Intellectual Filmmakers?

[dreamdead]

To steer some of the GD thread toward a more fascinating angle, I'm curious who people feel those intellectual filmmakers are... who are they and what makes up an intellectual filmmaker?

[dreamdead]

Something of a personal, on-the-fly personal list:

Carl Dreyer
Orson Welles
Michelangelo Antonioni
Stan Brakhage
Eric Rohmer
Andrei Tarkovsky
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Terrence Malick
David Lynch
Richard Linklater
Claire Denis
Jia Zhangke
Lee Chang-dong
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Shane Carruth

Yet these are filmmakers who make incredibly earthy films, and while all could be (and most have been) easily parodied, their intellectual nature is described filmically in entirely different ways. What's interesting is how much they give weight to the visual language of film and let those elements reveal the symbols of their themes. And while some are more talky than others listed above, I wonder what anchors them for me in this kind of narrow category.

[Izzy Black]

The ones I mentioned in the GD thread are Terrence Malick, Chantal Akerman, Michael Haneke, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis, Robert Bresson and Peter Greenaway.

Obviously, I think they make deep and intellectually interesting films, but if you are familiar with the biographies of these directors, that's where you can really tell how deeply intelligent they are. Many of them have done academic work outside of film. I'd also add Raoul Ruiz to that list. His book "Poetics of Cinema" is great.

[Izzy Black]

Also, Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Tarr, Sharunas Bartas, and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Those are the easy ones (and most of my favorites). A more interesting case is someone like Harmony Korine. No formal background. He comes from a place that is most notably one entrenched in the arts, but I think he has an immense intellect, especially if you've heard him talk at length about cinema.

[Winston*]

Claude Lanzmann?

[baby doll]

Regarding Claire Denis, Jonathan Rosenbaum recently remarked (http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2013/11/27/this-week-in-claire-denis-talking-with-columbia-professor-mehrnaz-saeed-vafa-and-others-about-no-fear-no-die-and-35-shots-of-rum) that "she's definitely an intellectual, but she makes her films instinctively rather than intellectually."

Incidentally, I'm surprised that dreamdead mentioned David Lynch, since in every interview I've seen him give, he comes off as a rabid anti-intellectual. That's not to say he's stupid or uneducated (obviously he isn't), but like all the greatest filmmakers--Bresson, Chaplin, Dreyer, Godard, Ozu, Resnais--his work is more emotional than intellectual.

[Izzy Black]

I think you're the first I've heard say that Godard's cinema is more emotional than intellectual.

I'd agree about Claire Denis, however. Not only is her approach more intuitive, but the feeling of her films is more intuitive (the elliptical structure of her films feel free-flowing, natural, and dreamlike, rather than deliberate, synthetic, and contrived, like, say, Tarantino's narratives), but they're also rich with substance. And so is she.

I think there's a tendency to wedge a false dichotomy between intuition and intellect, emotion and reason. I don't think the mind really works that way, not that simply, neither neurologically nor in the artworld.

[Bandy Greensacks]

Along with some of the others already mentioned:

Chris Marker
Gert de Graaff
Luis Buñuel
Peter Watkins
Errol Morris
Frederick Wiseman
Chris Morris (if you consider him a filmmaker)

[baby doll]

I think you're the first I've heard say that Godard's cinema is more emotional than intellectual.

I'd agree about Claire Denis, however. Not only is her approach more intuitive, but the feeling of her films is more intuitive (the elliptical structure of her films feel free-flowing, natural, and dreamlike, rather than deliberate, synthetic, and contrived, like, say, Tarantino's narratives), but they're also rich with substance. And so is she.

I think there's a tendency to wedge a false dichotomy between intuition and intellect, emotion and reason. I don't think the mind really works that way, not that simply, neither neurologically nor in the artworld.I wrote a blog entry (http://lesamantsreguliers.wordpress.c om/2012/05/23/bewitched-and-bewildered-nouvelle-vague/) about Nouvelle vague a few years ago on exactly this point. Even in his early funny movies, it's not always clear what's going on in the story, and he never pursues a single coherent thesis; one comes away from his movies with impressions more than firm ideas. (Incidentally, it's hard to think of any filmmaker whose public statements are less helpful in explaining their work.)

