275 Tout va Bien

[Donald Trampoline]

If you've seen any Godard films, you know he has numerous times dialed out the ambient sound for a brief moment so there is no soundtrack noise at all. Then he brings it back up again. (This going to completely blank audio does not happen in Tout va bien though. That's not what I'm saying.) I believe some examples off the top of my head are the moment of silence scene in Band of Outsiders, and I want to say Belmondo on the city street early in A Woman is a Woman. In any case, he is always emphasizing the relationship between sound and image in different ways and bringing the relationship between the two to our attention. Yes, it is correct he loves all things sound. However.....

There is wonderful attention to ambient sound in this film as well, and that is all present in the Tartan VHS. I am not saying that the ambient sound shouldn't be there. I'm saying in the Tartan release the spoken voiceover lines that I mention in my early post are actually audible-- either over a reduced (but still present) ambient sound or over an eliminated ambient sound that is then brought back in after the line has been spoken (just in a couple of instances in this particular film). Which is typical Godard (you notice and appreciate the ambient sound by its being removed and then reintroduced). Some lines of major importance are incorrectly barely audible in this Criterion release.

[Steven H]

I wonder how this would compare to the film itself instead of a PAL tape. Given Criterion's track record, I would assume they were correct and the Tartan tape was not, but while that seems logical, I'm certainly not an authority on Godard.

Some lines of major importance are incorrectly barely audible in this Criterion release.

I did track through and rewatch the part you mentioned, the first two lines are pretty easily audible, but the last line isn't. What are some of the other important lines missing? Just in case Criterion doesn't repress the release, it would be interesting to know these for a better understanding of the film.

[Donald Trampoline]

The couple of lines I'm talking about all are visible in the subtitles, but it is just that the French audio is barely audible or severely reduced from what it should be. So, as far as the understanding of the film, you are not missing out. Thank goodness for that at least.

The others you can notice by just seeing there are subs and that you can barely hear the lines they go with. (Apologies if I don't go back and itemize the few others besides the one I mention. Perhaps I will later.)

It takes away from the film in the following way: while the lines I mention are intended to be voiceover, the way they are presented in the Criterion DVD, they sound like they may just be from some random person in the crowd, don't they? Well, that's distorting the viewing experience, since they are not coming from the crowd, but from Jane Fonda speaking in voiceover. She is onscreen chatting with a man pushing a grocery cart, but these lines of hers are spoken in voiceover (very loudly and clearly in the Tartan and much more easily identifiable as being spoken by her).

P.S. - by ambient noise, I should clarify that I mean the sound of all the supermarket people arguing and yelling. The time at which this particular example I've cited occurs is at 01:30:45 "To change everything, where do you start?" "Everywhere!"

[vertovfan]

I especially like the part in Letter to Jane where Godard and Gorin sarcastically suggest carrying around Rodin's Thinker statue to every catastrophe in the world, to inspire pity!

[GringoTex]

If you've seen any Godard films, you know he has numerous times dialed out the ambient sound for a brief moment so there is no soundtrack noise at all.

Godard was also fond of drowning out his actors' dialogue by raising the ambient sound. Other than that, I have no idea whether Criterion's or Tartan's is the more correct mix.

[ellipsis7]

A strange bit of info (in error) has crept onto the back cover... A symbol and text refer to a notional English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack as an alternative to the mono original French Dolby Digital 1.0 soundtrack...

Truly a ghost in the Machine!

[cbernard]

Just caught up with this. Tout va bien is an extroardinary film of its time, but no less relevant today, and its long take set-pieces (the first, at the sausage factory set, is an unmistakable reference to Jerry Lewis's The Ladies' Man) deserve to be better-known. This is a militant Playtime. Perfect for post-election despair of all varieties.

However, I think Letter to Jane is even greater. It is a rigorous film, one that will turn your head inside out, it's on par with the best films of Chris Marker.

