by Joel
#94 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series in which I view, for the first time, some of the most critically acclaimed films of the previous decade.
Let me take a moment to clear up some misunderstandings about the “Best of the 21st Century?” title. The question mark is there for a reason; this is not my canon for the decade, but rather the collective critical canon as compiled by the website They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?. A talented critic named Kevin B. Lee started an exercise years ago in which he moved through the website’s all-time canon, watching and discussing the films he had not yet seen. His imaginative approach is to create video commentaries for each film – while my own work here is nowhere near as ambitious, I’m taking a similar approach, writing about each film on the 21st Century list that I haven’t seen. Key point: that I haven’t seen, so I have no way of knowing, going into a viewing right before a review, if I’ll like the movie in question. I’ve seen a few responses in the past saying something to the effect of “Can’t wait to see your other favorites” or “Do you really think this is one of the best of the whole decade?” Hopefully this introduction clarifies my approach.
I bring this up because otherwise some of you might be confused by what follows. So far in this series, I’ve been generally positive about the films discussed even if dissenting from the acclaim in some regards (which was already too much for some). This time I have to dissent from the apparent consensus altogether; by and large, I didn’t care for In Praise of Love, so for me that response to the question mark of my series title would have to be a “No.” It’s ironic that this film would be the one to warrant that response, since Jean-Luc Godard is one of my favorite directors of all time. Yet even in his prime, I think he could be hit-and-miss, often within the same film. We take the lows of Godard because the highs are so exhilarating; unfortunately in Praise, the latter are scarce and the former all too abundant. Though some have seen it in exact opposite fashion, I find the movie gets much better as it goes along, leading finally to a rapturous conclusion, but it’s too little too late to save the movie as a whole. The meta-questions on Godard’s old work vs. his new are most creatively addressed by Bob Clark in his “the-best-way-to-criticize-a-film-is-to-make-another-film a-video-game” response to Film Socialisme last week. As for In Praise of Love, I come not to praise but to bury. So proceed below the fold…
In Praise of Love contains two sections (many more if you want to put too fine a point on it, but two very distinct sections nonetheless). In the glacially-paced first, shot in a moody black-and-white, various characters reflect upon their lives and questions surrounding love, memory, and history. There is a filmmaker trying to make a documentary about love (or perhaps about Resistance heroine Simone Weill?) but his actions do not necessarily dictate everything we see; rather Godard seems to wander at will through Paris – this was his first film shot there in 35 years – and mourn the passing of the past. The tone of nostalgic reverie doesn’t quite suit the old master. Even in the “later period” films or fragments I’ve seen, there tends to be a restless flow to Godard’s images; yes, he has immersed himself in a classicism and scorned the Pop hagiography of his past, but he still seems to be at his best when suffering from an uber-cinematic ADD. The “elegance” of Praise’s first half then feels rather empty, as if Godard is trying to settle down and strike a Bressonian tone (the recently deceased filmmaker’s “Notes on a Cinematograph” are quoted later in Praise). But he can’t do Bresson any more than Bresson could have done Godard. Initially I found these scenes pleasant enough, but eventually they grew tiresome; affecting an elegiac, leisurely sensibility, they were unable to truly embody it.
The second half – which begins with a title setting it two years before the first half – begins far more promisingly. The cuts accelerate and Godard dips the visuals in bleary video colorization which discards the forced romanticism of the black-and-white “present.” This, excuse the expression, breathless and impatient aesthetic conveys a desire to seize life by the throat and drink its blood vampirically; this is Godard’s forte and while most critics seem to have preferred the monochrome photography of the first half, I much preferred the look of the second. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t lose its other problem: the ideas on display. Much has been made of the film’s anti-Americanism, but in truth it’s far too silly to be offensive (the actor playing the State Department official who “calls the shots in Hollywood, of course” looks like he’s inwardly counting down the seconds until he can get his paycheck and fly home). A young woman, hidden like Yoko Ono behind a veil of long hair, constantly interrupts the dialogue – mostly revolving around Steven Spielberg’s attempt to “steal” the memories of Resistance fighters – to remind us that Americans (er, North Americans, er, North Americans living in states, er North Americans living in united states, er North Americans living in united states that are located between Mexico and Canada…) have no name, and no history.
