[atsonicpark]

Reviews compiled..



Cristina Nord ( Die Tageszeitung Alemania): 8
Fernando Ganzo (Lumiere, España): 10
Gabe Klinger (The Auteurs Notebook, EE.UU.): 10 (It may be 10, it may be a 0... it doesn't matter. It was moving,
infuriating, liberating, painful, beautiful, ugly. In short, nothing
less than we expect from Godard. Not conventional in the least, as
some suspected, and clearly a work with consistent vision and of an
articulate mind, whatever the detractors will inevitably say)
Emmanuel Burdeau (Mediapart, Francia): 9,5
Sergio Wolf (Director artístico de BAFICI, Argentina): 10 (I vote only this time. Wolf)
Leonardo D'Espósito (Crítica de la Argentina, Argentina): 10
Mark Peranson (Cinema Scope, Canada): [when asked about the film] NO COMMENT
Jaime Pena (El Amante, Cahiers du Cinéma España, España): 10.9 (or 11)
Alejandro G. Calvo (Sensacine.com, España): 9
Olivier Père (Director artístico Festival de Locarno, Francia): 10
Carlo Chatrian (Panoramiques, Duellanti, Italia): 9
Diego Batlle (La Nación, Otros Cines, Argentina): 7
Luciano Monteagudo (Página/12, Argentina): 10
Scott Foundas (Filmlinc, EE.UU): 10
Carlos F. Heredero (Cahiers du Cinéma España, España): 8
Eugenio Renzi (Independencia, Francia): 10
Robert Koehler: (Variety, EE.UU.): 10
Roger Alan Koza (La Voz del Interior, Argentina): 10
Gonzalo de Pedro (Cahiers du Cinéma España, Público, España): 10


Quotes:

New York Times' Manohla Dargis writes — in an ArtsBeat blog entry — that her "thoughts on the movie – which looks like it was shot in both low-grade video and high-definition digital – are tentative and, for now, brief," you can't help but suspect that this is the only sane approach. She does get to work on it, mapping out three sections and offering first impressions of each, but on the whole, she's not rushing to judgement: "Clearly, it will take many more viewings of Film Socialism, an improvement in my French and many more fully translated subtitles before I can begin to get a tentative grasp on it. Such are the complicated pleasures of Mr Godard's work: however private, even hermetic his film language can be, these are works that by virtue of that language's density, as well as by their visual beauty and intellectual riddles, invite you in (or turn you off)."

Ben Kenigsberg in Time Out Chicago: "Film Socialisme is stunning to look at — memorable images include a man lecturing to what appears to be an empty auditorium and a boy in a Soviet shirt conducting a phantom orchestra — but it should be said the movie feels more tossed off than Godard's last two features, In Praise of Love (2001) and Notre Musique (2004), in which it was easier to discern a sense of organization. Like the epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Film Socialisme feels like Godard's personal journal, which would make it both ideal and a tad disappointing if it turns out to be a swan song."

"Rage over historical atrocity and America's effect on Europe have corroded Godard's formal focus," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "At this stage in his career, he expects that we expect him to puzzle us, we expect difficulty. He has traveled so far down the experimental rabbit hole that it's unclear whether the final hour, which is set near a filling station then ends a handful of montages, signals laziness or poetic injustice."

Lee Marshall in Screen: "Perhaps Jean-Luc Godard's least narrative production, this occasionally amusing, rarely thought-provoking and ultimately wearing reflection on civilization, language, democracy and llamas seems stuck in a 1960s timewarp, unable to renew the language of a filmmaker who has lost his urgency when compared to many of today's video artists."

"I have not the slightest doubt it will all be explained by some of his defenders, or should I say disciples," blogs Roger Ebert. "Although a commenter on my blog recently made sarcastic remarks about such a shameless liberal as me basking on the Riviera and drinking in Godard's socialism, there is nothing in the film to offend the most rabid Tea Party communicant, who would be hard-pressed to say what, if anything, the film has to say about socialism."

Melissa Anderson for Artforum: "The director returns to the topics that have dominated his film essays for at least twenty years: Israel and Palestine ('staying Haifa / right of return'), the Holocaust, the death of Europe, war. Film Socialisme may, however, be the first Godard work with LOL cats. But probably not the last."

