Godard married actress Anna Karina in 1961
Godard with actress Anna Karina on the set of A Woman Is a Woman, 1961
Godard and fellow director François Truffaut
Right to left, French directors Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, Jean Rouch, and Louis Daquin
Jean-Luc Godard is not the only director for
whom filming is like breathing, but he’s the one who breathes best. He is rapid like Rossellini, sly like Sacha
Guitry, musical like Orson Welles, simple like Pagnol, wounded like Nicholas
Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman, and insolent like nobody
else.
―François Truffaut, Text on Jean-Luc Godard: Two or Three Things
I Know About Him, 1966, Translatable
Images: Truffaut vs. Godard
Jean-Luc
Godard - Director - Films as Director:, Other ... - Film Reference Robin
Wood, updated by Rob Edelman
If influence on the development
of world cinema is the criterion, then Jean-Luc Godard is certainly the most
important filmmaker of the past thirty years; he is also one of the most
problematic.
Godard’s career so
far falls roughly into three periods: the early works from About de souffle to Weekend (1959–1968),
a period whose end is marked decisively by the latter film’s final caption,
“Fin de Cinéma”; the period of intense politicization, during which Godard collaborated (mainly
though not exclusively) with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov group
(1968–1972); and the subsequent work, divided between attempts to renew
communication with a wider, more “mainstream” cinema audience and explorations
of the potentialities of video (in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville). One
might also separate the films from Masculin-Féminin
to Weekend as representing a
transitional phase from the first to the Dziga Vertov period, although in a
sense all Godard’s work is transitional. What marks the middle period off from
its neighbours is above all the difference in intended audience: the Dziga
Vertov films were never meant to reach the general public. They were instead
aimed at already committed Marxist or leftist groups, campus student groups,
and so on, to stimulate discussion of revolutionary politics and aesthetics,
and, crucially, the relationship between the two.
Godard's importance
lies in his development of an authentic modernist cinema in opposition to
(though, during the early period, at the same time within ) mainstream cinema; it is with his work that film becomes
central to our century's major aesthetic debate, the controversy developed
through such figures as Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno as to whether
realism or modernism is the more
progressive form. As ex- Cahiers du
Cinéma critic and New Wave filmmaker, Godard was initially linked with
Truffaut and Chabrol in a kind of revolutionary triumvirate; it is easy, in
retrospect, to see that Godard was from the start the truly radical figure, the
"revolution" of his colleagues operating purely on the aesthetic
level and easily assimilable into the mainstream.
A simple way of
demonstrating the essential thrust of Godard’s work is to juxtapose his first
feature, Breathless, with the
excellent American remake. Jim McBride’s film follows the original fairly
closely, with the fundamental difference that in it all other elements are
subordinated to the narrative and the characters. In Godard’s film, on the
contrary, this traditional relationship between signifier and signified shows a
continuous tendency to come adrift, so that the process of narration (which mainstream cinema strives everywhere to
conceal) becomes foregrounded; A bout de
souffle is “about” a story and characters, certainly, but it is also about
the cinema, about film techniques, about Jean Seberg, etc.
This foregrounding
of the process—and the means—of narration is developed much further in
subsequent films, in which Godard systematically breaks down the traditional
barrier between fiction/documentary, actor/character, narrative
film/experimental film to create freer, “open” forms. Persons appear as
themselves in works of fiction, actors address the camera/audience in
monologues or as if being interviewed, materiality of film is made explicit
(the switches from positive to negative in Une
Femme mariée, the turning on and off of the soundtrack in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, the
showing of the clapper-board in La
Chinoise). The initial motivation for this seems to have been the assertion
of personal freedom: the filmmaker shatters the bonds of traditional realism in
order to be able to say and do whatever he wants, creating films spontaneously.
(Pierrot le fou —significantly, one
of Godard’s most popular films—is the most extreme expression of this impulse.)
Gradually, however, a political motivation (connected especially with the
influence of Brecht) takes over. There is a marked sociological interest in the
early films (especially Vivre sa vie
and Une Femme mariée ), but the
turning-point is Masculin-féminin with
its two male protagonists, one seeking fulfillment through personal relations,
the other a political activist. The former’s suicide at the end of the film can
be read as marking a decisive choice: from here on, Godard increasingly listens
to the voice of revolutionary politics and eventually (in the Dziga Vertov
films) adopts it as his own voice.
