JLG le Fou

"I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began.  I had nothing, nothing at all.  Oh, well, I had the book.  And a certain number of locations.  I knew it would take place by the sea.  The whole thing was shot, let's say, like in the days of Mack Sennett.  Maybe I am growing more and more apart from one section of current filmmaking.  Watching old films, one never gets the impression that they were bored working, probably because the cinema was something new in those days, whereas today people tend to look on it as very old."                   - Jean-Luc Godard on shooting Pierrot le fou

Any time you take up an interest or a hobby in earnest, I happen to believe you develop a kind of relationship with that part of your life, you go through waves of love and disinterest, worship and annoyed frustration.  But what makes a hobby a deep interest, I think, and what makes a person stick with that interest through the rough times, are that moment when you associate your own identity with it, when your life story becomes fused in a complicated way to this activity.

For me, this first interest that I grafted onto my personality was cinema -- movies, film, making them, watching them, all kind of tied in together.  I really didn't get to critiquing them or talking about them until much later on.  That's the point in time that I think my views on this obsession changed most.

Jean-Luc Godard is not a filmmaker that the average person you meet in class at an American university is going to have much interest in.  Maybe that's a generalization, but the man is not too audience-friendly, especially if that audience happens to be made up of 21st century youthful Americans who relentlessly consume expensive iPad games about birds and frogs and fruit while these same mobile devices are facilitating social revolution in the Middle East.  I'm not judging anyone for apps, I own an iPhone and am as guilty of this modern form of casual consumerism, but I'm just saying, Godard probably doesn't like us too much.

And on the flipside, I don't think most of his films would resonate with the average American kid today.  They definitely don't all resonate with me.  But all of the films by Godard I've seen (unfortunately, like most others, I've really only been exposed to his incredible 60s work... honestly it's enough for me at this point) inspire me in one way or another by virtue of their disruptive qualities.  Here's JLG explaining it better than I could, talking about editing:

"What is it ultimately that makes one run a shot on or change to another?  A director like Delbert Mann probably doesn't think this way.  He follows a pattern.  Shot -- the character speaks; reverse angle, someone answers.  Maybe this is why Pierrot le fou is not a film but an attempt at a film."

I can't talk about Delbert Mann.  But.  Improvisation, clearly, is an essential ingredient to Godard's work.  This might be a clumsy analogy, but based on his film production practices described at the top and his ideas about construction described just above, I've come to believe that what Godard does is a kind of jazz-fiction, an incorporation of traditional gestures/tropes of cinema (the guns, the girls, the romantic quest, the road), but arranged in the moment without regard for classical form.  And in the same way that jazz often loses me, sometimes Godard loses me, both politically and aesthetically.  I guess what I'm saying is that I value him more than some directors whose work I love more consistently because he is true to a strange method and the results are always jarring.  Jarring, but in a way that inspires you to see things differently.  And with the best of Godard, that feeling can last.

As I get further along in this project of analyzing my own musings and opinions on film, and as I find myself instinctively aligning my own personal views more and more with industry outsiders like Godard, I realize that my true problem is with the lack of a desire to surprise within our theaters.  Even if nobody ever really made good on the aesthetic promises of early Godard, radical and jarring cinema comes out all the time.  It just doesn't reach most people.  The kids have to go find it.

And I guess that's why I'm always so disappointed when I talk to anyone who mocks art cinema or dismisses anything that could be labeled, as I'm sure everybody including myself labels a Godard film, as "artsy."  The point isn't pretension or creating a cultural hierarchy, I believe the point of art cinema is to knock you upside the head momentarily, make you experience the world differently.  The good ones affect your perception long after you leave the theater.  Pierre le fou, at least, did that for me.