[Raiders]

Todd Haynes
Abbas Kiarostami

[Izzy Black]

I wrote a blog entry (http://lesamantsreguliers.wordpress.c om/2012/05/23/bewitched-and-bewildered-nouvelle-vague/) about Nouvelle vague a few years ago on exactly this point. Even in his early funny movies, it's not always clear what's going on in the story, and he never pursues a single coherent thesis; one comes away from his movies with impressions more than firm ideas. (Incidentally, it's hard to think of any filmmaker whose public statements are less helpful in explaining their work.)

I'm happy to say Godard's films leave you walking away more with impressions than firm ideas, but I still walk away from all of his films with ideas, and those ideas are far more dense and complicated (perhaps in part as a consequence of the impressionist nature of his narratives) than those I get from less thought-provoking fare. What's more, his films are clearly versed in the language of ideas, actively engaging academic history and intellectual culture. It's not just his interviews, but the films themselves that invite this sort of dialogue. Fortunately, Godard was a talented man, and his best films weren't about preaching to the audience (that means those films he made in the 60s in particular and those outside of his participation in the Vertov group), but were about inspiring thought and arousing the mind. He succeeds in doing this just about as well as any filmmaker I know.

[baby doll]

I'm happy to say Godard's films leave you walking away more with impressions than firm ideas, but I still walk away from all of his films with ideas, and those ideas are far more dense and complicated (perhaps in part as a consequence of the impressionist nature of his narratives) than those I get from less thought-provoking fare. What's more, his films are clearly versed in the language of ideas, actively engaging academic history and intellectual culture. It's not just his interviews, but the films themselves that invite this sort of dialogue. Fortunately, Godard was a talented man, and his best films weren't about preaching to the audience (that means those films he made in the 60s in particular and those outside of his participation in the Vertov group), but were about inspiring thought and arousing the mind. He succeeds in doing this just about as well as any filmmaker I know.With Godard's films, various allusions, aphorisms, and poetic conceits get thrown out but they don't really go anywhere; instead of a running commentary on the action (as in Soviet montage films, which have clear didactic aims), we basically get a series of footnotes. Furthermore, there's frequently an overload of information, so it's impossible to catch everything even if you watch the films many times (this is true even of La Gai savoir, which mainly consists of two actors in an empty room spouting Marxist theory for ninety minutes). So if anything, Godard's style is geared towards preventing the viewer from being able to extract any coherent ideas from his movies.

[Izzy Black]

For me, Godard's best films came in the 60s. Outside of Weekend and Pierrot le Fou, I don't feel insurmountable trouble digesting the ideas of his major films from this period. Le Mépris, for instance, isn't without its visual poetry, but it's a very simple tale. It's a portrait of the disintegration of a marriage, one that examines the hubris and hollowness of a man who sold his soul to commercialism, and the emotional insecurity, quiet suffering, and objectification of a woman as a consequence of his cold narcissism. It's also quite funny. Vivre sa Vie shows a woman's casual descent into prostitution, and it says more about capitalism with less speechifying than probably anything in his entire corpus. I think it's his best film. Also, consider the conversation with the philosopher at the end of the film. This is a beautiful scene because it's substantively rich quite apart from its context within the entire film. They aren't just waxing intellectual, they're imparting genuinely coherent and interesting ideas about language and love. The conversation scene arouses the mind, and indeed, coherent thoughts and ideas, even if there's no cathartic or dramatic resolution in the end. We still walk away with our minds stimulated.

