The second section takes place in a French petrol station and garage. Or you could do both.
Yet this film weirdly tilted me, just a little, away from agnosticism towards the faith. I would have looked forward to attending Godard's press conference, but of course he didn't attend it. But however wayward and annoying, Godard is a distinctive modernist screen poet.Jean-Luc Godard's new film may also be his last. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Godard: Film Socialisme at Amazon.com. We enter the cinema with open minds and goodwill, expecting Godard to engage us in at least a vaguely penetrable way.
Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. There are shots of kittens, obscurely linked to the Egyptians, as well as parrots. In Film Socialisme, Godard plays with digital film, showing its advantages and disadvantages with humorous and bizarre results. Film Socialisme is a collage of texts, musical phrases and still and moving images, and Godard's conception of essay cinema, comparable to Chris Marker, is brought yet further into alignment with the new generation of video artists – it could be the nearest thing we'll see to a kind of installation or installation crossover piece in cinemas. No one's expecting a box-office bonanza. It is a fragmented meditation on the themes of the nation state, justice, and historyor those who long ago gave up on Jean-Luc Godard, his latest film (which may also be his last) has absolutely nothing to offer. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports a positive score of 59% based on 58 reviews, with an average rating of 5.37/10. The fact that it has English subtitles that are only telegrammatic stubs, giving the rough gist in two or three words, doesn't help. Once in Montreal, I sat next to him at a little dinner for film critics, at which he arranged his garden peas into geometric forms on his plate and told us, "Cinema is the train. But in "Film Socialisme," he expects us to do all the heavy lifting. It's more the latest fruit born of an ongoing experiment that the director has been engaging in since his first feature, Breathless, more than 50 years ago. Film Socialisme is exasperating and opaque, and it proved to be the reddest of rags to critical bulls when it first surfaced last year. Other shots seem taken with cell phones, and there are bits and pieces from old movies.The film closes with large block letters: NO COMMENT. The third section, beginning notionally in Egypt, is a montage of images including Jerusalem, Odessa, Stalin and Hitler.In its wintry and valedictory way, the film returns us to the spirit of the 1960s, Godard's great heyday, when images and slogans really were believed capable of changing the world, and when France's young radicals were infuriated by their elders' inglorious collaboration both with the Nazis and with the Americans in enforcing an empire in south-east Asia. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. I guess he learned it from old Westerns.His Navajo speakers touch on socialism, gambling, nationalism, Hitler, Stalin, art, Islam, women, Jews, Hollywood, Palestine, war and other large topics. But in "Film Socialisme," he expects us to do all the heavy lifting.When the film premiered at Cannes 2010, it was received with the usual bouquet of cheers, hoots and catcalls. That I concede showed wit. Both are equally true. Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 64 out of 100, based on 13 reviews.
Defenders of Godard wrote at length about his content and purpose, while many others frankly felt insulted. He is now far, far away. These words appear in uppercased subtitles and are mostly nouns. These subtitles, Godard explained, are what he calls "Navaho English." I can't pretend to understand Film Socialisme.
(You can see it here: http://bit.ly/lznp1u)In the film, he shows us fragmented scenes on a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean, and also shots which travel through human history, which for the film's purposes involve Egypt, Greece, Palestine, Odessa (notably its steps), Naples, Barcelona, Tunisia and other ports. The garage is anybody's guess.There is also much topical footage, both moving and still. It is not the train." But only Godard has the authorial prestige to make it happen at all.It is a fragmented meditation on the themes of the nation state, justice, and history, and a further interrogation of the meaning of the image in our culture, and, probably, an extension of Godard's modernist self-questioning and deconstructing of cinema, pushing it further into a baffling counter-cinema or anti-cinema. Or not.Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Some Germans drive up, ask if this is way to the Riviera; she tells them to invade some other country and they roar off screaming: "Scheiss Frankreich!" Film Socialisme is exasperating and opaque, and it proved to be the reddest of rags to critical bulls when it first surfaced last year. It all seems terrifically political, but there is nothing in the film to offend the most devout Tea Party communicant, and I can't say what, if anything, the film has to say about socialism.Godard has sent my mind scurrying between ancient history and modern television, via Marxism and Nazism, to ponder — well, what? Or perhaps my memory has tricked me, and he said, "Cinema is the station.