Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
24.3.10
Great Ecstasy
This is a great ten minutes of cinema, I've been watching it over and over again for the last couple of days. Ever since I read about his idea of ecstatic truth, I've been fascinated by it and by Herzog himself. As far as I understand it, the idea is that truth doesn't rest in facts so much as something beyond them, in something both to do with us and completely separate from us. It has something to do with nature, too, some conception of a primitive human. The "bare life" that Giorgio Agamben talks about.
I was struck when I saw Grizzly Man by the apparent fictionality of the interviews with Timothy Treadwell's friends, the doctor that did the post-mortem and others. I later read that Herzog schooled his interviewers, rehearsing what they were to say and preparing lighting effects and the like, so that when it came to shooting they were effectively acting a part. His point is that the truth would not be served by their "spontaneous" descriptions to the camera, the apparent "reality" depicted given extra technical weight by the lack of carefully planned lighting; the apparent on-the-hoof-ness of it. Truth exists as something far past that.
It's a strange sort of spirituality that I like in his films. Moments of almost-transcendence (I think he'd hate that description) pop up frequently, filmed in slow motion to separate them from the film. It's a fascination with the edges of life - or perhaps the very middle - those moments where life appears close to something beyond its consituent parts, like flying through the air on skis in this film, or living in Antartica, living with bears, dragging a boat over a hill. There's something "other" to his films that's never spelled out or looked at directly, it's always by looking at the effects of whatever this other is that we see it, never it itself.
21.1.10
Social Space Filler
Found this on HTMLGiant today:
Looks great, there may well be a blog post about it.
And I finished Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? today, so I will be writing about that at some point in the not to distant future too.
Looks great, there may well be a blog post about it.
And I finished Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? today, so I will be writing about that at some point in the not to distant future too.
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.
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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.