Update late 2019: After realizing just how omnipresent modernization rhetoric was in France in the ’60s, how severe the hypertrophy of automation, how extensive the rhetorical quickening of the society, and how emphatically connected the unending road and the conquering car were to those symbolic projects, Godard’s sudden, inexorable brick wall seems all the more brutal, and all the more perceptive. Weekend is a centrifuge that spins what many were calling “modernism in the streets” into a perhaps-unrecoverable tailspin, a remorseless, unbending monstrosity propagating an unshakable doubt about the future of the world and the growth projections of Western modernity,

Original Review:

Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?

If Pierrot was the cataclysm, Godard’s Weekend is the fallout. An offhand joke midway through Pierrot – one of the many murders either committed or not committed by the central couple is presented as an impossible Dadaist implosion of automobile parts turned on their slantwise dimension – is curdled into a drunken stupor in Weekend. In Pierrot, the moment was baleful in its satire but flippant and recklessly fleet in its unceremonious, abstract, sudden-gust-of-wind presentation. In Weekend, an automobile pile-up rendered avant-garde art piece stops the film dead in its tracks, intentionally so, as the main characters errantly slobber between cars as subversive minimovies play out between the other passengers. It’s an elegant, wrathful expression of Weekend’s position as the comeuppance for Godard’s race-car cinema, a self-imposed crackerjack crash of non-narrative film now stopped dead in its tracks by its own ambition. Cinema breathing in its own fumes too long has turned into the cinema of the fumigated. Continue reading →

Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?

Pierrot le Fou is a candy-coated slurry of modernity as only Godard could have dreamt: cinema, philosophy, technology, tectonic outbursts of Demy-esque sing-speaking, and bellowing gusts of ennui encapsulated in a manic fantasia. The intersection of Godard and color alone is given primacy of place in the dueling introductory collages, two bewitching technicolor symphonies from Raoul Coutard (the French New cinematographer if ever there was one). In the first, a contented bourgeois couple wanders through a party that turns into a sepulchral haze as women spontaneously lose their tops in a playfully tossed-off expression of benign and malignant pop culture coalescing into a heated maelstrom and exploding in mutual psychedelic abandon. In the second, the same malleable color scheme, slipping between primary colors like stages of sleep in a seizure, basks the couple during their hasty, browbeaten escape from the party. In relying on the same color scheme during the party and during the party-escape, Godard furtively suggests that, even in hazarding a life on the run, they’ve done nothing but ensure your submission to the bourgeois, day-glo circumstances you escape from. Continue reading →

Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?

If Godard’s cinema prismatically spread its wings soon after Breathless, perusing the variant nascent realms of that debut’s arrythmically cadenced virtues, Band of Outsiders decides to leave it to other features to experiment with the nihilism of Godard’s investment in gender, modernity, and self-reflexive filmic form, even as it encapsulates features of all of the above. Godard would test his schismatic brand of cinema more vigorously in Pierrot le Fou and procure a more demonstrative premonition of cinema’s fallout, and the world’s abomination, in Weekend. But Band of Outsiders is far too busy with its own magnanimous brand of cinematic joie de vivre to concern itself with the end of anything. Of all of Godard’s films, Band of Outsiders most fully encapsulates the momentous high of going to the movies. Continue reading →

Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?

“If cinema if truth at 24 frames a second”, as Jean-Luc Godard famously said, then Breathless, the director’s estimable debut feature film and the breaking of the dawn for the French New Wave, absconds with that truth via Godard’s forgotten, demonic second-half riposte to the phrase: “and every cut is a lie”. With Breathless, Godard brought new meaning to the word “cut”, injecting his film with risky, tempestuous crackles, excising material, jumping between otherwise nominally cohesive sequences with jump cuts that turn the cinema into a seizure-filled parade of jumbled motion. Godard transformed the cinema by denouncing the claim that it was meaningfully realist altogether, implicitly connecting the dots between the cinematic hucksters of the world from Bunuel to Welles to even William Castle. In doing so, he skyrocketed the art-form to a higher plane of truth hop-scotching around its own limits by reveling in its own artifice. Continue reading →