Datedness

[ShanghaiOrange]

I watched Breathless today and it got me thinking. Is datedness a valid criticism of a movie? I mean, I watch Breathless, with its jump cuts and its cheesy jazz score and I can't help thinking this movie is OLD. It becomes a characteristic of the movie and it's hard to seperate it. It's not really the movie's fault though. So I don't know. Help me out here.

[modage]

shanghai, i dont know whats wrong with you. if godard had done Saw II you would've sucked him off on here until we all banned you for excessive posting/worst pictures ever.

but because all you could comprehend from this movie is "yeah with its jump cuts and its cheesy jazz score and I can't help thinking this movie is OLD" you feel the need to trash it and call it dated. disgusting.

i'm sorry, but i think you need a serious reality check to what cinema is.. why people make films.. and why people see them. you need a real general wake up call to cinema. it's not about "lets make a difference" or "who can make the best movie ever".. people go out and make a piece of art that means something to them that they're particularly passionate about and see if people will go out, buy a ticket and appreciate what they made.

thats about it. then theres some marketing and celebrities thrown in. but when it boils down to it, thats how things are. you have the most narrowminded sense of what films SHOULD ALL BE LIKE. and its so wrong, i cant believe i'm going on like this. because it seems like you're just doing this to stir the pot of hate. everyone is ripping on you cause its stupid. sorry, but thats it. stupid.

[ShanghaiOrange]

Whoa there Nancy Grace! I thought Breathless was great! I guess I didn't make that clear. I was just using that as an example.

All I was trying to ask is if datedness is a valid complaint. It's not the movie's fault, but after a point it becomes inextricably part of the movie and it's very difficult to get over. So I guess it comes down to what matters more: your experience of the movie or it's objective qualities.

But yeah, anyway, Breathless. Man, I loved that whole middle section when it's just the two of them in the room and they kept throwing cigarrettes out the window. Beautiful.

And Modage, man, where the hell is that coming from? You seriously need, like, a massage or something. With oils.

[Gamblour.]

Shanghai, don't worry. It's just misdirected hostility from this: http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=8478.msg216914#msg216914

I think a movie being old is as valid a complaint as saying a person is old. You have to really empathize with the film to understand what it was doing when it was first released. But a film like Breathless uses elements of cinema that have become dated, while films like Mean Streets or Battle of Algiers remain timeless because they are a) precocious in construction (editing, cinematography) and b) they avoid conventions of the time. I remember watching Mean Streets and thinking it could be made ten years from now and still be incredibly advanced. Dated movies aren't bad, that just means they're absorbed in the time they're in.

Actually, can you elaborate beyond cheesy jazz score?

[grand theft sparrow]

I think a movie being old is as valid a complaint as saying a person is old. You have to really empathize with the film to understand what it was doing when it was first released. But a film like Breathless uses elements of cinema that have become dated, while films like Mean Streets or Battle of Algiers remain timeless because they are a) precocious in construction (editing, cinematography) and b) they avoid conventions of the time. I remember watching Mean Streets and thinking it could be made ten years from now and still be incredibly advanced.

I think we can all agree that film has its own language, and like spoken languages, it evolves.  In the same way that there is a difference in the way that people talked the 40s versus now, there is a difference in the tone of films from the 40s to now (this is the reason that Munich had a 70s feel to it, in terms of the filmmaking; Spielberg tapped into the tone of that time) and there is a difference in tone from country to country. 

Saying a movie is old isn't like saying a person is old.  Using a film's age as a criticism is more like saying an old person's slang is outdated.  You still understand what they're saying and even find it interesting but on the surface, you can't directly relate to it.  You have to work a little harder to overcome the "language barrier."  In keeping with the example of French New Wave-era filmmaking, not everyone had the same type of childhood depicted in The 400 Blows but there's SOMETHING that everyone can relate to in it. 

I don't know that datedness is a valid criticism (unless we're talking about references that are up to the minute, like in Shrek, because things like the Macarena are just destined to be stuck in a certain time) but in the case of what Shanghai is talking about in reference to Breathless, it's sort of a no-fault situation... you just have to accept that that's how it was at the time. 

[JG]

a lot of godard is dated.  it was pretty good and groundbreaking at the time i'm sure, but breathless and even my life to live aren't much more than their dated innovations.

EDIT:  I wanna revise that.   They're really really good movies, but if you take away what they inspired and how innovative they were, I think they would just be really good movies.  i think godard didn't give enough to the story and was more worried about how groundbreaking it was.  i haven't seen all of godard's films from the 60s, but from based on what i've seen...

[ShanghaiOrange]

Actually, can you elaborate beyond cheesy jazz score?

Do you mean about what else is dated?

[Reinhold]

no. it's not a valid complaint unless the filmmaker set out to have the setting or time of production be comprehensively ambiguous.

everything's "dated." clearly, Birth of a Nation wasn't made on this side of 2000, but it's what Griffith wanted it to be. there are laps and stuff that people consider campy today, and the pacing is by no means as fast as modern audiences like-- but it's what Griffith set out to make.

to say that a movie is bad because it's dated doesn't seem valid to me.

[ShanghaiOrange]

Not everything is dated though. M, for example, was made 70 years ago but hasn't aged a day.
It's not just the fact that a movie's old, it's things in the movie that reinforce it as being "old" that make it dated.

[pete]

well, eff goddard man.  he wanted to prove that critics could make movies too and failed on that front.  I think it's safe to say that Breathless has dated itself because nobody gives a dung about Goddard's phony cleverness and phony everything anymore and even some poor peasant in Romania could see that Goddard's full of intellectual dung.

[Alethia]

it would certainly seem that way, wouldn't it?  but rewatch my life to live or pierrot le fou or weekend or numero deux or passion or slow motion or notre musique...and watch closely...there's much more than just a brain working there.

[polkablues]

What does Pete have against "Father of American Rocketry" Robert Goddard?

And if it's Godard he's talking about, he makes even less sense.

[soixante]

Everything gets dated eventually.  Fight Club might seem quaint and old-fashioned 20 years from now.