Godard on ABC

A clip from Breathless--just a few seconds of Jean Seberg selling The New York Herald Tribune in her yellow (gray) sweater--was shown on ABC's Nightline last night; it was a piece on how the French feel that they're losing the Champs-Élysées to American stores. What would Jean-Luc think? The archival film clip is a time-worn device of televised news narrative, a way of subtly tapping the (fictional) collective conscience; there are things we remember mostly through cinema.
Sometimes they are not even things cinema was present for. For example, cinema only came to the concentration camps after they were closed, but it's been atoning for that oversight with a half-century's worth of Holocaust movies whose television-like reliance on pre-established forms imbues the subject with a sort of boring seriousness, the distance of a news item. It's hard for us to feel about it because we've been told how to feel about for so many years, just as its difficult to feel empathy for the people on television. Rather, we process the information and then feel empathy--television language is indirect.

Another interesting juxtaposition (same channel): evening Oprah episode on wunderkinds (an Indian preteen studying to become a doctor, an Austrian girl with a photographic memory, etc.) followed by an advertisement for Harrington Learning Centers, a chain of "educational programs" to help your "underachieving child" get ahead.

The New Mythology

Sabrina Seyvecou in Choses Secrètes (Secret Things)

Secret Things (2002) is a mythological film--a fantasy film, even. Its director, Jean-Claude Brisseau, is known for his admiration of Fritz Lang--and, like Lang used Teutonic imagery in his Nibelungen films, Brisseau uses another familiar pantheon, and, in doing so, makes a convincing arguement that sexuality is the mythology of contemporary society. "Taboo" sexual elements and activites are as instantly recognizable, socially codified and thought-over by modern Westerners as Classical myths. The characters are sexual fauns, muses and Olympic gods; every actor seems to have had plastic surgery or, at the very least, a few too many spray tans. Incest and threesomes are Brisseau's Siegfried and Kriemhild. The sex scenes themselves play out as classically and rigidly as passion plays, only with three decades of softcore porn as their source material--and they are performed reverently, for Brisseau, like Lang, believes in the power of myths not as falsehoods but as social anchors. The effect is something simultaenously petty and epic, like a noir film.

Jean-Luc Godard's Trailer for Mouchette

Perhaps the greatest, most hopeful revelation you get from seeing Quatre Nuits d'un Reveur, especially if you've seen a good deal (or all) of Bresson's work beforehand, is his sense of humor--worldly but not misanthropic, it is suprisingly gentle and playful, yet so fitting you feel as though it's a quality you might have missed all along, as if it's been there the whole time under your nose.
Re-examination is the basis of film criticism. Jean-Luc Godard's astounding trailer for Mouchette, which he long denied having made (but finally admitted authorship by including it in a self-curated retrospective of his work) is a passionate defence of Bresson's warmth as well as the kinetic nature of his filmmaking. It jokes about the film's black-and-white austerity and its Georges Bernanos source material ("Sung by Georges," one of the simple, white on black title cards reads) while reinforcing its intensity and potency. It is not as much subversion as suggestion. It is included, along with other, equally informative extras on Criterion's release of Mouchette; it's probably the best effort to humanize Bresson for American audiences anyone's made in a while, considering the fashionability of discussing his "spirituality" by high profile know-nothings like Paul Schrader.