Numéro Deux – 197, Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Nieville

 

by Allan Fish

(France 1975 88m) DVD1

Aka. Number Two

This is a factory

p  Georges de Beauregard, Jean-Pierre Rassam  d  Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Mieville  w  Jean-Luc Godard  ph  William Lubtchansky  ed  Jean-Luc Godard  m  Leo Ferré

Sandrine Battistella (mother), Pierre Oudry (father), Alexander Rignault (grandfather), Rachel Stefanopoli (grandmother), Jean-Luc Godard (himself),

Looking back on Godard’s career I have always had problems with his films made post 1970, indeed post Weekend a few years earlier.  Some talents just burn brighter for a shorter period of time – take Sturges or Carné.  Godard, to these eyes, always seemed to want to push the envelope, to break new boundaries.  Others may see his radical attempts as merely wallowing in his own introspections and revelling in his own pretensions.  There’s a certain amount of truth in that as Godard has cultivated his own legend, for better or worse, but in truth few of his films made in the forty or so years since Weekend have galvanised me in the same way.

So here we are, in 2009 as I write, discussing one of only two films made in that apparent void here selected.  Numéro Deux is selected for different reasons.  It’s not a film that I particularly like, or would like to watch too often – twice so far and I am in no hurry to make it three or four – and yet it’s a film that provokes a response, cultivates debate and does exactly what Godard set out to do; namely, push that envelope. 

Read Full Post »

1995 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematography, Score, Short – RESULTS

by Allan Fish

Best Picture Toy Story, US (7 votes)

Best Director John Lasseter, Toy Story (4 votes)

Best Actor Sean Penn, Dead Man Walking (6 votes)

Best Actress Julianne Moore, Safe (7 votes)

Best Supp Actor Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects (6 votes), beating himself for Se7en

Best Supp Actress Kate Winslet, Sense and Sensibility (6 votes)

Best Cinematography Darius Khondji, Se7en (5 votes)

Best Score Randy Newman, Toy Story (4 votes)

Best Short A Close Shave, UK, Nick Park (5 votes)

—

OK, thank God that one’s behind us…

Read Full Post »

Alphaville – 1965, Jean-Luc Godard

 

by Allan Fish

(France 1965 98m) DVD1/2

Aka. Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution

α60

p  André Michelin  d/w  Jean-Luc Godard  ph  Raoul Coutard  ed  Agnes Guillemot  m  Paul Mizraki, Michel Legrand  art  Bernard Evein

Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution/Ivan Johnson), Anna Karina (Natasha Von Braun), Akim Tamiroff (Henri Dickson), Howard Vernon (Professor Von Braun/Leonard Nosferatu), Laszlo Szabo, Michel Delahaye, Valerie Boisgel, Christa Lang, Jean-André Fieschi, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Pierre Léaud,

Of all Godard’s classics of the 1960s, surely Alphaville is the daftest.  And yet, as you try to laugh at one scene or another you find yourself inexplicably unable to do so.  It’s a strange feeling whereby what seems almost a spoof of sci-fi at its most pretentious manages, in its borderline flippancy, to capture the essence of the Kafka and Orwell nightmare.  For 1954 it may be 1965, and where in Oceania language was being redefined and shrunk till it lost all of its wonderful ambiguity, so in Alphaville it’s done by replacing the Gideon bibles with dictionaries, still calling them bibles, but reprinting each new edition with even less words than before.  Who needs such words as tenderness or Robin Redbreast?  Indeed, who even needs colour at all?

So Lemmy Caution goes to Alphaville under the soubriquet of Ivan Johnson in search of the missing Henri Dickson.  He finds him, briefly, but also finds that Alphaville is the nerve centre of a society intent on removing all essences of humanity.  Human beings effectively turned into subservient androids.  Questions such as ‘why’ become reasons such as ‘because’ and everywhere else is the ‘Outer Countries’.

Read Full Post »

Sauve qui peut… – 1980, Jean-Luc Godard

by Allan Fish

continuing with the Godard series

(France 1980 87m) DVD2

Aka. Every Man for Himself; Slow Motion

Cinéma et video

d  Jean-Luc Godard  w  Anne-Marie Mieville, Jean-Luc Godard  ph  Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Jean-Bernard Menoud  ed  Anne-Marie Mieville, Jean-Luc Godard  m  Gabriel Yared  art  Romain Goupil

Isabelle Huppert (Isabelle Rivière), Jacques Dutronc (Paul Godard), Nathalie Baye (Denise Rimbaud), Cécile Tanner (Cécile), Anna Baldaccini (Isabelle’s sister), Fred Personne (Mr Nobody), Roland Amstutz (2^nd client), Paule Muret (Paul’s ex-wife), Monique Barscha (opera singer), Catherine Freiburghaus (farm girl),

