MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Außer Atem [de])

France 1960
d: Jean-Luc Godard
Gaumont-Columbia Tristar Home Vidéo / Opening / Les Films de ma Vie (Region 2 fr)

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Une femme est une femme

(Eine Frau ist eine Frau [de])

France / Italy 1961
d: Jean-Luc Godard
3sat TV (Region 0 de)

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Most of Godard's early movies are so much of their particular time that they'll need explanatory footnotes before long. This was the first of his colour/cinemascope tributes to the changing moods of Karina (his then wife); the film's own soundtrack notes that it might equally be a comedy or a tragedy because it's certainly a masterpiece. It has a thin thread of plot about Karina's desire to get pregnant, it flanks her with the pragmatic Brialy on one side and the romantic Belmondo on the other, then stands all of them in the shadow of MGM musical stars of the '40s and '50s, and it collages these elements together with sundry gags, worries, contradictions and asides into a kind of movie that nobody had seen before. The result is brash, defiant, gaudy and infinitely fragile.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Jean-Luc Godard's third feature and first studio production (1960) starts with a subversive premise: a "neorealist" musical in which the major characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy) can't really sing and dance, much as they'd like to. Periodically ravishing to look at (it's Godard's first foray into both color and 'Scope) and listen to (Michel Legrand did the nonsinging score), it's also highly deconstructive in the way it keeps jostling us away from these pleasures and in the general direction of indecorous reality. (It's also packed with both subtle and obvious references to other movies.) While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won't oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film's high spirits may still win you over. It is perhaps most memorable for being a highly personal "documentary" about Karina and Godard's feelings about her at the time, brimming with odd details and irreverent energies.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
Godard's third feature, conceived "within the framework of a neo-realist musical," is something of a romantic comedy with nods to René Clair and Ernst Lubitsch, about a stripper, Angela, who turns to a friend, Alfred - Alfred Lubitsch - to father her child after her lover has refused. "But the idealized, intermittently musical daily life of Clair's early talkies is part of a vanished world as is Lubitsch's tenuous web of ellipses which rescued the most banal situations. Godard's Paris and the people who inhabit its noisy boulevards have no real roots, and the quotations in which he delights only bring this out more clearly. ... Even this close-knit texture of small bistros, striptease joints, political suspicion and conjugal wavering is constantly violated in its naturalistic surface, not just by the comic turns of the plot but by Godard's reminders not only that the film is a performance but that the projected images are themselves illusory. Karina walks behind a pillar in her strip gear and appears completely dressed in her street clothes. Later she flips into the air the egg she is frying, goes to answer the telephone and comes back to catch the egg in the pan. We are in a world whose Columbus was Méliès. The film has a beauty that is brash and pathetic, like splintered colored glass, fragments that somehow compose a picture while refusing to hold together. ...
— Edgardo Cozarinsky, PFA

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux

(Die Geschichte der Nana S. [de])

France 1962
d: Jean-Luc Godard
Alive - Vertrieb und Marketing/DVD (Region 2 de)

