2 or 3 of the Times Godard Revolutionized Cinema
“My thermometer, my means of measurement is always The Cinema.” - Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Marcel Ophuls, 2009
Jean-Luc Godard, the madman in his own King Lear (1985)
The founding figure of the Nouvelle Vague, who passed away in September of this year at the age of 91, invented a new type of cinema not once, but multiple times. He was the most mutable, the most lively, the most philosophical and the most ornery of modern cinema’s architects and I wouldn’t even confine an analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s methodology or style from his immense, six-decade filmography to even a single film, let alone an entire Godard period. In my opinion, he simply cannot be summarized that way. One of the only things I can say about his work with any certainty is that it proves one cannot make a true, genuine film. Ever. Godard called cinema Truth at one point in his career, Lies at another. He was right both times. His entire career offered clues as to what this meant.
I will not attempt to contextualize any of his infamous temper tantrums, capricious reversals, fractious relationships with cast and crew members, or his contentious relationship with the press and many of his fellow filmmakers. I have no claim to understanding what was going on in Godard’s mind. All I can say comes from a personal standpoint - he has been central to my life as a film lover. No other filmmaker has so dazzlingly and with so much sophistication interrogated the medium.
That so many In-Memoriam tributes choose to focus on the most photogenic and chic elements of his more stylish and glamorous earlier work - probably because its aesthetic has endured thanks to its capacity to sell high-end merchandise like fragrances and designer clothing - is typically shallow and lazy non-journalism, its culprits barely able to hide their lack of curiosity. Throughout his career, Godard innovated and interrogated the power that cinema and images have over our minds and our lives and many reviewers in disguising their promotional journalism as criticism gloss over or outright ignore this.
Une Femme et Une Femme (A Woman Is A Woman, 1961), Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964)
So here, because there is so very much to say about Godard, I’ve decided to simply cite just a few of the many, many examples of Godard’s complete rethinking of the function and purpose of the filmed image. Each will begin with an appropriate Godard quote, only a few of which I could find sources for. These leaps in perspective across the developing technologies that convey moving pictures can act as an examination of successive waves of new mediums and trends themselves. Think of it like a highly abridged Godard reader, focusing on an essential 20th century artist who kept renewing cinema, which he saw as a dying artform, endlessly providing it with fresh opportunities for re-examination.
A Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960)
“Trusting in luck means listening to voices.” - Godard, sometime in the mid-60’s
Let’s get the one everyone talks about out of the way. There’s much more going in Godard’s revolutionary feature debut than just the extensive use of the jump cut, which was born out of necessity with the short shooting durations of the consumer grade cameras Godard utilized that had up until then been deployed solely by news photographers. Godard’s jump cuts take us not to a different moment, but to the same moment (often a banal one), arguing for a kind of beauty or truth that the director sees in that moment. A kind of auteurist thesis statement or mantra emerges in this development where the audience is invited to linger on something because the director thinks it’s beautiful or truthful.
Thus is a shot seen as a thought. A director’s thought. But more than simply coming off as a stylish and hip trick, it establishes what will be Godard’s trademark use of montage, which for him seemed to have almost infinite potential for playing in the present moment. No filmmaker explored the potential of the present moment like Godard from an intellectual standpoint. Perhaps Terrence Malick strangely enough has come close, albeit from an emotional standpoint.
Weekend (1967)
“I await the end of Cinema with great optimism.”
One of the first Godard films I saw was Godard’s definitive pivot into a new period that would insist on discovering dead ends wherever they were to be found. Everything was coming to an end in Weekend - society, relationships, traditions, left-wing radicalism and cinema. It was at this point that Godard began saying and never stopped reiterating that cinema’s time had come and that this was a good thing. It may be easy to write off Godard’s insistence on this idea of “The End of Cinema” as the raving of a doomsday prophet, rather than as a recurrent event - an opportunity for the renewal and recharging of artistic energies at a particular cultural, political or technological juncture. The existence of what gets torn down by the younger filmmaker who believed in revolution, who would face violent police reprisal in Paris in May of ‘68, serves as a basis for charting what the director saw as the inevitable usurpation and destruction of social structures by entropy and anarchism. Their subsequent reflowering is where the “optimism” part comes in.
Weekend is Godard’s first articulation of that ideological position (before the idea of “The Death of Cinema,” would essentially die with him - nice irony there). The movie opens with a young, cosmopolitan city couple who drive through the countryside on holiday and ends with the wife eating her husband's barbecued corpse before joining a band of feral guerilla fighters. These foretellings of apocalypse, jeremiads which Godard would continue to articulate throughout his career, would inform what he saw as new vistas in power politics as they were conveyed in new technologies and new imagistic media forms, with their startling capacities for revelation and oppression, right down to the verbal joke in the final title card.