It's also a beautifully poetic and ironic snapshot of a certain time in French culture. We see a young Parisian woman that casually strolls into a café and sits down to talk philosophy with a stranger. It's poignant because here is a woman so full of life and curiosity, but somehow utterly oblivious to her dire circumstances, even as we see her in scenes seemingly enraptured by the placating surfaces of modern consumer culture. She seems to operate under the false consciousness we hear about from Engels and Marx. It's a complex work because it highlights this curious problem of self-knowledge, consent, freedom, and choice, constantly negotiating the lines between ignorance and awareness, control and powerlessness (even the international title My Life to Live invokes this).The film's free form is more akin to free association or stream of consciousness rather than something that merely dissolves into incoherence. The film's form, really, mirrors her life.

Masculin Féminin and A Woman is A Woman are to me less effective or less interesting forays into Godard's musings on love, politics, and art, but I think Band of Outsiders and Breathless are both smart portraits of wayward youth in modern society. I consider these two films to be part of a kind of trilogy of sorts with Vivre sa Vie. They're my favorite of his pre-90s films.

As for Weekend, Le gai savior, Tout va bien, and so on, I'm not convinced we can so easily separate the film's form from its political ambitions. I think these films challenge our ability to extract coherent thoughts about narrative, but at another level, they inspire thoughts about the function or role of cinema in a political context; that is, film's ability to disrupt the dominate ideology and motivate the proletariat and enact social or political change. Apropos is the exchange in Olivier Assayas' recent film After May about how revolutionary films during this period and prior can be divided into two categories -those that employ a radical cinematic language and those that employ a traditional one (it makes not so veiled allusions to Godard as representing the former). The suggestion in the film is that while a traditional language is shaped by the dominate ideology, the radical one comes out no better, since its abstraction and its meta-layers seem to cater more to academics for sober reflection, and thus, made for consumption by the bourgeoisie as opposed to those socialist realist films composed in traditional styles intended to communicate more directly with the proletariat. Assayas' film almost seems to make the larger indictment that Godard's films in the late 60s and his eventual work with the Vertov group in the 70s is precisely one part of what lead to the divide between Marxists of the artistic stripe and the labor stripe which lead to the dissolution of the revolutionary spirit after May '68 as laid out in Boltanski's and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism (Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme). Or at least, it's not too difficult to draw that conclusion. It isn't hard to tell where Assayas falls in this debate given his aesthetic. As I wrote elsewhere, "Assayas' own cinema hovers somewhere between conventional narrative ideas and the experimental, reflecting the tempered, world-weary pragmatism his characters develop in the film."

[baby doll]

For me, Godard's best films came in the 60s. Outside of Weekend and Pierrot le Fou, I don't feel insurmountable trouble digesting the ideas of his major films from this period. Le Mépris, for instance, isn't without its visual poetry, but it's a very simple tale. It's a portrait of the disintegration of a marriage, one that examines the hubris and hollowness of a man who sold his soul to commercialism, and the emotional insecurity, quiet suffering, and objectification of a woman as a consequence of his cold narcissism. It's also quite funny. Vivre sa Vie shows a woman's casual descent into prostitution, and it says more about capitalism with less speechifying than probably anything in his entire corpus. I think it's his best film. Also, consider the conversation with the philosopher at the end of the film. This is a beautiful scene because it's substantively rich quite apart from its context within the entire film. They aren't just waxing intellectual, they're imparting genuinely coherent and interesting ideas about language and love. The conversation scene arouses the mind, and indeed, coherent thoughts and ideas, even if there's no cathartic or dramatic resolution in the end. We still walk away with our minds stimulated.

It's also a beautifully poetic and ironic snapshot of a certain time in French culture. We see a young Parisian woman that casually strolls into a café and sits down to talk philosophy with a stranger. It's poignant because here is a woman so full of life and curiosity, but somehow utterly oblivious to her dire circumstances, even as we see her in scenes seemingly enraptured by the placating surfaces of modern consumer culture. She seems to operate under the false consciousness we hear about from Engels and Marx. It's a complex work because it highlights this curious problem of self-knowledge, consent, freedom, and choice, constantly negotiating the lines between ignorance and awareness, control and powerlessness (even the international title My Life to Live invokes this).The film's free form is more akin to free association or stream of consciousness rather than something that merely dissolves into incoherence. The film's form, really, mirrors her life.

