Quote:
Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that’s an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s polyphonic nonfiction investigation of this phenomenon looks at the family from a variety of angles, with the director taking on the role of a sort of sociological detective. It’s a delightful and absorbing study of words and faces, mass media and personal isolation, and America’s odd margins.

Poto and Cabengo.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 13 min
Size: 	2.30 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1440x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 341 kb/s
BPP: 	0.116
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 137 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/44C2D86E5D275AE/Poto_and_Cabengo.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Jean-Pierre Gorin – Poto and Cabengo (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.

3.51GB | 51m 59s | 1440×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A4E36E03FD61AAC/Letter.to.Jane.An.Investigation.About.a.Still.1972.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/4A3420CC67C05FF/Letter.to.Jane.An.Investigation.About.a.Still.1972.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/4D17E5DCBEF6E91/Letter.to.Jane.An.Investigation.About.a.Still.1972.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/320D17E1BC4A425/Letter.to.Jane.An.Investigation.About.a.Still.1972.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.part3.rar
https://nitro.download/view/16EFE2892C3ACFE/Letter.to.Jane.An.Investigation.About.a.Still.1972.1080p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.part4.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin – Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:

Vladimir and Rosa was in many ways the last true product of the experimental revolutionary filmmaking cooperative the Dziga Vertov Group: the final film produced under the group’s banner before Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin went on to make the feature Tout va bien and the short Letter To Jane under their own names, before parting ways for good. Taking its title from Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, this film is typical of Godard and Gorin’s late 60s/early 70s collaborations. That is to say, it’s shrill, antagonistic, messy and often intentionally grating, as dense and complex as it is difficult and polemical. But it is also wickedly funny, aesthetically restless and inventive, and truly committed to considering every angle, every variation, on the ideas and situations it discusses. It is quite possibly the best film to emerge from the Dziga Vertov collective, the film where (prior to Tout va bien at least) the political ideas of Godard and Gorin are most cogently (and entertainingly) presented.

Although most of the DVG films are aesthetically and thematically catholic, broad in their consideration of various elements of capitalist society, Vladimir and Rosa narrows its focus to the trial of the Chicago Eight, the famous group of radical activists (including Abbie Hoffman and Black Panther Bobby Seale) who were tried in connection with the riots and protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Predictably, Godard and Gorin play fast and loose with the facts, staging the trial as a symbolic conflict between representatives of various left-wing factions on one side, and the bourgeois establishment on the other. Thus, the eight defendants in the film do not correspond exactly to the real activists; only the extreme pacifist Dave Dellinger (Claude Nedjar) and the Black Panther Bobby X refer to real people. The rest of the eight are filled out with archetypes in order to present a cross-section of radical politics: a hippie commune member (Juliet Berto), a proponent of women’s rights (Anne Wiazemsky), a factory worker and “individualist” agitator (Larry Martin), a student revolutionary (Yves Afonso), and others. Against these diverse radicals and Marxist thinkers are arrayed the forces of the pompous, oppressive judge Julius Himmler (Ernest Menzer) — a fascist parody of real Chicago Eight judge Julius Hoffman — and a jury comprised entirely of blank-faced bourgeois housewives and office drones.

The trial in the film plays out very similarly to the one presented in Peter Watkins’ contemporaneous Punishment Park, which must have been in production in America at roughly the same time as Godard and Gorin were making their own film in France: tapping into the zeitgeist on both sides of the Atlantic. In Watkins’ film, sequences from an obviously unbalanced and unjust trial are juxtaposed with images of the punishment, a torturous race through a desert wasteland pursued by heavily armed police. In Vladimir and Rosa, the trial itself is the sole focus, staged in a minimally designed courtroom with ancillary sequences about the defendants’ attempts to hone and understand both what they’re fighting for and how they should fight. These segments are further interspersed with meta-commentary from Vladimir Lenin (Godard) and Karl Rosa (Gorin), who debate and discuss how best to represent the story of the Chicago Eight as a film. As with all of the DVG films, Vladimir and Rosa is as much about the process of making the film as it is about the subject itself. Godard and Gorin were not concerned only with the Chicago Eight and the unjust nature of their trial — they were equally concerned with the question of how to tell this story, how to use the cinema as an ideological tool for understanding the meaning of the Chicago Eight trial.

