Godardism of the day

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• Tom Russell says:

  February 10, 2011 at 2:19 pm

  Please let this be a reg­u­lar feature.

• The Siren says:

  February 10, 2011 at 3:15 pm

  Are you going to have Godardism sub­sets, like “witty,” “inscrut­able,” “pro­voc­at­ive” or, here, “flat-out wrong”?

• Stephen Winer says:

  February 10, 2011 at 4:07 pm

  I’m with The Siren on this one. Perhaps you can call this fea­ture “Legends Say the Darndest Things!” or “Best Laffs from Cahiers!”

• ratzkywatzky says:

  February 10, 2011 at 4:30 pm

  Sh*t my ‘Dard says.

• haice says:

  February 10, 2011 at 4:40 pm

  Is not that quote the plot of CONTEMPT?

• The Siren says:

  February 10, 2011 at 4:44 pm

  “Sh*t my ‘Dard says.”
  *dies*

• Oliver_C says:

  February 10, 2011 at 6:04 pm

  “Best Laffs from Cahiers!”
  Including the unfor­get­table “I’m not inter­ested in watch­ing a film about Indian peas­ants who eat with their hands”, plus “ ‘Way of the Dragon’/‘Mission to Mars’ – one of the best movies of 1985/2000!”

• Jaime says:

  February 10, 2011 at 10:08 pm

  Context (his­tor­ic­al, with­in the inter­view, etc) prob­ably helped the com­ment make “sense” or some oth­er buzzkill non­sense. J’sayin’.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  February 10, 2011 at 10:11 pm

  I dunno, I put it up because I thought it made abso­lutely per­fect sense com­pletely on it’s own. I mean, the Siren is not wrong in char­ac­ter­iz­ing it as “flat-out wrong,” but in the lar­ger scheme of things, I’d say it’s abso­lutely dead-on. It’s all about a feel­ing, you see…
  And now that I think of it, I don’t think that as of 1962 he actu­ally WAS entirely wrong. Yes, French films had screen­plays, but the (mostly) men who wrote them did not, in large part, identi­fy them­selves as “screen­writers.” They were poets, nov­el­ists, journ­al­ists, even, who also wrote screen­plays. See Prevert, Queneau, and so on. Not a John August of Eric Roth or, more to the point, Herman or Joseph Mankiewicz in the bunch.

• Yann says:

  February 11, 2011 at 5:41 am

  You’re for­get­ting about Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost.

• The Siren says:

  February 11, 2011 at 9:01 am

  Glenn – I dunno, there were also a lot of screen­writers in Hollywood who also would have iden­ti­fied them­selves as some oth­er kind of writer before they admit­ted to being a screen­writer, because screen­writ­ing was­n’t exactly prestige-enhancing in their eyes. Mind you, I love Godard (pre-1968, but then I love every­one best before 1968, don­cha know) and enjoy the hell out of his utter­ances even when, or espe­cially when, he’s being obstrep­er­ous. But I suspect–and do tell me wheth­er or not I am right–that if you brought up the con­text of which Jaime speaks, it’s just anoth­er instance of Godard being delib­er­ately insult­ing to the French old-school film­makers he was osten­ta­tiously rebelling against.
  LIke, as Yann says, Jean Aurenche. See, the “feel­ing” I got from the quote was oh good grief Jean-Luc, will you lay off poor Autant-Lara…

• Glenn Kenny says:

