenes of conflict and war ('Humanities'). Each seeks understanding to certain questions on an individual, interpersonal and political level.

The first section held my attention the most. Inside the cruise ship is a plethora of "things" (if this was Godard of yesteryear, I'd maybe have written 'bourgeois distractions.') Only when we go outside, or see the light shine in, do we experience crisp photography, scenes of genuine beauty, and people spending their time at least trying to solve some of life's deeper puzzles. Perhaps this is just my own interpretation, but I like the way it is depicted visually. Money is a 'common good' – like water – but party-people onboard use it for nothing but bloated consumerism. Meaningless dance classes and revelry. As two people engage in philosophical discourse outside the main hall, a woman repeatedly falls against the glass partition. Is she dancing and letting her spirit free? Apparently not – she falls face down into the swimming pool.

There is a young girl seen frequently with an old man. Something strange there? A hooker perhaps? A maybe rather a scholar or seeker of truth – availing herself of the rich variety of elderly experience onboard (a philosopher, a UN bureaucrat, a Palestinian ambassador, and so on).

Characteristic Godardian effects are used with casual precision. There is no attempt at reality if it stands in the way of the point he is making. Such as when the background noise cuts out momentarily for the word 'happiness' to occurs in the girl's dialogue. Deliberate camera distortions emphasise an alcohol-sodden mentality of the majority of passengers, images often obscenely blurred, as if taken on a mobile phone. Or the mother in Section Two who talks to the camera about how she is totally unaware of the part she is playing.

There are more hidden references than an afternoon of Tarantino movies. Except, unlike Tarantino's work, Godard is not entertaining pub quiz movie geeks; but giving clues to further meanings within his experimental and exploratory work. A young lad gives a young woman a copy of 'La Porte Entroite,' (a coming of age novel). There are nods to Husserl's philosophical geometry which fit the film but will need hours of study to fully appreciate (we see a projection of a man lecturing on 'geometry as origin' – to an empty auditorium). And Balzac's 'Illusions Perdues,' which anticipates themes of aristocracy vs poverty as well as journalism as intellectual prostitution. And don't miss the homage later to Battleship Potemkin's Odessa Staircase slaughter.

Dialogue sparkles from witty – "The United Nations have been somewhat disunited since 1948," to surreal and Zen-like – "Once in 1942 I have encountered nothingness . . ." I'm quoting from memory and leaving the end of the quote for you to enjoy on screen.

The individual's relation to government is addressed by the adolescents in the second Section, posing a difference between the State and Society. The dream of the State is to be 'one'; whereas the dream of the Individual is to be two, to 'pair up.' Aggressively intrusive foreigners demanding driving directions are given a cold shoulder ("Go and invade some other country!") An intrusive camera, making a documentary about a coming election, similarly distances everyone from any (inner) reality.

Some of the phrases from Section Two bleed over into scenes of Section Three bloodshed. The young girl wants people to, "learn to see before learning to read." Godard's intertitles come fast and frequent, and in many different languages. At one point, a prayer in Hebrew and a prayer in Arabic are overlaid, visually and aurally. It recalls Godard's offhand response to the question, "Peace In the Middle East - when?" by replying, "As soon as Israel and Palestine introduce six million dogs and stroll with them as neighbours who don't speak, who don't speak of something else." Cinema is a remarkable opportunity sometimes to communicate without speaking those things which are often too difficult, or too sensitive, or simply whitewashed of their core by aimless chatter. Or by narrative movies.

I'll admit that I've only seen a handful of Jean-Luc Godard's movies. "Film socialisme" is the latest. Very bizarre movie. In fact, it doesn't really emphasize a plot. It's hard to tell what the movie's emphasis is supposed to be, with the focus on a group of people aboard a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. Maybe Godard wanted to address the use of certain places as tourist meccas, but I couldn't be certain. With current events in the world, it's probably significant that the movie includes Palestine.

I'd like to see the rest of Godard's movies, but I doubt that I'll ever be able to truly understand what sort of point he was trying to make with this one.

Watch for singer-songwriter Patti Smith in a brief appearance.

Film socialisme (2010)

BOMB (out of 4)

How does one go about explaining Jean-Luc Godard's FILM SOCIALISME? I guess you could say that the director just throws at us various film clips. Some take place on a ship. Some take place in Egypt. Some just seem to be random shots of people walking around. Some are film in beautiful HD while others are filmed on what appears to be a very old cell phone. The subtitles are often full of mistakes. It could be that the words are put together to where it's hard to read them. It could be that the subtitles aren't really telling us what the characters are saying. Was there a point to this madness? I think there are two possibilities. One is that Godard wanted to drive people to suicide so he made this film. The other theory of mine is that he wanted to make a film so horrid that his followers would still rave about how great it was. Either way this here is a pretty worthless film and it's not that it's horrible because of a horrible filmmaker. No, it's horrible because the filmmaker knows he's making something that is nothing but a waste of time. The reason Godard does this is beyond me but sitting through this film is quite unpleasant and it makes one realize that this film is so bad that you couldn't even recommend it to those who love bad movies. I'm not going to lie and say Godard is one of my favorite filmmakers because he isn't. There have been highly respected films of his (like ALPHAVILLE) that I simply hated. With that said, I could see why some would be drawn to it. With this movie it's just pure garbage and I must admit that I find it funny reading so many reviews that call this a piece of art and one of the greatest films of the decade. Reading Roger Ebert's review states that Godard showed this film in a four-minute version by playing it with the fast-forward button on high. This here might have been the greatest idea the director ever had.

