1010 Le petit soldat

[domino harvey]

All right, to start with, here is every Cahiers contributor who voted for Le Petit Soldat as one of the best films of the year (1963, the year it was commercially released in France)

Jean-Louis Comolli : 5th (for French films-- he submitted two lists, one for American films and one for French)
Michel Delahaye : 3rd
Luc Moullet : 6th
Jean Narboni : 4th (in a three-way tie with Donovan's Reef and Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
Eric Rohmer : 3rd (tied with Nine Days in One Year)

Overall it ranked tied in 21st place with Two Weeks in Another Town for Cahiers' list, and slightly higher at 19th place on the readers' list

Jean-Louis Comolli wrote La présence et l’absence (you can probably figure that one out without me), the Cahiers critique of the film, and it is very, very long. As promised, I will be translating the whole thing and will post when finished. I believe this will be the first time it's ever been available in English.

[domino harvey]

I'm sorry for the delay of translation, but a lot of Comolli's arguments read to me like nonsense (even for this journal), which makes parsing his exact meaning difficult because I can't be sure of his intent, which makes contextual grammar/vocab choices harder. Now, Cahiers were never ones to decline an opportunity to obfuscate their point, but, for example, what the fuck does this even mean

En cela qu'il semble fait de contraires et de bribes, qu’il semble s'organiser plus au fil des hasards qu'à la logique d'une structure, on peut le croire d’abord à la limite du possible, alors qu’il nous pousse en fait à la limite du pensable.

For which my best stab is

In that [Le Petit Soldat] appears to be made up of contrary elements and snippets, that it seems to be organized more by chance than by structural logic, we may initially consider it at the limit of the possible, when in fact it actually pushes us to the limit of the conceivable.

I don't know that I have it in me to translate all of this babble, maybe it's best to let this piece lie forgotten

[knives]

That is a bit of a word soup. I know several native speakers who deal with complicated language regularly that I could ask a favor for if you get tired of the effort.

[tenia]

It actually is quite an accurate translation from this French snippet, though maybe it's possible to obtain a smoother English translation.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Well my taken on the original would be that the conception of a scattergun strategy regarding logical structure leads initially to the straining of feasibility in a concrete sense but opens you up to the extremes of the imaginable in an abstract sense.

Ultimately this risks to be more gobbledegook than before but at least I understand it.

[domino harvey]

From issue 109 of Cahiers



Transl. Jean-Luc Godard behind Raoul Coutard behind the Caméflex in front of Hitler in front of Michel Subor.