Last Friday night I attended one of the US premiere screenings of Jean-Luc Godard's "lost masterpiece" Made In USA. The film was made in 1966 and shown internationally, so the long wait for American audiences created an interesting atmosphere at the screening. Public record claims that the lack of distribution back then was due to the fact that the plot and writing heavily ripped-off The Big Sleep, but I have to suspect that it was more likely because of the extreme anti-US sentiment throughout. This attitude manifests itself with some serious humor now and then, particularly in a great scene where Anna Karina questions two gangster stalkers as to their names and gets Robert McNamera and Richard Nixon as responses.
I thought the film was really successful overall. It's probably not amongst Godard's best work, but it certainly stands above most other films of the era (and by extension, ever). The cinematography - and use of color in particular - is expertly executed and unique. See Anna Karina in a vibrant yellow dress drenched against a nondescript yellow wall and bleached in voluminous amounts of sunlight. There's little to no actual narrative, but that's not what these films are about.
Since I was a youngster I was always way more interested in plays on formalism than narratives. From Burroughs to early French New Wave-inspired filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, I'm a sucker for merging shapes, color, texture, ambiance, a dash of hardboil and a general reverence yet explosion of genre memes. I never cared too much for good story told in an overly traditional matter.
Last night I watched the movie Point Blank in bed. It also has all of these things and can be seen in retrospect as an exercise that takes great influence and pleasure from Godard's work in films like Made In USA. On the surface you see Lee Marvin fucking a lot of people up. We can all agree that this alone is a fantastic premise for a film, but John Boorman - the director - really takes it all to the next level. The minimal plot is augmented with amazing cinematography that merges psychedelic motifs with 60s socal corporate hues and forms a dazzling basis to present a sort of neo-noir revenge story. It was also a time when American filmmakers weren't so scared to experiment with form and can serve as a lesson to our current breed of Hollywood lackeys that even if you have something of a cliche story, it's not too much to ask that you present something new and original with your colors, cuts and presentation. Onward!
