The film and writing by Jean-Luc Godard, and others, concerning the events occurring in Paris (and around the world) during and after 1968 provide an example of a Marxist inspired revolution in a first world context. “The spirit of the May days was utopian, expressive and festive,” writes Sherry Terkle. “The ideology of the [...]
filmstudiesforfree for-ever-godard
Film Studies For Free actively espouses the ethos of Open Access to digital scholarly material. It aims to promote good quality, online, film and moving-image studies resources by commenting on them, and by linking to them.
My recommendation today, another addition to Film Studies For Free’s listing of scholarly resources in audio or audiovisual form [...]
song from godard’s la chinoise
translated in english:
Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao
Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao
Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao
Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao
Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao
The rice is mad and me a cad
It’s the Little Red Book
That makes it [...]
“Godard’s cinema, broadly speaking, is within the modern tradition established by Brecht and Artaud, in their different ways, suspicious of the power of the arts- and the cinema, above all- to ‘capture’ its audience without apparently making it think, or changing it.”
- Peter Wollen
“The text becomes a composite structure [...] using different codes and semantic systems. Moreover, these are not simply different, but also often contradictory…The semantic component of a language is composite and contradictory, permitting understand on one level, misunderstanding on another. Godard systematically explores the areas of misunderstanding.” - Wollen, p.503
Art is a gun…THere are different sorts of guns. There is a real gun and another sort of gun. One is science, one is art, one is a novel…Well ideas are guns. A lot of people are dying from ideas and dying for ideas. A gun is a practical idea. and an idea is a [...]
I thought the cine-tracts were a really good idea. They started out with things about the police, about the repression, in an attempt to publicise what had been happening. The newspapers had been suppressing alot. To make it more widely known, they simply filmed photographs, for example. I mean they made films but very stylized….You [...]
Gay Knowledge also implicitly distinguishes itself from Marx on a second point. It seeks not merely to rethink man, but to undo him altogether….When, as a result of the combined activities of lingustics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, we are able to grasp the linguistic bases of human subjectivity, man will be “erased,” like ” a face [...]
Patricia proposes a radically new reading of the categories of truth and falsehood. She asks, “what is a false image?” and answers, “there, where the imave and sound [seem] true.” She thereby suggests that an image or sound is false not when it misrepresents reality, but when it seems adequate to reality–when we are able [...]
The zero point now has a radically new meaning: it signifies not a site of epistemological stability, a place where we can be sure that we are no longer in any way deluded, but the nullity disclosed through the unthinking of the thinker.
Kaja Silverman, ” I Speak Therefore I’m not,” 135
Emile suggests that what Gay Knowledge has finally made possible is not an objective knowledge of “the workers,” or “the bourgeoisie,” or even sounds and images, but rather a subjective knowledge of the void which grounds us. In the place of the “I think, therefore I am,” it proposes something like: “I speak, therefore I’m [...]
Because every film is part of the economic system it is also a part of the ideological system, for “cinema” and “art” are branches of ideology…the filmmaker’s first task is to show up the inema’s so-called “depiction of reality.” pp 754-755
Some notes about the mean features of this counter-cinema…
Narrative transivity Narrativev intransivity
Identification [...]
In the post-68 films, there seems to have been a kind of flattening out, so that fiction=acting=lying-=deception=representation=illusion=mystification=ideology. 506
[let me tell you
at the risk
of seeming
ridiculous
that the revolutionary
truly
is
guided by great
feelings of love]
Scenes of Paris’ student revolt, the Vietnam War, and other events of the late 1960s, along with posters, photographs, and cartoons, are backdrops to the words of Patricia Lumumba & Emile Rousseau, the two characters, in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Gai Savoir” (1969).
Music: a [...]
Alone in an abandoned TV studio, two militants have a discourse on language. Referring to spoken word as “the enemy”, the two deconstruct the meanings of sounds and images, attempting to experience the joy of learning.
www.kochlorberfilms.com
A look behind the scenes of how news programs are created. Excerpts from Brian Springer’s movie “Spin.”
Original trailer of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sci-Fi classic “Alphaville”, featuring Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine