July 7, 2006































Click here for video -- JLG showing the evidence that lies between how two filmmakers see Vietnam: Santiago Alvarez and Stanley Kubrick. (From Cinema Cinemas)

English translation by A. Dias in the comments field below...
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4 comments:

ZC said...

If only I understood spoken French ...

6:59 AM
Daniel Kasman said...

Can anyone translate?

8:59 PM
Andy Rector said...

Unfortunately I can't either. Godard has on several occasions decried Full Metal Jacket's lack of Vietnamese perspective in favor of Alvarez's film 79 Primaveras. Below is a bablefish translation of a capsule on this clip by Ruy Gardiner which indicates that it's a formal analysis that Godard is doing with the two screens. An analysis that doesn't just denounce blinkered american visions of the Vietnamese, but of war films in general. The particular sequence from Full Metal that Godard is showing has always seemed to me a lapse into conventional spectacle, Kubrick "taking advantage" as Ruy says...

"...Histoire(s) du cinema carries through an old Godardian dream: to think and to historificar the cinema using images, sounds and the assembly; or either: the proper language of the cinema. It composed the Histoire(s) in its bunker of Rolle, in these catacombs high tech, lined of monitors of video, that do not appear in JLG/JLG but yes in the special one of "Cinéma/Cinémas", in a flaring scene, great pedagogical ecstasy, where Godard shows to its interviewer because the use of ralenti in a set of documents of the Cuban Santiago Álvarez is interesting and because it is inadmissible of Kubrick in Born to kill "Alan Pauls, in Radar "In a television program, Jean-Luc Godard showed to two ribbons of video its interviewer. Two different visões of the War of the Vietnam. The first one was Been born To kill (Full Jacket Metal, 1987) of Stanley Kubrick, and the second 79 Springs, the average-metragem of Santiago Álvarez on the anniversary of Ho Chi-min. The confrontamento between the two films said respect to that Godard calls "critical appearance". The sequences of the film of Kubrick were exuberant, the perfect technique, the battles incrivelmente filmed, while Santiago Álvarez if limited to catch some fotogramas of soldiers walking for the Vietnamese bushes, to place in band of the sound, highest, a machine gun sound, and finally to make everything to destroy the fotogramas: to burn them, to make to leave them the reel, to show to the spectator the fragility of the film espelhada with the fragility human being in a war. The result also leaves exuberant, until stronger of the one than the images of Kubrick, but above of everything what it matters the Godard it is that the images of Santiago Álvarez can be beautiful or ugly, but evidently they condemn for its proper existence the war, remove of its images any power of fetiche of the image of war, while Kubrick if leaves to stage each image, as of its style, with its well-known preciosismo. Kubrick, in its film, can hate the reasons of the Americans, but it takes off advantage aesthetic of the war. Santiago Álvarez hates the war and makes question to show not showing it: inflicting in the images of the war all type of procedure to destroy the fotogramas, to take off of the war image all power of joy that it can supply "- Ruy Gardnier, in Contracampo (sorry Ruy, about the translation)

9:59 PM
André Dias said...

« There it is! This is the slow motion we find in Peckinpah, if you will... It addresses the crowd of spectators only by exploiting something that it lacks. It seems like what Welles talked about: a gimmick, a trick, a gadget. Something that's now usual in all these American directors, even in Kubrick, who disappoints me because he has more talent than them. And this is just Peckinpah, if you will... with the exploitation of Vietnam. To his film I wouldn't go because I wouldn't see the Vietnamese, or God knows in which form. They were there. You just needed to go there... He doesn't see them. Something's missing. Kubrick's film misses what America also missed. They keep showing... In war films about Germany, there's not one big Hollywood actor that hasn't, sooner or later, played a German general. Here no one has played a [Vietnamese] general, cause they didn't know how to do it. That's their shame. To cover up this shame with a slow motion, whatever talent one has, it doesn't work... Let see the Alvarez slow motion. We see a crowd that cries. And we see each one cry without privilege, despite being privileged. The spectator can make his choice. This is what never occurred...
Here is a war movie made by a Cuban. It's sufficient to see this to, when we show Kubrick's images see that they do not hold...
To say good or bad things... I, (...), it wouldn’t come to my mind to make war; I've deserted in two countries. But it's necessary to watch. We see something in which we believe and there he [Kubrick] doesn't believe in films anymore. He forces himself to believe. And at a certain point it doesn't stand. There's a minimum of honesty... We see that the other [Alvarez’s], which is made of documentary, is so worked by a stylised fiction like this, that it gives back something. And there [Kubrick's] lacks the documentary approach. »

1:01 AM

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