Michel Poiccard song: Shoot the Sun!
Now this one is just for entertainment. A song I wrote a year ago and previously posted in two of my earlier blogs. This is recycling myself because I have still not gathered much for my next post. (Darn! I’m posting poems again! Okay, this won’t be repeated) 
Its not irrelevant coz you have seen the film today; I just wish to extend the feel. Breathless (French: À bout de souffle; literally “out of breath”, 1960) by Jean-Luc Godard remains one of my evergreen favorite films. Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, remains a lovable thug with whom one will always identify, as long boys-as-men will fall in love with Jean Seberg, hopelessly…till he dances to death in the final scene (he knew it was coming within days and therefore considered it to be the adequate time to proposition an impossible love). Continue…
“I shook off the sweat and the sun. I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I’d been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.”
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Break the Law
Scream your Thoughts
Pull the Gun
Shoot the Sun
Burn the Bridges
Scald the Beaches
On the Run
Beat the Sun
If you ask me why I wired and stole that car
I would say that I did it just to freak
Didn’t know that in the age of machines
It would turn out to be a lifetime hellbound trip
Shadows of shifting clouds
Fleeting like shapeless doubts
Neon-signs tell my stories
Newspaper astrologies
If you predict that a bad day lies ahead
I will rub my shoedust-disdain in your face
If you send your kafka-cops to trail my fate
I will boogey-woogie, Bogey to my death
Peep the Butt
Jump the Cut
Scoot to Hell
Cat the Bell
Syncopated
Synch belated
Pull the Gun
Shoot the Sun
If she tells me that I am not meant for her
I will tell her baby love me meaningless
If she nods her pretty crew-cut Renoir-head
I can drop the hat and stop the skirt-chases
The sky above is bleached to white
Someone shrieking like a kite
A kitten litters in the gutter
It is dead, I cross my chest
If you ask me if I church the bloody Sundays
I will say that you’ve got me baby wrong
I know God is that gutter-dead kitten
The chaplain’s just a bored booky-moron
Think before taking a step
Step before thinking it late
Screw all bullshits
Raise the Hell
Grab the Girl
Grip the Gun
Sulk or Snarl
Shoot the Sun
I know I am not drifting in another movie
I know I have received no lines for me to speech
I know still I must traipse up-and-down the frame
I can see the sunglassed fool is in the game
I know he will give me away and lay the blame
Over the confused conduced striped-T-shirted dame
I know I will turn immortal and then I’ll die
I am trying to jump the cliff and then fly
I know I have waxy cursed daedalus-wings
I know I am throat-cut Orpheusinging
I know I am Mersaulting in the blanded beach
I know I am post-war cold-war Prometheusing!!!
Shit the beat
Beat the heat
Hit the nadir
Don’t retreat
Burn the Bridges
Scald the Beaches
On the Run
Beat the Sun
Break your Laws
Scream your Thoughts
Pull the Gun
Shoot the Sun
Disgusting … I’m done …
this is bliss!
Anindya Sengupta:
Joanna
July 23, 2008 at 10:58 pm
au contraire!!
u should definitely post more of these!!
Shreyashi
July 24, 2008 at 2:52 am
If you predict that a bad day lies ahead
I will rub my shoedust-disdain in your face
Das da way!
Anindya Sengupta: No one is visiting the blog anymore!
Joanna
July 26, 2008 at 1:41 pm
“No one is visiting the blog anymore!”
Well Anindya da….Provocation is such an innovation:)
“…dance of death”…rarely has cinema experienced such a moment of ecstasy and grief…ecstasy??? wat else when its the ultimate moment of salvation for Michele??? Who can forget the spout of smoke that Michel Poiccard ejaculates as he collapses??? he feels liberated…he is redeemed…Anindya da,taking a cue from u, Michel proclaims, “…I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother really-i felt that i had been happy and that i was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, i had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate”. (The Outsider,Camus). Thnx Anindya da…
But isn’t this dance also a lonesome lamentation for humanity??? wat does he mean when he says,”its a real scumbag”? The “Kafka-cops” knows it best…”you are a real scumbag”.
Anindya Sengupta: So you have visited again! Peace of mind…
The last line he utters when he dies…it is never properly translated anywhere; read somewhere that it comes closer to “it is disgusting!”. It is a weary irritation after such display of style, probably. Typically Godardian. Its not Poiccard…that line…it is JLG himself.
Dhriti
July 26, 2008 at 11:57 pm
oh….this translation industry is so “disgusting” for in the subtitles it runs as “its a real scumbag” (scum·bag / ˈskəmˌbag/ • n. inf. a contemptible or objectionable person.-oxford dictionary)………typically American. But then it is quite obvious for they always find it convenient to individualize…..otherwise “Bicycle Thieves” never gets translated into “The Bicycle Thief”.
Could it have been that Godard also meant this (the Hollywood system of individualizing) when, answering to Patricia’s query, the cops sub “it” with “you” (‘it is disgusting’ is subbed as ‘you are disgusting’)????
Maybe i’m making the wrong derivations…
Anindya Sengupta: Might be you are getting it wrong, might not be. Language plays a very important role in the film. Patricia, an American, speaks copybook french and Michel speaks in colloquial street-lingo (and utters Baudelaire though!). Therefore she doesn’t always understand what he is saying. This problem of language being not the ideal vehicle of communication is further explored in Godard’s Le Meprise (Contempt) in similar ways. Recall, like us, Patricia also doesn’t understand what he said after he utters those lines? She looks askance at the screen…
Dhriti
July 27, 2008 at 12:50 am
The poem may end with “disgusting” but it (poem) is not…
by the way
“If you ask me why I wired and stole that car
I would say that I did it just to freak
Didn’t know that in the age of machines
It would turn out to be a lifetime hellbound trip”
this line i think is valid too for Bimal of Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik…(just leave the word “stole”)…Wat do u say ?
Anindya Sengupta: Oh, welcome Prajjal! The first visitor from PG II! Yes, might be. Bimal exactly didn’t make the “hellbound trip”, but I get your point.
Prajjal
July 27, 2008 at 1:04 am
Anindya da…u r not getting my point…remember the sequence when Patricia, failing to understand what Michele says, asks the cops…the cop (off screen) instead of saying,”it is disgusting” (which is what Michele actually says) says “you are disgusting”, referring to Patricia. It is after this that Patricia looks askance at the screen…I was referring to this context in my earlier post…plzz refer to it…
Anindya Sengupta: Oh yes. I get it now. Yes, that makes everything more interesting and you now have a valid point. Still, we need to look at what the exact french words were.
dhriti
July 27, 2008 at 1:55 am
“If you ask me if I church the bloody Sundays
I will say that you’ve got me baby wrong
I know God is that gutter-dead kitten
The chaplain’s just a bored booky-moron”
ei charte line amar just fatiye laglo…
may i ask you something?
a collage of thoughts… reverberating in the “distant dusts of shadowed time”…..
are these not evident in Godard’s films? and when we see films like Alphaville, A Woman is a Woman, Notre Musique, Pierrot le Fou, Bande a part….
may be the last part of the above line is too poetic…but do u get the point? Breathless ta list theke deliberately exclude kora achey…
Anindya Sengupta: Yes Prithwish. “Distant dusts of shadowed time”: exactly that. What is ’shadowed time’ – now that we are reading Bazin – but cinema?
Um…plz, comment in English only
Prithwish
July 27, 2008 at 8:40 am