635 Weekend (1967)

[colinr0380]

I have to agree that Weekend does seem to look darker than I can remember on this new edition, but I'm not great at describing the technical side of how things look, so I'll defer to those who know better!

Kent Jones's visual essay on this disc is really valuable in noting some of the numerous quotes that fly past during the course of the film - these are the kind of things that Criterion really focuses on well in comparison to say the Tartan or Artificial Eye way of sending the film out there without any kind of context. For those distributors just making the film available is often an achievement in itself, so much so that it seems uncharitable to want anything more, but one of the reasons why I've always had a fondness for Criterion especially is the way that their editions help open up a dialogue around the film. The visual essay here (along with the reminiscence piece from cast and crew taking up the middle section of the booklet) is a great recent example of that. I'm trying to get my picks ready for the end of year awards, and I think this extra has just jumped into my list.

It was fascinating to read about Antoine Duhamel's thoughts on the use of his beautiful score (chilly and icy, and one which I wonder whether Howard Shore was inspired by for Crash) and the way that he composed music for the entirety of scenes, which Godard edited in and out from and raised and lowered the volume of, such as the opening conversation scene.

And if Criterion are looking for ideas for their Eclipse line, how about a "Mireille Darc, directed by Georges Lautner" set?

[MichaelB]

For those distributors just making the film available is often an achievement in itself, so much so that it seems uncharitable to want anything more

If a shoestring label like Second Run can supply copious context as a matter of expected routine, there's no sensible reason why a comparatively well-heeled label like Artificial Eye can't either.

[colinr0380]

Well, yes, but they don't seem to be taking the hints! Which just leaves them with releasing the films, which I suppose is the least they can do.

I was thinking about Artificial Eye in this context since the Raoul Coutard interview is ported over from the AE disc from back in 2004, one of the rare occasions where they did produce extras for a non-contemporary film.

[Mr. Ned]

Kent Jones' concise look at Weekend and its historical backdrop is an excellent supplement. One thing I noticed: the noticeable lack of clips of Pierrot le Fou; I counted only one still in the twenty minutes. Was this perhaps due to licensing issues? Who has license to Pierrot le Fou nowadays anyways?

[Drucker]

Who has license to Pierrot le Fou nowadays anyways?

Studio Canal

[rrenault]

Everyone complaining about the quality of the transfer obviously didn't see it screened at MOMA a few years back. I can assure you film projection gets a lot worse than a potentially undersaturated Weekend or a slightly piss-colored L'Enfance Nue.

[bdlover]

Okay, so having seen it in motion the problem is not that the whole BD is dark per-se, but that the colour timing is lazy and uneven. In particular, some shots have had their brightness / contrast crushed a little beyond what you would usually expect to see. It's distracting, and not quite how I remember it theatrically - and yet one must consider the possibility that this 'bad' grading is another of Godard's Brechtian tricks, suitable perhaps for a film 'found on a scrapheap'.

[Vocalities]

Sorry to bump this up, I don't really ever post here because I just like to lurk, but I just picked up this Bluray and it's the first time I had seen the movie, and I'm really confused about the audio. In some scenes the audio level of the music is so unbelievably loud that there is no way to know a character is speaking without reading the subtitles. I guess it doesn't matter since I'd need the subtitles anyway, but is this normal? Was it intended this way? If you didn't have the subtitles, I'd be surprised if you would even know some characters are speaking at times.

Sorry if this has been addressed, I didn't see anybody mention it and couldn't really find anything on it.

[colinr0380]

Do you mean the early scene with the couple in silhouette where the music rises and falls over the top of the conversation? Or something like the beeping of car horns drowning out dialogue?

They're quite Godardian traits that seem to suggest the unimportance of dialogue, or the way that sweet nothings obscure real emotions - see for example the opening scene of Contempt, where Bardot is in bed monotonously describing all the parts of her body to Piccoli while the score occasionally drowns her out. The other major one Godard uses is in his 'musical' films such as Une femme est une femme where the non-diegetic music suddenly starts and stops according to the whims of the characters (and Contempt fuses them both in the scene auditioning actresses in the theatre where the actress on stage suddenly starts and stops mid-singing, along with the blaring music suddenly cutting out, at the moments when the characters in the watching audience turn to speak to each other).

