JB, It’s a major piece of writing sir, coherant and elegant…… nad Beau T is one I’ll track down for sure.
I only just watched Les Carabiniers once…. and found it hard work. I’ll get back to it, but I want to do La Chinoise first.
I know it’s Godards attempt to deconstruct the war film, but so far it’s the least successful of his early films for me… but then I hated Breathless as a younger man and completely missed the point. Now I find I can find some of the layers and nuance that Godard has woven in, but it’s still an effort to me…. like reading Umberto Eco when he lays it on thick! I love it, but I’m not sure I get all there is to get.
as for Malick, I’m just thankful he gets to keep making films.
Musycks, I thank you sir.
With Les Carabiniers, the whole film is very stripped down and bare and sort of grim in its mise en scene. No good looking star actors, no sets, not even much dialogue. It’s like a film made after the end of the world, lol. It does take some getting used to, and when it premiered in Paris there were riots and the critics trashed it. They were particularly offended that Godard had dedicated it to the sainted Vigo. I think Vigo would have liked it, though.
Malick works too infrequently, I agree.
Justin….Funnily enough it reminded me of Vigo (non- L’Atalante) in it’s quirkiness and energy? It’s just hard to greet that anarchy of cinema when applied to war, after consuming all the mainstream stuff….. I liked the look of it a lot, but the mix of drollery, satire and absurdity with the almost documentary looking forest shootings is a stretch for my brain! I understand that it was Godards single digit salute to the political war machine, it just infuriates as well as provokes I guess? which was J L’s point all along you say? sneaky sod :)
Musycks, yes, Vigo was more than a bit of an anarchist, and Zero de Conduite is a celebration of that. I think it was Godard’s intention to make a black comedy about war, and to make it as hostile as he could. There’s no way to really present war in a film unless you find a way to make the viewer as frustrated, angry and horrified as a soldier in the middle of a fire fight. Samuel Fuller even said that you should shoot real bullets over the heads of the audience, in the theater, and that would be the best experience of war on film.
There’s a more subtle point to Les Carabiniers, which is that Michel-Ange and Ulysses, the two soldiers, are not sophisticated consumers of images: when Michel-Ange sees his first movie, he tears down the screen trying to rape the naked girl in the tub; and when the two are given a bunch of postcards as “deeds” to their war booty, they honestly believe that owning the images means they now own the real things represented by the images. So I think Godard is saying that to understand brutality we have to see primitively, precisely the opposite of the ironic, sophisticated way in which we have learned to safely consume images, an explosion of images of anything and everything.
That’s interesting Justin… Godard steers clear of the easy ‘war is hell’ approach at every turn I know, but it takes some getting used to.
Other directors would not have played that movie scene so comically and maybe made it creepier or psychotic in as much as the boys are simpletons suddenly with a degree of power at the nd of a gun. I’m more used to say the approach used by Malle in Lacombe, Lucien which deals with the same issue. Thanks for the insight.
Good stuff, Justin. I don’t know the Godard, it’s a missing piece for me, as well. But I know Beau Travail very well. I like placing movies side-by-side, not just to make a comparison but to interrogate them, perhaps nudge them to speak to each other. Ken Jones has a piece up which may interest you, http://www.rouge.com.au/12/think.html- Can Movies Think? I may be able to get my hands on a copy of Soldat.
Soldat is a great film. I got very excited when I realized that Claire Denis had not only built Beau Travail around the hero of Petit Soldat, but cast the same actor as well.
Justin Biberkopf
Bobby and Musycks, thanks for taking the time to look at that article. That essay took me three years to write, off and on. In fact when I started writing it I was under the mistaken impression that Denis was a male. lol. After doing a little more research into her I soon realized that mistake. I was just happy to come out of it in one piece. Beau Travail is a beautiful film. The Malick stuff is kind of a digression, but I guess I did feel a bit letdown by The New World, it seemed sort of like a whitewash of the real history. I could be wrong. I do think that if Malick had started with a sort of prologue showing the New World as it was before the colonists arrived, it would have been a more powerful statement, it could have been like the South Seas islands scenes in Thin Red Line.
Les Carabiniers is a very cool film, I recommend it. I think it’s still available on dvd, I’m not sure though.