“What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people.”

“A critic once asked why there was so much blood in Pierrot. That’s not blood, answered Godard, but red. Equally, his films are not stories photographed, but a record of actors playing parts. The focus of his films is the distance between camera and actors and between screen and audience.”

  

- David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004 Edition)

“This is not a Hollywood movie. In a Hollywood movie, after the movie is over, there’s nothing more. There is no relationship between the screen and the spectator. There’s just duration. If you don’t like it, you go to sleep, the way I do. But in other movies, you can’t forget about it. You have to talk about it afterward.”

- Jean-Luc Godard, Rolling Stone interview, June 14, 1969 (excerpted in the liner notes for Criterion's recent Bluray edition of WEEKEND)

* * *

As much as I hate to lead with a David Thomson quote¹, I think the first bit sums up everything I dislike about the motion picture exercises of Jean-Luc Godard. The second quote speaks to everything I admire about Godard (in theory) and what keeps me coming back to his films, however infuriating I find them.

Ashes of Time

Dust motes! Just one of the many wacky animated inanimate objects on display in Michelangelo Frammartino's meditation, LE QUATTRO VOLTE (THE FOUR TIMES), which I attempt to explain over at GreenCine.

Ape-Hangin'

Well, my review of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE BOONMEE ETC. ETC. has posted. Like his other films, I find BOONMEE more and more compelling as I digest it. It'll require more viewings but I'm moving on to another blindspot: Satyajit Ray, in anticipation of next Tuesday's Criterion release of THE MUSIC ROOM. I've had the Apu Trilogy sitting on top of my DVD player for about a week and the time has come to reckon with India's most well-known filmmaker.

Regarding BOONMEE, I doubt there will be too many images this year that are halfway as arresting as this: