The first section takes place on a cruise ship: passengers drift about, stateless, alienated. I guess he learned it from old Westerns.His Navajo speakers touch on socialism, gambling, nationalism, Hitler, Stalin, art, Islam, women, Jews, Hollywood, Palestine, war and other large topics. The third section, beginning notionally in Egypt, is a montage of images including Jerusalem, Odessa, Stalin and Hitler.In its wintry and valedictory way, the film returns us to the spirit of the 1960s, Godard's great heyday, when images and slogans really were believed capable of changing the world, and when France's young radicals were infuriated by their elders' inglorious collaboration both with the Nazis and with the Americans in enforcing an empire in south-east Asia.
A mule and a llama also live at the garage. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Yet there is something detached and blank about it all: Godard's lens is like the wrong end of a telescope. Godard structures Film Socialisme … Film Socialisme is a collage of texts, musical phrases and still and moving images, and Godard's conception of essay cinema, comparable to Chris Marker, is brought yet further into alignment with the new generation of video artists – it could be the nearest thing we'll see to a kind of installation or installation crossover piece in cinemas. It is not the train." Yet this film weirdly tilted me, just a little, away from agnosticism towards the faith. It is a fragmented meditation on the themes of the nation state, justice, and historyor those who long ago gave up on Jean-Luc Godard, his latest film (which may also be his last) has absolutely nothing to offer. No one's expecting a box-office bonanza. Once in Montreal, I sat next to him at a little dinner for film critics, at which he arranged his garden peas into geometric forms on his plate and told us, "Cinema is the train.
It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies. Or not.Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. These words appear in uppercased subtitles and are mostly nouns. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Godard: Film Socialisme at Amazon.com. But however wayward and annoying, Godard is a distinctive modernist screen poet.Jean-Luc Godard's new film may also be his last. In Film Socialisme, Godard plays with digital film, showing its advantages and disadvantages with humorous and bizarre results. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports a positive score of 59% based on 58 reviews, with an average rating of 5.37/10.
In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Film Socialisme is not a narrative film, not in any conventional sense.
But in "Film Socialisme," he expects us to do all the heavy lifting.When the film premiered at Cannes 2010, it was received with the usual bouquet of cheers, hoots and catcalls. A sulky young woman slouches by the pumps, surreally next to a donkey and a llama. The second section takes place in a French petrol station and garage. The garage is anybody's guess.There is also much topical footage, both moving and still. These subtitles, Godard explained, are what he calls "Navaho English." Both are equally true. (You can see it here: http://bit.ly/lznp1u)In the film, he shows us fragmented scenes on a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean, and also shots which travel through human history, which for the film's purposes involve Egypt, Greece, Palestine, Odessa (notably its steps), Naples, Barcelona, Tunisia and other ports. He is now far, far away. I can't pretend to understand Film Socialisme. In the spirit of Ken Russell, Godard actually posted an online video that used fast-forward to show his entire film in about four minutes. ... You can either laugh at it, as Mark Kermode did in his profoundly entertaining reviews, or you go deep. We enter the cinema with open minds and goodwill, expecting Godard to engage us in at least a vaguely penetrable way. Or perhaps my memory has tricked me, and he said, "Cinema is the station. In addition to standard digital video, Godard uses a state-of-the-art iteration of high-def video; some shots, especially aboard the cruise ship, are so beautiful and glossy, they could be an advertisement for something, perhaps a cruise ship. Patti Smith appears in a cameo, toting a guitar case. Reviews for Film Socialisme were mixed. Defenders of Godard wrote at length about his content and purpose, while many others frankly felt insulted. Words are spoken, some of them bits of language from eminent authors.