Talk:King Lear (1987 film)

Starting from Paumanok
Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops.
 * --Virginia Woolf, The Waves

MinorProphet (talk) 23:34, 22 January 2017 (UTC)>

Woolf's and Shakespeare's text
Are the sections on "Woolf's text" and "Shakespeare's text" really needed in this article? Their content do not appear to bear on this film at all, and the material would more naturally belong in the main article on the play. Furness' commentary, in 1880, on Shakespeare's play sit rather awkwardly in an article about a 1987 Godard movie. If the material is kept, it should probably be rewritten such that it doesn't appear Furness had a crystal ball. :-) --Xover (talk) 14:14, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Maybe he did. Please delete "As you wish, as you wish. As you which, as you witch, As you watch, as you watch, as you watch! Witchcraft. As you... er... As you like it. That's it. That's it! As You Like It. (00:17:38) :-)MinorProphet (talk) 06:11, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * (oh, and thanks for fixing those missing refs too!) --Xover (talk) 14:00, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Missing full refs
The following two short refs are missing full refs.


 * Loshitzky 1995
 * Seton 1952

Cheers, --Xover (talk) 14:41, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ MinorProphet (talk) 05:53, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Sardonic parody? Shurely not.
Lede, as of 13 March 2017 :
 * "King Lear is a 1987 film; a sardonic parody and adaptation of Shakespeare's play..."

Defs. from various online dictionaries:
 * Sardonic:
 * "Grimly mocking or cynical." Ultimately from sardanios, used by Homer to describe bitter or scornful laughter.


 * "Characterized by bitter or scornful derision; mocking; cynical; sneering."


 * "Showing little respect in a humorous but unkind way, often because you think that you are too important to consider or discuss a matter"


 * "Characterized by irony, mockery, or derision." Which also says "If you describe someone as sardonic, you mean their attitude to people or things is humorous but rather critical."

I would tend to assert that there are few more respectful films than this one, which is imbued (it seems to me) with an almost ecstatic understanding of high art and the function it fulfils in binding the various disparate elements of The Human Condition™ tightly together, but not so obviously so that the man on the top of the Clapham omnibus would necessarily notice.

I would suggest another adjective, or perhaps removing it altogether might be best, since—unsourced—it remains a contentious matter of opinion. Please feel free to remove any other POV statments which have crept into this article.

This is a parody of King Lear, including: GLOUCESTER Edmund! Do you think your mother was interested only in the money I gave her?
 * Parody:

EDMUND No! No! She was also after the money you didn't give her!

GLOUCESTER I'm ashamed to hear you talk that way!

EDMUND I could talk better if you'd raise my allowance.

GLOUCESTER You always want money for being good. Why can't you like your legitimate brother Edgar? He                        never wants anything for being good.

EDMUND Yeah, he's good for nothing.

I would suggest that a parody [enough online definitions] pokes knowing fun at its subject; and the more you know about it, the funnier it is: but Godard (I susepct) is in deadly earnest here. Have you watched JLG/JLG? It's the same thing but differently expressed, like walking round a sculpture.

Thus, I propose: "King Lear is a 1987 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play directed in the style of experimental French New Wave cinema." MinorProphet (talk) 07:42, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Godard's own words?
I've been unable to find a source for this sentence: These readings are sometimes thought to be Godard's own words. So I'm moving it here for now. Can you dig up anything? --Xover (talk) 08:34, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Haha, not really: sorry if you have been hunting around for this particular phrase. People either get King Lear, or they don't. You sometimes come across negative reviews/blogs/film websites which criticise the dialogue, thinking that everything which isn't by Shakespeare must be Godard's own personal ideas. As the article demonstrates, there is almost nothing by Godard himself. I just stuck the sentence in to sum up this unenlightened attitude, typified - I think - by Vincent Canby's review, but I've seen worse. The sentence is entirely superfluous, I was just having a general dig at those types of reviewers - for example this one - but maybe they'll get it one day. Thanks anyway. >MinorProphet (talk) 11:52, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks. But it also seems likely that someone has expressed that sentiment somewhere we could cite, so if you happen to run across it… --Xover (talk) 12:36, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Aha, found it, after 4½ years! Engaged on another task, I recently found a couple of quotes from the 1920s about montage which seemed to sum up the whole concept better than I have ever found it expressed: and added a refnote here. I think that King Lear repays repeated study, and I wondered if the Rotten Tomatoes score had gone up at all recently. I read through all the reviews again, and some of the things they say are genuinely hilarious: "King Lear could never be the starting point for those keen to learn of Godard’s work, but it’s innovative." (Simon Columb, BFI Review) - as I suggested some time ago in the following post, Lear is an object lesson in making a New Wave film, a detailed instruction manual which shows how to do it, but does not tell - which is the purpose of the article.

