Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
3.12.09
Noir Désir - Le Vent Nous Portera 12" [Rubber Room Re-edit]
One of the best songs on Al's super-super-super compilation he made for me, entitled "Distractions from Studies Vol. 1":
21.11.09
Modern Life
Watched this last night with Graham, Rebecca and Claire. Very, very good. Lots of great faces! The old guys (seen sat at the table, talking about a generation gap) have very similar accents (they both speak Occitan over French) to Honoré, one of the farmers we worked with in the Ardeche. The lives shown in the film were very familiar!
22.7.09
Beau Travail
Me and Al and Kath watched this the other night. Absolutely fantastic! A wonderfully individual film, it's like nothing I've ever seen. Full of beautiful photography, amazingly choreographed sequences of men in the Foreign Legion training, a real unnerving sense of forboding, of something not-quite-seen, something larger than than the men in the landscape. It's a fascinating enquiry into isolation, purity, the beauty of human - particularly male - bodies, and the image. It's use of music is also fantastic. In this sequence, we see a fabulous (and hitherto unknown to me) Neil Young song, the droney underlying score and at the end, parts of Benjamin Britten's opera for Herman Melville's Billy Budd, which the film is losely based on.
This vid is part of the whole film that the user's put on! Great! I urge you to watch it all, although I suppose it does deserve a big, big screen.
This vid is part of the whole film that the user's put on! Great! I urge you to watch it all, although I suppose it does deserve a big, big screen.
8.6.09
6.5.09
27.4.09
Two Or Three Things I Know About Godard...
(Cross-posted from my film blog).
The Believer magazine's March/April Film Issue comes with a DVD of a collection of Jean-Luc Godard's travels in the US. The first film is a 40 minute discussion, called Two American Audiences, with a group of film students at NYU. It's fascinating, especially as the film they're talking about is one of my favourites, La Chinoise.
Towards the end of the film (the fourth video in this post, at about 9 minutes), Godard says that what he liked about Brecht was that he "did philosophy through art". This is, I think, what Godard always tried to do, and Two or Three Things... is a prime example of it. (Weekend would be another, and possibly La Chinoise, although it's more performative).
As such it comes across as a film essay, or a journalistic investigation. It was inspired by a newspaper article on housewife prostitution in Paris, and illustrates Godard's theory that to survive in Paris it was a necessity. (According to the DVD booklet at least).
Compared to some of his other films from the same period that dealt with social and political problems - Vivre Sa Vie, Le Petit Soldat - this is less iconic-looking, less interventionist, but more thoughtful, introspective. A little dull though, too.
The problem, I think, is that it never really gets going. It doesn't build up a head of steam, the cutting is quick but quite unenergetic. There are interesting moments, such as when the whispered narration (by Godard himself) meditates on the relationship between language and image while we see shots of garage signs, street signs, shop titles etc. But generally it has something of the dirge about it. Perhaps it's the tone, which is the same throughout. The film's register never changes, which is uncommon for a 60s Godard film. The viewer is so used to seeing changes in timbre that when they don't happen it feels as if a minute's segment has frozen and extended for ten, twenty minutes.
It's interesting, then, to remind oneself of the highly dynamic, sometimes simple, sometimes complex political films Godard made in the 60s. (Letter to Jane, above, is an extension, or reply, to Tout Va Bien). One can perhaps see in Two or Three Things... the transition between the lighter - yet still socially conscious - films of the early-to-mid 60s and the "political period" films he made for five years or so from 1967's La Chinoise, continuing with Made in USA, Tout Va Bien and many others that are difficult nowadays to get hold of.
I wonder if that is the problem with Two or Three Things... - that it marks a transition, and is therefore neither one thing nor another.
The Believer magazine's March/April Film Issue comes with a DVD of a collection of Jean-Luc Godard's travels in the US. The first film is a 40 minute discussion, called Two American Audiences, with a group of film students at NYU. It's fascinating, especially as the film they're talking about is one of my favourites, La Chinoise.
Towards the end of the film (the fourth video in this post, at about 9 minutes), Godard says that what he liked about Brecht was that he "did philosophy through art". This is, I think, what Godard always tried to do, and Two or Three Things... is a prime example of it. (Weekend would be another, and possibly La Chinoise, although it's more performative).
As such it comes across as a film essay, or a journalistic investigation. It was inspired by a newspaper article on housewife prostitution in Paris, and illustrates Godard's theory that to survive in Paris it was a necessity. (According to the DVD booklet at least).
Compared to some of his other films from the same period that dealt with social and political problems - Vivre Sa Vie, Le Petit Soldat - this is less iconic-looking, less interventionist, but more thoughtful, introspective. A little dull though, too.
The problem, I think, is that it never really gets going. It doesn't build up a head of steam, the cutting is quick but quite unenergetic. There are interesting moments, such as when the whispered narration (by Godard himself) meditates on the relationship between language and image while we see shots of garage signs, street signs, shop titles etc. But generally it has something of the dirge about it. Perhaps it's the tone, which is the same throughout. The film's register never changes, which is uncommon for a 60s Godard film. The viewer is so used to seeing changes in timbre that when they don't happen it feels as if a minute's segment has frozen and extended for ten, twenty minutes.
It's interesting, then, to remind oneself of the highly dynamic, sometimes simple, sometimes complex political films Godard made in the 60s. (Letter to Jane, above, is an extension, or reply, to Tout Va Bien). One can perhaps see in Two or Three Things... the transition between the lighter - yet still socially conscious - films of the early-to-mid 60s and the "political period" films he made for five years or so from 1967's La Chinoise, continuing with Made in USA, Tout Va Bien and many others that are difficult nowadays to get hold of.
I wonder if that is the problem with Two or Three Things... - that it marks a transition, and is therefore neither one thing nor another.
9.4.09
5.4.09
Lyon Biennial
Came across this today, just in time to add into my essay. It looks like it'll be very interesting. Possibly the first "secondary" use of the "alter" prefix?
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.