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Twelve Brechtian tableaux chronicle the life and death of a whore, starting out as a documentary on prostitution, ending as a Monogram B movie. In retrospect, Godard expressed doubts about the cheap gangster pyrotechnics as being merely a nod to cinephilia. But like the highly stylised prostitution scenes, they are in fact a distantiating device forcing a more direct confrontation with the film's true subject: the enigmatic beauty and troubling presence of Karina, and the mystery of Godard's own passionate involvement with her. This film, as Godard has noted, was the first stage in the inevitable dissolution of their marriage, as described in "Pierrot le Fou"; and every scene in the film obliquely pinpoints that crisis as originating in the awareness that, as director to star actress, he found himself rapturously but humiliatingly playing client to her prostitute.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"My Life to Live" is a highly stylized and extraordinarily unformulaic adaptation of a simple premise: a young woman, seeking the freedom and excitement of, what Federico Fellini calls "La Dolce Vita", leaves her family to pursue an acting career, only to turn to a life of prostitution. From the opening sequence showing a detached, seemingly clinical exhibition of Anna Karina's face and profile, followed by an uneasy dialogue between Nana (Karina) and Paul (Andre-S. Labarthe) filmed at an angle showing the backs of their heads, we are introduced to the singular, iconoclastic vision that is Jean-Luc Godard. Stripped of expression and sentimentality, Godard, nevertheless, succeeds in creating a film that is visually stunning and full of pathos. We are drawn to Anna, not because of her seductive persona or compassionate actions, but because she is humanity, lost and desperate, incapable of comprehending her misery nor articulating her pain (Note the parallel character of Antonio Ricci in Vittorio de Sica's "The Bicycle Thief".
Godard's revolutionary camerawork transcends nouvelle vague novelty: it serves as a cinematic extension of Nana's soul. The awkward angles and long panning shots during Nana and Paul's conversations reveals the underlying tension and emotional distance between them. Deeply affected (understandably) by Maria Falconetti's performance in Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc", Nana's conversation proceeds in silent film intertitles - reflecting her own suffering and innate desire to achieve greatness and escape the banality of her sordid life. The seamless camerawork following Nana as she dances uninhibitedly around the billiard room feels intoxicating, almost mesmerizing - a fleeting glimpse of the few brief moments of pure joy she has ever known. "My Life to Live" is a truly remarkable film: a synthesis of artistic vision and moral tale, suffused with haunting melody, the ballad of a contemporary tragedy.
— Acquarello
•••••
It is wrong to state, as some critics have, that Godard is an extreme stylist without a stylistic system (as it is also wrong to make this claim about Godard's most significant contemporary disciple, Wong Kar-wai). The choices he makes illuminate his characters and situations, while specific visual motifs, for example the numerous backlit shots of Nana's upper profile, give the film a degree of continuity. And yet, the film does demonstrate a kind of hyperactivity, a willingness to look at its central character from a mass of different of perspectives, angles and through conventionally distinct modes of cinema (observational documentary, meta-cinema, fiction, essay). It is in this sense that one gets the feeling of watching a filmmaker drunk on the possibilities of a newly discovered, and newly free cinema.
This may all make this sound like an overly flashy and insubstantive film, but "Vivre sa vie" is actually amongst Godard's and the nouvelle vague's most intimate, moving, sustained and revealing works. The complex alternation between inside and outside, documentary and fiction, distanciation and involvement, actor and character, and what this asks of its audience, is the film's most profound achievement.
Through its obsession with the image of Nana, "Vivre sa vie" becomes a kind of lingering or after-image - best characterised by the close-up of her face and the multiple ways it has been imaged than by the narrative, or any one of the stories it tells or perspectives it unveils. In the end what I most remember is the image of Nana (isolated, crying and cut adrift in the pure space of the frame), the face of Falconetti's Joan, and the synthesis of looks, gestures and tears that characterises the scene revolving around Nana's moving visit to the cinema (the cinema as 'naked' faces, bodies, space and emotion). Godard's citation of Dreyer's film is movingly appropriate as it helps single out what is most remarkable in "Vivre sa vie". Both Dreyer's and Godard's films fragment filmic space, and the body, in similar ways and each provides amongst the most singular, painful and even cruel portraits of a character and actor on film. They both present female actors who show, give and nakedly reveal much more than we should ask for in the cinema.
— Adrian Danks, Senses of Cinema 2000

Le Petit soldat

(Der kleine Soldat [de])

France 1960
d: Jean-Luc Godard
3sat TV (Region 0 de)

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Godard introduces his 'little soldier' as a man turning from action to reflection: Bruno Forestier (Subor) is some kind of secret agent working against Algerian terrorists in France, but he doesn't believe in his fight, and his mind is full of aesthetic and philosophical questions. In fact, he's in many ways a prototype for "Pierrot le Fou". Bruno, too, falls in love with Anna Karina, and worries whether her eyes are Velazquez-grey or Renoir-grey; he suffers torture for her, and is finally betrayed, not by her but by the lousy political machine, in which Left and Right are mirror faces of each other. Looked at in the context of Godard's later, militant work, this film's analysis is at once naive and fascinating.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Made in 1960, on the heels of "Breathless", Jean-Luc Godard's second feature (and his first starring Anna Karina) is more typical of the intellectual rumination that would characterize his later work. Michel Subor plays a secret agent in Geneva who winds up being tortured by Algeria's FLN—arguably more as a kind of macho testing, like the protracted beating of the hero in "The Glass Key", than as a consequence of Sartrean position taking. For years "Le petit soldat" was banned in France for its treatment of torture and terrorism in the Algerian war; in fact Godard was closer to the right when he made it, but like his protagonist he was full of doubts. Subor's contemplative voice-over and Raoul Coutard's somber cinematography make this seem severe compared to the jazzy exuberance of "Breathless".
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
In his long-suppressed second feature ("Le Petit Soldat" was unreleased in France for three years due to the sensitive politics), Jean-Luc Godard utilized the thriller format to frame the story of a confused man in a complex situation. A French agent working in Geneva during the waning era of Franco-Algerian struggle, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor)'s indifferent politics and obsessive self-examination/definition lead him to a romantic involvement with Algerian agent Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina in her first Godard role). Their attempt to elude their political commitments by escaping to Brazil end in Bruno's torture by his own colleagues, and death for Veronica. It is only with his lover's death that Bruno's questioning finds answers and he becomes aware not only of responsibility for his own acts but for life itself. Godard examines Forestier's inside from the inside: Bruno's monologue and commentary is internal justification to an unseen, accusatory force. The cinematography by Raoul Coutard vacillates between documentary realism and stark, internal hallucination.
— Sally Syberg, PFA

