Jean-Luc Godard

[therewillbeblus]

Luckily you've both posted your lists in the dedicated thread, so you don't need it!

[domino harvey]

In the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn, why I do declare!

My lists, with orphans highlighted

GODARD
01 À bout de souffle (1960)
02 Pierrot le fou (1965)
03 La Chinoise (1967)
04 Masculin Féminin (1966)
05 Week End (1967)
06 Une femme est une femme (1961)
07 Vivre sa vie (1962)
08 Nouvelle Vague (1990)
09 One Plus One (1968)
10 Detective (1985)
11 Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)
12 Le Mépris (1963)
13 Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980)
14 JLG/JLG (1995)
15 King Lear (1987)
16 Tout va bien! (1972)
17 Notre musique (2004)
18 Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991)
19 Bande à part (1964)
20 Histoire(s) du cinéma (var.)

[therewillbeblus]

I really wish I participated in that list project... having finally finished off the lingering subbed shorts and commercials a few months ago, I may as well give it a shot:

1. Pierrot le Fou
2. Masculin Féminin
3. Weekend
4. Une femme est une femme
5. Notre Musique
6. Le Mépris
7. Sauve qui peut (la vie)
8. La Chinoise
9. À bout de souffle
10. Le Gai Savoir
11. Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
12. JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December
13. Vivre sa vie
14. Detective
15. Hélas pour moi
16. Nouvelle Vague
17. King Lear
18. 2 or 3 Things I know About Her
19. Puissance de la parole/ The Power of Speech
20. Closed Jeans (series 1 and 2) + Metamorphojean (commercials)

If the list was features only, Numero Deux and One Plus One would move in (or maybe Tout va Bien.. can the list go up to 21?) More than most filmmaker rankings, this list will reshape itself tomorrow, and almost entirely arbitrary beyond the top two

[Ovader]

I just found out that back in December Michael Witt posted on Facebook a link to a very rare film from the personal archive of Mike Dibb available on Vimeo.

In Witt's post he mentioned the following:

It’s a short film he directed for the BBC in July 1968 in Cowdray Park, where Godard was shooting a sequence for ONE PLUS ONE. It was broadcast on BBC2 within the framework of the arts magazine RELEASE on the 30 November 1968 to coincide with the screening (which has become famous…) of ONE PLUS ONE at the London Film Festival.

This version of the film is not the final broadcast version, for which the commentary, spoken here by Dibb, was replaced by that of a professional.

We learn from this little film that the film crew filmed by Godard in the Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemsky) sequence is the BBC crew that had come with Dibb to film the interview with Godard, and found themselves immediately co-opted into the latter’s film. (Apparently there was no film in the camera that ‘films’ Wiazemsky.)

A longer version of Dibb’s interview with Godard was published at the time in THE LISTENER.

[accatone]

Upon re-reading parts of Michael Witts Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian, i came to this:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/feat ... fn-39516-5
and found the corresponding film/video here:
https://www.rts.ch/play/tv/special-cine ... eo:9923322
It might be old news to some, but was new to me.

[criterionsnob]

Jean-Luc Godard Hints at Retirement in New 85-Minute Conversation

[aox]

Well, that's the end of cinema. Pack it up.

[therewillbeblus]

I don't have time to watch the video now, and I'm not sure if it answers this question, but is he indicating that those two films are made already, will be made in the future, or will be left as scripts?

[Big Ben]

Godard will only retire when he physically dies.

[Noiretirc]

Well, he is 90. Don't all working 90+ year olds hint at retirement?

[knives]

Not Eastwood, he’s just taunting death.

[dda1996a]

Does anyone remember (and can post a link to) the music "video" Godard did? I'm almost 100% it's Godard, and from what I remember it's supposed to be an anti-video, being a one shot of a tape deck?
Can't remember what it's called

[hearthesilence]

Does anyone remember (and can post a link to) the music "video" Godard did? I'm almost 100% it's Godard, and from what I remember it's supposed to be an anti-video, being a one shot of a tape deck?
Can't remember what it's called

When did he do this? FWIW, it sounds just like the Replacements when they did their first major label videos - they just filmed a speaker, using different takes for different videos/songs. (I don't think any of them watched Godard, and they released an anti-MTV song called "Seen Your Video" just a year before on their last indie LP, Let It Be, which is a landmark and still once of my very favorite LP's ever.)

[Rayon Vert]

I don't think this is it by the description, but it is a music video clip Godard did in 1996. I'm not seeing anything else in the IMDB credits that fits the bill.

[Edw]

Does anyone remember (and can post a link to) the music "video" Godard did? I'm almost 100% it's Godard, and from what I remember it's supposed to be an anti-video, being a one shot of a tape deck?
Can't remember what it's called

The France Gall song Rayon Vert links to is the only music video listed in Michael Witt's extensive bibliography (in "Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian") of JLG's filmed and written work through 2012. At Letterboxd someone refers to the Gall video as the second one Godard made, without unfortunately saying what the first one was.
"Faut pas rêver" (1977) is referred to as a music video by someone else at Letterboxd, and it seems to be in the spirit of your inquiry. But it's actually three minutes of a kid looking at an offscreen tv broadcasting a complete video or musical performance while chatting with his Mom and eating an apple - all the sound is diegetic, so the music is somewhat muffled - followed by a bit of text from Godard wondering if tv will be more relevant to the people when the Left take power.

[Rayon Vert]

Wikipedia has a list of one-shot music videos in case that might help find it (though I imagine it's English-voiced music biased).

