I’ve always wanted to explore more Godard movies. In film school, we watched Weekend which I was dreading would be an inaccessible obscure art film, and you better believe us film students called it Weekend at Bernie’s. I ended up totally loving it. It was meta, anarchic, broke all the rules of narrative and was just a treat to watch. I thought all Godard movies would be that awesome, but when Breathless proved to be just two people talking about their relationship, that wasn’t as cool to me, though I appreciate how groundbreaking it was at the time of the French New Wave. I also respect that he was captain of the Enterprise. Jean-Luc Godard was on “The Next Generation,” right?
I’ve been slow to fill in the Godard filmography so when Cohen video sent two lesser known (to me at least) Godard films, I was curious. Hail Mary and For Ever Mozart are later Godard, coming in from 1985 and 1996 respectively, but these are the types of rule-breaking art films I was looking for after I saw Weekend.
A short film, The Book of Mary, plays for 28 full minutes and goes right into Hail Mary. I thought that was another Godard trick, starting the actual movie 30 minutes in with a new set of opening credits. No, it’s a short by Anne-Marie Mielville, but I don’t think it would be a stretch to interpret how it leads in Hail Mary. It’s just the story of little girl named Mary distracting herself from her parents’ troubled marriage, and apparently it played this way per Godard’s insistence.
I can’t pretend I know exactly what For Ever Mozart means. That will probably take several viewings, and if I never get there, that’s okay too. That’s what art is for. I know I liked the way Godard interrupted his own musical cues, made a Terminator 4 reference before there was even a Terminator 3, and withheld the subtitles of some of the dialogue. I think the Bosnian/Serbian is not translated, but some of the French wasn’t either.
For Ever Mozart is much more open to interpretation. Hail Mary has the beginning, middle and end of the Immaculate Conception story, with all its modernization and artistic adaptation. As I said, it still has plenty of abstract Godardisms. Mozart meanders between art and war and back to art, much like Weekend took a loose structure with its subjects. It is challenging for sure, and my favorite sequence in it could be appreciated as a short independent of the larger film. An actress is directed to perform take after take of simply saying “yes,” or “oui” en Français, while the director keeps responding, “No.” It’s bizarre, yet you kind of get what is happening.
Both films have a ton of interviews, many with collaborators of Godard’s who did not work on these two particular films. They, along with historians and film critics, give a greater sense of Godard’s methods and work ethic. On Hail Mary, there is a video diary of Godard directing scenes from the movie, and it is as gloriously abstract as a Godard film. It’s a chance to hear Godard’s voice and illustrates some layers that I would not have inferred from my American Generation X perspective. Just the positioning of Mary’s head is significant, and we get an interview with Roussel reflecting on her work with Godard.
Audio commentaries with film historians, and director Hal Hartley on Hail Mary, explain a lot of references and interpretations, if a bit academically prepared in the case of For Ever Mozart. They are highly informative and the great thing about art film is that explanations don’t give anything away. They just provide information for further interpretation. At least they did confirm that the missing subtitles in Mozart were intentional.
While I don’t feel like I’m ready to give a master class in Godard, I feel greatly nourished in my film education. I’ve still got some classic Godard to see and I feel like I’ll get more of a kick out of the obscure ones than the more famous ones. Hail Mary and For Ever Mozart might never have been on my radar had these Blu-rays not come out, and they have sufficiently tided me over until my next cinematic historical excursion.
Hail Mary:
For Ever Mozart:
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
