Godard: When Did His Career Go Sour?

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I posit that he's virtually unwatchable and/or irrelevant post-Weekend (1967). I know that someone's going to try to flip In Praise of Love on me here, so please let me know if you've seen it more than twice, because I find it completely crap upon re-viewing it.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 11 August 2003 20:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Could you please expand the concept, I mean I don't always receive instant visual pleasure or entertainment by watching his later works but I think that irrelevant is too much in a world in which people consume ink to talk about miike...

― francesco, Tuesday, 12 August 2003 17:29 (twenty-two years ago)

Well, I mean, let's face it, he was teetering on the verge of incomprehensibility ever since Pierrot le fou. I think that Godard's career essentially has been a slow downwards slide - while his internal devices of playing with film language and rhetoric had initially huge and undeniably important returns, I find his oeuvre to be one that is, organized chronologically, for the most part dimishing returns from work to work. As far as I'm concerned, the last one I felt that even was worth the effort of getting through (the breaking-point, if you will), is Weekend.

Honestly, I expected many more people to come out of the woodwork to either offer their own point in the filmography where they tend to get exasperated or for their to be a ton of Godardites here to burn me at the stake. Where are you people?

― Girolamo Savonarola, Tuesday, 12 August 2003 19:11 (twenty-two years ago)

(wind blows)

― amateurist (amateurist), Tuesday, 12 August 2003 19:15 (twenty-two years ago)

"Anyone? Anyone?

How about you, Mr. amateurist?"

― Girolamo Savonarola, Tuesday, 12 August 2003 19:49 (twenty-two years ago)

I think Godard is like Ridley Scott : his earlier films were only good by accident. Once he was in control of his material he started to fuck things up. Scott let his cold proto-fascist machismo run free in movies that had no use for it, Godard made sure smug auteurism oozed out of every frame of his films. Bande à part is the last Godard film that has more greatness than Godard in it. After that one, all of his work is killed dead by his desire to be Super-Brecht.

― Sommermute (Wintermute), Tuesday, 12 August 2003 21:08 (twenty-two years ago)

hello people DETECTIVE!

― s1utsky (slutsky), Tuesday, 12 August 2003 21:59 (twenty-two years ago)

plus FIRST NAME: CARMEN!

― nnnh oh oh nnnh nnnh oh (James Blount), Wednesday, 13 August 2003 00:48 (twenty-two years ago)

I like Passion alot also

― nnnh oh oh nnnh nnnh oh (James Blount), Wednesday, 13 August 2003 00:49 (twenty-two years ago)

I think JLG/JLG and In Praise of Love are two of Godard's best. And I've seen each at least a half-dozen times.

― Josh Timmermann (Josh Timmermann), Wednesday, 13 August 2003 06:15 (twenty-two years ago)

unwatchable okay, but i'm skeptical about "irrelevant" - irrelevant to what? why is being "relevant" important?

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 13 August 2003 12:04 (twenty-two years ago)

why is being "relevant" important?

I wouldn't say that relevance itself is an important or requisite virtue of a film/filmmaker. However, I think that in the case of Godard, he clearly has an agenda and a program (though it certainly had its shifts and phases). So relevance would be a valid criterion to judge Godard on, I'd say, since he seems to value it and use it to shift the contemporary mores about the mutability and possibility of cinema. I think that Godard is very concerned about his relevance (which, while this doesn't necessarily matter itself either, can clearly be seen reflected in his work).

― Girolamo Savonarola, Wednesday, 13 August 2003 13:52 (twenty-two years ago)

totally agree with you justyn:
talking about relevance implies a brief defintion of the categories we are using: f.e.: influence (whatever we want that to mean) on other directors, expansion of the medium's grammar..and so on. and even if we could reach a shared ground in pointing out a common vocabulaty it doesn't mean that being relevant is a good thing per se in this field. I mean I love so much Jarmush's work for its total being a not-necessary cinema.

To say Godard reached his highpoints by chance is trying to hide the speculative side of his work that is always the result the application of theoretical problems to a specific practice.

anyway one peak is Nouvelle Vague and its soundtrack cd composed of the all the sound track of the movie

― francesco, Wednesday, 13 August 2003 13:57 (twenty-two years ago)

four weeks pass...

I don't know, but I would bet the long (like 10 minutes) sideways tracking shot (is that right?) of the grocery store in Tout Va Bien. Then again, I like that movie...

― Pete Scholtes, Thursday, 11 September 2003 21:13 (twenty-two years ago)

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