Les Carabiniers

(Die Karabinieri [de])

France / Italy 1963
d: Jean-Luc Godard
3sat TV (Region 0 de)

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Godard's strangest movie, based on a political play and nurtured along as a project by Rossellini. Two moronic thugs (with ironically 'classical' names) join up as soldiers and pillage the world in a global war; they return home to their equally moronic wives and display their spoils. Godard juxtaposes their mindless exploits with extensive archive footage of warfare. His presentation of the sheer idiocy of war admits moments of grotesque humour (one of the soldiers sees his first-ever movie and tries to enter the screen), but it's mostly a cold and pitiless vision. Perhaps the most usefully extreme film of its kind ever made.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Jean-Luc Godard's "Les Carabiniers", an anti-war allegory told from the viewpoint of those who fight, is a refreshing antidote to the recent spate of war films. It details the adventures of Michelangelo and Ulysses, two peasants who, eager to partake in illicit and amoral activities made suddenly licit by the declaration of hostilities, agree to fight their king's war. It is not a particular war, but one which, in Raoul Coutard's landscapes and Roberto Rossellini's script, takes place nowhere and everywhere. A Brechtian anti-narrative, filmed objectively and dispassionately, eschewing emotional, visceral reactions, "Les Carabiniers" portrays the futility and absurdity of war. Coutard's newsreel-like images serve as a counter 'truth' to the image modern civilization creates of itself. In fact, Godard's exploration of Western consciousness, and its rationales for waging war, turns on an examination of images-the personal, stylized, collective and anonymous images that shape our view of the world. When Michelangelo and Ulysses return home from the war, they proudly bear a suitcase full of postcards. In their conviction of the equivalence of the 'mechanical reproduction' and the real thing, they've accepted the postcards as title-deeds for their spoils of war. On his first visit to the movies, in a classic confusion between the representation of reality and reality, Michelangelo ducks from a train and attempts to peek into a woman's on-screen bath. While Michelangelo and Ulysses' reality is literally reduced to images on cardboard and the movie screen, it is also part of a 'larger picture,' an ideology constructed on possessions and possessing.
— Kathy Geritz, PFA

Le Mépris

(Die Verachtung [de])

France / Italy 1963
d: Jean-Luc Godard
Kinowelt Home Entertainment / Arthaus (Region 0 de)

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A film about - among other things - integrity. The basic situation, faithfully adapted from Moravia's novel A Ghost at Noon, concerns a young woman (Bardot) who is gradually possessed by an overwhelming contempt for her husband (Piccoli), a writer beset by doubts when he is called in as script-doctor to a film of The Odyssey, being made by a director (Lang) who wants to capture the reality of Homer's world, and a crass producer (Palance) who just wants more mermaids. Yes, she agrees that the money will be useful; no, she doesn't feel he is selling out since he is interested in the subject; and which ever way he decides to jump is perfectly all right by her. But there still remains that tight knot of contempt which she won't explain and he doesn't understand. Around this Godard weaves subtle parallels with Homer's tale of patient Penelope, the statues of Minerva and Neptune which brood over the modern tragedy, locations which paradoxically set the airy spaces of a flat in Rome against the confines of the Homeric landscapes of Capri, and for good measure a stream of cinematic jokes. Magnificently shot by Raoul Coutard, it's a dazzling fable.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
A profoundly sad yet beautiful fable about the cinema ... An adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel A Ghost at Noon, CONTEMPT concerns itself with the filmmaking process, the nature of film authorship, and the art of adapting a novel for the screen. Godard favors a personal idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking and adaptation as is evidenced in his utilizing Moravia and Homer's work to relate the characters in the film to the people in his own life: Paul, Camille, and Prokosch evoke Odysseus, Penelope, and Poseidon while also suggesting Godard, his wife (and favored female lead at that time) Anna Karina, and distributor Joseph E. Levine.
The genesis of the project is worth recounting. Approached by Italian producer Carlo Ponti about a possible collaboration, the New Wave auteur suggested an adaptation of the Moravia novel with Kim Novak and Frank Sinatra in the leads. The pair refused. Ponti then suggested Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Godard refused. Eventually Bardot was chosen because of the potential financial rewards that could be garnered from revealing her celebrated delectable flesh on screen. However, Godard had the last laugh: the most extensive nudity is in the film's subversively tame opening scene. Committed to a personal cinema, Godard cast himself as Lang's assistant director and used the great auteur as his mouthpiece. CONTEMPT is beautifully photographed in Cinemascope with sun dappled color by Raoul Coutard and Georges Delerue provides the haunting score.
— TV MovieGuide

