On watching the queue for Godard's "Socialism" at the Cannes Palais

Berlin is like the coolest place in the world these days, and London still has the coolness of the nineties, but Paris will always be cool as long as people still watch Bout de Souffle. I dig that, I just don’t get why people are so serious about those movies.

For instance for the people standing in line at the Cannes Palais on the Boulevard de la Croisette, waiting to see Godard’s latest (last?) offering Socialism, JLG is the man with the supersonic penis. He hunts the big ideas, gets them in range and blows them to bits with his penis. His penis is the strongest thing in the wimpy world of art cinema, and, these people say:

“We need Godard to kick the shit out of the ignorant West. We need him to blow King Kong, and consumerism and Keanu Reeves through a brick wall.”

I want to say again that it would be churlish and sort of adolescently iconoclastic to say that Godard’s movies weren’t exciting and cool and great when I watched them, and Jesus they must have been exciting in the 60s can you imagine? Big broken-nosed Belmondo loping alongside the sexiest Seberg of all time. And all of it frenetically cut together, like by a lunatic, with big pictures of Bogie. Wowzer. What I’m trying to say is just this:

Shot some big game once, doesn’t make him a sharpshooter.

Take a practical example. With Bande a Part and Breathless, Godard chopped his films up like no-one had ever seen it before. Its crazy to watch, but it also makes you think about Godard himself, hunched over on a stool somewhere with a pair of scissors, smashing up his own dailies. Nowdays, funky editing styles just make you think of MTV. Besides, in the technology of cinema there was just more to smash up in the sixties. They weren't proper hunters, but more like cider sodden aussies crashing along b-roads in oafish four by fours in search of roos to fender-marmalise.

The main point is this though. Those early new wave efforts were designed, as Susan Sontag said, to destroy the cinema de papa. With its cigarettes and its bollocksed noir, Breathless waseven more than a parody, its was a conscious reduction of everything that cinema had been before, a reduction down to "a gun and a girl." This is were the Cannes Palais crowd underestimate Godard. He wasn't just a gunslinger. He was Shiva. But once you've destroyed everything, you're done.

So I just don’t know if Godard should still be making movies. The great destroyer doesn't have anything to destroy and besides, he doesn't even know whats already been destroyed. The upshot is that he does a bit of a Columbine.

I aint seen it but apparently this Socialism film is going to be impossible to watch. Godard himself basically demanded that non-Francophones who wanted to watch it should "learn French." The idea that a great 60s revolutionary should be making films so brashly undemocratic is a complete capitulation to the criticisms that he always put him self at risk of.

I don’t even know if this is a judgement on his movies, I’m just saying, I don’t understand why I should go and see them. He’s not like a great story teller or anything, he's an iconoclast, and there's nothing more butters than an athritic middle finger. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get these old guys.