Geoff Andrew in Time Out complains about "Another of his essays on the impossibility of making movies in our time, this has all the dreariness of a pathologist's dictated notes." but this merely unknowingly confirms the significance of Pluggy's farts and Horace's riduculus mus. Anyway, here is the culprit which I think my sentence These readings are sometimes thought to be Godard's own words originally referred to: Desson Howe in the Washington Post, who unsurprisingly misquotes Reverdy's "An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant, and true.":
 * Sellars appears determined to get through, whether it makes sense or not. Godard, as the dreadlocked professor, veers between didactic pretentiousness and self-mockery, talking from the corner of his mouth and sprouting such Godard-isms as, "An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic but because the cessation of ideas is decent and true." - Blimey, that was over 14 years ago since I quoted it...

I reckon that a "Godard-ism" is an excellent example of the typically gnomic sort of thing Godard might say, but spoken by someone who has no idea what Godard is attempting to achieve or where the words come from, and no interest in finding out either. Season's greetings, an' all that. MinorProphet (talk) 22:49, 21 December 2022 (UTC)


 * @MinorProphet: Awesome! Thanks for not giving up / forgetting about this. And season greetings to you and yours too! Xover (talk) 10:11, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Current lede
"King Lear is an 1987 international experimental film directed by Jean-Luc Godard," etc.

I would agree that King Lear partly meets the definition of an experimental film as described in the linked article; but said article doesn't even mention Godard. Thus: is King Lear actually an experimental film? I would tend to suggest not. If anything it is an instruction manual, a 'how-to' for someone who might desire to make a film in the style of the avant-garde Nouvelle vague. Sure, KL has the appearance of an experimental film: but every single visual technique which JLG used in King Lear had been fully explored for some eighty or ninety years since the first flickering moving images were cast on a screen, and since sounds could be made to accompany the celluloid cells. But appearances can be deceptive, as the film makes plain. By the time Godard made KL, he was a highly experienced director. Just because KL appears to be a bit weird, I would suggest that doesn't make it—of itself—'experimental'. MinorProphet (talk) 21:23, 28 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Having had a look at the experimental film article again, although King Lear meets the definition of the opening sentence, most of the rest of the article tends to concentrate on small-budget and considerably more radical underground experimental films. Godard had a budget of $1,000,000, although a lot of that was spent on Concorde flights. I would also suggest that although the New Wave was itself 'experimental', its auteurs were carrying out a different kind of experiment altogether. I'm not sure that experimental film belongs in the lede at all.
 * Also, has been breaking the notes and incorporating them into the main text, which defeats the whole point of footnotes. I have asked them for to be reverted. Also Lear is not an 'international' film in terms of multiple production firms from many countries: the sole production firm of Golan-Globus The Cannon Group, Inc. was based in New York and Lear happened to be filmed in Switzerland and New York by a Swiss director. Lear did have an international cast, but that's not the same thing and not particularly relevant, I feel.
 * Thus, I propose a return to: "King Lear is a 1987 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play directed in the style of experimental French New Wave cinema."
 * All reverted. MinorProphet (talk) 14:05, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Rags
If KL is, as an early intertitle suggests, three films in one, how would we know? "Suppose we called red, green?" "It's not blood, it's red."

