Jean-Luc Godard

[Romolo]

Zoetrope co-produced Sauve qui peut (la vie). I'm pretty sure that was the extent of the relationship.

Coppola also wanted Godard to direct Hammet, which Wenders eventually directed.

Could you please mention the source you rely on to assert that Coppola asked Godard to direct Hammett?

[Altair]

I'm pretty sure that's in Peter Cowie's book on Coppola, published by Faber.

[Romolo]

I'm pretty sure that's in Peter Cowie's book on Coppola, published by Faber.

Thank you Altair, but I think that in Peter Cowie's book, it's Truffaut and not Godard who his is mentioned in the paragraphs on Hammett.

[Red Screamer]

Anne Wiazemsky writes about Godard's meetings with Lennon (and she herself having tea with McCartney under the conference table) in her book Un an après.

Only now realizing the irony: Godard repeatedly mentions in interviews that his long-unfulfilled ambition before making films was to become a novelist for prestigious French publisher Gallimard...which is exactly what Wiazemsky accomplished after giving up acting, and with great success.

[beamish14]

I'm pretty sure that's in Peter Cowie's book on Coppola, published by Faber.

I don’t think Godard was actually on Zoetrope’s payroll like Michael Powell and David Lynch, but he observed some of the making of One From the Heart and I think wanted to make a documentary about it

[Altair]

I'm pretty sure that's in Peter Cowie's book on Coppola, published by Faber.

Thank you Altair, but I think that in Peter Cowie's book, it's Truffaut and not Godard who his is mentioned in the paragraphs on Hammett.

Thank you! I didn't have my copy to hand to double-check.

[accatone]

Anne Wiazemsky writes about Godard's meetings with Lennon (and she herself having tea with McCartney under the conference table) in her book Un an après.

Only now realizing the irony: Godard repeatedly mentions in interviews that his long-unfulfilled ambition before making films was to become a novelist for prestigious French publisher Gallimard...which is exactly what Wiazemsky accomplished after giving up acting, and with great success.

Histoires du Cinema is with Gallimard as well - the quatre volumes first edition is beautiful. Just for thr record…

Short question: Is there a transcript or subtitled version of Godards segment from the 3x3D anthology film available somewhere? The film itself is on youtube -

[domino harvey]

There are definitely subs around for it. Have you looked on OpenSubtitles?

[accatone]

Thanks D. - will dig into this! I thought i remembered a DVD but was not able to track one down. Faux memory i guess.

[Red Screamer]

Cannes Classics 2024.

Including the news: two more “final” Godard films announced, a short film and a scénario film for the short (as he’s done before).

[Stefan Andersson]

JLG´s Scénarios - trailer w/ English subs; DoP Fabrice Aragno on making the film:
https://www.festival-cannes.com/2024/sc ... uc-godard/

[Stefan Andersson]

"Impossible scenario, the death of Virgil", a documentary about "Scénarios" by producer Mitra Farahani:
https://ventura.gal/en/project/impossib ... e-virgile/

[Red Screamer]

I just read the first volume of Godard par Godard and I made a Letterboxd list with all of the films he recommends in his early criticism (up through July 1959).

I thought it was funny that the interviews with Rossellini and Renoir were marked as fabricated, but the interview with Reichenbach happens to attribute to the filmmaker the same tastes as Godard the critic, often repeated in his reviews—the great films which tend toward documentary: Eisenstein’s unfinished Que Viva Mexico, Murnau’s Tabu, Welles’ unfinished It’s All True, and Rossellini’s not-yet released India. I would guess the interview is based on something that actually took place, since there’s detailed information on Reichenbach’s upcoming films, but surely that’s a canon (plus a passing reference to Logan’s Bus Stop) too unusual for multiple people to share, unless the two were closer friends than I’ve heard.

[domino harvey]

Interesting list. The inclusion of Rouch's Jaguar refers to a working, non-commercial version noted by Cahiers as Jaguar (en cours de montage) (1953-1955). The finished 1967 film you've linked consists of this material and subsequent material filmed later

[Red Screamer]

Right, I’ll make a note of that. Thanks!

[fiendishthingy]

No subtitles, unfortunately, but the Cinémathèque française just posted an 80-minute talk with Godard from 1985.

I'm not sure when they were added, but I just noticed that this now has English subtitles available.

[domino harvey]

This may have already been posted somewhere on the board but I’d never read it: Godard in interview with Cahiers du Cinema circa 2019, in which we learn, among other things, that Godard liked Adele Haenel but not her films. This is quite an interesting exchange, though:

CDC: In the film, you show pictures of Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette. One after the other.

JLG: In my view, these are the three from the Nouvelle Vague. It’s missing Rozier, who wasn’t at Cahiers, but who was the Nouvelle Vague all alone. Chabrol isn’t part of it.

CDC: Even the first films up to Les Bonnes Femmes?

JLG: I thought so at that time. But he was more concerned with selling films. I couldn’t not put Truffaut in there. Chabrol is a pharmacist even if he wrote a Hitchcock. But he made an incredible number of films. I tried to find The Blood of Others based on a novel by Simone de Beauvoir. I didn’t know it at all.

CDC: Did the passing of Jean-Pierre Mocky affect you?

JLG: He was nice. I liked him a lot, not his films. I can find them nice because he’s the one that made them. There’s one that I liked a lot, but he didn’t. La machine à découdre.

CDC: Do you often think of your years at Cahiers?

JLG: Yes, it’s my life.

CDC: That is what is beautiful about The Image Book. The whole life piles up. You keep everything with you.

