Speaker 1: Old years, folks, it's show time.
Speaker 2: People pay good money to see this movie when they
Speaker 2: go out to a theater. They are cold sodas, hot
Speaker 2: popcorn in the monsters in the protection booth.
Speaker 3: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 4: Let it off.
Speaker 1: Without getting emotional to declaim loud and clear the cold
Speaker 1: and serious trophy you are about to hear. Pay attention
Speaker 1: to its message and defend yourselves, or it will certainly
Speaker 1: be painfully seared like a brand on your troubled imaginations.
Speaker 5: Let me does that feel?
Speaker 3: Does that seem?
Speaker 4: Let us come up there?
Speaker 2: Sorry about one? Really?
Speaker 1: What I did?
Speaker 2: That's a nou sujeanson.
Speaker 4: And is.
Speaker 6: A female? O care? You're the murdered? Look at you?
Speaker 4: Man passes from an upper stage of savagery to a
Speaker 4: lower stage of barbarism for the Horror Shops.
Speaker 1: Weekend cheerly justifies the passion of fortune Goda in young America.
Speaker 3: See it.
Speaker 7: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 7: joined me once again? Is mister rob Saint Mary?
Speaker 6: What a rotten film? Only meet our crazy people also.
Speaker 7: Along with us, as mister Andre du.
Speaker 3: The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with
Speaker 3: more horror.
Speaker 7: We are wrapping up two months out of Patreon requests
Speaker 7: with one from our very own Andre du with Jean
Speaker 7: Luke Goudar's Weekend, released in nineteen sixty seven. The film
Speaker 7: is a tale of a married couple going on a
Speaker 7: road trip to visit the parents with the intention of
Speaker 7: killing her father and getting her inheritance. And it's also
Speaker 7: about the state of Africans under colonialism. There are some
Speaker 7: other things that happen in here too, and will be
Speaker 7: attempting to spoil them as we go along. Consider yourself warned. So, Andre,
Speaker 7: when was the first time you saw Weekend and what
Speaker 7: did you think, sir?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Weekend about ten years ago when I started
Speaker 3: delving into Goddard's movies and the French New Wave, hardly
Speaker 3: due to your coverage of Alphaville. Yeah, I had seen
Speaker 3: what are probably some of his best Alphaville Bonda part Loquio,
Speaker 3: Lefu Breathless, of course, and then I thought, okay, let
Speaker 3: me check this one out as well. It has a
Speaker 3: good rating on IMDb, and I was, Yeah, I was
Speaker 3: impressed with its absurd humor back then, and I think
Speaker 3: I only saw it at the surface with a lot
Speaker 3: of it going over my head. I was more appreciating
Speaker 3: its form back then and how Godard plays with a
Speaker 3: different aspect. It's the filmmaking to give you an experience and.
Speaker 6: Rob how about yourself? If I remember correctly, I think
Speaker 6: this may have been around the time that I was
Speaker 6: working at Thomas Video. This would have been in the
Speaker 6: late nineties. I think that New Yorker Video originally put
Speaker 6: it out on VHS, and I think that was what
Speaker 6: I saw because I remember them did a very specific
Speaker 6: design to their Gooduard series, and I think it was
Speaker 6: recommended to me by a coworker who I was working
Speaker 6: at the bookstore at the time. And I did not
Speaker 6: get it in a lot of ways then. Obviously I
Speaker 6: hadn't read enough marks. I didn't understand a lot of
Speaker 6: the cultural specific French references, historical references to the era.
Speaker 6: At the time, it was only like, I don't know,
Speaker 6: nineteen twenty years old. But the one thing that did
Speaker 6: stick with me was him playing with again, just Godard,
Speaker 6: playing with structure, the intercut title cards all the way through,
Speaker 6: and especially that which it's renowned for that I think,
Speaker 6: what is it eight ten twelve minute A long tracking
Speaker 6: shot of the giant car accident and traffic jam, I
Speaker 6: guess you could say, and so something like that kind
Speaker 6: of sticks with you visually. So that's what it was.
Speaker 6: And I hadn't really rewatched it in a while until
Speaker 6: I watched it for this episode, and I watched it
Speaker 6: on Criterion Channel streaming along with some of the extras,
Speaker 6: and this time really watched it for substance. What did
Speaker 6: these sections mean? Was he really trying to say as
Speaker 6: opposed to it just being spectacle?
Speaker 7: It's ironic because I might have rented this from Thomas Video.
Speaker 7: I don't remember if I rented it from there, or
Speaker 7: there was a Blockbuster on nine Mile in Ferndale that
Speaker 7: I used to get a lot of good things from
Speaker 7: as well. They had a great foreign section. But yeah,
Speaker 7: I probably watched this back in nine the five ninety six,
Speaker 7: something like that. Much younger man coming to this didn't
Speaker 7: really appreciate it then. I'm not sure if I appreciate
Speaker 7: it now. I think I've been pretty public about my
Speaker 7: rocky relationship with Godar and the way that he makes films.
Speaker 7: But yeah, I got a lot more out of it
Speaker 7: this time. But I think you guys can probably see
Speaker 7: from my notes, there's a point probably about halfway through
Speaker 7: the film where I just break down. I'm just like Jesus,
Speaker 7: went is this going to end?
Speaker 6: It just goes on and on.
Speaker 7: Oh man. I like certain parts of this. I like
Speaker 7: the traffic jam. I like the idea of them on
Speaker 7: this road trip to commit murder. But yeah, after a while,
Speaker 7: it's just like, oh my god, what is going to
Speaker 7: happen in this movie? Is something going to happen? It
Speaker 7: reminded me a lot of some of the stuff he
Speaker 7: was doing later, like One plus one Sympathy for the Devil,
Speaker 7: where it's just, oh, I'm going to talk to the
Speaker 7: camera for a while and rant about things and okay,
Speaker 7: but yeah, I'm going to try to approach this discussion
Speaker 7: with an open mind. By the way, Rob, I really
Speaker 7: appreciate the decorating that you did in your place, where
Speaker 7: you've got the red, white, blue, and yellow behind you,
Speaker 7: really capturing the color scheme of this film with the
Speaker 7: French flag slash American flag and then the yellow of capitalism.
Speaker 7: This is what's going on because we've got that shell
Speaker 7: oil truck in that traffic jam, and then we get
Speaker 7: big yellow trucks and yellow objects through the rest of
Speaker 7: the film after that too. I'm not sure if we
Speaker 7: get yellow before that, but it feels like this film
Speaker 7: is very carefully constructed.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you for believing that my apartment is also
Speaker 6: carefully constructed, because I had no such plan. As you
Speaker 6: could see, capitalism is right behind me with all my
Speaker 6: Christmas cards that I haven't taken down.
Speaker 7: Yet, so it's almost February.
Speaker 6: I keep up my Christmas card still my birthday which
Speaker 6: is in February. That when the Birthday cards come, the
Speaker 6: Christmas cards come down. So that's how it works.
Speaker 7: This movie has a very forward momentum, and so much
Speaker 7: of it is a quote unquote road movie. But before
Speaker 7: we get to the road, there are some very interesting sections,
Speaker 7: like the and I had a hard time telling Roland
Speaker 7: from other men, and sometimes I had a hard time
Speaker 7: telling the main female character, Krinn from other people. But
Speaker 7: Karen's a lot more easy to spot than roll On,
Speaker 7: because I thought for sure that it was roll On
Speaker 7: and Corin at the beginning when she's recounting this incredible
Speaker 7: sexual escapade that she was on. But I don't think
Speaker 7: that's him, right. Is that her psychiatrist or something, or
Speaker 7: is that rollan or is that her lover?
Speaker 3: I thought that was the lover from the first scene
Speaker 3: on the balcony. Okay, I'm still not sure, but indeed,
Speaker 3: in my first couple of viewings I was also confused
Speaker 3: due to the lightning, and I noticed throughout the movie
Speaker 3: that some people come back, some actors come back in
Speaker 3: different roles. The guy that's shooting a rifle at them
Speaker 3: when they just leave the city is again, I think,
Speaker 3: the communist tractor driver later on, and another guy later on,
Speaker 3: and it's on and there's that lady that plays Alice.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think that it's again a thing to
Speaker 3: make you aware that you're watching a movie and you
Speaker 3: need to engage with it. You or not just they're
Speaker 3: too escape, but you're rather part of the experience yourself,
Speaker 3: which is what I felt throughout the movie.
Speaker 6: You know, the thing for me in this and especially
Speaker 6: in that scene where you're talking about, is the way
Speaker 6: it's lit, the way music is used. The music at
Speaker 6: times is so overpowering, the way it's staged. I get
Speaker 6: the feeling so much that it's not so much that
Speaker 6: he wants you to relate to characters in this film.
Speaker 6: It's very much characters are more symbolic of something. They
Speaker 6: represent an idea more than they represent a fully formed,
Speaker 6: emotional person that you're supposed to engage. I'm supposed to
Speaker 6: care about this couple and do they meet their goal
Speaker 6: in the end. I think he has any interest in that.
Speaker 6: I think that really what he's interested in doing is
Speaker 6: using these people as cardboard cutout stand ins for particular ideas,
Speaker 6: particular concepts, political interplay, and just really having us engage
Speaker 6: those aspects as opposed to how we would engage a
Speaker 6: traditional narrative. And I think that really opens up a
Speaker 6: form a bit and gives them a little bit more
Speaker 6: to play with. And this is where, and I agree
Speaker 6: with you, Mike, you start to see that shift. I
Speaker 6: think you start to see it with guitar, when you
Speaker 6: get to like Paralleafu, maybe a little bit with contempt.
Speaker 6: We start to play with this a little bit. But
Speaker 6: by this time and into the late sixties and later,
Speaker 6: he's really gone off. I'm not really interested in characters anymore.
Speaker 7: No, it doesn't feel like a movie. It feels like
Speaker 7: a dialogue he's trying to have with the audience.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's more socratic dialogues. He's trying to get people
Speaker 6: to argue, and then he wants you to like listen
Speaker 6: to the argument or the symbols and to think about
Speaker 6: what they mean in terms of the state of the
Speaker 6: world at the time in which the movie was released.
Speaker 3: Yeah, indeed, I see what you mean there, because I
Speaker 3: also felt like he's not trying to advocate for one
Speaker 3: side or the other, the bourgeoisie or the hippies necessarily.
Speaker 3: He's just showing you their sides and with the details
Speaker 3: of each and then you're supposed to make your own
Speaker 3: judgment of it. He's not trying to necessarily tell you, oh,
Speaker 3: you should go one way or the other.
Speaker 6: Obviously, if we were going to sit here and create
Speaker 6: a scorecard, I'd say he would definitely be stacking it
Speaker 6: more against the bourgeoisie and their disconnection from their own humanity,
Speaker 6: disconnection from their own values. What do they even care about.
Speaker 6: There's just a nihilism, you know, when it comes to
Speaker 6: this couple and the way that they the whole premise.
Speaker 6: As you said in the beginning, Mike, they've gone off
Speaker 6: to basically snuff out her parents so they can get
Speaker 6: the inheritance, and then there's various things along the way.
Speaker 6: We meet if I'm remembering correctly, and I'm going to
Speaker 6: Butcher as a name, but it's best known actor for
Speaker 6: playing in the truefol.
Speaker 3: Films Jeanne Leude. I forget, there's another name there and.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so anyway when you see him, Oh, okay,
Speaker 6: he's well known. But there's a scene in there in
Speaker 6: which basically the husbands, Yeah, you want to fuck her find.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he sells her out at one point. Yeah on
Speaker 7: the road. Oh is that your woman? Yeah, she's my wife.
Speaker 6: Do what you want? Yeah, I don't care. So there's
Speaker 6: this lack of values that I think Goddard's really trying
Speaker 6: to talk about in terms of this couple that could
Speaker 6: be a stand in for anyone. There's stand ins for
Speaker 6: certain strata of class within Recian society that he probably
Speaker 6: saw around him. And although Felini was having fun with
Speaker 6: it in a way like in La dulce Vita, where
Speaker 6: it's oh, it's these out of touch, rich fun folks
Speaker 6: who are running around doing crazy antics for the poor
Speaker 6: and the working class people don't necessarily get to enjoy
Speaker 6: themselves in that way.
Speaker 7: It feels like a critique of the bourgeoisie, but also
Speaker 7: a critique of the revolutionaries and just like, no, you're
Speaker 7: not doing it right, and we're going from the past
Speaker 7: with you mentioned the Jean Pierre Leo character and the
Speaker 7: Jean Claudiert because he's in there, as he's in there
Speaker 7: a couple of times, like you were saying, Andre, he's Santus,
Speaker 7: who I believe is from like the era, the Reign
Speaker 7: of Terror type of era of France.
Speaker 6: It was like robes Pierre's number two or something, which
Speaker 6: this is a reference that French people would get that
Speaker 6: I'm not hip enough to understand the French Revolution, so
Speaker 6: I'm just like, Okay, guy looks like Napoleon or something.
Speaker 3: All right, fine, exactly I thought he's Napoleon as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and there's also there's a mention of Thermidor, which
Speaker 7: is one of the months that they added to the
Speaker 7: calendar during the French Revolutions. I'm like, okay, yeah, I
Speaker 7: don't I'm not as familiar with that as I probably
Speaker 7: should be. But this is what we did in the past,
Speaker 7: and now here we are in the present, and especially
Speaker 7: when it comes to and I know we're jumping around,
Speaker 7: but I really don't think it matters with this film.
Speaker 7: But when we get very close to the end, and
Speaker 7: we have the speeches from the African gentleman and the
Speaker 7: Arab gentlemen, and apparently their speeches are flipped, so the
Speaker 7: Arab is making the point of the African and then
Speaker 7: the Africans making the point of the Arab. And I
Speaker 7: didn't catch that the guy was supposed to be Arabic
Speaker 7: until I looked in the credits and saw Arab. So
Speaker 7: I was like, oh, okay, because I've seen him before,
Speaker 7: and I think the gentleman's actually Hungarian. So it feels like, Okay,
Speaker 7: this is what we should be concentrating on. But it
Speaker 7: takes us almost the entire movie to get to that point.
Speaker 7: But yeah, to your point, like, these two people, they're awful.
Speaker 7: Our main characters are terrible people. They don't respect anybody.
Speaker 7: They just get in fights. The the whole thing of
Speaker 7: them skirting around the traffic jam is fascinating them, driving
Speaker 7: through the blood and the gore is fascinating them, just
Speaker 7: running people off the road. Towards the end of the film,
Speaker 7: they're having a fun time just being complete road terrorists.
Speaker 6: And the world.
Speaker 7: That they live in. We have to talk about this.
Speaker 7: It looks like the apocalypse because we have cars everywhere
Speaker 7: on the sides of the roads, just burning wrecked car.
Speaker 7: There's the field that they go to with the Oh God,
Speaker 7: the guy who claims to be the son of God.
Speaker 7: Plus I think it's another revolutionary and the way that
Speaker 7: they go into that field and it's just all these
Speaker 7: wrecked cars all over the place until he magically makes
Speaker 7: them disappear and they become sheep, which I'm sure made
Speaker 7: you very happy, Rob, because I think the whole thing
Speaker 7: with the sheep and he's called the avention Angel, it's
Speaker 7: all a boon Weeld reference.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there is a think a title card for exterminating angels.
Speaker 6: So for me, it's funny because I can see a
Speaker 6: feedback loop between this film and in a way maybe
Speaker 6: something like Fami of Liberty. This is probably as close
Speaker 6: as Gooduard's ever going to get to Bonwell ask. Although
Speaker 6: Bunwell will tell you all day long that he wasn't
Speaker 6: trying to make any particular point, Gadard definitely wants you
Speaker 6: to know that he's making a point.
Speaker 7: That's the whole point in the movie. It feels because
Speaker 7: that hey, listen to me, I've got things to say.
Speaker 3: I'm coming back to the character. The main characters, I
Speaker 3: think they set it out from the beginning. They are
Speaker 3: trying to kill each other, and they both are cheating
Speaker 3: on each other, so they don't really care about each other.
Speaker 3: They have this objective of getting the money. But what
Speaker 3: I find it interesting is how they can actually work
Speaker 3: together to get out of all those situations that they
Speaker 3: get into to escape, whether the son of God or
Speaker 3: to steal a car or so. So they're quite a
Speaker 3: good team, even though they don't want to be with
Speaker 3: each other. So yeah, they're very resourceful while lacking character.
Speaker 7: And you wonder why everyone is stuck in traffic because
Speaker 7: they can skirt around everything within eight minutes of time,
Speaker 7: but everybody else is just fine to sit in this
Speaker 7: mess and people playing cards and throwing ball from one
Speaker 7: car to another, people fascinated with the two or three
Speaker 7: cages with wild animals out there, and even amongst the
Speaker 7: I love the way that he does this tracking shot.
Speaker 7: But even while you're tracking along there there are cars
Speaker 7: that are wrecked and I'm like, oh, that's the wreck.
Speaker 7: And then that keeps going is you know there's more
Speaker 7: to this, and you just keep going because when we
Speaker 7: hit the shell truck and there's a white car that's
Speaker 7: wedged underneath the shell truck. I was like, Oh, that's
Speaker 7: the accident. No, you keep going until you finally see
Speaker 7: all of the gore and the destruction, and just yeah,
Speaker 7: he is. I like the whole thing of him saying
Speaker 7: it's not blood, it's the color red when he shows blood,
Speaker 7: and like that horrific rabbit scene that we get on
Speaker 7: because also we should probably warn people if you are
Speaker 7: not into animal cruelty. I'm not into it personally, but
Speaker 7: if you can't handle seeing that on screen, you should
Speaker 7: not be watching this movie because there's a lot of
Speaker 7: animal cruelty that happens in here. And it just feels
Speaker 7: like that was the thing to do with these more
Speaker 7: revolutionary movies is, oh, I'm also going to show someone
Speaker 7: slaughtering a pig or cutting the neck of a goose
Speaker 7: or something like that, and you get a few of
Speaker 7: those here. That skinned rabbit is really upsetting.
Speaker 6: Which reminded me of a night Obviously, this wasn't a
Speaker 6: staged thing that he was trying to reference, I don't think,
Speaker 6: but it reminded me of Roger and Me, where the
Speaker 6: scene in Roger and Me were.
Speaker 7: Yeah, pets or meat.
Speaker 6: Yeah, where the poor lady is like, you want buy rabbit,
Speaker 6: and then she proceeds to kill and dress the rabbit
Speaker 6: on camera, which was a very controversy seen in that
Speaker 6: little documentary. But I'm thinking about the car accident and
Speaker 6: the way that you describe it in that they can
Speaker 6: move through. I guess again, if you take it as symbolism,
Speaker 6: people are stuck in certain ways, and they're either stuck
Speaker 6: and they're entertained by being stuck. They're stuck in severe distress.
Speaker 6: But it's their wealth allows the mobility to move through
Speaker 6: this rate of horrors. Basically, it allows a certain amount
Speaker 6: of distance and cleanliness from it all. It allows them
Speaker 6: to buy people off or to play into whatever needs
Speaker 6: people are asking around them, that their values can be
Speaker 6: malleable so that they can move through. And So for me,
Speaker 6: when I look at that and the fact that yeah,
Speaker 6: it's more like a giant car crash spectacle, is that
Speaker 6: is instead of being a traffic jam per se where
Speaker 6: they're just stuck and they're just going to sit in it,
Speaker 6: they don't have to sit in it. They can elevate
Speaker 6: above it because they have something that's probably eight ninety
Speaker 6: percent of the people who are sitting there don't.
Speaker 3: Have about the traffic scene. I haven't really gotten to
Speaker 3: a point where I could dissect a message out of it.
Speaker 3: I was just enjoying it for what it is, the
Speaker 3: different people from all sorts of parts of society. And
Speaker 3: I'm originally from Romania, and that kind of traffic behavior
Speaker 3: is often seen there. We don't usually have good infrastructure,
Speaker 3: so you have one lane road on each side, and
Speaker 3: then you need to overtake that way, and people will
Speaker 3: not let you merge back in, so then you're better
Speaker 3: off overtaking some more. But that in a very selfish way.
Speaker 3: So I just looked at it as more of a
Speaker 3: critique of sometimes how I behaved in traffic.
Speaker 2: They may be very civilized up there, more than we
Speaker 2: are here on Earth, with no wars or traffic accidents,
Speaker 2: and we'd never know that.
Speaker 7: I very much like that the camera is leading them through,
Speaker 7: that this is this incredible tracking that we have, and
Speaker 7: that we the camera's always ahead of them until the
Speaker 7: very end when they finally get to speed off, But
Speaker 7: until then, the camera's just leading. Occasionally it will pause
Speaker 7: when they have to pause, but it's almost always ahead
Speaker 7: of them until you get that final shot, and I
Speaker 7: really like too that they continue that shot and pan
Speaker 7: the camera over as they are completely free that wide
Speaker 7: open field, and I'm just like, where are people driving
Speaker 7: across the field. It feels very like people are stuck
Speaker 7: there of their own volition that they almost seem it
Speaker 7: feels like everybody other than our main couple seems to
Speaker 7: be okay being stuck in traffic and having the guys
Speaker 7: like fixing his sales and all this, or like I said,
Speaker 7: one guy's fixing his car up, and I'm like again,
Speaker 7: I'm like, is he the cause of the traffic jam? No,
Speaker 7: he's just takes some time to fix up his car,
Speaker 7: So maybe do a tune. Almost immediately after that, when
Speaker 7: they make a stop, there's another traffic accident, and it's
Speaker 7: the whole thing with the tractor hitting the little sports
Speaker 7: car and just the dead guy in the sports car
Speaker 7: that they keep cutting back to and the fight between
Speaker 7: the woman who was in the car and then this
Speaker 7: tractor driver. And now we're introducing a lot more about
Speaker 7: class and all this, and they start talking about Marx
Speaker 7: and then what's really interesting to me is that when
Speaker 7: they go to our couple and they're like, well, you
Speaker 7: settle this. You saw this, and they just yeat themselves
Speaker 7: out of there. They're like, no, thanks, I don't want
Speaker 7: to talk about this at all, and then they start
Speaker 7: yelling at them and calling them Jews, and I'm just like,
Speaker 7: where is this coming from. There's a lot of anti
Speaker 7: Semitism in this movie. Even later on there's somebody who
Speaker 7: insults somebody else by calling them a Jew.
