JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (1994) User Reviews

Beauty, Reflection

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 18 May 2016]

Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.

Stephen Holden describes the film as "fascinating but often impenetrable collages of densely packed images and poetic musings woven with wrenchingly beautiful fragments of classical music." Indeed, that is very much what this amounts to, a mixture of sounds and images, not necessarily in any real narrative form.

What is striking is how the film has a title suggesting it is Godard looking back on his career at the end of his life. And yet, he was only 64, which generally is not considered too terrible old. Those in the movie business often work much later. In fact, as now (2016), Godard is 85 and still very much alive, not to mention still actively making films. His role in the business is not quite finished.

complexity with grace

[rino-5 · 10/10 · 2 July 2000]

This film, a companion piece to Hélas pour moi, is so rich in theme and idea that one can only begin to write about it. Godard's artistry (which as always, is total) works like a gadfly across many levels, and so maybe the best way to go about this is to list its main themes.

* Swiss/French Nationality (father, homeland and identity)

* Semiotics of Imagery (composition and idea, the duality of reality, technology)

* Editing (blindness and sight)

* Perception (phenomenology, the humanity of the image)

* Music (the layered nature of sound association/interpretation)

* Politics (current affairs and historical, Europe/America)

* History (literature: in quotation - Rimbaud, Diderot, Kafka etc. and socio-political)

* Oeuvre (reference and statement, responsibility and reputation)

* Time (memory and culture as co-dependent, predictions and 'passing', death.)

* Love (the portrait GIVES, JLG as affect)

* Meditation (the reflective writer, interpretation & truth, translation and puns)

* Cinema Industry (distributors, censors/classification)

* Tennis (Proust)

• With so many themes, all patiently painted in close to an hour, we should admire Godard for his patent fluency. Even in the early 90s he is still at the height of his powers (despite the 70s rumours), much like the peak of the Baroque period several centuries ago.

rino breebaart

My twentieth Godard..

[chaos-rampant · 31 March 2011]

In my ongoing quest to penetrate the mind of Godard, I figured few films would be more poignant than this self styled portrait. This is not merely about what he has or is willing to say on the subject because we can glean that from any number of the films he made during that period, JLG/JLG is no more a self portrait in that aspect than Nouvelle Vague or the Histoire(s) films, but how does he frame himself, literally?

In the finale of Children Play in Russia from the previous year he left us with an image of himself stubbornly cranking at a camera to make it work. What images here? Two stand out for me, patterns that recur: Godard the old crone, a sunken face in the dim light of his library, ruminating quotes from old dusty books. Then Godard the kid, excitedly a prankster, now preparing to edit a film or playing tennis with a wry smile. He feels comfortable in both roles, or we wouldn't be shown. Both pertain here.

He begins this with a childhood photo of himself. In the voice-over he's anxiously rehearsing for the occasion, will he be judged a success or a failure? JLG/JLG gives us a fascinating rare glimpse of how he shapes his thought, this should be a treasured artifact for the avid Godard fan. Usually we arrive at the process too late, when the thought has been reduced to a provocative slogan. For example, "the rule of Old Europe is to destroy the art of living". Here we can see the method by which we arrive at that admission, born schematically on a piece of paper.

The less said about the childishness with the star of David though, the better. An embarrassing failure of humour, if it was intended as such. But having stuck with him for so long, I view these fallacious missteps with a hint of sympathy.

But the vantage point I get is this: why does Godard feel he matters, at least enough to pose for his own self portrait?

It's folly to expect a very lucid picture, or a particularly honest one, but it's important for me to see how the question is formulated, what conditions is it posed under. For this I must go back to the premise I had touched on in one of my first Godard writings, his ouevre seen as the koan of the Zen Buddhists, the enigmatic phrase that means nothing in the face of it yet demands an answer by the initiate, the answer again meaning nothing, serving only as proof that the mind is unlocked.

To my surprise I discovered as I was watching this that I could read the typically inscrutable musings like they were a simple text. What used to demand real effort of concentration, now flows naturally. The question then is formed by two admissions, both magnificent.

One is the realization of the illusion of ego: a man who feels cold says "I am cold", but in the silence before and after the utterance only the cold body exists. The other is the promise of love: promising to love, a man becomes the embodiment of love, the only reward being this; after the hardships of a lifetime, he can look back and see that he has loved.