The diatribes are tiresome and one-note (as numerous other critics have pointed out, America not only has a history, Godard once celebrated it) but Birth of a Nation contains views far more rancid than anything here, and that’s still a great movie. What damns Praise is that it foregrounds its ideas so consistently that often there’s little else to take in. This is especially true in the first part, when the black-and-white pseudo-documentary approach can kid you into thinking you’re experiencing some kind of cinematic art but a comparison with any passages where Godard’s really on fire (like the end of this film, for instance) will immediately show you the difference between the genuine and the ersatz. Even once Godard picks up his aesthetic pace, the “ideas” remain front and center as if he considered his half-baked notions of America’s cultural (lack of) identity (an interesting topic if handled with subtlety and insight) so important that the movie must be rendered merely a carrying vessel for them. Long sections feature characters pacing around rooms, conversing, no longer imaginatively shot as in Contempt or Hail Mary, but merely captured with an eye for content above all else. (Nonetheless, the “plot” of Praise is often almost impossible to follow.)
Yet as the film winds down to a close, Godard catches fire and the movie burns up in a glorious conflagration before our eyes. Praise‘s first truly emotionally effective scene in the movie occurs when we finally see the long-haired woman’s face; revealed, she asks her mother why the family name was changed from Samuel. The older woman does not respond, she seems addled by senility, and suddenly all Godard’s ramblings about memory find their powerful articulation in this woman’s expression. Then the visuals themselves begin to dissolve and bleed into one another, as if Godard is furiously scratching away the surface of the movie – and till now it’s been almost entirely surface – and revealing the palpitating heart underneath. Seascapes create a chiaroscuro affect around floating heads, waves wash over men getting into cars, a view out of a blurry windshield becomes a kind of heavenly visitation, the glowing orbs of headlights now angels come down to kiss our screens. Having knocked the film, I’d nonetheless tell you to seek it out if only for this rapturous finale. Perhaps it could be seen as a transition out of Praise’s mode and into the style of Notre Musique’s electric opening. The opening of Musique is the only part of that film I’ve seen, but it’s coming up in this countdown and if all of Notre Musique contains this kind of dizzying power and aching beauty, I look forward to it. At any rate, it will be a relief after the disappointment of Praise.
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Next film: Let the Right One In
Mr. Lee should only know what his idea has now spawned! Ha!
I found this particular Godard ponderous and inaccessible, and only recommended to those Godardians who refuse to believe there man has never (or is incapable) of making a bad film. This is one time where Godard deserves the nastiness aimed at him from John Simon. But Joel, your position here is dead-on in this masterful entry in this amazing series.
Your work on the sidebar is utterly spectacular. I am speechless!
Ha – well, Lee’s stuff is still far more ambitious & inventive than anything I’ve attempted, I have to say but I may be moving in that direction next yr/we’ll see…
Yeah, it’s interesting how even though this appears so highly on this list (which means a LOT of critics had it on their year-end top 10 lists) it has so many detractors. Roger Ebert and Charles Taylor being two notable names. Hope Notre Musique is better.
Thanks on the sidebar too. It was, um, fun. (Well, actually it was sort of, just took way too long, haha…)
Joel are you responsible for the amazing sidebar work on Wonders in the Dark? I am totally impressed with the visual organization. Well done!
I thank you for your thorough review of In Praise of Love. Between you and what Sam has to say, I am going to give this one a miss.
Yes, I’m especially happy about how good the Vader shot looks there. Personally I might’ve picked something from THX or TPM, but who am I to complain? All in all, it’s quite classy.
Thanks guys! I agree that probably THX/TPM might have come closer to the Bob feel, but the shot looks so damn good! (I took it from that Fall & Redemption of Anakin post I did a while back – ditto the animation shot for Stephen, which comes from a Pink Elephants on Parade! screen-cap tribute to Dumbo, though I actually stole that shot from another blog which did an awesome reading of the sequence, I’d recommend it to Stephen though I guess Dumbo has been taken care of as far as the countdown is concerned.