If each film-maker was a movie character, who would Jean-Luc Godard be?  If asked he may have chosen that played by Jean-Pierre Melville in his own A Bout de Souffle.  To me, he’s Johnny Strabler, the biker gang leader played by an iconic if too-old Marlon Brando in The Wild One, being asked what he’s rebelling against and replying “whaddya got?”  That’s how Godard seemed to wish to be seen, as an enigma, rebelling for the sake of rebelling and unsure of exactly what he was rebelling against.  Like the cinema’s take on the ageless rocker who will never recapture the anarchic best of his twenties, but still struts round the stage like he’s 25 when he’s 40 years older.  Godard wasn’t that old in 1980, but he was turning 50, an age which doubtless seemed light years away to the man responsible for A Bout de Souffle, Vivre sa Vie and Bande a Part.  If anything, what does the 50 year old Godard see the world as?  No paradise, that’s for sure, but rather a desert in which sexual fantasy seems the only escape, and only then if it’s of the taboo variety not to be spoken in public.

Read Full Post »

1994 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematography, Score, Short – RESULTS

by Allan Fish

Best Picture Sátántángó, Hungary (8 votes)

Best Director Krzysztof Kieslowski, Three Colours: Red (7 votes)

Best Actor Johnny Depp, Ed Wood (9 votes)

Best Actress Irène Jacob, Three Colours: Red (11 votes)

Best Supp Actor Samuel L.Jackson, Pulp Fiction & Martin Landau, Ed Wood (9 votes each, TIE!)

Best Supp Actress Faye Wong, Chungking Express (8 votes)

Best Cinematography Gabor Medvigy, Sátántángó & Piotr Sobocinski, Three Colours: Red (6 votes)

Best Score Zbigniew Preisner, Three Colours: Red (10 votes)

Best Short Bottle Rocket, US. Wes Anderson (3 votes)

—

Read Full Post »

Passion – 1982, Jean-Luc Godard

 

by Allan Fish

continuing the Godard mini-series

(France 1982 88m) DVD1/2

Looking for real light

p  Catherine Lapoujade, Armand Babault, Martine Marignac  d  Jean-Luc Godard  w  Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Claude Carrière  ph  Raoul Coutard  ed  Jean-Luc Godard  art  Jean Bauer, Serge Marzoff  cos  Christian Gasc, Rosalie Varda

Isabelle Huppert (Isabelle), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Jerzy), Michel Piccoli (Michel), Hanna Schygulla (Hanna), László Szabó (Lászlo), Patrick Bonnel (Patrick), Sophie Luchachevski (Sophie, script-girl), Myriem Roussel (Myriem), Magali Campos (Magali),

In his introduction to Godard’s film on the UK DVD, Colin MacCabe talks of how Passion grew out of a time in Godard’s life when he was given to the belief that it was “no longer the time for great masterpieces, but a time when everything will become a masterpiece.”  It’s a statement Andy Warhol might once have agreed with, the effective irrelevance of story, films where what happened on screen was sufficient for art.  So in Passion, the real, the staged and the merely observed merge and separate on impulse.

How to begin to describe it; first take the notion of a film being made within the film, directed by Polish director Jerzy and a film whose mission statement seems to be to capture the light effects of various western painted masterpieces.  Rubens and Delacroix are mentioned, while Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ and Ingres’ Valpinçon Bather feature heavily.  Around them are spun three other central characters, or ciphers as may be more accurate.  Michel is a hotelier who houses the crew during the shoot.  Hanna is his wife, who loves director Jerzy and who Jerzy wants to be in his Rubens portion of the film.  Isabelle works in a nearly adjacent factory – also owned by Michel – and tries to start a strike seemingly mirroring the events of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Read Full Post »

La Chinoise – 1967, Jean-Luc Godard

 

by Allan Fish

the first in a series of pieces on the masterpieces of eternal enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard.

(France 1967 96m) DVD1/2

Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec ses images claires

d/w  Jean-Luc Godard  ph  Raoul Coutard  ed  Agnès Guillemot, Delphine Desfons  m  Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Michel Legrand (also Franz Schubert, Antonio Vivaldi)

Jean-Pierre Léaud (Guillaume), Anne Wiazemsky (Veronique), Juliet Berto (Yvonne), Michel Sémeniako (Henri), Lex de Brujin (Kirilov), Omar Diop (Omar), Francis Jeanson (Francis), Blandine Jeanson (Blandine), Eliane Giavagnoli,

La Chinoise, Godard’s first film with Anna Karina’s successor, Anne Wiazemsky, is a film that defies time more than any other.  It’s the film that prefigured and seemed to predict events of less than a year later in Paris, and caught the mood of revolutionary fever and fervour in the air.  But how to capture its essence?  What is La Chinoise in Godard’s career?  The film after Deux ou Trois…?  The film before Weekend?  The connections to both are clear enough.  Yet it’s also 1967, the era of Vietnam, Sergeant Pepper, Pompidou, and Warhol.  It’s his Chelsea Girls, and his ‘Remembrances of Times Past, Present and Future’, a play with acts, a poem with cantos, a symphony with movements.  And it’s his Hamlet, asked by Polonius what he’s reading, and replying “words.”

