by Agnes Poirier
The world's critics, gathered in Cannes to see Jean-Luc Godard's latest film, expected many things from cinema's imprecator-in-chief, ranging from brilliance to ridicule by way of the obscure, but they didn't expect this, and as always with Godard, he outwitted us all. Godard's art of subtitles sent the monolinguistic hordes screaming after three minutes. How dare he? How dare he translate only one word in five? When a character on screen said, for instance, "L'argent est un bien public", the English caption on the screen read "money public good". With never more than three words on screen, widely spaced and sometimes even joined together, no pronouns and no verbs, Godard does what no other film director will ever dream of achieving: say merde to reality. And it does take a truly Wild Bunch, the English-named French film company which financed the film, to pay to watch an oeuvre's own sabotage.
Like Zidane's head-butt as a way of adieu, Godard has just signed, with his latest film – aptly named Film Socialisme – his own suicide note. Both men, gods in their fields, can defy the world they live in and deny reality: the privilege of tragic heroes. By refusing to play the game of subtitles, Godard is making his film unexportable outside the ever-shrinking francophone world. But even there, his film requires from francophones to have a smatter of German, Italian and Russian as whole scenes in those languages are not translated at all.
από την ιστοσελίδα της Guardian
The world's critics, gathered in Cannes to see Jean-Luc Godard's latest film, expected many things from cinema's imprecator-in-chief, ranging from brilliance to ridicule by way of the obscure, but they didn't expect this, and as always with Godard, he outwitted us all. Godard's art of subtitles sent the monolinguistic hordes screaming after three minutes. How dare he? How dare he translate only one word in five? When a character on screen said, for instance, "L'argent est un bien public", the English caption on the screen read "money public good". With never more than three words on screen, widely spaced and sometimes even joined together, no pronouns and no verbs, Godard does what no other film director will ever dream of achieving: say merde to reality. And it does take a truly Wild Bunch, the English-named French film company which financed the film, to pay to watch an oeuvre's own sabotage.
Like Zidane's head-butt as a way of adieu, Godard has just signed, with his latest film – aptly named Film Socialisme – his own suicide note. Both men, gods in their fields, can defy the world they live in and deny reality: the privilege of tragic heroes. By refusing to play the game of subtitles, Godard is making his film unexportable outside the ever-shrinking francophone world. But even there, his film requires from francophones to have a smatter of German, Italian and Russian as whole scenes in those languages are not translated at all.
από την ιστοσελίδα της Guardian
