More Media Funhouse full episodes on the Net, free!

The Funhouse TV show will celebrate its 30th anniversary on Sept. 30 of this year. Besides making me feel incredibly old, the fact that I’m still doing the Funhouse after all this time does make me proud. I’m proud that I’ve kept the show going despite obstacles too numerous to mention, proud that I’ve gotten to cover a broad spectrum of both high art and low trash (something you can’t do in mainstream media — it’s one or the other, and neither makes $), and proud that I’ve been able to share it all with the Manhattan cable viewers of the show, those who read the associated writing I’ve done (both on this blog and in my DVD/BD reviews), and those who watch the show virtually on the MNN stream each late Saturday night. 

So, I felt it was time to put a few more shows up online in their entirety. This can’t be done on YouTube, which arbitrarily enforces copyright, bashes to death the notion of “fair use” and critical context, and deals harshly with those who ain’t payin’ them. As for popular categories of “fair use” YT vids, I never wanted to talk through or “shrink” into a tiny box the clips I show on the program; I don’t think me “reacting” to things is interesting — I introduce the material and then let ’er rip! 

This time it’s a quartet of recently produced shows, two of which fit snugly into the “high art” category, one of which is surely “low trash,” and a fourth that is simply a great Golden Age film that deserves a bigger audience. 

The last-mentioned is the first show I posted. On this episode, I discuss and show clips from the 1937 British thriller Love from a Stranger. I will readily admit that the reason I encountered this particular thriller (which I hadn’t heard of until recently) was because I had finally obtained the long out-of-print (and often wildly overpriced) book The Wild Wild World of the Cramps by Ian Johnston. 

In the book, which supposedly the Cramps were not fond of (a shame, because it’s the best of the two books written about them and is quite reverent and informative), there is a section from an interview in which the late lamented Lux Interior provides a list of films he really loves. The Cramps’ deep love for both Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis was mentioned in many of their interviews (and they sang theme songs from films by both men), but this longer list was interesting, in that it mostly seemed to have items that were put out by two public domain video labels of the time. 

Thus, it seemed to me to be a list of Lux’s recent purchases — many of the movies were just standard-issue horror and juvenile delinquent flicks. The list, started out, though, with the masterwork of frenzy that is The World’s Greatest Sinner by Timothy Carey. 

Lux also included Love from a Stranger in his list. Here is the entry: 

“Lux: It’s a great old movie and stars Basil Rathbone as a serial killer. 

Ivy: He plays a psychotic! 

Lux: Basil Rathbone in his most demanding performance (laughs) and I ain’t kidding. He starts off as being really suave, sweeps this girl off her feet and tells her he’s rich. As the movie goes on he becomes more and more nutty and in the last half hour of the film she realizes the man she’s married to is a full-blown psychotic. She’s alone with him in this house in the middle of nowhere and he plans to kill her. He becomes more disheveled throughout. They’ll be sitting eating dinner and he’ll suddenly turn round to her and say, ‘WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!’ He shovels tons of food into his mouth and it all starts dribbling down his chin and then he burps, loudly… this is Basil Rathbone! He turns into a monster. 

Ivy: He just turns into a monster without make-up. The performances are excellent.” 

The only things I can add to this lively description is that the film was scripted by the leading woman screenwriter of the time, Frances Marion (who wrote Dinner at Eight), and was based on a short story by Agatha Christie. It does have some really good twists and turns, and does feature a truly manic turn by the future Sherlock Holmes (aka Wolf von Frankenstein). 

 

Another title mentioned in a different list of movies recommended by Senor Interior (in the 1986 tour booklet that contained list of faves from all four members of the band) is Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968). This film was part of a major rediscovery (thanks to the great producer Dave Friedman letting one mail-order firm know about a trove of 16mm copies of pretty much forgotten titles) of sexploitation titles, and it is well worth a look. Lux liked it SO much that he wrote a song with the same title. 

The 9,000th version of the “Most Dangerous Game” scenario (in which humans are the prey that is hunted, not animals), this one features an insane female hunter pursuing three down-and-out figures on the streets of NYC: a washed-up actor, a junkie beatnik, and a former wrestling “champeen,” played by none other than Da Bull himself, Jake LaMotta (who really trades on that nickname here, being killed in a mock bullfight by the hunter, dressed to the nines in a torera outfit). It’s a quite amazingly nuts film and worthy of a full Funhouse episode. 

 

Time to flip the equation and move to the “high art” side of the film world. This is represented by a pair of episodes paying tribute to one of the biggest heroes in the Funhouse, namely Uncle Jean, aka Jean-Luc Godard. After his death, I knew I would have to look long and hard through his work and assemble a series of episodes paying tribute to his work, era by era. So far, I’ve assembled and aired two of these shows, and one episode discussing and excerpting scenes from A Vendredi Robinson, the 2022 Mitra Farahani film that offers us a last sustained look at JLG in his natural habitat (filmed in 2014-15 before he was gravely affected by a neurological condition). 

The first show covers the first six years of his most famous period, the Sixties, from 1960 to ’65. I discuss a few of the tenets of his work, display a few of the many magazines and books devoted to him, and then show scenes from nine of his first 10 features. (Including some that are truly iconic — and ripped off to no end — and some that show off specific aspects of his work.)

 

The second episode completes the overview of Godard Sixties features. (I’ll approach the anthology contributions, shorts, and the missing ’60s feature in a future episode.) Here I open with some more books/magazines and an anecdote illustrating what it was like seeing Godard’s most obscure work in a certain Manhattan museum.

From that point I move on to the period in his work that opened the way for an incredible amount of radically unusual films in the late Sixties/early Seventies. We move from his last classically “New Wave” film (MASCULIN FEMININ) to his post-“end of cinema” features in 1968. 

 

I plan to only put up a select few episodes online. (There have been over a thousand new shows in the 30 years we’ve been on the air.) The only way to see the show regularly for those outside of Manhattan is to catch it late Sat/early Sunday at 1:00 a.m. EST on the MNN stream on Ch. 3, the “Spirit Channel.”

Media Funhouse episodes on the Net

Back in August, just as the Media Funhouse TV show was about to enter its 30th year on the air (the show debuted on September 30, 1993), the cable access organization that airs the show, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, moved its HQ from 59th Street and 11th Ave. to 38th Street and 11th Avenue. At this point the live streams of MNN channels went dark and a third party organization began airing their shows — in a bizarre twist, the Standard Definition shows began airing in HD (and within an odd onscreen pattern of a letterbox-within-a-windowbox).

The last-mentioned aspect (and many other daily grinds) has kept me so busy that only now — now in a week when the live streams are in fact BACK ON-AIR (!) — have I had the chance to find a suitable “platform” to host a Media Funhouse online “channel” of the recent episodes that no one outside of Manhattan could see. (I take my viewership outside the borough as seriously as the ones inside the borough.) OK.ru is the site of choice, since Vimeo demands cold hard cash for every bit of space it allots a videomaker, the workings of DailyMotion are a puzzle, and YouTube has various wondrous stumbling blocks — most of them “international bans” — in place for those who create video montages.

