Government funding of film

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard

Ever since high school, I have been pondering the uses and disuses of government funding of the arts. With regards to film the different policies in Europe and North America have engendered two types of cinema: European art house films and American blockbusters. A quote by a certain David Carr, a libertarian:

Many years ago, not long after I had graduated from law school, I briefly succumbed to a rather silly conviction that I was a cultural barbarian and this state of affairs could be addressed by becoming an afficianado of European cinema. I should admit that this conviction was in no small measure driven by the belief that being au fait with the work of European film-makers was a surefire way to impress the girlies.

So I started to spend much of my free time ferreting out art-house independent cinemas (of the kind that sold organic brownies in the foyer instead of popcorn) and sat through endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.

These films have all amalgamated in my mind and I cannot remember the name of even a single one. After about six months, I decided that no woman was worth this level of constipation so I threw the towel in and went back to watching simplistic sci-fi blockbusters and gangster movies.

While I find Carr’s position particularly barbaric, I can understand his irritation at some European directors who excel at pompousness, seriousness and pretentiousness. Also, there seems to be no popular European cinema. Dyer and Vincendeau have argued in the early nineties that the only European popular cinema is US cinema. But surely, there has been a European popular cinema in the sixties and seventies?

On different note David Lynch is someone (whose films I like) who seems to be working within this paradigm of European artsiness and I wonder: are his films making money? Where does one find this kind of info. Here?

Also, government funding is tied in with the concept of cultural significance, the rationale being that a government can fund the cultural significant products of tomorrow.

Very short summaries: the cinema of Lynch

Lynch’s oeuvre in 10 tropes:

the eternal dwarf – dreams and lesbian fantasies – doubles and alter egos – film/theatre within film – red curtains – unusual (long pause) conversations – sound effects – bizarre characters – kinky sex – mysterious titles

INLAND EMPIRE, the new Lynch that runs almost three hours, in a Belgian cinema starting Wednesday. Speaking of Belgian cinema, I’m quite enjoying the film writing of Dave Mestdach in Focus Knack (and Focus Knack in general).

A middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema

Matthew of Esoteric Rabbit and Zach of Elusive Lucidity have been watching some of the films from Godard’s ‘revolutionary’ period. I’ve never been impressed by the films of Godard (not Breathless, not Pierrot, not Week End) except for Contempt (I guess due to my predilection for the prose of Moravia) and although I’ve never watched Godard’s political cinema, I suspect that I will like them in the way that I enjoyed William Klein’s Mr. Freedom. Also, here is an interesting post by Darren of Long Pauses on Godard’s 66-67 period.

Some notes on Godard’s films (and especially Le Gai savoir) and a critique by Guy Debord followed by some Godard quotes:

In the ‘revolutionary’ 1969 Le Gai Savoir Jean-Luc Godard liberates himself from all narrative requirements, and emerges as a pure cinematic essayist. Godard writes essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, he films it.

Le Gai savoir (Eng:The Joy of Knowledge) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard, started before the events of May 68 and finished shortly afterwards. Coproduced by the O.R.T.F., the film was upon completion rejected by French national television, then released in the cinema where it was subsequently banned by the French government. The title references Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. [1]

Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his films are automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Godard produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a concierge educated by the mass media. Godard’s “critiques” never go beyond the innocuous humor typical of nightclub comedians or Mad magazine. His flaunted culture is largely the same as that of his audience, which has read exactly the same pages in the same drugstore paperbacks. –Situationist International, 1966

… it is harldy surprising that Godard was dismissed as an imbecile by many of those from the avant-garde milieus connected to lettrism. The ardour of Guy Debord and his associates on the subject of Godard stems directly from the fact that Jean-Luc was providing the bourgeoisie with a middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema. Indeed, the invocation of the penal code during the discussion of prostitution in Vivre sa vie recalls Debord’s similar use of material on the soundtrack of his 1953 feature length anti-classic Screams in Favour of de Sade. –Summer of Love: psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 1960s

Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard’s ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized. [1]

British Sounds (1970) is an experimental film by Jean-Luc Godard, there is a scene with an extended close-up of a woman’s pubis.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. –Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. –Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard

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.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated. –Jean-Luc Godard