Speaker 6: I think part of that has to do with the
Speaker 6: fact that Ian bourgeois circles that Jews were always equated
Speaker 6: with communism too, because of Marx obviously has a Jewish background,
Speaker 6: that they've always been interlinked in that way. Go back
Speaker 6: to Henry Ford. He talked about communism as part of
Speaker 6: an international Jewish conspiracy. So all of this it makes
Speaker 6: sense that in some minds to interlinked.
Speaker 7: And that whole strange thing too, where they are being
Speaker 7: looked at more than our main couple. The traffic accident,
Speaker 7: which is I believe labeled in one of those title
Speaker 7: cards as the class struggle. You're cutting back to these
Speaker 7: people who are standing in front of all of these advertisements,
Speaker 7: including the Soo Gas with the tiger put the tiger
Speaker 7: in your tank, and they're all just staring like this.
Speaker 7: I don't want to say Greek course, because they don't
Speaker 7: say anything, but they're just like these mute witnesses looking
Speaker 7: at the spectacle that's going on in front of them.
Speaker 7: And it's very the montage as far as we don't
Speaker 7: see them in relationship to the car, the tractor and
Speaker 7: car crash, but we just keep cutting back to them,
Speaker 7: and we get different configurations of a man and a woman,
Speaker 7: or three working class people, or this woman who looks
Speaker 7: a lot like what's her name and Goodar's Was he
Speaker 7: married to her?
Speaker 6: Really?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 7: And we with Zemski, who was in a lot of
Speaker 7: his films, including Laschonois and he and she was later
Speaker 7: in we talked about her in Oh gosh, Well she
Speaker 7: was definitely in Seizon Man. She's a huge part of
Speaker 7: that one. But anyway, we keep cutting back to these
Speaker 7: people individually grouped, and then towards the end of the segment,
Speaker 7: we just get this long shot of all of them
Speaker 7: all together. You get that one great guy who just
Speaker 7: keeps laughing as well, and you're just like, it feels
Speaker 7: like Goodar has all of these pieces of film that
Speaker 7: he can use and he's going to stick in this
Speaker 7: guy's reaction where he's laughing at the most inappropriate times.
Speaker 7: I'm like, that works. He is showing off the mechanics
Speaker 7: of filmmaking so much to take us out of watching
Speaker 7: a film and make us think more about how is
Speaker 7: this film being presented to us and why.
Speaker 6: You know, one of the things I was thinking about
Speaker 6: with the use of logos in here, because you brought
Speaker 6: up Shell and you talked about the Soo gas and
Speaker 6: they're like, there's all these ads and everything. Remember this
Speaker 6: is sixty seven, and this of course in the pop
Speaker 6: culture pop art influence, you've got Warhol and things like
Speaker 6: that was coming out in that time. So the reuse
Speaker 6: of advertising and twisting it or pulling it apart and
Speaker 6: juxtaposing it against other ideas I think was probably part
Speaker 6: of the visual art understanding at the time. The other
Speaker 6: thing that I was thinking about, and it's funny because
Speaker 6: we've used the term several times, is spectacle, and was
Speaker 6: thinking about I don't know if you're familiar with the
Speaker 6: society of the spectacle, the work by Ytabor or of
Speaker 6: the situationists, So the situation.
Speaker 7: That's a lot about that. When we talked about kin dialectic, Sprig.
Speaker 6: Bricks watching this movie and understanding that stuff now and
Speaker 6: understanding what the war in the Situationists we're trying to
Speaker 6: get at with the idea of obviously it's a Marxist
Speaker 6: critical theory about kind of the degradation of human life
Speaker 6: and how we've moved from being directly involved in life
Speaker 6: to being just representational. We've flattened from a three dimensional
Speaker 6: human into a representation, which is interesting because in the
Speaker 6: film talking about that in terms of the characters, these
Speaker 6: are not three dimensional characters, They're just representations. And obviously
Speaker 6: all of this leads up to with the Situationists being
Speaker 6: a part of the events of sixty eight in the
Speaker 6: student rebellions and not only in France but in other
Speaker 6: places around the world. Just all of the things that
Speaker 6: are this film. It's weird to say it in that way,
Speaker 6: feels vary of its time if you understand what was
Speaker 6: happening in that time. And I'm sure that when this
Speaker 6: was released, like probably young college students were like fucking
Speaker 6: right on, like they felt spoken to, and I'm sure
Speaker 6: that the elders who were represented by the couple were
Speaker 6: enraged by this movie or just totally confused, like I
Speaker 6: don't have no idea what this guy is trying to saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I took this the sequence itself to me was
Speaker 3: probably one of the most colorful ones of the movie.
Speaker 3: And I think even starting with the husband being dead
Speaker 3: in the car that is also very beautifully framed with
Speaker 3: his sunglasses still perfectly on, I think, and then I
Speaker 3: took the different people being in front of those boasters
Speaker 3: as just their portraits, but first of all in the
Speaker 3: context of consumerism with the ads around them. But also, yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know what to call it. A flex from
Speaker 3: Goddard in checking this box as well for how to
Speaker 3: get this guy images across but not necessarily making you
Speaker 3: be distant from what is actually happening. Is just about
Speaker 3: playing with the medium here. To come back to your
Speaker 3: first question you asked me when I first saw it,
Speaker 3: I think having seen it now and paying attention to
Speaker 3: the movie, I realized, I think this is about the
Speaker 3: time where I was starting to lose my attention to
Speaker 3: the movie because everything that comes after this colorful sequence,
Speaker 3: part of it was new to me. Of course, the
Speaker 3: revolutionaries that stuck with me, but then I was drifting
Speaker 3: in and out and attention with this movie even when
Speaker 3: I requested it. I was watching it a year ago,
Speaker 3: and only for this podcast is when I could really
Speaker 3: delve into parts of what it meant. But I think, yeah,
Speaker 3: it requires extensive research, and I actually I wrote to
Speaker 3: you that I wasn't as keen on the movie after
Speaker 3: rewatching it the first time for the podcast, But ever
Speaker 3: since then, I watched the gup times since and it
Speaker 3: has grew on me, and I think, yeah, this still
Speaker 3: is an impressive sequence. Coming back to it, with the
Speaker 3: framing of it very I don't know, magazine esque, very
Speaker 3: everything is actually an ad there, even the car crash itself.
Speaker 7: Godar is trying to have a little bit of fun
Speaker 7: in this as well, especially with some of the word
Speaker 7: play that he's doing and some of these plays with
Speaker 7: the form that he's undertaking. Even going all the way
Speaker 7: back to that first scene, not the first scene, because
Speaker 7: there's the opening with the apartment and looking down at
Speaker 7: the car accident that happened there, appreciation everything that's going
Speaker 7: to happen in the rest of the movie, but that
Speaker 7: long sequence of her confessing quote unquote and telling that
Speaker 7: erotic story, playing with the form in so far as
Speaker 7: bringing in the music and the very I would say,
Speaker 7: inappropriate music to what's happening on screen, really playing with
Speaker 7: that and also drowning out what he's saying. As an
Speaker 7: American viewer or other viewers that have subtitles, we're in
Speaker 7: a privileged position because we actually get this to read
Speaker 7: everything that she's saying, whereas the music is drowning her out.
Speaker 7: I think if I was a native French speaker, I
Speaker 7: would not be able to hear half of the stuff
Speaker 7: that she says because the music coming in at the
Speaker 7: wrong time quote unquote. But then he's also having fun
Speaker 7: too with the title cards, and right before that image
Speaker 7: of all of those people standing there in front of
Speaker 7: the ads, you get the title card that says foe
Speaker 7: to graph and it's faux so a false photograph, a
Speaker 7: false image. And you even get to see that the
Speaker 7: woman whose boyfriend or husband died is there with the crowd,
Speaker 7: and I think that the tractor driver is with them
Speaker 7: as well. So they're all just standing there and it
Speaker 7: goes on for a long time to the point where
Speaker 7: I'm like, is this still image? No, they're actually still there.
Speaker 7: They're breathing and living, but it looks like this very
Speaker 7: staged photograph of them in front of all those very beautiful,
Speaker 7: colorful ads.
Speaker 6: I was thinking about that accident again since you brought
Speaker 6: it up, and I'm talking about with the farmer, and
Speaker 6: then the couple and the dead guy in the car,
Speaker 6: and then you've got of the bourgeois couple, and you
Speaker 6: were talking about people like standing around and watching, and
Speaker 6: I think the first time when I saw that, I'm
Speaker 6: just like, I don't what is he trying to say here?
Speaker 6: And so if I were to venture a guest now
Speaker 6: looking at it, it seems to me And maybe this
Speaker 6: is just because when you're a hammer, everything is a
Speaker 6: nail to you. But being someone who used to work
Speaker 6: as journalism, it almost feels like it Dart's trying to
Speaker 6: talk about news or something or reportage, where it's you
Speaker 6: have the classes without power looking and staring and being
Speaker 6: entertained by each other and feeling some sense of I
Speaker 6: don't know, superiority or or separation when they should be
Speaker 6: together working together, which like leading into that seeing guard
Speaker 6: uses the Internationale, which is the international song for the
Speaker 6: Communist Party. And then you have the people who do
Speaker 6: have power, who are like I don't want to get involved,
Speaker 6: I don't do anything with that the people who could
Speaker 6: affect change, the people who do the power, don't want
Speaker 6: to engage with this. They would rather sit back and
Speaker 6: not do anything, while the people who lack power, who
Speaker 6: could be working together, are actually battling each other for what,
Speaker 6: you know, for entertainment, for spectacle, for rubbernecking.
Speaker 7: You think about all the horrific images that are probably
Speaker 7: on their TVs at this time. I know that obviously
Speaker 7: France had their own role when it came to Vietnam,
Speaker 7: but also Algeria and just all of these things where
Speaker 7: and we address colonialism throughout this, but yeah, I can see.
Speaker 7: I love this point of this being spectacle that you
Speaker 7: would get on your TV every single night.
Speaker 6: Probably Obviously that's another piece of this is the collapse
Speaker 6: of empire. I remember talking to my uncle a few
Speaker 6: years ago, who had been a British commando, and he
Speaker 6: told me all the places in the sixties where he
Speaker 6: went to Aiden, which is Yemen, who went to Tanganika
Speaker 6: and Africa Borneo And I was talking to him and
Speaker 6: I said, it sounds like you guys were the closers.
Speaker 6: And he goes, what do you mean by that? And
Speaker 6: I said, well, it sounds like you went in there
Speaker 6: and tried to set the place up before they turned it.
Speaker 6: The British turned it back to the locals for local control.