What I get from all this, is the state of awareness that emerges. The mind is not transcended yet, and the Buddhist koan remains inscrutable, but it does not dictate desire and ego anymore. Like the citations that burrow his works, his early New Wave period then exists as an original text (itself the product of citations) to be dismantled, a gradual constant process of the shedding and destruction of self. For the majority of viewers this early period is a stumbling block, a hindrance, whereas as a lot of Godard fans conclude the coming of age happens in the 90's. This is his truly great period (and onwards perhaps).

Having pursued the political chimera that failed him, he knows this is not our saving grace so he turns inwards. Having pursued, upon that realization, the mind, he discovers that only illusions inhabit it.

Godard matters then because he came this far. I'm curious as ever to see where he goes from here.

The postmodern poet of words and images

[vicentiugarbacea · 10/10 · 26 August 2006]

A poet is a man who is a master of words. He uses them to express life in an artistic way, basically. A filmmaker is a man who seeks to express life artistically in a visual manner through certain techniques specific to film. There is a man, "A man, nothing but a man, no better than any other, but no other better than he" who is a double poet, a master of the words and a master of the moving images. His poetry is both literary and visual. His cinema is a double poetry. JLG/JLG Self-portrait of December made in 1995 is a work of double poetry. Jean Luc Godard is raising several questions about art, culture and life. He seeks his place in this world. It is not an autobiography but a self-portrait as he states. A new type of self-portrait which is like mixing a self-portrait by Van Gogh and a poem by Walt Whitman. I have the image of Van Gogh's blue tones peasant-like self -portraits with yellow straw-hat and Song of Myself by Walt Whitman. What is art after all? "Art is like fire: it lives from what it burns answers" Godard.

"Now, I have to sacrifice myself so that trough me the word "love" means something, so that love exists on earth."

Man commits himself to living without ulterior motive

[tfmorris · 10/10 · 7 January 2007]

Will you take seriously what is before you in the present moment or will you see it merely as fitting into the scheme of things?

The colors you see are just in your mind. You feel like you are looking through glass at the exterior world, but all the colors are just a result of a message from you optic nerve. Goddard is a dualist; he believes that there is an outward reality that corresponds to the inner representations. He vows to love that reality, to take it seriously. You do not invade Iraq when you take your present situation seriously. When you invade Iraq you are relating to your scheme of things; you would like to make some alterations in the scheme. That children will be frightened by your bombs seems insignificant in comparison to the grander scheme of thing, if it even crosses your mind.

The end of the movie corresponds to the reference to Being and Time near the beginning. We need to move beyond thinking about how we are judged by others (either as being up there or down there). The Dick Cheneys of the world would be trapped in this concern for THEM as they rearrange the scheme of things. This could be seen quite clearly in the first President Bush.

Our minds present us with 24 or so different still pictures every second. Our lives (apart from satori or nirvana) are like a flip book.

If I am all there in the present moment won't I end up on welfare? Don't I have to look out for number one? Godard will take his chances. This is not because there is something great about being natural, and it is not because there is something awful about being artificial. It is because he loves. And then when we care about something we build up a predisposition to care about the same sort of thing. At Republic 485d Plato illustrates this phenomenon by talking of channels in our souls. The more water goes down one channel and makes it deeper, the less water will flow down the other channels. Sainthood would come at the end of this process, but the key moments are at the beginning and in the subsequent reaffirmations. If you try to be pure in the present often enough (and with real passion, Kierkegaard would add) you'll end up with an inclination to be that way in the future. It will be easier once you've got the inclination. Then what other people think of you will not be such a deep channel. The real struggle is now.

