Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) [35 points/4 votes]
"'The film is out there. For the future. And, with Beethoven, I think sometimes it is a bit too much.' - Pedro Costa on Film Socialisme
On the surface, few films are feel as contemporary as Film Socialisme, from the utilization of every digital recording medium possible to Godard's first statement on Web 2.0 with the Twitter-like 'Navajo' subtitles to the purest function of YouTube (cat videos) and the always camera-toting observer, documenting thin slices of life. And yet, few films feel so historically threaded and grounded as this one, using no less than the origins of Western arts and politics to ground the horrors of the recently lapsed century and our current one.
Beginning on the recently sunk cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, with its unmistakably garish yellow spires, a marriage of aesthetics: 1970s Godard (a confessional, melodramatic cinema) with Vertov -- a blending of the staged, the maybe staged, and the observational and voyeuristic. The ship, a cruising Dubai of pretentious and dubious appropriations where Alain Badiou and Patti Smith, the very rich and the petit-bourgeois, coexist, touring the debris of Western culture along Mediterranean (which may be the most full-bodied environmental Godardian metaphor since he filmed the ruins of East Germany in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero). The film moves to a gas station in rural France, where familial collectivism disintegrates into a behind-the-scenes provincial-porn documentary, a diagnosis of the failings of new/trans media backdropped in a candy-colored pop art hellscape. It is here that the film finds a traditional pace, a tenderness (the mother/son relationship especially) that signals, ever so subtly, a trust in youth.
Much like Notre Musique opens, Film Socialisme concludes with dense, tangential visual and aural threads, color graded to something close to cosmic digital paint, unifying thoughts, conversations and materials. -- again, a collectiveness encompassing images from the trapeze sequence from Beaches of Agnes (an infinite conversation in Arabic and Hebrew) and the Odessa steps while reshaping the entire first sequence, cutting the past with present. While Godard avoids a didactic socialism (or utopianism), he redefines it for this very great medium through a vigorous, nearly hyper-linked dossier about all of us and where we're moving in time." - Michael Lieberman
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