Week 11/2023

This week we settle down at three screenings where cinema and film criticism meet.

KASKcinema in Ghent will screen Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux by Jean-Luc Godard. In an article published by Sabzian, Frieda Grafe wrote: “The pre-formed units of meaning Godard inserts into his narrative are a kind of critical device, variants of both the theme and the way the film is shaped. It is a parody of the still ubiquitous essentialist separation of form and content.” The film will be introduced by film scholar Eduard Cuelenaere.

Eric de Kuyper, who plays an important role in Belgian film culture, will introduce the screening of Shanghai Express by Josef von Sternberg. De Kuyper characterises von Sternberg as a “paradoxical filmmaker”, who seemed to submit to each and every Hollywood cliché while managing to unmask them at the same time. The film will be followed by a discussion on de Kuyper’s work as a film critic. In the coming weeks, Sabzian will republish a number of striking texts from his remarkable oeuvre, with a new commentary by de Kuyper.

La terre de la folie by Luc Moullet will be shown at Cercle du Laveu in Liège, which is run by a collective of volunteers who created the conditions of a technically high quality cinema while inhabiting a social multi-usage space. 

Moullet, former film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, once wrote that “the filmmaker criticizes, and the critic praises.” Le Monde called the film “reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist documentary Terre sans pain, revisited in this instance by the combinatory art of Georges Perec.”

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux
Jean-Luc Godard, 1962, 80’

A film about Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a prostitute.

EN

“Godard takes his moto for this film – essay on freedom and responsibility from Montaigne: ‘Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself.’ The life of the prostitute is, of course, the most radical metaphor for the act of lending oneself to others. But if we ask, how has Godard shown us Nana keeping herself for herself, the answer is: he has not shown it. He has, rather, expounded on it. We don’t know Nana’s motives except at a distance, by inference. The film eschews all psychology; there is no probing of states of feeling, of inner anguish.”

Susan Sontag1

 

“Vivre sa vie was a profound experience for many of us. I was amazed by scene after – the record store, where the camera moves with Anna Karina’s character Nana according to the demands and the rhythm of her work; the encounter with the philosopher Brice Parain in the café; the ‘documentary’ sequence where the details of Nana’s trade as a prostitute are laid out before us with clinical detail on the soundtrack and visual poetry on the screen. But it was the full effect of the film was so illuminating. Nana was seen from so many different perspectives and studied so carefully and closely that it was like seeing a great portrait painted by a master right before our eyes. For some, her sudden, brutal death was unsatisfactory. For me, it felt right, because that was the way it happened out on the streets.”

Martin Scorsese2

  • 1Susan Sontag, “On Godard’s Vivre sa vie“, Moviegoer, no. 2, Summer/Autumn 1964, p.9.
  • 2Martin Scorsese, “Godard is Perhaps Dead”, Cahiers du Cinéma, 13 October 2022.

NL

“Bij Godard bestaat dit niet, deze interpretatieve combinatie van beeld en taal die beweert het innerlijk van de personages te vatten en een volmaakt beeld ervan te geven. Er wordt duidelijk gemaakt dat de taal niet enkel dient om het beeld te begeleiden. Ze wordt integendeel als een onafhankelijk, gelijkwaardig expressief element naast het beeld geplaatst. In plaats van het geruststellende samenspel van beeld en taal om de overzichtelijkheid te vergroten van wat wordt weergegeven, worden in Vivre sa vie zowel het afgebeelde als de manier van afbeelden via een constante splitsing van beeld en taal gerelativeerd. Bovendien resulteert deze scheiding in een dubbel perspectief: het perspectief van de afgebeelde personages en het perspectief van degene die hen ziet. Godards camera bewaart een afstand; hij registreert. Godard weigert de kijker via dramaturgische manipulaties een mening op te dringen. De werkelijkheidsaanspraak van zijn kunst berust niet op een zo trouw mogelijke nabootsing van de werkelijkheid, maar manifesteert zich in de erkenning van het fictieve karakter ervan.”

Frieda Grafe1

screening
KASKcinema, Ghent
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
La terre de la folie
Luc Moullet, 2009, 90’

In a thinly-populated area in the Alps, the number of suicides and murders is extremely high. Luc Moullet explores the causes and consequences of these alarming actions. He travels to five villages that form a ‘pentagon of madness,’ and interviews inhabitants about the crimes of the past century.

EN

Notebook: Did you have that sort of trouble, going around the countryside talking to people about crimes that involved people who were still alive?

Luc Moullet: Yes, of course. There is a kind of “omertà” – an idiom of Naples – a kind of code of silence of the Mafia. And it exists, or at least a similar thing, particularly in the Southern Alps. So at first it was difficult to find people who could speak. Usually I could find one; though in one case a witness didn’t want to talk so I replaced him in the film with myself.

In the middle of the movie you say that there seems to be almost a “culture” of madness and crime in the area. I got the sense that a lot of the people you talked to enjoyed telling these horrible stories – that they seemed more like stories than local events people were personally involved in. It was almost like folklore they were relating to us.

Daniel Kasman and David Phelps in conversation with Luc Moullet1

 

“As Jean-Claude Biette said, naturalism is the identification of elemental life with humankind. Land of Madness’s in depth unification by the most primitive madness, that of cretinism, does not make the film naturalist, for cretinism here is on the order of esotericism. In the middle of the film, Moullet says: ‘President Chirac had a psychoid daughter, but President Sarkozy didn’t, so he reduced the money allotted to psychiatry.’ The audience laughs, it’s easy. Except that 20 minutes later, this dumb and mean laughter is upset by an even more troublesome laughter due to the revelation of Moullet’s failed suicide attempt from a bridge. Esotericism: the easiest hides the most difficult while accentuating madhouse bareness on the off-beat. Thus the viewer gradually understands – but never at the moment – that everything here resonates in the hidden setting of the self-portrait, even bile and death.”

Serge Bozon2

FR

« À travers une suite d’entretiens, Luc Moullet élabore la cartographie de cette « terre de la folie » dont il est originaire. Avec le ton et l’humour qui lui sont propres, le cinéaste fait s’enchaîner les situations, les personnages. Le cinéma traverse de part en part cette enquête documentaire, du sol jonché de bobines de films dans le grenier familial, à l’évocation de King Vidor qui réussit à résoudre un crime grâce au tournage d’un de ses films. Moullet aimerait bien faire de même, mais il découvre qu’il est devenu le principal suspect de son enquête… »

Pascal Catheland1

screening
Cercle du Laveu, Liège
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
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