Film Socialisme [DVD]

His 60s classic output had a vibrancy,colour,storylines,graphics,playful punning with language,irreverence,jumpcut techniques,love of Hollywood.They swept you along with them in the New Wave of French film and auteur theory. Pierrot Le Fou,Breathless,Le Mepris.After 1968, Godard took off with socialist perspectives,becoming more obscure, didactic projects,less accessible.Film Socialisme is in the run of excellent later films starting with Slow Motion, In Praise of Love and now Film Socialisme.Often written off by critics who oppose the anti-narrative school,they write Godard off as being cranky, perverse,curmudgeonly,unable to communicate or not wishing to.The ideals that led to him making films are still strong,hence the intellectual currency of socialism. Film Socialisme is a film in three parts: "Des choses comme ça" ("Things like that"), "Quo Vadis Europa" and "Nos humanités" ("Our humanities"). This is a variation of his Dziga Vertov phase.Inspired in part by De Olievera's A Talking Picture.

In the first part of this symphony in 3 movements, on a Mediterranean cruise liner travelling to different ports, tourism as Empire,in a shrinking Europe of moral failure and cultural decline.He satirises the bourgeoisie,driven in flocks of asinine passivity,demented frenzy. The cruise ship's interior is sometimes captured with high-quality DV, sometimes with lower-grade stock, at other times in pixilated,splotchy,bright fashion probably filmed with cell phone cameras.Alain Badiou,philosopher, lectures about Husserl in an empty theatre,Patti Smith wanders with guitar, a Russian student and detective debate about lost Spanish gold of the Spanish Civil War, gorgeous images of the sea are juxtaposed with the banalities of shipboard life,the quotations of philosophers.Godard's obsessions are with dialectics,binary opposites,returning to the geometry of origins.

We then shift to a series of interactions among members of a family who operate a garage in the French countryside, the family of husband,wife and two children,do not become characters,because of interruptions,they remain statues that speak,with a llama and donkey. The children hold their parents to account with questions about liberte, egalite, fraternite. Thence to several brief scenes set in a variety of politically-charged locales, including Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Naples,Barcelona and Greece: six sites where myth predominates, that present how European culture learned how to make both art and language by studying its ancestors.There is a brilliance of framing and editing,the vital interaction of image with sound.Fragmented,splintered,disjointed imagery and sound.The Odessa Steps figure due to Eisenstein,also Orson Welles's Don Quixote.

Film Socialisme prefigures Greece's debt,our debt to Greece,Europe's dependence upon America,the Arab Spring, Palestine,the losses of the ancient sources of our humanity,shoring the fragments of his film essay/images/texts against his ruin(he's 79).He utlises philosophical texts,poems,words of European writers,to invade and modify,with the accumulation of voices,dialogue,the received meanings of each viewer.The concept of video installation comes to mind,now painting and cinema are dead. The individual installment of a body of work.The past and future of Europe is the central subject; the perception of image with text is the experiment.This takes place in many languages, English proper,Navajo English,Greek,Russian,Arabic,French,Italian.His subtitling in Navajo English is a political act of rebellion against English as the dominant language.Clips from Italian neorealist films,Agnas Varda, war archives,Hollywood classics,as well as a series of animals: parrots, cats, a donkey,a llama,a bull,swirling sharks. All should find themselves incomplete, open,messy at the film's end,this memoir that merges film,history and the self,never a finished work.This pathway to the future,the importance of new Godard,liberation extends outwards from
the film.Later Godard is in need of more attention than his early output.

Intriguing cinematography throughout makes this a massive visual success, but this film is inscrutable as text. It is "scrutable" (?) only to a small clique of Godardophiles. Unfortunately, when Godard gets political he also gets extremely abstract. The political history that he so often references both verbally and visually is obvious enough, but what we are to do with that history is not so clear.

There are many different Godard's though. Sometimes you get the playful cineaste and sometimes you get the political historian. In the recently released Histories we get the playful cineaste and the political historian considering the complicated and uncertain relationship between image & reality. I recommend the Histories without hesitation.