JLG: I debuted in the second Revue de cinéma when it was with Gallimard and it was with the help of Doniol-Valcroze that I entered Cahiers little by little. Doniol-Valcroze was the son of a friend of my mother’s at the Victor-Duruy high school. I thought he received me because of that. I learnt later that he was demobilized and took refuge in Switzerland. It was my mother who got him to France, to Thonon, on a little speedboat called “the hyphen” and with which we often went vacationing in my grandfather’s property. I discovered that after Doniol-Valcroze’s death. I wasn’t against the Cahiers management at that time. He was the editor-in-chief along with Bazin. He was a “gentle man” in the literal sense of the term. I didn’t know Bazin like Truffaut did at all. I knew Bazin as the head of a communist organization, Work and Culture, just opposite the Beaux-Arts. There was a small library opposite run by a friend of Rivette’s from Rouen. It’s a story that I attached myself to little by little, not from the beginning, but there are all these stories I want to keep to myself. I was prudent like the Delacroix character. I stole some money from one of my uncles to finance Rivette’s first short film, Le Quadrille.

CDC: Whom did you feel closest to?

JLG: Rivette. Then Truffaut, but before he made Les Mistons. I don’t know if he was already married to Madeleine Morgenstern, whom I liked a lot. He’d become rich by this point. Madeleine Morgenstern’s father was the head of a distribution company called Cocinor in the Nord region and in Paris. But when he wrote “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema”, I hung out with him a lot. I wasn’t so much with Rivette. We could go see films at 2pm and leave at midnight because it was a single-admission cinema. I’d give up after an hour or two. Rivette stayed until the end. Rohmer had a different life. He was a professor and lived in a small hotel opposite the Sorbonne. His name was Schérer and he started signing “Rohmer” so that his mother didn’t know he led a dissolute life in cinema. These were three different friends. It was real camaraderie with Schérer—I still call him Schérer—Rivette and Truffaut. Schérer was one of the few who knew which woman I was in love with, and I was the only one to know that he was in love with the wife of an old head—a communist—of the CNC. Rohmer was ten years older and he was the counterbalance to Bazin and Pierre Kast. In The Image Book, I have a shot of the Liberation of Paris. We see an FFI member from behind, with a gun on his back, speaking to a woman on her knees. To my mind, this man was always Pierre Kast. I hope it’s true.

CDC: We get the feeling that you didn’t have political discussions at Cahiers at that time.

JLG: Very little. It was the cinema. Even girls were a secret. I remember a moment during the Algeria war. I was at the Place de l’Alma with Rivette. A car sped by with the “nee-naw” of the OAS siren. I saw that as a shot by Douglas Sirk. And Rivette chided me. I couldn’t see things politically at that time. The one who could easily do that was Straub, because he was there from the beginning.

[JSC]

For someone who ingested the sheer amount of cinema that Godard did in his lifetime I would imagine there were
plenty of films that fell short of his expectations. I remember listening to John Lennon's Rolling Stone interview from
1970 where he disses a few records and then him saying that maybe his own problem was that he simply expected more
or perhaps expected too much from other artists.

[domino harvey]

I do wonder if Godard’s rejection of Chabrol in those terms is tied up in residual resentment for Chabrol’s ability to always get decent funding for his films? Obviously he wasn’t the only one to be so fortuitous— Truffaut was similarly lucky but on a smaller scale of volume due to his death, and Rohmer always broke even but he also purposely constructed films that would not cost anything so that’s a special use case in itself. But it’s interesting to frame his exclusion in that lens when Truffaut sold out hardest of all

[pistolwink]

But a shot as a photo is not a shot from the film anymore. On the other hand, the second image, as a photo, is a shot from the film.

Never change, JLG.

[rrenault]

Was Truffaut really a "sellout" though? I know that's the standard film history narrative, but on some level I feel his tendency to employ "movie-ness" in a self-conscious manner such as in films like Mississippi Mermaid was simply an element of his aesthetic arsenal. This makes sense given his deep love for Hitchcock. Much of what Truffaut did was to make "Movies" in a very self-conscious manner, and this just happened to find some degree of commercial favor in the sixties and seventies, but can one really label him, in retrospect, more "middlebrow" than much of Kurosawa's output, La Dolce Vita, or Antonioni's MGM era? Granted, something like The Last Metro veers a bit towards "heritage cinema", but films like Mississippi Mermaid and The Woman Next Door manage to be oddly unsettling in a way that, say, a Bertrand Tavernier or Louis Malle film might not be. The standard narrative seems to be Truffaut was a middlebrow irrelevancy after Jules and Jim (or perhaps The Soft Skin). Just my two cents.

[knives]

His failed projects highlight his ‘sellout’nature a bit more as he was more than willing to work with the old guard he railed against. He didn’t really have firm commitments.

[Never Cursed]

Yeah, it's kind of an about-face to begin one's career railing against critics/awards bait and end it consciously making films in the exact same vein (though even that comparison isn't complete, as Pastoral Symphony, a film he scathingly criticized in his "Certain Tendency" essay, is much better than his late-period work). For me, his political and aesthetic attitudes will always be summarized by his biography's hilarious relation of the date of his first march in the Mai '68 protests: June 1. A fence-sitter through-and-through.

[rrenault]

These are fair points through and through. Then again, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Pierre Melville were hardly "men of the left", but I guess they, and even Rohmer to a degree, showed more "conviction" in their overall body of work, even if said conviction couldn't exactly be framed in simple left/right terms.

[rrenault]

These are fair points through and through. Then again, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Pierre Melville were hardly "men of the left", but I guess they, and even Rohmer to a degree, showed more "conviction" in their overall body of work, even if said conviction couldn't exactly be framed in simple left/right terms.

In either case, I do sense there being a canonical rehabilitation effort under foot for Truffaut's later work. Hence all those Radiance releases. Whether or not it holds water in the long run only time can tell.