OK.ru is the “YouTube of Russia.” To those who might think that “I’ll be *watched* if I go to that site!” I have a fast newsflash: You’re being watched on YouTube. You’re being watched (especially!) on Facebook. Your social media is being registered and logged everywhere at every time. Unless you go “off the grid” entirely, as long as you have an active presence online, you’re being watched. From your desktop computer, your work computer (again, especially), and most definitely your tablet and phone, you’re being watched. (And I've "unlocked" the embeds from ok.ru below, so you can click them and watch the videos through this blog entry.)

And, as for YouTube, the clips that were the points of contention were fascinating. The films of Bob Rafelson that everyone knows — his early work for BBS (his company with Schneider and Blauner) — were fine with YT. It was his later movies that are owned outright and that no one can EVER post sequences from. And with Godard it gets even hairier.

Godard mixes three overlaid
images with (at least) two audio tracks
in Histoire(s) du Cinema.

Uncle Jean (as I like to call him, based on his role in the film Prenom Carmen) was a “mix-master,” a sampler of longstanding. He used words from other writers, images from painters, and music from classical composers in his Sixties films, and by the Eighties was crafting video essays that were composed almost entirely of others’ work, reassembled by his hand (one of his first notable articles was called, “Montage, My Fine Care”). 

However, since he was using other people’s work so heavily, when you post HIS work on YouTube, you find that the original sources are banned — most notably, one German classical CD label does not want to monetize your clip (or, more accurately, Godard’s clip) with their sounds on it, they want you “banned” outright.

Godard also worked actively at one point with a record label that released the soundtracks of his films (complete, with every sound, every newly spoken word, and all the thousands of sounds he had taken from other sources on their discs). This has caused his “late-period” masterpiece Histoire(s) du Cinema to have its sound banned entirely from YouTube — at the moment you post a video including a clip from his video epic, you are “internationally banned” for using JLG’s sound (his name appears as the copyright owner), even though he was fond of putting “No Copy Right” at the end of his video essays and he publicly supported (to the tune of donating 1,000 euros!) a downloader who was under indictment, saying “There is no such thing as intellectual property.”

After facing this obstacle, there was only one way to go: away from U.S. video platforms. OK.ru truly fits JLG’s dictum and thus has not just hundreds, but thousands of films on it. It now has the “missing” episodes of my cable-access series, and I can think of no better company to be in than a crazy digital library of thousands of films. Here is the link to the Media Funhouse channel. 

Now, onto the shows:

I have new episodes paying tribute to Godard in the works, but first of all wanted to reshow older Funhouse eps in which I focused on his films. Firstly, there is part one of my interview from 2004 with Colin MacCabe, the film historian who wrote the first English-language biography of Godard.

MacCabe discusses his book in this interview but also answers questions about broader concepts in Godard’s work. He also in this episode discusses what it was like to work with Uncle Jean, as the producer on three of his video essays (and yes, I ask him about clearance of film clips!).

 

Moving back to the “consumer guide” aspect of the Funhouse, I also reshowed this episode, which found me reviewing and showing clips from three new releases: the Eclipse box of films by Godard’s one-time “Dziga-Vertov group” collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Godard’s own Film Socialisme and the mighty, mighty Histoire(s) du Cinema.

 

As for “unseen” Godard, I also have done various episodes on his video essays. I am quite proud of having shown Funhouse viewers one of his most beautiful short creations, “De l'origine du XXIe siècle” (2000) in its entirety in this episode. I include clips from other essays, but “origine” is a most exquisite view of the 20th century that proceeds backward chronologically, mixing newsreels of the realest atrocities with the most fantasy-based images from fiction films, concluding with perhaps the perfect metaphor for a century in which the action never stopped: the dance with the can-can girls in Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir. (Godard leaves in all the spinning around, but cuts just as the hero falls down while dancing.) 

 

Another absolutely gorgeous Godard short is “Puissance de la Parole” (1988). Godard counterpoints a couple’s emotional breakup over the phone — with dialogue from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice — with an older man and a young girl discussing mankind’s need for knowledge — with dialogue from Poe’s prose poem “The Power of Words” about two deities (or angels, if you prefer) conversing about mortals. 

It’s a stunning work in terms of both its magical inscrutability (the Poe side) and its earthy humanity (the Cain breakup dialogue). Even more stunning is that this work of raw emotion and aesthetic beauty (which ends with the mingling of classical music with songs by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan) was commissioned as a commercial for a phone company. (Thus, the breakup over the phone.) 

 

The episode that I’m most proud of in this batch on ok.ru is the second part of my interview with Colin MacCabe, discussing various aspect of Godard’s work. Firstly, I remade this episode entirely — I edited from the original interview tape, leaving all of what MacCabe had said (I had initially cut a now-fascinating bit about Godard surely opposing the neo-liberalism that runs through current European politics) and using better copies of the film clips I had initially included in the episode. 

Secondly, there is the range of topics we covered in a short amount of time. They include the viewer’s response to Godard’s use of so many references (MacCabe’s answer to this is very instructive; it gives Godard fans an answer to those they may know who remark that Godard’s work is too layered to be comprehensible), Godard’s then-current political position, the use of autobiography in Godard’s essays and fiction films (including his appearances as “Uncle Jean” the crazy filmmaker), the seminal importance of Histoire(s) du Cinema to his output during the late Eighties and Nineties, the themes in his transitional work In Praise of Love, and, not forgetting, Godard’s much-ignored (or misunderstood) sense of humor.

 

I saluted Bob Rafelson first on this blog and then did three episodes on the show about him. The first episode covered his best-known period, in which he made films for his mini-studio BBS, aka the House The Monkees Built. Thus, we begin with Head and end with his non-BBS Stay Hungry.

 

The second episode in this series of shows covers his next three films, which came out at intervals (by this point, Rafelson had burned some bridges in the film industry, and he was also pursuing his biggest interest, traveling). So, we begin with his “comeback” in 1981, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and end with the film he proclaimed his favorite, the adventure saga/character study Mountains of the Moon (1990).

 

The third and last of this series of episodes covers Rafelson’s last four works for hire. These range from the screwball comedy Man Trouble (1992) to his underseen, terrific last film, No Good Deed (2002), starring Samuel L. Jackson. 

 

The next show focuses on a French romantic comedy-drama that hasn’t ever been available in the U.S., Adorable Liar, directed and cowritten by Michel Deville. The most intriguing thing about it is that the two very cute lead actresses later worked for Godard (whereas Deville had just worked with… Anna Karina!): Marina Vlady and Macha Meril. 

It’s a cute, slight film about two sisters from the provinces in Paris. One of them (Marina) lies to men a lot, to the extent that when she finally meets her true love — well, he just doesn’t believe her. Among the cast are two Funhouse faves when they both very young men: Pierre Clementi (in his movie role) and the great Michael Lonsdale. 

 

I was very pleased to interview Balthazar Clementi, the son of the actor-filmmaker Pierre Clementi, when he was in NYC promoting his father’s films as a director (plus the U.S. publication of his dad’s memoir, A Few Personal Messages). 

