Over twenty years ago, in the spring of 1989, I took a seminar in graduate school called "Narrative Complexity in Film." The class was taught by Robert Carringer, who was (and still is) an expert on Orson Welles. In the semester, we studied three auteurs--Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder--whose movies were deemed by Carringer to be "narratively complex." It's no exaggeration to say that this seminar changed my life. I had never seen a film by Godard before, but I fell in love with his work and ended up writing my dissertation about the reception of Godard's films in America.
The fifth week into the class, in the middle of our Godard unit, we watched Weekend (1967), Godard's surrealist diatribe against capitalism. The plot of Weekend is simple: a husband and wife, both supremely shallow and evil people, travel from Paris to the French countryside to visit the wife’s sick mother. (In fact, during this trip the husband and wife plan to murder the sick mother and claim her inheritance.) What makes Weekend so bizarre isn't this set-up, but the individual episodes that the husband and wife get involved in on their journey. They get trapped in an excruciatingly long traffic jam (shot as a single long-take tracking shot); they meet a hitchhiker who calls himself God and turns a field of wrecked cars into a flock of sheep; they light Emily Bronte on fire; etc., etc. I found Weekend endlessly inventive the first time I saw it (which was in Carringer's seminar), and to this day it remains one of my favorite films.
Near the end of Weekend--and don’t worry about spoilers, since Weekend doesn’t try to create any kind of conventional suspense in viewers--the husband and wife are captured by a band of cannibalistic hippies. There's an amazing shot at the hippie's camp, near a lake. The camera tracks horizontally back and forth, right and left, across a tableau of a drummer pounding a fast beat. Meanwhile, various members of the hippie commune wander in and out of camera range and a voice on the soundtrack recites portions of the Comte de Lautremont's Les Chants de Maldoror ("I salute you, Old Ocean!"). The scene ends with the camera zooming out to the water, filling the screen with blue and sky.
The first time I saw this scene, I was so moved I cried. I still remember sitting in the uncomfortable auditorium seat, my head full of feelings and ideas ("Godard’s camera is inscribing a thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic!") that challenged my definition of what a film could be. I also remember hearing a noise behind me, faint at first and then louder...and I remember my surprise when I realized that the noise was the snoring of another student in the seminar: ZZZZZZZZZZZZ. But that was a valuable lesson too: it taught me that people don't necessarily respond to movies like I do, and that I need to remember that one person’s epiphany is another person’s nap.
And you? What's the strangest film you've ever seen, and under what conditions did you see it?
