guedesnino For Godard nothing seems to be as complicated as the simpler things. Therefore, to expect that his film "King Lear" was a passable film adaptation typical of Shakespeare's tragedy, it is at least the public's total lack of knowledge about the director or incoherence on the part of critics.Although some lines of Shakespeare's play are used in the film, only three characters (Lear, Cordelia, and Edgar) are, so to speak, "presented." King Lear is, without any confessionals, a difficult film, and so it is, if we consider Godard an insane director (in the positive sense), we have in this his visual experiment, the apex of human insanity when questioning art in a new world Of a major nuclear disaster (in reference to the Chernobyl episode).I view Godard's films as a laudable experimentation, which makes it unmistakably unique to each film. Godard is one of the rare, almost sole director who succeeds in affirming cinema through denial, thus more than presenting or affirming what cinema is, Godard discusses the various possibilities of being and making movies. And it does this by laughing and mocking the audience, but not in a gratuitous and unnecessary mockery instead, laughter is in front of our lack of care in assimilating the narratives of a film, seeking understanding and logic for everything, including in art, that historically sought Always breaking with the conventional, taking into account the very incoherence that is humanity and its disastrous way of living.

polysicsarebest This is by far one of the weirdest films ever made, as I've said before. Godard is probably my second favorite director (right behind Kitano), and this isn't his first really weird film or anything (I'd go so far as to say all of his films in his unfairly-neglected-but-superior "late period" are quite strange in some way, either in their fractured narrative, or in their hardcore deconstruction of typical movie-making -- "Where's the story?" indeed...). But this is kind of a mix of everything he'd done with his newer stuff, when it came out; all the themes and elements and ideas he had been exploring, and it even predicts a bit of his stuff after this. People usually get interested in this film for its genesis and some of the bizarre happenings in this film (Godard signs a contract on a napkin; Godard recorded telephone conversations with producer and put it in the film, which peeved the producer off; Godard never actually reads past page 3 of King Lear itself; this film was made from like 4 or 5 different aborted scripts cobbled together; a father and daughter sign on to do this movie, do 5 takes or so, and then walk off the set in disgust, all of which is captured in the movie, with a voice-over explaining this; Woody Allen was hired to be in this film and he had no idea what he was doing so he drinks some coffee, puts some safety pins in some film, recites a few verses from the play King Lear and that's about it).Well, it goes far beyond that, as far as strangeness is concerned... seeing Molly Ringwald in a Godard film is just bizarre, first of all (keep in mind she was HUGE at the time; Pretty In Pink and all that stuff). Second of all, Godard's narration is absurd. I mean, you can barely even tell what he's saying, in English (this is also his only English film from beginning to end!). He might as well have been recorded through a voice box. Godard plays a guy with a headdress made of hi-fidelity wires, so he can jack himself into the unknown at any time. He is looking for "The image". Since Godard never actually read King Lear, the film instead asks if King Lear is even an important work of art, if it's even valid a radioactive, post-Chernobyl landscape. So, the main actor (who actually says the line, "Oh yeah, by the way, my name is William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth." in a comical tone) is "searching" for, uh, something, and he encounters a bunch of crazy characters, in an extremely, EXTREMELY fractured narrative, with scenes ending abruptly, double (sometimes triple) voices of characters constantly on the soundtrack, and pretty much everything crashing, colliding, and being completely out of sequence, out of time, out of tune. Oh, let's not forget the soundtrack, which is made of slowed-down and electronically-manipulated versions of Beethoven symphonies; also, there is a loud, annoying, seagull sound about every 3 minutes in the movie.Sounds like a disaster, doesn't it? Well, I gotta say, it's one of the best films -- not just by Godard -- but EVER. Even beyond the "strangeness" that attracts me, there is a strange, otherworldly beauty to the proceedings. Godard designed the film to fail, but he did so in a way that's really, really interesting, and is actually extremely experimental, especially when you consider that this was designed to be a mainstream film! Godard himself said he never got page 3 of King Lear, it didn't interest him at all... he said the film was the first 3 pages of King Lear and the rest of it is him trying to "Get past" the rest of the play. Which is hilarious, absurd, and reason enough to check it out...A powerful film, misunderstood to be certain, groundbreaking and unconventional in every way, I'd say anyone into Jodorowsky and stuff like that should probably want to seek this out and have their mind blown.

