Jean Luc Godard making an appearance in his film 'Prénom Carmen',1983.
The place of the young adult in every day living is a thought JLG pulls out into the sunlight for airing now and again, sometimes bang in the middle of a perfectly linear storyline.
Especially in his films after the Maoist period,...why there's the Nouvelle Vague,Forever Mozart, Eloge D'Amour,this after his complete deconstruction of cinema,breaking it down to sound and visuals,putting the two tracks of sound up against each other,dragging them to the other ends of the room till they stayed there stretched,tortured ,reaching once more for their halves.
He made his peace with their inseparability.
He raised them to life through the years till they had reached a peaceful lull in Eloge d'Amour. The critics applauded the madman's return to 'watchable' cinema ,and sat down to nibble at what he offered.
The critics save some are never interested in the ghosts between the frame,the awkward silences,.. what it took for these silences to gather their full throated tone.

I am reworking the structure of this blog.
give me a month.
or lesser!


em,and if anyone is wondering,that's belmondo on the ground.godard in the coat and glasses,facing us.last scene of 'A bout de souffle'.
notice:no crowd control.just Coutard and a camera.
I'd like to meet the guy who took this picture.How did he know I'd have liked to see this picture!?!lol..
ffffff.

just in case i didn't make my trajectory of research clear in the last post....
i'm drawing analogies between the film language of 3 of jean luc godard's films with a narrative technique of poetry called vakrokti developed by kuntaka,an indian scholar writing in at around 1012 AD.

the parallels leave me speechless.
lol...

purely academic work,but i figured it'd be interesting to feature bits of my dissertation writing here...atleast the cuckoo,non theoretical part
.
.
...part of the brief is to analyse the works of a film director of our choice,and highlight our observations on the mere construction or map out our views on the different trajectories we observe springing from the pieces of work.
lol...

an excerpt:


'if all the subjects in the world are discussed philosophically,there is no wonder at all.'
Kuntaka,'Vakrokti-jivita',1012 AD.

a poet catches the ghosts in the spaces between frames,catches the vacant moments we are all familiar with, but had no idea we shared with so many others.few find means of articulating the precise form of these phantoms.
for me,jean luc godard's films read out poetically.i have respect for the manner in which he wields the craft to identify these ghosts and his success in being able to translate the poetry onto the screen.a film maker's journey from the recognition of a feeling,to articulation through the voice or hand,to a plan for bringing these visuals to light via film,on through the edit and sound design,usually causing the end product to be quite a different from what it was at conception.
almost like a human who goes through so much with the passage of time that he loses his identity momentarily when he reaches a point when a thought must be concluded,when the debate must be drawn for the moment to a close.




he is left with what seem to be his values at present and he holds them to the light to compare them with the values he had started out with in the beginning.



has he started believing in a conjured image of himself?(all in an effort to be able to define what he is at the present moment to himself.)the film maker is left with what he has on hand now,and what he remembers of the subject he had considered to make a film on,in the beginning.he is left to wonder which version is closer to the truth.the film is the film maker.the poetry becomes the poet.

belmondo needs to live again.
because milann believes again.lol..

so i'm writing this dissertation,
the only way i can keep writing for it is if it spills over here.so deal with it.
and if it's too much godard for everyone,it can't be helped.

for now..nana has something to say..
'Vivre Sa Vie',Godard,1962.
'I think we're always responsible for our actions.We're free.
I raise my hand,I'm responsible.
I turn my head,I'm responsible.
I am unhapppy,I'm responsible.
I smoke,I'm responsible.
I shut my eyes,I'm responsible.
I forget I'm responsible,but I am..

..A message is a message.
Plates are plates.
Men are men.
And life is life.'
Godard tracks to and from Nana.
Sounds of a commotion fill the café Yvette and Nana sit at.A car screeches,the camera pans in jerks, in time to the machine gun fire heard.Godard draws analogies though his visuals to his text.
The camera rests at the door.
and i rest my case beside it.
good god.


if the link up there doesn't work,you could look out for chapter 6 on this page

marfat

Alright.
To kick off this new found energy i've raked up from somewhere to share whatever i'm reading up on currently,here goes....
the first post obviously goes out as an ode to my self ordained research on Godard,though catching it like this mid action,one foot hovering in the air might make it a shaky start,but what the hell! I quote Fritz Lang,from 'Contempt'/'Le Mépris'(Godard,1963) 'You must always finish what you have started'.
.
.
yea so I've been catching myself haemorrhaging in glee at the simplest sentences again.......
...
anyway.
I went through serge daney's essay on godard and godardian pedagogy,he's an old critic,been there when the pack was around writing for the cahiers du cinéma in '64..
here's the translation of it.

was completely or maybe partly disillusioned by the technical manner in which godard's films were broken down, hell,i was pissed off.mercenary.i mean,have a look at this little nugget i found from
'Nouvelle Vague' (Godard,1990)

look at the bloody skill,the subtlety with which those positives are made negative...the track throbbing forward with the waves,the repetition,the exquisite sound design. did you see the placement of the lamps in all the segments?for those of you who went through the article,if this form of film making is school ,then hell i'm loving school! and i believe if anything,the students of this school are encouraged,kicked offa their royal behinds to think,ask questions,get up and yell for what they feel for,goddammit,.. it's a save from the sink into the intellectual hogwash waiting around the corner.
and no .godard hasn't stopped questioning things either,the monotone voice is stating the questions because they've been run over so much,the only place the questions have is in a declarative sentence.
so in his assembly line analysis of the post '68 films where is daney speaking from,what's the pulpit?
socialist?
maoist?
or he just dry?

got me thinking of the fakirs and how they've possibly figured it all out..with their philosophy of marfat,I mean...of seeing the sameness in the differences,seeing the differences in the sameness and coming out of it knowing that these differences need to be maintained so things move in the cycle they're meant to move in.
why am i bringing up the fakirs when i'm talking about godard,coz it's all the same, see?