Post by Capo on Jul 22, 2007 22:14:30 GMT
Passion
Jean-Luc Godard 1982 France / Switzerland
The turbulent (love) lives of a film director, the manager of a hotel at which the cast and crew are staying, and the workers of the factory neighbouring the hotel, all intermingle.
The plot description seems misleadingly clear, but its clarity might help the would-be viewer going into it, so elusive is Godard's blending of ideas and narrative strands, not only in overall structure (going back and forth between locations and lovers), but in the obscurity with which he treats singular scenes: on the one hand with extreme minimalism (the camera hardly moves), on the other with a complicated, maximalist soundtrack, with conversations happening out-of-frame - if they're in the scene at all. Intermittently brilliant, it comes some twenty years after Truffaut's try at dense self-reflexivity, Day for Night, and seems in comparison - as no doubt expected - emotionally cold if intellectually rich. Perhaps it is due to the audacious blend of sexual, brutish vulgarities and notions of high art: there are lots of naked bodies shot in painterly reconstructions of Rembrandt, Ingres, Delacroix and Ingres; and it seems somehow fitting that Godard releases this the same year as Greenaway's debut feature, The Draughtsman's Contract: it is the film which Greenaway's work would come to resemble closest. Best scene: the cavalry riding through the artificial film set, dwarfing the buildings and streets they ride through.
Jean-Luc Godard 1982 France / Switzerland
The turbulent (love) lives of a film director, the manager of a hotel at which the cast and crew are staying, and the workers of the factory neighbouring the hotel, all intermingle.
The plot description seems misleadingly clear, but its clarity might help the would-be viewer going into it, so elusive is Godard's blending of ideas and narrative strands, not only in overall structure (going back and forth between locations and lovers), but in the obscurity with which he treats singular scenes: on the one hand with extreme minimalism (the camera hardly moves), on the other with a complicated, maximalist soundtrack, with conversations happening out-of-frame - if they're in the scene at all. Intermittently brilliant, it comes some twenty years after Truffaut's try at dense self-reflexivity, Day for Night, and seems in comparison - as no doubt expected - emotionally cold if intellectually rich. Perhaps it is due to the audacious blend of sexual, brutish vulgarities and notions of high art: there are lots of naked bodies shot in painterly reconstructions of Rembrandt, Ingres, Delacroix and Ingres; and it seems somehow fitting that Godard releases this the same year as Greenaway's debut feature, The Draughtsman's Contract: it is the film which Greenaway's work would come to resemble closest. Best scene: the cavalry riding through the artificial film set, dwarfing the buildings and streets they ride through.