All power to the people,
Best to you one and all.
Just a quick post to keep it all tres interesant.
I just finished Jean Luc Godard’s film Masculin Feminin. This may be my new favorite Godard film. It is right up there with Pierrot le Fou. It actually comes later, but the setting and the black and white film make it feel more like early works like Breathless and Band of Outsiders.
Here are a number of quotes from the man himself. These were compiled by IMDB:
“I make film to make time pass.”
“I don’t think you should FEEL about a movie. You should feel about a woman. You can’t kiss a movie.”
“Tracking shots are a question of morality.”
[on Los Angeles] “It’s a big garage.”
“There is no point in having sharp images when you’ve fuzzy ideas.”
“Every edit is a lie.”
“Up to now — since shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution — most movie makers have been assuming that they know how to make movies. Just like a bad writer doesn’t ask himself if he’s really capable of writing a novel — he thinks he knows. If movie makers were building airplanes, there would be an accident every time one took off. But in the movies, these accidents are called Oscars.”
“What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war.”
“I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of ‘Cahiers du Cinema.’ The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.”
“In a house there is the top floor and there is the cellar. The underground filmmakers live in the same house as Hollywood, but they work in the cellar. It’s up to them if they like to live in the dark. The Hollywood filmmakers are more intelligent, because they have that sunny top floor.”
“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”
Speaking at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival about filmmaker Michael Moore: “Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.”
“It’s over. There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.”
“In the beginning I believed in Cannes, but now it’s just for publicity. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.”
“People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me.”
[on cinema] “Truth twenty-four times a second.”
“You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.”
“My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.”
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
As promised, here are the next three installments of the soul music series I am writing for Culture Grits. The latest installment will be there sometime this coming weekend (?) and will tell the beginnings of the Otis Redding story.
In the Beginning: The Genesis of Stax II
In the Beginning: The Genesis of Stax III
The Bearcat, the Beauty, and the Sweet Stank of Success
Enjoy!
Also be sure to open this stand-alone player and preview my entire new – 12 song – CD “Blue Turns Black”
These songs will soon be available for downloading, so stay tuned.
Love,
Joe Nolan
Open this stand-alone player and preview Joe’s entire new CD “Blue Turns Black”
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