ACF Critic Series #19: Armond White, Jean-Luc Godard

 

I have a new conversation on movies and politics. Armond White and I talk about Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps the most talented filmmaker obsessed with politics. We talk about his latest movie, The Image Book, but especially about three of his ’60s movies, which serendipitously arrived in America together in ’68, as a kind of trilogy of 20th c. Europe, past-present-future, or from the war to the coming revolution: Les Carabiniers, La Chinoise, and Weekend.

From ironic documentary to prophetic farce, Godard had a humorous way of revealing the terrorism of the left, half-a-year before May ’68, and the consumerism proposed by the right, both forms of materialism that would prove soul-desiccating.

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  1. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    • #1
  2. Jim Beck Inactive
    Jim Beck
    @JimBeck

    Evening Titus,

    Re letting people in the line of traffic.  We recently had lunch with a physics prof from Brazil, and in discussing the question what is different between US and Brazil, concerning traffic, number one,  folks in Brazil do not let folks in, and he was surprised that folks here sometimes do.  We noted that folks in the UK can be as aggressive.  So the scene may work in France, ( they are sour pusses away, lousy existentialists), but it doesn’t work here, of course if there were a fight a gun could appear for bad or good.  And of course the Noah’s ark truck has already set sail and it is too late to get on board now.  Those 60’s did produce a rotten crop of folks, (author may have self identified).

    • #2
  3. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Jim Beck (View Comment):

    Evening Titus,

    Re letting people in the line of traffic. We recently had lunch with a physics prof from Brazil, and in discussing the question what is different between US and Brazil, concerning traffic, number one, folks in Brazil do not let folks in, and he was surprised that folks here sometimes do. We noted that folks in the UK can be as aggressive. So the scene may work in France, ( they are sour pusses away, lousy existentialists), but it doesn’t work here, of course if there were a fight a gun could appear for bad or good. And of course the Noah’s ark truck has already set sail and it is too late to get on board now. Those 60’s did produce a rotten crop of folks, (author may have self identified).

    People looking for love in all the wrong places.

    Godard was a child of WWII. He was a humanist, of a strange, atheistic kind. He can see both the insanity & the things that trouble people in a situation like this traffic jam. He has a sense of humor about people not on their best behavior because he’s not eager to blame them–he sees the circumstances that drive them nutty. Maybe if they see themselves & each other, too, they can laugh, too.

    A similarly harsh comic in America would be Billy Wilder, admittedly a European emigre, but he really did love America & knew America very well, so that he saw that there was plenty wrong that might go obviously wrong. It did; but comic poets rarely expect to be taken seriously–people so rarely do…

    • #3
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