Postmodern film great for postmodern intellectuals

[mel_tuset · 5/10 · 17 May 2005]

I really don't want to be to hard with this movie just because I didn't liked it. The film has very interesting ideas and thoughts but well, they are just to boring for me. It is a typical postmodern movie which in my opinion would be better understood on a book. After all, self portraits are more usual found in paintings or who knows, perhaps even books, but films are a visual form of art. The film could be compared with Bergman's films because they both handle existentialism and are a good sample of the post modernism wave. Godard's self portrait is not an autobiography,it reflects how he feels about several subjects which include death and cinema. In my opinion, it is like he would have plugged a tape recorder into his brain in order to record his thoughts and then put this tape together with some images to produce a film. Perhaps if Virginia Wolf had lived in the 60's she would had been a very good friend of Godard and instead of becoming a writer, she could have become a filmmaker. So,I guess this movie is for the very intellectual kind of person who can bare a 102 Minutes boring to dead film, or, perhaps if you rent it, you can press the "stop" button every 10 minutes in order to think about what you just heard and then continue with the film, otherwise, you'll get lost with so much ideas in such a short period of time. oh! and Just for the record, I do like other Godard Films.

a fascinating, precisely self-indulgent mess

[Quinoa1984 · 5/10 · 24 August 2007]

This is not exactly the kind of film one would ever, ever, ever see in any multiplex on the planet- or for that matter in most of the art-house theaters. It's a home movie/essay/rumination/poetic ramble-on from the cranky crane of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, who filmed the bulk of this his Autoportrait in December in his home. We see him look over photos, write, pontificate about the disconnect of art in society, the nature of semantics, and so on and so on. Needless to say it isn't a complete waste of time from a filmmaker who's as equally talented and daring in his attacks on film style and method as he is a celluloid masturbating wild-man. I did find many of Godard's personally supervised camera set-ups, the tone of the shots, how long each one rests on himself in full ego-bound and ego-questioning glory, at least watchable and at best interesting in how there is some kind of form to the puzzle that Godard presents the audience.

And yet it is, of course, a lot of times impenetrable because of his fervent disavowal of film as something that should be in the slightest bit conventional. I don't mind the central idea behind this approach to film-making, certainly from someone as confident- or at worst arrogant- as the bad boy of French cinema. But try as I might, what one ends up with is still more frustration than anything that can be easily taken away from it. Long gone are the trips into satirizing genre or deconstructing the narrative (yet keeping it) with philosophical and poetic tangents often from books. There is something worthwhile going on in JLG/JLG, but your guess is as good as mine. May be a masterpiece to the most stuck-up film buffs (not that one needs to be, per-say, but I'd imagine mostly snobs who push aside all other conventional product as pure waste), yet there is a reason it's mostly in obscurity as opposed to one of the Criterion releases.

feelings translated into images

[ncrln · 22 March 2004]

This was the movie I wish I had made. To watch it in a theater was quite an experience and I was so moved by it that I stayed seated and watched it for a second time. The movie is, as the title says, a self portrait. Images of places the author loves, music that moves him, pieces of films' dialogs, quotes, objects, all put together. It is like looking into one's soul through what he loves. I was lucky because I have a similar taste in literature, art, cinema and music, and overall the experience was one of self exploring. Otherwise I don't think I would have found it the least interesting. It is a film about the author himself, and should be regarded as a film and as an audio-visual self portrait.

just about unwatchable

[Thomas-58 · 5 April 2003]

To see this work is to realize what becomes of a man whose monumental contributions to his craft/art came many decades prior. It's a shame that Jean-Luc Godard, grandmaster of the French New Wave, who once brought unprecedented spunk and verve to his films of the early 60's, all the while shattering and redefining most accepted cinematic notions for a new generation of filmgoers and filmmakers, now is forced to deal with his downfall. Yet he refuses to acknowledge the glaringly obvious fact that his magic touch has just about totally dissipated, for he has become so forlorn in his contempt of accepted societal expectations of film and in his need to further push his musings that the cinema is dead, that he is stuck within himself.

In JLG/JLG, we get many, MANY quotes from philosophers and other high-thinkers, put to what use? Beats me. Juxtaposed with shots of rolling hills, ocean waves crashing onto rocky shores, Godard toying around with rolls of film, writing on large pads of paper, and then playing tennis, it all ads up to a nice variety of static images. Pedantic in tone and crusty in narration, the film nevertheless abruptly dispenses one though provoking moment when Godard explains his take on metaphysics via two interlocking triangles that form a 6-pointed star.

Ultimately, I left the film with just one clear idea, albeit likely not one that Godard had intended - it is evident that for Godard, life does not imitate art; as, unlike his best films, he is going out with a whimper instead of a bang. Final Grade: D