The films of the
Dziga Vertov group (named after the great Russian documentarist who anticipated
their work in making films that foreground the means of production and are
continuously self-reflexive) were the direct consequence of the events of May
1968. More than ever before the films are directly concerned with their own
process, so that the ostensible subjects—the political scene in Czechoslovakia (Pravda) or Italy (Lotte in Italia), the trial of the Chicago Eight (Vladimir and Rosa)—become secondary to
the urgent, actual subject: how does one make a revolutionary film? It was at
this time that Godard distinguished between making political films (i.e., films
on political subjects: Costa-Gavras’s Z is a typical example) and making films
politically, the basic assumption being that one cannot put radical content
into traditional form without seriously compromising, perhaps negating, it.
Hence the attack on realism initiated at the outset of Godard’s career
manifests its full political significance: realism is a bourgeois art form, the
means whereby the bourgeoisie endlessly reassures itself, validating its own
ideology as “true,” “natural,” “real”; its power must be destroyed. Of the
films from this period, Vent d'est
(the occasion for Peter Wollen’s seminal essay on “Counter-Cinema” in After Image ) most fully realized this
aesthetic: the original pretext (the pastiche of a Western) recedes into the
background, and the film becomes a discussion about itself—about the
relationship between sound and image, the materiality of film, the destruction
of bourgeois forms, the necessity for continuous self-criticism and
self-awareness.
The assumption
behind the Dziga Vertov films is clearly that the revolutionary impetus of May
1968 would be sustained, and it has not been easy for Godard to adjust to its
collapse. That difficulty is the subject of one of his finest works, Tout va bien (again in collaboration
with Gorin), an attempt to return to commercial filmmaking without abandoning
the principles (both aesthetic and political) of the preceding years. Beginning
by foregrounding Godard’s own problem (how does a radical make a film within
the capitalist production
system?), the film is strongest in its complex use of Yves Montand and Jane
Fonda (simultaneously fictional characters/personalities/star images) and its
exploration of the issues to which they are central. These issues include the
relationship of intellectuals to the class struggle; the relationship between
professional work, personal commitment, and political position; and the problem
of sustaining a radical impulse in a non-revolutionary age. Tout va bien is Godard’s most
authentically Brechtian film, achieving radical force and analytical clarity
without sacrificing pleasure and a degree of emotional involvement.
Godard’s
relationship to Brecht has not always been so clear-cut. While the
justification for Brecht’s distanciation principles was always the
communication of clarity, Godard’s films often leave the spectator in a state
of confusion and frustration. He continues to seem by temperament more anarchist than Marxist.
One is troubled by the continuity between the criminal drop-outs of the earlier
films and the political activists of the later. The insistent intellectualism
of the films is often offset by a wilful abeyance of systematic thinking, the
abeyance, precisely, of that self-awareness and self-criticism the political
works advocate. Even in Tout va bien,
what emerges from the political analysis as the film’s own position is an
irresponsible and ultimately desperate belief in spontaneity. Desperation,
indeed, is never far from the Godardian surface, and seems closely related to
the treatment of heterosexual relations: even through the apparent feminist awareness of the
recent work runs a strain of unwitting misogyny (most evident,
perhaps, in Sauve qui peut). The
central task of Godard criticism, in fact, is to sort out the remarkable and
salutary nature of the positive achievement from the temperamental limitations
that flaw it.
From 1980 on, Godard
commenced the second phase of his directorial career. Unfortunately, far too
many of his films have become increasingly inaccessible to the audiences who
had championed him in his heyday during the 1960s. Sauve qui peut (La Vie) (Every Man for Himself), Godard’s comeback
film, portended his future work. It is an awkward account of three characters
whose lives become entwined: a man who has left his wife for a woman; the
woman, who is in the process of leaving the man for a rural life; and a country
girl who has become a prostitute. In fact, several of Godard’s works might best
be described as anti-movies. Passion,
for example, features characters named Isabelle, Michel, Hanna, Laszlo and
Jerzy (played respectively by Isabelle Huppert, Michel Piccoli, Hanna
Schygulla, Laszlo Szabo, and Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who are involved in the
shooting of a movie titled Passion.