[flambeur]

If you've seen any Godard films, you know he has numerous times dialed out the ambient sound for a brief moment so there is no soundtrack noise at all. Then he brings it back up again. (This going to completely blank audio does not happen in Tout va bien though. That's not what I'm saying.) I believe some examples off the top of my head are the moment of silence scene in Band of Outsiders, and I want to say Belmondo on the city street early in A Woman is a Woman. In any case, he is always emphasizing the relationship between sound and image in different ways and bringing the relationship between the two to our attention. Yes, it is correct he loves all things sound. However.....

There is wonderful attention to ambient sound in this film as well, and that is all present in the Tartan VHS. I am not saying that the ambient sound shouldn't be there. I'm saying in the Tartan release the spoken voiceover lines that I mention in my early post are actually audible-- either over a reduced (but still present) ambient sound or over an eliminated ambient sound that is then brought back in after the line has been spoken (just in a couple of instances in this particular film). Which is typical Godard (you notice and appreciate the ambient sound by its being removed and then reintroduced). Some lines of major importance are incorrectly barely audible in this Criterion release.

Not typical Godard, typical Fritz Lang.

[AZAI]

Why hasn't somebody mentioned the blue bathrobe JLG is wearing in the interview yet?.......If I get dragged out of bed as early as his appearance suggests I would have to take at least 5 coffees before I can start a monologue like that!

[colinr0380]

I liked Letter to Jane a lot, perhaps more than Tout Va Bien (I must have watched Letter To Jane four or five times, compared to Tout Va Bien's two so far, although part of that might just be due to the shorter running time and need to rewatch to take it all in!). It is great that the two films are together though, they illuminate one anothers arguments. Letter to Jane is brilliant, annoying, irritating, exciting and both pretentious and illuminating, made great for me by the contradictory feelings it inspired and the issues it covered, even if it was done in a brutally blunt manner!

Hopefully Criterion will release some of the Dziga Vertov films in the future, this release has wetted my appetite for the even more insular, non-commercial productions!

Letter to Jane feels like a harangue more than an attempt to conduct a discussion and while the tone is not particularly nasty it can feel a little condescending - a lecture. But it is saved by the feeling that a lot of the comments are justifiably made to show an audience what they should know about the use of selection in the media to highlight or ignore an issue, depending on many factors such as what the flavour of the week is, perceived public opinion, the decisions of newspaper bosses of what to cover and, of course, the presence of a celebrity and perhaps to a lesser extent, politicians (as perhaps the recent Live8 concerts well meaningly but excruciatingly show - Brian Eno summed it up best when he appeared on a recent BBC Radio 4 discussion programme and said that he was very wary of the idea of the Live8 concerts changing anything, but got caught up in the idea of it as a way to show leaders of countries that they could think beyond their own borders in decision making, to "think beyond the next election", but said that unfortunately the lack of progress in the final summit left the situation similar to the first Live Aid of "well meaning white people" rather than in a situation of helping Africa help itself).

Letter To Jane does have that feeling of preaching to the converted in the sense that I think anyone who was not willing to go along with the point of view expressed would likely walk out after about five minutes, but I guess that this is the same kind of insular style that all the Dziga-Vertov films were made in. It is kind of refreshing though to see a film which assumes one point of view and then does not take time to try to explain it to an assumed middle-ground audience, but explicates its views in its own terms and if the audience wants to understand they can, but there is no interest in pandering.

Poor Jane Fonda! I would partly agree with the booklet essay's letter back to the filmmakers that it does seem mean spirited at times in its attack on 'the actress'. It could be argued that if Jane had not got involved in various well meaning campaigns (which bring much needed media attention to campaigns due to her celebrity) that there would be no material for the film. She might feel aggrieved by the film and feel attacked, a bit like someone might if they offered a starving person a piece of bread and was then attacked by them because there was no butter on it! It feels like Jane is an easy target, she laid herself open to criticism by doing what she did and allowing herself to be photographed that way and is being lambasted for her naivete.

