In praise of love = Eloge de l'amour

In the first part of ‘In Praise of love’ a man is intent on auditioning actors for a film he is making on the relationship between a man and a woman who met in the Resistance to fascism in World War Two. Filmed in stark contrasts of black and white, the film within a film takes second place to philosophical mediations on the replacement of “history by technology” and the displacement of “politics by gospel”. In the film’s last third, the stock changes from black and white film to digital video and the colours have the vividness and expression of post-impressionist painting. An elderly couple are being courted by Hollywood executives to sell their story of meeting in the Resistance and surviving the Holocaust. Their antagonistic grand-daughter, reminding them that Schindler’s widow did not share in the wealth generated by Spielberg’s film of ‘Schindler’s List’, argues against the monolithic tendency of Hollywood to exchange in, profit from, and trivialise the lived experience of others. She also reminds us that her grandparents’ history mirrors that of French philosopher Simone Weil, whose social humanism is of no interest to the business people from Los Angeles. What does all this have to do with love? ‘In Praise of love’ reminds us that not only did Jean-Luc Godard re-invent the grammar of film but that he is also one of cinema’s great romanticists. The discordant sounds and jump-cuts of his earlier films have given way to a more mediative mise-en-scene, but his experimentation with sound and image are still provoking and exciting. This film is a philosophical essay on the changing faces of love, an argument against Hollywood’s monopoly of the image, a melancholy ode to a vanishing Paris, an examination on age, passion and politics, and a celebration of the possibilities in both film and video. At the twilight of his life, Godard has created an ode that still argues for the importance and value in something called history, in something called cinema. In French with English subtitles.