The latter appears to be not so much a structured narrative as a series of
scenes which are visions of a Renaissance painting. The film serves as a
cynical condemnation of the business of moviemaking-for-profit, as the extras
are poorly treated and the art of cinema is stained by commercial
considerations.
Prenom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen) is Godard’s best latter-career effort, a
delightfully subversive though no less pessimistic mirror of the filmmaker’s
disenchantment with the cinema. His Carmen is a character straight out of his
earlier work: a combination seductress/terrorist/wannabe movie maker. Her
uncle, played by Godard, is a once-celebrated but now weary and faded film
director named, not surprisingly, Jean-Luc Godard.
It seemed that
Godard had simply set out to shock in Hail,
Mary, a redo of the birth of Christ set in contemporary France. His Mary is
a young student and gas station attendant; even though she has never had sex
with Joseph, her taxi-driving boyfriend, she discovers she is pregnant. Along
with Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of
Christ, this became a cause celebre among Catholics and even was censured
by the Pope. However, the film is eminently forgettable; far superior is The Book of Mary, a perceptive short
about a girl and her constantly quarrelling parents. It accompanied showings of
Hail, Mary, and is directed by
long-time Godard colleague Anne-Marie Miéville.
Detective, dedicated to auteur heroes John Cassavetes, Edgar G. Ulmer, and
Clint Eastwood, is a verbose, muddled film noir. Despite its title, Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), an observance
of the lives of a wealthy and influential couple, only makes one yearn for the
days of the real “Nouvelle Vague.” The narrative, which focuses on the sexual
and political issues that are constants in Godard’s films, is barely
discernable; the dialogue—including such lines as “Love doesn’t die, it leaves
you,” “One man isn’t enough for a woman—or too much,” “A critic is a soldier
who fires at his own regiment,” “Have you ever been stung by a dead bee?”—is superficially
profound. King Lear, an excessive,
grotesque updating of Shakespeare, is of note for its oddball,
once-in-a-lifetime cast: Godard; Woody Allen; Norman and Kate Mailer; stage
director Peter Sellars; Burgess Meredith; and Molly Ringwald. The political
thriller Allemagne Neuf Zero (Germany
Nine Zero), although as confusing as any latter-day Godard film, works as
nostalgia because of the presence of Eddie Constantine. He is recast as private
eye Lemmy Caution, who
last appeared in Alphaville. Here, he
encounters various characters in a reunified Germany.
Helas Pour Moi (Oh, Woe Is Me), based on the Greek legend of Alcmene and
Amphitryon and a text penned by the Italian poet Leopardi, is a long-winded
bore about a God who wants to perceive human feeling; those intrigued by the
subject matter would be advised to see Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Faraway,
So Close. JLG/JLG—Autoportrait de Decembre (JLG/JLG—Self-Portrait in December),
filmed in and near Godard’s Swiss home, is a semi-abstract biography of the
filmmaker. Its structure is appropriate, given the development of Godard’s
cinematic style. Ultimately, it is of interest mostly to those still concerned
with Godard’s life and career.
Light
of day: Raoul Coutard on shooting film for Jean-Luc Godard - BFI Raoul
Coutard from Sight and Sound, Winter
1965-66, also seen here: Light
of day 3-page article by Raoul
Coutard from Sight and Sound, Winter
1965 (pdf)
Before Godard,
cameramen used to demand an absurdly long time to set up the lights for a shot.
The cameraman would insist on a good two hours to organise a straightforward
horizontal pan. He could have moved five or six times faster; but he said to
himself: The less I demand, the less I exist. In effect, and without him even
being aware of it, the cameraman’s performance had become a gigantic act. He
turned down certain camera angles, certain movements of the actors, simply for
the satisfaction of demonstrating his own existence. Films had become an
accretion of elements which really had nothing to do with the cinema. They were
the product of a collective circus, in which each technician put on his own
star turn.
Godard didn’t say to
the cameraman: “You are going to handle the photography this way, that way, at
an angle, against the light, etc.” What he said to him in effect was: “I want
only one thing from you. You must rediscover how to do things simply.” People
have been impressed by Godard and the rest because for them a film is a matter
of cinema. Exclusively of cinema.
