COMMENT ÇA VA?
AKA: How Is It Going?
Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville
William Lubtchansky - Cinematographer
Starring: Michel Marot, Anne-Marie Miéville
Avant-garde / Experimental Deconstruction Cult Film ......Rated R
"As in their first two films, Ici et ailleurs (Here And Elsewhere) and Numéro deux (Number Two), Comment ça va is a troubling examination of the politics of representation by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.........the use of text and video images in the film foreshadows Godard's work in his television series Histoire(s) du cinema....... As an exercise in deconstruction (or audience manipulation), "Comment Ca Va" is hypnotic, offering a voice-over debate revolving around the effect of images upon a viewer, which is brought to life by contrasting (against the voice-over) white noise, long close-ups of a woman typing (not a man's fingers, as the woman is cast in a secretarial position even as a discourse questioning the kind of social structures that would include sexism or stereotypes plays out in the background, thus challenging the sexual politics of the intellectual milieu that such a debate would be the product of), and montages of static images of riot-and-strike scenes, which focus the discussion of how the expressions and gestures of the individuals in the captured images manipulate an audience that arrives with preconceptions and expectations that can be slotted into existing ways of viewing the world..........The film, framed as a letter from a communist newspaper editor (M. Marot) to his son, is about the editor's attempt to collaborate with his typist (Anne-Marie Miéville) on a video about their newspaper and printing press. Their disagreements about how to edit the tape lead to an extended conversation about how images are chosen by the media, and the differences between words and pictures. Over the course of that conversation, the film considers images of the struggle against dictatorship in Portugal, a French strike, and the death of Francisco Franco. This formally difficult film investigates the way newspapers make meaning and in whose interests they do so. Comment ça va was the third collaboration between long-term film making partners Godard and Miéville. ......Intellectually and philosophically this is fascinating, and descendants of this interrogation of images and their power as signifiers can be found in the work more recent directors as diverse as Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Spike Jones and Todd Haynes. But in this earlier presentation, Godard drops the fun factor to zero, creating a film that is provocative, and weirdly haunting, but very, very didactic. "
CAST
Michel Marot .... Communist Newspaper Editor
Anne-Marie Miéville .... Odette
LANGUAGE......FRENCH
SUBTITLES.......ENGLISH
RUNNING TIME.....1 Hour 18 Minutes
PACKAGE: ....English Jacket
PICTURE QUALITY: ....Fair...Low Production Values....
063... Comment ça va? (1978) JEAN-LUC GODARD
Godard...1976 Film COMMENT ÇA VA?...1,132...(lematinbisou...public)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU0KLGp4EoM
Uploaded by lematinbisou on Feb 1, 2010
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