In this episode (the first of a projected three), we discuss his father’s filmmaking, which works as both a diary of his very busy life in the Sixties and Seventies (with his friends — Nico, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Tina Aumont, Viva — and his costars — Deneuve, Piccoli, Klaus Kinski, Udo Kier — showing up in various candid moments) and avant-garde meditations on the periods in which the footage was shot. 

 

The final new episode (barring an Xmas show that isn’t good to post, for another year at least) was a discussion of, and scenes from, a lost major-studio film that was yet another fascinating failure from the era in which the major studios (MGM, in this case) were all trying to reproduce the success of Easy Rider.

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970) is an incredible mess, but one of those messes from that insanely productive period in which even the failures make for compelling viewing. Here, the film boasts (besides wonderful NYC location footage) two items that make it one-of-a-kind: the first are two supporting players (folk singer Holly Near and psychedelic frontman turned gay standup comic Michael Greer) who are so good in their roles that they steal the film away from its lead, Don Johnson (in his first film role).

The second amazing aspect of the picture is the score. Certain “hard” bands were signed to MGM Records, so their music fits with the plot and images, but the light, bubblegum sound of the Mike Curb Congregation is also heard. Their cover of “Happy Together” is just lame, but the fact that the catchy-as-fuck “Sweet Gingerbread Man” (by Michel Legrand and Marilyn & Alan Bergman) is used in trippy, sexy scenes (including one right after Johnson has had a threesome with two his hippie girlfriends) is a mind-blower. The song would be better suited for Willy Wonka or Doctor Dolittle, but it wound up in this film and thus made for sublimely silly musical interludes. 

 

Again, the Media Funhouse channel on OK.ru can be found here.

As it currently stands, MNN has reached its new HQ and has put back into action its live streams. This is great news for me, as I welcome every like-minded viewer we can get in “the tent.” As of the day this blog post goes up, the streams at mnn.org are back up and working. The one that airs Media Funhouse at 1:00 a.m. late Saturday/early Sunday can be found here.

I have been informed that they are still fine-tuning these streams, but they look delightful as of this writing, so I can only hope they will remain up and working for a long time to come….

Media Funhouse guests speak about Godard

It’s been a few weeks since Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard) died, and I do plan on writing something about his life and work for this blog. But in the meantime, I wanted to post what I initially thought of as “the end” of the piece, namely a collection of eight videos in which Media Funhouse interview subjects spoke about Godard. Two of the guests were admirers who happened to meet Godard as their indie filmmaking careers flourished; two were performers in his 1980s films (commonly thought of as his “comeback” films, although he never really left — he just stopped and then restarted making fiction films); three were collaborators behind the camera; and one wrote the first (and still best) biography of Godard in English.

I should explain that these interviews were done under various conditions. In some, I spoke to the guest under very tight time constraints, so my Godard-related questions were slipped in “under the wire.” In others we had ample time with the guest and so they could go on at length about their admiration for, or work with, Godard. The interviews were shot in conference rooms, hotel rooms, a Lincoln Center office, and one artist’s kitchen. I was very happy to get these responses about a filmmaker that clearly fascinated the interview subjects as much as he fascinated all of his diehard fans for the last six decades-plus, and I’m now happy to share them all in one package. 

*****

As an “appetizer,” two clips from different interviews with Hal Hartley, where I asked him about Godard and his influences. He had interviewed Godard for a U.S. filmmaking magazine and had the great experience of telling Uncle Jean that he went to one of Godard’s recent films with his actor-friend Martin Donovan, who “laughed at the wrong part” of the film. Godard’s answer? “There are no wrong parts.”

I used that as a springboard for an earlier question to Hartley in the ’96 interview and then slipped in a query about Godard before the end of the chat. In ’06 Hartley answered the question in a broader sense, discussing how important it is for filmmakers to have influences and to openly copy them, on the way to developing one’s own style. 

 

Leos Carax is one of the most talented directors around, but few know about his acting career. There hasn’t been much to it (six supporting roles of various size in films directed by others) — then again, his filmmaking career has consisted of only six (splendid) features so far. 

He made his acting debut on film (minus a bit as an extra in one of his own pictures) in Godard’s KING LEAR (1987). I asked him about his appearance in that film and also about his being influenced by the French New Wave.

 

Next up is Jane Birkin. Ms. Birkin acted only once for Godard, in SOIGNE TA DROITE (Keep Your Right Up, 1987). She had a small part, but I thought it was still important to ask her what that time spent with JLG was like, and she came up with a lovely portrait of a cranky, laser-focused man with a bad cold. (None of which should surprise a diehard Uncle Jean fan.)

 

Independent filmmaker Amos Poe discussed his paean to Godard, UNMADE BEDS (1976), in my interview with him. That film revolves around a guy in ’76 NYC who believes he’s living in a French New Wave movie at the turn of the Sixties.

That part of our chat was interesting, but an even juicier morsel came out later in our lengthy interview: Amos had been ripped off money-wise by Uncle Jean! Watch the clip for details, but the story involves Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Robert Fripp, and a proposed remake of ALPHAVILLE.

 

The filmmaker Claude Miller served a long and fruitful apprenticeship assisting other directors in the 1960s. He was as an assistant director or production manager for Bresson, Truffaut, Demy, and Godard. I got reflections from him on three of those four, and here is his remembrance of time working with Godard on 2 or 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (production manager, and he’s also seen as an actor behind a pile of books on a table in one sequence), LA CHINOISE (no official credit, but he said he worked on the film to me), and WEEKEND (assistant director).

He had fond memories of working with JLG, and he certainly was present at a great moment in Godard’s career — when he was making his “last” fiction films, before he went fully political (and non-fictional) for a decade.

 

D.A. Pennebaker was a consummate documentarian who shared quite a lot in my discussion with him, reviewing his older films while also promoting his more recent ones with his partner/wife Chris Hegedus. His time with Godard was spent making (with his partner Richard Leacock and Uncle Jean) a Godard project called 1 A.M. (ONE AMERICAN MOVIE). It was to be a sort of panorama of America on the brink of revolution, but Godard left the project after most of the footage was shot and abandoned the whole thing.

What Pennebaker edited together, called ONE P.M., does play like one of Godard’s “pitch” storyboards (drawn so he could get a notion of what he wanted, but also to cajole money out of producers). It’s a series of unrelated episodes, some documentary, some fiction: Rip Torn acts up a storm around NYC, Eldridge Cleaver is seen being wary of the filmmakers’ cameras, Tom Hayden gives lengthy speeches, and the Jefferson Airplane beat the Beatles to the punch by having a rooftop concert months before LET IT BE. (And getting chased off by the cops.)

In the meantime, we see Pennebaker’s footage of Godard staging and shooting some of the scenes — it’s by far one of the closest studies of Godard at work in the Sixties. Even though he’s not making a classic film, you can still see his imagination (and budding interest in radical politics) radiating all around him.

 

The last two interviews featured here gave me the most information about Godard as an artist (and as a person, although Birkin’s remarks can always be kept in mind). Cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who worked with JLG for a number of years on every project he did, from fiction features to video essays, provided some excellent insights about his working methods. Here we talk about her first film with him, SOIGNE TA DROITE, where she was behind the camera filming Godard as an actor (playing his “Uncle Jean” character – this time called “The Prince”).

