1986 - MEETIN' WA Jean-Luc Godard sort of interviews Woody Allen

Jean-Luc Godard sits down with Woody Allen in Allen's New York townhouse (which has a very nice view of Central Park),  for an interview.

Godard  and Allen talk a little about film and the effects of television on the viewer.  Allen seems very nervous and tends to repeat a lot of the same answers he has given in previous interviews.  He talks about how dissatisfied he is with his films after he completes them, he reminisces about the good old days attending films in a theater before the advent of VHS tapes.  He really doesn't say anything interesting.

What's interesting about the film is what Godard does with it.  He plays around with it inserting titles throughout, slows it up, fades it to black and in one odd scene, films himself stacking boxes of what I presume are Woody Allen films.  Godard also puffs on a cigar throughout the film, for a non smoker like Allen that must have been a little annoying.  Godard looks like a scruffy bum.

This short film is actually kind of funny and was fun to watch, clearly Godard was having a good time making it.  Woody has a "deer in the headlights" look throughout it.  He's probably wondering how in the hell he got mixed up in all of this.

26 minutes.

1967 - 15 minutes of Godard's LA CHINOISE was enough

Threw this one into the DVD player the other night, found it sitting on the public library bookshelf, never a good sign.

Jean-Luc Godard was a French intellectual filmmaker in the 1960's. He had previously been a film critic and writer and was part of the French New Wave movement revitalizing film in Europe. Godard was a hard core left winger in his politics. He used film to discuss and analyze his political and socialist beliefs. Godard was also very pretentious. Every time new Godard films were released, the East Coast critical establishment would swoon over them like they were the 2nd coming of something. 
I can't help wondering if they actually watched these films and were able to stay awake at the same time.   

 
La Chinoise is about a radical cell of left wing students plotting the assassination of a political figure. They are apparently infatuated with The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. If these idiots knew anything about Mao, they would have known that he wasn't the nicest guy, if you can call not being a nice guy a man who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

What the film is really about is having a group of actors stand one at a time, in front of a camera spouting a lot of left wing gibberish at the audience. After about 15 minutes of this, I fast forwarded through the remainder of the film to see if got any better. It didn't. Back to the library it went.