What is it about?  It’s about kids with pretensions to change the world from their microcosm of an apartment.  It’s about Marxism-Leninism.  It’s about prostitution, of bodies and of ideas.  It’s about Mao, Castro, Jim Hendrix and Descartes, and Sergeant Fury, Captain America and Batman.  It’s about the Lumières opposes to Méliès. It’s a schizophrenic argument a director has with himself. 

Read Full Post »

1993 – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supp Actor, Supp Actress, Cinematography, Score, Short – RESULTS

by Allan Fish

Best Picture Schindler’s List, US (10 votes)

Best Director Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List (9 votes)

Best Actor Anthony Hopkins, The Remains of the Day (9 votes)

Best Actress Juliette Binoche, Three Colours: Blue & Holly Hunter, The Piano (9 votes each, TIE!)

Best Supp Actor Ralph Fiennes, Schindler’s List (9 votes)

Best Supp Actress Anna Paquin, The Piano (11 votes)

Best Cinematography Janusz Kaminski, Schindler’s List (7 votes)

Best Score Zbigniew Preisner, Three Colours: Blue (8 votes)

Best Short The Wrong Trousers, UK, Nick Park (6 votes)

—

Read Full Post »

Bakumatsu Taiyoden – 1957, Yuzo Kawashima

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1957 110m) DVD2

Aka. The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era

I’d kill all the crows in the world

p  Takeshi Yamamoto  d  Yuzo Kawashima  w  Keiichi Tanaka, Shohei Imamura, Yuzo Kawashima  ph  Kurataro Takamura  m  Toshiro Mayuzumi  art  Shohei Imamura

Frankie Sakai (Inokori Sahaiji), Sachiko Hidari (Osome), Yoko Minamida (Koharu), Yujiro Ishihara (Shinsaku Takasugi), Izumi Ashikawa (Ohisa), Toshiyuki Ichimura (Mokubei), Nobuo Kaneko (Denbei), Hisano Yamaoka (Otatsu), Yasukiyo Omeno (Tokusaburo), Masao Oda (Zenpachi), Masumi Okada (Kisuke),

There were times when I felt that I was never going to see Yuzo Kawashima’s comic masterpiece.  There’s a bitter irony to the fact that Kawashima is neglected in the west while his protégée Shohei Imamura is rated by many as the greatest Japanese master of the post-war era.  Imamura made excellent films, but Kawashima, Oshima, Yoshida and Masumura were his peers and there are cases for Shindo, Yoshimura, Teshigahara, Wakumatsu and Ichikawa, too.  Kawashima was the biggest loss, however, as he died prematurely.  The year he died Imamura made his greatest film, The Insect Woman, starring Sachiko Hidari, who’d been so splendid in this, Kawashima’s most saluted film.

Read Full Post »

The Telephone Book – 1971, Nelson Lynn

by Allan Fish

(USA 1971 88m) DVD1

The searching white lights of Moo

p  Merwin A.Bloch  d/w  Nelson Lynn  ph  Leon Perer  ed  Ian Saltzberg  m  Nate Sassover  art  Jim Taylor

Sarah Kennedy (Alice), Norman Rose (John Smith), Barry Morse (Har Poon), Jill Clayburgh (girl with mask), Ultra Violet (Miss Whiplash), William Hickey (man in bed), James Harder (caller #1), David Dozer (caller #2), Lucy Lee Flippin (caller #3), Dolph Sweet (caller #4), Ondine (narrator),

Just reading the synopsis of Nelson Lynn’s film made me smile.  The initial recollection was of that Python sketch about the world’s funniest joke; the one we never actually heard more than the first line of, but which proved as fatal in wartime as the worst mustard gas.  Here we have a girl in Manhattan, an everyday 18 year old chick; no brains, little in the way of anything really, except perhaps a nice figure.  She’s relaxing in her apartment when, while trying to sleep, she receives a phone call…

Today it’d probably be a cold-caller, that tell-tale background noise of a call centre prompting a replacement of the receiver before they’ve had a chance to say anything.  For our girl Alice though, it’s the call of a lifetime.  She is the recipient of the world’s greatest ever dirty phone call, one that gets her so aroused and so ecstatic that she just has to track down the caller.  He tells her to look him up, he’s in the directory.  His name is John Smith, so she calls up every John Smith she can find trying to find out which one he is, with initially no success.  Her quest takes her to the set of a stag movie directed by and starring the ageing Har Poon (a hilarious Barry Morse, humping away in his boxers and socks, while a bevy of naked beauties writhe all over him). 

Read Full Post »