Quote of the day
I really would have liked to have a boy and a girl be involved, a couple who had the urge to show things, who were kind of involved with the cinema, the sort of young people you might meet at small festivals. They'd be given a copy of the film on DVD, then be asked to train as skydivers. After that, places would be randomly chosen on a map of France, and they'd parachute down into those locations. They'd have to show the film wherever they landed. In a café, at a hotel... they'd manage. People would pay 3 or 4 euros to get in — no more than that. They might film this adventure, and sell it later on. Thanks to them, you get a sense of what it means to distribute a film. Afterwards, only you can make the decision, to find out whether or not it's able to be projected in regular theaters. But not before having investigated everything for a year or two. Because beforehand, you're just like me: you don't know what the film is, you don't know what might be interesting about it. You've gone a little outside the whole media space.
—Jean-Luc Godard (translated by Craig Keller)
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Alternate version:
“And I wanted to distribute it like this: you take a boy and a girl, or two or three small groups, you give them video copies, you drop them out of an airplane by parachute, they have a map of France, they don’t know where they’re going to land, and you let them sort things out, go into cafés, show it a few hundred times… Then you look at what’s happening — they get the lay of the land, they find out what people think about the film. In the second year, you show it in a few screening rooms at small festivals. Afterwards, you no longer need to release it — you’ll have recouped everything, especially since the producers have put in so little — 300,000 euros — but this will have taken four years. In lieu of that, it’s being distributed into a world for which it wasn’t produced…”
From here, also translated by Craig Keller, to whom we are most thankful for this work.
What struck me when I first encountered this quote in the original interview was the fact that Godard is dead serious.
What strikes me is that this is how experimental film has existed for years. Sans parachutes, though I may be wrong.
beautiful!
This is totally an interesting way of distributing a film. I wanna do that! I just read about these guys who are showing their film in installments like a Charles Dickens novel. Pretty strange too but interesting. Maybe they’ll drop down and show the film too
haha
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The manner in which this content is translated is reminiscent of someone retelling a dream.
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