Episode 728: Weekend (1967)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Old years, folks, it's show time.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
People pay good money to see this movie when they
go out to a theater. They are cold sodas, hot
popcorn in the monsters in the protection booth.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 4 (00:20):
Let it off.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Without getting emotional to declaim loud and clear the cold
and serious trophy you are about to hear. Pay attention
to its message and defend yourselves, or it will certainly
be painfully seared like a brand on your troubled imaginations.

Speaker 5 (01:38):
Let me does that feel?

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Does that seem?

Speaker 4 (01:51):
Let us come up there?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Sorry about one? Really?

Speaker 1 (02:01):
What I did?

Speaker 2 (02:02):
That's a nou sujeanson.

Speaker 4 (02:07):
And is.

Speaker 6 (02:13):
A female? O care? You're the murdered? Look at you?

Speaker 4 (02:45):
Man passes from an upper stage of savagery to a
lower stage of barbarism for the Horror Shops.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
Weekend cheerly justifies the passion of fortune Goda in young America.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
See it.

Speaker 7 (03:30):
Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
joined me once again? Is mister rob Saint Mary?

Speaker 6 (03:35):
What a rotten film? Only meet our crazy people also.

Speaker 7 (03:39):
Along with us, as mister Andre du.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with
more horror.

Speaker 7 (03:46):
We are wrapping up two months out of Patreon requests
with one from our very own Andre du with Jean
Luke Goudar's Weekend, released in nineteen sixty seven. The film
is a tale of a married couple going on a
road trip to visit the parents with the intention of
killing her father and getting her inheritance. And it's also
about the state of Africans under colonialism. There are some

(04:09):
other things that happen in here too, and will be
attempting to spoil them as we go along. Consider yourself warned. So, Andre,
when was the first time you saw Weekend and what
did you think, sir?

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, so Weekend about ten years ago when I started
delving into Goddard's movies and the French New Wave, hardly
due to your coverage of Alphaville. Yeah, I had seen
what are probably some of his best Alphaville Bonda part Loquio,
Lefu Breathless, of course, and then I thought, okay, let
me check this one out as well. It has a

(04:42):
good rating on IMDb, and I was, Yeah, I was
impressed with its absurd humor back then, and I think
I only saw it at the surface with a lot
of it going over my head. I was more appreciating
its form back then and how Godard plays with a
different aspect. It's the filmmaking to give you an experience and.

Speaker 6 (05:03):
Rob how about yourself? If I remember correctly, I think
this may have been around the time that I was
working at Thomas Video. This would have been in the
late nineties. I think that New Yorker Video originally put
it out on VHS, and I think that was what
I saw because I remember them did a very specific
design to their Gooduard series, and I think it was
recommended to me by a coworker who I was working

(05:26):
at the bookstore at the time. And I did not
get it in a lot of ways then. Obviously I
hadn't read enough marks. I didn't understand a lot of
the cultural specific French references, historical references to the era.
At the time, it was only like, I don't know,

(05:47):
nineteen twenty years old. But the one thing that did
stick with me was him playing with again, just Godard,
playing with structure, the intercut title cards all the way through,
and especially that which it's renowned for that I think,
what is it eight ten twelve minute A long tracking

(06:09):
shot of the giant car accident and traffic jam, I
guess you could say, and so something like that kind
of sticks with you visually. So that's what it was.
And I hadn't really rewatched it in a while until
I watched it for this episode, and I watched it
on Criterion Channel streaming along with some of the extras,

(06:33):
and this time really watched it for substance. What did
these sections mean? Was he really trying to say as
opposed to it just being spectacle?

Speaker 7 (06:43):
It's ironic because I might have rented this from Thomas Video.
I don't remember if I rented it from there, or
there was a Blockbuster on nine Mile in Ferndale that
I used to get a lot of good things from
as well. They had a great foreign section. But yeah,
I probably watched this back in nine the five ninety six,
something like that. Much younger man coming to this didn't

(07:06):
really appreciate it then. I'm not sure if I appreciate
it now. I think I've been pretty public about my
rocky relationship with Godar and the way that he makes films.
But yeah, I got a lot more out of it
this time. But I think you guys can probably see
from my notes, there's a point probably about halfway through
the film where I just break down. I'm just like Jesus,
went is this going to end?

Speaker 6 (07:27):
It just goes on and on.

Speaker 7 (07:29):
Oh man. I like certain parts of this. I like
the traffic jam. I like the idea of them on
this road trip to commit murder. But yeah, after a while,
it's just like, oh my god, what is going to
happen in this movie? Is something going to happen? It
reminded me a lot of some of the stuff he
was doing later, like One plus one Sympathy for the Devil,

(07:50):
where it's just, oh, I'm going to talk to the
camera for a while and rant about things and okay,
but yeah, I'm going to try to approach this discussion
with an open mind. By the way, Rob, I really
appreciate the decorating that you did in your place, where
you've got the red, white, blue, and yellow behind you,
really capturing the color scheme of this film with the

(08:11):
French flag slash American flag and then the yellow of capitalism.
This is what's going on because we've got that shell
oil truck in that traffic jam, and then we get
big yellow trucks and yellow objects through the rest of
the film after that too. I'm not sure if we
get yellow before that, but it feels like this film
is very carefully constructed.

Speaker 6 (08:32):
Well, thank you for believing that my apartment is also
carefully constructed, because I had no such plan. As you
could see, capitalism is right behind me with all my
Christmas cards that I haven't taken down.

Speaker 7 (08:43):
Yet, so it's almost February.

Speaker 6 (08:46):
I keep up my Christmas card still my birthday which
is in February. That when the Birthday cards come, the
Christmas cards come down. So that's how it works.

Speaker 7 (08:54):
This movie has a very forward momentum, and so much
of it is a quote unquote road movie. But before
we get to the road, there are some very interesting sections,
like the and I had a hard time telling Roland
from other men, and sometimes I had a hard time
telling the main female character, Krinn from other people. But

(09:16):
Karen's a lot more easy to spot than roll On,
because I thought for sure that it was roll On
and Corin at the beginning when she's recounting this incredible
sexual escapade that she was on. But I don't think
that's him, right. Is that her psychiatrist or something, or
is that rollan or is that her lover?

Speaker 3 (09:37):
I thought that was the lover from the first scene
on the balcony. Okay, I'm still not sure, but indeed,
in my first couple of viewings I was also confused
due to the lightning, and I noticed throughout the movie
that some people come back, some actors come back in
different roles. The guy that's shooting a rifle at them

(09:58):
when they just leave the city is again, I think,
the communist tractor driver later on, and another guy later on,
and it's on and there's that lady that plays Alice.
So yeah, I think that it's again a thing to
make you aware that you're watching a movie and you
need to engage with it. You or not just they're

(10:19):
too escape, but you're rather part of the experience yourself,
which is what I felt throughout the movie.

Speaker 6 (10:26):
You know, the thing for me in this and especially
in that scene where you're talking about, is the way
it's lit, the way music is used. The music at
times is so overpowering, the way it's staged. I get
the feeling so much that it's not so much that
he wants you to relate to characters in this film.
It's very much characters are more symbolic of something. They

(10:49):
represent an idea more than they represent a fully formed,
emotional person that you're supposed to engage. I'm supposed to
care about this couple and do they meet their goal
in the end. I think he has any interest in that.
I think that really what he's interested in doing is
using these people as cardboard cutout stand ins for particular ideas,

(11:11):
particular concepts, political interplay, and just really having us engage
those aspects as opposed to how we would engage a
traditional narrative. And I think that really opens up a
form a bit and gives them a little bit more
to play with. And this is where, and I agree
with you, Mike, you start to see that shift. I

(11:33):
think you start to see it with guitar, when you
get to like Paralleafu, maybe a little bit with contempt.
We start to play with this a little bit. But
by this time and into the late sixties and later,
he's really gone off. I'm not really interested in characters anymore.

Speaker 7 (11:48):
No, it doesn't feel like a movie. It feels like
a dialogue he's trying to have with the audience.

Speaker 6 (11:53):
Yeah, it's more socratic dialogues. He's trying to get people
to argue, and then he wants you to like listen
to the argument or the symbols and to think about
what they mean in terms of the state of the
world at the time in which the movie was released.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah, indeed, I see what you mean there, because I
also felt like he's not trying to advocate for one
side or the other, the bourgeoisie or the hippies necessarily.
He's just showing you their sides and with the details
of each and then you're supposed to make your own
judgment of it. He's not trying to necessarily tell you, oh,

(12:30):
you should go one way or the other.

Speaker 6 (12:32):
Obviously, if we were going to sit here and create
a scorecard, I'd say he would definitely be stacking it
more against the bourgeoisie and their disconnection from their own humanity,
disconnection from their own values. What do they even care about.
There's just a nihilism, you know, when it comes to
this couple and the way that they the whole premise.
As you said in the beginning, Mike, they've gone off

(12:54):
to basically snuff out her parents so they can get
the inheritance, and then there's various things along the way.
We meet if I'm remembering correctly, and I'm going to
Butcher as a name, but it's best known actor for
playing in the truefol.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Films Jeanne Leude. I forget, there's another name there and.

