Slow movie is slow

When you pay attention to (Godard's) films, their language is really no more different or difficult than Antonioni's or Kubrick's. Kubrick was fairly mainstream on the surface - spectacle, guns, violence etc - so he perhaps feels less highbrow. But I think they all use the same language. They all favoured symbolism, allusion and abstractions, though I'm not quite sure what you'd call this language.

I would agree he's no more difficult, but I think all three were quite different.

Kubrick is semi-accessible because most of his films do contain semi-traditional plots. I say "semi" in both cases because there's a strong streak of the uncanny in Kubrick, the narrative/cinematic techniques that usually make it obvious that there's something going on beyond the plot--that it has greater significance than its sheer entertainment value--and there are usually elements left unresolved. Still, it's possible (though superficial) to enjoy Full Metal Jacket as a war film, The Shining as a horror film, etc. OTOH, it's very hard to do with Antonioni or Godard.

Antonioni because he usually downplays plot/narrative in favor of that ennui aesthetic, often using strong (occasionally artificial) imagery that is meant to echo his characters' psychology. Perhaps the one exception to this is La Notte (at least among his mature films). Godard takes typical genres and plots and toys with them with numerous disruptions, subversions, and everything else so that the typical elements are damaged, often beyond coherent recovery.

Godard films are the equivalent of taking a knife and paint to already-created paintings, turning them into something grotesque. Godard also (at times) almost completely abandoned narrative for essay films and documentaries, and at certain points the plots could be so minimal and the experimentation so strong that the former was barely even there (I think of Numero Deux as a prime example). In general, 70s Godard is as hard to swallow as any avant-garde, experimental stuff, but I think he's at his best when he has a plot to use as a kind of ground-bass for his experiments.

I haven't seen "Sauve qui peut", or even heard of it before (IMDB says its a documentary?), but I think I've seen all his 1980s features. He was doing the whole "poetic indie" thing a good 2 decades ahead of everyone else. It's just the budget-cinematography that lets some of them down.

You need to see "Hail Mary", it's his best film of that decade. I always pimp this film whenever I talk about Godard.

Sauve qui peut was what he called his "second first-film," his return to narrative filmmaking after the 70s experimentation (ie, not a documentary). It's available on Criterion blu-ray. Of the three 80s films I've seen, the only one I thought let-down by the cinematography was Prenom: Carmen, which I watched and reviewed last night. Hail Mary is next in my chronological viewing; you're the third person to highly recommend it to me so I'm looking forward to it (I already have it on blu-ray).

BTW, here are my reviews for the last three Godards I saw:

Prenom: Carmen - Jean-Luc Godard - 6.5/10

Very loosely based on Bizet's Carmen, this Godard film is his first less-than-brilliant film of the 80s, though not without appealing qualities. It's certainly his lightest and even funniest film since Band of Outsiders, though inflected with his 80s obsessions: sex and the impossibility, even absurdity, of sustaining intimate connections, here told via the relationship between Carmen and Joseph; music, especially the way in which music manipulates images, here periodically scored to Beethoven's late string quartets, and in one memorable section to Tom Waits's Ruby's Arms; and metafictional reflection, here featuring Godard himself as an aging, crazy, director who's pulled out of a mental institution by his niece to direct a film, which is really only a cover-up for a kidnapping attempt.

While the subjects (and music) seems typical of serious (sometimes pretentiously so) Godard, his handling here is primarily self-effacing and satiric. The bathroom scene, with both Carmen and Joseph handcuffed together, is like something out of a silent comedy, and it's probably no accident we see Godard (as the director) in a restaurant scene reading a Buster Keaton book; while the bank robbery, with its tableaux vivant style and absurdities, like a janitor casually mopping up blood or a teller napping in the middle of a firefight, is hilarious. In Maruschka Detmers Godard found perhaps his most beautiful, magnetic muse since Anna Karina, and it's a shame this was their only film together. Godard has both of his leads frequently, casually, fully nude, but there's very little eroticism or even little connection between them. Godard does playfully infuse some scenes with music so as to make them seem romantic--even moving when he uses the Adagio from Beethoven's 15th Quartet, perhaps the most profoundly spiritual piece of music ever composed--but when he abruptly stops the music he reveals how dryly ironic he is, and how naively deluded his characters are.

Despite being shot with Raoul Coutard, Carmen lacks the visual beauty of his last film, Passion, or even Sauve qui peut, and perhaps that accounts for my rather lukewarm reaction. What's missing here that's so omnipresent in a film like Band of Outsiders is that freewheeling, effervescent energy. Godard here is a still a bit too sobered, reflective, and melancholic to completely and convincingly pull of a comedy at this stage in his career, and while parts of it works it doesn't come together as a whole the way his previous two films did.

Passion - Jean-Luc Godard - 8.5/10

Passion is a Godard film in the tradition of Contempt and Comment ca va? being a film about filmmaking, the clash between art & business, work & love. As its starting point it takes a director making a film called Passion involving tableaux vivants while being pressured by his producer(s) about the "story," while these filmed paintings are used to symbolically express events and relationships in the director's own life, particularly those between the sophisticated wife of a hotel owner, and a young, naive, factory worker girl, who tries to rally a union for not getting paid for her work. It also marks the reunion between Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard and as a result may be the singularly most beautiful film in Godard's filmography to this point. Especially towards the end there is shot-after-shot, scene-after-scene that is heart-stoppingly gorgeous.