In another way the tone of the film is perhaps a way of saying "didn't you learn anything when you worked on our film?", which seems a little presumptious on the filmmaker's part that their actors should be as committed to the message of the film as they were (after all they were using Fonda's name, and acknowledge it in the cheque signing opening of Tout Va Bien, as much as she later used the people of Vietnam), but after all Jane had only just chosen to ally herself in the making of Tout Va Bien, so the political points of Godard and Gorin's film should have been fresh in her mind. There is a mention of Fonda being unhappy with being sidelined (and she and Montand are both literally obscured in one scene during the strike!) in Tout Va Bien as the emphasis went onto the workers and their problems, so perhaps her subsequent tour, as well as being a continuation of her work that she had previously been involved in, could itself be a response to her being sidelined in Tout Va Bien - the actress reimposing herself as clear while the background people whose story that she is bringing to light are shown fuzzily, the complete opposite of Tout Va Bien's characters. It leads us to wonder about how far those being photographed have control over the way that they are represented - did Jane herself choose which photographs were allowed to be published? Or did the photographer have the choice and his own ways of presentation that influenced how he composed the picture? Are we reading too much into the picture? Probably - and maybe not because these might all be subconscious decisions that go on every day in deciding which pictures go to which article to show a particular point of view. Discussed aloud they are pretentious because they are concepts that are so simple and overlooked. Does the media bow to the way celebrities want themselves presented, or do they portray people in such a way that they control the up and down of a media career? It is probably a situation in which the control fluctuates between different parties all the time, which makes 'apportioning blame' for a particular image difficult. Is the actress ideologically 'clear' because she is afraid of being ideologically 'fuzzy' (as she had been forced to be in Tout Va Bien), or had she just returned to the confines of conventional photojournalism as the only way to get her message across to a major audience? After all who would want to see an article about an actress when all the pictures of her were out of focus? Is it wrong to use your celebrity to highlight issues, and risk trivialising them, or is it wrong not to?

In Letter to Jane the conflicts over who controls the image are brought out: is the actress manipulating it? or the out of focus Vietnamese person? or the magazine that printed it? How have each of them made the image work in their interests? Or have they been exploited? Has the magazine been 'duped' into publishing a piece on Vietnam just because Jane Fonda went there? Has the reader been duped into learning about Vietnam because he/she likes to hear about what Fonda is up to? Has Jane Fonda gotten publicity about herself as well as the issue that she is supporting out of her trip? Did this particular photo impress an image of Vietnam into the minds of those who saw it, or did it add to a cumulative effect to show what was happening? Insignificant in itself, but when combined with hundreds or thousands of other images, powerful?

I was thinking after seeing the short interview clip with Britney Spears used in Fahrenheit 9/11 about how important it would be now to do something like a 'Letter to Britney' analysing every body movement, what her casual gum chewing implies while making pat statements in support of Bush, and how conscious this micro-managed media poppet is of her ideological manipulations! (I'm guessing very, or at least her agents are!)

But at the same time it shows how poorly Britney would compare to Jane. There is a sense that Jane would actually care and might take comments made about her role seriously and that it may influence her attitude (although I've no way of knowing, Jane Fonda might not have given a damn!). I'm just not sure Britney would understand the points made, and wouldn't care even if she did! I guess what I am trying to get at is that celebrity and politics has moved from political activism of the Jane Fonda-style to the soundbite style that provides less material for a 'Letter'-style analysis. Or perhaps there is a lot of material there, just in need of a different analysis, and someone to highlight it! Maybe that the political activism of the past is just more bluntly linked to celebrity publicity now! (Although to me Live8 was a throwback to the 'let's highlight an important cause' style, although I'm sure it didn't harm too many careers either!). A particular cause attracts celebrity support as a push to the celebrity, rather than the celebrity bringing themselves to an issue that they feel is important, which I'm sure is an issue that a film like Team America: World Police was playing about with.

[Noiretirc]

Wow, a 5-year bump!! Thank you for this thread. I'm only just learning about / investigating these films (Tout va Bien and Letter To Jane), and I desperately want this disc. So, 5 years later, what sayest thou, those who gushed over the release? (And those who didn't?) Does water under a bridge cause re-assessments? How does this hold up amongst all Godard film, and all Criterion Godard? Anyone want to sell the old DVD to me? Thanks.

