Picks for Sunday, February 12

NEIL YOUNG:  HEART  OF GOLD   Jonathan Demme’s superb film of Neil Young’s 2005 performance at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme’s bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984). But this new concert movie is also a warm, unhurried paean to the considered pains and pleasures of middle age — as much, one senses, for the director (who shot it while taking a year off from filmmaking after The Manchurian Candidate), as for his subject. Aside from a sprinkling of the old favorites (“Four Strong Winds” — the only number the musician didn’t write himself — “Old Man” and the title song) that made many of us fall in love with Young long before our joints began to creak, Heart of Gold is far from a nostalgia trip. No big deal is made of the near-fatal brain aneurysm that spurred Young to sit down and write the melodies collected on his well-received Prairie Wind album. Still, the crisis is all there in songs about marriage (Young’s wife, Pegi, sings and plays guitar onstage with the band), his father’s dementia, what it’s like to be a “rich hippie” and his empty nest, as well as in those about 9/11, Chris Rock and the golden wheat fields depicted in backdrops specially designed for the movie (and flooded with the mellow amber light of cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ lyrical camera). Along with Bruce Springsteen, Young is our most durable troubadour of the ordinary, yet I doubt that anyone but his wry, endearingly shambling self will ever dismiss him as an old-fart rocker. As much a champion of punk as of country music, Young keeps on growing without ever pandering to his audience or abandoning the old friends he’s played with, in some cases, for 30 years. As they gather onstage, guitars in hand, for the quietly thrilling finale, Demme tracks from face to face (among them Emmylou Harris in all her precise, bony beauty) and instrument to instrument, honoring the collaborative spirit that goes into the making of a song. (ArcLight) (Ella Taylor)

Histoire(s) Du Cinema 

Arriving in the U.S. nearly a decade after its completion, Jean-Luc Godard’s monumental six-part essay film–cum–incantatory tone poem — originally conceived as JLG’s response to the 100th birthday of cinema — stands as a pivotal, summary, perhaps even climactic, work in its maker’s career, and thus in the history of film. Through a barrage of visual and musical quotations, and using some of the most complicated and evocative montage of his career, Godard addresses — passionately, sometimes pessimistically and always with his characteristic slyness — the cinema that intoxicated him as a child, that he upbraided and fetishized as an iconoclastic young critic, and that he almost single-handedly revolutionized as a filmmaker. Everything Godard considers is part of one gigantic, category-smashing continuity of ideas and images: film, art, literature, music. He can leap from 19th-century French painting and the rise of industrialism (“The 19th century, which invented every technique, also invented stupidity . . .”) to cleverly shuffled clips from his personal masters (Nicholas Ray, Jean Vigo, Von Stroheim, Griffith, Hitchcock, Dovzhenko and Robert Aldrich) and, of course, his own movies — all interleaved with Gaugins and Giottos, cheesy porno footage and newsreel images from the 20th-century atrocities that Godard accuses the cinema of being unable or unwilling to record or prevent. (For example, we see Errol Flynn, then the slogan “CAPTAIN BLOOD,” then Hitler himself — connections, connections!) Always we return from these rhythmic, free-associative digressions to the director smoking cigars in his book-filled study, intoning the chantlike, quasi-poetic aperçus that redirect and revivify his discourse. The density of JLG’s editing, his eye-opening juxtapositions of image against sound — and, through his many back-and-forth lap dissolves, of image against image and sound against sound — repeatedly amaze you with their shocking inventiveness. At one point, a Monet painting of a sylvan stream appears, then footage of German soldiers fording a similar stream in the summer of 1940, while the flickering dissolves make it seem as though the Nazis are invading Giverny itself — a staggering metaphorical violation in Godard’s eyes. There is a bracing provocation like this every other minute in Histoire(s), a film packed with astounding assertions, moments of searing poetry, and tart political analysis. It takes five hours to watch, but a lifetime may be needed to ponder and plumb its seemingly bottomless, but ultimately fathomable, depths. The superlative for once is fully warranted: masterpiece. (UCLA Film and Television Archive; Chapters 1 & 2 — Fri., Feb. 10, 7:30 p.m.; Chapters 3 & 4 — Sun., Feb. 12, 7 p.m.www.cinema.ucla.edu)(John Patterson)