She also rebuffs the notion that he was a master of lighting and instead calls him a “master of framing,” detailing how his very specific methods of framing an image made his visuals so distinct and readily recognizable.

 

And finally: The only full-length interview I did that was entirely concerned with Godard was with film critic and historian Colin MacCabe, whose biography “Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy” had just been published. (The first biography in English and, as I said above, still the best one in this language.) When I spoke to him in early 2004, a lot of Godard’s “late period” films had yet to come out on DVD (and there was no such thing as the “underside of the Internet” where rare foreign films with English subs were lurking, ready to be grabbed and watched).

I had seen Godard’s film and video work of that time at select screenings at rep houses and (mostly) MoMA, so I was able to talk about it with Mr. MacCabe, but I wasn’t sure if my viewership had, so I spoke with him here about Godard’s perception of his audience and how one should watch his brilliant eight-part sensory overload, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (made from 1988-98). 

Mr. MacCabe, who had not only interviewed Godard many times and wrote the biography but also produced three of his video essays, was quite generous with his knowledge of his subject and gave me some very valuable answers about how to take in the essays, which are indeed the masterworks of the last three decades of Godard’s career (along with a few of the final fiction films). This is part of a longer chat.

Jacques Rozier: Dream vacations run aground

Photo by
Raymond Cauchetier.

While Godard remains the only one of the internationally famous French New Wave filmmakers to still be with us, a lesser-known French filmmaker whose work in the late Fifties and early Sixties was distinctly in line with the “nouvelle vague” (both the Cahiers posse and the Left Bank group) is still alive at 95. Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962) is the greatest New Wave film to never receive a single legal release on U.S. DVD or Blu-ray (or even VHS), but his later lengthy comedies are just as worthy of study — and just as unavailable in the U.S.

This piece will not be a survey of Rozier’s life and career, but rather an in-depth exploration of the four fiction films of his that are available in France on DVD and are thankfully now all on the Rarefilmm site. Adieu Philippine is most definitely the masterpiece in the bunch, but the three comedy features that followed possess a charm and a deadpan notion of (Rozier’s favorite theme) things falling apart that makes them very unique farces.

Younger Rozier.

Although Rozier’s 1955 comic short about a precocious schoolboy, “Rentree des classes” is delightful, the true prelude to Philippine is Rozier’s short “Blue Jeans,” which qualifies as an early New Wave short, as it was released in 1957. All the hallmarks of the movement are there: real locations, innovative camerawork, editing (mostly wipes here) to move the plot along, the behavior of young people as the subject, and “empty” moments where the characters contemplate their future.

The films follows two young men in Cannes — Rozier offering a preliminary version of a theme he loves, namely people on vacation. The boys wander the city and the beach trying to pick up girls, but when they get them they have neither the money to romance them properly nor the savoir faire to move it to the “next level.”

Rozier employs an older-sounding narration to voice the thoughts (in past tense) of one of the young men. The age in the voice convinces us that, while this short was shot in the present tense, the events are being pondered by an older man remembering his youth. (Rozier, like the other New Wavers, was around 30 when he made his filmmaking debut.)

His feature debut, Adieu Philippine (watch it on Rarefilmm) is indeed his best-known film. The film contains all of the facets that New Wave debut features have, plus it has a wonderful musical soundtrack consisting of original compositions by Jacques Denjean, Paul Mattei, and Maxime Saury, pop songs, and some irresistible (to the characters and us) cha-cha music.

The film’s plot is beautifully structured. The most commonplace aspect of it — two young women (Stefania Sabatini, Yveline Céry) are in love with one young man (Jean-Claude Aimini) — is complemented by the fact that the young man knows that he’s about to be “called up” for military service in Algeria (during the Algerian War, a conflict that was not supposed to be mentioned in French films).

This serious element serves as a brilliant counterpoint to the mostly light-hearted tone of the film, which is emphasized in the second half from the shift in location — the lead Parisian trio go on a Club Med vacation to Corsica. In the final scenes, the girls begin to truly suffer over their “shared” love of the boy, and the boy finally registers his uncertainty at going off to war.

Thus, Philippine is an apparently light romantic comedy that has a barely concealed serious subtext. This is particularly fascinating in light of the fact that the film falls into the “two carefree girls” subgenre of New Wave film, which stretches from Godard’s “Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick” (1959) to Rivette’s masterwork Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Rozier added flavor to his tale of young people by hiring non-professionals for the three lead roles. They are all surprisingly good and lend an air of awkwardness and authenticity to their roles.

The visual experimentation that Rozier utilized in “Blue Jeans” is used wonderfully here, as the wipes — and jumpcuts and fades — again convey the movement of time, while the film’s most memorable musical sequence has the camera serving at one point as the “dance partner” for one of the girls (Céry). 

As a cha-cha tune plays, she dances with us, staring into the camera, providing the sort of bond with the viewer that characterized the famous moment in Monika (1953) by Bergman where Harriet Andersson looks straight into the camera (as Godard had Karina do in Vivre Sa Vie).

The film’s release was delayed for a few years. It was shot in 1960 and was to be edited and released in ’61. There was a major problem, however — the sound was missing from various scenes, and so Rozier had to lip-read what the characters said, since he had allowed his non-pro leads to largely improvise their dialogue.

Godard was a great admirer of Rozier’s (see below), to the extent that he introduced him to the producer Georges de Beauregard. Unfortunately, Rozier didn’t get along with Beauregard; it is noted in Rozier’s French Wikipedia bio that Rozier’s feud with the producer was one reason he was considered “the enfant terrible of the New Wave.” Philippine came out without Beauregard’s name on it, and in a version that had been reedited by Rozier from the initial cut intended for release, approved by the producer. 

Rozier may not have been a writer for the Cahiers or a Left Bank storyteller, but his work was very warmly received by two of the most outspoken of the “nouvelle vague.” Francois Truffaut’s review proclaimed: “You will not find a single unusual frame in Adieu Philippine, not a single camera trick, and neither will you discover a single false note nor any vulgarity. Nor will you find ‘poetic moments’; the film is an uninterrupted poem. Its poetry could not emerge clearly from looking at rushes; it arises from any number of perfect harmonies between images and words, sounds and music.” [Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1978, Simon & Schuster, pp. 324-325]

Godard declared Philippine to be one of his ten favorite films of 1963, and wrote about “Blue Jeans”: “Here the truth of the document makes common cause with the grace of the narration. True are the two layabouts who patrol Cannes on scooters in search of girls; graceful the long tracking shots along the Croisette or the rue d’Antibes, boldly edited one after the other in direct cuts. True the dialogue and attitude; graceful the realism of the photography and the shutters which poetically scan the afternoon on the warm sand…. It is a film about time passing — in doing what? In exchanging kisses. So its moral, both gay and sad, is that of Louis Aragon’s quatrain:

In the crossways of kisses/The years pass too quickly/Beware beware/Shattered memories.”

[Godard, Godard on Godard, ed: Milne, 1972, The Viking Press, pp. 114-15]

Uncle Jean’s opinion of Philippine was pithier: “Quite simply the best French film of these last years.”