[jorencain]

I'm only just learning about / investigating these films (Tout va Bien and Letter To Jane), and I desperately want this disc. So, 5 years later, what sayest thou, those who gushed over the release? (And those who didn't?) Does water under a bridge cause re-assessments? How does this hold up amongst all Godard film, and all Criterion Godard? Anyone want to sell the old DVD to me? Thanks.

I actually just watched this yesterday. I love "Tout va bien," and it definitely holds up under repeated viewings. It's engaging politically and cinematically. It may not have the raw power of "Weekend" or other Godard films, but it's an inventive and intelligent survey of the political climate in France after May '68. I have only watched part of "A Letter to Jane," which seemed a bit tedious to me. I haven't really given it a chance. It's a DVD worth getting, for sure.

[Michael Kerpan]

I liked Tout va bien quite a bit. Letter from Jane is my most disliked Godard film (though I hate Week End almost as much, albeit for very different reasons). Tout va bien had touches of humor -- and its leftwing politics mostly made sense (in the context of the film).

[BrianInAtlanta]

Gorin claimed he had to do quite a bit of the directing after Godard's motorcycle accident and some of it does seem like someone doing a Godard homage rather than Godard doing it himself: the obvious tribute to Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man set; the replay of Weekend's long tracking shot in the supermarket, all seems a bit retrograde. Tout va bien also loses something if you haven't seen the parallels with the other Dziga Vertov's: the assembly line from British Sounds, the war between the French Communist Party and the student radicals in Wind From The East, the young radical women of Vladimir and Rosa and Lotte in Italia showing male radicals how there is a class struggle within their relationship, etc.

Letter to Jane just doesn't strike me as that mean-spirited as it does others (and did Jane Fonda). I get much more a sense of playfulness from it with all the word twisting and a greater desire to raise questions in the viewer's mind rather than Godard and Gorin hectoring that their point of view must be taken as dogma. There's also the problem that the main idea they are proposing, the mainstream media might have a hidden agenda that colors every detail of how they relay the news, has gone from a radical revelation to a commonplace assumption.

[Noiretirc]

Just caught up with this. Tout va bien is an extroardinary film of its time, but no less relevant today, and its long take set-pieces (the first, at the sausage factory set, is an unmistakable reference to Jerry Lewis's The Ladies' Man) deserve to be better-known. This is a militant Playtime. Perfect for post-election despair of all varieties.

However, I think Letter to Jane is even greater. It is a rigorous film, one that will turn your head inside out, it's on par with the best films of Chris Marker.

I agree whole heartedly with your assessment of Tout Va Bien. There are so many Pythonesque moments too! I almost expected to see Gumbys when various groups of people were holding still for the camera. I think this work is superbly paced. Even if you feel you are being lectured by Godard here, you have to admit that each platitude is being delivered via a very interesting scene or development. My attention was held for every moment of the 96mins and I can't wait to see this again. I saw many similarities between the style of this and the 80s films, and I have a very hard time believing that Godard was often AWOL here, due to his accident, leaving prime duties to JPG. I'm shocked that this film is often considered to be from a much less exciting period than the so-called Classic 59-67 period.

I'm still struggling with Letter To Jane, however.

[Numero Trois]

Context is everything in this film. The casual viewer enjoys Godard's earlier work because of its intense romanticism and his later work because of its poetic melancholia. This isn't one of those films.

True, but on the other hand it's nowhere near as dense as his later work. And the theme of worker vs. owner has of course not aged a single day.

Gorin claimed he had to do quite a bit of the directing after Godard's motorcycle accident and some of it does seem like someone doing a Godard homage rather than Godard doing it himself: the obvious tribute to Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man set; the replay of Weekend's long tracking shot in the supermarket, all seems a bit retrograde.

The factory manager's extended monologue also doesn't seem like the usual Godard style. The tone for that scene leans more to the satirical than savagely acerbic. Both that supermarket sequence and the factory manager one for me rank as the most amusing in Godard's ouevre.

How does this hold up amongst all Godard film, and all Criterion Godard?

