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.

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.

Two voices. One French, one American. A political tract concerning the issues of Communism in the workplace and ideals of freedom and equality, post-May, 1968, is recited back and forth over an obscured image of bodies slumbering in what appears to be a garden. The image is pastoral and idyllic in presentation, suggesting an almost abstract quality devoid of time and place. After a series of static images that simply observe these scenarios – largely with no real movement within the frame – we see a small group of actors preparing themselves for a film. As we continue, these actors, who speak Italian and are dressed in period costume, wander through this idyllic location as the narration goes on to discuss a cinema of revolution and the history of politics in cinema dating as far back as Sergei Eisenstein. Through this, the filmmakers are able to reflect on the notions of politics and history in both a cultural and cinematic sense; creating in the process a film that collapses elements of genuine historical fact, and superimposes them over the struggles and issues of the present day.

Two voices. Both French. The film here is one of a handful of collaborative efforts between the filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who under the creative banner of The Group Dziga Vertov, would produce a number of essay-based films that looked specifically at contemporary political issues from a Marxist/Leninist perspective. Unlike Godard’s more socially aware films, pre-1967, The Dziga Vertov Group would reject conventional filmmaking practices altogether; focusing instead on a deconstructive approach that relied heavily upon the use found sounds and images that were cut together with the appropriate use of voice over and ironic screen-titles that not only offer some kind of background to the events unfolding, but also worked against the audience, distracting and disarming the viewer from what was happening on screen. This makes the viewing process even more difficult, with the already weighty bombardment of spoken information and the miscommunication of the two voices already alienating those of us unfamiliar with Communist manifestos or the working conditions in Europe in 1969.

Despite the general ideology of the Dziga Vertov Group, which was to reject the claim of authorship that Godard and his generation of critics had previously helped to define, the images of Le vent d’est (The East Wind/The Wind from the East, 1970) are typical of the man who gave us La chinoise (1967), and later Le gai savoir (The Joy of Learning, 1969), with the pastoral settings suggesting elements of the final act of Week End (1967), while the continual punctuation of high-rise apartment buildings and the wheels of industry that feature in the second half of the film call to mind a similar devise used in the earlier 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, 1967). However, whereas those films had used clever visual metaphors and deconstructive film techniques to tell stories as a means of conveying socio-political satire, they did so with a vague semblance of narrative.

Here, the film is mostly a continual stream of thought over some beautifully composed images. Naturally, there are numerous other devises used that are typical of Godard’s work, both before and after his period with “The Group”, such as the use of repeated images (or motifs), looped dialog (so that the same words or phrases are repeated a number of times throughout), inter-titles (here, illegibly scrawled in marker pen), the presentation of the camera as part of the proceedings (the “general assembly”, as Godard puts it) and the natural facade of cinema as presented by print damage, spliced frames and deliberate mistakes (again, the deconstructive notion of cinema as truth).

Without question, the images of the film are simply astounding, and are easily amongst the most beautiful and provocative scenarios that Godard has ever created; with the single image of these ancient, anachronistic figures, Bergman-like in their presentation of white gowns against green hills, wandering through these glorious fields being a particularly astounding sight, eventually giving way to the more aggressive, deconstructive images of mass graves, construction and the general process of film production itself, pushing us back towards the direction of Week End. However, despite the brilliance of Godard’s filmmaking and the range of his ideas, Le vent d’est – like many of these Dziga Vertov Group films – is incredibly difficult to recommend to a potential audience, despite the obvious quality of its production. The continual bombardment of voice-over narration – delivered in a flat, rapid fire Parisian (American?) accent from an unaccredited voice actress – reminds us that this is a visual essay, presented in the form of a radical, experimental film. As a result, most viewers will find the film a complete chore; more so than any other Godard film, all of which require a certain level of cooperation from the audience, but tend to reward our efforts with an element of human concern.

Even when presented in such a way as to be completely obvious to the point of almost agitprop sloganeering, Le vent d’est nonetheless retains some level of ambiguity; drawing parallels between the two winds – the east and the west – and the voices on the soundtrack, with Godard and Gorin again using the film to investigate the present day struggle by way of the past (a past as represented by the cinema itself). The film isn’t to be approached in the conventional sense, but rather digested in two or three single sittings, with any real attempt to interpret the film, or pick up on every single topical reference, really requiring a lot more energy and perception as illustrated in this post. Arguable, the film is dated in the political sense – having now become a period piece that looks at a specific era in twentieth-century existence – however, it is also a truly uncompromising work from a collective of filmmakers attempting to communicate something radical through the medium of film. Even if you disregard the experience, you have to marvel at the presentation of Godard’s images, and the conviction of his ideals. (lightsinthedusk.blogspot.com)

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/D5BBB6582978D3E/le-vent-d-est.avi

Eng srt:
http://artsubs.wz.cz/subs/godard.1970.le.vent.dest.en.zip

Language(s):French
Subtitles:english

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