Author: Bob Westal (Page 262 of 265)

A juicy piece of cold war history that’s also a job of work to watch, this 1967 feature from the ultimate aesthetic bomb thrower of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, deals with a group of young people from well-to-do backgrounds sharing an apartment and, between lengthy philosophical, political, and artistic discourses, planning terrorist acts inspired by China’s Communist Chairman Mao. Led by a “Little Red Book” quoting actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud, “The 400 Blows”) and his winsome, but even more ideologically committed girlfriend (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife at the time), it’s clear this seriously naïve group isn’t, in John Lennon’s phrase, going to make it with anyone, anyhow — but boy do they talk about it. Never very comfortable with ordinary dramaturgy, Godard, a fanatical far leftist at the time himself, toys with avoiding it altogether here. The film is mostly a series of intense conversations touching on long dead controversies and rift that were then current among Europe’s more extreme left, leavened with bits of impish humor and cartoonish, primary-color-fueled compositions (lots and lots of red, naturally) courtesy of the director and his great cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. Godard’s next film was probably his masterpiece — the compelling, freaky and hilarious “Week End” — but it also famously proclaimed the “end of cinema.” The destruction of conventional, watchable cinema was already largely in practice here. (For all the visual rock and roll dazzle of “La Chinoise” with none of the work, see the snazzy trailer.)

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What do you do when you’re not yet 40, the world’s most celebrated cinematic renegade, you’ve made your masterpiece (1967’s “Week End”), and it ends with the words “end of cinema?” If you’re Jean-Luc Godard, the Johnny Rotten of the French New Wave, you try to prove it by making movies that dispense with traditional meaning entirely. Still an oddity nearly 40 years after its release, “Le Gai Savior” (which means something like “The Joy of Knowledge”) is an interminable, exquisitely filmed, cinematic conversation between two archly doctrinaire Marxist students (Julie Berto and New Wave stand-by Jean-Pierre Leaud). The subject at hand is language as the enemy of the extreme social change that they advocate. The dialogue takes place entirely on an empty, darkened stage and examines the very notion of language, while being interspersed with a collage of random material and bizarre and often irritating sound effects and narrations by Godard himself. Nearly unwatchable for most of its length, it is also all but impenetrable. (Godard scholar Colin MacCabe has written that Godard’s films from this period “address an ideal audience.” I guess I’m not a member of that audience.) It is also, like Godard himself during this period, horribly politically obtuse. If only he had known that the puritanical, repressive, murderous Maoist Chinese government he so admired — despite his fierce opposition to these same tendencies in the West — would, within a couple of decades, be enabling many of the world’s most rapacious capitalists.

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Considered a masterpiece by many, this occasionally moving and exciting 1982 festival winner and arthouse hit tells the story of a group of civilians taking an ultimately violent stand against Italian and German fascists just prior to the allied liberation of Italy in 1944. Written and directed by Italy’s Taviani Brothers, “Night” is a late example of neorealism, a style that attempts to combine “fly on the wall” realism with flourishes of emotion. I’ve never cared for the style very much, but the problems that undo “The Night of the Shooting Stars” go well beyond my personal impatience with its genre. The main issue is that the film focuses almost equally on a large number of characters and, with a length of 103 minutes, there doesn’t seem to be enough time to get to know them well enough to care about what happens. Also, the story is recounted by a woman telling her children about some mostly very grown-up events that happened when she was six, most of which she could not have personally witnessed or understood at the time. In that case, you might expect some very non-realistic stylistic flourishes or displays of childlike imagination, but, with the exception of single brief fantasy sequence, it is all mostly presented in pretty but literal fashion. Curious viewers are probably better off starting with Robert Rosellini’s 1945 “Rome, Open City,” shot only months after the Nazis had left the city and the only purely neorealist film I’ve ever loved.

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