It's a very good film, a quite welcome change of pace between the overly abrasive post-68s and the more forbidding mid-70s films.

[aox]

I finally caught this during the week and thought it was fantastic. I've seen 90% of Godard's features from 1960-1967 (up until Weekend and Sympathy for the Devil) and nothing later except Film: Socialism. So I am missing everything between 1968-2010. I guess I just burned out of Godard at some point, even though I own and love most of his 60s output. I have read this thread, and had always heard that Tout va Bien was a huge change in style and ushered in his 1970s phase. However, I really didn't notice a huge change in style from this film to his 60s output. Besides some of the wardrobe, haircuts, and a few bits of technology, this looked like typical Godard that I know from the 60s period. Even the ending in the grocery store reminded me of the traffic jam in Weekend.

This thread was pretty insightful in its comparisons to his 60s work, but one film that no one has talked about in this thread and I see rarely mentioned in conversations regarding his 60s period is La chinoise. Is there a reason I don't see this film mentioned often even when discussing 60-67 Godard? I couldn't help but think of La chinoise, and its conceit around the exploration of Marxist/Maoist thought, seemed to be gregariously tied in with the themes of Tout va Bien. I felt that Tout va Bien just seemed like a much more mature examination of the same themes and a return to an almost bourgeois narrative that I had heard Godard rejected after Weekend (apologies if that assumption is wrong). La chinoise is severely underrated and overlooked in my opinion, as I guess many would argue that this one is too. I need to revisit both this and La chinoise at some point.

[domino harvey]

I think La Chinoise is one of Godard's best works, and my favorite of his classic era behind only Breathless and Pierrot le fou (though of course they're all at worst still pretty good and worth seeing). I'm biased because I once watched it many, many times in a row to prepare for a screening I was hosting on campus back in the day, but I think it straddles the playful line between embracing and mocking the politics of the era, before Godard went all-in on one side of the arguments he presents

[colinr0380]

"When you read about a factory in the paper, its full of boring details, as if the guy had just discovered factories for the first time. He feels pity, he practically cries. But he never shows the struggle, how things change, how good it can feel to lay into a real pain in the ass. Workers are always made to look sinister.

It's complicated. I can't explain."

As mentioned above about Tout va Bien being a perfect film for post-election despair, its also a kind of perfect film for post Brexit reflection! If ironic due to being French and dealing with French political ennui! But really its also about internationalism, bosses, even journalists, parachuted into situations with little understanding of how their presence is affecting the situation, just expected to govern, explain and defuse, if not listen.

Its sort of a post-uprising film that takes place in the periods of stasis when the first shots in the war have happened (or the first baton blows landed!) but nobody really knows what to do next. Whether this is the beginning of something major or just yet another manufactured crisis to allow some of the tension to be cathartically released against an uncaring system until the here today, gone tomorrow manager is fired and someone else just as bad takes their place.

I was particularly taken this time around by the way that the film is particularly scathing not just of the caricature pompous boss (who does however get to make his own very Godardian politcal speech espousing his philosophy of the death of Marx and Engles in the face of, imperfect but the best we've got, capitalism, albeit with grandiloquent hand gestures that rather underline his flamboyant callousness! It was quite amusing that one of his only concessions to the drawbacks of capitalism is that it lets people pleasure themselves too much! Very Ballardian!), but of the other "bourgeois who bourgeois" - the main couple of "Him" and "Her" played by Yves Montand and Jane Fonda.

The film really captures the sense I'm feeling at the moment of the journalist classes seeming to be completely at sea and unable to properly explain the world to their audience. Partly because they feel left behind by events that they felt deeply connected to moving on to something else and leaving them behind (in this case 'revolutionary' May 1968 having turned into 'compromised' 1972), and perhaps partly because they don't know who their audiences are anymore, at least politically but maybe socially too. Being closer to the bosses than the proleteriat, as suggested by being confined with the boss in his office during the takeover of the factory.