CP, I’m a little bit uneasy about driving you away from ANY Godard, even this one! Suffice to say there are any number of his films I’d recommend before this, but I still wouldn’t want to dissuade you from ever giving it a chance. As the conversation here shows, there’s at least plenty to discuss!
Terrific essay as always and, JOEL, the opening paragraphsv had me lau/hing out loud. In all honesty, I’ve found this series to be one of the more relevant and refreshing both your site and WITD has produced for the internet intelligentsia. I’m glad you started by clearing things vup as, I’m sure some would have scratched there head at first view of this piece. Personally, when I admire a writers work, I find even ther negative reviews entertaining and thoughtful (and, in case you haven’t figured it out, you’re one of the contributors here I admire most). The essay here, although negative in view, has me wanting to see this film and see what you’re getting at.
Thanks, Dennis – I’m glad it’s appreciated! No worries on the Blackberry, at least you have that excuse when you have typos. Hmmm, maybe I should pretend I have one and pull that out whenever I notice major spelling/grammatical errors (sorry, guys, I blogged this from my touchpad on the T…) 😉 Btw, you’re an “author” now too in the site categories I added, so once I finish archiving everything and update the writer’s list (and move it up the sidebar, it’s way too low right now) anyone will be one click away from looking up your work. Keep ’em coming…
P.S. Please pardon the spelling and grammar in the above comment by me. I’m blogging from this infernal BLACKBERRY again. It makes me wonder how we ever got along without flat panel screen TV’s, our fucking microwave ovens, and machinery that tells us how to get places without us ever using our brains to notice the way. Despicable really…
I didn’t get any coherent plot either. Writing this now, I can’t remember who was who and where and what and why. It was a bit messy. It had less of what you normally get in a Godard film. There’s less beauty and less insight. I thought the super-saturated sections looked quite ugly, actually. The politics can be as ugly as it wants (I’m not sure he fully believes what he says – he’s a provocateur really) as long as it’s intellectually challenging. Here, it’s not
Godard retains, however, his ability to create a great Close Up although here they seem more empty. I’ve thought before that his numerous Close Ups of attractive women in deep thought risked making them all seem like the same woman.
Notre Musique is much better. I think it’s one of his best films. Have you seen FILM SOCIALISME?
I have to disagree here quite a bit. I’ll agree that it isn’t Godard’s greatest, but watching it again recently has helped me crack open much of what was bubbling under the surface for me in past viewings. Unlike most of his other films, “Eloge” is a still-life– that moment where young Edgar holds up two classic paintings for his elder patron is a telling moment for decoding the film– and while all those static, depersonalizing long-shots which either obscure faces or bury them in excess visual information can often be frustrating, it’s a crucial device in the film’s treatise on memory. Often throughout I felt as though the characters were more or less describing my experience of watching the movie– Edgar’s maxim that you never really experience looking at one landscape, but that it always makes you experience another one in your memory, for example. Though shot in Paris (on the same high-contrast black and white stock as in the futuristic “Alphaville”, apparently), so much of the nighttime footage here gave me a richer “New York” experience than most films actually shot in the city. When the girl insists that a statue of a fallen war hero should not read his title, the army that killed him or even his nationality, it reminded me of how Godard constantly puts an extreme distance between us and his characters– throughout the film it’s only the minor, indeed almost inconsequential actors reading lines for Edgar’s “project” that recieve close-ups. So much of it ties in, including that blank book that Edgar leafs through sporadically– this film itself is something of the same, its pages made blank by all the depersonalization. Edgar and the girl are mostly voice-over presences throughout, disembodied spirits haunting the streets of Paris.