Speaker 6 (13:15):
Yeah, and so anyway when you see him, Oh, okay,
he's well known. But there's a scene in there in
which basically the husbands, Yeah, you want to fuck her find.

Speaker 7 (13:25):
Yeah, he sells her out at one point. Yeah on
the road. Oh is that your woman? Yeah, she's my wife.

Speaker 6 (13:32):
Do what you want? Yeah, I don't care. So there's
this lack of values that I think Goddard's really trying
to talk about in terms of this couple that could
be a stand in for anyone. There's stand ins for
certain strata of class within Recian society that he probably
saw around him. And although Felini was having fun with

(13:55):
it in a way like in La dulce Vita, where
it's oh, it's these out of touch, rich fun folks
who are running around doing crazy antics for the poor
and the working class people don't necessarily get to enjoy
themselves in that way.

Speaker 7 (14:09):
It feels like a critique of the bourgeoisie, but also
a critique of the revolutionaries and just like, no, you're
not doing it right, and we're going from the past
with you mentioned the Jean Pierre Leo character and the
Jean Claudiert because he's in there, as he's in there
a couple of times, like you were saying, Andre, he's Santus,

(14:30):
who I believe is from like the era, the Reign
of Terror type of era of France.

Speaker 6 (14:36):
It was like robes Pierre's number two or something, which
this is a reference that French people would get that
I'm not hip enough to understand the French Revolution, so
I'm just like, Okay, guy looks like Napoleon or something.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
All right, fine, exactly I thought he's Napoleon as well.

Speaker 7 (14:52):
Yeah, and there's also there's a mention of Thermidor, which
is one of the months that they added to the
calendar during the French Revolutions. I'm like, okay, yeah, I
don't I'm not as familiar with that as I probably
should be. But this is what we did in the past,
and now here we are in the present, and especially
when it comes to and I know we're jumping around,

(15:13):
but I really don't think it matters with this film.
But when we get very close to the end, and
we have the speeches from the African gentleman and the
Arab gentlemen, and apparently their speeches are flipped, so the
Arab is making the point of the African and then
the Africans making the point of the Arab. And I
didn't catch that the guy was supposed to be Arabic

(15:35):
until I looked in the credits and saw Arab. So
I was like, oh, okay, because I've seen him before,
and I think the gentleman's actually Hungarian. So it feels like, Okay,
this is what we should be concentrating on. But it
takes us almost the entire movie to get to that point.
But yeah, to your point, like, these two people, they're awful.
Our main characters are terrible people. They don't respect anybody.

(15:58):
They just get in fights. The the whole thing of
them skirting around the traffic jam is fascinating them, driving
through the blood and the gore is fascinating them, just
running people off the road. Towards the end of the film,
they're having a fun time just being complete road terrorists.

Speaker 6 (16:18):
And the world.

Speaker 7 (16:20):
That they live in. We have to talk about this.
It looks like the apocalypse because we have cars everywhere
on the sides of the roads, just burning wrecked car.
There's the field that they go to with the Oh God,
the guy who claims to be the son of God.
Plus I think it's another revolutionary and the way that

(16:41):
they go into that field and it's just all these
wrecked cars all over the place until he magically makes
them disappear and they become sheep, which I'm sure made
you very happy, Rob, because I think the whole thing
with the sheep and he's called the avention Angel, it's
all a boon Weeld reference.

Speaker 6 (16:58):
Yeah, there is a think a title card for exterminating angels.
So for me, it's funny because I can see a
feedback loop between this film and in a way maybe
something like Fami of Liberty. This is probably as close
as Gooduard's ever going to get to Bonwell ask. Although
Bunwell will tell you all day long that he wasn't
trying to make any particular point, Gadard definitely wants you

(17:22):
to know that he's making a point.

Speaker 7 (17:24):
That's the whole point in the movie. It feels because
that hey, listen to me, I've got things to say.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
I'm coming back to the character. The main characters, I
think they set it out from the beginning. They are
trying to kill each other, and they both are cheating
on each other, so they don't really care about each other.
They have this objective of getting the money. But what
I find it interesting is how they can actually work
together to get out of all those situations that they

(17:51):
get into to escape, whether the son of God or
to steal a car or so. So they're quite a
good team, even though they don't want to be with
each other. So yeah, they're very resourceful while lacking character.

Speaker 7 (18:05):
And you wonder why everyone is stuck in traffic because
they can skirt around everything within eight minutes of time,
but everybody else is just fine to sit in this
mess and people playing cards and throwing ball from one
car to another, people fascinated with the two or three

(18:25):
cages with wild animals out there, and even amongst the
I love the way that he does this tracking shot.
But even while you're tracking along there there are cars
that are wrecked and I'm like, oh, that's the wreck.
And then that keeps going is you know there's more
to this, and you just keep going because when we
hit the shell truck and there's a white car that's

(18:47):
wedged underneath the shell truck. I was like, Oh, that's
the accident. No, you keep going until you finally see
all of the gore and the destruction, and just yeah,
he is. I like the whole thing of him saying
it's not blood, it's the color red when he shows blood,
and like that horrific rabbit scene that we get on

(19:10):
because also we should probably warn people if you are
not into animal cruelty. I'm not into it personally, but
if you can't handle seeing that on screen, you should
not be watching this movie because there's a lot of
animal cruelty that happens in here. And it just feels
like that was the thing to do with these more
revolutionary movies is, oh, I'm also going to show someone
slaughtering a pig or cutting the neck of a goose

(19:32):
or something like that, and you get a few of
those here. That skinned rabbit is really upsetting.

Speaker 6 (19:38):
Which reminded me of a night Obviously, this wasn't a
staged thing that he was trying to reference, I don't think,
but it reminded me of Roger and Me, where the
scene in Roger and Me were.

Speaker 7 (19:49):
Yeah, pets or meat.

Speaker 6 (19:50):
Yeah, where the poor lady is like, you want buy rabbit,
and then she proceeds to kill and dress the rabbit
on camera, which was a very controversy seen in that
little documentary. But I'm thinking about the car accident and
the way that you describe it in that they can
move through. I guess again, if you take it as symbolism,

(20:12):
people are stuck in certain ways, and they're either stuck
and they're entertained by being stuck. They're stuck in severe distress.
But it's their wealth allows the mobility to move through
this rate of horrors. Basically, it allows a certain amount
of distance and cleanliness from it all. It allows them

(20:34):
to buy people off or to play into whatever needs
people are asking around them, that their values can be
malleable so that they can move through. And So for me,
when I look at that and the fact that yeah,
it's more like a giant car crash spectacle, is that
is instead of being a traffic jam per se where

(20:56):
they're just stuck and they're just going to sit in it,
they don't have to sit in it. They can elevate
above it because they have something that's probably eight ninety
percent of the people who are sitting there don't.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
Have about the traffic scene. I haven't really gotten to
a point where I could dissect a message out of it.
I was just enjoying it for what it is, the
different people from all sorts of parts of society. And
I'm originally from Romania, and that kind of traffic behavior
is often seen there. We don't usually have good infrastructure,

(21:31):
so you have one lane road on each side, and
then you need to overtake that way, and people will
not let you merge back in, so then you're better
off overtaking some more. But that in a very selfish way.
So I just looked at it as more of a
critique of sometimes how I behaved in traffic.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
They may be very civilized up there, more than we
are here on Earth, with no wars or traffic accidents,
and we'd never know that.

Speaker 7 (21:57):
I very much like that the camera is leading them through,
that this is this incredible tracking that we have, and
that we the camera's always ahead of them until the
very end when they finally get to speed off, But
until then, the camera's just leading. Occasionally it will pause
when they have to pause, but it's almost always ahead

(22:18):
of them until you get that final shot, and I
really like too that they continue that shot and pan
the camera over as they are completely free that wide
open field, and I'm just like, where are people driving
across the field. It feels very like people are stuck
there of their own volition that they almost seem it

(22:39):
feels like everybody other than our main couple seems to
be okay being stuck in traffic and having the guys
like fixing his sales and all this, or like I said,
one guy's fixing his car up, and I'm like again,
I'm like, is he the cause of the traffic jam? No,
he's just takes some time to fix up his car,
So maybe do a tune. Almost immediately after that, when

(23:02):
they make a stop, there's another traffic accident, and it's
the whole thing with the tractor hitting the little sports
car and just the dead guy in the sports car
that they keep cutting back to and the fight between
the woman who was in the car and then this
tractor driver. And now we're introducing a lot more about

(23:23):
class and all this, and they start talking about Marx
and then what's really interesting to me is that when
they go to our couple and they're like, well, you
settle this. You saw this, and they just yeat themselves
out of there. They're like, no, thanks, I don't want
to talk about this at all, and then they start
yelling at them and calling them Jews, and I'm just like,
where is this coming from. There's a lot of anti

(23:45):
Semitism in this movie. Even later on there's somebody who
insults somebody else by calling them a Jew.

