Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010/Kino Blu-ray)/The Invisible Frame/Cycling The Frame (2009/1988/Icarus Films DVD)
Picture: B-/C Sound: B-/C+ Extras: C+/B- Films: B-
The
following releases look at history in their own way and with a political angle.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) continues his long project
of rejecting what he sees as U.S.
imperialism and other mixed issues.
Starting as a auteur of the French New Wave in 1959, he rejected this in
later 1967 when he turned to a Maoist filmmaking period (which had him fighting
with everyone from Jane Fonda to The Rolling Stones) and then did years of
advanced video experimental films in the 1970s, only to resurface in the 1980s
as an auteur again.
Outside
of documentaries and shorts, he does a feature every few years or so recently
including For Ever Mozart (1996,
reviewed elsewhere on this site), In
Praise Of Love (2001, reviewed elsewhere on this site) and Notre musique (2004) in which video
increasingly creeps into his filmmaking, he wants to subvert the expectation of
images using all formats and he refocuses on sound in a new way.
This
time, he sets his story (what there is of it) on a cruise ship as microcosm of
a conformist, consumerist society, which gets really interesting as he makes it
a joke as compared to actual footage from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925, reviewed on Kino Blu-ray elsewhere on
this site) as the failure of a revolution that needs to possibly rise again,
but as usual, he never explains how this could happen or how it (or its
results) previously failed. More video
than ever is used here, but does this mean he thinks digital video has created
a filmmaking democracy? This is another
stream-of-thought project that owes something to that 1970s video period and he
has some points to make, but it is often a broken record with no new ideas.
Still, I
liked how he constantly, endlessly foils comfortable expectations or the
meditative state of actually watching any film and makes his points he has
always made clear and the result is to basically bring them up to this period
in time. This is very interesting, but
you had better have a good attention span to get it.
History
is also an issue for Godard and as a sequel to Alphaville (1965, reviewed elsewhere on this site) he made the
short Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
(1991) about the fall of The Berlin Wall and how that can be bad in that we
forget The Holocaust, The Cold War and key history itself. This is also the concern of two other shorts
starring one of the best actresses around, Tilda Swinton.
The Invisible Frame/Cycling The
Frame (2009/1988)
are two shorts that have her simply peddling a bike around a free Germany and
looks at the wall directly in both cases.
Both directed by Cynthia Beatt, the 1988 Cycling has Swinton showing the banality of the Wall and why it
needs to go. How it is and was always a
horrible thing and how many died, as well as how it was always an affront to us
all. There she is wishing it were gone
in a sad tone. Of course, no one could
have imagined her wish would come true in only a few years. Invisible
addresses and celebrates its removal, its fall and its obsolescence, but still
manages to find remnants of it that make sure we don’t forget what Germany Year 90 Nine Zero fears we
might forget. These shorts are quiet,
yet say much about including in their visuals and approaches to sound. I was very happy and impressed with these
underrated works.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image on Socialisme
is a mix of older film footage, degraded film & video images and new video
plays more like a documentary (maybe this is Godard’s answer to “reality TV”?)
and could not look better than it does here.
That includes several shots that would not look as good on a DVD. The letterboxed 1.78 X 1 image on Invisible and 1.33 X 1 image in Cycling are on par with each other,
though the newer production is video and older is film (likely 16mm) and they
both have their softness and fidelity limits, but are both very watchable, well
edited and well shot.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Socialisme has some audio purposely distorted, some audio that is
monophonic in nature and both Fence films have lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 mixes
that are just fine with the older film monophonic and later film simple stereo
at best. Extras on Socialisme include an alternate “Navajo” English subtitle option
for the film as seen in theaters, booklet on the film including informative essay
in the Blu-ray case, stills and trailers.
Frame offers its own stills and text on the filmmaker and project are
the only other extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