To this end, Godard and Gorin’s characters engage in a series of loosely comic skits in which they attempt to come to terms with the limits of cinematic representation. At one point, they stalk back and forth down the center of a tennis court as a pair of white-clad couples try to play around the pacing filmmakers. As they traverse the court, they speak into audio apparatuses that simultaneously amplify and distort their voices, creating disorienting echo effects that make their conversation difficult to follow. And yet this effect is precisely what they’re talking about: the difficulty of making themselves understood, the imprecision of language and images in dealing with complex ideological matters. This segment is an acknowledgment that their filmmaking equipment is both a gift and a curse. Just as it amplifies their voices, allowing them to spread their message further and more easily, it also distorts what they have to say, ironically blurring the message even as it is disseminated. Later, the filmmakers show up in disguise as bourgeois oppressors, Godard in a fetishistic cop uniform and Gorin draped in judge’s robes, the two of them playacting as authority figures. Playfully perverse as ever, Godard pulls a lengthy nightstick out of his unzipped fly as a demonstration of violent oppression (and its unspoken sexual component) in action.

Scenes like this counter the typical impression of Godard’s Dziga Vertov period as joyless or humorless. Indeed, in this film his gnomic sense of humor is especially lively, expressing itself in the form of blunt and pointed satire. Judge Himmler is a nasty but hilarious satirical concoction, living up to his fascist name with his cartoonish screech of a voice and his knee-jerk tendency to deny all of the defense’s requests and grant all of the prosecution’s. He seems to be on the verge of falling asleep whenever one of the defendants delivers a lengthy polemical speech, he pounds repeatedly for silence with his gavel until the wooden block on his desk goes flying through the air, and he doodles absent-mindedly on the Playboy spreads strewn across his bench. He’s an absurd caricature of corrupt authority, an editorial page cartoon who might as well have a label hung around his neck to complete the picture. Godard and Gorin are painting in primary colors here, but it works because their actors are fully engaged in this broad satirical project, especially the fiery Menzer and the always enjoyable Juliet Berto, who even casts knowing glances at the audience from time to time, as though to include them in on the joke. There’s a level of self-awareness about it all that rescues the film from its own polemical excesses, like its repeated reliance on Nazi comparisons.

This is, of course, one of the primary goals of the Dziga Vertov Group, to make films that question themselves, that engage with economic and social conditions at every level. Throughout the film, they question the commitment of various groups to radical revolution, asking what separates a hippie commune from the way its members lived outside of the commune, or how a supposedly radical lawyer like William Kuntsler, who defended the real Chicago Eight, can reconcile his radicalism with the comfort of his economic existence, his nice apartment and car. There’s a real potential here for Godard and Gorin to come off as sanctimonious, as self-righteous posers placing themselves on a higher intellectual plane than their subjects. But it’s obvious that they’re not exempting themselves from these inquiries, they’re not pretending that they have achieved any kind of revolutionary perfection. Their film is susceptible to the same failures, the same limitations, as any other project that attempts to exist outside of an all-pervasive system. What they’re after, more than anything, is a recognition of those limitations, a continual process of investigation and, above all, careful thought.

The film also engages directly with questions of race and gender, particularly in the characters of Bobby X and Anne Wiazemsky. The former, like his real-life counterpart Bobby Seale, is marginalized even at the trial, separated from the other defendants, continually denied his right to defend himself or speak for himself. He is, like Seale, chained to a chair, bound and gagged in court, a gesture of extreme restraint that robs him of his rights. He is, eventually, in the film as in life, excluded from the trial altogether, shuffled off into a separate trial so that the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven. The film dramatizes this absence in two ways: first, visually, through the use of an empty red chair that calls attention to Bobby’s absence, and second, abstractly, with the use of black frames. Throughout the DVG period, Godard frequently used black leader to convey absence and to separate images from one another, and here his voiceover self-consciously states that these interjections have finally achieved their purpose as a way of indicating the disappearance of a black revolutionary. Bobby is, alone among the film’s subjects, held up as exempt from Godard and Gorin’s commentary on revolutionary limits: because of his race, he is truly outside bourgeois society in a way that privileged whites like the filmmakers and other actors have to struggle and fight towards.