Speaker 6 (23:51):
I think part of that has to do with the
fact that Ian bourgeois circles that Jews were always equated
with communism too, because of Marx obviously has a Jewish background,
that they've always been interlinked in that way. Go back
to Henry Ford. He talked about communism as part of
an international Jewish conspiracy. So all of this it makes

(24:14):
sense that in some minds to interlinked.

Speaker 7 (24:17):
And that whole strange thing too, where they are being
looked at more than our main couple. The traffic accident,
which is I believe labeled in one of those title
cards as the class struggle. You're cutting back to these
people who are standing in front of all of these advertisements,
including the Soo Gas with the tiger put the tiger

(24:40):
in your tank, and they're all just staring like this.
I don't want to say Greek course, because they don't
say anything, but they're just like these mute witnesses looking
at the spectacle that's going on in front of them.
And it's very the montage as far as we don't
see them in relationship to the car, the tractor and

(25:01):
car crash, but we just keep cutting back to them,
and we get different configurations of a man and a woman,
or three working class people, or this woman who looks
a lot like what's her name and Goodar's Was he
married to her?

Speaker 6 (25:16):
Really?

Speaker 8 (25:17):
No?

Speaker 7 (25:18):
And we with Zemski, who was in a lot of
his films, including Laschonois and he and she was later
in we talked about her in Oh gosh, Well she
was definitely in Seizon Man. She's a huge part of
that one. But anyway, we keep cutting back to these
people individually grouped, and then towards the end of the segment,

(25:40):
we just get this long shot of all of them
all together. You get that one great guy who just
keeps laughing as well, and you're just like, it feels
like Goodar has all of these pieces of film that
he can use and he's going to stick in this
guy's reaction where he's laughing at the most inappropriate times.
I'm like, that works. He is showing off the mechanics

(26:02):
of filmmaking so much to take us out of watching
a film and make us think more about how is
this film being presented to us and why.

Speaker 6 (26:11):
You know, one of the things I was thinking about
with the use of logos in here, because you brought
up Shell and you talked about the Soo gas and
they're like, there's all these ads and everything. Remember this
is sixty seven, and this of course in the pop
culture pop art influence, you've got Warhol and things like

(26:31):
that was coming out in that time. So the reuse
of advertising and twisting it or pulling it apart and
juxtaposing it against other ideas I think was probably part
of the visual art understanding at the time. The other
thing that I was thinking about, and it's funny because
we've used the term several times, is spectacle, and was

(26:54):
thinking about I don't know if you're familiar with the
society of the spectacle, the work by Ytabor or of
the situationists, So the situation.

Speaker 7 (27:03):
That's a lot about that. When we talked about kin dialectic, Sprig.

Speaker 6 (27:05):
Bricks watching this movie and understanding that stuff now and
understanding what the war in the Situationists we're trying to
get at with the idea of obviously it's a Marxist
critical theory about kind of the degradation of human life
and how we've moved from being directly involved in life
to being just representational. We've flattened from a three dimensional

(27:26):
human into a representation, which is interesting because in the
film talking about that in terms of the characters, these
are not three dimensional characters, They're just representations. And obviously
all of this leads up to with the Situationists being
a part of the events of sixty eight in the
student rebellions and not only in France but in other

(27:46):
places around the world. Just all of the things that
are this film. It's weird to say it in that way,
feels vary of its time if you understand what was
happening in that time. And I'm sure that when this
was released, like probably young college students were like fucking

(28:07):
right on, like they felt spoken to, and I'm sure
that the elders who were represented by the couple were
enraged by this movie or just totally confused, like I
don't have no idea what this guy is trying to saying.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Yeah, I took this the sequence itself to me was
probably one of the most colorful ones of the movie.
And I think even starting with the husband being dead
in the car that is also very beautifully framed with
his sunglasses still perfectly on, I think, and then I
took the different people being in front of those boasters

(28:44):
as just their portraits, but first of all in the
context of consumerism with the ads around them. But also, yeah,
I don't know what to call it. A flex from
Goddard in checking this box as well for how to
get this guy images across but not necessarily making you
be distant from what is actually happening. Is just about

(29:08):
playing with the medium here. To come back to your
first question you asked me when I first saw it,
I think having seen it now and paying attention to
the movie, I realized, I think this is about the
time where I was starting to lose my attention to
the movie because everything that comes after this colorful sequence,
part of it was new to me. Of course, the

(29:28):
revolutionaries that stuck with me, but then I was drifting
in and out and attention with this movie even when
I requested it. I was watching it a year ago,
and only for this podcast is when I could really
delve into parts of what it meant. But I think, yeah,
it requires extensive research, and I actually I wrote to

(29:52):
you that I wasn't as keen on the movie after
rewatching it the first time for the podcast, But ever
since then, I watched the gup times since and it
has grew on me, and I think, yeah, this still
is an impressive sequence. Coming back to it, with the
framing of it very I don't know, magazine esque, very
everything is actually an ad there, even the car crash itself.

Speaker 7 (30:17):
Godar is trying to have a little bit of fun
in this as well, especially with some of the word
play that he's doing and some of these plays with
the form that he's undertaking. Even going all the way
back to that first scene, not the first scene, because
there's the opening with the apartment and looking down at
the car accident that happened there, appreciation everything that's going

(30:38):
to happen in the rest of the movie, but that
long sequence of her confessing quote unquote and telling that
erotic story, playing with the form in so far as
bringing in the music and the very I would say,
inappropriate music to what's happening on screen, really playing with
that and also drowning out what he's saying. As an

(31:01):
American viewer or other viewers that have subtitles, we're in
a privileged position because we actually get this to read
everything that she's saying, whereas the music is drowning her out.
I think if I was a native French speaker, I
would not be able to hear half of the stuff
that she says because the music coming in at the
wrong time quote unquote. But then he's also having fun

(31:22):
too with the title cards, and right before that image
of all of those people standing there in front of
the ads, you get the title card that says foe
to graph and it's faux so a false photograph, a
false image. And you even get to see that the
woman whose boyfriend or husband died is there with the crowd,

(31:46):
and I think that the tractor driver is with them
as well. So they're all just standing there and it
goes on for a long time to the point where
I'm like, is this still image? No, they're actually still there.
They're breathing and living, but it looks like this very
staged photograph of them in front of all those very beautiful,
colorful ads.

Speaker 6 (32:07):
I was thinking about that accident again since you brought
it up, and I'm talking about with the farmer, and
then the couple and the dead guy in the car,
and then you've got of the bourgeois couple, and you
were talking about people like standing around and watching, and
I think the first time when I saw that, I'm
just like, I don't what is he trying to say here?
And so if I were to venture a guest now

(32:29):
looking at it, it seems to me And maybe this
is just because when you're a hammer, everything is a
nail to you. But being someone who used to work
as journalism, it almost feels like it Dart's trying to
talk about news or something or reportage, where it's you
have the classes without power looking and staring and being

(32:53):
entertained by each other and feeling some sense of I
don't know, superiority or or separation when they should be
together working together, which like leading into that seeing guard
uses the Internationale, which is the international song for the
Communist Party. And then you have the people who do

(33:15):
have power, who are like I don't want to get involved,
I don't do anything with that the people who could
affect change, the people who do the power, don't want
to engage with this. They would rather sit back and
not do anything, while the people who lack power, who
could be working together, are actually battling each other for what,

(33:36):
you know, for entertainment, for spectacle, for rubbernecking.

Speaker 7 (33:42):
You think about all the horrific images that are probably
on their TVs at this time. I know that obviously
France had their own role when it came to Vietnam,
but also Algeria and just all of these things where
and we address colonialism throughout this, but yeah, I can see.
I love this point of this being spectacle that you

(34:03):
would get on your TV every single night.

Speaker 6 (34:06):
Probably Obviously that's another piece of this is the collapse
of empire. I remember talking to my uncle a few
years ago, who had been a British commando, and he
told me all the places in the sixties where he
went to Aiden, which is Yemen, who went to Tanganika
and Africa Borneo And I was talking to him and
I said, it sounds like you guys were the closers.

(34:27):
And he goes, what do you mean by that? And
I said, well, it sounds like you went in there
and tried to set the place up before they turned it.
The British turned it back to the locals for local control.
He goes, Oh, absolutely, he goes. We wanted those people
to work with us, even though we weren't in control,
to make sure the oil flowed or whatever. And I
remember talking to him about it, and I said, how

(34:47):
do you feel about it? He's eighty years old now,
and I said, how do you feel about your time
in service? He goes, those places? Aren't you better than
when I left him sixty years ago? He goes, it
was a waste. He goes, there was a waste of
life on all sides the people that we killed, and
my friends, you got killed in the service of doing
the work. And I was like, wow, that's a rare sign,
I say, for someone who went through the kind of

(35:08):
work that he did in that time.

Speaker 7 (35:10):
And it feels like America's really feeling that even more
now than we did with Vietnam, with places like Afghanistan
or Iraq or some of these other places that we
quote unquote liberated and then we got the hell out
of there. And tell me the difference between Afghanistan before
we were there and after we were there, Taliban's still there.

Speaker 6 (35:30):
And then spend a trillion dollars on.

