The outrage of the mainstream press in Cannes about Godard’s Film Socialisme was quite predictable. In his Scanners, Jim Emerson has even gone to the trouble of compiling excerpts from 15 New York Times reviews of Godard’s films, spread out over half a century and all offering variations on the same complaint: “[approaching] the films themselves as though they are puzzles designed to frustrate (and to eventually be ‘solved’), then [blaming] Godard for not doing a better job of solving them himself because they’re too hard.” And it was apparent even to me, witnessing everything from Chicago, that this anger was only intensified by the minimalist pidgin-English subtitles and Godard’s last-minute cancellation of his press conference. I was reminded of the near-riot once occasioned by a screening of his Un Film comme les autres (perhaps the emptiest and the most talkative of all of Godard’s films to date), in New York’s Lincoln Center in 1968, thanks in part to an attempt at adding an English voiceover on the spot that made the French and English equally incomprehensible. Which suggests that Godard’s aesthetic and ideological provocations often help to clear the way for still other sources of anger that may or may not be related to them. Read more
I was too late in catching up with La La Land to have included it in my best-of-the-year lists for Sight and Sound and Film Comment, where it likely would have figured in both cases. But one telling aspect of the movie that I find missing from the reviews that I’ve read is just how desperate its euphoria turns out to be — which is not an argument against this euphoria but a statement of what gives rise to it and what makes it so poignant. Of course this is a fact about many of the greatest musicals (and greatest post-musicals, such as those of Jacques Demy that Damien Chazelle is so obviously emulating) that characteristically gets overlooked, which is how much the elation of song and dance is only half of a dialectic that also highlights failure, hopelessness, and defeat. The most salient thing about the musical numbers here is how they figure as interruptions to misery and diverse irritations and frustrations — interruptions that are typically interrupted in turn by the hell of a freeway traffic jam or the anguish of a failed audition.
This is what makes the singing and dancing seem absolutely necessary, not merely a simple flight from unpleasantness. Read more
This was organized by my dear friend Sunčica Fradelić, who was one of the mainstays of FilmFactory in Sarajevo (2013-2016), where I taught four times. She’s now working as the director of Kino Klub Split, where I’ve subsequently lectured and taught several times, and the only reason why she couldn’t attend the Workshop’s final (and only) Zoom meeting, which was yesterday, is that her boiler broke. But because she belongs in the picture below, I’ve added a picture of her that I took at a panel at Split’s Kino Klub last year.
Even though not all of the seven students, located in different parts of Serbia and Croatia, made it to the end of the workshop –- which was conducted via emails shared by everyone before our 105-minute “in-person” gathering yesterday — I told the five who made it through that they were the brightest reviewers I’ve ever been lucky enough to teach, even though the English they wrote in was their second language. The films they wrote about were Last Year at Marienbad, Rio Bravo, TheEnchanted Desna, and Rear Window, and the reviews they read aloud and discussed yesterday will be posted later on Kino klub Split’s web site.[3/21/21] Read more
