Two or Three Things I Know About Godard...

By Staff

"In discussing the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard," writes Craig Keller in a 2003 article for Senses of Cinema, "one inevitably arrives at the question of where exactly to mark this artist’s own "leaps forward" on the timeline of a long and prolific career; and in addressing that question, one first must decide how to make the distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after,’ and then how many times to make the distinction." Yes, It’s time to prep for your meeting with Jean-Luc Godard at the Castro Theatre on Friday, SF360.org writers Michael Guillen, Robert Avila, and Miljenko Skoknic offer a few places to get started. Keller’s A to Z intensive at SOC locates "Two or Three Things I Know About Her…" as one of the announcers of "the shift in Godard’s methodology to a fundamentally Marxist social critique."

Discomfort was being felt at the time, and The New York Times online makes access to Renata Adler all the way back in 1968 eerily, clickably simple: "There is an almost intolerable, conscious tension in Godard’s work now between word and picture: one’s attention is so riveted to the work onscreen that Godard seems to think he can afford to freight it — at one point he speaks of himself as a painter and a writer — with a verbal text that takes off at right angles and includes almost anything that he would care to say."

You want more? Strictly Film School finds a lot more to like: "‘Two or Three Things I Know About Her’ is a highly eccentric and audaciously complex, but sincere, passionate, and infinitely fascinating exposition on identity, modernization, international politics, and consumerism." Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian UK: "Unashamedly intellectual, discursive, noodling film-making, a cinema of ideas, conceived in a language that is demanding, but not totally opaque…." For the rest, there’s the UC Berkeley bibliography. Dig in.

03.28.2007