Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Godard's choreography is concerned more with the dance than the dancers. The middle section of the movie is explicitly about film-his film, the nature of film, the death of film. Godard's cinema collective assembles on screen, and the members discuss what has already gone wrong with the film they are making. Significantly, their criticisms are ideological rather than aesthetic...
That story, though, is excruciatingly boring. Godard never said he was interested in entertaining; now, it appears, he disdains even deception. When his early movies dealt with film, even tangentially, they did so with provocative wit and a serene, pungent charm. Vent de L'est, however, says at its audience, Your bourgeois concern for my movie is as contemptible as my regard for medium. "Realism," Godard once said, "is never exactly the truth, and the realism of cinema is obligatorily faked." In Vent de L'est, even the lies are faked, and the incessant, didactic narrators are finally...
...RAFELSON'S film, Five Easy Pieces, is already being touted as this year's Easy Rider, for whatever that's worth. The movie falls into two parts. In the first, an oil rigger played by Jack Nicholson lives the beer-drinking, bowling, broad-screwing life which most screenwriters and intellectuals imagine occurs in lower-middle working class settings. But we shortly discover that the boozer is also a piano player manque: he is a wandering, gifted member of an extraordinarily talented musical family. Nicholson is the prototype Alienated One, a sort of prodigal son with balls, and his journey...
There are brilliant moments in the film, moments in which Rafelson has crystallized what-it's-like-now and why-everything-is-so-depressing. Helena Kallianiotes as a dykey hitchhiker who is obsessed with ecology ("All this crap!") and mankind ("Man-man is such a shit! ") is a brilliant parody of an elusive type, the ardent but empty-headed advocate of well-intentioned but flaccid causes. (That she is portrayed as a Lesbian-in fact, that the more insipid characters of the film are women-betrays a nasty truth about the movie.) The bowling, beer, and sex scenes are authentic...
...another example: At the end of the film, Nicholson is again faced with a crisis: he is now alienated from both his bequeathed identity (gifted pianist) and his assumed one (oil rigger cum sumbitch). The moment is poignant enough, but the response of theprotagonist of Five Easy Pieces is only a depressingly immature reassertion of character consistency-he blows town. When what is desperately needed is a fresh way to look at something, we are given something to look at. Apocalyptic world-views are fashionable, and it's a respectable ambition to depict what it is that drives...