With Arms Outstretched

FAIL; I'm back

Sometimes I fear I will become like one of my favorite undergrad professors who, despite being a brilliant woman and my mentor, was just so out of it when it came to technology, pop culture, basically anything that was both “cutting edge” and understood best by fifteen year olds. I want to believe that I could figure out how to host my own blog and website, and I know that the majority of technical problems I’ve encountered with the “new blog” over the last few months have had more to do with my laziness than ineptitude. Sometimes you really shouldn’t try to fix what ain’t broke, and blogger definitely ain’t broke, unlike my silly other blog, whose DNS servers keep spontaneously changing (thank you Google). So I’m back, for good, and I’m bringing those few posts from the other blog home with me.




I watched Masculin féminin for the first time the other day and the first word that comes to mind is underwhelmed. My friend Claire, a Godard virgin until that night, watched it with me and it was a strange introduction to not only Godard but also the New Wave. It wasn’t at all what I expected, and the dude who wrote the essay for the Criterion supplement (an Australian critic, Adrian Martin) felt the same way. It was actually comical to share my reaction with Claire and then have some of it echoed and the rest clarified or simply just explained better in Mr. Martin’s essay:

When I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-seventies, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It represented France’s nouvelle vague of the 1960s, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and featured icons like Jean-Pierre Léaud, and even, fleetingly, Brigitte Bardot. It spoke of love and sex and politics and work. It captured every teenager’s dream of hanging out and fooling around in Parisian cafés. It spoke—way beyond its specific place and time of France in 1965—to the confusions of any modern generation stranded between the no-longer-workable moral values of a vanishing world and the yet-to-appear arrangements of a new order.

Masculin féminin also existed entirely in my head—as a perfectly imaginary object, a little like the ideal movie that Paul (Léaud) himself “secretly wanted to live”—thanks to the fact that my only access to it at the time was through a gorgeous fetish object published by America’s Grove Press, in 1969, a transcription of the film accompanied by many luminous frame reproductions...

When I finally saw Masculin féminin on a screen, it was something of a shock: grayer than I had imagined (Godard’s regular cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, replaced by Belgian-born Willy Kurant); less romantic and lyrical than his previous movies, like Contempt (1963) or Pierrot le fou (1965); and, all up, rather serious and sad. Indeed, the movie came at an intriguing, ambivalent juncture in Godard’s career: on the one hand, it picks up the harsh tone and steely approach of several of his earlier movies that deal with political subjects, such as Le petit soldat (1960) and Les carabiniers (1963); on the other hand, it captures a mood of melancholy––moments of heartbreaking solitude caught, on the run, in the midst of a thoroughly mad and chaotic world—that returns in force in the eighties, with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), and continues right up to the present. The special aura of Masculin féminin comes from its double focus: the sense that Godard is watching his characters from a great distance and judging them (for their venality and banality) is counterpointed by a secret empathy, a fleeting tenderness.

Ambivalent. A fleeting tenderness. Gray. I couldn’t agree more.

It is not that these things make it a bad film, though, and in fact it is quite the opposite. It just seems that all the people I’ve ever spoken with about this film, and all of the writings I’ve read concerning it, seem to be speaking about an entirely different film from the one I saw. My impression was that it was fresh, fun, and full of energy, but I don’t know if I’d use any of those descriptors now having seen it.

In actuality it was really kind of sad.

I know that there’s so much more to say on this film that is a lot more insightful and important than the fact that it wasn’t what I expected, but upon first viewing that’s really all I can do. Expectations Violations Theory, in action.

posted by Alison @ 12:43 PM