Speaker 6: He goes, Oh, absolutely, he goes. We wanted those people
Speaker 6: to work with us, even though we weren't in control,
Speaker 6: to make sure the oil flowed or whatever. And I
Speaker 6: remember talking to him about it, and I said, how
Speaker 6: do you feel about it? He's eighty years old now,
Speaker 6: and I said, how do you feel about your time
Speaker 6: in service? He goes, those places? Aren't you better than
Speaker 6: when I left him sixty years ago? He goes, it
Speaker 6: was a waste. He goes, there was a waste of
Speaker 6: life on all sides the people that we killed, and
Speaker 6: my friends, you got killed in the service of doing
Speaker 6: the work. And I was like, wow, that's a rare sign,
Speaker 6: I say, for someone who went through the kind of
Speaker 6: work that he did in that time.
Speaker 7: And it feels like America's really feeling that even more
Speaker 7: now than we did with Vietnam, with places like Afghanistan
Speaker 7: or Iraq or some of these other places that we
Speaker 7: quote unquote liberated and then we got the hell out
Speaker 7: of there. And tell me the difference between Afghanistan before
Speaker 7: we were there and after we were there, Taliban's still there.
Speaker 6: And then spend a trillion dollars on.
Speaker 7: It and countless lives being lost in the process.
Speaker 6: Or destroyed in the process, in which you've got people
Speaker 6: who come back and they can't deal with living in society.
Speaker 7: Speaking right too. That the idea of the when they
Speaker 7: meet the Exterminating Angel, and he makes some interesting points,
Speaker 7: this whole thing of asking the wife what her name is,
Speaker 7: and she's okay, your first name's your first name, but
Speaker 7: your last name, Oh no, that's your husband's name. What's
Speaker 7: your real name, No, that's your father names. You don't
Speaker 7: even know who you are. And that was interesting, especially
Speaker 7: like in sixty seven, like on the Eve of Women's
Speaker 7: Liberation and all this. But there are rhymes that go
Speaker 7: through this whole movie, like the idea of him, the
Speaker 7: extreminating I'm just gonna call him that because I can't
Speaker 7: remember the character name, but the exterminating Angel, just like
Speaker 7: making a rabbit appear in the car, and that comes
Speaker 7: back later on with that skinned rabbit that we have,
Speaker 7: and I love that. It's like, oh, you are a
Speaker 7: miracle man, you can create miracles. This is what I
Speaker 7: want and this is what my husband wants. She wants
Speaker 7: to be a natural blonde. He wants a squadron of
Speaker 7: mirage fours and quote like the Yids used to thrash
Speaker 7: the walks like Jesus Christ, dude, and that was I
Speaker 7: had to look up what a mirage for was. I
Speaker 7: figured it was some sort of war device and yeah,
Speaker 7: it's this plane that the French had from I think
Speaker 7: they started in fifthifty six. And I want to say,
Speaker 7: I read that it's the only French plane that's in
Speaker 7: the British Air Museum because of his use so effectively
Speaker 7: by the British and by the French when it came
Speaker 7: to some of the colonialism stuff.
Speaker 6: I love the thing that you talked about, and you
Speaker 6: have the two couples and the one that's married and no,
Speaker 6: we screw legally.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, there's so much better.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're so much better than you. So that's the
Speaker 6: idea of the social privilege of status of marriage in that.
Speaker 6: But also to the point that you made where it's
Speaker 6: just like to keep asking. They could be gifted anything,
Speaker 6: they could be they could ask for anything, and all
Speaker 6: they want are material goods. They want dresses, cars, vacations.
Speaker 7: He wants the Weekend. Like James Bond, he.
Speaker 6: Says he had no imagination for anything beyond just creature comforts.
Speaker 7: There's also a rhyme too, and I'm trying to remember
Speaker 7: where this show's up again, because when the exterminating angel
Speaker 7: come to them, he has a gun in one hand
Speaker 7: and a branch in the other, and he uses the
Speaker 7: branch like it's a whip, and he starts whipping at
Speaker 7: them with the branch. And later on, oh, that's right,
Speaker 7: the husband uses a branch and he starts whipping at
Speaker 7: the guy before they turn the tables, and then he
Speaker 7: turns the tables yet again, and the whole the sheeps
Speaker 7: appear and he starts beating them. But I want to
Speaker 7: say there's a branch used even in another sequence as well.
Speaker 7: And then also there's the rhyme of her telling that
Speaker 7: erotic story and talking about all of this food play
Speaker 7: that's going on, and I want to say, somebody sits
Speaker 7: in a bowl of milk, and I want to say
Speaker 7: there's some eggs that are used. And then eggs are
Speaker 7: used right towards the end of the film too, with
Speaker 7: the cannibals and the guy cracking the eggs. You see
Speaker 7: the woman's legs sticking up, and he's cracking these eggs
Speaker 7: and it looks like he's cracking them right onto her
Speaker 7: sex organs, and then a big fish and it looks
Speaker 7: like he's shoving fish inside of her in order to
Speaker 7: make her even yumier when they bake her up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh, I saw that scene as another type of fetish
Speaker 3: or yeah, sexual scene of the hippies in just the
Speaker 3: position to the initial scene of the bourgeoisie, where it's
Speaker 3: perverted and the hippies are also perverted and somewhat of
Speaker 3: a similar fashion with the eggs, but then differently. So yeah,
Speaker 3: which one is better in this sess? I don't think
Speaker 3: there's a good artist trying to make a point here.
Speaker 3: It's just showing you everyone is similar but with a
Speaker 3: different twist.
Speaker 6: The chef with the fish and the lady. I was like, ma'am,
Speaker 6: did Godard pre sage led Zeppelin? That's a deep cut?
Speaker 7: Was it a mud shark? I thought it was a
Speaker 7: red snapper? Oh boy.
Speaker 6: Anyway, I'm not going to get any further into that.
Speaker 6: If you want to know what that is, just type
Speaker 6: in led Zeppelin mud shark into Google and you can
Speaker 6: find all about it.
Speaker 7: I think they meet sound Jews right after they have
Speaker 7: their own car crash, and speaking of material goods, they
Speaker 7: don't seem to care that they've been in an auto
Speaker 7: accident at all, in a major one. There's flames, there's
Speaker 7: multiple cars involved, but it's her Erme's bag that she's
Speaker 7: concerned about the most. That she loses her bag, so
Speaker 7: that whole tie to the material goods again, and she's
Speaker 7: just so, oh, my bag, my bag. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 7: but yeah, it's really with the Saint Just's character where
Speaker 7: we get our first person who's coming to the camera
Speaker 7: and just directly addressing us. And I want to say,
Speaker 7: it's about not even halfway through the movie, but this
Speaker 7: begins a real trend of people speaking to us directly
Speaker 7: because we get that. Of course, I thought about the
Speaker 7: Arab and the African later on, but it's, yeah, it's
Speaker 7: interesting that we have those. And it's around I can't
Speaker 7: remember exactly where they start to really acknowledge that they're
Speaker 7: in a film. There's one part where they are trying
Speaker 7: to get a ride because after they lose their vehicle
Speaker 7: with this crash, they keep trying to get rides from
Speaker 7: different people and they're asked a series of questions, and
Speaker 7: I think the first question is are you in a
Speaker 7: movie or is this real life? And when they say, oh,
Speaker 7: I'm in a film, it's just like they drive on.
Speaker 7: There's who is right, the Arabs or the Egyptians, and
Speaker 7: the woman's the Egyptians, and they drive on and I'm
Speaker 7: trying to remember what the third question is. It reminds
Speaker 7: me a little bit of Monday, Python and the Holy Grail.
Speaker 3: Oh it crushed the bridge of ye answer me these questions.
Speaker 3: Three the other side, he see, Yeah, it was who
Speaker 3: would you rather screw Mao or Yeah, Johnson or to.
Speaker 7: Be honest, that's right, yeah, Mao or Johnson. Yeah, I
Speaker 7: think Mao would be a more tender lover myself.
Speaker 3: But the other question about the Egyptians, that's funny because
Speaker 3: you guys got a bit political, and I thought to myself,
Speaker 3: I shouldn't, but I will. It is funny. How so
Speaker 3: this movie was Yeah at the brink nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: and yeah, something major was changing then, but then history
Speaker 3: works as cycles, and now again the question was who
Speaker 3: shot first? The Israelis or the Egyptians. So yeah, it's
Speaker 3: something that you can probably have a discussion about today.
Speaker 6: The other thing that I find interesting in here, and
Speaker 6: it's a very simple point, is that it's not a
Speaker 6: heavy one like what we just ran through, is that
Speaker 6: they've been asked over and over again through here for help.
Speaker 6: People have asked them for help, to get involved, to
Speaker 6: get them a ride somewhere, and then when they find
Speaker 6: themselves in similar situation, it's basically, you created this. You
Speaker 6: created the world in which we live in because you
Speaker 6: had status you could move through, and you didn't bother
Speaker 6: to lift anyone up in that time. So therefore there's
Speaker 6: no one there to help you when you need them.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I see that as a nice little kind
Speaker 6: of fuck you to that strata by Gidard, just basically
Speaker 6: saying that the more you take, the less you're gonna get.
Speaker 3: Another section where they're aware of being in a film
Speaker 3: is but I don't know exactly where it fits. Is
Speaker 3: there in the woods and they meet the girl that
Speaker 3: talks about those logic problems and the other guy, and
Speaker 3: I think the first statement is what said as his intro,
Speaker 3: this movie is full of crazy people or something like that,
Speaker 3: And then when they burn the girl, it's, yeah, they're
Speaker 3: just imaginary characters. But and then Coreen, I think, says, yeah,
Speaker 3: we're nothing more than that either or something similar to that. Right,
Speaker 3: So it is all very aware, even the characters themselves,
Speaker 3: but still they're driven by those materialistic things.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: No, you're totally right. And I think that's supposed to
Speaker 7: be Tom Thumb and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, though
Speaker 7: I was getting more of a tweedled or Tweedledumb. I'm
Speaker 7: not sure I have a heart time keeping them apart.
Speaker 7: Oh she was Emily Bronte. Okay, oh wow, I did
Speaker 7: not get.
Speaker 6: That at all, because originally I thought it was some
Speaker 6: sort of Lewis Carroll reference obviously the Rabbits.
Speaker 7: And then isn't there a title card in there too
Speaker 7: that says something I don't know? Somehow I picked up
Speaker 7: Lewis Carroll as well. So yeah, that's why I thought
Speaker 7: she was Alice. And maybe it was the blue I
Speaker 7: want to say, she's wearing a blue dress as well.
Speaker 7: I'm talking about playing with form, and of course those
Speaker 7: title cards definitely play with form, but he's playing with
Speaker 7: form two. When it comes, he'll fade up on a scene,
Speaker 7: he'll fade down, he'll fade back up. Okay, what's happening here.
Speaker 7: He'll start a scene a few times, like when they meet,
Speaker 7: because they pretty much go from that San just who's
Speaker 7: played by Jean Pierre Leo, right to him as another character,
Speaker 7: at least I'm assuming so, because he's not dressed the
Speaker 7: same him in the phone box and the way that
Speaker 7: he has to sing that song, and he's singing the
Speaker 7: song and at first I was like, Oh, he's just
Speaker 7: singing a song, but it feels like the song he's
Speaker 7: singing is talking about his situation right there. But with that,
Speaker 7: when they open up that scene, they do title card,
Speaker 7: they show them coming up, they show him in the
Speaker 7: phone box, and then I want to say, they fade
Speaker 7: out real quick or they just cut. It might be
Speaker 7: a hard cut to them walking back up again that
Speaker 7: same title card. It's like we get a replay of that.
