{"id":3428,"date":"2018-05-13T18:39:30","date_gmt":"2018-05-13T18:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commarts.pleather.us\/2018\/05\/13\/jean-luc-godards-consultant-explains-his-michael-bay-reference-and-filmmaking-process-the-closest-model-is-the-torah\/"},"modified":"2018-05-13T18:39:30","modified_gmt":"2018-05-13T18:39:30","slug":"jean-luc-godards-consultant-explains-his-michael-bay-reference-and-filmmaking-process-the-closest-model-is-the-torah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/2018\/05\/13\/jean-luc-godards-consultant-explains-his-michael-bay-reference-and-filmmaking-process-the-closest-model-is-the-torah\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s Consultant Explains His Michael Bay Reference and Filmmaking Process: \u2018The Closest Model Is the Torah\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/t\/jean-luc-godard\/\" id=\"auto-tag_jean-luc-godard\">Jean-Luc Godard<\/a>\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/t\/the-image-book\/\" id=\"auto-tag_the-image-book\">The Image Book<\/a>\u201d is a sprawling mash-up of movies from across the history of the medium, set to the legendary filmmaker\u2019s lyrical voiceover, and many audiences at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/t\/cannes\/\" id=\"auto-tag_cannes\">Cannes<\/a> premiere were caught off guard by the overload of reference points. While not as much of a conversation-starter as his innovative 3D effort \u201cGoodbye to Language,\u201d the 87-year-old Swiss-French director has certainly crafted a provocative, boundary-bursting cinematic achievement as only he could. Cineastes will get chills from the mere glimpses of \u201cJohnny Guitar,\u201d which Godard first celebrated in references to the movie from the first decade of his work over 50 years ago.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pmc-related-link read-more\">\n\t\t\t<strong class=\"pmc-related-type\">Read More:<\/strong><a target=\"_self\" href=\"http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/2018\/05\/the-image-book-review-jean-luc-godard-cannes-1201963343\/\" title=\"\u2018The Image Book\u2019 Review: Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s Supercut Makes the Case That We\u2019re All Doomed \u2014 Cannes 2018\">\u2018The Image Book\u2019 Review: Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s Supercut Makes the Case That We\u2019re All Doomed \u2014 Cannes 2018<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p class=\"p1\">But one clip struck some viewers as strange even by Godardian standards: a fleeting, lo-res shot from \u201c13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/t\/michael-bay\/\" id=\"auto-tag_michael-bay\">Michael Bay<\/a>\u2019s 2016 war movie about the attack on the American compound. Like much of what we see in \u201cThe Image Book,\u201d the shot lasts no more than a few seconds, and it shows an armed, bearded man firing a bazooka at an unseen target. Since much of Godard\u2019s voiceover finds him ruminating about the current state of the Arab world (and its neglect), one could easily write off the fleeting visual as one of many random images in this dense collage, which uses existing images as shorthand for a range of ideas about modern civilization.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But Godard, who is reportedly frail even as he keeps busy from his home in Switzerland, materialized at Cannes with a hilarious FaceTime appearance at the festival\u2019s press conference. So of course somebody asked him about the Michael Bay thing. However, when Vulture reporter Kyle Buchanan approached the microphone hovering just below an iPhone screen \u2014 where the wizened auteur appeared as a cropped digital image that wouldn\u2019t look out of place in one of his late-period productions \u2014 he pled innocence. \u201cI don\u2019t remember that film,\u201d he said. \u201cI think if I inserted that footage there, it\u2019s because it contains something I didn\u2019t find anywhere else.\u201d But when Buchanan pressed the filmmaker, noting that \u201c13 Hours\u201d appears in the credits for his new movie, Godard concluded, \u201cI don\u2019t think that these images come from that film.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2018\/05\/is-michael-bay-and-13-hours-in-the-new-godard-film.html\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">his report of the encounter<\/a>, Buchanan muses on whether the incident was \u201ca credits snafu\u201d or \u201cmaybe he was just having fun with me, and Godard is a closet Bay head.\u201d The truth: \u201cThe Image Book\u201d does sample Bay\u2019s film, as I confirmed with <a href=\"https:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nicole_Brenez\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">Nicole Brenez<\/a>, an experimental film professor at the New Sorbonne University who served as a consultant on the project since 2015, when Godard first started working on it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">\u201cI guess Jean-Luc totally forgot the origin of the shot,\u201d Brenez wrote me by email, two days after she walked the red carpet as one of the representatives for the film attending in his place. \u201cHe watched thousands of movies, read thousands of texts, and experimented with dozens of editing strategies. So, in the process, one can forgive him for having forgotten a source he wasn\u2019t really interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-video\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Ohhhhh shit there&#8217;s video of me asking Godard about Michael Bay <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/ozNJaCwg2j\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">pic.twitter.com\/ozNJaCwg2j<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/kylebuchanan\/status\/995534129189007360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">May 13, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\">Ultimately, Godard\u2019s integration of commercial cinema in &#8220;The Image Book&#8221; doesn\u2019t correlate with his personal feelings about any specific reference point, and asking him to explain any specific clip misses the broader point: \u201cThe Image Book\u201d doesn\u2019t deal explicitly with filmmakers or filmmaking eras like his free-ranging eight-part \u201cHistoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma\u201d project; instead, it operates as a kind of holistic statement on a media-saturated age, when humanity has been overrun by capitalist fantasies. \u201c13 Hours\u201d provides just one example of the deleterious relationship between religion and war, just two of his many targets, and he didn\u2019t have to know the movie or the director to find an entry point for his argument.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Ultimately, searching for specific answers in Godard&#8217;s work can lead to frustrating dead ends. Having abandoned traditional narrative approaches ages ago, his recent projects work as extensions of his freewheeling intellectual proclivities, and they usually contain a kind of poetic frenzy that defies precise explanation. \u201cAll the images, sounds, and the relationship between them are so numerous and intense that not only is nothing arbitrary,\u201d Brenez wrote me, \u201cbut nothing is unequivocal. There is a rhizome of meanings in each new relationship. I\u2019m not a specialist of religion, but the closest model for me seems to be the Torah \u2026 even if Jean-Luc probably never opened it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Source: IndieWire film<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201cThe Image Book\u201d is a sprawling mash-up of movies from across the history of the medium, set to the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-3428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-careering"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paqOTj-Ti","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.valdosta.edu\/m2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}