|   David Matthews  |

 

Portable Bohemia

September 15, 2022 / Vol. VII, No. 18

Go to Portable Bohemia

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.

 

Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  

Greetings from the far left coast where I am slightly under the weather as I type on Wednesday after getting the nifty new covid vaccine and the annual flu shot yesterday. Nothing serious, just a little achy. I wonder if the reaction is due to malfunction in the Bill Gates microchip the vaccine is used to implant so the Deep State can track us. What they might be tracking is a mystery. Perhaps how often I get up during the night to use the bathroom.

 

Memo from the film desk. On Tuesday we lost one of a kind, Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022), Last of the French nouvelle vague filmmakers who made their mark in the 1950s and 1960s, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda, Eric Rohmer, among others. Emmanuel Macron said France has lost a national treasure because that is what a head of state says when a figure of Godard's stature steps on a rainbow.

 

Was Godard a giant? Bergman was a giant. Fellini. Kurosawa. I shy away from ranking Godard with them. He was significant, an iconoclast, sui generis. He left his mark. His films can be interesting, sometimes even enjoyable. Some are good films to have watched.

 

Near the end of Faces Places (2017) Agnès Varda and collaborator JR are to meet up with Godard at his house. When they arrive, he refuses to come to the door. An annoyed Varda tells JR that her friend Godard is a rat. She still likes him, she says, but he's a rat.

 

Trailers for a few favorites by Godard:

  • À bout de souffle (Breathless) (2019), wtih Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Small-time thief steals a car, murders a motorcycle cop, and has an affair with an American student. It does not end well.

  • Vivre sa vie (1962) with Anna Karina (Godard's first wife). A young woman in Paris takes up prostitution. It does not end well.

  • La chinoise (1967) with Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky (Godard's second wife). A small group of French students study Mao and how to use terrorism to change the world.

  • Weekend (1967). "A surreal tale of a married couple going on a road trip to visit the wife's parents with the intention of killing them for the inheritance" (IMBD). An epic traffic jam. People randomly machine gunning other people. Cars in flames. Historical figures from other centuries. Rock and roll guerrilla cannibals in the woods outside Paris. Violence and carnage are highly stylized, cartoon like, the impact cold, clinical cerebral. Roger Ebert called Weekend Godard's best film and his most inventive, almost pure movie. "This is a radical, bitter view of society, and Godard is at pains to dismiss any optimistic liberal solutions." (Weekend, RogerEbert.com, April 11, 1969)

 

Quoting Godard (all but the first from IMBD)

  • All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.

  • Cinema begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.

  • Americans don't have critics. For me, there are only two, James Agee and Manny Farber. The rest are reviewers.

  • Bresson [Robert Bresson] is to French cinema what Mozart [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart] is to German music and Dostoyevsky [Fyodor Dostoevsky] is to Russian literature.

  • All of us will always owe him [Orson Welles] everything.

 

Godard mon amour (2017) chronicles Godard's turn to Mao and revolutionary dogma in the late 1960s. Set against the backdrop of student riots in Paris in 1968, the director must choose between politics and cinema. Along the way he falls in love with nineteen-year-old actrress Anne Wiazemsky during the making of La Chinoise.. Louis Garrel as Godard, Stacy Martin as Wiazemsky. Includes his role in shutting down the Cannes film festival in sympathy with the students.

 

Reviewer Mark Kermode gave the film three stars (out of five). Godard dismissed the project as a "stupid, stupid idea," which PR flacks instantly put to use to promote the film (Redoubtable review – the follies of Jean-Luc Godard exposed, The Guardian, May 13, 2018). Godard mon amour (orig. title Redoubtable) is not a great film, but I rather enjoyed it. more than Kermode's rating might lead one to think. At the end he gives the film its due:

 

the ’68 uprisings are evoked with an unironic vigour that suggests that Hazanavicius has a higher purpose than mere snark. Behind the absurdity of Jean-Luc’s babbling polemics there remains something of value–a palpable sense that significant cultural change is afoot. Redoubtable may be largely played for laughs, but there’s a melancholy romance at its heart that hints at sincerity lurking amid the satire.

 

Welcome news from Ukraine where Russian forces are conducting a special military regrouping, leaving behind weapons, equipment, uniforms, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive recaptures towns and swathes of territory in the east and south of the country. The tyrant Putin is reportedly undaunted. I am cautiously hopeful, wary of premature celebration.

 

Max Boot attributes Ukrainian success to four factors:

  • Western aid

  • unity of Ukrainian people behind Zelensky's government

  • ingenuity, skill, and fighting spirit of its armed forces

  • corruption and stupidity of the Putin regime

 

Putin, the Butcher of Bucha, has tried to break Ukraine’s will to fight with barbaric attacks on civilians, but, just as with Hitler’s bombing of London, his tactics have backfired by uniting his victims against him. If Ukrainians need any motive to keep fighting, it is supplied by the grisly atrocities that Russian forces commit wherever they go. (Max Boot, The four factors that explain Ukraine’s extraordinary military success, Washington Post, September 12, 2022)

 

Some conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, a big player, give lip service to support for Ukraine while calling for Congress to reject the president's request for additional funding. I agree with Mona Charen, herself pretty dang conservative:

 

Saying "we should support Ukraine" but denying them the $ is cowardly and dishonest. I imagine Heritage would have said to Churchill, "We support you in spirit, but as for weapons you're on your own."

 

Related reading:

  • Tom Nichols, Why the Russian Military Brutalizes Ukraine, The Atlantic, September 9, 2022

  • David L. Stern, Ukrainian hit squads target Russian occupiers and collaborators, Washington Post, September 8, 2022

  

New blog post: Special Master? September 12, 2022. Special master. Isn't that a poem by Allen Ginsberg? No, wait, the Ginsberg poem is "Please Master." To the best of my knowledge Trump's request for a special master to review the trove of government documents seized by the FBI at the Mar-a-Lago palace has nothing to do with Ginsberg's poem about sex and domination. But, heck…read more>>

 

Keep the faith.

Stand with Ukraine.

yr obdt svt

 

Pictured below: Matthews bros (July 2022). I don't have any new photos and am not enthusiastic about digging through the archives. So let's recycle this one from good times with the family.

 

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