Masculin Féminin and A Woman is A Woman are to me less effective or less interesting forays into Godard's musings on love, politics, and art, but I think Band of Outsiders and Breathless are both smart portraits of wayward youth in modern society. I consider these two films to be part of a kind of trilogy of sorts with Vivre sa Vie. They're my favorite of his pre-90s films.

As for Weekend, Le gai savior, Tout va bien, and so on, I'm not convinced we can so easily separate the film's form from its political ambitions. I think these films challenge our ability to extract coherent thoughts about narrative, but at another level, they inspire thoughts about the function or role of cinema in a political context; that is, film's ability to disrupt the dominate ideology and motivate the proletariat and enact social or political change. Apropos is the exchange in Olivier Assayas' recent film After May about how revolutionary films during this period and prior can be divided into two categories -those that employ a radical cinematic language and those that employ a traditional one (it makes not so veiled allusions to Godard as representing the former). The suggestion in the film is that while a traditional language is shaped by the dominate ideology, the radical one comes out no better, since its abstraction and its meta-layers seem to cater more to academics for sober reflection, and thus, made for consumption by the bourgeoisie as opposed to those socialist realist films composed in traditional styles intended to communicate more directly with the proletariat. Assayas' film almost seems to make the larger indictment that Godard's films in the late 60s and his eventual work with the Vertov group in the 70s is precisely one part of what lead to the divide between Marxists of the artistic stripe and the labor stripe which lead to the dissolution of the revolutionary spirit after May '68 as laid out in Boltanski's and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism (Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme). Or at least, it's not too difficult to draw that conclusion. It isn't hard to tell where Assayas falls in this debate given his aesthetic. As I wrote elsewhere, "Assayas' own cinema hovers somewhere between conventional narrative ideas and the experimental, reflecting the tempered, world-weary pragmatism his characters develop in the film."I don't want to separate these films from their political ambitions; I just don't think their political ambitions are very interesting in themselves. Nor do I think their agendas are all that clear cut. Although I've always seen La Chinoise as ridiculing its characters, both Bordwell and Thompson seem to think Godard views them uncritically, and Weekend and Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) betray a similar ambivalence with regards to the counterculture: In the former they're cannibals, while in the latter there's a whole sequence making fun of the Black Panthers (or at the very least, it can be seen as making fun of them). Instead of analyzing these subjects intellectually, he seems to be feeling his way through them.

As for the scene with the philosopher in Vivre sa vie, I think it works so well as a scene not because the ideas themselves are very interesting per se but because of their relationship to the narrative and the lively performances.

[Izzy Black]

I don't want to separate these films from their political ambitions; I just don't think their political ambitions are very interesting in themselves.

Well, OK. I only consider his films' politics in relation to everything else, but I don't ignore their politics. Politics is a big part of Godard's cinema, but so is love, art, and life.


Nor do I think their agendas are all that clear cut. Although I've always seen La Chinoise as ridiculing its characters, both Bordwell and Thompson seem to think Godard views them uncritically, and Weekend and Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) betray a similar ambivalence with regards to the counterculture: In the former they're cannibals, while in the latter there's a whole sequence making fun of the Black Panthers (or at the very least, it can be seen as making fun of them). Instead of analyzing these subjects intellectually, he seems to be feeling his way through them.