How, indeed, would we know? Easy. The colours are the key. Or rather, what the characters are wearing. Either they are wearing red (or red is the predominant, most noticeable hue); or yellow; or brown-ish overcoats. In a couple of shots, they wear clothing so dark that it appears to be black.

I don't have my extensive notes with me detailing every single costume change, so this is from memory. Maybe red is the past - see the first shot of William Junior in the restaurant and the red flowers on the table and perhaps his tie. "Twenty years later", perhaps a minute or less later, the flowers and i fink William's shirt are yellow; also when he is looking at the pictures in an album beside the hotel bedroom window; and Cordelia's cream/yellow top in the bedroom with Learo, and also when the maid taps out a rhythm on the tea cups. [NB the overall tints in the released DVD are definitely and—it seems—deliberately muted, cf Histoire(s) du cinéma in the refnotes]; this might signify a 'present' which occupies much of the film. The brown overcoats (cf Junior in the woods; shot of Cordelia and Learo beside the river; and the fire scene in the empty house) may signify some possible, or impossible unspecified future time (or time out of time) which may or may not take place. In any case, I feel what the "Characters!" wear is highly meaningful, and a mere description of their rags (cf. Act II Sc. 4: "Fathers that wear rags / Do make their children blind. / But fathers that bear bags / Shall see their children kind.") wouldn't go amiss amidst the welter of clear-eyed detail with which Godard fills this film to bursting point. MinorProphet (talk) 21:23, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

"Experimental film"
This term has been appearing in the lede. I have been removing it. See also 'Current lede' section above. People are so used to Hollywood-style editing that anything that doesn't resemble a continuous reality does their head in. Godard excels in deliberately disrupting this fundamental basis of American cinema. I came across a succinct explanation of the difference in "Shakespeare’s e-a-r" by Simon Ryle, in Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 2019, Vol. 100(1) (Sage) pp. 24–43.

Ryle says that Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (published in 1985, two years before King Lear was made) claims that "cinema fragments reality by recording sequential photographic images in time and reconstructs an impression of reality in the sequential projection of these images. The movie camera cuts the space–time continuum of reality into twenty-four image units per second, and the projector, dependent on that specific idiosyncrasy of the human visual sensorium known as persistence of vision, puts reality back together." According to Ryle, "Deleuze analyses how classic Hollywood montage produces what he terms ‘The Movement-Image’. This technique of montage centres on the re-coupling of shot units to produce an impression of reality, which he terms ‘the whole.’" The framing of objects and the editing of time-space together constitute 'the shot'. This classic Hollywood technique "splices together fragments of discontinuous space so as to arrive at a coherent presentation of movement." (Ryle, pp. 38-39)

Ryle goes on to say that European New Wave/avant-garde cinema, and Godard's films especially, employ an opposite technique to ‘the movement image’, which Deleuze calls ‘the time image’. ‘[w]hat counts is on the contrary the interstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it’.(Deleuze, p. 179). "Cracking open of the smooth reconstruction of space, and with it the disintegrations that are repressively hidden in plain sight by the Hollywood regime of images, Godard’s betweenness involves an interstitial disruption of the Hollywood strategy of using movement to evade and obscure the fragmentation of reality that is the very basis of cinema." (Ryle, p. 39)

Godard's King Lear is an extreme example of ‘time images’ applied not only to the visual, but also to the aural senses; the soundtrack is sliced up in the same way. Thus Lear is not at all experimental, but instead a virtuoso display of an entirely valid and other way of making films. If you don't like it, bad luck. Go and watch a Marvel movie. MinorProphet (talk) 04:32, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

New source material
Molly Ringwald has recently published a piece about her experiences in filming this movie.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/molly-ringwald-on-filming-shakespeares-king-lear-with-jean-luc-godard

There may be some information in that article that could be carried over. Kaleid (talk) 17:25, 24 December 2022 (UTC)