It’s been a long time since the late Jean-Luc Godard made traditional or even vaguely conventional “movies.” That has almost never interested the legendary French New-Wave filmmaker.
If anything, the director’s movies over the last 30 or so years have been experiential audio/visual collages more interested in pictures, sounds, cuts, and de-saturation; a maddening barrage of dadaist statements.
His latest film to screen at Cannes, titled Titled “Trailer of the film that will never exist: Phony Wars,” seems to be another one of those. We now have a trailer.
Described as “the ultimate gesture of cinema,” Godard wrote this accompanying text for the film:
“No longer trusting the billions of diktats of the alphabet to give back their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a true language by returning to the places of past shootings, while taking into account the present stories.”
Using images from the beginning of cinema to today, the legendary filmmaker cuts, splices and, let’s be honest, will likely just throw visuals into this burning skillet of angry MONTAGE. And the word definitely deserves the ALL-CAPS treatment because that’s exactly what this film is going to be. It’ll probably delve into the sensory, aesthetic and, this being Godard, the radically political.
One yearns to be transported by his sonic and tactile experiments–after all, his best film in ages, 2014’s “Goodbye to Language,” was an unequivocally gorgeous amalgam, in 3D no less, and represented his best work in years. The follow-up, 2018’s “The Image Book,” sadly, was too impenetrable for my tastes.
Whatever usually interests Godard is only hinted at to the audience, with abrupt cuts and purposeful flow interruptions that seem to indicate the filmmaker wants to frustrate rather than invigorate. You can call them art exhibits disguised as films — Godard revels in the endorphin rush of posing inaccessible questions, not to mention many of the ugly images and sounds perpetrated on-screen.
No, Godard was never for “The Avengers” crowd, a cinematic radicalist who would always swing big — sometimes failing and other times triumphing.
Still no distributor for "Bucking Fastard," "Alpha Gang," "The Last Photograph," "Closing Night," and "The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd." The issue seems to be quality more than a lack of willingness to buy.