I think part of the problem is you conceive of intellectual filmmaking as consisting of simplistic, straightforward messages, a binder of black and white logic cashed out in terms of endorsement vs disavowal, criticism versus praise. But Godard's films ruptures these kinds of binaries. An honest filmmaker, and an intelligent filmmaker, needn't be imparting or force feeding black-and-white messages to the audience. To the contrary, this is the very antithesis of truly thoughtful, challenging filmmaking. More to the point, it undermines the very thing Godard was so concerned about, which was the oppressive, totalizing effects of capitalism and ideology. His films invite us to participate critically, in what we're watching and what we're feeling, but without giving us easy answers or simple conclusions. French New Wave films, as Bordwell and Thompson note, often have ambiguous endings and protagonists with ambiguous motives (passive protagonists). Godard is neither cynically outright critical of his characters nor outright sympathetic. It's quite enough that he's curious about them, but that doesn't mean that his films aren't rich with ideas and substance. There's a difference between a film that's complicated, arouses deep feelings, asks questions, and inspires thought, and a film that's completely incoherent, imparting ultimately meaningless or unhelpful ideas, deriving value only from what extent it plays around with narrative rather than how it negotiates deeper emotions and explores our relationship to the world.


As for the scene with the philosopher in Vivre sa vie, I think it works so well as a scene not because the ideas themselves are very interesting per se but because of their relationship to the narrative and the lively performances.

If you notice in my post, I noted how the film has both narrative and non-narrative significance. I spent most of my post discussing its narrative significance. Unlike you, however, I take away from this narrative something more than just some cool (incoherent?) story, but rather, I see it as a story full of feeling and significance, a story with impressions and ideas about the world we live in. Vivre sa Vie still strikes me as a good example of a Godard film that is neither incoherent nor thoughtless.

[baby doll]

Well, OK. I only consider his films' politics in relation to everything else, but I don't ignore their politics. Politics is a big part of Godard's cinema, but so is love, art, and life.

I think part of the problem is you conceive of intellectual filmmaking as consisting of simplistic, straightforward messages, a binder of black and white logic cashed out in terms of endorsement vs disavowal, criticism versus praise. But Godard's films ruptures these kinds of binaries. An honest filmmaker, and an intelligent filmmaker, needn't be imparting or force feeding black-and-white messages to the audience. To the contrary, this is the very antithesis of truly thoughtful, challenging filmmaking. More to the point, it undermines the very thing Godard was so concerned about, which was the oppressive, totalizing effects of capitalism and ideology. His films invite us to participate critically, in what we're watching and what we're feeling, but without giving us easy answers or simple conclusions. French New Wave films, as Bordwell and Thompson note, often have ambiguous endings and protagonists with ambiguous motives (passive protagonists). Godard is neither cynically outright critical of his characters nor outright sympathetic. It's quite enough that he's curious about them, but that doesn't mean that his films aren't rich with ideas and substance. There's a difference between a film that's complicated, arouses deep feelings, asks questions, and inspires thought, and a film that's completely incoherent, imparting ultimately meaningless or unhelpful ideas, deriving value only from what extent it plays around with narrative rather than how it negotiates deeper emotions and explores our relationship to the world.

If you notice in my post, I noted how the film has both narrative and non-narrative significance. I spent most of my post discussing its narrative significance. Unlike you, however, I take away from this narrative something more than just some cool (incoherent?) story, but rather, I see it as a story full of feeling and significance, a story with impressions and ideas about the world we live in. Vivre sa Vie still strikes me as a good example of a Godard film that is neither incoherent nor thoughtless.Some of Godard's movies are more coherent than others, but the more coherent ones aren't necessarily my favorites. In Vivre sa vie, the scene in question is shot very simply so the ideas stand out more clearly than in the opening sequence of Pierrot le fou where Belmondo's voice-over has to compete with a rapidly edited sequence of disconnected images. I never denied that Godard's films lacked ideas or that one shouldn't respond to them intellectually, only that one responds to them primarily on an emotional level.

[Izzy Black]

Some of Godard's movies are more coherent than others, but the more coherent ones aren't necessarily my favorites. In Vivre sa vie, the scene in question is shot very simply so the ideas stand out more clearly than in the opening sequence of Pierrot le fou where Belmondo's voice-over has to compete with a rapidly edited sequence of disconnected images.

