Sunday, May 19, 2013

Les trois désastres

On Seeing the Premiere of the New Godard [Part of the Otherwise Unfortunate 3X3D] at Cannes, 18.05.13

(reposted/revised from my Twitter) The Godard short is re-entry hot.

Topics: dimensions (how a building might be in 3 dimensions but when it collapses it's in 2, like... 

...how in Hiroshima people were 3D then became 2D when their ash-shadows were left against walls. Topics covered (cont'd) —

...mathematics and "N"; catastrophes (désastres); dice (dés); cosmos (astres); reality and time; money; cinema; Eisenstein; Orson Welles;...

..and on and on. Narrated by Godard (mostly) and Miéville and more. Broken into 3 sections (1st, 2nd, 3rd disasters). ...

 ... The third section recounts "the story of the dog" through history and what he must wonder if he sits near a fireplace...

 ...and listens to the conversation between a man and a woman. This is one of the most powerful, moving. and poetic passages in all of JLG...

 ..Godard himself appears from moustache down in extreme close-up during this 3rd section, which is punctuated with footage...

...of a dog (in 3D naturally) in the wet autumn-leaf -strewn woods gazing up into the camera. It's an overwhelming image and moment...

...There are also several punctuational moments where b&w stills of director's faces [Welles; Ford; N. Ray] snap from "squished" aspect-ratio to their proper...

...dimensions. Among the HD 3D sequences shot 'in-house', there's the documentation of the assembly of the apparatus, how JLG created his 3D technique, ...

...with two DSLR cameras placed on a mount, beside one another, one rightside-up, the other upside-down; we see the camera[s] "film itself"...

...later revealed (filmed by the same camera itself [from an outer angle]) in an incredible tracking shot to be pointed into a giant mirror (i.e., "the ultimate movie")..

(that is, a JLG-3D camera filming in tracking shot a JLG-3D camera, stationary and unmanned, filming itself in a mirror..

(..which resulting image we see previously a few times) (but it is revealed as a shot into a mirror; not a shot of the camera[s] from across an imaginary 180-degree-line)..

..It closes with JLG in VO denouncing James Cameron ("the master of the Titanic") for perverting depth/profundity with his use of 3D...

...and words to the [very rough] effect that he [Cameron] has no idea what to do with his technology, why he forced this technique upon the world, nor has any clue as to what dimensions are...

... / are used for. The final supertitle reads: "3D / malheur numérique." —

There are things in this movie we have never seen nor imagined.
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