Bande à part

(Die Außenseiterbande [de])

France 1964
d: Jean-Luc Godard
TV5 TV (Region 0 fr)

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Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

(Lemmy Caution gegen Alpha 60 [de])

France / Italy 1965
d: Jean-Luc Godard
BR3 TV (Region 0 de)

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One of Godard's most sheerly enjoyable movies, a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction in which tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution turns inter-galactic agent to re-enact the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice by conquering Alpha 60, the strange automated city from which such concepts as love and tenderness have been banished. As in Antonioni's "The Red Desert" (made the previous year), Godard's theme is alienation in a technological society, but his shotgun marriage between the poetry of legend and the irreverence of strip cartoons takes the film into entirely idiosyncratic areas. Not the least astonishing thing is the way Raoul Coutard's camera turns contemporary Paris into an icily dehumanised city of the future.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
ALPHAVILLE is a brilliant satire of an alienated society that has been robbed of its poetry and emotion by science and technology. The film's central conceit—and joke—is that this dystopian futuristic society is actually contemporary France, and the pod-like, conformist mindset of its people already exists. All of the interiors were filmed in dehumanizing glass and concrete office buildings and hotels, filled with sterile corridors and fluorescent computer rooms. All of the exteriors take place in a nocturnal Paris illuminated only by car lights and flashing neon. The casting of Eddie Constantine was inspired, as he had established the character of the hard-boiled dick Lemmy Caution in a series of French movies based on Peter Cheyney's novels. With his trench-coat, fedora, cigarette, and craggy face, Constantine recalls a poor-man's Humphrey Bogart, nonchalantly shooting everything in sight. Raoul Coutard's superbly mobile camerawork and Paul Misraki's excellent score all contribute to a movie that proves that you need neither a huge budget or computer effects to make a classic sci-fi movie, but only imagination.
— TV MovieGuide
•••••
"Poetry is a craft for mortals and therefore mortally dangerous...Contraband...and consequently the more precious, for it is true...that if the world becomes a dream, the dream in turn becomes a world" (Godard on Cocteau's Orphée). In "Alphaville", Godard establishes a techno-Fascistic city in which poetry, and ideas of love and conscience, are contraband, therefore mortally dangerous. His stunning dream/nightmare world is created with mysterious, dread-filled and hauntingly beautiful images; but Alphaville, the "capital of pain," is Paris. The plot is a brilliant mixture of comic strip, film noir and science fiction. Special agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is sent on an intergalactic mission to Alphaville to dispose of the diabolical scientist Leonard von Braun (a.k.a. Léonard Nosfératu), whose mechanical brainchild Alpha 60 tortures the populace with logic. Here is a playful homage to film noir and also a sad reflection, particularly in the wretched figure of Akim Tamiroff as a soul-dead ex-agent. A wonderful moment in this surprisingly moving film finds the poker faced, monosyllabic, hard-as-nails Lemmy Caution trying to communicate the meaning of the word "love" to von Braun's robotized daughter Natasha (Anna Karina).
— PFA

Pierrot le fou

(Elf Uhr nachts / Pierrot le Fou [de])

France / Italy 1965
d: Jean-Luc Godard
3sat TV (Region 2 de)

