Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for
showtimes
The five best words in the English language: new Jean-Luc Godard
movie. OK, so three of those words are technically French, but no one
is being particular, least of all Godard. The film at-hand, FILM SOCIALISME,
is at best a fragmented, three-part narrative, and unlikely to win any
new fans for the legendary new-waver. Once again Godard displays a mastery
of the cinematic form. Here he makes fascinating contrapuntal use of
several differing video formats (including cell phone, standard definition
digital video, and crisp, beautiful HD video), focusing on and weaving
together the visual textures unique to each of the various technologies.
As a result, the shots at times bang against one another, jarring the
viewer with each seemingly random cut, while at others the contrast
works to give us an intimate view of an elderly couple eating a meal
(cell phone) or a bourgeois family basking in the sun (HD). Godard's
deep understanding of film as an audio-visual medium is also on display.
A sound bridge carries us from the mostly white passengers on a cruise
ship—the location of the first sequence of the film—dancing the night
away, to the Asian and African workers who keep the playland going;
an older male voice speaks like a narrator from off-screen while a young
woman lectures back at him about Lenin and ideals while watching a movie
on a laptop, perched on the bed in one of the ship's cabins. Various
soundtrack elements clog our ears as they compete with one another,
forcing the audience to pick one out of the crowd, and drop the others.
The social commentary about the clueless, apathetic rich and the poor
workers whom they ignore is overt in each of these scenes (I can imagine
Marcuse laughing from farther off-screen than the old narrator), and
equally excusable. The film's dialogue, which is primarily in French
and English with a sprinkling of other languages, is only given in fragmented
pidgin English, utilizing what Godard has termed "Navajo" subtitles.
We get perhaps one or two words of text for every twenty that are spoken,
a stunted poetic comment, misspellings and all ("AIDS tool forkilling
blacks," e.g.). This provocative withholding of information can make
the already subtextually and thematically dense narrative frustrating
to follow, but it's results are brilliant when one is able to synthesize
the different details being communicated in the pictures, sounds, and
text into a larger meaning. Like an epic poem using 3 tangentially related
stories to explore a unified theme, the film eventually shifts to a
second stanza where the family crisis of a French politician goes down
at a gas station (while her daughter reads Balzac next to a llama),
and then shifts again to show what appears to be a montage of the various
cultures which border the Mediterranean Sea. This distinct separation
makes story tertiarily important. Secondarily, the film is an essay
on the current state of humanity, akin to Chris Marker's SANS SOLEIL
in its multiculturalism and simultaneous hope and disdain (when the
travelogue gets to Palestine, an intertitle flashes "Access: Denied").
But, primarily, the film is a stretching of the width and breadth of
possibility within the medium. Godard was recently described by Owen
Gleiberman as "Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky," and he
shows us, for perhaps the last time, that he understands both the powers
of cinema to make us engage in the act of seeing with ones own eyes,
and the power structures inherent in its gestures and punctuation. (2010,
101 min, 35mm) Cine-File.info
No comments:
Post a Comment