While Godard can still be disorienting with his varied experimentation--here it's mostly the pervasive use of out-of-synch sound that renders dialogue closer to voiceovers--this film is closely related to its predecessor, Sauve qui peut, in developing and maintaining a strong narrative thread as the film progresses. It's also similar to that film in its overriding tone of subtle melancholy (but with occasional snatches of self-effacing humor here as well). You can feel in these 80s films a Godard more interested in the personal and interpersonal than the political and theoretic, even when these films are still tackling questions about the relationship between, eg, work & love, which Godard seems to equate and contrast to the impersonal, mechanistic nature of business (both Isabelle's factor job/boss, and the director's pestering producers). The final tableaux-vivant, the only staged outside, is Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera, itself a symbolic of the transitory nature of love, which fits both the director's leaving the film production (and the country) while Hanna, the hotel girl, wanders through the painting in search for him.

Ultimately, due to Godard's semi-esoteric usage of the paintings (and classical music) as a symbolic structuring device, this film isn't as accessible as his previous, Sauve qui peut, nor are the characters and relationships quite as compelling, but it is arguably a more thematically complex film as well as being even more beautiful. These 80s Godard films may no longer possess the dynamic energy of the 60s, or the radical experimentation of the 70s, but in their place is a somber tonal and visual beauty, as well as characters that feel closer to humans than symbolic models.

Sauve qui peut (la vie) - Jean-Luc Godard - 8.5/10

After a decade of filmmaking as a radical aesthetic playground in the 60s, and a decade of impassioned political and documentary experimental filmmaking in the 70s, Godard's Sauve qui peut, his "second first-film," is a sobered and even melancholic return to narrative. In a way this film feels like the hangover of the previous decades. While it has Godard's experimental narrative tactics galore--the anarchic use of disjunctive sound, the random "deconstructive" slow-motion photography, the elliptical editing--it's also his most humanistic, sympathetic film since Vivre sa vie, and perhaps his most personal ever. The political fervor has diminished to a trickle, and in its place is either abstract sound (like the music motif) or pregnant silence. The camera has an eerie calmness to it--static most of the time, shot from a longer-than-average distance--and the visuals has a burnished beauty. The narrative structure is even surprisingly lucid, with three sections (and a coda) focusing on three characters: one a filmmaker named Godard (hint), the second his ex-girlfriend, and the third a prostitute. All three sections are intriguing yet diverse, with only that nocturne-like tonal quality connecting them. Overall it's a brilliant return to form, one of Godard's most tonally complex films and, dare I say it, one of his most accessible.

Have you seen Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds"? That's what I'm thinking of. It's like this style of modernism boils down to old guys walking about and ruminating.

It's the last Antonioni I haven't seen (besides his first two). I have seen Identification of a Woman, though, which is very similar to how you describe BTC.

Hitchcock was a pulp man, and so a plot man, but by his standards "Vertigo's" pretty Antonioni-ish.

Indeed by his standards.


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Hitchcock was a pulp man, and so a plot man, but by his standards "Vertigo's" pretty Antonioni-ish.

It's probably the most abstract, at least relatively of his films, and the one without the plotting narrative style that he normally tended towards.

I haven't seen any of those films yet, so can't comment. PTA might be morphing from a Scorsese copy to some kind of modern version of 1960s Euro-modernism.

Early PTA-Boogie Nights, Magnolia- is very Scorsese with a touch of Atlman. Multi-character epics, but with a razzle-dazzle look-at-me young filmmaker bravado, operatic and with lots of screaming. The "new" PTA-There Will Be Blood, the insanely frustrating Inherent Vice and The Master-is very much in the mold of Herzog or Kubrick-deliberately, almost methodically slow, character wandering through landscapes sometimes literally without purpose, kicked around by political and social forces, full of ambient Johnny Greenwood music. I've actually been quite curious what you'd think of The Master.

The King's sane at the start of the film. He's a normal dude. Except he's totally insane and deluded, because he refuses to acknowledge that he and his sons are murderous tyrants.

I think that Kurosawa deliberately withholds information. At first, I felt a little sympathy for the guy. It's a tragedy based on King Lear, after all. But as the film progresses, you get more information and a bit of a darker look: this guy was really a murderous tyrant, and we find out that he's been the perpetrator of a lot of the violence now cycling back to him. I think in a sense, it's sort of deliberately karmic; it's less about what's happening to him individually and more about what's happening on a larger scale.

This kind of weird rambling is exactly what that whole era of modernist films evolved into.

Ran has a different tone than Kurosawa's early work though. Much PTA described above, he kind of went from kinetic, exciting, and energetic quieter, almost cynical, contemplative. There's less action, it's more painterly, and it has an odd sort or rhythm that it took me a couple of viewings to get into. Even the music changes, from the rousing marches of Sato to the almost Mahler-like-style of Ran. Kurosawa's change in worldview led to a complete change in style, tone, and feeling in his films.

His first film, "Fear and Desire", was all about guys walking in the bush and hurling abstract musings. So this is how Kubrick sees himself at a young age: a kind of high-brow, Euro-modernist. But Kubrick's gotta make money. He's gotta eat. So he does pulp, then straightforward prestige pictures, then starts doing what he wants, getting increasingly abstract until he's right back where he started with "Fear and Desire", only now starring Tom Cruise.

For a guy who was so odd and intellectual, I've always been surprised that he was fairly marketable.

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