Another semester has started and, once again, in addition to teaching the kiddies about film, the cinetrix is sitting in on a colleague's class. This one's on Godard, Varda, and les freres Dardennes, three filmmakers about whom she knows various degrees of sweet fuck all.
Par example, before today, the cinetrix had never gotten around to seeing Godard's Rohmer-scripted early short Charlotte et Veronique, ou Tout les Garcons s'appellent Patrick (now thoughtfully included on Criterion's edition of A Woman Is a Woman). She suspects some of the students were still too busy recovering from the shock of learning this iteration of Great Directors would be [gasp!] subtitle central to appreciate just how thick and fast JLG flings cultural signifiers on the screen. OK, and, granted, they might be slightly less attuned than the cinetrix to just what a movie-mad snapshot it takes of the state of cinema in the late 1950s.
Transistors and turntables. Hegel and Picasso. Elvis and James Dean. Mickey Mouse, mirrored moues, even a girl and a gun. The hallmarks of nouvelle vague Godard are all there already. And, yes, the director glowers behind a newspaper whose front page decries the Tradition of Quality. But didn't I also glimpse Welles's Hank Quinlan fulminating from the cover of that Cahiers du Cinema on the cafe table? And I'm pretty sure the girls trilled a few bars of "Que Sera, Sera." Bonjour, auteurs! It's giddy, silly fun.
[Also fun is discovering which of the cinetrix's former students have chosen to continue to study film. One seemed confused to see me on the other side of the classroom dynamic; another has gone and transitioned from one gender to the other. Que sera, sera, indeed.]