Speaker 7: And that's right after the car crash, where the film
Speaker 7: is basically going out of the frame and it almost
Speaker 7: feels like the film itself, the actual mechanics of the
Speaker 7: film going through a projector is what causes the car crash.
Speaker 7: That's the thing that I love and hate about Godar
Speaker 7: At the same time, I think I really like that
Speaker 7: he plays with the form, but sometimes he plays with
Speaker 7: it so much where it's just like it feels a
Speaker 7: little bit like intellectual masturbation. And I'm like, okay, I
Speaker 7: like that you can play with these things. But at
Speaker 7: the same time reminds me a little bit of what
Speaker 7: Trufau was doing. And I know Godar would hate that
Speaker 7: I was comparing him to Trufaux. But the little bit
Speaker 7: with the piano player where the guy says, you know, oh,
Speaker 7: I swear I'm my mother and then they cut to
Speaker 7: the mother made my mother drop dead. If lying cut
Speaker 7: to the mother and you see it grasp or chest
Speaker 7: and fall to the floor, It's like a very Monty
Speaker 7: Python type of thing. And sometimes I think Monty Python
Speaker 7: and Godar would go really well together. The idea of
Speaker 7: two fictional characters, or like Bronte isn't fictional, but her
Speaker 7: and Tom Thumb just like showing up and having a
Speaker 7: conversation with our main characters. That feels like it could
Speaker 7: be the start of a Monty Python skeet.
Speaker 6: And that's the thing talking about Monty Python here, it's
Speaker 6: like what Python started year and a half after this
Speaker 6: movie come out. This movie does not talk down to
Speaker 6: the audience. It basically expects you to understand literary reference.
Speaker 6: You need to understand what Marx was talking about. You
Speaker 6: need to be to what's going on in the world
Speaker 6: in terms of like foreign intervention and what's going on
Speaker 6: much the same way. The Python's humor was that way.
Speaker 6: It did not explain to the audience, It did not
Speaker 6: dumb it down. Sure there were dick and fart jokes
Speaker 6: in there, but at the same time they're doing skits
Speaker 6: about philosophers and philosophy and references to all kinds of
Speaker 6: history and weirdness. So I see this as living in
Speaker 6: the same kind of time, in the same period and
Speaker 6: the same ideas in a lot of ways, trying to
Speaker 6: make points about the culture in which they're living at
Speaker 6: the time.
Speaker 3: I haven't been in the generation that watched Monty Python myself,
Speaker 3: but I did make a note here, and it was
Speaker 3: when Corene says, oh, my herm is a bag, and
Speaker 3: I'm going to take it from an intellectual point to
Speaker 3: a very non intellectual side. That made me think of
Speaker 3: SNL as some parts of this being as absurd as
Speaker 3: they are, and yeah, going into the that sketch format.
Speaker 3: To me, it's touched on SNL and also to it
Speaker 3: being just relevant to that day that period. Yeah, you
Speaker 3: might not get it two months later or two years
Speaker 3: later or what is it forty years.
Speaker 6: There, fifty Now, I'd even throw in Putney swopen there too,
Speaker 6: to a certain extent, just the absurdism of Bob Downey
Speaker 6: and what he was doing and needing to understand the
Speaker 6: revolutionary spirit in which that was made to use.
Speaker 7: A title card that says taboo and totem and I'm
Speaker 7: just like, okay, we're now talking about Freud. He does
Speaker 7: expect you to know all of these things, even when
Speaker 7: somebody will throw it a line and it'll be like
Speaker 7: Mark said this, and I think Karen is like, no,
Speaker 7: actually that wasn't Marx, that was Jesus. She says, that
Speaker 7: was another communist, that was Jesus. And yeah, those things
Speaker 7: where it's like Emily Bronte asking all of those ridiculous
Speaker 7: like logic problems, and I'm like, I guess this is
Speaker 7: But it feels like this movie a lot of times,
Speaker 7: and I'm sorry this might be an unfair thing to say,
Speaker 7: but it feels like this movie is set up for
Speaker 7: us to leave the theater, go to the cafe and
Speaker 7: have a five hour discussion of what we just saw.
Speaker 7: It feels like these movies are very much set for
Speaker 7: cafe society.
Speaker 6: I referenced Gedbor and society of a spectacle. A movie
Speaker 6: like this fits into a lot of that French philosophy
Speaker 6: of the era. There was a lot of people who
Speaker 6: are writing philosophical treatises. I don't know how many people
Speaker 6: are reading that, but I think maybe Guard was like,
Speaker 6: let me take these ideas that are floating in the ether,
Speaker 6: and maybe I can get people to pay money to
Speaker 6: go look at it and make it more mass, whatever
Speaker 6: mass was at that time, and try to infect larger
Speaker 6: society with these ideas. In a certain way, I think
Speaker 6: it sits on the shelf with Gee Deebor, George Battai
Speaker 6: or like you've talked about Lacan and Similacrum and things
Speaker 6: like that. It just all fits within what was being
Speaker 6: discussed in that period between post World War Two into
Speaker 6: the mid seventies French philosophy.
Speaker 7: The moment that the film loses me, it feels like
Speaker 7: this is a very midway point for the film. It
Speaker 7: may be, it may not be, but it feels like
Speaker 7: for me, it's the scene where they get picked up
Speaker 7: by the yellow truck and it's the guy who is
Speaker 7: out selling and demonstrating pianos, and you get that long.
Speaker 7: I want to say, it's a three sixty. It's a
Speaker 7: three sixty, and it just it goes around and around,
Speaker 7: and then at one point it stops, and then it
Speaker 7: goes the other way. It feels interminable, and that it's
Speaker 7: the actual music on the soundtrack of the guy playing
Speaker 7: the piano and he keeps I don't know if he's
Speaker 7: fucking up the song or not, but he just keeps
Speaker 7: playing it. And again it's I haven't really said I've
Speaker 7: talked about the music a little bit, but just how
Speaker 7: discordant the soundtrack is, like those the music that comes
Speaker 7: up and stuff. But in the gosh, and so much
Speaker 7: of this movie, through eight minutes of the traffic jam
Speaker 7: section and then through so much more of it, it's
Speaker 7: people honking their horns and just being it's so difficult
Speaker 7: sometimes to listen to and like the two guys who
Speaker 7: are talking, you know, giving little speeches to us later on,
Speaker 7: the garbage men, they just are going on and on,
Speaker 7: or there's a moment later on when they're with the cannibals,
Speaker 7: and it's the guy on the drum set and he's
Speaker 7: just playing the drums. Then you have somebody else who's
Speaker 7: like reading a speech and I can't remember whose speech
Speaker 7: that is, but again it's a big quotation and it
Speaker 7: just goes on and on, just droning. But that drumming
Speaker 7: after a while just becomes so much so I'm like,
Speaker 7: would you shut the fuck up already? And that's what
Speaker 7: I want to yell at the screen. Was so much
Speaker 7: of this movie is it's just And again, I know
Speaker 7: he's playing with form, he's playing with me, he's playing
Speaker 7: with his audience, and he wants to make me uncomfortable
Speaker 7: and he's doing a great job of it.
Speaker 6: The only thing I can think of with the piano
Speaker 6: piece is him commenting. And again, here's your Boonoel reference
Speaker 6: is Bunuel took a lot of heat for using certain
Speaker 6: pieces of classical music in Lage Door. So you could say, okay,
Speaker 6: the guards making a reference to European classical tradition and
Speaker 6: classical music and how this is a refined thing, but
Speaker 6: instead it's being played in the courtyard of a farm.
Speaker 6: And you could also say that it's probably a little
Speaker 6: bit more of a I don't want to say quieter,
Speaker 6: but it's not as energetic as other parts. So if
Speaker 6: it was just a constant flow out of a fire
Speaker 6: hose at you just overwhelm you all the time. So
Speaker 6: there's part of me that thinks, okay, this is the
Speaker 6: low period. He wants you to feel a god take
Speaker 6: forever because everything had been so rapid to that point.
Speaker 6: So it's I guess you could say it's the sorbet
Speaker 6: it's the palate cleanser. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I saw it as a moment where everybody is so
Speaker 3: all those yeah, the people, the farmers there, and even
Speaker 3: our characters even though they're bored, but they're all listening
Speaker 3: to the beautiful music of Mozart, and yeah, the moment
Speaker 3: indeed of tranquility. Everyday work stops. We just listened to
Speaker 3: this piece of music, and then the guy playing it
Speaker 3: or Godard is trying to say how much better this
Speaker 3: is than classical music of that time or pop music
Speaker 3: being influenced by it. So it's like an ad for Mozart,
Speaker 3: but just saying like how much Yeah, this is so
Speaker 3: much better Intellectually.
Speaker 7: Sometimes it feels like Godard just has a beef with
Speaker 7: everything modern music, the idea of rock or even, yes,
Speaker 7: to your point, modern classical. He's got problems with in
Speaker 7: every single thing. And it feels like just almost like
Speaker 7: a screed of here's all the shit that's making me
Speaker 7: mad right now.
Speaker 2: I got a lot of problems with your people.
Speaker 7: You're gonna hear about it. Yeah, I'm gonna have these
Speaker 7: two puppets on screen and they're going to represent something
Speaker 7: that I just despise, and we're gonna torture them for
Speaker 7: the next hour and forty minutes. Yeah, and just show
Speaker 7: you all the reasons why the bourgeois are empty vessels
Speaker 7: that don't mean anything to me.
Speaker 3: But on the music, to touch on the drumming of
Speaker 3: the hippies, I think that made no sense. I was
Speaker 3: trying to actually pay attention to the rhythm and they
Speaker 3: were just trying to be cool hippies playing a drum beat,
Speaker 3: but that is not proper drumpling. Might not know that
Speaker 3: as well, but it didn't sound good to me. So
Speaker 3: it was also again, yeah, a critique of the hippies,
Speaker 3: of them, yeah, taking up music but then having no
Speaker 3: talent or no skills for that. I just mentioned one
Speaker 3: plus one Something for the Devil. After this film, it
Speaker 3: becomes a lot of more of these type of screeds.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy he makes Pravda and Win from the East,
Speaker 3: or in seventy one he makes Lotti and in Italia.
Speaker 3: But like some of these movies See You at Mao,
Speaker 3: like those things are basically it feels like long political
Speaker 3: things and stuff that he doesn't even take credit for.
Speaker 3: I want to say, a lot of his films during
Speaker 3: that period he doesn't even put his name on, and
Speaker 3: they just become things that he wants people to see
Speaker 3: and to experience. He's pretty much done with filmmaking for
Speaker 3: a little while, this type of filmmaking, and it takes
Speaker 3: I don't know, a couple of years before he gets
Speaker 3: back to it. And yeah, to your point, Rob sixty eight,
Speaker 3: it's right around the corner. And this feels like he's
Speaker 3: looking into the future and being like, hey, listen, what
Speaker 3: I'm saying here is going to really the chickens are
Speaker 3: going to come home to roost very soon.
Speaker 6: Do you want to talk about someone who had their
Speaker 6: finger on the pulse? And this feels like definitely he
Speaker 6: knew he knew something was up that I don't think
Speaker 6: other filmmakers in that period quite understood. Also at the
Speaker 6: same time, I also want to step back and look
Speaker 6: at Guard's own history. He was part of this class
Speaker 6: as we grew up. He was the son of a banker.
Speaker 6: He understood these people, He understood this culture. He understood
Speaker 6: I guess the old familiarity breeds contempt kind of thing
Speaker 6: where it was like under he knew the things that
Speaker 6: he did not like about growing up in that milieu.
Speaker 7: Only is this a critique of France and what was
Speaker 7: going on in France at the time, but he also
Speaker 7: does a lot of critiquing of America, which I'm all
Speaker 7: on board for. Things like during the speech that the
Speaker 7: African gentleman is giving where they are like cutting to
Speaker 7: these people and they have like headbands on. They start
Speaker 7: talking about Native Americans and how the Iroquois were the
Speaker 7: real progenitors of democracy and all this, and I was like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 7: that I'm on board with that kind of thing. And
Speaker 7: that calls back to that little kid at the beginning
Speaker 7: who's dressed up like an Indian chief and he's shooting
Speaker 7: arrows at their car. I'm like, okay, here's this echo
Speaker 7: that's coming back again. It's almost like the first part
Speaker 7: of the movie sets up so many things that we're
Speaker 7: going to see sprinkled throughout the rest of the film.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a smaller symbolic action that gets escalated. Well. At
Speaker 6: the same time, the couple's constantly trying for this to
Speaker 6: make sense. They're trying to understand what's going on.
Speaker 7: They're like me as a movie viewer.
Speaker 6: Exactly, So I guess the couple at the same time
Speaker 6: is the audience. You always look for the audience character.
Speaker 6: That's what I always say in movies.
Speaker 7: I love too that he's playing with the form in
Speaker 7: the because we don't I don't think we ever do
Speaker 7: we ever make it to their final destination. Don't they
Speaker 7: find out off screen about what happened with the father
Speaker 7: and that the mother's got the money. I want to
Speaker 7: say that's around the time of the bath scene, where
Speaker 7: you also hear the story of the hippopotamus. But the
Speaker 7: thing with the bath scene I love is that is
Speaker 7: such a critique of films for me, where it's our
Speaker 7: main character Corin, who is known for being in very
Speaker 7: sexy French films and Mrael dark and the way that
Speaker 7: she's in the tub and her breasts are not visible,
Speaker 7: so from the chest down we don't see anything and
Speaker 7: she's just taking a bath. But then right over her shoulder,
Speaker 7: as a classic painting where you can't see breasts and
Speaker 7: its breasts are okay in classic works of art, but
Speaker 7: please no nudity from the actual actor or actress on screenplays.
Speaker 6: I also think it's a way for him to critique
Speaker 6: the visual I guess you could say the male gaze,
Speaker 6: because he did the start of the same thing in
Speaker 6: contempt with Brigie Bardeaux. So he's got Brisgie Bardeux, but
Speaker 6: he shoots her these colors in all these different ways
Speaker 6: that it's yeah, okay, she's naked, but so.
Speaker 3: What Yeah, I don't know how how much censorship or
Speaker 3: if there were ratings back then or somebody was looking
Speaker 3: into that. But then again, like you said to me,
Speaker 3: it was a point of we can't show a breast.
Speaker 3: It's just not the actress's breasts here. Whether you're seeing
Speaker 3: what you would see anyway, it's just that this is
Speaker 3: acceptable for a lower rating.
Speaker 7: Yeah, even though the first title card that we see
Speaker 7: is not appropriate for anyone under eighteen, and it's in
Speaker 7: that same fine treatment. So I'm like, oh, okay, that's
Speaker 7: that's an interesting way to start using those title cards
Speaker 7: is with the warning, and then we get the idea
Speaker 7: of what's he say, like this film was rescued from
Speaker 7: a trash heap.
Speaker 6: The first one is a film adrift in the cosmos,
Speaker 6: So it kind of gives you the idea that there's
Speaker 6: a certain level of camu ask absurdism where it's just like,
Speaker 6: now this matters, We're just gonna drift.
Speaker 3: Having seen his previous movies from the seventies, it feels
Speaker 3: like it's putting pieces or all those movies together and
Speaker 3: putting them in the blender. There's the absurdism of Alphaville,
Speaker 3: the colorfulness of Pierre Leifu, that the innovative techniques that
Speaker 3: started with Breathless and so on, and then the political
Speaker 3: messages of Lashinas and so on. So everything mixed together,
Speaker 3: and then a ramp top to eleven and set a
Speaker 3: drift for people too to grab onto.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the colors in this movie pop so well. It's
Speaker 7: a gorgeous looking film, and it's.
Speaker 6: Good when you finally get to the revolutionaries and as
Speaker 6: we come into the end here, because you actually get nature,
Speaker 6: you actually get forests and trees and grass and that
Speaker 6: isn't all burned out because it cars. And I was
Speaker 6: just thinking about the ending there where has the wife
Speaker 6: become a revolutionary and do they literally eat the rich?
Speaker 7: Has she become a revolutionary or is she just going
Speaker 7: along with whatever's going to allow her to live or
Speaker 7: go along? I honestly don't know what her motivation is
Speaker 7: at that point, And I do love that moment when
Speaker 7: she's eating and they're like, oh, yeah, that's your husband, basically,
Speaker 7: and she gives no no indication that it upsets her whatsoever.
Speaker 7: You're like watching her face to see if she even
Speaker 7: acknowledges that there's nothing there.
Speaker 6: Again, it just shows there are no values. That's basically
Speaker 6: we go get darts kind of trying to show through.
Speaker 6: The thing through these characters is they're not moored by anything.
Speaker 6: They don't feel a connection motion and don't feel the
Speaker 6: connection to sentimentality. If anything, they're bound by the conventions
Speaker 6: of the society in which they're in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think she even says I'll take a bite
Speaker 3: later as well, or something to that extent. She's just
Speaker 3: therefore going along with the flow at this point, I think.
Speaker 3: And then yeah, no real moral judgment. Yeah, no mourning
Speaker 3: of her husband, nothing in that sense, no emotion.
Speaker 7: No, And I want to say, there's another dead rabbit
Speaker 7: in that sequence. There's of course the pig, which is
Speaker 7: very upsetting watching the pig, or there's a looks like
Speaker 7: the I want to say, it's a goose that's half
Speaker 7: living and just flapping around. It's a very horrific scene
Speaker 7: that I can't handle. The idea of eating the husband
Speaker 7: I'm absolutely fine with, but yeah, watching those poor animals suffer,
Speaker 7: it's really rough. It feels like they're play acting like
Speaker 7: everybody in this commune, hanging out in the forest. I
Speaker 7: don't see any sort of structures for them to sleep
Speaker 7: or anything. They just seem like they're content to run
Speaker 7: around in the forest and play revolutionary. And you keep
Speaker 7: getting August Light is one of the title cards. What
Speaker 7: was it September? No, the ah something of October.
Speaker 6: Yeah, October is an obvious reference to the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 7: And I'm like, are you saying that they were playing revolutionary?
Speaker 7: Probably not, because they actually were doing things, whereas with
Speaker 7: these folks, they just seem to be content to wander
Speaker 7: around the forest and at one point they knock out
Speaker 7: a motorist who's on a little motorbike and probably eat
Speaker 7: him as well.
Speaker 6: And I guess you could say that again, the people
Speaker 6: who start the revolution will just feast on and fight
Speaker 6: amongst those without power. If they do eat the husband, fine,
Speaker 6: he was in some position of authority. But you just
Speaker 6: get the feeling that Guard's saying, your revolution is just
Speaker 6: only going to hurt the people you're trying to liberate. Anyway,
Speaker 6: what are you doing? Is that really the way to
Speaker 6: go about it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it felt chaotic and I didn't actually understand if
Speaker 3: there was a revolutionary purpose stated right, they it was
Speaker 3: just revolution for the sake of revolution, So then it
Speaker 3: was just chaos and going along with the flow. Another
Speaker 3: critique of that kind of approach.
Speaker 7: Let's go ahead, We're going to take a break, and
Speaker 7: we'll be right back after these brief messages.
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Speaker 7: All Right, we are back, and we were talking about weekend,
Speaker 7: and I found it interesting that the whole traffic I
Speaker 7: don't know how much I can say as far as
Speaker 7: was this inspired by another story or was it just
Speaker 7: a coincidence that there's the traffic scene, because there's a
Speaker 7: short story by Julio Cortazar called Law to Pieceta del Sur,
Speaker 7: which is all about a traffic jam, and it just
Speaker 7: the whole story, I don't want to say, it's what
Speaker 7: like fourteen pages maybe, and it's just all of these
Speaker 7: people that are in this traffic jam and this idea
Speaker 7: of this never ending traffic jam. And I know I've
Speaker 7: seen something similar in other films as well.
Speaker 3: I want to.
Speaker 6: Say, good right, it's hilarity on the Highway.
Speaker 2: Daisies Junior and Lisa Hartman star in Great American Traffic Jam,
Speaker 2: a superstation movie presentation double feature.
Speaker 7: That was I think an inspiration. And then there's actually
Speaker 7: a movie that's based solely on that just called Traffic
Speaker 7: Jam from What's seventy.
Speaker 6: Seventy nine nine.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I tried watching that one. That was a
Speaker 7: little bit rough too, just because all of the characters
Speaker 7: are pretty despicable. I didn't really care for any of
Speaker 7: them either, even though there's some great actors in that one.
Speaker 6: And I finished it just before the show because you
Speaker 6: dropped it for us take a look at. And it
Speaker 6: felt like for me at least, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 6: I was sentimental or something, but it snuck up on
Speaker 6: me in the end the first half or three quarters,
Speaker 6: I was just like, Oh, this is what are you
Speaker 6: trying to say? It felt like it had this kind
Speaker 6: of broad comedy, like broad Italian comedy of the seventies feeling,
Speaker 6: with some kind of points I was trying to make.
Speaker 6: And at times I couldn't quite follow who they wanted
Speaker 6: us to follow, because I think there's seven or eight
Speaker 6: different scenarios that we follow. So there's a rich guy
Speaker 6: in his assistant, there's a mom and her kids. There's
Speaker 6: like a whole family with a grandma and a young
Speaker 6: girl who's pregnant, and the dad keeps saying you should
Speaker 6: get an abortion because this is embarrassing that you're knocked
Speaker 6: up and you're not married. There's a husband and wife
Speaker 6: who are going on like a twenty fifth anniversary trip.
Speaker 6: That guy's played by Fernando Ray, so of course Bunuel
Speaker 6: and then so take your drink. Marcello Mastriani is in here,
Speaker 6: and he plays an actor, and when people find out
Speaker 6: that he's in here, then that there's an actor, they're
Speaker 6: like wow, they set upon him. There's just all these
Speaker 6: different variables. There's a gal who's traveling alone, who's some
Speaker 6: sort of musician, and she befriends the guy who's got
Speaker 6: the baby food truck, which pays off in the end
Speaker 6: that storyline. There's just all these storylines. And I think
Speaker 6: similarly to what I discussed with Guard's use of the
Speaker 6: road in here and how people are stuck, I would
Speaker 6: say the difference is everybody's stuck. I'm blanking on the
Speaker 6: name of the director, but everybody is stuck and nobody's
Speaker 6: getting anywhere, and it has this real feeling of I
Speaker 6: guess you could put that piece from Psycho in here,
Speaker 6: where we're all in our little traps, gnashing our teeth
Speaker 6: at each other, trying to get free, but there is
Speaker 6: no freedom. We're we're stuck in these various roles and
Speaker 6: we just try to screw each other over literally and figuratively,
Speaker 6: especially if we're talking about that rape scene, or we
Speaker 6: don't want to get involved, or we do want to
Speaker 6: get involved. I see it as the director trying to
Speaker 6: have a lot of different conversations about sort of humanity
Speaker 6: on the whole, and just using a traffic jam as
Speaker 6: a basis to do it.
Speaker 7: It's a pressure cooker, but you get to see people's
Speaker 7: real emotions come out in a traffic jam because it's
Speaker 7: such a frustrating situation. And the director, by the way,
Speaker 7: was Luigi Coomancini.
Speaker 6: I had talked about before when we had did I
Speaker 6: Think Don of the Dead. One of the things that
Speaker 6: I really loved about the Romero films was putting people
Speaker 6: under pressure and seeing how they react. And that's really
Speaker 6: what this does, is it It brings out the best
Speaker 6: and the worst aspects of humanity within a scenario.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's like the beginning of Land. Doesn't that all
Speaker 7: take place in a traffic jam and you just see
Speaker 7: the worst of humanity and hear some of the worst
Speaker 7: music of the twenty first century.
Speaker 6: All singing, all dancing exactly.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, because that's what you do during a traffic jam?
Speaker 6: Why not they do that?
Speaker 7: At least that's what I did.
Speaker 6: They do that in here too?
Speaker 7: Do they do that in Romania? Is that like all singing,
Speaker 7: all dancing traffic jams?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 3: But what do we do? Use the car horns a lot?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Another very a soundtrack that put me on edge.
Speaker 3: But so in the movie traffic Jam, I think, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a situation to put all these different types of
Speaker 3: characters to deal with it, and okay, may I don't
Speaker 3: know if all of them, but they somehow evolve through
Speaker 3: this experience and even the relationships between that lady that
Speaker 3: was traveling alone and the trucker. While in Weekend nobody
Speaker 3: has really evolved. There's no the characters are the same
Speaker 3: as they were in the beginning. So that hasn't changed them.
Speaker 3: That hasn't added anything.
Speaker 7: Which is what makes me think that she's playing at
Speaker 7: being a revolutionary, just like perhaps the other revolutionaries are.
Speaker 7: Just she is not coming at this from a Oh
Speaker 7: I see the error of my ways and now I
Speaker 7: must amend them. It's okay, I'll go with the flow.
Speaker 7: And if this is what I need to do, and
Speaker 7: if I need to eat my husband for sustenance. I
Speaker 7: didn't really care for him anyway. Maybe eventually I can
Speaker 7: make it back to my lover and my posh little apartment.
Speaker 6: Yeah. One of the things that I really liked in here,
Speaker 6: like I said, the things that snuck up on me
Speaker 6: was more towards the end. There is the sexual assault
Speaker 6: rape scene here that's pretty horrific. But he uses that
Speaker 6: to point out again, like I talked about people in
Speaker 6: position of authority, there's a car behind where this is
Speaker 6: taking place, where someone's got a gun, and there's also
Speaker 6: these older men who could get involved. They debate among
Speaker 6: themselves what should we do, and one says, what if
Speaker 6: that was your daughter? And one guy gets upset and says,
Speaker 6: don't bring her into this, And so they don't do anything.
Speaker 6: They're just paralyzed to do anything or to get involved,
Speaker 6: and they act like they didn't see it and all
Speaker 6: of that. But closer to the end of the film,
Speaker 6: really there's this What starts it off is this ambulance
Speaker 6: that's trying to get through and this guy's trying to
Speaker 6: get to the hospital and he ends up dying and
Speaker 6: they call this guy over. I don't know if he
Speaker 6: was a priest or just a whatever. It didn't really
Speaker 6: seem like he was a priest or a or minister.
Speaker 6: But he gives his kind of last rites and it's like,
Speaker 6: to me, one of the most humanistic encapsulations if you
Speaker 6: were looking for a thesis statement of the movie. And
Speaker 6: then I love the fact that I think it's the
Speaker 6: rich guy we've been seeing who's got more money, and
Speaker 6: he's wants to sign this girl to a record contract
Speaker 6: as she turns him on and all these various things,
Speaker 6: and he says, Hey, I'm in publishing. Can I talk
Speaker 6: to you about publishing that? And he's like no, and
Speaker 6: he just walks away. And what that kind of reminded
Speaker 6: me of as we talk about other movies, is the
Speaker 6: commodification of the sacred, And to me that felt and
Speaker 6: granted he had been dead a few years by then,
Speaker 6: but it felt a little bit like what Pasolini was
Speaker 6: talking about in Cello and the idea of commodification of
Speaker 6: the body, commodification of sacred things in the culture, and
Speaker 6: how that had just gone way out of line in
Speaker 6: his mind, that mass production and whatnot. But like I said,
Speaker 6: in the end, the movie just snuck up on me.
Speaker 6: I wasn't expecting to be as affected by it because
Speaker 6: when I got into it, so the first half hour
Speaker 6: forty minutes, I'm like, oh my god, this thing. I'm like,
Speaker 6: where are we going? Who are we following? What is
Speaker 6: it that you want me to look at? And then
Speaker 6: when I finally looked at it as vignettes and maybe
Speaker 6: some interlinking, and then tried to take a more Okay, fine,
Speaker 6: I'm just going to go along on the ride. I'm
Speaker 6: not going to try to buy into anything. I'm just
Speaker 6: going to go with it. I felt that it paid
Speaker 6: off in the end for me.
Speaker 7: So I looked up there as a movie from nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty so right after this one, an American film called
Speaker 7: The Great American Traffic Jam also known as Gridlock, and
Speaker 7: it is a who's who of every seventies actor that
Speaker 7: you could possibly think of. The lead actor on IMDb
Speaker 7: is Desi Arnez Junior, and then you get into John Beck,
Speaker 7: James Gregory, Lisa Hartman, Michael Lerner, Ed McMahon, wink Martindale,
Speaker 7: Al Molenaro, Charles Napier. I know it's going to be terrible,
Speaker 7: but I have a feeling I'm going to be watching
Speaker 7: this pretty soon and it is available in full on YouTube. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: this one, the Italian film hard to find, but it
Speaker 7: looks like it was released in multiple languages, and I
Speaker 7: was very glad to be able to find one with
Speaker 7: maybe not the best English subtitles, but English subtitles.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was serviceable because I only knew about four
Speaker 6: words in.
Speaker 7: Italian manngia yah.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 7: The traffic jam and the whole traffic jam scenario, the
Speaker 7: whole pressure cooker thing that I'm talking about, really reminded
Speaker 7: me of the beginning of Falling Down, And that's one
Speaker 7: of those where we started in the traffic jam. That's
Speaker 7: like kind of the opening credits, if memory serves. And
Speaker 7: then after that, Michael Douglas gets out of the car
Speaker 7: and eventually gets out of the car business. No, he
Speaker 7: gets out of the car and makes his journey after that,
Speaker 7: but it really takes that crucible of the car, the
Speaker 7: traffic jam, to push him to that next step where
Speaker 7: he then chooses violence and then begins his whole odyssey
Speaker 7: across Los Angeles. But he does that by foot rather
Speaker 7: than being stuck in a traffic jam the whole time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a road movie, literally, a road movie. Stuck
Speaker 6: on that roach.
Speaker 7: When we were emailing back and forth, Andre you had
Speaker 7: mentioned that there were things from the Substance, and I
Speaker 7: haven't seen The Substance yet, but how do you feel
Speaker 7: that Weekend and the Substance are maybe having a little
Speaker 7: bit of a dialogue.
Speaker 3: I saw The Substance when it was released here. I
Speaker 3: live in the Netherlands in September, and I watched The
Speaker 3: Weekend for the first time and just watching The Substance
Speaker 3: in the cinema, so there are a lot of scenes
Speaker 3: where you're just bounded with gore, horror, literal, buckets of
Speaker 3: blood and the message itself about yeah, actresses in Hollywood
Speaker 3: and the male gaze and everything. It's pounded and pounded
Speaker 3: with every sequence in that movie. So it felt similar,
Speaker 3: but again maybe not about the same subject, but the
Speaker 3: way Weekend is just bombarding you with either a spectacle
Speaker 3: or horror. The bits of blood on that bunny and
Speaker 3: all the skin bunny, Okay, it is not stopping. And
Speaker 3: then I also looked at the watch at one point, Okay,
Speaker 3: we're only halfway through this movie and it still has
Speaker 3: to go. It was a similar feeling that it doesn't
Speaker 3: let you breathe to give you that message. But yeah,
Speaker 3: with a different purpose and another dialogue that I saw
Speaker 3: here is what Rob mentioned. But you mentioned the exterminating
Speaker 3: thing angel from Boudwell because there's a title card. But
Speaker 3: to me, this would be a good double feature with
Speaker 3: the discrete charm of the bourgeois. They are walking on
Speaker 3: the in the discretion arm of the Bozzi. There are
Speaker 3: those sequences between different scenes where they're walking on the
Speaker 3: field on a road, so that felt like the road
Speaker 3: movie that this is where they're looking for their way
Speaker 3: to Ooinville. Also the sequence where there's the sound of
Speaker 3: the plane and then you see it crashed and Boudwell
Speaker 3: uses the plane sounds to cover he uses it for
Speaker 3: a different purpose. But yeah, it reminded me of that.
Speaker 3: And then again, yeah, it's a satire on the bourgeoisie.
Speaker 3: I think Bouell does it in it. So whatever part
Speaker 3: of Weekend is the satire about the bourgeoisie, I think
Speaker 3: Godar does it very angrily and bluntly, while Bludewell is
Speaker 3: a lot more Yeah, chiseled a lot more elegant with it,
Speaker 3: and the humor absurd, but still a different type of absurdity,
Speaker 3: not as grotesque. Or horror someone as we can, but
Speaker 3: still a nice I was actually wondering whether this is
Speaker 3: god the hardest answer to Blundell's movie, But who Know's
Speaker 3: movie came when it came after.
Speaker 6: I was thinking about what you were talking about with
Speaker 6: the use of sound to block out certain passages. And
Speaker 6: Budwell does it like I think twice maybe three times
Speaker 6: in Discrete Charm, and it's I always thought it was
Speaker 6: to get you off the plot, that those sections are
Speaker 6: where he was going to explain like who the murderer
Speaker 6: was or something like that, and it's that's not important.
Speaker 6: I fucking care about that. Don't pay attention to that idea.
