Jean-Luc Godard
1969
54 minutes
Finally, some noise! You're going to fall in love with the way this film sounds after the first ten minutes in a factory. This makes you want to pause the film and listen to a Judas Priest album to warm up and then restart just to listen to the metal. Hypnotic factory noises with occasional readings from The Communist Manifesto. A naked woman on screen (again you had to bring your laptop to the coffee shop...) while someone reads political tracts. A television news reader reads an old-school right-wing reactionary tract ranting about communists and socialists ruining the world. Then we get some cringey Beatles parodies, turning them into filk songs from someone's labor solidarity meetup. And finally we get the closing image of a few minutes of fists punching through a bunch of Union Jacks. Fuck yeah! You're ready to put the vegan Docs in your closet that you never quite finished breaking in back on your feet and then go start an Oi band after watching this. Let's go find the asshole that sprayed NF propaganda shit from a stencil onto your back alley and give him a good stiff kick in the yarbles!
Fifty-four minutes this would have been if you didn't replay the beginning part a few times for emphasis while on an exercise bike. (This is a great film if you want to pedal furiously for forty-five minutes and then cool down.)
You're a fan of sound collage, and you are happy to have some noise experiments under your belt. You have a side project as "Crabcakes the Christian Clown" and put out ambient/noise tracks under that name. Most of these started as conceptual projects, but you decided to actually record them (with a minimum of effort), mostly so you could claim to people that you also perform as Crabcakes the Christian Clown. The first two you recorded were all sound collage pieces formed from found sound/resourced pornography. One track is an hour-long endeavor from an especially formulaic series of pornographic gonzo videos which all share the same obnoxious narrator/cameraman talking throughout. You layered about a dozen of these on top of each other and it literally sounds like hell. It sounds like a gymnasium full of people having rough, unpleasant sex while onlooking idiots shout encouragement and instructions.
Another shorter piece, entitled "Who Are You" is nothing but the interview parts of a bunch of first time/casting videos, most of them for extremely mature or very large women. The videos themselves are mostly innocuous, with some spicy personal questions thrown in the mix.
Another project is called "Ted", which is a simultaneous overlay of about a dozen TED talks at once of about fifteen minutes apiece. It sounds like a dozen people mainsplaining how business works at once to you. Another is similarly composed of model train videos.
Your favorite of the bunch, however, is a track composed of 70 or so instructional videos on how to make balloon animals. All of them share the same soundtrack, with a unique beginning, repeating musical theme, and a closing tune played on a calliope. Every time the calliope music sounds, a balloon animal gets its soul. This is what you do in your spare time for fun. So of course you're going to love this film. Of course you are.
Time to choose something different: