Category: Cinema

The Image Book: A Review

James Ashley

image-book

Jean-Luc Godard released Le livre d’image in 2018. It is a montage film that stitches together brief film images – from the history of cinema, from the news and from his own films.

While it uses the same strange score editing as Farwell to Language, the overall effect is much more hypnotic – and beautiful.

The quick edits are overlaid with narration by Godard himself. At a certain point, his reflections turn to France’s relationship to the middle east and there is some original footage that Godard shot.

Montage films are kind of wonderful. There’s Wong Kar-wai’s film Hua yang de nian hua that stitches clips from Asian cinema totally unfamiliar to Western audiences. Watching it feels like glimpsing into a secret world. The beautiful scene in Cinema Paradiso that collects all the scenes deemed by the Catholic censors to be too explicit is a celebration of life, sexuality and cinema all at once. A recent discovery for me was The Road Movie from 2016, which basically takes dashcam footage uploaded by Russians and serializes it. Most of the footage involves car crashes. The best parts of it, though, are the moments before the sudden car crashes where you listen in on friends chatting, spouses fighting or the Russian version of AM talk radio. There’s a strange feeling of normalcy to those moments that makes one feel that we are all the same, wherever we are, whatever language we speak.

And then the crash happens.

The Image Book doesn’t contain any crashes. Instead it feels like a journey through Jean-Luc Godard’s mind while looking at the world through the eyes of one of cinema’s great masters.

Goodbye to Language: A Review

James Ashley

goodbyetolanguage

I’ve watched Godard’s Goodbye to Language (“Adieu au Langage”, 2014) once so far. It deserves and requires multiple viewings. It is a montage film, shot with multiple cameras (including a Go Pro) and covering multiple overlapping and unrelated story lines. There are also lots of shots of Jean-Luc Godard’s dog.

The movie is purposefully annoying. Take for instance the use of fast cutting. Fast cutting comes from music video editing and is used to convey forceful action. But the fast editing is still tied together with an underlying soundtrack to provide a sense of continuity and to bracket a series of related footage. Godard, on the other hand, undermines this by starting a piece of the score and then chopping it unceremoniously like a record player losing its groove. And then he does this over and over with the same piece of unsatisfyingly broken music in different places throughout the film.

If there’s a clue to what the film is “about” (and does it really need to be about anything) it’s in a line in the last third of the film, about a couple on the verge of breaking up, where both characters say that they understand what their partner is saying but cannot understand what they themselves are saying. It’s like a reverse gaslighting. Which, to be fair, is what marital fights feel like.

Other parts of the film include ponderous philosophical monologues and dialogues about the “tyranny of the image” – the tendency of myth and magical thinking to displace discursive reason. Godard also has lots of scenes of people interacting with their phones in book stalls and standing next to other people, highlighting something that has become so common that we no longer comment on it, but which can still shock when we see it on film. Smartphones and internet culture are in their own way manifestations of the tyranny of the image, since they replace long-form thinking with easily digestible memes. To the point that we now take for granted that long-form is a  waste of time and assume that it is normal (or even possible) to absorb complex thoughts in a few minutes.

Naturally there is irony in the title and concept of the film since film itself is a replacement of discursive thought with images and syllogistic reasoning is replaced with a musical score to move us from one narrative moment to the next. Except in Godard’s hands, the film resists us and makes even the simplest things hard. It fucks up the score. It limits the beautiful long shots. It uses gritty camera footage at a time when high quality digital images are cheap and easy. The handling of the sex scene is bleehhhh. Worst of all, the central story is anti-ship in a medium that requires sexually appropriate relationship building to ensure commercial success.

The overall effect of the movie on me is that I struggled to watch it but can’t stop thinking about it even weeks later. And parts of the movie I thought were pretentious and had less there than met the eye – I now think contain infinite depth.

An extra feature of the film is that it was originally shot in 3D and was exhibited at Cannes in 3D. I watched it in 2D but now will try to track down the 3D DVD. Like other amazing films – such as Bi Gan’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night  — it uses a cinematic medium that has since fallen out of favor.  I fortunately still have an old 3D flatscreen and a 3D DVD player to watch it on.

Other movies, like Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, which is ultimately a technical master’s experiment in 3D cinema, isn’t even available in 3D DVD format. Given the current death of the movie theater in America, there’s even a chance that we won’t ever be able to see it in its intended form again.

The Future of Cinema and Reader Response Theory

James Ashley

bigfootboardgame

One of the great burdens and pleasures of being at home is filling a lot of down time with streaming content. I currently stream from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Comcast, Disney, Shudder, Criterion Channel, Crunchyroll, Hulu, Master Class and HBO Max. Of these, Amazon Prime seems to be the least curated. You find the weirdest things.

Prime has a lot of Sasquatch movies. My early fascination with Bigfoot starts with the Leonard Nimoy In Search of … series and continues through Harry and the Hendersons, multiple The X-Files episodes, Abominable (the bigfoot movie based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window) and more recently The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot starring Sam Elliott and Aidan Turner.

tales_of_darkness

None of this had prepared me, however, for the experience that is Bigfoot Tales of Darkness. Here is the irresistible synopsis provided by Amazon:

This is a series of tales of Bigfoot, of a mythical creature from heaven that once was a arch angel named Lucifer has come to earth and man knows him as Bigfoot. As he kills and rampages humans through all the tales in this story.

I couldn’t get through more than ten minutes of it. The film seems to be pieced together out of stock video purchased online with some homemade electronic music layered over the top.

But I still want to give it the attention it may not deserve because it is so crazy and someone somewhere, using the tools available to them, went to the trouble of making a movie about Bigfoot being the devil and somehow got it onto Amazon Prime. Plus I have lots of extra non-commuting time these days.

There’s a theory of literature called Reader-response criticism that fits well into the way we currently consume media. It rejects modernist theories of authorial intent and concerns itself more with the experience of the reader. This was a precursor of the “death of the author” movements that came in the 80’s.

In our own times, the way people access media and the rise of cult followings has dramatically changed the way films are created, marketed and distributed. Audiences are balkanized in such a way that content marketed to small groups and genre fans can be highly profitable and can even afford to alienate large swathes of people. This is in contrast to massive budget superhero films that can only achieve profitability by killing on opening day as well as in overseas markets (esp China) and then in the cable, streaming and DVD aftermarkets as well as product tie-ins and merchandising.

Following some of Umberto Eco’s ideas, this made me wonder if I could make myself an ideal reader for this movie. An audience of one.

To accomplish this (and overcome my physical response to the first 10 minutes of Bigfoot Tales of Darkness, a combination of lethargy and nausea) I need to put it in a different intellectual context.

Godard

Because it might be some kind of highly experimental film that plays on genres and narrative structure, eschewing actors for stock video clips, I decided the avant-garde French film director Jean-Luc Godard might be a good reference for understanding (or creating an understanding) of what the ideal author of this Bigfoot movie is trying to say.

Godard’s last two films, in particular, have adopted a bricolage style of film-making, clipping together images and fragments, using both high quality film and low quality video, with often confusing sound editing that breaks up the continuity instead of tying it together like a normal movie score would do.

Over the next week I plan to watch and report on Godard’s 2014 award-winning film Goodbye to Language, about a couple’s breakup interspersed with shots of a dog playing, and his 2018 film The Image Book about the misrepresentation of Arab culture in Western movie making.

They both have poor reviews on IMDB. Critics, amirite?

I’ll follow this with a fair attempt to assess Bigfoot Tales of Darkness on its own terms.