Speaker 7 (35:31):
It and countless lives being lost in the process.

Speaker 6 (35:36):
Or destroyed in the process, in which you've got people
who come back and they can't deal with living in society.

Speaker 7 (35:43):
Speaking right too. That the idea of the when they
meet the Exterminating Angel, and he makes some interesting points,
this whole thing of asking the wife what her name is,
and she's okay, your first name's your first name, but
your last name, Oh no, that's your husband's name. What's
your real name, No, that's your father names. You don't
even know who you are. And that was interesting, especially

(36:05):
like in sixty seven, like on the Eve of Women's
Liberation and all this. But there are rhymes that go
through this whole movie, like the idea of him, the
extreminating I'm just gonna call him that because I can't
remember the character name, but the exterminating Angel, just like
making a rabbit appear in the car, and that comes

(36:25):
back later on with that skinned rabbit that we have,
and I love that. It's like, oh, you are a
miracle man, you can create miracles. This is what I
want and this is what my husband wants. She wants
to be a natural blonde. He wants a squadron of
mirage fours and quote like the Yids used to thrash
the walks like Jesus Christ, dude, and that was I

(36:50):
had to look up what a mirage for was. I
figured it was some sort of war device and yeah,
it's this plane that the French had from I think
they started in fifthifty six. And I want to say,
I read that it's the only French plane that's in
the British Air Museum because of his use so effectively
by the British and by the French when it came

(37:11):
to some of the colonialism stuff.

Speaker 6 (37:14):
I love the thing that you talked about, and you
have the two couples and the one that's married and no,
we screw legally.

Speaker 7 (37:20):
Oh yeah, there's so much better.

Speaker 6 (37:21):
Yeah, we're so much better than you. So that's the
idea of the social privilege of status of marriage in that.
But also to the point that you made where it's
just like to keep asking. They could be gifted anything,
they could be they could ask for anything, and all
they want are material goods. They want dresses, cars, vacations.

Speaker 7 (37:41):
He wants the Weekend. Like James Bond, he.

Speaker 6 (37:44):
Says he had no imagination for anything beyond just creature comforts.

Speaker 7 (37:51):
There's also a rhyme too, and I'm trying to remember
where this show's up again, because when the exterminating angel
come to them, he has a gun in one hand
and a branch in the other, and he uses the
branch like it's a whip, and he starts whipping at
them with the branch. And later on, oh, that's right,

(38:11):
the husband uses a branch and he starts whipping at
the guy before they turn the tables, and then he
turns the tables yet again, and the whole the sheeps
appear and he starts beating them. But I want to
say there's a branch used even in another sequence as well.
And then also there's the rhyme of her telling that

(38:33):
erotic story and talking about all of this food play
that's going on, and I want to say, somebody sits
in a bowl of milk, and I want to say
there's some eggs that are used. And then eggs are
used right towards the end of the film too, with
the cannibals and the guy cracking the eggs. You see
the woman's legs sticking up, and he's cracking these eggs
and it looks like he's cracking them right onto her

(38:55):
sex organs, and then a big fish and it looks
like he's shoving fish inside of her in order to
make her even yumier when they bake her up.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
Oh, I saw that scene as another type of fetish
or yeah, sexual scene of the hippies in just the
position to the initial scene of the bourgeoisie, where it's
perverted and the hippies are also perverted and somewhat of
a similar fashion with the eggs, but then differently. So yeah,

(39:27):
which one is better in this sess? I don't think
there's a good artist trying to make a point here.
It's just showing you everyone is similar but with a
different twist.

Speaker 6 (39:36):
The chef with the fish and the lady. I was like, ma'am,
did Godard pre sage led Zeppelin? That's a deep cut?

Speaker 7 (39:44):
Was it a mud shark? I thought it was a
red snapper? Oh boy.

Speaker 6 (39:47):
Anyway, I'm not going to get any further into that.
If you want to know what that is, just type
in led Zeppelin mud shark into Google and you can
find all about it.

Speaker 7 (39:55):
I think they meet sound Jews right after they have
their own car crash, and speaking of material goods, they
don't seem to care that they've been in an auto
accident at all, in a major one. There's flames, there's
multiple cars involved, but it's her Erme's bag that she's
concerned about the most. That she loses her bag, so

(40:15):
that whole tie to the material goods again, and she's
just so, oh, my bag, my bag. I'm like, okay,
but yeah, it's really with the Saint Just's character where
we get our first person who's coming to the camera
and just directly addressing us. And I want to say,
it's about not even halfway through the movie, but this

(40:38):
begins a real trend of people speaking to us directly
because we get that. Of course, I thought about the
Arab and the African later on, but it's, yeah, it's
interesting that we have those. And it's around I can't
remember exactly where they start to really acknowledge that they're
in a film. There's one part where they are trying

(41:00):
to get a ride because after they lose their vehicle
with this crash, they keep trying to get rides from
different people and they're asked a series of questions, and
I think the first question is are you in a
movie or is this real life? And when they say, oh,
I'm in a film, it's just like they drive on.
There's who is right, the Arabs or the Egyptians, and

(41:22):
the woman's the Egyptians, and they drive on and I'm
trying to remember what the third question is. It reminds
me a little bit of Monday, Python and the Holy Grail.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
Oh it crushed the bridge of ye answer me these questions.
Three the other side, he see, Yeah, it was who
would you rather screw Mao or Yeah, Johnson or to.

Speaker 7 (41:44):
Be honest, that's right, yeah, Mao or Johnson. Yeah, I
think Mao would be a more tender lover myself.

Speaker 3 (41:52):
But the other question about the Egyptians, that's funny because
you guys got a bit political, and I thought to myself,
I shouldn't, but I will. It is funny. How so
this movie was Yeah at the brink nineteen sixty eight,
and yeah, something major was changing then, but then history
works as cycles, and now again the question was who
shot first? The Israelis or the Egyptians. So yeah, it's

(42:16):
something that you can probably have a discussion about today.

Speaker 6 (42:19):
The other thing that I find interesting in here, and
it's a very simple point, is that it's not a
heavy one like what we just ran through, is that
they've been asked over and over again through here for help.
People have asked them for help, to get involved, to
get them a ride somewhere, and then when they find

(42:41):
themselves in similar situation, it's basically, you created this. You
created the world in which we live in because you
had status you could move through, and you didn't bother
to lift anyone up in that time. So therefore there's
no one there to help you when you need them.
So yeah, I see that as a nice little kind

(43:02):
of fuck you to that strata by Gidard, just basically
saying that the more you take, the less you're gonna get.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
Another section where they're aware of being in a film
is but I don't know exactly where it fits. Is
there in the woods and they meet the girl that
talks about those logic problems and the other guy, and
I think the first statement is what said as his intro,
this movie is full of crazy people or something like that,

(43:32):
And then when they burn the girl, it's, yeah, they're
just imaginary characters. But and then Coreen, I think, says, yeah,
we're nothing more than that either or something similar to that. Right,
So it is all very aware, even the characters themselves,
but still they're driven by those materialistic things.

Speaker 6 (43:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (43:50):
No, you're totally right. And I think that's supposed to
be Tom Thumb and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, though
I was getting more of a tweedled or Tweedledumb. I'm
not sure I have a heart time keeping them apart.
Oh she was Emily Bronte. Okay, oh wow, I did
not get.

Speaker 6 (44:07):
That at all, because originally I thought it was some
sort of Lewis Carroll reference obviously the Rabbits.

Speaker 7 (44:14):
And then isn't there a title card in there too
that says something I don't know? Somehow I picked up
Lewis Carroll as well. So yeah, that's why I thought
she was Alice. And maybe it was the blue I
want to say, she's wearing a blue dress as well.
I'm talking about playing with form, and of course those
title cards definitely play with form, but he's playing with
form two. When it comes, he'll fade up on a scene,

(44:36):
he'll fade down, he'll fade back up. Okay, what's happening here.
He'll start a scene a few times, like when they meet,
because they pretty much go from that San just who's
played by Jean Pierre Leo, right to him as another character,
at least I'm assuming so, because he's not dressed the
same him in the phone box and the way that

(44:58):
he has to sing that song, and he's singing the
song and at first I was like, Oh, he's just
singing a song, but it feels like the song he's
singing is talking about his situation right there. But with that,
when they open up that scene, they do title card,
they show them coming up, they show him in the
phone box, and then I want to say, they fade
out real quick or they just cut. It might be

(45:19):
a hard cut to them walking back up again that
same title card. It's like we get a replay of that.
And that's right after the car crash, where the film
is basically going out of the frame and it almost
feels like the film itself, the actual mechanics of the
film going through a projector is what causes the car crash.

