Message de salutations: Prix suisse / remerciements / mort ou vif

Jean-Luc Godard's new five-minute film. Arthur Mas transcribed the French sound-track, and I translated it into English, here at The Notebook at MUBI.

UPDATES: 3/21/2015:

– A commenter at The Notebook, wrote: "The opening is taken from Ramuz’s text from Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale [Histoire du soldat, 1918].

– Another Notebook commenter, Dmitry Golotyuk, wrote: "Fernandel is for sure: it’s his line from Regain[Harvest, 1937] by Marcel Pagnol."

– Martial Pisani emailed me today, writing: "Another thing we can take for certain is that Chiens perdus sans collier refers in Godard's mind to the 1955 Delannoy film. Truffaut couldn't stand it, and wrote about it in Arts. There are details about it in the book by de Baecque. We can see the kids in Les mistons [The Mischief-Makers, François Truffaut, 1957] tearing up the poster of the film and, apparently, Truffaut later said that the film wasn't so bad but his hatred for it was the reason he wanted to make Les quatre cents coups [The Four Hundred Blows / Wild Oats, 1959]...

"The links between all the references stay quite mysterious. Since the poem by Pasolini (VI part of Les cendres de Gramsci) is said to be the description of his childhood landscape, we may think that the film is an evocation of Switzerland the way Godard used to see it as a child: Ramuz's text seems to be well known by Swiss schoolboys at the time, as were the historic figures of the country... and last but not least, Erwin Ballabio was a famous Swiss goalkeeper!

[Ballabio is also a commune located in Italy between the west-east points across the Swiss border of Denges and Denezy in the canton Vaud. –CK]

"There is still work to do!"

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