Godard‘s Adieu au langage at the movie theater.
Lights go out. Ten minutes later, some spectators sense that the common idea of story doesn’t belong to this movie.
Someone begins to grumble.
The 3D vision combined with deliberately imperfect focal planes and “wrong” camera movements cause headaches and dizziness. Grumbles become moans.
Shortly after, when an actress farts, an indignant lady leaves the theater. Then, a shitting dog claims another victim.
End of the movie. Lights go on, and a man insults the medium between him and the director, that is to say the screen.
It’s been a physical experience as well as mental endurance training. Impossible not to reflect on the role of spectator, sitting on a comfortable and burgeois chair: the spark is the discomfort, the anger that author induces.
The movie, barely unwatchable, takes its meaning because is directed by the great maestro, and at the same time escapes (or deceptively do) from the cultural market that phagocytizes everything. In this sense, this is a great work.
I like to imagine Godard himself hiding in dark theaters during the screening, filming the worst reactions and insults of the spectators. Waiting for the sequel.
4 hearts
Japanese photographer Ikko Narahara.
In his early work Narahara focused on people who were living in isolation from the everyday world, such as monks in a Trappist monastery or the inmates of a women’s prison. His work aimed at creating a “personal document”, he aspired to “a process of laying bare the inner form by thoroughly depicting the exterior” (Ikko Narahara).
Walking a tightrope between description and abstraction, objectivity and a personal narrative, Narahara transcended the journalistic documentary photography then prevalent in Japan. Furthermore, Narahara displayed a particular facility for abstraction and the staging of everyday scenes in strict graphic compositions.
4 heartsIn your sight are nine orbs, or rather globes, by which all things are held together. One is the celestial, the outermost, embracing all the rest, the Supreme God himself, who governs and keeps in their places the other spheres. In this are fixed those stars which ever roll in an unchanging course. Beneath this are seven spheres which have a retrograde movement, opposite to that of the heavens. (M.T.C.)
2 heartsIndex and credits:
1. Italian former legend of free diving swims up during an apnea course at deepest pool in the world for free and scuba diving. (Olivier Morin / Getty Images)
2. A shovel is placed over coal briquettes during a protest in front of the chancellery in Berlin. (Hannibal Hanschke / Reuters)
3. Coast Guard members conduct flare training on Plum Island, Massachussetts. (U.S. Coast Guard / Petty Officer 3rd Class MyeongHi Clegg/handout / Reuters)
4. A Buddha sculpture is seen through red strings, which is part of an artwork on display at a shopping mall in Beijing.
5. Indian labourers work at a cotton processing and packaging industry in Kadi. (Sam Panthaky / Getty Images)
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