(45:41):
That's the thing that I love and hate about Godar
At the same time, I think I really like that
he plays with the form, but sometimes he plays with
it so much where it's just like it feels a
little bit like intellectual masturbation. And I'm like, okay, I
like that you can play with these things. But at
the same time reminds me a little bit of what

(46:02):
Trufau was doing. And I know Godar would hate that
I was comparing him to Trufaux. But the little bit
with the piano player where the guy says, you know, oh,
I swear I'm my mother and then they cut to
the mother made my mother drop dead. If lying cut
to the mother and you see it grasp or chest
and fall to the floor, It's like a very Monty
Python type of thing. And sometimes I think Monty Python

(46:24):
and Godar would go really well together. The idea of
two fictional characters, or like Bronte isn't fictional, but her
and Tom Thumb just like showing up and having a
conversation with our main characters. That feels like it could
be the start of a Monty Python skeet.

Speaker 6 (46:42):
And that's the thing talking about Monty Python here, it's
like what Python started year and a half after this
movie come out. This movie does not talk down to
the audience. It basically expects you to understand literary reference.
You need to understand what Marx was talking about. You
need to be to what's going on in the world

(47:02):
in terms of like foreign intervention and what's going on
much the same way. The Python's humor was that way.
It did not explain to the audience, It did not
dumb it down. Sure there were dick and fart jokes
in there, but at the same time they're doing skits
about philosophers and philosophy and references to all kinds of

(47:23):
history and weirdness. So I see this as living in
the same kind of time, in the same period and
the same ideas in a lot of ways, trying to
make points about the culture in which they're living at
the time.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
I haven't been in the generation that watched Monty Python myself,
but I did make a note here, and it was
when Corene says, oh, my herm is a bag, and
I'm going to take it from an intellectual point to
a very non intellectual side. That made me think of
SNL as some parts of this being as absurd as

(47:58):
they are, and yeah, going into the that sketch format.
To me, it's touched on SNL and also to it
being just relevant to that day that period. Yeah, you
might not get it two months later or two years
later or what is it forty years.

Speaker 6 (48:13):
There, fifty Now, I'd even throw in Putney swopen there too,
to a certain extent, just the absurdism of Bob Downey
and what he was doing and needing to understand the
revolutionary spirit in which that was made to use.

Speaker 7 (48:29):
A title card that says taboo and totem and I'm
just like, okay, we're now talking about Freud. He does
expect you to know all of these things, even when
somebody will throw it a line and it'll be like
Mark said this, and I think Karen is like, no,
actually that wasn't Marx, that was Jesus. She says, that
was another communist, that was Jesus. And yeah, those things

(48:53):
where it's like Emily Bronte asking all of those ridiculous
like logic problems, and I'm like, I guess this is
But it feels like this movie a lot of times,
and I'm sorry this might be an unfair thing to say,
but it feels like this movie is set up for
us to leave the theater, go to the cafe and
have a five hour discussion of what we just saw.

(49:16):
It feels like these movies are very much set for
cafe society.

Speaker 6 (49:21):
I referenced Gedbor and society of a spectacle. A movie
like this fits into a lot of that French philosophy
of the era. There was a lot of people who
are writing philosophical treatises. I don't know how many people
are reading that, but I think maybe Guard was like,
let me take these ideas that are floating in the ether,
and maybe I can get people to pay money to

(49:42):
go look at it and make it more mass, whatever
mass was at that time, and try to infect larger
society with these ideas. In a certain way, I think
it sits on the shelf with Gee Deebor, George Battai
or like you've talked about Lacan and Similacrum and things

(50:04):
like that. It just all fits within what was being
discussed in that period between post World War Two into
the mid seventies French philosophy.

Speaker 7 (50:13):
The moment that the film loses me, it feels like
this is a very midway point for the film. It
may be, it may not be, but it feels like
for me, it's the scene where they get picked up
by the yellow truck and it's the guy who is
out selling and demonstrating pianos, and you get that long.

(50:36):
I want to say, it's a three sixty. It's a
three sixty, and it just it goes around and around,
and then at one point it stops, and then it
goes the other way. It feels interminable, and that it's
the actual music on the soundtrack of the guy playing
the piano and he keeps I don't know if he's

(50:56):
fucking up the song or not, but he just keeps
playing it. And again it's I haven't really said I've
talked about the music a little bit, but just how
discordant the soundtrack is, like those the music that comes
up and stuff. But in the gosh, and so much
of this movie, through eight minutes of the traffic jam

(51:18):
section and then through so much more of it, it's
people honking their horns and just being it's so difficult
sometimes to listen to and like the two guys who
are talking, you know, giving little speeches to us later on,
the garbage men, they just are going on and on,

(51:39):
or there's a moment later on when they're with the cannibals,
and it's the guy on the drum set and he's
just playing the drums. Then you have somebody else who's
like reading a speech and I can't remember whose speech
that is, but again it's a big quotation and it
just goes on and on, just droning. But that drumming
after a while just becomes so much so I'm like,

(52:00):
would you shut the fuck up already? And that's what
I want to yell at the screen. Was so much
of this movie is it's just And again, I know
he's playing with form, he's playing with me, he's playing
with his audience, and he wants to make me uncomfortable
and he's doing a great job of it.

Speaker 6 (52:16):
The only thing I can think of with the piano
piece is him commenting. And again, here's your Boonoel reference
is Bunuel took a lot of heat for using certain
pieces of classical music in Lage Door. So you could say, okay,
the guards making a reference to European classical tradition and

(52:38):
classical music and how this is a refined thing, but
instead it's being played in the courtyard of a farm.
And you could also say that it's probably a little
bit more of a I don't want to say quieter,
but it's not as energetic as other parts. So if
it was just a constant flow out of a fire
hose at you just overwhelm you all the time. So

(53:01):
there's part of me that thinks, okay, this is the
low period. He wants you to feel a god take
forever because everything had been so rapid to that point.
So it's I guess you could say it's the sorbet
it's the palate cleanser. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
I saw it as a moment where everybody is so
all those yeah, the people, the farmers there, and even
our characters even though they're bored, but they're all listening
to the beautiful music of Mozart, and yeah, the moment
indeed of tranquility. Everyday work stops. We just listened to

(53:39):
this piece of music, and then the guy playing it
or Godard is trying to say how much better this
is than classical music of that time or pop music
being influenced by it. So it's like an ad for Mozart,
but just saying like how much Yeah, this is so
much better Intellectually.

Speaker 7 (53:59):
Sometimes it feels like Godard just has a beef with
everything modern music, the idea of rock or even, yes,
to your point, modern classical. He's got problems with in
every single thing. And it feels like just almost like
a screed of here's all the shit that's making me
mad right now.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
I got a lot of problems with your people.

Speaker 7 (54:21):
You're gonna hear about it. Yeah, I'm gonna have these
two puppets on screen and they're going to represent something
that I just despise, and we're gonna torture them for
the next hour and forty minutes. Yeah, and just show
you all the reasons why the bourgeois are empty vessels
that don't mean anything to me.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
But on the music, to touch on the drumming of
the hippies, I think that made no sense. I was
trying to actually pay attention to the rhythm and they
were just trying to be cool hippies playing a drum beat,
but that is not proper drumpling. Might not know that
as well, but it didn't sound good to me. So

(55:05):
it was also again, yeah, a critique of the hippies,
of them, yeah, taking up music but then having no
talent or no skills for that. I just mentioned one
plus one Something for the Devil. After this film, it
becomes a lot of more of these type of screeds.

(55:27):
In nineteen seventy he makes Pravda and Win from the East,
or in seventy one he makes Lotti and in Italia.
But like some of these movies See You at Mao,
like those things are basically it feels like long political
things and stuff that he doesn't even take credit for.
I want to say, a lot of his films during

(55:48):
that period he doesn't even put his name on, and
they just become things that he wants people to see
and to experience. He's pretty much done with filmmaking for
a little while, this type of filmmaking, and it takes
I don't know, a couple of years before he gets
back to it. And yeah, to your point, Rob sixty eight,
it's right around the corner. And this feels like he's

(56:10):
looking into the future and being like, hey, listen, what
I'm saying here is going to really the chickens are
going to come home to roost very soon.

Speaker 6 (56:18):
Do you want to talk about someone who had their
finger on the pulse? And this feels like definitely he
knew he knew something was up that I don't think
other filmmakers in that period quite understood. Also at the
same time, I also want to step back and look
at Guard's own history. He was part of this class

(56:39):
as we grew up. He was the son of a banker.
He understood these people, He understood this culture. He understood
I guess the old familiarity breeds contempt kind of thing
where it was like under he knew the things that
he did not like about growing up in that milieu.

Speaker 7 (57:00):
Only is this a critique of France and what was
going on in France at the time, but he also
does a lot of critiquing of America, which I'm all
on board for. Things like during the speech that the
African gentleman is giving where they are like cutting to
these people and they have like headbands on. They start

(57:20):
talking about Native Americans and how the Iroquois were the
real progenitors of democracy and all this, and I was like, okay, yeah,
that I'm on board with that kind of thing. And
that calls back to that little kid at the beginning
who's dressed up like an Indian chief and he's shooting
arrows at their car. I'm like, okay, here's this echo

(57:41):
that's coming back again. It's almost like the first part
of the movie sets up so many things that we're
going to see sprinkled throughout the rest of the film.

Speaker 6 (57:48):
Yeah, a smaller symbolic action that gets escalated. Well. At
the same time, the couple's constantly trying for this to
make sense. They're trying to understand what's going on.