Regardless of these raves, the film failed at the box office. It took nearly a decade for Rozier to produce his second fiction feature. In the years between he directed shorts and several original TV programs, many of which were about music (popular and classical) and fashion. A bunch of these shorts can be found on the “underside” of the Internet. Most are not available with English subs, but a few are.

The two earliest shorts (mentioned above) are both included in the French box set with English subtitles; two others, “Dans le vent” (an early Sixties short about the fashion trend of women wearing capes) and the extremely silly “Nono Nenesse” (a 1970s pilot for a TV show where four adult actors, including noted comic performers Jacques Villeret and Bernard Menez, played precocious babies) are also available with English subtitles on the Net  (although the latter barely needs any).

Three of the best of Rozier’s interim documentaries have been included on Criterion discs. “Paparazzi” and “Bardot et Godard” (both 1964) are on the Contempt release — both were authorized by Godard to show the making of the film, with the former focusing on the many photographers trying to get even a telephoto glimpse of Bardot, the latter showing some location footage and explaining the film’s plot and themes. Rozier’s full-length 1964 doc about the legendary Jean Vigo for the “Cinéastes de notre temps” series is included on the Complete Jean Vigo collection on Criterion. (My review of the set is here.)

The subsequent, lengthy comedy features by Rozier are, as noted above, included in the French box set and on the Rarefilmm site. The first of these is the epic-length (for a comedy) Du côté d'Orouët (watch it on Rarefilmm), which is the most “immersive” of Rozier’s comedies crafted in the documentary style. Shot on 16mm for French TV in 1969, the film was never shown on television and was released to theaters four years later.

No dubbing or visual effects for Rozier — he shot Orouët in a candid style with direct sound. All the better to convey the realistic side of a journey to the Atlantic coast by three young women who are looking for diversions from city life.

These ladies giggle. A lot. They in fact spend a great deal of the first two-thirds of the film giggling at various situations. Joëlle (Danièle Croisy) is our initial focus of attention, as we see her at her white-collar office job. She has been invited on vacation by her friend Kareen (Françoise Guégan), who has the ability to share with cousin Caroline (Caroline Cartier) a family beachfront house in the coastal town of Saint Gilles Croix de Vie. Shortly into their visit, the girls are joined by nerdy Gilbert (Bernard Menez), Joëlle’s coworker, who has a pretty evident crush on her.

Gilbert becomes the central figure in the film, with Kareen and Caroline teasing and taunting him, and Joëlle being oddly cold. The film’s tone shifts at the hour and 45 minute mark (Orouët runs a full 154 minutes) when Joëlle is openly seen as being miserable at the dinner table. Rozier studies the antic behavior of the three girls and Gilbert up until then, and his documentary approach (documentary conveying a “serious” tone to most viewers) does blend in an unusual fashion with the light-hearted silliness.

The last half-hour finds the vacation falling apart, as the girls lose their taste for the local life by the beach and Gilbert finally snaps — after preparing a big dinner that no one eats, he finally notes to Kareen that “you take me for an imbecile.” This rebellion is cemented in the final, “turnaround” scene where we are back in Paris and Joëlle watches at a restaurant as her new coworker flirts with Gilbert, while she (Joëlle) laments how uncertain her future is.

Menez featured
on the DVD release.

The above sounds like quite a lot of plot, but it is actually conveyed in a very short span of time. One comes away from Orouët thinking of it as a tale of a man who has been (latter 20th-century phrase) “friend-zoned” by the object of his affection and can find no way out. (This was further underscored by the fact that Menez went on to have a successful career as a confused “nice guy” comic actor in TV and movies.)

Orouët does rework the notion behind Philippine: that “happy summer vacation” movies can have dramatic subplots lurking behind the carefree images of girls in swimsuits. Rozier continued to explore vacations that go awry in his next two comedy features. 

Watching Rozier’s lengthy comedies one is struck by his desire to create humor in a deadpan fashion by shooting the most farcical sequences in real time. This sense of “real duration” comedy that lasts longer than that in conventional farces (which run 80–100 minutes tops) is quite a tall order for a filmmaker, and only one other filmmaker in my opinion has undertaken it and succeeded; Jean Rouch in the several-hour version of Petit a Petit (1970), about African dignitaries who visit Paris to find out how to properly build skyscrapers. (This version is rarely exhumed, but I saw it at Anthology Film Archives many years ago.)

Orouët was indeed Rozier’s longest comedy, but his next feature, The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976; watch it on Rarefilmm), has the most solid comedic premise: A travel agent comes up with a “Robinson Crusoe” getaway where the customers go to a desert island and live by their wits.

The travel agent is played by the great French comic actor Pierre Richard, who by the time of Castaways was already famous, having made The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972). Rozier was asked to dream up a vehicle for Richard, who was eager to work with Rozier but who had to move on to a different project at a certain point — therefore, an odd twist near the end of the film where his character disappears for several scenes and then is revealed to have been jailed.

As with all of Rozier’s features, Castaways has an episodic structure, in which Richard and chubby, jovial Jacques Villeret function as a comedy team, running the vacation in a wholly incompetent manner. The passengers initially like the idea of being adventurous, but they soon grow tired of Richard’s odd demands — for example, he stipulates that they must swim from boat to shore as they approach the island, since Crusoe was the survivor of a shipwreck. Thus, their boat can’t neatly dock at their destination.

A passenger who remains interested is Julie (Caroline Cartier), a press attaché whom Rozier utilizes as a narrator in the last third of the movie. This might have been because of Richard’s “disappearance” from the plot or because a “joining” device was needed to guide the viewer, since Rozier had no completed script for the film and allowed the actors to improvise.

The scenes that work best are the ones in which Richard imparts his castaway “logic” to the passengers. The scenes that don’t quite gel are an introductory subplot about Richard cheating on his girlfriend with a Brazilian woman (which runs the first 20 minutes of the picture and amounts to nothing in terms of the story as a whole) and some of the sequences at the end of the journey, where Villeret and Cartier nearly become a romantic couple.

Rozier is quite skilled at shifting the tone of his films. Even so, the chubby and playful Villeret seems like a very odd choice as the would-be Crusoe who does indeed know what he’s doing on the desert island — and thus seems desirable to the press attaché.

As had happened with Rozier’s two preceding features, Castaways had a troubled post-production period, after an eight-week in Guadeloupe and Dominica. The producers didn’t like Rozier’s improvisatory method of filming and the large amount of footage he shot. It took two years before he had a final cut assembled, and the film ultimately failed at the box office, despite Richard’s enthusiasm for the project from start to finish.

As it stands, Castaways has some great scenes and memorable images, and it leads the way to Rozier’s next comedy, Maine Ocean (1986).

Maine Ocean (watch it on Rarefilmm) is the closest thing to a conventional French farce that Rozier ever made, but it still has all the hallmarks of his style, from documentary filming techniques to deadpan comedy rendered in “real duration.” The difference, here, however, is that the filmmaker didn’t concentrate his energies on delivering a linear storyline — he lavishes attention here on subplots and gets rid of all his main characters save one in the final scene. The characters do take a very linear trip, as is reflected in the title, from the Gare Montparnasse (which is located on the Avenue du Maine in Paris) to the Atlantic Ocean.

