Eloge de L'Amour

Jean-Luc Godard - 2001
Heartbreaking, brilliant, complex, enigmatic, dense.
The first section has that incredible black and white imagery, again using strong outside light and completely underexposing the rooms it shoots in. The low angle, among others, acts to cut off heads or not let us see who is talking. It's people, but it's also abstract shapes. Then that piano motif comes in, the heartbreaking one. The remarkable thing is it never comes in on an 'emotional' scene; there is not a single such scene in this film/video in that sense (though I'm not sure quite how to describe the 'L'Atalante' shot). The emotion, the Elogie, rather builds up through memory, and comradeship. The shooting on the street is again dark (and black and white), Bresson references, on park benches, the only lights shining being the whites of headlights. Can we tell the story, the history, without falsifying it? Memory requires comradeship, comradeship requires memory. The titles flash; quelquechose de l'amour.
The second half of video is remarkable. He lights his video, again, pretty hard in many ways, nearly always backlight, backlight backlight; and then he films with no side or front, so the shapes we see on the interior are pretty much in black. Maybe it's the colours, the sea and the sky, that are most distinctive. Huge blue, green, and that orangey yellow seem to be almost the entire palette. I don't know how we got that white balance; post-production, it's got to be. We could make the film about the past, about history, before the Americans colonise it.... but we can't. The hatred of the Americans is clear, but balanced; they want a memory too, that's why they snatch ours, or our attempts. The end is strangely affirming, the train (always the train) and the walk, nothing was said, but there's more... I never wanted this to end.