By Peter Bradshaw

"Mischievous and mysterious at all times, Jean-Luc Godard presented Cannes with his latest and possibly even last work, Film Socialism, playing in the Un Certain Regard category: it's a complex fragmented poem of a movie, flashing up on to the screen images, sequences, archive-reel material and, as ever with this film-maker, gnomic slogans and phrases, here in bold, sans-serif capitals, white on black. Flouting the traditional conventions of character and storytelling more thoroughly than in recent work such as Our Music or In Praise of Love, Godard was more than ever concerned with ideas. Perhaps it is absurd to demand of him a moral, or a guiding aesthetic, but as far as one could be divined, it came down to one idealistic statement: "Les idées nous séparent; les rêves nous rapprochent (Ideas divide us; dreams bring us together)".

Film Socialism is indeed like an uncertainly remembered dream. Its first section appears to take place on a cruise ship: various disjointed sequences follow one another; then we shift to a family-owned petrol station somewhere in France. A confrontation between French and German passengers appears to resonate with disputes and tensions within the family; archive film shows searing images from the second world war, from Israel and Palestine, from the modern-day Odessa Steps. On paper, these elements sound exasperating, baffling and banal – and that's certainly how they were received by some. But I found their confrontational quality, and the bold juxtapositions, very resonant. Godard himself did not appear, having sent his apologies from his Swiss home. We have to hope that the 79-year-old is not very sick. Cannes, and cinema, would be duller and dumber without him."

By Xan Brooks

"Two days after ducking out of his scheduled press conference, Jean-Luc Godard continues to haunt the wings of the Cannes Palais. There is little hope of arriving at a consensus over his latest (and reputedly last) film. Some say Film Socialism is an eccentric masterpiece; others that it's an eccentric mess. File me in the latter camp. My sense is that old age has soured Godard: he has grown so disdainful of his audience, and society in general, that he can barely be bothered to invite us in anymore. Again, I fear I was duped by the title. Isn't "socialism" about inclusivity, about pulling together and meeting as equals? Film Socialism has no interest in that. It is Godard's arrogant repudiation of the world around him; a burst of lofty non-communication. Crucially, the subtitles are rendered in what he has described as "Navajo English", a kind of semiotic sloganeering that strips out the verbs and teeters on the verge of nonsense. "Spacial form egoism. Empire or tourism." I'm betting the film makes a little more sense in the original French. But only a little.

So anyway, that was Film Socialism with its Navajo English. Some like. Don't like."

By Owen Gleiberman

"The first half of the movie presents scenes on a cruise ship, which Godard treats just like the spaceship in WALL-E — as a giant, floating metaphor for our passivity and corruption. There are striking, abrasive, raggedly degraded video shots of people dancing in the ship’s disco (the music is distorted into scrapes so that it sounds like electronic torture with a beat); these shots suggest that our entertainment escapes have become a form of madness. Godard presents the passengers on the ship as clueless zombies and happy pawns, and his images have some of the primary-color narcotic sharpness one remembers from Pierrot le Fou (1965) and One Plus One (1968). At the same time, the words and phrases at the bottom of the screen offer an ongoing haiku analysis of our current condition: words like “today bastards sincere” or “aids tool for killing blacks.” Then there are the oversize headlines that really spell things out, like this one: “Palestine: Access Denied.” At one point, the screen flashes (untranslated) Arabic letters in white with Hebrew letters in blood-red superimposed on top of them. Richard Brody, in his magisterial 2008 Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, has acknowledged the filmmaker’s creeping anti-Semitism, and watching Film Socialisme, you don’t need a translation to know what Godard is really saying: that Israel, with regard to the Palestinians, isn’t just in violation — but, rather, that it is a violation.

He’s still cryptic about it, of course, and he lumps Israel in with other “antisocialist” regimes, hectoring the whole world for its litany of injustice. With his leftist-nihilist agitprop laid over an increasingly fractured and depersonalized underground-film vocabulary, Godard is now a strange hybrid — Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky. Late in the movie, he gets some montage going that’s like a deconstructed music video, and you feel the surging pull of his power as a filmmaker. But you also feel one of the key motivations behind his obliqueness, his splintered-cinema techniques: If Jean-Luc Godard actually came right out and said what he was thinking, in all its off-putting extremity and even ugliness, he might knock himself right off his pedestal."