The plot, such as it is, starts off with a classic farcical misunderstanding: a Brazilian dancer (Rosa-Maria Gomes) who speaks very little French is accosted on a train by two by-the-books ticket takers (Bernard Menez, Luis Rego) who badger her about not having followed ticket-approval protocols. A French lawyer (Lydia Feld, who also coscripted with Rozier) who speaks Portuguese comes to her aid, and the dancer ends up accompanying the lawyer to one of her trials — a very funny case involving a violent fisherman (Yves Alonso) who believes himself to be easygoing and a victim of circumstances.

In a show of spontaneity that is the norm in Maine Ocean, the lawyer then accompanies the dancer on her cross-country trip to “see the sea” at Les Sables-d'Olonne. (They eventually wind up in a fishing town on Yeu Island.) The newfound friends then re-encounter the two ticket takers and the violent client, all of whom are in love with our heroines.

This ragtag group are joined by a Mexican entrepreneur (a wonderfully over-the-top Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), who believes the Brazilian dancer can sing (which she can’t). He sets in motion the third act, in which there is a delightful scene set in an empty civic center, where the entrepreneur finds out the truth about the Brazilian, and all the characters (including the drunken ticket takers and the equally drunk fisherman) take part in an impromptu dance.

Benez’s ticket taker ends the film alone, taking a circuitous journey home to his wife and kids in Nantes. Although one misses the rest of the cast, his character’s moving from a small boat to a bigger one, back to a smaller one, and then to the smallest of all in the finale to reach the shore makes him perhaps the ultimate Rozier figure — a guy whose vacation fell apart but who has exciting and incredible memories that will last him the rest of his life.

Menez is clearly one of Rozier’s favorite performers (the Wiki photos of Rozier in both his American and French Wiki bios come from an appearance the filmmaker made at a Menez book signing), but the performer that amused this viewer the most is Yves Alfonso, who had showy roles in Godard’s Masculin-Feminin, Made in U.S.A., and Weekend. Alfonso’s staccato-sounding way of speaking (which is actually a regional dialect of French called “Poitou”) and his character’s short temper are great comic devices that make him stand out from the otherwise friendly and low-key characters in the film.

As noted above, Maine Ocean is closer to the “normal” French film farce than any other Rozier picture. Average French farces move along familiar lines — mistaken identity, characters who try to reinforce their lies, role-playing, and the misadventures of dunderheaded comic “types.” The fact that Rozier worked in this, more traditional fashion of emphasizing characters and gags most likely contributed to the film being not only a critical success (all of Rozier’s films had that distinction) but also a modest hit with the public.

The Seventies farces of filmmaker Bertrand Blier, whose dark and absurdist comedies are generally dissimilar to Rozier’s (and who was the subject of a series of 14 episodes on the Funhouse TV show!), bears one strong element in common with Rozier’s humorous films, especially Maine Ocean: the male characters are all idiots and the women possess the clear minds (or at least the rational logic) needed to get things accomplished. Rozier is very different from Blier (and is from an earlier generation of French filmmaking), but their shared fascination for chaos-causing males does unite their comedies.

Perhaps it was the presence of Feld as a co-scripter, but the vacation in Maine Ocean involves no lingering images of women in swimsuits — although the Brazilian does dance in her very skimpy costume in the civic center scene.

Rozier’s work changed a great deal from the late Fifties through the late Eighties, but his visual approach remained the same. One can lament that he was only able to make five feature films in his career (the last being Fifi Martingale in 2001, costarring Alfonso and Feld, who again coscripted). But those films are engrossing models of French farce, delivered in a uniquely realistic manner and with a common theme — sympathetic but harried characters using their “getaway” vacation to prove something to themselves. It’s a very different approach that refreshed an age-old genre.

Rozier in recent years.

I said at the outset of this piece that I would not be discussing M. Rozier’s personal life, but I must at least mention the latest, very sad headline that appeared across the Internet in July of 2021 concerning Rozier. A movement arose to amass many signatures on a petition to get the filmmaker lodging after it was revealed that his landlord was throwing him and his wife (who was ill at the time) out of their apartment.

This is a very sad development, which is explained in English here; the fact that his eviction was occurring as he (age 94!) prepared prints of his films for a tribute to his work at the Cinematheque Francaise was an even unkinder cut. A recent article in English on the Criterion website states briefly that “fortunately, filmmaker and writer Paul Vecchiali came to [Rozier’s] aid.” I could find no confirmation of how Vecchiali helped out Rozier — one must also be aware that Vecchiali himself is currently 92 years old.

If anyone has any additional info or links about what is happening with M. Rozier’s living situation, please let me know in the comments section. In the meantime, I urge everyone to watch the Rozier films that are now available on the Net, and rejoice in the fact that a filmmaker who worked against adverse conditions for most of his career is finally getting his vacation in the sun.

UPDATE (5/23): Thanks much to "Gone to the Movies" for the note verifying that Vecchiali did indeed help out Rozier. The organization mentioned in the Tweet is the Société des Auteurs Réalisateurs Producteurs. It's good to know that old New Wavers are there to help each other out. Bravo, M. Vecchiali!

Thanks to friend and superior cineaste Paul Gallagher and Rarefilmm mastermind Jon Whitehead for help with access to these films. The Rarefilmm site can be found here.

Snow is on the water (but a good cigar is a smoke): The pandemic interviews of Godard

The world’s greatest living filmmaker still has some ideas he’d like to impart. He’s now 90 (offering an excuse for his crankiness, which, admittedly, he’s displayed for the 60 years he's been making films), his voice trembles, and he’s clearly not in peak condition. But he still smokes fat cigars, is amenable to being interviewed at length every few months, and has some things to say.

The gent in question, Jean-Luc Godard, speaks in a decisive, declarative fashion, but he often travels circuitously around a topic he’s been asked about, only to give an answer that is related to the question but also introduces a second, related idea. He speaks conceptually yet also poetically — making his answers to questions seem like prepared notions or aphorisms while they are really just the products of a very unique method of thinking.

It is that unique approach to ideas and poetry that has made his films so important in the six decades since A Bout de Souffle. He remains one of the most influential filmmakers currently working while still also offering new ideas, striking imagery, and playful audio collages. We can count ourselves lucky to still be able to see new work by him in this most confused and chaotic of centuries.

Two lengthy interviews have been conducted with Godard (hereupon referred to sporadically as “Uncle Jean,” his farcical alter-ego from some of his Eighties “comeback” fiction features) since the onset of the pandemic. In the more recent one he is seen to be less healthy, more fragile, yet still engaged and opinionated. Much was made of the fact that the second interview contains his declaration that he will retire for good after making two more features. Given his current condition, we would be very lucky to see two more features come from him. After that, he certainly deserves a rest.
*****

The first of the two interviews was conducted for students of the ECAL, Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne, on April 7, 2020. Although Godard has noted that he felt Swiss in France and French in Switzerland, he does have a strong connection to his homeland — since that’s where he came back to, to focus his energies on film- and video-making, and to just live. (Of course, to be the true-blue contrarian he has always been, he notes “I may have a Swiss passport, but I’m French.”)