I will admit that the movie’s politics are incredibly hard to swallow– not only are they offensively rude and mean spirited, but they’re also fairly hypocritical. True, it’s absurd for Godard to say that Americans have no past of their own when he used to celebrate it in other films, but it’s even worse– at times he’s using that past IN THIS FILM ITSELF. Right before the scene with the State Department guy (who’s actually the son of Eddie Constantine, and named after his father’s role Lemmy Caution from “Alphaville”), Edgar quotes the famed maxim from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”– if the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Then during the infamous “Americans of North America” sequence (which wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself if it were played a little gentler and broader for comedy– it would’ve worked in “Contempt” and been a lot easier to digest), the girl that Edgar pines over (who does come off as a real bitch there) explains the origin of the term “OK”– from a field report after a battle in the American Civil War, noting “Zero Killed”. So really, it is completely self-righteous, insensitive and just plain absurd.
“True, it’s absurd for Godard to say that Americans have no past of their own when he used to celebrate it in other films, but it’s even worse– at times he’s using that past IN THIS FILM ITSELF.”
But Godard doesn’t say that, one of his characters does. Just as one at one point one of the characters talks about how sick he is of Americans, and another character says they weren’t so sick of them in 1944.
Same difference, especially when Godard puts those words into the mouth of a character whose face we barely ever get to see in the film. Perhaps he was aiming to have her sound like a spoiled brat instead of being his own mouthpiece in the film, but the general tone of the film wasn’t quite light enough to pull that off. Like I said before, in earlier films, it would’ve been fine. Bardot in “Contempt”, or Karina in anything could’ve pulled off that scene without seeming quite so bitchy. But then perhaps that’s because Godard gave those actresses (especially Karina) such long and longing close-ups that we aways were able to identify them as their own character (again, especially Karina).
Oh I don’t know about that, especially since Godard has really emphasized the disembodying of voices in so many of his films, including In Praise Of Love (I’m not aware of a filmmaker more attuned to the relationship between an image and a sound, and more willing to disrupt it). I’m not sure what not seeing her face, then, has to do with the fact that she is clearly not Godard–a lot of people complain about didacticism in late Godard, but I think it’s really the opposite, he’s very much concerned with dialogue and contradiction (something Stephen pointed out in his review of Film Socialisme with his Godard quotes regarding characters as statues). I mean any director technically puts their words in the mouth of an actor or actress; that doesn’t mean its their view, I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you were saying because that just doesn’t make any sense.
“Edgar’s maxim that you never really experience looking at one landscape, but that it always makes you experience another one in your memory, for example.”
I forgot about that. That was one bit I liked a lot.
I have to say, while there’s a fair amount that I don’t quite enjoy in the film, it’s one that hits me deeply on a personal level. The whole thing is about the unrequited nature of courtly love, or at least how the memory of love always carries with it an air of courtly unrequitedness about it (or at least that’s one of the things it’s about).
Interesting discussion emerging here. I have not yet seen Film Socialisme, but I very much look forward to it.
Peter, I think the reason we assume the views are Godard’s own, or at least those of the film, is that he doesn’t present them in much of a dialogue with anything – the opposite perspective, to the extent is presented at all, is presented in cardboard-cut-out fashion (like the State Department official) or satirical hostility (that narration about the Kosovars). While we recognize the anti-American/anti-Spielberg statements to be somewhat silly there’s nothing within the world of the film to imply Godard sees them that way.
Now, as Stephen points out, in a way this doesn’t matter, I’m all for a film taking a perspective opposite to my own (besides, in some ways I think he does have points about the oppressiveness of Hollywood’s sentimentality and its troubling disregard for any real sense of history – Exhibit A being the Oscars’ axing of honorary awards from the main broadcast, which Godard has now become ensnared in…). But the film doesn’t present these views in a sophisticated or dialectical way; worse, it doesn’t present much else at all until the very ending – the film is like a half-baked essay adorned with a few attempts at verse (only successfully flowering at the end). For all the acclaim Godard receives as a thinker, I’ve frankly always been far more impressed by him as an artist. Here I think he gives the former persona way too much preference.