Again, I think where we aren't aligning is that while the narrative in Godard's films becomes increasingly more unstable in the late 60s and into the 70s, there is still a function there, often a political one. As even Bordwell and Thompson note, non-narrative meanings emerge. It's no accident this all coincided with very key political events occurring in France at the time. You don't appreciate the political elements. I suppose you'd probably just casually dismiss it as uninteresting postmodern cultural studies, or whatever, but I think it's there. I also think it has value. Not necessarily because I agree with Godard's politics, but because it makes his films more layered and complex experiences to me.


I never denied that Godard's films lacked ideas or that one shouldn't respond to them intellectually, only that one responds to them primarily on an emotional level.

I've already address the point about the unhelpful distinction between emotion and reason. A film that explores the depths of human experience can be as much a deeply emotional experience as an intellectual one.

[baby doll]

Again, I think where we aren't aligning is that while the narrative in Godard's films becomes increasingly more unstable in the late 60s and into the 70s, there is still a function there, often a political one. As even Bordwell and Thompson note, non-narrative meanings emerge. It's no accident this all coincided with very key political events occurring in France at the time. You don't appreciate the political elements. I suppose you'd probably just casually dismiss it as uninteresting postmodern cultural studies, or whatever, but I think it's there. I also think it has value. Not necessarily because I agree with Godard's politics, but because it makes his films more layered and complex experiences to me.It makes the films interesting from a historical point of view, but that's equally true of a great many bad movies. (Lots of political films came out of France in the late '60s but probably not many of them are worth checking out today.) I agree that Godard's films from the period are "dated" in the best possible way, but their interest as time capsules is incidental to their interest as films. Or to put it another way, I'm more interested in how the film makes a point than the point being made.


I've already address the point about the unhelpful distinction between emotion and reason. A film that explores the depths of human experience can be as much a deeply emotional experience as an intellectual one.Sure, but I think one reason that Godard's films from the period (or at least some of them) hold up better than those of other leftist filmmakers from the same period is that he's able to engage the viewer emotionally. Not to get all Pauline Kael about it, but I don't know if it is unhelpful to distinguish between a measured, intellectual response (i.e., does the film make a good point?) and an immediate, involuntary response (is the film interesting or boring, exciting or funny?).

[Izzy Black]

It makes the films interesting from a historical point of view, but that's equally true of a great many bad movies. (Lots of political films came out of France in the late '60s but probably not many of them are worth checking out today.) I agree that Godard's films from the period are "dated" in the best possible way, but their interest as time capsules is incidental to their interest as films. Or to put it another way, I'm more interested in how the film makes a point than the point being made.

I don't look at history dispassionately. The film's politics are relevant to our world today. They inform the lives of the characters, stories, and experiences of the world of the film, which reflect not only past worlds but can inform us about our present world. I don't dismiss layers in film appraisal. I maximize them. Or to put it another way, I'm as interested in how a film makes its point as I am in the point itself. They aren't mutually exclusive items.


Sure, but I think one reason that Godard's films from the period (or at least some of them) hold up better than those of other leftist filmmakers from the same period is that he's able to engage the viewer emotionally. Not to get all Pauline Kael about it, but I don't know if it is unhelpful to distinguish between a measured, intellectual response (i.e., does the film make a good point?) and an immediate, involuntary response (is the film interesting or boring, exciting or funny?).

It's an unhelpful distinction because my intellectual interpretation or understanding of the film bears on how I feel or react emotionally. They go hand in hand for me. Vivre sa Vie wouldn't have had a fraction of the emotional impact it had on me if I didn't understand what the movie was about or what was happening. Even more experimental films can be understood. Narrative incoherence in cinema often has a point, a purpose, or a function. It's typically by recognizing that function that renders it meaningful or emotionally rewarding. But to be fair, I didn't care much for either Pierrot le fou or Weekend, regardless of their themes, coherence or lackthereof. It's been a while since I've seen them, however. I plan to revisit them at some point.