Summer’s beginning and I’m back on the blogging wagon (or is it off the wagon). There has been so much going on in my three academic-quarter break from this site that I don’t want to even attempt to delve into all the details. Most of which is boring anyway but.… There was Romance! There was Action! There was Horror! You could say my nine-month absence from whatever it is that I do on this thing was…Breathtaking. I made some cheap, bad movies, I wrote some writings, I performed some writings, I met some lovelies. I didn’t watch as many movies as I should have. Something about the guilt of sitting in a theatre when you know you have a stack of papers to grade makes it hard to watch the film. I did see The Red Shoes yesterday though. How could I not. San Diego’s no New York. We don’t have a single institution that regularly revisits past films. Blame it on the audience, blame it on the distributors, blame it on the audience again. Anyway, I had seen it only once before but on DVD so the centerpiece of the film, the actual performance of The Red Shoes was Breathtaking. But something deterred me from experiencing the same awe I did when I first watched the film about a decade ago or so. Maybe it’s because I’ve discovered Max Ophuls since the first time I saw The Red Shoes, a director with similar sensibilities but has more to offer in his exploration of artifice and melodrama. Or that I’ve come to love A Small Back Room, a smaller Powell & Pressburger with edge-of-the seat editing that anticipates newer action fare like The Hurt Locker. The Red Shoes is not Powell & Pressburger’s masterpiece as conventional film culture lets us believe. But Godard’s trailers are as much of a masterpiece as the films they are “synopsizing.” Breathless turned 50 this year, at least in turned 50 in the states- it may be a year older in Europe. And the trailer for a reissue of Breathless that played before The Red Shoes yesterday reminded me of how much pleasure I receive from watching a Godard trailer. Any of them. His trailers, which he cuts himself, are like metacommentaries on the film, as well as commentaries on the tropes of film trailers in general. Take for example here an excerpt from the narration in the trailer of Pierrot le Fou:
A little harbor like a Conrad novel. A sailboat like in Robert Louis Stevenson. An old brothel, like in Faulkner. An Adventure film. Like in the Algerian war. A love story. Remembrance of Things Past.
The metonymic objects here highlight the tension between literature and film as arts, poking fun of the notion that film art is not as serious as the literary arts. Or he could be deflating the role of the great author, or at least exploring the possibility of such taboo. And again, how clever is he also to equate The Algerian war with an adventure film. By the way, is it pretty common now to refer to Remembrance of Things Past by its more “accepted” translation: In Search of Lost Time? I haven’t read anything about it but it must have shaken the translation community to make such move. I think there’s a Camus translation out there called The Outsider, but obviously it doesn’t have the same cultural reverberation as The Stranger. But In Search of Lost Time seems to be sticking. I’ll have to agree with critic Armond White (which is not as uncommon as you would think) when he argues for changing the title of Breathless to a more apt translation: Breathtaking. If Breathless is an exploration of cinematic convention and film history, especially of Hollywood’s, then Breathtaking is a better title since this conventional old Hollywood trailer blurb encapsulates, in that one word, the very thesis of the Godard film. The film itself is a sort of annotated trailer. And the trailer for Breathless I watched only reinforces this:
And yes, Godard still makes trailers that are playful that comments on the convention of trailer. Here’s Godard’s trailer for his latest movie Film Socialism, which makes hyperaware the role of the trailer as synopsis by giving us the whole damn thing and speeding it up:
Tags: Breathless, Godard, movie trailers, Powell & Pressburger, The Red Shoes
