tieman64
"I don't know him (Spielberg) personally. I don't think his films are very good." – Jean-Luc GodardJean Luc Godard's "In Praise of Love" is divided into two parts. First part: a filmmaker's project about a love affair. This section is filmed in luxuriant blacks and whites. It is cinema as past. It occurs first. Second part: a filmmaker tries but fails to connect to a young woman. This section is filmed in saturated colours. It is cinema as future. It occurs second. Godard's order is accurate; past follows present because "the past" here is the filmmaker's memory in the present.Unsurprisingly, "Love" is not only about a physical romance between people (and countries/cultures), but the romance between Edgar, a filmmaker, and cinema. A stand in for the younger, more optimistic Godard of the 60s, Edgar charters Godard's own journey toward disillusionment.The film's second section revolves around a grandmother - a Resistance fighter during WW2 - whose "past history" is sought by Hollywood producers who work for Steven Spielberg. The resistance loses and Hollywood co-opts her tale. "Because they have no memories of their own," Godard muses, "Americans buy the memories of others." Here, history has been subsumed to fiscal and technological muscle. "He who controls technology, controls history," someone then says, both the past and cultures flattened, homogenised and foisted upon a world too weak to resist. But the past, Godard reminds us, has always been a kind of one dimensional artifact; always a collection of thin signs, signifiers and pop icons. Think 60's America, think hippies, weed, Dylan and bell-bottom pants; the memory triggers of an era.Many have complained that the film is "anti-Spielberg", but Godard is rallying against a more generalised form of "cultural imperialism"; the inability of smaller countries (the old grandmother) to resist the logic of a very neo-liberal, late capitalism. He then goes on to state that techno-capitalism, the engine of Hollywood, "colonizes the way Nazism once did". This reads like a bit of shallow sensationalism, though there are some similarities between the two: Nazisms rampant mysticism, its vehement anti-capitalist stance whilst simultaneously being rabidly capitalist, the way capitalism "benignly" bulldozes cultures by innocuously presenting new (and false) choices which we ourselves willingly choose etc.It is clear that Godard has contempt for "Schindler's List" (those who argue that "Spielberg made no money off "List" miss the point), which he largely believes is a trite bag of lies (which modern historians have since verified - see Gruntova, Crowe, Meyer). But his real target is the way cinema repackages, distorts and commodifies history, reducing the past to a set of myths designed to placate. Godard doesn't quite exempt himself from this process. In "Carmen" Godard made fun of being out of sync with the world, casting himself as a washed up wreck of a movie director called "Uncle Jean". In this film, he expresses his inability to love cinema. Cinema has left him hanging like an ex lover. He no longer believes in it as a transformative artform."Love", like a number of Godard's later films, is shot like a series of fleeting fragments. Memory is omnipresent, it invents our current reality, and as such the film is structured around a series of memory triggers. Making heavy use of montages, thematic juxtapositions, symbols, symbolic vignettes and jump cuts, Godard's language here is too esoteric for audiences to digest in one or even two viewings. Like Godard's greatest films ("Weekend", "Film Socialisme", "Our Music", and to a lesser extent "Made in USA", "Histoire(s) du Cinema", "First Name: Carmen", "JLG/JLG", "Nouvelle Vague", "Hail Mary", "Every Man For Himself", "Contempt", "King Lear" and "Pete the Madman"), it's one which gets better, more touching, with re-watches.More typically Godarddian musings follow: "moving forward is a rejection of your former self." Edgar is the only character in the film who's trying to become an "adult" - seen here as an effort to transcend the world's "Spielbergs" - an attempt which is comically mirrored to Godard's admission that in his old age, he is left only to gaze at the past, unable to move forward and trapped with the regrets of his youth. The idea that youth and old age are recognisable (from a physical and philosophical perspective) and easy to achieve with little effort whilst adulthood, or a "fully-realized, ethical maturity", is more elusive since few people are "allowed" to reach their potential, is repeated throughout the film.And so despite Edgar's best efforts, he is unable to achieve what he set out to do. He makes the jump from childhood to old age without ever becoming an "adult". The world simply doesn't care about Edgar and his "love project", preferring to be trapped in a kind of infantalized, Spielbergian limbo. "The State cannot embrace the world in its totality," Godard then opines. "The state is self-serving and negates love." Love, in Godard's case, is indistinguishable from cinema. Neither is allowed and capitalism's logic is a threat to both.And while most filmmakers see the past as something dead and gone, it's very much alive for Godard, for whom understanding history is the only way to break the vicious cycle of human tragedy. Like "Our Music" and "Film Socialisme", the idea here is that all art forms have failed to evade capitalism, and film, in its ahistoricism, in its unwillingness to understand the past, has followed suit. While these political ruminations are typical of late-Godard, the film's tone is wholly new. This is ultimately a love story, or rather, a film about every form of love: the love between people, creeds and countries, the love of philosophy, the love of what Godard calls "truth and clarity", the love of an ex lover, the of love cinema and the potential the fantasist hopes it still holds. In each sub-section of the film, such "love" morphs into loss and/or melancholy.8.5/10 - Multiple viewings required.
bob the moo
Edgar is a director trying to pull together a project around the subject of love. While drawing it up the author meets a young woman he once knew very well and he spends time with her again while jumping through the various funding and organisational hoops. In the second part of the film we skip backwards two years to the point where the author originally met the woman. At this point in his life he is representing Hollywood and is in the process of purchasing the rights to the story of the girl's grandparents, who ere in the resistance during the majority of World War II.There's one thing to be said for Godard and that's that you can be fairly confident he isn't going to be directing the next Harry Potter film as this 2001 movie shows he is as difficult and rewarding as he could be. The first half of the film is in black and white, while the second is in blistering digital colour. If my plot summary suggests a total cohesion then forget it – the suggested connection with a romance is more from my summary than the actual film. Instead what we have is free flowing dialogue that covers issues around America, art, love, age, humanity and so on – it is difficult to get into but it is worth trying. The dialogue is rather pretentious and too 'deep' to be natural or realistic but it still engages the brain in a way that kept me interested even if I struggled to get into narrative or characters, or to really agree with much of what was being said. I say it is worth trying but I would suggest that this makes it a weak film by the standards of more linear films and should be seen as more of an experience than a story or 'normal' film.Matching this, the direction is both hypnotic and off-putting. Shots are framed in very arty ways with the characters in shadow, out of focus, out of shot etc for much of the film; the b&w section is crisp and feels older than it is, while the colour section is startling in its intensity. Again all this has the dual effect of coming across as rather pretentious and overly arty but then also being interesting enough and imaginative enough to keep you watching. Of course many audiences will be put off, and rightly so because not even once does this film take a step towards the audience to help us out – instead it pitches its tent and simply says that we can take it or leave it. In my own 'difficult' style, I managed to do both and found the film as frustrating and alienating as I did interesting and involving. The cast are hard to judge because they are rather stilted and cold throughout, but none of them really give anything that could be described as a poor performance.Overall this is a strange film and one that is worth a try and worth sticking at for what it does well. However this is not as simple as it should have been and the film does very little to help the audience keep involved and interested. Visually it is true art-house stuff but yet is also great to look at – starkly beautiful or weirdly colourful; meanwhile the dialogue is unnatural and pretentious but yet still interesting and thoughtful. A strange mix but one that is worth a try.