Speaker 7 (58:01):
They're like me as a movie viewer.

Speaker 6 (58:02):
Exactly, So I guess the couple at the same time
is the audience. You always look for the audience character.
That's what I always say in movies.

Speaker 7 (58:11):
I love too that he's playing with the form in
the because we don't I don't think we ever do
we ever make it to their final destination. Don't they
find out off screen about what happened with the father
and that the mother's got the money. I want to
say that's around the time of the bath scene, where
you also hear the story of the hippopotamus. But the

(58:34):
thing with the bath scene I love is that is
such a critique of films for me, where it's our
main character Corin, who is known for being in very
sexy French films and Mrael dark and the way that
she's in the tub and her breasts are not visible,

(58:58):
so from the chest down we don't see anything and
she's just taking a bath. But then right over her shoulder,
as a classic painting where you can't see breasts and
its breasts are okay in classic works of art, but
please no nudity from the actual actor or actress on screenplays.

Speaker 6 (59:15):
I also think it's a way for him to critique
the visual I guess you could say the male gaze,
because he did the start of the same thing in
contempt with Brigie Bardeaux. So he's got Brisgie Bardeux, but
he shoots her these colors in all these different ways
that it's yeah, okay, she's naked, but so.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
What Yeah, I don't know how how much censorship or
if there were ratings back then or somebody was looking
into that. But then again, like you said to me,
it was a point of we can't show a breast.
It's just not the actress's breasts here. Whether you're seeing
what you would see anyway, it's just that this is
acceptable for a lower rating.

Speaker 7 (59:54):
Yeah, even though the first title card that we see
is not appropriate for anyone under eighteen, and it's in
that same fine treatment. So I'm like, oh, okay, that's
that's an interesting way to start using those title cards
is with the warning, and then we get the idea
of what's he say, like this film was rescued from
a trash heap.

Speaker 6 (01:00:17):
The first one is a film adrift in the cosmos,
So it kind of gives you the idea that there's
a certain level of camu ask absurdism where it's just like,
now this matters, We're just gonna drift.

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
Having seen his previous movies from the seventies, it feels
like it's putting pieces or all those movies together and
putting them in the blender. There's the absurdism of Alphaville,
the colorfulness of Pierre Leifu, that the innovative techniques that
started with Breathless and so on, and then the political

(01:00:52):
messages of Lashinas and so on. So everything mixed together,
and then a ramp top to eleven and set a
drift for people too to grab onto.

Speaker 7 (01:01:01):
Yeah, the colors in this movie pop so well. It's
a gorgeous looking film, and it's.

Speaker 6 (01:01:09):
Good when you finally get to the revolutionaries and as
we come into the end here, because you actually get nature,
you actually get forests and trees and grass and that
isn't all burned out because it cars. And I was
just thinking about the ending there where has the wife

(01:01:29):
become a revolutionary and do they literally eat the rich?

Speaker 7 (01:01:34):
Has she become a revolutionary or is she just going
along with whatever's going to allow her to live or
go along? I honestly don't know what her motivation is
at that point, And I do love that moment when
she's eating and they're like, oh, yeah, that's your husband, basically,

(01:01:55):
and she gives no no indication that it upsets her whatsoever.
You're like watching her face to see if she even
acknowledges that there's nothing there.

Speaker 6 (01:02:06):
Again, it just shows there are no values. That's basically
we go get darts kind of trying to show through.
The thing through these characters is they're not moored by anything.
They don't feel a connection motion and don't feel the
connection to sentimentality. If anything, they're bound by the conventions
of the society in which they're in.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Yeah, I think she even says I'll take a bite
later as well, or something to that extent. She's just
therefore going along with the flow at this point, I think.
And then yeah, no real moral judgment. Yeah, no mourning
of her husband, nothing in that sense, no emotion.

Speaker 7 (01:02:48):
No, And I want to say, there's another dead rabbit
in that sequence. There's of course the pig, which is
very upsetting watching the pig, or there's a looks like
the I want to say, it's a goose that's half
living and just flapping around. It's a very horrific scene
that I can't handle. The idea of eating the husband

(01:03:08):
I'm absolutely fine with, but yeah, watching those poor animals suffer,
it's really rough. It feels like they're play acting like
everybody in this commune, hanging out in the forest. I
don't see any sort of structures for them to sleep
or anything. They just seem like they're content to run
around in the forest and play revolutionary. And you keep

(01:03:28):
getting August Light is one of the title cards. What
was it September? No, the ah something of October.

Speaker 6 (01:03:38):
Yeah, October is an obvious reference to the Russian Revolution.

Speaker 7 (01:03:43):
And I'm like, are you saying that they were playing revolutionary?
Probably not, because they actually were doing things, whereas with
these folks, they just seem to be content to wander
around the forest and at one point they knock out
a motorist who's on a little motorbike and probably eat
him as well.

Speaker 6 (01:03:59):
And I guess you could say that again, the people
who start the revolution will just feast on and fight
amongst those without power. If they do eat the husband, fine,
he was in some position of authority. But you just
get the feeling that Guard's saying, your revolution is just
only going to hurt the people you're trying to liberate. Anyway,

(01:04:19):
what are you doing? Is that really the way to
go about it?

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
Yeah, it felt chaotic and I didn't actually understand if
there was a revolutionary purpose stated right, they it was
just revolution for the sake of revolution, So then it
was just chaos and going along with the flow. Another
critique of that kind of approach.

Speaker 7 (01:04:40):
Let's go ahead, We're going to take a break, and
we'll be right back after these brief messages.

Speaker 9 (01:04:49):
You obviously love podcasts, but are you also a fan
of movies and television? Do you want to listen to
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(01:05:12):
Hollywood Outsider dot com.

Speaker 7 (01:05:14):
All Right, we are back, and we were talking about weekend,
and I found it interesting that the whole traffic I
don't know how much I can say as far as
was this inspired by another story or was it just
a coincidence that there's the traffic scene, because there's a
short story by Julio Cortazar called Law to Pieceta del Sur,

(01:05:36):
which is all about a traffic jam, and it just
the whole story, I don't want to say, it's what
like fourteen pages maybe, and it's just all of these
people that are in this traffic jam and this idea
of this never ending traffic jam. And I know I've
seen something similar in other films as well.

Speaker 3 (01:05:52):
I want to.

Speaker 6 (01:05:52):
Say, good right, it's hilarity on the Highway.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
Daisies Junior and Lisa Hartman star in Great American Traffic Jam,
a superstation movie presentation double feature.

Speaker 7 (01:06:05):
That was I think an inspiration. And then there's actually
a movie that's based solely on that just called Traffic
Jam from What's seventy.

Speaker 6 (01:06:13):
Seventy nine nine.

Speaker 7 (01:06:15):
Yeah, and I tried watching that one. That was a
little bit rough too, just because all of the characters
are pretty despicable. I didn't really care for any of
them either, even though there's some great actors in that one.

Speaker 6 (01:06:26):
And I finished it just before the show because you
dropped it for us take a look at. And it
felt like for me at least, I don't know, maybe
I was sentimental or something, but it snuck up on
me in the end the first half or three quarters,
I was just like, Oh, this is what are you
trying to say? It felt like it had this kind
of broad comedy, like broad Italian comedy of the seventies feeling,

(01:06:50):
with some kind of points I was trying to make.
And at times I couldn't quite follow who they wanted
us to follow, because I think there's seven or eight
different scenarios that we follow. So there's a rich guy
in his assistant, there's a mom and her kids. There's
like a whole family with a grandma and a young

(01:07:13):
girl who's pregnant, and the dad keeps saying you should
get an abortion because this is embarrassing that you're knocked
up and you're not married. There's a husband and wife
who are going on like a twenty fifth anniversary trip.
That guy's played by Fernando Ray, so of course Bunuel
and then so take your drink. Marcello Mastriani is in here,

(01:07:35):
and he plays an actor, and when people find out
that he's in here, then that there's an actor, they're
like wow, they set upon him. There's just all these
different variables. There's a gal who's traveling alone, who's some
sort of musician, and she befriends the guy who's got
the baby food truck, which pays off in the end

(01:07:57):
that storyline. There's just all these storylines. And I think
similarly to what I discussed with Guard's use of the
road in here and how people are stuck, I would
say the difference is everybody's stuck. I'm blanking on the
name of the director, but everybody is stuck and nobody's

(01:08:17):
getting anywhere, and it has this real feeling of I
guess you could put that piece from Psycho in here,
where we're all in our little traps, gnashing our teeth
at each other, trying to get free, but there is
no freedom. We're we're stuck in these various roles and
we just try to screw each other over literally and figuratively,

(01:08:39):
especially if we're talking about that rape scene, or we
don't want to get involved, or we do want to
get involved. I see it as the director trying to
have a lot of different conversations about sort of humanity
on the whole, and just using a traffic jam as
a basis to do it.

Speaker 7 (01:08:57):
It's a pressure cooker, but you get to see people's
real emotions come out in a traffic jam because it's
such a frustrating situation. And the director, by the way,
was Luigi Coomancini.