tfmorris I have watched this film perhaps 100 times, and many of those times I feel as if I am watching it for the first time. It is incredibly rich.Quite a bit of philosophical sophistication is presupposed, so let's start with some basics. When Plato says that what you hear does not come from what you see he is perfectly correct. The colors that are produced in your mind by a message from your optic nerve do not cause the sounds that you hear. The green is not in the grass, only in your mind. The grass absorbs various radio waves, and your eye picks up on the unabsorbed reflected waves. The green is your body's miraculous way of letting you know about the radio waves around you. You are actually experiencing a series of still pictures, approximately 24 per second. If they were significantly faster than that, you would experience a movie as a series of still pictures. You are active in this process, because you organize the raw sensations. This can be seen in a gestalt shift.In everyday experience we are isolated people. All we relate to are the images that are in our minds. Zen Buddhists think we can have direct contact with the mysterious outside reality--not merely contact with images that those objects helped produced (satori). Godard is concerned with satori, but he is also concerned with experiencing the projector of the series of still pictures that he is experiencing. Your mind is working incredibly hard organizing everything you are experiencing 24 times a second. The incredible amount of organization it takes for you to read this sentence is but a small fraction of what your mind has just done.If a child were very bored with a movie, he might look around and see that it all comes from this light in the back of the room. If you had no interest in the images thrown up on your private movie screen by the ground of your being, perhaps you too could turn around and experience this projector. I take the projector to be Atman. Brahman (which I take to be the same as nirvana) would be actually going into the projection room. This is what they are trying to do in the movie theater. But (Oh no!)they are not innocent, and we get caught up with these images (which together their relationship to other images Kant calls reality); they are like the child who is too interested in the movie to look around.Now it is like choosing the first fruit from a cornucopia. I had some understanding of the ending this time, so let's start there. Here comes the spoiler: a seagull calls. It is trying to make it's presence known for some reason or other. We experience merely the result of a message from the nerve from our ear. It significance is just that: it's merely in our minds, but it comes from an outside reality that is trying to makes its presence known. It is part of the world that is not mere representation. That world (sacred to Godard) is really out there. The movie ends with that reminder.The visual image at the end is merely the words: King Lear A Study. Godard is saying that he has figured out something about King Lear. What that might be is indicated by the preceding lines read by a female voice: "Lend me a looking glass, if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives." A looking glass presents images that are recognized as images. Lear is hoping against hope that Cordelia is still alive. He would have been satisfied if she could have heaved her heart into her mouth, if the unseen reality could become manifest to him. But now there might be something that is not a mere image on the looking glass--the mist or stain. This mist would represent Cordelia's life. Of course it is just a representation or image of her life, but for Godard their are images and images. An image is strong (which means that it has greater emotive force) if the association of ideas is distant and true. The opposite of this would be a flat image, as if perspective had been abolished. When Godard goes back and forth between images that tend to merge into each other, we are relating to them as two dimensional. Cordelia could not heave her heart into her mouth, but if Lear had been perceptive her silence could have shown him about her inner reality. The mist on the stone would show her that she lives, and would thus have strong emotive force. He could relate to her inner reality through the representation.It is not Lear's voice that reads the lines at the very end of the film, but the same resonant female voice that is associated with the symbolism of the white horse. The horse would be the emotion that finds its occasion in the strong image. There is something within us that wants to break out of our isolation and rises to the occasion when an opportunity to do so presents itself. This wholehearted response to an image allows me to be without reservation, and thus for my solitude to know yours (satori).Right before that we have Lear saying "She is as dead as earth." This corresponds to the image of Lear with Cordelia's dead body looking out at the source of the waves. The pebbled shore would be the private movies screen with its many objects. The waves would be the 24 times a second movement that throws itself onto the movie screen. Lear is not letting death defeat him. He's using the emotive power of her death to try to succeed to turn toward the projector. Wait Cordelia. The earthly reality is not the only reality, and he would relate to that reality that now has Cordelia.

valmont7 No Plot. Four characters who don't interact. Nothing happens. Peter Sellars walks around and thinks. His recurring voice-over monologue obsessively examines a thought that is not very interesting to begin with. Not content merely to bore us, Goddard assaults us with shot after shot of crudely filmed, irrelevant imagery, accompanied by unintelligible overlapping speech. Perhaps there's something resembling an idea buried underneath all the nonsense. But I doubt it. And what does any of this have to do with 'King Lear'? To be bored by a film is bad enough, but this film is aggressively, offensively, violently boring.