The film also acknowledges the differences in male and female understandings of oppression and class, and one scene attempts to bridge the inevitable gap by having Wiazemsky and Afonso take turns reading from a treatise written by an African woman. This is a film about trying to understand other ways of viewing the world: just as Godard and Gorin are approaching the experience of American activists through the story of the Chicago Eight/Seven, the film incorporates various attempts at understanding how issues of class, race, sex and violence might be seen differently by different kinds of people. As the climax of the Dziga Vertov Group’s ongoing project towards a revolutionary cinema, Vladimir and Rosa is a dense, confounding and strangely engaging work. The witty, dialectical reversals of Godard and Gorin drive the film, dealing intelligently with the various contradictions, oppositions and paradoxes at the heart of capitalist society. – Ron Howard

1.75GB | 1 h 36 min | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8B0853EB83FD5A8/Jean-Luc_Godard_&_Jean-Pierre_Gorin_-_(1970)_Vladimir_and_Rosa.mkv

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Groupe Dziga Vertov & Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin – Vladimir et Rosa (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Routine Pleasures makes of its investigation of “men and imagination” in 1980s America “a small-scale epic,” in Gorin’s words, a remake of Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939). Gorin’s principal subject is a group of model train enthusiasts who meet weekly at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in Southern California: their miniature landscapes preserve a lost, perhaps illusory America, and their obsession curiously entwines work and childhood. Gorin weaves this subject with another: his friend and mentor Manny Farber. Farber doesn’t appear, except in photographs; but his paintings and words (and such preoccupations as Jimmy Cagney) do; and Gorin, again assuming the persona of bemused investigator, shuttles between these strands with effortless ingenuity. The film’s intersecting narratives function like the crossing tracks of the train set, or the lines of force of Farber’s paintings, establishing nodes of resemblance and resonance; and all the while Gorin assesses American identity, its experience of geography and frontier, of masculinity, of history, of the relation of private and collective. Like Poto, Routine Pleasures is notable for its lightness and charm, although the polyphony here is if anything more intricate than in its predecessor. One should also mention Babette Mangolte’s excellent cinematography, marvellously nuanced both in black and white and in color. For Routine Pleasures, Gorin won the award for Best Experimental Documentary at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence.

1.20GB | 1h 20mn | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6B6A09F84C4FCC6/Jean-Pierre_Gorin_-_(1986)_Routine_Pleasures.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Jean-Pierre Gorin – Routine Pleasures (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Wind From the East” (“Le Vent D’Est”) is a very deep and highly political discussion about communism, capitalism, art, revolution, intellectualism, Maoism, USSR, tradition, paradigms, poetry… It’s hard to put it in terms of “it’s about…”, since the sequence of images is not based in any form of traditional narrative. In fact, it’s the very opposite of it, its essence sprouting from the need of subversion, a need directly connected to the social/historical/political/artistic context of the 60’s and 70’s: to show things in a different way leads the viewer to see differently, therefore to think differently. A experimental cut, poetic even, given the metaphorical quality of the images. The frontiers of film language fades and encounters those of other art forms, not to weaken the film unity nor its message, but to strengthen them both.

Quote:
Wind From the East is a product of Jean-Luc Godard’s involvement, during the late 60s and early 70s, with a collective filmmaking experiment known as the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is, typically of the films he made during this period, about ideas and simultaneously about how best to express those ideas through the medium of film. The film deals with the situation of a strike and, during its first half, methodically analyzes the different components of the strike: the workers, the radical students who encourage the strike while not quite being able to communicate in the same terms as the workers, the union delegates and other middlemen who preach moderation and compromise, the employers who demand the immediate resumption of work, the police state that suppresses the strike on behalf of capitalism.

All of these forces are allowed a voice on the film’s dense, verbose soundtrack: a collage of voices constantly talking, expressing different points of view on the strike and on anti-capitalism in general. Some voices, in sympathy with socialist ideas, advocate for small measures, for small steps and incremental advances, while other voices, representing the bourgeois and the capitalist classes, say that things are already good enough, or getting better, that the strike is accomplishing nothing, that it should end already. Both of these views are contrasted against the voice of the agitator, the radical, the militant, who denounces both those who say that the work is already done and those who say that the work should proceed more slowly. Godard doesn’t speak himself, but it is obvious that this last voice is representative of his own.