As that one worker says at the end of the factory strike sequence, the uprising is more about a short term explosion of discontent than any particular long term strategy. A shrillly chanted slogan more than a moving song. One that isn't just about bullying the boss and giving him the runaround until he eventually has to barge Jane Fonda aside (with a frantic "excuse me but I must piss!!"), smash the window of his office with a brick and urinate out the window (in perhaps the best display of 'trickle down economics' that I've ever seen!), but also about sticking it to the unions too, who pretend that they are in desperately important negotiations on worker's rights with facts and figures galore to back their arguments up, yet still end up rubber stamping the management decisions at the end. Unions in this film seem to be seen as a way of obfuscating the issue and giving the workers a sense of engagement while ensuring that work goes on as normal during the interminable negotations. Of course the uprising upsets the unions more than the management because it is their careful plans that have been utterly derailed by the workers going wild in the factory.

But maybe that also is a great excuse for the unions to abdicate responsibility for the management's inevitable retribution? A retribution we never see because Fonda's journalist has moved on to the next story in the meantime. The inconclusiveness of journalistic reporting is of overriding importance here.

The film is split half and half between the factory uprising in the first half and then the focus on "Him" and "Her" in the second. The factory is the primary focus for that first half but less than irrelevant in the second, as it fades in the consciousness of our main characters and they move on to other things.

First we get Yves Montand's "Him" explaining his work as a commercials director ("If you must define me, I'm a filmmaker who does commercials. The distinction is important to me"), with his latest shoot having a background radio reporting on air strikes in Vietnam being cut off by some jaunty pop music for the leg model girls in the commercial to dance to. This section is about disenchantment with the New Wave, as Montand explains his role in '68 and then being unable to take on a commission to adapt a David Goodis novel when it didn't feel as if it spoke to his current way of thinking. It appears that "Him" couldn't deal with the idea of making artistic work for pointless reasons, and so has jumped entirely into pure commercial work in response. It can either be seen as fully selling out (as "Her" implies in the fight later on) or another response to feeling destroyed by the feeling of the revolution having passed - that there is no choice anymore and better to submit to another factory process than delude yourself into feeling that there is still true art to be made and a fight to be fought on the cinema screen.

"I'm only now starting to understand something that Brecht pointed out over 40 years ago. Do you know his preface to Mahagonny? Isn't it brilliant?"

"Her" on the other hand hasn't entirely given up yet, though we see her about to (one of the implications of the film is that her idealism has been enabled to last so long into 1972 due to "Him" taking his entirely commercial-based direction in life. There's even a pointedly added maid cleaning up their tea tray at one moment during their row scene in their apartment. I also think it is important that the maid only appears in the 're-take' of the overlapping beginning of a scene shown from a different angle that hasn't neatly cut her presence out of the film, like the crew members holding the clapper board get edited out. I suppose to "Her"'s/Jane's credit, she at least helps by putting her cup on the tea tray for the maid!). Fonda already feels diminished in the first shot we see of her at work doing a radio broadcast, but one that just involves her echo chamberingly approvingly quoting Charlie Hebdo on the state on the death of journalism!

As with Montand (and I guess the boss of the factory!), Fonda also has a great speech (though overdubbed by a French voiceover in the scenes with Fonda speaking English, which of course then get translated by Criterion in the subtitles! Layers upon layers of distracting translation obfuscating a speech and running the risk of misinterpretation) in which she speaks to an unseen interviewer about her feelings towards her work and issues around reporting. Of seeing the world move on to other subjects without closure on current events. Of journalism becoming, or maybe has always been, a method of distraction with 'new content' and soundbites rather than long form enlightenment. "Her" feels boxed into a niche and fears becoming an irrelevance as she is expected to have journalistic 'expertise' (or rather just basic competence) at all sorts of subjects rather than those she has affinity for. She wants a voice of her own, but is stuck working for a broadcaster with a 'house style' that stifles idiosyncratic takes on the world (could that itself have relevance to working with Godard and Gorin?). And like "Him" (which is probably the real underlying issue during their fight), "Her" has tried to give up completely and mould herself into what her employer wants of her, but only finds her articles getting rejected and writer's block from stifling her creativity.