Speaker 6 (01:09:07):
I had talked about before when we had did I
Think Don of the Dead. One of the things that
I really loved about the Romero films was putting people
under pressure and seeing how they react. And that's really
what this does, is it It brings out the best
and the worst aspects of humanity within a scenario.

Speaker 7 (01:09:23):
Yeah, it's like the beginning of Land. Doesn't that all
take place in a traffic jam and you just see
the worst of humanity and hear some of the worst
music of the twenty first century.

Speaker 6 (01:09:32):
All singing, all dancing exactly.

Speaker 7 (01:09:34):
Oh yeah, because that's what you do during a traffic jam?

Speaker 6 (01:09:38):
Why not they do that?

Speaker 7 (01:09:39):
At least that's what I did.

Speaker 6 (01:09:40):
They do that in here too?

Speaker 7 (01:09:42):
Do they do that in Romania? Is that like all singing,
all dancing traffic jams?

Speaker 6 (01:09:46):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:09:46):
But what do we do? Use the car horns a lot?

Speaker 6 (01:09:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (01:09:50):
Another very a soundtrack that put me on edge.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
But so in the movie traffic Jam, I think, yeah,
it's a situation to put all these different types of
characters to deal with it, and okay, may I don't
know if all of them, but they somehow evolve through
this experience and even the relationships between that lady that
was traveling alone and the trucker. While in Weekend nobody

(01:10:18):
has really evolved. There's no the characters are the same
as they were in the beginning. So that hasn't changed them.
That hasn't added anything.

Speaker 7 (01:10:27):
Which is what makes me think that she's playing at
being a revolutionary, just like perhaps the other revolutionaries are.
Just she is not coming at this from a Oh
I see the error of my ways and now I
must amend them. It's okay, I'll go with the flow.
And if this is what I need to do, and
if I need to eat my husband for sustenance. I
didn't really care for him anyway. Maybe eventually I can

(01:10:50):
make it back to my lover and my posh little apartment.

Speaker 6 (01:10:54):
Yeah. One of the things that I really liked in here,
like I said, the things that snuck up on me
was more towards the end. There is the sexual assault
rape scene here that's pretty horrific. But he uses that
to point out again, like I talked about people in
position of authority, there's a car behind where this is

(01:11:14):
taking place, where someone's got a gun, and there's also
these older men who could get involved. They debate among
themselves what should we do, and one says, what if
that was your daughter? And one guy gets upset and says,
don't bring her into this, And so they don't do anything.
They're just paralyzed to do anything or to get involved,
and they act like they didn't see it and all
of that. But closer to the end of the film,

(01:11:38):
really there's this What starts it off is this ambulance
that's trying to get through and this guy's trying to
get to the hospital and he ends up dying and
they call this guy over. I don't know if he
was a priest or just a whatever. It didn't really
seem like he was a priest or a or minister.
But he gives his kind of last rites and it's like,

(01:12:00):
to me, one of the most humanistic encapsulations if you
were looking for a thesis statement of the movie. And
then I love the fact that I think it's the
rich guy we've been seeing who's got more money, and
he's wants to sign this girl to a record contract
as she turns him on and all these various things,
and he says, Hey, I'm in publishing. Can I talk

(01:12:22):
to you about publishing that? And he's like no, and
he just walks away. And what that kind of reminded
me of as we talk about other movies, is the
commodification of the sacred, And to me that felt and
granted he had been dead a few years by then,
but it felt a little bit like what Pasolini was
talking about in Cello and the idea of commodification of

(01:12:45):
the body, commodification of sacred things in the culture, and
how that had just gone way out of line in
his mind, that mass production and whatnot. But like I said,
in the end, the movie just snuck up on me.
I wasn't expecting to be as affected by it because
when I got into it, so the first half hour
forty minutes, I'm like, oh my god, this thing. I'm like,

(01:13:07):
where are we going? Who are we following? What is
it that you want me to look at? And then
when I finally looked at it as vignettes and maybe
some interlinking, and then tried to take a more Okay, fine,
I'm just going to go along on the ride. I'm
not going to try to buy into anything. I'm just
going to go with it. I felt that it paid

(01:13:29):
off in the end for me.

Speaker 7 (01:13:31):
So I looked up there as a movie from nineteen
eighty so right after this one, an American film called
The Great American Traffic Jam also known as Gridlock, and
it is a who's who of every seventies actor that
you could possibly think of. The lead actor on IMDb
is Desi Arnez Junior, and then you get into John Beck,

(01:13:55):
James Gregory, Lisa Hartman, Michael Lerner, Ed McMahon, wink Martindale,
Al Molenaro, Charles Napier. I know it's going to be terrible,
but I have a feeling I'm going to be watching
this pretty soon and it is available in full on YouTube. Meanwhile,
this one, the Italian film hard to find, but it

(01:14:18):
looks like it was released in multiple languages, and I
was very glad to be able to find one with
maybe not the best English subtitles, but English subtitles.

Speaker 6 (01:14:27):
Yeah, it was serviceable because I only knew about four
words in.

Speaker 7 (01:14:30):
Italian manngia yah.

Speaker 6 (01:14:35):
Yes.

Speaker 7 (01:14:36):
The traffic jam and the whole traffic jam scenario, the
whole pressure cooker thing that I'm talking about, really reminded
me of the beginning of Falling Down, And that's one
of those where we started in the traffic jam. That's
like kind of the opening credits, if memory serves. And
then after that, Michael Douglas gets out of the car
and eventually gets out of the car business. No, he

(01:14:57):
gets out of the car and makes his journey after that,
but it really takes that crucible of the car, the
traffic jam, to push him to that next step where
he then chooses violence and then begins his whole odyssey
across Los Angeles. But he does that by foot rather
than being stuck in a traffic jam the whole time.

Speaker 6 (01:15:18):
Yeah, it's a road movie, literally, a road movie. Stuck
on that roach.

Speaker 7 (01:15:25):
When we were emailing back and forth, Andre you had
mentioned that there were things from the Substance, and I
haven't seen The Substance yet, but how do you feel
that Weekend and the Substance are maybe having a little
bit of a dialogue.

Speaker 3 (01:15:37):
I saw The Substance when it was released here. I
live in the Netherlands in September, and I watched The
Weekend for the first time and just watching The Substance
in the cinema, so there are a lot of scenes
where you're just bounded with gore, horror, literal, buckets of

(01:15:59):
blood and the message itself about yeah, actresses in Hollywood
and the male gaze and everything. It's pounded and pounded
with every sequence in that movie. So it felt similar,
but again maybe not about the same subject, but the
way Weekend is just bombarding you with either a spectacle

(01:16:24):
or horror. The bits of blood on that bunny and
all the skin bunny, Okay, it is not stopping. And
then I also looked at the watch at one point, Okay,
we're only halfway through this movie and it still has
to go. It was a similar feeling that it doesn't
let you breathe to give you that message. But yeah,

(01:16:46):
with a different purpose and another dialogue that I saw
here is what Rob mentioned. But you mentioned the exterminating
thing angel from Boudwell because there's a title card. But
to me, this would be a good double feature with
the discrete charm of the bourgeois. They are walking on
the in the discretion arm of the Bozzi. There are

(01:17:09):
those sequences between different scenes where they're walking on the
field on a road, so that felt like the road
movie that this is where they're looking for their way
to Ooinville. Also the sequence where there's the sound of
the plane and then you see it crashed and Boudwell
uses the plane sounds to cover he uses it for

(01:17:31):
a different purpose. But yeah, it reminded me of that.
And then again, yeah, it's a satire on the bourgeoisie.
I think Bouell does it in it. So whatever part
of Weekend is the satire about the bourgeoisie, I think
Godar does it very angrily and bluntly, while Bludewell is
a lot more Yeah, chiseled a lot more elegant with it,

(01:17:54):
and the humor absurd, but still a different type of absurdity,
not as grotesque. Or horror someone as we can, but
still a nice I was actually wondering whether this is
god the hardest answer to Blundell's movie, But who Know's
movie came when it came after.

Speaker 6 (01:18:10):
I was thinking about what you were talking about with
the use of sound to block out certain passages. And
Budwell does it like I think twice maybe three times
in Discrete Charm, and it's I always thought it was
to get you off the plot, that those sections are
where he was going to explain like who the murderer

(01:18:32):
was or something like that, and it's that's not important.
I fucking care about that. Don't pay attention to that idea.
Stop getting into this idea that you're going to follow
a plot through this thing. And so that's what I
really loved about Discrete Charm, which anyone who knows this
show knows is one of my favorites. And we did
a great episode with John Claude Carrier too for wrote

(01:18:55):
script if you'll look that up. But the other one
and that I thought of, and it was a year
after this, it was sixty eight. The kind of reminds
me of this film is the Milky Way, And in
the Milky Way, he's got two guys who are on
pilgrimage to Saragoza in Spain, and as they go they

(01:19:15):
get into these different vignettes. But in that and they're
all over the place, They're all within time, they're in
back during the time of Christ, they're medieval Europe, they're
in the current era. That is more about Whinwell talking
about Catholicism and the intricacies of faith and the absurdities
of it to him. And so it again much more elegant,

(01:19:39):
much more controlled, much more humorous as opposed to angry
than guitar. But I do see there's that. I don't know,
he's not around, can't ask, but I maybe there is
a dialogue between you have Guard pulling from Bunwell and
then Bunwell pulling for Guard, and in other ways going

(01:20:03):
forward into his later films.

