AKA In Praise Of Love. Godard’s first film to find UK distribution since 1987 is a veritable feast for eye and mind. Shot on glistening black-and-white stock and multicoloured videotape, the love story of Edgar and Berthe is an intensely moving meditation on the nature of love, memories and their representation.
After about an hour and a quarter there is a brief section that draws together the depth, the narrative, the concentration and the beauty of this film. The Hollywood e... more >
After about an hour and a quarter there is a brief section that draws together the depth, the narrative, the concentration and the beauty of this film. The Hollywood execs have left having bought the life story of two ageing French resistance fighters. We see the close-up of a record playing and hear the words, ‘Dein guldenes Haar, Margarethe’ from Celan’s excoriating concentration camp poem that sets the Aryan golden-haired Margaret against the Jewish ‘ashen-haired’ Shulamith. We cut back to the woman resistance fighter leafing through a photograph album. We see a photograph of a group of women on the beach – victims, survivors? We do not need to know, memories cannot be bought. The scene then changes to a port at night, the harbour lights shining in golden trails across the water, recalling the golden hair. How does unspeakable horror become exquisite beauty? Through sublimation? Acceptance? The horror of the war and the holocaust has been absorbed into the land and into the sea and is a constituent of present-day Europe. Forgetting is not possible. This is all communicated in about 45 seconds of film. Against such filming, claims that this is an unfocussed piece of work consisting only of beautiful images are insubstantial. < less
In Eloge de l’amour a pair of children dressed in Breton folk costume call on a house with a petition demanding that The Matrix be dubbed into Breton. It is a bizarre ... more >
In Eloge de l’amour a pair of children dressed in Breton folk costume call on a house with a petition demanding that The Matrix be dubbed into Breton. It is a bizarre scene, but one peculiar to a country that has been unusually aware of American cultural imperialism, an issue that Jean-Luc Godard has perennially explored. Like most of Godard’s films, Eloge has got lots of different things going on in it. It tells two stories. In one Edgar, a filmmaker, plans to produce a statement about the nature of love. During preparation, he meets Berthe, whom he feels he has seen before. In the second story, set two or three years earlier, Edgar goes to Brittany to interview a historian through whom he meets an elderly couple who fought in the wartime Resistance. Through them, he meets Berthe.
During the National Film Theatre season last summer, a number of Godard’s recent works were showcased. Emerging out of late Godard, Eloge, shot partly on delicious monochrome celluloid, its last third shot on video in saturated colour, has a visual, aural and thematic density which demands another look.
“There can be no resistance without memory”, characters reiterate, bringing into focus the two instances in recent history when France was overrun: by the Nazis in 1940, by the Americans ever since. Mired in the bleak and compromised atmosphere of Occupation France and bristling with allusions to filmmakers from Spielberg to Vigo, memories here are difficult, painful. When Edgar is told the truth about the old lady, he leaves Berthe and returns to Paris. Like history, love is neither easy to forget nor easy to remember.
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