Jean-Luc Godard celebrated his 87th birthday on December 3 and even though I read a handful of articles and re-tweeted tweet I saw about the master I’m only getting around to mentioning it here. Maybe I was slow to this task because GODARD seems too massive for a quick mention in a blog post. He’s absolutely one of my favorite film directors and movies like Pierrot, Le Feu have had a direct impact on my own creating. While I love the frenzied physicality of Oliver Stone in his prime, and I’m in an eternal/fraternal wrestling match with John Cassavetes for the rest of my life, Godard’s marriage of incisive vision, and sensuous imagery and editing gives us a stylized cinema of cool that turns a critical eye back on the camera and even on the audience. I saw Godard’s 3D film Goodbye to Language the one time it screened in Nashville at the Nashville Film Festival back in 2015. A sampling of the critical response following the movie’s 2014 premiere at Cannes includes Antoine De Baecque writing that the film remained faithful to the ideals of the French New Wave by being “absolutely contemporary” and telling the truth of the modern age. While Éric Neuhoff of Le Figaro wrote that Godard was an “old senile adolescent” who had “lost his inspiration” and “has learned nothing about love, the couple [or] society”, and mocked the film’s fifteen-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Would you believe that they’re both right?

Here is Godard with Dick Cavett in a warm and charming interview from 1980.

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This year we mark three decades since the release of John Cassavetes’ last film, Big Trouble, in 1986. Truth is, I’ve never seen Big Trouble — Cassavetes stepped-in to helm the troubled production when the original writer/director bailed on the project. For most fans of Cassavetes, his last film was the 1984 marital drama Love Streams which included his usual cast of actors, and his constant themes of love, art, madness and messy humanity. Love Streams won the Golden Bear in Berlin, and one gets the sense that Big Trouble was just an excuse for Cassavetes to direct another picture in the face of his failing health. Cassavetes suffered from hepatitis complicated by drinking, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1989.

Here’s a BBC Channel 4 Cinephile documentary from 1993 featuring Cassavetes’ cast member Peter Falk recalling the director’s films and their friendship…

Stay Awake!

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