June 8, 2008

à Leningrad, à Madagascar, à Dresen, à Hanoi, à Sarajevo...



*

7 comments:

Andy Rector said...

from Craig Keller:

Judging from the other clips, it looks like TSR broadcast in 16x9 (1.78:1), so-called "widescreen." As such, they've chopped the top and bottom off of Godard's 1.33:1 image, rather than pillarboxing it with black bars on the left and right to maintain the original format. Terrible.

1:20 AM
c said...

Le zéro n'existe qu'en arithmétique.
1 de 1 ne se peut retrancher, si 1 est un homme.


Henri Michaux

7:37 AM
Anonymous said...

Thanks a million for this! Wish I spoke French though :(

8:20 AM
Anonymous said...

Sorry, but I don't see anything NEW here, it seems to me a sort of "remix"/"re-editing"/"re-cycling" of bits and pieces from "Histoire(s)" and some other neighbouring Godard films. Not even a phrase (or rather, a quotation) seems new. Or is it? In any case, a straight case of "déjà vu, déjà entendu" that worries me.
Best,
Miguel Marías

3:27 AM
craig keller. said...

Miguel is right -- this is not a new, not even a reconstituted work. It's an excerpt from Episode 4B, Les Signes parmi nous, and runs from the 9m 58s mark, until the 13m 34s mark. (Times correspond to the NTSC Japanese DVDs.)

The voice-over is as follows, using the translation from the ECM book:

GODARD: "In a sense, don't you see, fear is God's daughter all the same, redeemed on the night of Good Friday. She's not beautiful to look at, no -- sometimes laughed at, sometimes cursed, renounced by everyone, -- but nevertheless, make no mistake, she sits at hte bedside of every last illness. She intercedes for no man.

"And now -- that night -- getting up in the night -- every night -- faint light in the room -- whence mystery -- nil from the window -- no -- almost nil -- it does not exist -- nil --"

WOMAN (MIÉVILLE? BINOCHE? AZÉMA?): "Still, blank as a negative -- Ilford, Kodak, or Fuji -- still in one piece, too, and only needing to be breathed on heavily, to tighten it, whatever the breather's name -- Hitchcock, Langlois, Vigo. Yes, let's fade in -- magnetic montage of ideas without points of suspension. We aren't in a detective novel or one by Céline. That guy... let's leave literature to him; he really deserved to suffer, and to re-enlist book after book in the regiments of the language. Us with the cinema, that's another matter and, first of all, life, which isn't new, but difficult to talk about. One can hardly simply live it and die it, but talking about it -- oh well, there are books, yes, but in the cinema we don't have books. We only have music and painting and those too, as you well know, live themselves, but don't talk all that much. So the cinema -- perhaps you understand a little, now -- why -- what can I say. Because life is the subject with Cinemascope and color as attributes. If we have wide ideas, life...

"I should have said a beginning of life. Something like the story of Euclid's parallel lines: that was a beginning of geometry.

"There have been other lives, and there will be other lives. It's simple to imagine a lily being broken, lions being hunted with bows, the silence of a hotel in the north of Sweden -- but other people's lives are always disconcerting for the strongest of reasons. So the solitary life that I would very much have liked to pin down, and have admired, or reduce to its basic elements to interest the pupils, the inhabitants of the earth in particular, -- in a word, the solitary life that I would very much have liked to hold prisoner by means of panning shots of nature, fixed shots of death, short and long takes, loud and soft sounds, free or enslaved actors and actresses, and what have you, -- but life thrashes around worse than Nanook's fish, slips between our fingers like memories of Monica Vitti in the red desert of Milan suburbia -- all is eclipsed. And here I seize the chance to tell you, as if in passing, that the only big problem in cinema seems to me to be where and why to start a shot, and where and why to end it."

11:33 AM
c said...

you can also confirm here (french text):

La «partition» des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard

---> 4b - Les signes parmi nous

---> 9’59

4:20 AM
Andy Rector said...

It was posted by someone other than TSR, and without 1/3rd of TSR's blights:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MxCm0zf3vX0

4:50 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Archive