Godard seemed to always be concerned with the pretension of language being inadequate to convey meaning, which is stated more clearly in the title of his 2014 film, Goodbye to Language. Not only does he suggest language is a poor mediator of meaning (in a fashion so incoherent that you have to figure this out from second hand accounts in many cases... or from longterm fanboyism), but he makes sure you won't get any meaning out of the film by making it inscrutable and fractured. There is little to cling to. Characters come and go, nameless ones, who fail to be more than ghostly stereotypes that function as many different mouthpieces for Godard.

There are political references, mentions of Stalin, Hitler, other dictators, communists, events related to WWII or occurring just before or after it, colonialism, etc... Some of the references are obscure, some quite well known, but they're all thrown around in an incoherent jumble. Never much more than a bunch of ideas that one can mostly only guess about.Most ideas remain too undeveloped to be interesting or garner much though from the viewer. It's mostly just name dropping and references. His films took a turn for an essayistic style—essentially essay films, barraging an audience with many ideas, skits, monologues, visuals, poems, sounds, music, etc. in a sometimes pleasing medley—he could convey so much, often doing so with considerable panache, but it seems to me that he's becoming less coherent and fails to be interesting in his experiments… it's all so detached. Early iterations of his style had a semblance of narrative to run the ideas through or developed mouthpieces that could be more easily identified as a sign of something. He's gone too far into the excesses of postmodernism and has failed to craft an engaging piece of cinema. No, this is more like unfunny (okay so sometimes it is funny: "Go invade another country," says a rude girl when pressed for an answer by tourists—oh, and this is while she's reading Balzac, which is revealed with a camera zoom, followed by random shots of a llama and disconnected shards of dialogue) comedy vignettes than cinema. Godard actually comes off as a bit of a memelord here—the man always was with the times… the hyperactive nature and strange soundbites lend it that kind of quality, not to mention the cat video that Alissa watches (accompanied by her obnoxious imitation "meow."

The chronology of the movie seems to be Part 1: Godard goes on a cruise with his rich friends. Part 2: Godard films in his backyard and focuses on a family. Part 3: Archival footage that mercifully does away with all the annoying characters

Many images do not work very well with the spoken word, and one might argue: that is the point. The actors don't really act—they're there to be mouthpieces, even more so than many older Godard movies. They're little more than a source being cited in a paper. Actor's often speak in a loopy French sing-song poetic style, which contradicts the rather prosaic lines often spoken, not to mention the chopped up mess that are the subtitles of this film—Navajo English, which is one of Godard's jokes for translating the french into English and cutting out words on a whim to make less sense than he usually makes.

Compared to his old work with Raoul Cotard, the cinematography is rather ugly at many points. He uses many different digital cameras—from webcams to professional cinema cameras. There are digital artifacts and he tends to heavily oversaturate the colors in certain scenes to the point where the images look warped. Some shots look lovely but there's no real rhyme or reason to it, no consistency. Random canted angles of random things happening on the cruise ship, for example—random montages, etc.

One example of a scene would be the year 1936 being referenced. Following that, a woman on screen has a monologue about Moscow's and other countries involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Matryoshka dolls are sitting around her in the foreground. She is arguing with a person, and the movement of gold out of the Spanish bank is a key topic. Some other woman, unseen in the background, begins to babble something unrelated, some of it while the first woman is still talking. A male character approaches the first woman, ruffles her hair, and name drops a communist, then walks away... that's what most of the movie is like, only less interesting.

Godard is just some elitist who expects everyone to learn his language, not like language is an effective means of expression, according to him, the absurdist. Luckily the DVD has full English subs, not that it makes a lot of sense most of the time, anyway.

Jean-Luc Godard is a reference in cinema and changed the art fifty years ago with a unique challenging style that defied current esthetics and etiquette.

His latest work can be described more as an eclectic experiment than any enduring piece of cinema, but it serves to show his mastery of the art and his ability to dissect it in its most basic components before trying to create a different, distinct experience for the viewer. He plays with themes, locations, styles and intermingles with little restriction photos, videos, ambient sounds, silence, music, narrations, monologues, dialogues to delves into a dream-like undefined cinematic discussion.

The film does not quite work as a whole, precisely from this lack of focus, but some of the imagery (some sharp and some out of focus, some old and some new, some seemingly meaningless and some full of allegories, etc.), dialogues (existential, simple, social, revolutionary) and intertitles do reach a cord and will be remembered subconsciously or consciously. It's lack of clear content or continuity should not take away from it's task of deconstruction and desire to destabilise our current comforts. In that aspect, Godard grabs the rug under conventional cinema and pulls very hard to make it topple over dumbfounded and confused.

There are three segments, each shorter than the previous, but besides being glad to finally leave this seemingly derelict boat and to briefly know a fictional philosophising family, there is not enough distinction between the segments to warrant further feedback at this point. Only that as Godard's life perhaps, and exemplified in the crafty ancient time-telling device in segment #2, time is getting shorter...

Maybe we'll get it right some day, may be one of many messages of this remue-méninges.