The film’s soundtrack essentially tells its story, subverting the conventional narrative expectations of the cinema. Its images, related only tangentially to this tale of strike and conflict, instead depict a pastoral rural setting through which various characters wander, dressed up to symbolically embody the various voices of the soundtrack. There is a bourgeois woman in a frilly dress, carrying an umbrella to shield herself from the bright sun. There is a union representative, a compromiser, dressed in a bold suit that makes him look like a reject from the Sgt. Pepper’s photo shoot. There is a policeman or army officer, dressed like an American cavalryman in a John Ford Western, with his musket and his saber and his horse, a real Hollywood icon of law and order. And there are the young radicals, the students and workers in their shabby clothes and long hair, opposing these forces of suppression and status quo. The whole thing has an aura of playfulness that belies the dead-serious ideas being expressed in the film. When the militants fight with the cavalryman, it’s staged as a play cowboys-and-Indians battle, like kids waging pretend war, the bullets never hitting anyone, the sword never slicing anyone up. When someone does bleed, it’s the bright red paint that Godard favored — along with an equally bold blue — in title cards and mise en scène alike in many of his films from the second half of the 60s on.

Godard’s playful references to the Western are made most explicit during a segment in which he declaims and analyzes the filmmaking theory behind his radical films of the late 60s and early 70s, opposing this filmmaking practice to Hollywood’s “realism.” In contrast to radical filmmaking, the voiceover declares, Hollywood works on the assumption that an image of a horse is not only the same thing as the horse, but is in fact better. Godard, drawing on Magritte’s infamous painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe, says the opposite: this is not a horse, this is not reality, this is not a real Union soldier, this is not an Indian. His joking deconstructions of Hollywood plots and characters in earlier films had already hinted at this point, and here, by toying with genre and narrative in only the roughest and most casual of ways, he is definitively rejecting the idea that what we see on a cinema screen should be taken at face value.

In another scene, Godard parodies the conventional understanding of cinema as a source of spectacle and entertainment. A man breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the camera in Italian, his words translated into French by the female narrator, describing the dark space of the theater and the people in it. The man ends his monologue by coming on to a pretty girl in the back of the theater, asking her to join him in his splendid rural surroundings. This is, as Godard sees it, the essential nature of the cinema, an act of seduction, asking audiences to believe in the space of the screen so completely that they wish to enter it.

Godard is suspicious of this cinema of seduction, but in some ways he can’t help recreate it as well. His images are at times calculated to produce boredom, to focus attention on the words pouring by on the soundtrack: static images of youths lying in the grass, their faces obscured by protruding shubbery, or endless takes of people trudging slowly through open fields. Godard is critiquing the pictorial sensibility, the presentation of images as beautiful, but his own images are often beautiful as well — one suspects that Godard’s aesthetic sensibilities frequently sabotage his theoretical embrace of ugly or functional images. At times he deviates from his subjects to film the leaves on trees nearby, a move dating back to 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which he wondered aloud why it was necessary to photograph a woman if the tree swaying in the breeze behind her was equally interesting.

Later, he stages a scene in a field of pink flowers that might have come from a Monet painting: a bourgeois woman sitting with umbrella over her head, chatting amiably with a man standing nearby. The two figures, particularly the woman, are obscured by long green stalks topped with pale pink buds, the kind of pointillist field of flowers beloved by Monet. On the soundtrack, the female narrator applies various historical and fictionalized names to the two figures, positioning them as representatives of bourgeois oppression: a white woman who falsely accuses a black man of rape and gets him lynched; a scientist who develops napalm to destroy Third World lands and people; a German Communist who urges moderation in responding to the encroaching Nazi threat before the Second World War. One of the names given to the woman in the image is the wife of Monet (although with the wrong name), along with a (presumably fabricated) description of her opposition to worker activism. Coupled with the pastoral beauty of this very Monet-like image, the message is obvious: beauty is to be distrusted, and the bourgeois people framed within such lovely images are often actors in racist violence, in fascism, in the suppression of the working class.

Interestingly, though the film is all about getting beyond the abstract and the theoretical into practical action, Godard really only runs into trouble when he tries to advocate for specific action, which for him at this point means revolutionary violence. Gone are the back-and-forth debates over violence that marked his La Chinoise, from a few years earlier. The advocacy of violence here is direct and troubling, complete with practical advice for militants — avoid leaving fingerprints — and images of homemade explosive devices constructed from various consumer goods. Godard does nod to Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers — which earlier in the film he’d criticized as an unforgivably Western take on Third World struggle — in his direct images of bourgeois businesspeople and children shopping or traveling, but the disconcerting advocacy of random violence is never resolved by counterarguments as it often was in Godard’s other films. Allowed to stand alone as it here, it’s the clearest example of Godard’s theoretical ideas existing in a vacuum where priorities and relativities are obviously skewed.

