Santropez: Made in USA
I haven’t seen Made in USA but Godard haves an extense filmography, I don’t know if you have heard about Le Petit Soldat, it’s pretty enterntaining and still one of his most political films. In other films like Notre Musique, the political content is not as easy as it could be, but is always interesting to me, specially when he doesn’t make things implicit.
Godard was always political, even in Breathless. But then-
“…it’s all really just banalities. But Godard, the most famous Swiss Maoist, will never be able to understand them. He might well, as is his usual practice, coopt the above—lift a word from it or an idea like that concerning filmed advertisements—but he will never be capable of anything but brandishing little novelties picked up elsewhere: images or star words of the era, which definitely have a resonance, but one he can’t grasp (Bonnot, worker, Marx, made in USA, Pierrot le Fou, Debord, poetry, etc.). He really is a child of Mao and Coca-Cola.”
“The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art” (1967)
Here’s an interesting chapter on Godard I just found. ‘Home Movies: The Curious Cinematic Collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard’ written by Catherine Grant.
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5MsRuzXiEc5ZmMyNDAzOTktYmIzMS00NDMzLWEzNjQtMDM2MzRkM2FjYzY5&hl=en_GB&pli=1
It includes a Godard quote where he says, “As for me, I’ve become aware, after 15 years of cinema, that the real
‘political’ film that I’d like to end up with would be a film about me which would show to my wife [Anne Wiazemsky] and daughter what I am, in other words a home-movie-–home-movies represent the popular base of the cinema.”
What do we think about Godard’s notion of a “political” film here?
He’s ismply saying “The personal is political.”
No surprise that Guy Debord didn’t like Godard. He clearly saw him as poacher of Situationist ideas.
Or is it “the everyday, the banal is political?”
Interesting in connection with modern trends in documentary and experimental film, with the overabundance of home movie footage. Politics has certainly moved closer to a utilization of the home movie in recent years. The home movie is used to evoke and comment on the political.
Nothing terribly political about Paris Hilton.
I guess not, because she’s the opposite of the everyday and the banal!
David Ehrenstein
Yes but that’s a statement about political ideology.
And its quite true insofar as the myth whites have constructed out of “America.” This is a palce that while here had to be “discovered” by whites and “won” from its indiginous population — who were slaughtered.
These simple facts aren’t taught as “American history.” Ever.