Really good points, but the other side is already there isn’t it? It’s in dialogue with something/someone that not’s necessarily on the screen, but the fact that we can think of it in those terms speaks I think to the fact that a dialogue is taking place, if not as overtly as in Film Socialisme (and I guess it could be argued not as successfully, though I’d disagree). But I think your comment here gets to the root of the problem in that in what you see as “a half-baked essay adorned with a few attempts at verse” I see some of the most beautifully constructed and desperate and catastrophic and romantic and indescribable film art I’ve ever seen. Along with Helas pour moi, this is the Godard that moves me most, and as much as I might try to intellectually justify that with this talk of dialogues established with an ominous off-screen presence, the emotions are the reason I fell in love with this movie.
And I find your position really curious, I agree that the ending is just incredible, but for me I think it’s because it’s both a deconstruction and reconstruction of what was going on in the whole picture–even as the image disintegrates the narrative is contextualized (through sound) so we begin to understand it, and yet it remains mysterious too, there’s something horrible and beautiful about it. It’s impossible to describe, but I feel like it’s very much interrelated to the rest of the picture, and I can’t really imagine how it would affect me if I thought the rest of the film was relatively ponderous or flaccid.
Peter, it is interesting – like we’re seeing different movies! Since I love Godard, I’ll probably revisit the film at some point and hopefully I’ll be able to see more of what you see there. I do wonder if the polemical aspect isn’t a hindrance (not that it’s polemical per se – Godard often is – but the nature of its polemicism, being so seemingly one-note). As for the dialogue, I hear you, and I thought you might make that point, but I suppose the problem is that he characterizes the other side within the film, and in such a one-dimensional way, that he’s kind of short-circuiting the conversation! But I’m intrigued by Jim’s notion below (let me jump down to it)…
Another exciting choice for consideration, Joel!
This is an especially puzzling movie. I saw it in conjunction with the very belated release of Made in USA, with its turning the Kiss Me Deadly component inside-out, to supposedly trump directors like Bresson, Robbe-Grillet and Demy for falling for its supposedly decadent American nihilism.
I’ve only seen it once, but Eulogy for Love just might be a rare moment of Godard eating crow. The preoccupation there, with a dialectic of love, not to mention the free-wheeling coloration so close to the much-despised Demy, is so tantalizing, so not Godard! If that is on, the ridiculous dictum about America having no history (in a context of obsessing over an American lodestone from 1955) could be self-deprecating.
It’s an interesting notion, Jim, and it points to how isolated Godard the person is as well as how cryptic he can be as an artist. His statements in this film were taken at face value given his political history, some of his statements into interviews (which in themselves might have been a sort of play-acting), and the perception that he expresses himself through his films more directly than most artists do. Yet it is entirely possible that viewers are missing a level of self-deprecation and irony here.
In my defense, I’d say that I’m usually pretty good at picking up on this from Godard – indeed, I regard him as in many ways a brilliant and offbeat humorist, to the point where I’m literally laughing out loud and at bare minimum grinning along with so many of his movies – and not just the ones that are supposed to be somewhat funny like Band of Outsiders or La Chinoise but more cryptic ones like Week End or even the Dziga-Vertov group ones I’ve seen. And from what I’ve heard of King Lear, it’s along the same lines. Probably the worst line hoisted on Godard is that he’s some kind of self-serious somber intellectual artist when in fact he’s in many ways a lightning-fast comedian.
So if I didn’t see the humor and winking aspect here, I’m inclined to believe it didn’t go over my head. Yet to play devil’s advocate I’m far more familiar with his 60s modes than his 90s or 00s ones so it’s possible his tongue-in-cheek aspect has just gotten more obscure and sophisticated over the years and I can’t pick up on it the way I could in the older work. I’ll “humor” that possibility…
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I don’t know how much it really means for the commentary here now that the back and forth has died down a bit, but even though this movie is far from my favorite Godard flicks, I can’t help but love it. As a whole, I like it even better than “Contempt”, and THAT movie has a plum Bardot nude-scene and Fritz Lang. It’s a beautiful, though challenging movie.
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