I wanted to reply to bornjaded's post (though it's from two years ago and this is such an obscure film, I doubt we'll be having much of a dialogue). But still. I just watched this film with my husband last night and we both found it totally fascinating. I was particularly moved by Sally Kirkland's performance as Joanne -- and didn't recognize her at all until I saw her name in the credits. I love bornjaded's comparison to Lars Von Trier's heroic lead performances. I, too, thought she was incredibly brave in this film -- that drunk scene was almost unbearable to watch.
What I particularly wanted to respond to is your criticism of the rupturing of the film's point of view by showing jump cuts and the final slow motion sequence. I thought the final sequence was, as well as being stunningly effective film-making, formally justified in that it showed Joanne's destruction of Joe's whole visual construct, his camera, his voyeurism, his control. At the risk of sounding too dogmatic or reductive, the whole time I was watching the film, I kept laughing about how the so-called sexual revolution was really just the continued sexual enslavement of women with new clothes, new music and some new dance moves. It was just killing me how every woman who walks into Joe's apartment throws herself at him to the point where it was beginning to seem like a sixties male fantasy -- that is, until the arrival of Joanne who suddenly was this fully realized, intelligent, questing, sexually alive creature. A real match for Joe (the "Joe" and "Joanne" parallel only now occurs to me), including his madness. I kept thinking of Diane Arbus watching Sally's performance, how brave it must have been for her to step out of her inscribed world, take up a camera, re-make herself and finally lose her mind. So when the film ends with Joanne trashing Joe's place, I thought, "This is fantastic -- the rules of the male gaze are being destroyed, Joanne has arrived and now the whole machine is about to be re-made." It was like seeing the corrupt regime thrown over, or, in a stab at a psychological reading, the repressed feminine insisting on her full expression. In that sense, it made sense to me that the film could rupture its own form in this final moment. It is being taken over, painfully, by Joanne's subjectivity. I loved it. Woke up thinking about it first thing this morning, always a good sign of some powerful cinema.
As for the jump cuts, they didn't bug me as much as they did you, I felt like that device was more or less established throughout -- take another look at the first half of the film, several of the early scenes are fragmented with that same noisy sound effect.
Anyway, just wanted to try to engage with someone about this powerful but obscure film. I agree with another commenter that had it been European it might have been more recognized. Hell, most Godard is WAY more impenetrable than this was. Isn't it fun to imagine that people actually made movies like this once?
What I particularly wanted to respond to is your criticism of the rupturing of the film's point of view by showing jump cuts and the final slow motion sequence. I thought the final sequence was, as well as being stunningly effective film-making, formally justified in that it showed Joanne's destruction of Joe's whole visual construct, his camera, his voyeurism, his control. At the risk of sounding too dogmatic or reductive, the whole time I was watching the film, I kept laughing about how the so-called sexual revolution was really just the continued sexual enslavement of women with new clothes, new music and some new dance moves. It was just killing me how every woman who walks into Joe's apartment throws herself at him to the point where it was beginning to seem like a sixties male fantasy -- that is, until the arrival of Joanne who suddenly was this fully realized, intelligent, questing, sexually alive creature. A real match for Joe (the "Joe" and "Joanne" parallel only now occurs to me), including his madness. I kept thinking of Diane Arbus watching Sally's performance, how brave it must have been for her to step out of her inscribed world, take up a camera, re-make herself and finally lose her mind. So when the film ends with Joanne trashing Joe's place, I thought, "This is fantastic -- the rules of the male gaze are being destroyed, Joanne has arrived and now the whole machine is about to be re-made." It was like seeing the corrupt regime thrown over, or, in a stab at a psychological reading, the repressed feminine insisting on her full expression. In that sense, it made sense to me that the film could rupture its own form in this final moment. It is being taken over, painfully, by Joanne's subjectivity. I loved it. Woke up thinking about it first thing this morning, always a good sign of some powerful cinema.
As for the jump cuts, they didn't bug me as much as they did you, I felt like that device was more or less established throughout -- take another look at the first half of the film, several of the early scenes are fragmented with that same noisy sound effect.
Anyway, just wanted to try to engage with someone about this powerful but obscure film. I agree with another commenter that had it been European it might have been more recognized. Hell, most Godard is WAY more impenetrable than this was. Isn't it fun to imagine that people actually made movies like this once?