Meetin' WA
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Meetin' WA | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
Starring | Woody Allen Jean-Luc Godard |
Cinematography | Pierre Binggeli |
Edited by | Jean-Luc Godard |
Release date | 1986 |
Running time | 26 minutes |
Country | France |
Language | English |
Meetin' WA is a 1986 short film by Jean-Luc Godard.[1] In the film, he interviews his "old friend" Woody Allen.
Description
The film mainly consists of an interview of Woody Allen by Godard, with the help of film scholar
Godard then asks Allen about the influence of television on his work, saying that Allen's shots of New York City buildings in Hannah and Her Sisters seem to owe something to the way television portrays things. Finding the question obtuse, Allen instead rhapsodizes on his youthful experience of the cinema. In an epilogue, Godard is seen rifling through ephemera and a stack of books on a table. Suddenly, declaring that "the meeting is finished," he slams the stack of books down on the table, slowing down the gesture in post production, so that the slam of the books hitting the table has a low, ominous tone. The final intertitle, displayed longer than the others, declares: "Meeting's Over."
Background
The film was made as a substitute for the traditional press conference with the director following the premiere of Hannah and Her Sisters at the Cannes Film Festival. According to Tom Luddy, who helped arrange the interview, the impetus was to keep Allen involved in Godard's King Lear project while Godard was stalled for lack of ideas. Knowledge of Godard's life and work illuminate what might otherwise be an opaque encounter as one in which Godard was disappointed by his interview subject. For example, Allen describes being influenced by novels when writing Hannah and Her Sisters and asserts that script writing is the most important phase of filmmaking for him. This is at diametrically opposed to Godard's philosophy and method of filmmaking, where the work is in the process of being created across all stages of filmmaking, particularly editing, and the primacy is on images, not text.
References
- ^ "Meetin' WA". cinematheque.fr (in French). Retrieved 2024-02-09.
External links
- Meetin' WA at IMDb