Godard Lashes Out At Hollywood
Hailed by the French as “the God” of cinema, controversial director Jean-Luc Godard launched a caustic attack on Hollywood at the Cannes film festival Tuesday.
Godard, arguably the most influential filmmaker of his generation, complained that big U.S. studios had effectively smothered the artistic potential of cinema.
He also lashed out at the United States in general, portraying it in his latest film, “Eloge de l'Amour,” which is in competition in Cannes, as an overbearing guzzler of other people's culture.
“I thought that cinema was made to show things in large, in an original fashion, but it ... soon fell under the influence of California and very quickly became a commodity,” the 70-year-old director told reporters.
Godard was a founder of the French “New Wave” cinema in the 1960s. His films rarely have a story line but use brilliant montages of sound and image to often stunning effect.
Some people find them exhilarating, others find them boring.
The contrast between Godard and the Hollywood giants could not be greater, and when asked what he thought about Steven Spielberg, director of such box-office hits as “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler's List,” the Frenchman gave a slight shrug.
“I don't know him personally. I don't think his films are very good,” he said, adding that he would be happy to dissect one of his movies scene-by-scene if a cinema could be freed up.
He was particularly severe about the Holocaust drama “Schindler's List,” based on a novel by Thomas Keneally.
“It is strange, he had no idea about (the Holocaust) so he went and looked elsewhere (for inspiration). When we don't have an idea about something, we look first of all within ourselves,” he said, puffing on a cigar.
In “Eloge de l'Amour” we see Hollywood producers buying the rights to the story of two old French resistance fighters.
“The real question in fact is to know if an American superproduction today has the right to dramatize all the great hopes that came out of the end of World War II,” the film's production notes said.
The film thinks not. At one point, one of the French characters turns bitterly on the producers, snapping: “No wonder you need other people's stories, you don't have any of your own.”
Asked what he thought audiences in the United States would make of his picture, Godard replied: “I think they will have little chance of seeing it, apart from maybe in a few little cinemas.”
“Eloge de l'Amour” is an intellectually demanding film that follows a man as he prepares an artistic project covering the four stages of love - meeting, physical passion, separation and reconciliation.
The story is told backward, filled with poetic images and dotted with literary quotations. Present day sequences are captured in black and white while the earlier passages are shot in vivid color.
/It is the story of a person who becomes an adult,” the unshaven, bespectacled Godard said.
With Godard's legendary status in the art cinema world, the arrival of his latest film is always a happening in France and long lines formed outside the Cannes auditorium Tuesday for the premiere.
“In Godard there is God,” said a French journalist as he presented the director before Tuesday's news conference.
Written By Crispian Balmer © MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Reuters Limited contributed to this report