He tells the interviewer, Lionel Baier, that he can have as much time as he wants, but Baier sticks to his own questions and doesn’t ask the ones that were supplied by students. He, like the later interviewer, is obviously a great student of Godard’s work, and so his questions are mostly about the themes that JLG has been obsessed about for the last few decades.

The discussion starts with Godard mentioning a project he thought about but never went through with — showing the life of a cable-news anchor. In classic poetic JLG-speak, he notes this about his inability to get a real news anchor to allow their professional and personal life to be seen on-camera for his film: “They were willing to die for the news, but not willing to live it.”

The interviewer asks him how he takes in news these days, and Godard says he reads three newspapers (Liberation, Charlie Hebdo, Le Canard Enchaîné) and watches TV news (the kind without commercials) twice a day.

The first major topic tackled is, of course, the pandemic. Godard immediately goes into metaphorical mode, noting that “the virus is a form of communication… It needs to latch onto a host like certain birds.” In reference to the rapid progression of COVID, he notes “Yes, that’s capitalism for you. It’s all about growth.”

He speaks in metaphor and poetic likenings throughout. He posits at one point that the American attack on Iraq could be viewed as an attack on the area where language began (Chaldea). He then notes that, of course, George W. Bush and his cohorts wouldn’t know at all what was meant by that, but he then launches into a characteristically brilliant riff on how the best writers and artists tried to go “beyond, besides, and below language.” He quotes the poet Boileau-Despreaux, who said [JLG’s phrasing] “Review your work 20 times, and polish and re-polish it constantly.”

A great portrait of JLG, taken in July 2020
by the terrific photographer Hedi Slimane.
All the shots in this series
 can be viewed here or on Slimane's site.

This returns to a theme I’ve talked about on the Funhouse TV show in the past few months — how non-American filmmakers, especially those brought up in Europe, are very knowledgeable about the other arts besides cinema. We’re lucky if American filmmakers know the history of cinema, whereas the masters of the medium have always been familiar with literature, painting, classical music, and other foundational work that one can then veer away from (while still being aware of what the seminal works are in other media).

It’s been noted about Godard by some who knew him that the books that he’s quoted from in his films have not actually been read by the filmmaker. He has himself admitted that he has looked for the best quotes in certain works of fiction and poetry. In the ECAL interview, he notes he currently prefers reading non-fiction (and detective stories in the world of fiction — the names Jean-Patrick Manchette and David Goodis are singled out for praise). He notes he remains interested in the scientific method and the work of scientists (thus, his interest in the virus). 

At the point the ECAL talk was done he was working on a project, but would only say it was on the topic of (and he says this phrase in English) “fake news.” He said the notion was to pit the “news virus” one gets at home with simply living one’s life. (And he acknowledges that one of his best-known films is titled Vivre Sa Vie). Another project he was interested in doing in 2020 was an opera, with music to be provided by the jazz-experimental record label ECM (which has released the full soundtracks — dialogue and sound effects included — of some of JLG’s films). 

He talks about Anne-Marie Melville, with whom he’s been involved as a filmmaking partner and as a real-life partner since the 1970s. He notes that their devotion to the cause of Palestine brought them together — and in the second interview, discussed below, he refers to her several times as “my wife.” (But the two have never legally married — unless they’ve hidden that fact away from the public and press — and haven’t lived together for years.)

Then the real contrarian impulse kicks in, since he’s talking with a film scholar and being viewed by cinephiles — Uncle Jean starts bitching about living and dead filmmakers by saying that “three-quarters of them are not auteurs.” Of course, the buffs will love this, thinking he’s bitching about mainstream directors who make crappy action movies, crappy comedies, and crappy dramas. But, in a characteristically cranky mode, he wants to redefine who was in and out of the Nouvelle Vague, and who of the critically vaunted directors really was an auteur and who wasn’t.

Ben and Benedict
 poster

Thus, he orphans Claude Chabrol by saying he was not truly a New Wave filmmaker — “he was never an auteur. He was different. There was Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, and me. And three or four lesser-knowns, such as Claude Nedjar’s wife, Paula Delsol, who made a good little film [Ben et Bénédict, 1977], which I consider to be better than Agnes Varda. At the beginning Agnes made a few good films, two or three….”

He then admits that a few other names could be included in the New Wave. He, of course, leaves out the Left Bank, except for Varda whom he demotes — Resnais, Marker, and other directors of the same age group and similar disposition — Demy, Malle, and a few others. He basically has a problem with the term “filmmaker” as well as auteur/author. To him, auteur “is a status,” not a marker of quality.

He also downgrades two of the greatest cult heroes of the critic/filmmakers of the Fifties/Sixties: Sam Fuller and Nick Ray. The great Fuller acted for Godard in Pierrot Le Fou and his shots are mimicked in a bunch of JLG films, including A Bout de Souffle; the rebel-icon Ray was habitually mentioned in the Sixties Godard films and his work was included in later video essays like Histoire(s) du cinema. They are now, according to older, crankier, Uncle Jean “auteurs moyens” (middling authors).

Possibly the most surprising “demotion” for lovers of great French cinema is his current day takedown of Jacques Becker — after he himself wrote one of the finest-ever reviews of an admittedly lesser Becker film, which I quote in this blog post.

Casque d'or (1952), one of
Becker's many masterpieces.

“We [at Cahiers] even defended authors of bad films. In my opinion, there’s only one film in which Becker was really the author, and that was Touchez Pas au Grisbi. None of the other films…. were [as good]. I wrote a review that upset him. I said, it’s because it was bad that he dared to do it badly.” JLG never clarifies which film he’s talking about, but again I direct you to his rave review of Montparnasse 19, which I mentioned in my posts about Becker.

Bresson, however, has lost none of his luster for Godard — he notes the reverence the New Wavers had for Bresson’s little book Notes on Cinematography. He also later in the ECAL chat oddly also underscores that the now-“rediscovered” (by cinephiles like the recently departed Bertrand Tavernier, whose list of favorites seemed to be comprised mostly of those directors “demoted” by the Cahiers group back in the Fifties) Claude Sautet. Godard praises Sautet’s films as “tight.” An odd combination, that — Bresson and Sautet….

At one point the interviewer does touch an emotional cord by asking if Godard misses his old New Wave colleagues. “Yes, I miss them a lot. Because we talked a lot, but now we hardly ever do. We talk about films when there’s a film to make, but apart from that it’s different.”

Young French filmmakers in 1959.
Front row, left: Truffaut. Back row:
Chabrol (glasses), JLG (shades).

Keep in mind, of course, that when he recorded this interview, even Varda had died, so the core of the Nouvelle Vague *and* the “Left Bank” brilliant innovators had all died. So, one assumes he’s speaking in the present tense about the past – or simply implying that he used to talk with more collaborators (as when he had the same cinematographer for several years — Raoul Coutard — and when he had a filmmaking partner other than Ms. Mieville — Jean-Pierre Gorin).

In closing, he is asked to provide the usual “advice” to young filmmakers. With typical circuitous elan, he simply says, “They should check what they’re doing.” (We return to the Boileau-Despreaux quote above.)

And the interviewer does “break character” to add in, while the tape is still running, “You mean a lot to us.” Uncle Jean’s unsentimental but still jovial response? “Yes, I’m aware of that. … So far, so good….” 

