"Made in U.S.A."

By David Hudson on 01/07/2009

"Jean-Luc Godard's 'Made in U.S.A.' is not the celluloid holy grail, but it's close enough," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Four decades after its local premiere at the 1967 New York Film Festival, the least-seen, most quintessential movie of Godard's great period gets an American distributor and even a limited run." The distributor is Rialto Pictures and the run begins on Friday at New York's Film Forum and carries on through Los Angeles and Boston.

"Godard is one of those unfortunate artists who has not been well served by his fan base, and if you have the impression that 'Made in U.S.A.' (or 'Alphaville,' Week-end,' or 'Tout Va Bien') has more in common with an undergraduate critical theory seminar than with the MGM musicals and pulp detective stories that were Godard's inspiration, you are not alone," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "With forty years worth of philosophers, hagiographers, fashion designers and video-store fanboys (thanks a lot, Quentin Tarantino) guarding these pictures as their own, it no longer feels possible to recognize what was so joyous, liberating, and fresh about these movies in the first place - what was so damned new and fun."

Updated through 1/16.

"Of all [of the late novelist Donald] Westlake's cinematic accomplices, Godard was perhaps the least grateful," writes Darrell Hartman, explaining in Interview why the film has been so difficult to see for so many years. "Westlake, to him, was from a different (and somewhat hostile) planet. But he was also a cinema-friendly writer, and it's possible that Godard, a pastiche artist with a thing for crime thrillers, intended this very idiosyncratic adaptation as a compliment. Even if he never paid for the rights."

Some "Immediate Impressions" from Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door: "Too easy to weight 'Made in U.S.A.' to the personal: certainly it bears the scars of the Godard/[Anna] Karina breakup, but it's more than that; as it is more than a politicized response to the Mehdi Ben Barka affair; as it is more than a flippant dismissal of American foreign policy (signified by two Cahiers critics, Jean-Pierre Biesse and Sylvain Godet, playing 'Richard Nixon' and 'Robert McNamara')."

On a related note, Godard's "La Chinoise" screens at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 29 and 30.

Update: David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook: "Like 'My Life to Live' (1962), 'Made in USA' is, on all levels, about a woman trying to live an independent existence from the world and yet one devoted to it; Karina's opening lines, spoken as she wakes up, and written (in slightly different order) by Samuel Beckett in a little abstract story on the anxiety of influence and the eternality of love the year before, haunt everything that follows."

Updates, 1/8: First, an online listening tip. "Godard's vital art chastens this strange period when cinema has been divided into empty commercialism and elite esoterica," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "'Made in U.S.A.' is a tonic experience; its style is both vibrant and severe like Godard's 1985 'Detective.' But it's also Godard's most soulful movie." Aaron Hillis talks with White for GreenCine Daily.

Jason Jude Chan for Flavorwire: "The haute and household fashions, the first-edition design of a book jacket, the way a cigarette is lit at so-and-so a distance - Godard's aesthetic choices are out-and-out gorgeous even when his intellectual pursuits get fogged in translation."

Updates, 1/9: "Between 1964 and 1967 Mr Godard directed a mind-boggling nine feature films, completing one every few months in a frenzy of productivity that blurred the line between prolific and compulsive," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "That a handful of these films have become touchstones - classics even - is one of the jokes that history likes to play now and then as it transforms bloody-minded aesthetic radicals into canonical figures."

"The title isn't arbitrary," writes David Fear in Time Out New York: Godard's paying tribute to the B-movie pleasures of our studios (the film is dedicated 'to Nick [Ray] and Sam [Fuller]') and condemning the Cold War imperialism imported from the USA. The new 35mm Scope print heightens Raoul Coutard's cinematography and Anna Karina's beauty (this would be the star's last film with her ex-husband) to dizzying degrees; it's as if you're seeing Godard's in-living-color commentary for the very first time."

"Is 'Made in U.S.A.' itself just collage of mod art movements of its time?" David Phelps places stills next to a few examples in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"'Made in U.S.A.' is notoriously unfaithful to its source novel," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine, "but there are actually a surprising number of scenes that come directly from the book, suggesting that Godard actually read the entire thing (more than can been said about his 'King Lear'). In fact, Karina comes closer than either [Lee] Marvin or [Mel] Gibson to nailing Parker's cold professionalism. Don't be fooled by her mod fashion - behind that block-pattern primary-colored dress is a gat just waiting pop you in the gut."

Updates, 1/10: László Szabó plays Paul Widmark, "the stoic but dogged perhaps-ally of Karina's heroine Paula Nelson," writes Glenn Kenny, introducing a terrific round of recollections from Szabó at the Auteurs' Notebook. "As Szabó himself notes, he's one of only two actors who worked with each of the most prominent directors to emerge from the Cahiers scene and create the so-called Nouvelle Vague."

"Produced at the same time as 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her' (literally - 'Two or Three Things' was shot in the mornings and its counterpart in the afternoons), Godard's 1966 'Made in U.S.A.' serves as a sort of cinematic B-side to the far more canonical former film, a playful, yet ominous, inversion of its companion piece's Lego block-colored realism - Godard even suggested, in the spirit of Faulkner's 'The Wild Palms,' that the two films be projected together in alternated reels." Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot: "'Two or Three Things' gets the good stuff, the philosophic, sociological, and semiotic highlights - haunting voice-over musings on being and nothingness, investigations into economic and spiritual prostitution, Bouvard and Pécuchet-style/Dadaist book excerpt mishmashes - while 'Made in U.S.A.' takes up generic experimentation and allusion, the kind of through-the-looking-glass venture into the subversive possibilities of Hollywood B-movies that Godard, on the cusp of his political allegiance to Marxist anti-commercial filmmaking, was just beginning to lose interest in. Needless to say, it's a qualitative imbalance to the often-confused 'Made in U.S.A.'s considerable disadvantage."

Update, 1/11: "From its red, white, and blue titles (which conveniently reference the national hues of both France and the States) onward, the unabashedly Pop-era 'Made in USA' presents an unsettlingly bright film noir en couleur - or as one character puts it, 'Walt Disney with blood.'" Ed Halter for Artforum: "The total effect is of a France invaded by Yankee pop culture and cold-war intrigue - itself a 'work in progress' - mutated into a Franco-American hybrid, both vibrant and violent, but unsure of its destiny."

Update, 1/16: "And freedom, when everything's fenced into place?" asks David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Godard has two answers, at least."

Tags: Anna Karina, Jean-Luc Godard