  February 11, 2011 at 9:21 am

  Well, as I don’t want any­one to get too agit­ated on behalf of Autant-Lara, here’s a lar­ger ver­sion of the quote, which demon­strates that Claude was the last thing on Jean-Luc’s mind as he for­mu­lated his amus­ing aperçu:
  “The Hakims asked me to do ‘Eva.’ To begin with, I did­n’t like the act­ors they had in mind. I wanted Richard Burton. They agreed in the­ory. They said ‘We’ll call him.’ I said, ‘There’s the tele­phone.’ ‘Yes, well, it’s awkward…he may not be at home.’ So I knew they did­n’t want him. The woman I saw as someone like the Rita Hayworth of five or six years ago. At all events, the act­ors had to be American. Film people are point­less if they aren’t American. What does it mean if a Frenchman says ‘I’m a scriptwriter’—no such creature exists. Whereas it does­n’t mat­ter with an American if it does­n’t exist; things American have a myth­ic­al ele­ment which cre­ates their own existence.”
  Two things: It’s funny that by this time Burton was suf­fi­ciently ensconced in Hollywood that Godard thought of him as American. Also, I ima­gine Godard was thor­oughly frus­trated by his inab­il­ity to get Burton into one of his films; he wanted Dick and Liz for ‘Pierrot le fou’ a few years later, let us recall.

• The Siren says:

  February 11, 2011 at 11:08 am

  HA! I like the quote a lot bet­ter as a paragraph–too funny. All righty, off to cre­ate my own myth­ic­al exist­ence, doll.

• Eric Stanton says:

  February 11, 2011 at 1:08 pm

  “he wanted Liz and Dick for ‘Pierrot le fou’ a few years later, let us recall.”
  Okay, that goes into my per­son­al pan­theon of altern­at­ive movies I would kill to see.

• Jason LaRiviere says:

  February 11, 2011 at 9:29 pm

  Has Brody’s man-love for Swanberg become offi­cially patho­lo­gic­al: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/02/in-berlin.html#entry-more
  “I’m wait­ing for the usu­al detract­ors to howl that Swanberg is no Bergman and to offer a chal­lenge to watch, say, “Persona” and “Art History” side by side.”…your move Glenn

• Jason Melanson says:

  February 11, 2011 at 11:38 pm

  That’s some nice deck stack­ing from Brody. He says: “to put the thirty-year-old Swanberg’s work beside Bergman’s at thirty gives the advant­age to Swanberg in terms of the per­son­al imprint on the medi­um.” Clearly com­par­ing Swanberg to Bergman, but then later he says: “Of course, Bergman made “Summer Interlude” at thirty-three and “Monika” at thirty-five, so the bar is high—so high that nobody should be forced to meas­ure up to it.”
  So to sum­mar­ize: Swanberg is bet­ter now than Bergman was at thirty, but it’s not fair to hold him to the stand­ards of Bergman at thirty-three. But of course if we are going to play the “Swanberg is less exper­i­enced than Bergman was” game, you could say Bergman dir­ec­ted his first film in 1946 and dir­ec­ted SUMMER INTERLUDE in 1951. Swanberg made KISSING ON THE MOUTH in 2005, and his latest “mas­ter­pieces” in 2010. But I digress…

• Glenn Kenny says:

  February 12, 2011 at 8:23 am

  Thanks, Jason and Jason. I am not going to join in the pre­dicted “howls of deri­sion;” dis­ap­poin­ted by the deck-stacking you cite, among oth­er things, I’m fin­ished try­ing to debate Brody on Swanberg, or on any­thing else for that mat­ter. I DO like this bit from Brody’s descrip­tion of “Silver Bullets:” “[…]his [Swanberg’s] atten­tion to col­or, to shad­ow, to fram­ings, to glar­ing touches of col­or that height­en an emo­tion. It’s also true that his atten­tion to these mat­ters, over the years, hasn’t always been equal, and, para­dox­ic­ally, some of his best work (such as ‘Hannah Takes the Stairs’) is far more devoted to char­ac­ter and per­form­ance than to the visu­al world that his act­ors inhab­it.” “Hasn’t always been equal;” yeah, that’s ONE way of put­ting it. Brody, Sallitt, and Keller’s cham­pi­on­ing not­with­stand­ing, the case of Swanberg is pretty simple: though not really so bright, he dis­covered in col­lege that he could get cer­tain women to strip for him, and even to let him touch their girl parts, if he pre­ten­ded he was a film­maker! And over the course of his work, it’s pos­sible to fol­low his con­tinu­ing, erm, atten­tion to these mat­ters without hav­ing to read all that hard between the lines: see the pro­gres­sion from “LOL” to “Hannah” to “Nights and Weekends” and make par­tic­u­lar note of the role Swanberg casts him­self in in that last film. (For some reas­on that Ruttles song “Cheese and Onions” is run­ning through my head right now.) See also “Hot American Bodies,” or whatever it was called, in which the slath­er­ing of fake obser­va­tion­al irony barely cam­ou­flaged the true nature of what was Swanberg’s most overtly Joe-Francis-inspired endeavor.The prob­lem for Swanberg recently has been that now he has to MAKE A CAREER out of imper­son­at­ing a film­maker. And with Brody’s help, it may just work out. I’m curi­ous to see “Silver Bullets” because of the bull­shit Swanberg spouted about David Foster Wallace being “on his mind” as he con­ceived and shot the movie. (I’ve said words to this effect before, but giv­en that Swanberg moves his lips when he texts, I can­’t ima­gine he’s actu­ally pen­et­rated much of Wallace’s actu­al work, and is more likely just con­sumed with mor­bid pre­oc­cu­pa­tions about artist sui­cides.) Beyond that, I am likely to pass.