Film Socialisme, however, is not really a film you can review as anything but an aesthetic object/a piece of abstract underground cinema. In many ways it covers the same ground as the Histories but its much more abstract and much less resonant as a discourse on image, reality, history, politics.

As fond as Godard is of texts, he resists stable readings/meanings of any texts including his own. Thus his fondness for word play in many of his works including both the Histories & Film Socialisme. But in the Histories word play is not the only form of discourse. In Film Socialism it is.

In Film Socialisme, the word play is sometimes amusing, but an hour and forty minutes of word play as the only text will leave any viewer (even the most loyal Godardophiles) hungry for something solid to respond to. In Film Socialisme there are plenty of breathtaking images but since the meaning of each image remains elusive there is no accumulation of meaning and when the film is over one is left only with a handful of fleeting impressions.

The following is just a dose of what you will find in this film:

Chapter One: The Sea and the Decks and Interiors of The Costa Concordia

Gorgeous cinematography of the sea juxtaposed with generic tourist activity.
No real characters to connect with. Suggestions of stories but just barely.
Overheard utterances are all three and four word collages evoking history & politics (esp Algiers).
A girl in a white dress repeatedly walks into a wall of glass and then falls into a pool and floats face down. No one notices.
Patti Smith haunts the corridors with guitar.
There is a strong sense that this is a voyage to nowhere and that all voyagers (tourists and intellectuals and artists alike) are all equally lost. But this is highly speculative on my part.
The sea.
Funerary music.

Chapter Two: The Gas Station Bordering Lush Green Farmlands

Unbelievably gorgeous use of primary colors (reminiscent of Pierrot Le Fou). And light.
A film crew tries to capture something about the family that runs the rural gas station but the something is resistant to capture.
As in part one, dialogue is all patchwork, abstract.
Here though, in this context, the "text" feels like rural resistance to urban intellectualizing. Again, this is highly speculative on my part.
Country life looks and feels more attractive than ship life. It is perhaps no more scrutable than life at sea but more humble, more rooted, and the characters display more feeling.
Godard exercises his (these days rarely seen) Bunuelian humor by placing a llama and/or a donkey in many scenes.

Part Three:

Footage of the horrors of history. Some actual footage, some cinematic renderings of historical events. Juxtaposed with art history slides.
Brief cut to passengers exiting the Costa Concordia.
Footage of contemporary cafe life & student revolutionary stirrings.

"Film Socialisme" is really a triptych that starts with a riveting modern-day "Ship of Fools" Mediterranean cruise in which some passengers lament various socialist conundrums that have high value to revolutionaries but, alas, no one else. Maybe I should call the film a modern-day "Ship of Fool's Gold" as one of Godard's characters questions the disturbing fate of Spanish Republic gold on a floating casino bound for Spanish ports. As we watch tourist liquidity squandered in gaming rooms, it is impossible not to see this ship as a symbol of triumphant but self-destructive corporate capitalism: the world as one vast and aimless Club Med. Since Godard is a Brechtian film maker, expect no conventional characterization or narrative. Ideas are what matter here and they are very compelling ones--given power by ironic juxtapositions with the film's setting. To wonder about the failure of revolution on a pleasure cruise is absurdly heroic. Nevertheless, the first third of this film is one of the best Godard has made.

I confess to having become restless during the second third, a "family drama" where a French garage owner confronts his children for their alienation from what seems to them (and Godard) sentimental fealty to and respect for elders. Both generations seems like comic caricatures and I am not sure what Godard wants me to feel, except, perhaps, utter, unbridgeable disconnect.

In the third part, the film regains structural power and has a visceral excitement reminiscent of Stan Brakhage. We are plunged into a 20th century fin-de-siecle collage of images that remind me of William S. Burroughs most Bruegel-like cut-and-paste invocations of societal collapse and disorder. This last part is like a symphonic scherzo. The film left me admiringly breathless. Godard continues to be Godard--making major films that only he can make.