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'Put a tiger in my tank' says Belmondo to an outraged Esso pump attendant... and the voyage begins. "Pierrot le Fou" was a turning-point in Godard's career, the film in which he tried to do everything (and almost succeeded). It's the tragic tale of a last romantic couple fleeing Paris for the South of France. But then again it's a painting by Velazquez (says Godard); or the story of a bourgeois hubby eloping with the babysitter; a musical under the high-summer pine trees; or a gangster story (with Karina the moll and Belmondo the sucker). She was never more cautious about her love; he was never more drily self-aware; and the film agonises for two hours over a relationship that is equal parts nonsense and despair. In desperation he finally kills her and himself while the camera sweeps out over a majestic Mediterranean sea. And a voice mockingly asks: 'Eternity? No, it's just the sun and the sea'.
— CA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple," Jean-Luc Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina). Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful 'Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. Godard's misogynistic view of women as the ultimate betrayers is integral to the romanticism in much of his 60s work—and perhaps never more so than here—but Karina's charisma makes this pretty easy to ignore most of the time. The movie's frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo's character quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue cars are stolen and destroyed.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
Curious that the film described as "Godard's most freewheeling film" should end in a murder-suicide. "I wanted to do...the story of the last romantic couple alive," Godard has said of "Pierrot le fou", and he may have done just that. Certainly, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina) are Godard's last romantic couple, and maybe even his first: their adventure in eros and danger on the Riviera fulfills the dream of escape for Michel and Patricia ("Breathless"), Franz and Odile ("Bande à part"), and Lemmy and Natasha ("Alphaville"). But this is Godard's "You Only Live Once" and his sense of fatalism seems at least as strong as Fritz Lang's; only he neatly reverses the story with Belmondo playing the fool implicated in the gangster world of Marianne, with whom he escapes a stupid bourgeois existence ("deformed clowns clothed as princes") and reinvents love. She calls him Pierrot after the puppet; he does a human puppet drama of the Vietnam war to lord it over the American tourists on the Riviera. The pathos of modern living, as powerfully expressed through Godard's experimental, philosophical exposition as it was in Lang's melodrama, is now updated to include ennui, accident, and absurdity among the forces destructive to love. Still, it was Lang, playing himself in Godard's Contempt, who mused, "Death is not a conclusion"; for Pierrot and Marianne, it is a kind of beginning. Shot by Raoul Coutard in brilliant primary colors, "Pierrot le fou" is ravishing, and very moving.
— PFA

Masculin, féminin: 15 faits précis

(Masculin - Feminin [de])

France / Sweden 1966
d: Jean-Luc Godard
3sat TV (Region 0 de)

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Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle

(Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von ihr weiß [de])

France 1967
d: Jean-Luc Godard
3sat TV (Region 0 de)

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Détective

(Détective / Investigation - Die totale Überwachung [de])

France / Switzerland 1985
d: Jean-Luc Godard
ZDF TV (Region 0 de)

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The trouble with Godard films is the weight of expectation brought to them: sometimes they're strained and serious ("Passion"), sometimes they're megabores ("Hail Mary"), and sometimes mini-masterpieces like "Détective". This is a cross between a "Grand Hotel" for the 1980s and film noir: a crumbling Paris hotel houses four groups of people whose paths occasionally cross. One is the group around house-detective Terzieff, still trying to solve a murder of years ago; another is the entourage of boxer Tiger Jones, in training under the eye of his manager (Hallyday); another is a couple on the verge of breaking up; and the last is the Mafia. Much of it, especially Léaud (Terzieff's nephew-aide) and Cuny as a Godfather who judges men by their toilet habits, is riotously funny. Built on the charisma of its stars and on memories of the great thrillers of the 40s, tenuously held together by Godard's romantic pessimism, curiosity and sense of humour, it's co-dedicated, sensibly, to Clint Eastwood.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Don't let the title mislead you: "Détective" is hard-boiled melodrama in name only. With a scrambled thriller plot, it's strictly a shaggy-dick flick. But its shagginess and even its sardonic gloominess are part of its quirky charm. In "Détective", Godard returns to the brass-knuckles fiction of his younger years to see if he can extract some lasting truths from it. ... The film is full of political wisecracks and classical music, movie quotes and book quotes. ... "Détective" is perverse and arbitrary-but that helps make it a warts-and-all reflection of Godard ... unified by feelings of nostalgia, resignation and despair. It's a Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man. ... You could label the narrative 'Front Window': in a whimsically run hotel, an unholy trio of menages ... work out their mysterious relations under the eyes (and the cameras) of a former hotel detective [assisted by] his sleuthing nephew. ... Godard's imagery has rarely been more elegant and concise [and] this film about faded passions and failure is gorgeously colored.
— Michael Sragow, Examiner
•••••
Jean-Luc Godard's deconstruction of film noir has the lightness and comic zip of some of his 60s features, though the mix of elements isn't quite as rich as it's been in his other films. The action is largely restricted to a Parisian hotel, where house detective Laurent Terzieff and his skulking assistant Jean-Pierre Leaud are making a half-hearted attempt to solve a two-year-old murder; fight promoter Johnny Hallyday is trying to train his new discovery, "Tiger" Jones, on a minimal budget; middle-class married couple Nathalie Baye and Claude Brasseur are struggling to work out the kinks in their relationship; and Mafia chieftain Alain Cuny discusses philosophy with a tiny French schoolgirl. The film's most interesting aspect is its finely layered Dolby sound track, which is full of such wonderfully Godardian experiments as moving the background score to the foreground while the voices cower beneath blasts of Schubert, Wagner, and Ornette Coleman.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader