Godard Mon Amour
Godard Mon Amour
Michel Hazanavicius earned an unlikely Oscar with his silent movie about silent movies, The Artist. He’s back with another film set in film history, this time the tumultuous 1960s. Godard Mon Amour satirizes real-life auteur Jean-Luc Godard, starting when the once fresh young director of Breathless embraced pompous self-importance and impossible possibilities. In the revolutionary contradictions of the era, he wanted to destroy cinema while continuing to make movies.
Godard Mon Amour begins as Godard (Louis Garrel) labors with his teenage wife Anne (Stacy Martin) on La Chinoise, a Maoist mouthpiece so dull that the crestfallen director was deemed a “reactionary imbecile” by Communist China. Godard Mon Amour mimics the director’s flippant multi-perspective style as he flounders through the 1968 uprising that shook France. He’s a celebrity uncomfortable with celebrity, a wannabe man of action who keeps tripping and breaking his glasses. Bernardo Bertolucci tells him off in a funny scene.
Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now - Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970
“The temperament of the festival was difficult,” Joni Mitchell says with almost British understatement. The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was hijacked by militant morons and Mitchell, coaxed out of Donovan’s Gypsy caravan, eventually soothed thousands of savage beasts singing her songs in a fragile voice. She performed those early numbers to an audience that sometimes quieted and listened and sometimes threatened violence. The concert footage was shot and well assembled by Oscar-winner Murray Lerner.
That Summer
Albert and David Maysles’ famed Grey Gardens (1975) documented Jackie Onassis’ reclusive, eccentric relatives Edith and Edie Beale. The brothers were crew for the aborted Beales documentary by celebrity photographer Peter Beard. Some of Beard’s footage is seen in That Summer, which serves as a larger home movie reminiscence of Beard’s summer of ’72, spent with Lee Radziwill, Mick and Bianca Jagger and the gang. Andy Warhol looks nonplused sitting on a beach in broad daylight.