Elsewhere, though, the film is simply fascinating and complex, deeply engaged in dealing with the question of how to represent class struggle, how to deal with questions that aren’t fully resolved even for the people taking part in the struggle themselves. As with most of the Dziga Vertov Group films, Wind From the East is in part about its own process of production. At one point, in a convoluted meta maneuver that’s hilarious in its boldness, the narrator talks about how the next scene is a document of a conference that was called for the purposes of deciding how to film the next scene, with the subject being how to film an assembly of socialists and the ideas they present. Then the scene plays out exactly as described, with overlapping voices only occasionally resolving into an identifiable phrase, in French or Italian, while the camera spins around, revealing the sound crew, filming the trees, showing images of Stalin and Mao, panning among the students sprawled out in the grass at the gathering. The scene consists of filming the discussion that is intended to decide how to film the scene, a kind of filmmaking paradox that Godard obviously finds delightful, and invites us to find delightful as well. As the narrator says, the voices are confused and the ideas are not necessarily fully developed, but they’re trying to move forward, trying to express complicated ideas and incite change.

That describes the films of the Dziga Vertov Group in general. Although in practice the “group” generally consisted of Godard and his collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, the theory of the DVG was intended to create a whole new practice and ideology of making films. Wind From the East is thus constantly calling into question the methods of Godard and Gorin as well as the methods of Hollywood cinema. The narrator often speaks in the second person, as though talking about the filmmakers: always “you,” encompassing everyone in the failures and limitations of the film. When the narrator describes images of apartment blocks and suffering working class people as enforcing the bourgeois order, she might be describing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with all its similar images of towering urban buildings representing the alienation of its characters. Godard, who broke from his own past and his own oeuvre after 1968, is consistently looking forward in films like this, trying to start over from scratch. If he doesn’t always succeed, as the film itself frequently and explicitly acknowledges, the results are rarely less than fascinating anyway. Wind From the East is a rich, complex work, a work of bold ideas and slapdash, often goofy aesthetics, approaching the cinema not with a reverent aesthetic sensibility, but with an anything-goes mentality that promotes experimentation and risk-taking on every level.

Ed Howard

http://nitroflare.com/view/BEDDF0921E18A51/Le_vent_d%27est.1970.720p.BluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, English, Spanish, Japanese

The post Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin – Le vent d’est AKA Wind From the East (1970) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The film centers on a strike at a sausage factory which is witnessed by an American reporter and her French husband, who is a director of TV commercials. The film has a strong political message which outlines the logic of the class struggle in France in the wake of the May 1968 civil unrest. It also examines the social destruction caused by capitalism. The performers in Tout va bien employ the Brechtian technique of distancing themselves from the audience. By delivering an opaque performance, the actors draw the audience away from the film’s diegesis and towards broader inferences about the film’s meaning.

The factory set consists of a cross-sectioned building and allows the camera to dolly back and forth from room to room, theoretically through the walls. Another self-reflexive technique, this particular set was used because it forces the audience to remember that they are witnessing a film, breaking the fourth wall in a literal sense. This type of staging was appropriated from Jerry Lewis’s film The Ladies Man. Godard and Gorin use other self-reflexive techniques in Tout va bien such as direct camera address, long takes, and abandonment of the continuity editing system.

Extras included:
1. Interview – Jean-Luc Godard (1972)
— This rather strange interview shows us JLG, unshaven and in a bath robe talking about Tout Va Bien and the intentions they had with it. Although it’s only 7 minutes, Godard gives us a great deal of information about his ideas on film and the relationship between the workers and filmmakers……very interesting.
2. Interview – Jean-Pierre Gorin (2004)
— In 27 minutes Jean-Pierre Gorin talks about his collaboration with Godard, what the intentions of the Dziga Vertov group were (to make films politcally, not to make political films), how they worked and how their joint-venture ended. Of course it deals specifically with the making of Tout va Bien and Letter to Jane. It is a nice start for my biggest release ever.

3.67GB | 1h 35m | 956×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7DF57E4149A768E/Tout.va.bien.AKA.All’s_Well.1972.576p.Bluray.AAC.x264-LAA.mkv https://nitro.download/view/ADCE6766977B649/Tout_Va_Bien_(1972)_Extras.rar

Language(s):French,English
Subtitles:English

The post Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin – Tout va bien AKA Everything’s All Right [+extras] (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.

331MB | 51m 59s | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/754FDD96C6BFFD4/Letter.to.Jane.An.Investigation.About.a.Still.1972.576p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin – Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.