[Vocalities]

Do you mean the early scene with the couple in silhouette where the music rises and falls over the top of the conversation? Or something like the beeping of car horns drowning out dialogue?

They're quite Godardian traits that seem to suggest the unimportance of dialogue, or the way that sweet nothings obscure real emotions - see for example the opening scene of Contempt, where Bardot is in bed monotonously describing all the parts of her body to Piccoli while the score occasionally drowns her out. The other major one Godard uses is in his 'musical' films such as Une femme est une femme where the non-diegetic music suddenly starts and stops according to the whims of the characters (and Contempt fuses them both in the scene auditioning actresses in the theatre where the actress on stage suddenly starts and stops mid-singing, along with the blaring music suddenly cutting out, at the moments when the characters in the watching audience turn to speak to each other).

Really? I'm honestly just recently going through his films. I started with Breathless so I guess I haven't stumbled upon those traits yet. It's not even one scene, it's multiple scenes, and it's usually music that comes and goes in waves from subtle to overwhelming.

Anyway, thanks for clearing it up for me. Really enjoyed Weekend by the way. Such an interesting film.

[colinr0380]

The great aspect of Godard is the way he is playing with form to such an extent that content doesn't exactly become irrelevant but gets subsumed, or is subordinate to, the symbolism (for example the way that Masculine Feminin throws away the love story in its final scene, as if chiding us for having cared about the characters). Weekend is kind of the climax of all of this in the his classical filmmaking period before he moves into the more heavily didactic political works (which are kind of foreshadowed here in those speech-making scenes in the middle of the film). I'd suggest that it might not be the best place to jump right into, although I would have to admit then that Weekend was only the second film by Godard I saw after Contempt!

Perhaps Band of Outsiders might be good to turn to next as that is still very relationship and narrative based yet is also showing some of those moves into experimenting with form in scenes such as the 'sixty seconds of silence' that the characters dare each other into.

This might just be because it was the first Godard film I saw but I think Contempt is still the key to his 60s works, and with that being a film about filmmaking it really deals with a lot of those issues of sound: the overpowering and overwhelming, ironically commenting on and underscoring musical scores and issues of language, communication and what gets lost in translation (both in actual conversations in different languages, but also widened out to cover different character's interests and writing versus filmmaking as all having problems of miscommunication)

One thing that is very amusing to see on the Criterion disc for Contempt is the way that the English dubbed track irons out all the issues of the soundtrack rising up over the top of the dialogue (it plays underneath as a normal score would) and the way that it causes a lot of problems in the scenes with the translator! That dubbed track was a great, and very amusing, inclusion on the disc!

[wigwam]

yeah i saw Breathless and Weekend first, didnt get it, then saw Contempt which I liked and Band of Outsiders which I loved and 15 years later he's now my favorite and I've seen all but 4 or 5 shorts and Weekend is a top 5, it just wasn't the place for me to start

[domino harvey]

Sorry to bump this up, I don't really ever post here because I just like to lurk, but I just picked up this Bluray and it's the first time I had seen the movie, and I'm really confused about the audio. In some scenes the audio level of the music is so unbelievably loud that there is no way to know a character is speaking without reading the subtitles. I guess it doesn't matter since I'd need the subtitles anyway, but is this normal? Was it intended this way? If you didn't have the subtitles, I'd be surprised if you would even know some characters are speaking at times.

Sorry if this has been addressed, I didn't see anybody mention it and couldn't really find anything on it.

Funnily enough, I think it was on the MIA commentary for this film that Sterritt mentions how English speakers, thanks to zealous subtitles, actually understand more of what's going on in a Godard film than native speakers!

[JMULL222]

Yeah, like the 'analysis' scene - the joke is that the dirtiest bits get drowned out by the fluctuating score; but that's lost on us subtitle-readers.