 

 *****

A year can make a lot of difference in a senior’s life. In the second lengthy interview video, which was uploaded to YouTube on March 2 of this year, Godard seems shakier, more tired, and more uncertain. The last, however, comes from the fact that this interview came off poorly, not for its content but because of persistent technical troubles and difficulties in understanding between the interviewer and Godard.

The talk was tied in to the fact that Godard was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala in India. Godard was seen briefly via his cellphone at the ceremony where he was awarded the honor but, luckily for the festival, he agreed to be interviewed at another time. Unluckily for the festival, the chat was conducted on the Net and was conducted in English, a language that Godard admittedly doesn’t remember all that well. (A translator was standing by online, but she also had technical problems and had to render quick translations of what Uncle Jean had said, which is not an easy task under the best of circumstances.)

So, this is a more jarring and saddening viewing experience, but if you view this interview video first (as I did), it’s a lot less jarring (minus the obvious increasing tremor in JLG’s voice). The difficulties encountered in the discussion are quite daunting, though. Godard’s circuitous, conceptual, and poetic language is very hard to translate and make sense of. (One would have to paraphrase or rethink the wording in the second language.)

Here, both speakers are operating with verbal impediments. The interviewer, C.S. Venkiteswaran, is clearly a brilliant, sharp thinker, who speaks with an Indian accent; Godard, on the other hand, has his classic speech impediment (which was quite well approximated by Louis Garrel in the rather awful Le Redoubtable, aka “Godard, Mon Amour,” 2017).

One adds onto those trouble-causing elements for a bilingual conversation the fact that the Net connection between the two suffered glitches and lags, and the fact that both gentlemen are clearly very set in their ways: Godard is always going to answer in his characteristically circuitous fashion, and Venkiteswaran continued to ask rather lengthy questions, even when it was obvious that shorter queries would’ve worked better, given all the difficulties. (As someone who has many lengthy questions in interviews, I sympathize.)

Again, Uncle Jean smokes a BIG cigar with much relish and again, he starts off likening cinema to the coronavirus. When called “one of the youngest filmmakers” currently working, he admits “I’m still at the beginning” and then affirms that his main concern is “movies and reality — what reality is and what is the [best] way to catch reality.”

The central metaphor he latches on to here — and this seems to reflect on the commodification of “content” on the Net and the consumer society in general — is that “production” should be what people are concerned about, and instead “distribution” becomes the main obsession. In the case of cinema, he notes that “distribution has choked production to be at the service of the viewer.”

On the shoot for the 3-D film
 Adieu au langage (2014).

He continues with this metaphor for a while and revives the idea throughout the interview. He notes that commercials should be longer — one assumes, since he craves sheer honesty, and if commercials stopped pretending they were just mere interruptions, the viewer would be clearer about what they are and what they’re conveying. At this point a period of dead silence ensues, the first of a bunch in the video.

Godard takes this little sejour from the conversation to reflect on silence. He asks the interviewer if he could describe “an image of silence.” When Venkiteswaran says he can’t, JLG provides what might be the most profound and beautiful moment in the talk when he says, “I look out my window and there is snow. The [18th-century French] writer Jules Renard said silence is snowing on the water.” He then adds, “In doing that we are still making cinema.”

At this point one is happy to realize that Godard’s mind is as nimble as ever, with tangents that might only completely work if translated into and out of Japanese. (The above Renard quote has the distinct feeling of a Japanese epigram.)

Venkiteswaran’s best question for Godard produces another one of these tangents — in this case it is unfortunate, because the question is indeed so good. To wit, with surveillance cameras and webcams everywhere, the state is currently the biggest mass producer of images; add to that the wild profusion of images uploaded by consumers onto the Internet. With these two new sources for millions and millions of images, where does the contemporary filmmaker fit in?

Godard’s answer to this is refer to history — in this case “archeology” done on family history that he has done over the years. He refers to the human memory as being finite and emphasizes that our memory of our family can only be traced back a few generations (“a few grandmothers – I don’t count in centuries, but in grandmothers,” he notes).

Another shot of Godard in July 2020,
taken by the great Hedi Slimane.

At this point there is more silence, and so Godard goes into another reverie. Again, the meat of the conversation is a tangent. He meditates on the fact that in film “a few seconds after saying ‘Action,’ we say, ‘Silence!.’ The difficulty of today’s cinema is that it only thinks Action and does not think Silence. However, it says both while shooting!”

The next two topics are again extended metaphors by Uncle Jean — the first involves a discussion of his favorite topic, language. (He notes that “Today there is only speech, only words, only alphabet.”) The second returns to the theme of virus as communication. He mentions that he once appeared on TV with his cousin Jacques Monod, who “discovered DNA.” (Per Monod’s Wiki, he is “widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology.”)

Godard maintains he asked Monod in which direction DNA could go — his cousin maintained that it only proceeded in one direction, but the contrarian filmmaker says he still inquired about it going in the opposite direction… prefiguring the RNA molecule. (This is how he puts it — at these points, one assumes that his ideas are sound, but his method of conveying them is, again, roundabout and possessing a degree of Wellesian self-aggrandizement.) This retrovirus, he notes, brings us something that “we try to destroy,” instead of trying to understand it.

After another metaphorical tangent, in which he discusses how most filmmakers frame images (from the outside in) and how he likes to frame (from the center outward), he takes out his latest “script,” which is in fact an accordion-pleated succession of cardboard cards that have images and handwritten sentences on them. (His handwriting is a sight familiar to those who’ve seen any of JLG’s films from Pierrot Le Fou onward.)

At this point he makes the announcement that became the most-repeated item from this interview. He states that he has two scripts assembled, called “Scenario” and “Droles du guerres” (Funny Wars). “I’m finishing my movie life by doing two scripts, and after that I will say goodbye to cinema.” One hopes he can get both films made, or even one of them, since he does indeed seem shaky. (But infinitely determined, which is what has clearly kept him alive until the age of 90.)

Toward the end of the chat Godard speaks about the nationality of he and his “wife,” the filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. He notes that they are expatriates in both Switzerland and France — “The Swiss authority doesn’t consider us as good Swiss people, and the French authority has completely forgotten us as French citizens.”

At the end, Venkiteswaran asks Godard why India, the world’s leading producer (and, as Uncle Jean notes, the leading distributor!) of films, wasn’t included in his epic video project Histoire(s) du Cinema. JLG confesses that he knows nothing of Indian cinema outside of Satyajit Ray, because Indian films were very hard to see in France. When quizzed by the host of the event at the very end as to why he has never traveled to India, the always-circuitous Godard instead recounts a tale of how he was rejected from traveling to Vietnam when the war was on.

The end of the interview reminds us that Uncle Jean is indeed an old gent who is only passingly familiar with modern devices, even though he has several times in the last decade sworn fidelity to his iPhone. He wants to show an illustration of what he believes himself to be to the hosts, and thus he searches around for quite a while to find it. With the help of his cinematographer-producer-researcher Fabrice Aragno, he finally comes up with the image in his iPhone gallery — it’s a drawing of a fisherman casting his line, waiting to see what he will catch.