Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Adieu




A few random thoughts on Jean-Luc Godard:

How much I love every single frame of Contempt.

The car crash scene in Weekend.

The dance scene in Band of Outsiders.

Godard in the long black-and-white interview, released in 1967, with Fritz Lang.

The way the beautiful Nouvelle Vague, with Alain Delon, has a boat scene that engages with Delon's boat scene in Purple Noon in a weird and unsettling way.

Lemmy Caution cruising around Alphaville, the ultimate world-weary PI in his trenchcoat and hat -- film noir and sci-fi merged in the film perfectly, with a tiny budget and no special effects.

Eddie Constantine back as Lemmy Caution 26 years later, yet looking the same (because he always looked old) in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero.

Pierrot Le Fou, based on a Lionel White novel.  Is the heist novel source recognizable at all?  Not really, but with Godard somehow that doesn't really matter.

Godard's unending love of pulp, crime fiction, detective stories, noir -- all put to his own purposes of course.

The man's crankiness and irascibility, which could make him no less funny than when he wasn't being cranky or irascible. 

The way Isabelle Huppert, in Every Man for Himself and Passion, is a perfect Godardian actor, with her unreachability, her inscrutability, the total absence of anything like sentimentality.

How you can find an artist's work annoying and even maddening (sometimes) and still feel that you want to consume as much of it as you can.

And any film lover could go on and on about this...

For Ever Godard!




1 comment:

Art Taylor said...

I just rewatched Vivre Sa Vie recently--and was planning on watching some more Godard even before the news of his death. Oddly, I don't think I've ever seen Contempt! I need to move that to top of the list...