[dda1996a]

Does anyone remember (and can post a link to) the music "video" Godard did? I'm almost 100% it's Godard, and from what I remember it's supposed to be an anti-video, being a one shot of a tape deck?
Can't remember what it's called

When did he do this? FWIW, it sounds just like the Replacements when they did their first major label videos - they just filmed a speaker, using different takes for different videos/songs. (I don't think any of them watched Godard, and they released an anti-MTV song called "Seen Your Video" just a year before on their last indie LP, Let It Be, which is a landmark and still once of my very favorite LP's ever.)

Yes, it is The Replacement's Left of the Dial video what I had in my head. I guess someone connected it to Godard somewhere so my mind mixed the two up, thinking Godard was behind it. I guess someone wrote it was an anti-music video like Godard made some anti-movies or related the prankiness of both or something, which is why my brain remembered Godard when thinking about the video.
Thank you all for your help!

[zedz]

The France Gall song Rayon Vert links to is the only music video listed in Michael Witt's extensive bibliography (in "Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian") of JLG's filmed and written work through 2012. At Letterboxd someone refers to the Gall video as the second one Godard made, without unfortunately saying what the first one was.

I don't know who was saying that on Letterboxd, but if they were speaking loosely they might have been referring to his segment of Aria, which is in some ways a subversion of the form of the music video.

[colinr0380]

"Faut pas rêver" (1977) is referred to as a music video by someone else at Letterboxd, and it seems to be in the spirit of your inquiry. But it's actually three minutes of a kid looking at an offscreen tv broadcasting a complete video or musical performance while chatting with his Mom and eating an apple - all the sound is diegetic, so the music is somewhat muffled - followed by a bit of text from Godard wondering if tv will be more relevant to the people when the Left take power.

I would count this as, albeit a rather unorthodox, music video! Its a 1978 television piece for the Patrick Juvet song Faut pas rêver, or "Dream On"

Here's the translation of the bulk of the piece (though not the few lines before the daughter is provided with the apple to eat or the rather crucial end part that runs under the final black screen) from the For Ever Godard book, which also notes that the voice of the mother "Camille" is played by Anne-Marie Miéville:

Mother: Are you going to Olivia's this afternoon?
Daughter: Yeah, sure!
Mother: Have you done the exercises she asked you to do?
Daughter: Well, yes, everything!
Mother: Yes, because you've got to work a little in between classes, the classes alone aren't enough.
Daughter: Yeah... but God... I practice my scales anyway and I study anyway!
Mother: Did you go swimming this morning?
Daughter: Uh-huh
Mother: What did you do? Competitive [...] things like that?
Daughter: We swam a few kilometres, it took ages... You know, it was... it's a 25 metre swimming-pool so when you do twenty lengths... it takes a while.
Mother: For the... er... modern competition system
Daughter: There were only four of us who managed a kilometre
Mother: Why do you do it then, do you like it?
Daughter: Yeah, I suppose... I don't... I dunno... Well, I managed 900 metres, I had another... 100 metres to do, and after that, you forget you're swimming, so...
Mother: Okay, we should put away the crockery from time to time, because its all very well leaving it to dry, but it mounts up, and then... there's... there's loads and it's always me who puts it away, I'm sick of it!
Daughter: Listen, I'll do it later, I've got to watch this.
Mother: You always say you'll do it later, you watch TV, you've always got something to do and you don't do it, and I end up doing it! It's not fair!
Daughter: That's not true...
Mother: Yes it is!

Final quotation:

"When the left has power will television still have so little to do with people?"

[colinr0380]

And here's a section from Raymonde Carasco's essay "The Forms of the Question" from For Ever Godard about the clip:

As is the case with all the brief forms invented by Godard, this little opus is not in the least a minor work. It is made up of two shots: first, a medium fixed shot of a little girl who is eating an apple for her afternoon snack after coming home from school; she is responding to her mother, whom we don't see (the voice of Anne-Marie Miéville is recognisable) and who asks her about her day, while the little girl watches, distractedly, a television set that is supposedly broadcasting the song of Patrick Juvet (whom we don't see either). Then, the second shot shows the following question appearing as text on a black background: "When the left is in power, will television still have so little of a relationship with people's lives?"

In this everyday dialogue, we find the emergence of a fundamental critical question that, in the mid-1970s, must have been perceived as quite violent (at that time we were right in the middle of the Giscardian regime, and it would take seven more years for the left to come to power). We also find here a little study on the problem of off-screen. The positioning out of frame, in turn, of the song, the mother, and of the television set leaves room for an image of ordinary life, convincing particularly in proportion to its modesty and to its passive nature (the little girl is tired: she is relaxing; she is doing nothing; all the active elements remain at a distance). But this image of ordinary life cannot be the only image called for by the question written on the screen.

The shot here possesses three layers of meaning: first, a polemical meaning, as the shot positions itself, in its simplicity, against false ideological images, since the frame obstructs the televised images and keeps them out of play. Second, an actual and relative meaning, since the shot does not pretend to fulfil the programme that the critical question announces. Third, the shot is a sample or glimpse of an alternative, creating a gap in the ordinary stream of dominant images. In this way, the shot here turns into a "Problem" in the Godardian sense that we are trying to construct: that is to say it is always at the same time polemical, prospective and dialectical.

That's quite a heady reading, but an interesting one. For my part I think it is also key that we cut to the black screen just as the mother starts berating the child for her lackadaisical manner and, after complaining about her not helping to wash up, the conversation continues under the black screen with words like "argent" thrown about, as the frustrated mother cuts her child's reverie short by bringing her own issues to the table about how much all this stuff is costing her.

[Edw]

And here's a section from Raymonde Carasco's essay "The Forms of the Question" from For Ever Godard about the clip…

Thanks for the two contextual posts! My casual acquaintance with the piece is betrayed by the fact that I apply a masculine pronoun to the girl. Should have said 'their'…