• Evelyn Roak says:

  February 12, 2011 at 2:16 pm

  Well said Jason M.
  1) I am struck by com­par­is­on to Bergman.
  2) Come come detract­ors but my com­par­is­on is not what I am saying.
  3) But, let us com­pare them at 30 and Swanberg is the winner.
  4) I will con­tin­ue to com­pare them when it bene­fits my argument.
  5) But, no, you can’t com­pare them when the bar is high. That isn’t fair.
  Starting the dis­cus­sion and pree­mpt­ively dis­miss­ing responses to the flail­ing asser­tions one made themselves….well, hope­fully there is some uni­form­ity to the pos­i­tion that this is a fal­lible and unpro­duct­ive mode of dis­course, stub­born, faulty and unopen to actu­al conversation.
  Dismissing any­thing about Swanberg or Bergman this is simply shoddy cri­ti­cism and writ­ing. Strawmen and fake inter­locutors and fail­ure of logic and incon­sist­en­cies abound. It is either obtuse or insin­cere. The con­tin­ued reli­ance on writ­ing against the fic­ti­tious con­ser­vat­ive crit­ic­al cabal and that con­cern trump­ing writ­ing about the movies, crit­ic­al pos­i­tion­ing over cri­ti­cism, just makes no sense or has no weight. To then make logic­ally faulty, incon­sist­ent argu­ments on top of that baffles.

• jbryant says:

  February 12, 2011 at 4:41 pm

  Coming to the SyFy Channel – the makers of DINOSHARK, SHARKTOPUS and MANSQUITO bring you a ter­ri­fy­ing vis­ion of anoth­er unholy hybrid – SWANBERGMAN!

• Asher says:

  February 12, 2011 at 11:09 pm

  I like how he’s com­par­ing dir­ect­ors to each oth­er at giv­en ages, as if they were base­ball play­ers. Preminger did­n’t make a great, or even good film, until LAURA, when he was 39 – but by the time he was 45 he had made 5 clas­sics (I count WHIRLPOOL). So is one sup­posed to value Swanberg over Preminger in a child­ish base­ball card col­lect­ing sense because he’s made more okay films than Preminger did at the age of 30? Or is it sup­posed to mean that Swanberg will go on to be a great­er dir­ect­or than Preminger was because he’s more pre­co­cious (though of course, Preminger spent the com­par­able years in ques­tion being the best the­at­ric­al dir­ect­or in Vienna, so you can­’t really fault him for being a slow starter)? I guess it’s more one of those things that he knows does­n’t mean any­thing but throws out anyway.

• jbryant says:

  February 13, 2011 at 5:28 am

  Brody seems to be for­get­ting that Bergman is dead, which auto­mat­ic­ally makes him bet­ter than Swanberg. 🙂