"It's like the subject matter, the material itself, forces you to write and think about it in a different way....The more I move forward, the less I understand. I'm an American correspondent in France who no longer corresponds to anything"

"Her's" frustration is more pronounced but it seems to me less about the clashing of a relationship or an actual fight over ideological differences between the couple, more that they are at different stages of the grieving process. Its difficult to really say that this is about wider political differences having consequences that ripple down into personal relationships as the film is colder than that. This isn't really an emotionally 'real' couple. We're distanced from them more than the couple in Contempt, say, despite their relationship mirroring (even parodying) that more grandly tragic relationship of romance and the filmmaking process.

There's no particular chemistry between Montand and Fonda at all, but that feels intentional because the love story is literally manufactured (through bookending voiceovers) purely to structure the film. "Him" and "Her" have no existence outside of the screen anymore. They're not moving the audience through their character's relationships with each other, but by their character's most abstract intellectual problems with the society into which they've been placed (or parachuted into to act inside). There are maybe parallels to be drawn here to 'foreigner in a foreign land' stories of 'benevolent exploitation' for articles that don't end up explaining events any more than the journalist's idea of events (even an anticipation of that run of journalist stories from the 1980s from The Killing Fields, Under Fire, Salvador, Year of Living Dangerously, etc) present here in Tout va bien even before things move onto Letter To Jane and Vietnam journalism and that idea is tackled head on!

I particularly liked the meta-moments of the film that only emphasise the making of it more. The cheque opening and voiceovers are primary here, but I also particularly liked the way that we get 'overlapping' edits to other shots in which we see the last few seconds of the previous scene from a different angle. This is not just seeing the same action from a different camera angle though, but the overlapping last line or action is being actually re-staged and performed, inevitably with minor differences. Its almost like the unpredictable discontinuity of life bursting through the seams of the film! That cutting is also alluding to the manufacturing process of this consumer entertainment product itself, with all of its different takes getting stitched together into, what should be if all went to plan, a seamless whole!

And I love the long bookending shots of the film of the cutaway view inside the factory with the floor plan being wider than the cinema screen itself so it has to do a kind of typewriter roll back and forth to show everything, in a camera move that both reminds of the same movement in Contempt but also of the way that all the workers, union members and managers are sort of bouncing back and forth in antechambers of the building, all trapped in their own areas. But I also love the long, again back and forth, tracking shot in the supermarket looking past the rows of bleeping checkouts and down the aisles of pre-packaged goods, occasionally moving past a group of people listening to a Communist party member selling from his neat display of special offer reduced price manifesto pledges as if they were vegetables! (Who has only the discount to offer, not much information on the content he is selling!) I particularly like when the militants invade the supermarket and the shot begins to track back the other way, and in a contrast to the cutaway action of the factory we instead have plains of action from the running figures in the far background to the shoppers in the aisles doing their shop (continuing to fill their trolleys while the world around them crumbles), to Fonda and other shoppers nearer to camera, to the tills still going in the foreground!

It's another almost Ballardian moment of ironic uprising, as the militants just suddenly appear to invade this supermarket (Why exactly? Perhaps they're like mountaineers - "Because it's there!") and just as suddenly there are police officers armed with batons there to beat them back too, as they try and steer shoppers out without paying!

But more than anything the same back and forth, slightly disconnected nature of the tracking shot similar to the factory one suggests this is all from "Her"'s point of view as slightly befuddled observer on the margins of inexplicable behaviour, writing her last journalistic piece before she throws in the towel at the behaviour of these crazy Europeans and jets back to the US.

It's taken me a long time to fully connect with this film, and in some ways I wish it didn't feel so relevant right about now, as the issues in it feel pressing again, but its a fascinating piece of work.

[GTO]

My morning movie this AM. I loved the deconstruction of cinema aspect. Haven't seen that done successfully in anything else, but I do have hundreds more movies to get to.

Couldn't stop thinking what sweetly innocent years 1968 and 1972 were. I wonder what Godard thought about his movies being turned into consumer products. I'd go steal some in solidarity with the revolution but, being hopelessly bourgeois, I'm much too lazy.