[Oedipax]

For anyone who reads French, I highly recommend this article on the philosophical differences behind types of subtitling - it takes as its primary example Une femme mariée (and Vivre sa vie) to discuss, for instance, subtitling silent dialogue that is seen on-screen (and therefore comprehensible to native speakers paying attention to lip movement) but mute on the soundtrack. It also addresses the matter of subtitles that go beyond the original soundtrack and what a native audience could be expected to understand.

[Kirkinson]

One of the best things that ever happened to me re: Godard-watching was accidentally renting an English-dubbed VHS of Une femme mariée when seeing it for the first time. Of course the performances were no match for the original French, but the dub faithfully reproduced all of Godard's idiosyncratic plays on the way dialogue is heard, and it was very refreshing to be able to experience and appreciate this first-hand without having to imagine or extrapolate what it must be like for fluent speakers of French.

[colinr0380]

Yeah, like the 'analysis' scene - the joke is that the dirtiest bits get drowned out by the fluctuating score; but that's lost on us subtitle-readers.

Even if it is being used in an unorthodox way it also does what any score usually does and helps to add an extra emotional dimension that is totally absent from the explicit but unsexy goings on. I like that what the characters are talking about even if we could hear every word isn't very enlightening, apart from showing that they're rather detached from each other and appear to like having affairs and telling their partner about them in clinical, to the point of boring, detail, but the score is adding that sense of sad observation of those characters and their empty lives (a sadness and pity that they don't really deserve!) and that layering the emotion on in an extra-diegetic manner in the face of the cold, cruel characters the film is presenting is perhaps the best diagnosis of the sickness at the heart of society.

The welling up of the score in a way helps to upend the usual hierarcy of a film's imagery and pushes the focus of the audiences attention on that aspect, and the beauty of it in conjunction with the slow zooms in and out of the image, rather than onto an engagement with the characters and whatever issues they are dealing with taking primacy.

Anyway, it certainly makes me look at the saucer of milk I put out for the cat in a whole different way!

Or in Godardian terms:

"It certainly made.....saucer of milk....cat....different way!"

[bottled spider]

^ that's one of the things I like about Godard's King Lear, which is in English. It gives a sense of what (presumably) his French language films are like for francophones, with their overlapping and intermittently audible dialogue.

[cross-posted]

[knives]

^ that's one of the things I like about Godard's King Lear, which is in English. It gives a sense of what (presumably) his French language films are like for francophones, with their overlapping and intermittently audible dialogue.

[cross-posted]

Ditto toward the navajo subtitles which I got a feeling made reading the film more like watching it if that makes any sense.

[Kirkinson]

Ditto toward the navajo subtitles which I got a feeling made reading the film more like watching it if that makes any sense.

Maybe for some scenes, but for most of Film Socialisme the "Navajo" subtitles are breaking down dialogue that is actually clearly audible, so that's sort of like the direct inverse of what we've been talking about. But it's interesting to think about in that context, yes.

[domino harvey]

This strikes me as a somewhat misleading poster design...

[feihong]

That's amazing. The way the couple is strolling away from the burning car and the bodies is breathtakingly casual. The rest of the poster is looking forward to some Italian movies still a few years away, I think.

"A Woman and a Man on Saturday and Sunday" is kind of an odd translation of the title, too. It almost sounds––and looks––like you're in for an Antonioni movie, by way of Claude Lelouch.

[Numero Trois]

It almost sounds––and looks––like you're in for an Antonioni movie, by way of Claude Lelouch.

Starring Laura Antonelli!

[colinr0380]

The way the couple is strolling away from the burning car and the bodies is breathtakingly casual.

Didn't the poster makers realise that she had left her Hermès handbag in there!?!?

[remy]

I was trying to spot Jean Eustache while rewatching this film yesterday. I always assumed he played the violent hitchhiker (Joseph Balsamo), but IMDB tells me it's not him. Could anybody point me to the scene where Eustache appears?

(Btw, IMDB also tells me that the name "Joseph Balsamo" comes from the lead character from Black Magic with/by Orson Welles... Had never made the connection before)