Numero Deux (Number Two, 1975)
“You have to listen to the image and look at the sound.” - TV interview with Dick Cavett, 1980
Godard abandons narrative altogether and would infuse this and virtually all future projects with a didacticism that can be liberating or boring depending on how steadfastly one sees the medium as a vessel for stories. The integrity of images in the context of an increasingly fractured society is being questioned along with what seems like consciousness itself. This is the focal point from which a very deep and satisfying examination of the mediatizing of our lives with television and home video is approached in a very basic way. We see a clear line of evolution in Godard’s use of montage. Either two adjacent TV-sized images against a black background or the superimposition of one image onto another, such that we get simultaneous frontal or reverse angles and these choices along with many, many others in the film stem from the director’s ethical position.
There is always a philosophical or ethical reason for the innovative techniques of the film critic whose entire directorial career sustained and extrapolated his critique. Godard has reiterated in interviews that emerging filmmakers do not interrogate the choices they make. “Why?” he asks. “Why is it that you are doing this?” It was in watching this quantum leap in the development of film vocabulary that I began to doubt narrative as the source of cinema’s vitality. For this medium to be serventile to narrative limits its potential.
Presented with fragmented double images, the mind can’t help but make connections. That’s the story. The lesson that there is no right answer, which infuriated many viewers, is taught by the filmmaker-theorist who once described his aesthetic as “that of a sniper on a roof.” The rest of us may just happen to enjoy trying to wrap our minds around the fluctuating, unstable message and that activity may actually be as legitimately entertaining as any escapist enterprise.
Forget the story. Cinema is so much more than a vessel for story.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1980-1998)
“It makes me laugh when you bring two things together which have nothing to do with one another.”
No Godard project could be better served by thinking of cinema as something dead that lived in the past than this 266-minute, 8-part series, which critics like Dave Kehr and Joanthan Rosenbaum cite as a sort of cinematic positioning similar to Finnegan’s Wake. The Joyce novel lies in a theoretical space outside spoken English, asking the question from beyond its entombment, “What was language?” Godard’s series, the most intricate and challenging item in his filmography, begs the question, “What was cinema?” Histoire(s) du Cinéma was conceived, assembled and is presented as a video project. It uses the technological distinctions of video and its ontological implications as an entirely separate and distinctive medium from film to meditate on film and only video could have made its creation possible.
In the examination of a century’s worth of cinematic history, the juxtaposition of images is achieved with the functions to be found on any VCR or DVD player. Freeze frames, fast-forwards, rewinding, slow-motion and muting become tools to aid more traditional cinematic ways of working with images like editing, superimposition, captioning and sound mixing. The 20th century serves as Godard’s timeline for telling the story of cinema from birth to its death (not from natural causes but rather by murder at the hands of Capitalist enterprise). One must have the stomach for Godard’s punky subliminalism and his penchant for wordplay. Above all, cinema must be seen as a language. Then be prepared to ask yourself: what does it say when it is speaking in tongues, as if in a trance?
Adieu au Langage (Goodbye To Language, 2014)
“You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.”
In his penultimate feature-length film, Godard saunters up and demonstrates the best and perhaps the only meaningful use of 3D to be found in movies. With the exception of Martin Scorsese’s underrated Hugo (2011), there hasn’t been a 3D feature in which 3D is used in a way that explores and interrogates its use to this extent. To my mind, Godard’s wrangling of 3D technology walks it back (or forward) from pretty-looking visual enhancement to a more basic idea onto which he can platform his didactic poem.
It’s used so expressively and logically as part of an overall artistic strategy (backed as always by a set of deeply held ethical principles) that it barely registers as such. There is a sense of play in the way that multilayered images convey increasingly fraught modes of communication and perception in the digital age. His musings on the consciousness of dogs alone are worth the price of admission. This doesn’t feel like the film of an 84 year-old crank who began as an eggheaded brat out to plant bombs underneath the world of conventional movies. And yet it still bears the confidence and authority of an artist who for six-decades mocked the pathetic servility that still characterizes most of the world’s filmmakers today.
I was struck here by Godard’s distrust of language, a theme which has always been present in his work (albeit with wordplay). The combative and obscure Godard here seems to be at one with the calm and steady Godard, as he pioneers a new means of viewing the images that are informing our consciousness, in ways our conscious minds are not aware of. Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr astutely observes that Godard is one name on a very short list of directors for whom if you take a single frame out of any of his films, you will immediately recognize it as his work. I came out of this feature something more than I was before. And I recognize all serious admirers of his work have a different feature for which this is true, emerging from the film feeling differently than when they went in.
Godard’s work does that. It makes us feel autonomous. Like we have nothing to fear. Today’s studio releases are comic books with scripts in one form or another. This filmmaker, an anti-cinephile to the core, has repeatedly demonstrated the potential of film as an interwoven, multivariate combination, or rather, synthesis of image, sound, rhythm, music, movement and human gazing. These elements, fused together as part of a grander dialectic, passionate but devoid of sentimentality (like Stanley Kubrick, strangely) characterize an art form that it turns out has more to say than any other discipline about the function of human autonomy, its shifting perspectives, and the trails that await it on its never-ending journey. We are strong and free, this artist’s work of tremendously renewable social value assures us. It preaches with large-scale impact the universal pedagogy of strength and moral sense; endlessly inventive, alive with the unpredictable convulsive energy befitting the hijinks of a sage prankster god, the wry smile poking through the cigar positioned in his crooked mouth.
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