The Toronto International Film Festival is upon us! Their line-up is wonderful, their festival awesome, and their city a joy, but I will not be there. Fortunately, Amanda, a colleague of mine, will be! What's more, she'll be blogging from the Festival with updates on the films she's seen and her impressions of the grand shindig.TIFF's program this year contains almost every single film that I've been excited to see for the remainder of 2010, and I'm eager to hear Amanda's thoughts. You can link directly to her site here.
4 comments:
Do you know if Amanda went to see Godard's latest? I heard that the Socialisme screening was so disastrous (there were, intentionally, no English subtitles) that half the audience walked out!
I also heard that Brian De Palma is there, too. Hope Amanda runs into him!
I asked her, and here's her response.
"I did not...and this screening was the public screening, so I would not have had access to it. Honestly, I simply wasn't that interested in seeing it...sigh"
Gotta be honest, man. If I see this one, it'll be entirely out of respect (although I'm not sure that's the right word) for the historical stature of Godard. In my study of it to this point, I haven't found a lot to love about his work.
I'm another one of those people who whines that his career went downhill after Breathless, which is the only one I love. I thought his recent film Notre Musique was a decent curiosity but hardly a masterpiece.
And it was so like him to not show up when the film premiered at Cannes. Typical pointless Godardian stunt--same with this whole business of refusing to add English subtitles to Socialisme, in my opinion.
The only film of Godard's that I've really loved is Vivre sa vie, although I find myself looking fondly back at Pierrot Le Fou for some strange reason. When I watched it, I found that film maddening, and now want to revisit it. Go figure.
Like you, I question his motives. What's the real point of some of these gimmicks? While he was certainly innovative at the start of the French New Wave and played a vital role in the discovery of a new cinematic vocabulary, for years afterword he's seemed content to jerk his audience around for (seemingly) no reason.
I'd tend to believe that the next steps forward that cinema as an art form will take place will be found in the way of technological innovation and the way that they're integrated with traditional filmmaking. I suspect that, whether he realizes it or not, Godard's attempt to say something "new" with Film Socialisme is nothing less than a former titan's attempt to be relevant again.
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