Speaker 6: Stop getting into this idea that you're going to follow
Speaker 6: a plot through this thing. And so that's what I
Speaker 6: really loved about Discrete Charm, which anyone who knows this
Speaker 6: show knows is one of my favorites. And we did
Speaker 6: a great episode with John Claude Carrier too for wrote
Speaker 6: script if you'll look that up. But the other one
Speaker 6: and that I thought of, and it was a year
Speaker 6: after this, it was sixty eight. The kind of reminds
Speaker 6: me of this film is the Milky Way, And in
Speaker 6: the Milky Way, he's got two guys who are on
Speaker 6: pilgrimage to Saragoza in Spain, and as they go they
Speaker 6: get into these different vignettes. But in that and they're
Speaker 6: all over the place, They're all within time, they're in
Speaker 6: back during the time of Christ, they're medieval Europe, they're
Speaker 6: in the current era. That is more about Whinwell talking
Speaker 6: about Catholicism and the intricacies of faith and the absurdities
Speaker 6: of it to him. And so it again much more elegant,
Speaker 6: much more controlled, much more humorous as opposed to angry
Speaker 6: than guitar. But I do see there's that. I don't know,
Speaker 6: he's not around, can't ask, but I maybe there is
Speaker 6: a dialogue between you have Guard pulling from Bunwell and
Speaker 6: then Bunwell pulling for Guard, and in other ways going
Speaker 6: forward into his later films.
Speaker 7: I mentioned seats Man earlier. I would definitely recommend that
Speaker 7: one because we don't know what happened in France in
Speaker 7: order to have all of these cars littered all over
Speaker 7: the freeway. It's not just one or two, it's dozens,
Speaker 7: and you come across cars that are actively on fire,
Speaker 7: dead bodies just strewn across the road. As the movie progresses,
Speaker 7: it gets worse and worse. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 7: of the idea in Seats of Man, where there's some
Speaker 7: sort of plague that we don't know what it is
Speaker 7: that is killing off people, and so main two characters
Speaker 7: go to a beachside place and they live there and
Speaker 7: they seem to be safe from whatever this plague is.
Speaker 7: I feel like there's that connection also with Godar's ex
Speaker 7: wife in there as well. And then The Lion Has
Speaker 7: Seven Heads also would be a good double feature with Weekend,
Speaker 7: just because there is there's a ton of talk about politics.
Speaker 7: The Roachia films that were Roasia films, they feel like
Speaker 7: they're as revolutionary as but for me, they always seem
Speaker 7: to have a little bit more structure and substance to them.
Speaker 7: And I like that he's having a dialogue with the audience,
Speaker 7: but he's not necessarily speaking to the audience directly. He
Speaker 7: always have characters just directly addressing us. I found it
Speaker 7: very fascinating to go back to those two speeches by
Speaker 7: the garbage men and just the way that they will
Speaker 7: look at us, but then they'll look to the side,
Speaker 7: come back to us, look to the other side, come
Speaker 7: back to us. It's almost like they're addressing everyone in
Speaker 7: the audience, but it's almost like they're on a street
Speaker 7: corner talking to all of these people around them and
Speaker 7: maintaining that eye contact rather than it just being straight
Speaker 7: to the eye of the camera lens. But yeah, I
Speaker 7: love that Roshia, especially in line has seven heads. He's
Speaker 7: really memory serves. It has been a while since I've
Speaker 7: seen it, but he's talking a lot about the African colonialism,
Speaker 7: which is ironic since he was on or going European
Speaker 7: colonialism in Brazil, so he was it's also happening over
Speaker 7: here too. But yeah, I love that movie and would
Speaker 7: really recommend that to folks.
Speaker 6: And the one that this reminded me of, and it
Speaker 6: was only because of the ending, But the more that
Speaker 6: I thought about it, I was like, Okay, maybe there's
Speaker 6: some there. Did Joel em Reid go out of his
Speaker 6: way to make a pro feminist communist statement with Bloodsucking Freaks?
Speaker 6: I don't necessarily think so, but I think you can
Speaker 6: read Bloodsucking Freaks as an allegorical film for that era
Speaker 6: in the seventies. And what I mean by the connection
Speaker 6: to Weekend is when the wife is eating her husband.
Speaker 6: The last shot we get in Bloodsucking Freaks is the sandwich, which, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's someone's penis and one of them, Yeah it could
Speaker 6: be sars. That all we know is the caged women
Speaker 6: from the basement got out and went crazy. So you
Speaker 6: could say that's Joel m Read saying feminism will be
Speaker 6: the end of the patriarchy. But the other thing that
Speaker 6: I did think about, and like I said in.
Speaker 7: By the Way, I love how Much You go to Badfort's.
Speaker 6: Last Let's talk he breaks as one of my top fifteen.
Speaker 6: I've written essays on it. Andrew Rousch wanted it first
Speaker 6: Trash Cinema book if you want to read the essays
Speaker 6: in there. But the thing I was thinking about is
Speaker 6: how I talked about the characters in this film are
Speaker 6: stand ins. They're not really characters that Guard wants to
Speaker 6: us to emotionally invest in. And I would say in
Speaker 6: Blood Sucking Freaks it's the same. It's not as distant,
Speaker 6: is what Gaduard has here. But all of the characters
Speaker 6: within that universe that he creates are all representative of something.
Speaker 6: They're all representative of a female idea, a business owner
Speaker 6: who controls everything. The cops. There's all these different characters
Speaker 6: that represent various concepts, and you can look at it
Speaker 6: as a statement on what was going on at the time. Again,
Speaker 6: and I keep having to put this disclaimer on here
Speaker 6: because when I did Blood Sucking Freaks with You, my
Speaker 6: very first episode many moons ago, I remember someone either
Speaker 6: emailing in or putting in the comments I don't listen
Speaker 6: to your show for some sort of communist lecture, professor lecture.
Speaker 6: And I said, all right, what do you want me
Speaker 6: to do?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 6: Look at all the boobies. Oh, look at all the blood. Wow,
Speaker 6: that was cool.
Speaker 7: You remember that one time where there are all the boobs?
Speaker 6: That was awesome exactly Remember that time you're in the Beatles, Yeah,
Speaker 6: that was awesome.
Speaker 3: We didn't touch on the two points that I had
Speaker 3: in my notes. When was that the Son of God?
Speaker 3: I think it's Joseph Balsamo who was Charlotte and in
Speaker 3: French three, But he says he wants to go to
Speaker 3: London to start flamboyance in movies or something like that,
Speaker 3: which I found just very funny because everything was very
Speaker 3: flamboyant in this movie. But there was still more to that.
Speaker 3: And then another point to me. That was very funny
Speaker 3: was the end the card where it's end of cinema
Speaker 3: and then it shows that it's actually the end and
Speaker 3: the cinema visa for the movie. But it was funny
Speaker 3: how he played with that, and then it was the
Speaker 3: end of a specific type of era for Godard in
Speaker 3: that sense.
Speaker 7: I was really dreading talking about this film, But I'm
Speaker 7: really glad that we had this discussion because this was
Speaker 7: a great discussion and makes me appreciate this film a
Speaker 7: lot more than I had, especially back in ninety five
Speaker 7: ninety six whenever I saw it the first time. So
Speaker 7: I'm really glad Andre that you brought this back to
Speaker 7: me and made me give this a second chance, rather
Speaker 7: than me writing it off and being like, oh, another
Speaker 7: good art masturbation fest. I really appreciated this conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like I said, I watched it first time for this podcast,
Speaker 3: and in my opinion of it was, oh my god,
Speaker 3: what is is? What are we going to talk about here?
Speaker 3: But I think it is something that is worth a
Speaker 3: great discussion like this one and then further exploring. I
Speaker 3: think I will go back to it to see certain
Speaker 3: points also after this discussion, to see how certain scenes
Speaker 3: play out and it's going to be something to engage
Speaker 3: with further for me.
Speaker 6: For me, it reminds me of some other films like
Speaker 6: I just saw recently Kinds of Kindness, and I like,
Speaker 6: I hit or miss sometimes on that director's movies, but
Speaker 6: that one. Someone asked me, did you like it? And
Speaker 6: I'm like not when I was watching it, But after
Speaker 6: I got home and thought about it and put it together,
Speaker 6: I'm like, Okay, I like it as an intellectual exercise.
Speaker 6: And I was sitting there watching it for I don't
Speaker 6: know two and a half hours. I'm just like, I
Speaker 6: I'm not engaging with it that way. How I feel
Speaker 6: about Weekend where it's I like it as a thought exercise.
Speaker 6: I like it as something that I can get into
Speaker 6: and pull apart. These pieces. Look at it from historical angle,
Speaker 6: from pisophical angle, things like that. Is it something that
Speaker 6: I'm like, you know what I really need to watch
Speaker 6: right now? I need you to put on fucking Weekend? Man. No,
Speaker 6: I am not. That is not at the top of
Speaker 6: my Q on Criterion Channel. There's other things I'm gonna
Speaker 6: watch first, just for shits and giggles, and in tournament.
Speaker 7: Hey, everybody's working for the weekend. Man, exactly all right,
Speaker 7: We're going to take another break and play a preview
Speaker 7: for next week's show right after these brief messages.
Speaker 2: Jerry Doolittle is on the move, and whether by cap,
Speaker 2: by air or by foe, she'll get Jack Flash out
Speaker 2: of trouble to get thanks. No matter what she gets into,
Speaker 2: we'll be Goldberg jumping Jack Flash.
Speaker 4: That has the most amazing night.
Speaker 6: Starts October tenth and Famous Players another selected theaters nearing you.
Speaker 7: That's right, we are kicking off a whole month of
Speaker 7: movies starring Whoopy Goldberg. We're calling it Woop Prairie. But
Speaker 7: I'm still work shopping that until then, I want to
Speaker 7: thank my co host, Robin Andre. Rob, what is the
Speaker 7: latest with you?
Speaker 6: I'm just enjoying my days out here in the high deserts.
Speaker 6: Sorry to hear that you're getting the freezing, but hey,
Speaker 6: that's weather in Michigan. And I've just been enjoying my life,
Speaker 6: getting outside, exercising and started working on this novel. And
Speaker 6: I'm making some good progress. So I don't know, maybe
Speaker 6: i'll finish that, see if that comes out in some way.
Speaker 6: If it does, you'll hear about it.
Speaker 7: Here first, and Andre, how about yourself? What are you
Speaker 7: up to over there?
Speaker 3: The only thing that I can plug is my record label,
Speaker 3: Legendary Sound Research, which is a bit in a pause
Speaker 3: for now, but we'll probably start kicking off soon again.
Speaker 3: It's underground dance music on all platforms and physical media
Speaker 3: as well, if you'd like to check that out.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much guys for being on the show.
Speaker 7: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 7: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 7: of the other shows that I work on. They are
Speaker 7: all available at Wirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Speaker 7: Patreon community. If you want to join the community, just
Speaker 7: like Andre did, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 7: Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over
Speaker 7: the world.
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Speaker 10: Set, don't don't.
Speaker 3: Do this's my note ball.
Speaker 8: Don't know them? Would they fall to explain the autos
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Speaker 3: Memb sen be Wait my, she's so.
Speaker 8: Good, she looked fine to night.
Speaker 4: She s.
Speaker 8: Got to get tonight. I don't not have bust. I'll
Speaker 8: be with my she's so good. I have today be
Speaker 8: with my guy, so great.