Godard in 3D

Last night we went to a showing of the film "3X 3D" at the Vancouver Film Festival.   The film was a collection of three short films, commissioned by the Portuguese city of Guimares, directed by Godard, Greenaway, and Pera (a Portuguese director).

The Godard episode was something extraordinary, in his very late style; a dense collage of spoken aphorisms, musical excerpts, sounds, excerpts from films, still images, etc. which resists any kind of interpretation that I know of.   Incomprehensible, in the best sense; I think he is pushing the limits of what we can perceive in the cinema, and forcing us to rethink how we perceive.  

A few days later, I was at the Neue Galerie in New York to see their show of early Kandinsky.   As I sat in a room surrounded by the wildly colorful canvases that Kandinsky made in his very beginning abstract period, I wondered what people made of them back then.   For a world where representational painting was the only kind of painting, they must have been both shocking and incomprehensible; people did not know how to look at the canvases.  I feel that way about the Godard; I need to look and listen to film in a different way to understand it.  So, for the moment,  I am content to let it wash over me.

(Screenshots should be in 3D, but, luckily, the internet is not in 3D yet.)

Godard's dog!

The Greenaway episode was completely different, taking full advantage of 3D technology.  It was one continuous shot moving through space and time around an old church.  People, written texts, and objects were flying around everywhere in a dense visual collage.   And, for once, the sonic collage was equally inventive; snippets of classical music from different eras moved in and out, along with a jumble of voices and other sounds.   Candy for the eye and ear!

I have no idea what these colored spheres are about, but it was fun to watch them move about it 3D space.

The other episode shall not be spoken of.