I’m not clever enough to provide snappy answers to stupid questions; but I am smart enough (sometimes) to know when to shut up. Here, though, is what I am smart enough to say: The things I love that I don't understand hold me like a simple object gently in the palm, and measure my inconsiderable heft, and toss me; and I’m happy while in flight. The nagging suspicion that I cannot simply love a movie, but must understand it, deadens me. Jean-Luc Godard fills me with this blind—or simply blurry—love:
Contempt,
My Life to Live,
Breathless. And whenever I chide myself for that blindness, I try to emulate my betters, like Blind Johnny Milton, the Puritan blues man who bore his mild yoke, considered how his light was spent, and stood and waited, serving. I should be so lucky.
Band of Outsiders also blinds me. It’s—a movie—and a discussion of the movie—and of movie-making itself—and deeply regretful that the discussion ever occurred—and exhilarated by its lack of regret for all the rest of it.
The contradictions may chatter on until I have no room left to speak, but this minor love-triangle/heist movie jumps off the sidewalk like firecrackers when it turns to itself interrogatively—and to us, asking us to consider the intersection of narrative and image, the fiction of voice-over, the actors' acknowledgment of an audience, perhaps even of their own presence in a film. Add to that the contrite—or self-consciously trite?—attempts to retract distances between narrative and audience, technique and experience—interrupted by the film itself, which refuses to settle down and simply be the movie—and we have guerrilla warfare waged against (for?) movie-making, freezing all cinematic elements until the only movement is somewhere in the director's eye, a reflection—but one we will never see, stuck in our seats with just whatever the movie leaves us.
I cannot explain this; I cannot even explain why I like each Godard film I see better than the one before. But in
Band of Outsiders when the two crooks and their accomplice/victim line-dance in some little joint, solemn in self-conscious performance, but matter-of-fact, almost carefree, while the narrator forces the music to cease while he speaks, cluing us in on the characters' thoughts—presenting them so flatly we suspect either the thoughts themselves or the fact that those are actually characters with thoughts—or even the narrator's account of the thoughts—I find all of those things I think I know about this movie crowding in, making me smile—then asking why I'm smiling.
And at the end, when murder will out, I am relieved by the choice of survivors, but wonder if I have overstepped my bounds by feeling anything at all. Still, I cannot simply assert that Godard is an extra cool, cold son-of-a-bitch: I enjoyed
Band of Outsiders too much. And I don’t see monumental precision, like the builders of the Pyramids, framing disdain for the observer with the perfect circling cold of astronomy. Godard works too fast, and tumbles in too much. Again, all I can explain is that I want to see another, and another. I am back to bliss, even though I have to close my eyes every once in a while—the most constant viewing of all—as it all passes by, hand-held and measured in meaningless seconds, like a blind sprint through the Louvre.
I’m not clever enough to provide snappy answers to stupid questions; but I am smart enough (sometimes) to know when to shut up. Here, though, is what I am smart enough to say: The things I love that I don't understand hold me like a simple object gently in the palm, and measure my inconsiderable heft, and toss me; and I’m happy while in flight. The nagging suspicion that I cannot simply love a movie, but must understand it, deadens me. Jean-Luc Godard fills me with this blind—or simply blurry—love: Contempt, My Life to Live, Breathless. And whenever I chide myself for that blindness, I try to emulate my betters, like Blind Johnny Milton, the Puritan blues man who bore his mild yoke, considered how his light was spent, and stood and waited, serving. I should be so lucky.
Band of Outsiders also blinds me. It’s—a movie—and a discussion of the movie—and of movie-making itself—and deeply regretful that the discussion ever occurred—and exhilarated by its lack of regret for all the rest of it.
The contradictions may chatter on until I have no room left to speak, but this minor love-triangle/heist movie jumps off the sidewalk like firecrackers when it turns to itself interrogatively—and to us, asking us to consider the intersection of narrative and image, the fiction of voice-over, the actors' acknowledgment of an audience, perhaps even of their own presence in a film. Add to that the contrite—or self-consciously trite?—attempts to retract distances between narrative and audience, technique and experience—interrupted by the film itself, which refuses to settle down and simply be the movie—and we have guerrilla warfare waged against (for?) movie-making, freezing all cinematic elements until the only movement is somewhere in the director's eye, a reflection—but one we will never see, stuck in our seats with just whatever the movie leaves us.
I cannot explain this; I cannot even explain why I like each Godard film I see better than the one before. But in Band of Outsiders when the two crooks and their accomplice/victim line-dance in some little joint, solemn in self-conscious performance, but matter-of-fact, almost carefree, while the narrator forces the music to cease while he speaks, cluing us in on the characters' thoughts—presenting them so flatly we suspect either the thoughts themselves or the fact that those are actually characters with thoughts—or even the narrator's account of the thoughts—I find all of those things I think I know about this movie crowding in, making me smile—then asking why I'm smiling.
And at the end, when murder will out, I am relieved by the choice of survivors, but wonder if I have overstepped my bounds by feeling anything at all. Still, I cannot simply assert that Godard is an extra cool, cold son-of-a-bitch: I enjoyed Band of Outsiders too much. And I don’t see monumental precision, like the builders of the Pyramids, framing disdain for the observer with the perfect circling cold of astronomy. Godard works too fast, and tumbles in too much. Again, all I can explain is that I want to see another, and another. I am back to bliss, even though I have to close my eyes every once in a while—the most constant viewing of all—as it all passes by, hand-held and measured in meaningless seconds, like a blind sprint through the Louvre.
Comments
Post a Comment