Speaker 7 (01:20:05):
I mentioned seats Man earlier. I would definitely recommend that
one because we don't know what happened in France in
order to have all of these cars littered all over
the freeway. It's not just one or two, it's dozens,
and you come across cars that are actively on fire,

(01:20:25):
dead bodies just strewn across the road. As the movie progresses,
it gets worse and worse. It reminds me a lot
of the idea in Seats of Man, where there's some
sort of plague that we don't know what it is
that is killing off people, and so main two characters
go to a beachside place and they live there and
they seem to be safe from whatever this plague is.

(01:20:48):
I feel like there's that connection also with Godar's ex
wife in there as well. And then The Lion Has
Seven Heads also would be a good double feature with Weekend,
just because there is there's a ton of talk about politics.
The Roachia films that were Roasia films, they feel like
they're as revolutionary as but for me, they always seem

(01:21:08):
to have a little bit more structure and substance to them.
And I like that he's having a dialogue with the audience,
but he's not necessarily speaking to the audience directly. He
always have characters just directly addressing us. I found it
very fascinating to go back to those two speeches by
the garbage men and just the way that they will
look at us, but then they'll look to the side,

(01:21:31):
come back to us, look to the other side, come
back to us. It's almost like they're addressing everyone in
the audience, but it's almost like they're on a street
corner talking to all of these people around them and
maintaining that eye contact rather than it just being straight
to the eye of the camera lens. But yeah, I
love that Roshia, especially in line has seven heads. He's

(01:21:52):
really memory serves. It has been a while since I've
seen it, but he's talking a lot about the African colonialism,
which is ironic since he was on or going European
colonialism in Brazil, so he was it's also happening over
here too. But yeah, I love that movie and would
really recommend that to folks.

Speaker 6 (01:22:11):
And the one that this reminded me of, and it
was only because of the ending, But the more that
I thought about it, I was like, Okay, maybe there's
some there. Did Joel em Reid go out of his
way to make a pro feminist communist statement with Bloodsucking Freaks?
I don't necessarily think so, but I think you can
read Bloodsucking Freaks as an allegorical film for that era

(01:22:36):
in the seventies. And what I mean by the connection
to Weekend is when the wife is eating her husband.
The last shot we get in Bloodsucking Freaks is the sandwich, which, yeah,
it's someone's penis and one of them, Yeah it could
be sars. That all we know is the caged women

(01:22:59):
from the basement got out and went crazy. So you
could say that's Joel m Read saying feminism will be
the end of the patriarchy. But the other thing that
I did think about, and like I said in.

Speaker 7 (01:23:12):
By the Way, I love how Much You go to Badfort's.

Speaker 6 (01:23:15):
Last Let's talk he breaks as one of my top fifteen.
I've written essays on it. Andrew Rousch wanted it first
Trash Cinema book if you want to read the essays
in there. But the thing I was thinking about is
how I talked about the characters in this film are
stand ins. They're not really characters that Guard wants to

(01:23:37):
us to emotionally invest in. And I would say in
Blood Sucking Freaks it's the same. It's not as distant,
is what Gaduard has here. But all of the characters
within that universe that he creates are all representative of something.
They're all representative of a female idea, a business owner
who controls everything. The cops. There's all these different characters

(01:24:01):
that represent various concepts, and you can look at it
as a statement on what was going on at the time. Again,
and I keep having to put this disclaimer on here
because when I did Blood Sucking Freaks with You, my
very first episode many moons ago, I remember someone either
emailing in or putting in the comments I don't listen

(01:24:22):
to your show for some sort of communist lecture, professor lecture.
And I said, all right, what do you want me
to do?

Speaker 8 (01:24:31):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (01:24:31):
Look at all the boobies. Oh, look at all the blood. Wow,
that was cool.

Speaker 7 (01:24:36):
You remember that one time where there are all the boobs?

Speaker 6 (01:24:39):
That was awesome exactly Remember that time you're in the Beatles, Yeah,
that was awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
We didn't touch on the two points that I had
in my notes. When was that the Son of God?
I think it's Joseph Balsamo who was Charlotte and in
French three, But he says he wants to go to
London to start flamboyance in movies or something like that,
which I found just very funny because everything was very

(01:25:09):
flamboyant in this movie. But there was still more to that.
And then another point to me. That was very funny
was the end the card where it's end of cinema
and then it shows that it's actually the end and
the cinema visa for the movie. But it was funny
how he played with that, and then it was the

(01:25:32):
end of a specific type of era for Godard in
that sense.

Speaker 7 (01:25:37):
I was really dreading talking about this film, But I'm
really glad that we had this discussion because this was
a great discussion and makes me appreciate this film a
lot more than I had, especially back in ninety five
ninety six whenever I saw it the first time. So
I'm really glad Andre that you brought this back to
me and made me give this a second chance, rather

(01:25:59):
than me writing it off and being like, oh, another
good art masturbation fest. I really appreciated this conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:26:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:26:09):
Like I said, I watched it first time for this podcast,
and in my opinion of it was, oh my god,
what is is? What are we going to talk about here?
But I think it is something that is worth a
great discussion like this one and then further exploring. I
think I will go back to it to see certain
points also after this discussion, to see how certain scenes

(01:26:30):
play out and it's going to be something to engage
with further for me.

Speaker 6 (01:26:35):
For me, it reminds me of some other films like
I just saw recently Kinds of Kindness, and I like,
I hit or miss sometimes on that director's movies, but
that one. Someone asked me, did you like it? And
I'm like not when I was watching it, But after
I got home and thought about it and put it together,
I'm like, Okay, I like it as an intellectual exercise.

(01:26:57):
And I was sitting there watching it for I don't
know two and a half hours. I'm just like, I
I'm not engaging with it that way. How I feel
about Weekend where it's I like it as a thought exercise.
I like it as something that I can get into
and pull apart. These pieces. Look at it from historical angle,
from pisophical angle, things like that. Is it something that
I'm like, you know what I really need to watch

(01:27:19):
right now? I need you to put on fucking Weekend? Man. No,
I am not. That is not at the top of
my Q on Criterion Channel. There's other things I'm gonna
watch first, just for shits and giggles, and in tournament.

Speaker 7 (01:27:33):
Hey, everybody's working for the weekend. Man, exactly all right,
We're going to take another break and play a preview
for next week's show right after these brief messages.

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
Jerry Doolittle is on the move, and whether by cap,
by air or by foe, she'll get Jack Flash out
of trouble to get thanks. No matter what she gets into,
we'll be Goldberg jumping Jack Flash.

Speaker 4 (01:28:06):
That has the most amazing night.

Speaker 6 (01:28:08):
Starts October tenth and Famous Players another selected theaters nearing you.

Speaker 7 (01:28:12):
That's right, we are kicking off a whole month of
movies starring Whoopy Goldberg. We're calling it Woop Prairie. But
I'm still work shopping that until then, I want to
thank my co host, Robin Andre. Rob, what is the
latest with you?

Speaker 6 (01:28:26):
I'm just enjoying my days out here in the high deserts.
Sorry to hear that you're getting the freezing, but hey,
that's weather in Michigan. And I've just been enjoying my life,
getting outside, exercising and started working on this novel. And
I'm making some good progress. So I don't know, maybe
i'll finish that, see if that comes out in some way.

(01:28:48):
If it does, you'll hear about it.

Speaker 7 (01:28:50):
Here first, and Andre, how about yourself? What are you
up to over there?

Speaker 3 (01:28:54):
The only thing that I can plug is my record label,
Legendary Sound Research, which is a bit in a pause
for now, but we'll probably start kicking off soon again.
It's underground dance music on all platforms and physical media
as well, if you'd like to check that out.

Speaker 7 (01:29:12):
Thank you so much guys for being on the show.
Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
of the other shows that I work on. They are
all available at Wirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Patreon community. If you want to join the community, just
like Andre did, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over

(01:29:33):
the world.

Speaker 4 (01:29:38):
Bad Le.

Speaker 8 (01:30:07):
Name, don't be well, say stop? She was fine to.

Speaker 10 (01:30:18):
Set, don't don't.

Speaker 3 (01:30:44):
Do this's my note ball.

Speaker 8 (01:30:50):
Don't know them? Would they fall to explain the autos
that set me to be to do not.

Speaker 3 (01:31:16):
Memb sen be Wait my, she's so.

Speaker 8 (01:31:22):
Good, she looked fine to night.

Speaker 4 (01:31:27):
She s.

Speaker 8 (01:31:38):
Got to get tonight. I don't not have bust. I'll
be with my she's so good. I have today be

(01:32:07):
with my guy, so great.

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