The new issue of La Furia Umana contains an extensive dossier on Godard. There’s always the hazard of writing on Godard aping the form-breaking style of its subject without his poetry, and this collection is no exception. But there are highlights, including Rick Warner’s analysis of the director’s love of tennis and his rejection of standard narrative editing (“Tennis, as with its use in Pierrot, is a figure that evokes the apprehension of life, but life now is understood within the parameters of a full-on dialectical world outlook. Abstract and bordering on slapstick humor, these tennis scenes [in Vladimir and Rosa] mark a dialogical gap in the middle of an ongoing inquiry, a chaotic space within which new and more just thinking has a chance to arise, thinking inclined toward political action.”) and Michael Witt’s history of Godard and Miéville’s company Sonimage (“It revolved around an attempt to live out a working practice in which the divisions of labour and of the sexes were dissolved in a reflection on the implications of finding pleasure in one’s work whilst collaborating with a partner one loves (to love work, and work at love).”). There’s even visual tributes, two lovely watercolors by Stephanie Wuertz and Sasha Janerus (the second here) inspired by Godard’s films and excerpts from a witty “collage novel” treatment by Lewis Klahr (himself the subject of articles elsewhere in the issue) that recasts Contempt with Clark Kent and Metamorpho.
Another multi-lingual film magazine, The World of Apu, has released its second issue, offering an eclectic collection of works including Irish immigrant Maeve Rafferty’s identification with the movie and novel Brooklyn (“Perhaps all these things for which the film was criticized were what made it so easy for me to enter into on first viewing. I filled all the gaps with my re-lived emotions, memories, and the tucked-away knowledge from the novel that I’d already molded for my own purposes.”), poems inspired by Farewell My Concubine and Vive L’Amour (“Now there’s a close-up of her face. The girl is still in tears. A couple passes by in front of the bench/She is still in tears”), and even Maanasa Visweswaran’s interpretive dance homage to Mehta’s Earth. Via David Hudson.
Read More “The View Beyond Parallax… more reads for the week of February 9”