Now, it’s obvious
that from the moment when the cameraman agreed to return to simplicity, and
stopped trying to be interesting, the general style of the film image was going
to change. Because, with the cameramen all determinedly tricking out their
circus turns, the image had become pretty extravagant.
I had got a fair
idea about this at the French Society of Photographers, in the Rue de Clichy.
Before working in films I was a photographer; and at Rue de Clichy, at that
time, the pupils in general followed two styles of photography. There were street
scenes, photographs of their wives sitting by windows, off-the-cuff reportage,
which the instructors thought were uninterestingly lit. Then there were the
photographs where the lighting was artificial and gimmicky, and where one
sensed immediately that the subject was no longer a bit of real life, but had
been carefully posed amidst a network of lamps. This was the ‘Style Harcourt’;
and the instructors at the school, who were much attached to this type of
photography, called it, quite seriously and without any intention of being
unkind, “cinema lighting.” So it was: one could say that all films were lit
like that.
But the photographs
that work, the ones that can be looked at for any length of time with some kind
of interest or emotion, are not only those of Cartier Bresson, but also the
old- fashioned portraits taken by Petit and Nadar. They took these photographs
in studios lit by one big window – by the light of day, by that really
beautiful all-over light which is daylight. And a film cameraman ought never to
let himself forget that the eye of the spectator is naturally tuned to full
daylight. Daylight has an inhuman faculty for always being perfect, whatever
the time of day. Daylight captures the real living texture of the face or the
look of a man. And the man who looks is used to daylight.
* * *
The human eye
penetrates to the depths of a room, then in a second it turns to a window; and
it isn’t disturbed by the transition. But the camera is disturbed – or, rather,
the film stock is. To keep the natural beauty of real light on the screen,
whatever movements Anna
Karina and Belmondo
may make around their room in Pierrot le fou –
that’s the cameraman’s job. That is what Godard was asking for when he said, in
his usual hesitant way, “Monsieur, we are going to be simple.”
Godard himself isn’t
exactly simple. I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I never know beforehand just
what he wants, and that complicates matters. And what he wants is usually a
whole lot of things at once. He wants to shoot without lights; he’s thinking of
a shot in a Lang
film which he saw six months ago, and of the left half of a shot by Renoir… he’s no
longer sure which one, and he can’t really explain any further, but really it
wasn’t at all bad.
Then after having
told me this, he sends me off the set, me and everyone else, while he thinks
about the way he’s going to do it. And when I come back, I find that it’s no
longer the same shot. And anyway he would rather like that very white light
which lit up the end of a table in a shot (unhappily a very short shot) from a Griffith film,
and he has always wondered whether perhaps that very white light didn’t really
come from the developing processes used in the Griffith laboratories, which
must have been quite different from any other… and so on, and so on. No, Godard
isn’t simple.
I remember one of
the very few occasions on which we worked in a studio. It was for the long
interior sequence, made up of long takes, in Une Femme est une
femme. The camera movements were to be so weird and so complicated that
Godard had for once resigned himself to studio shooting.
Well, what is the
point of a studio? How does it make the work easier? In a studio, for instance,
one can lift up the wall at one’s back, to make room for the camera and a lamp
or two. I wanted to do just that. Godard told me: “No. We mustn’t move the
wall. When a husband watches his wife bringing in the joint she has burned, he
can’t move the wall to bawl her out from further away. He stays in his chair
and looks from there.”
Another advantage of
the studio is that with extremely complicated scenes, of the kind we had in Une Femme est une femme, the set-builder
can construct his set in such a fashion that the camera dolly can move more or
less anywhere without too many problems for the cameraman. I told Godard:
“Change the set, move those two posts further away from each other. I can’t get
through.” His answer: “Out of the question. A young couple in a flat near the
Porte Saint-Denis don’t live in rooms with acres of space. I’m talking about
that sort of young couple. You’ll just have to manage.”
The third
justification for a studio, and the essential one: the catwalks up in the roof
to which one attaches the lights. We were making Une Femme est une femme in colour, and of course colour film stock
at that time was slow, so we had to have at least some light to be able to see
anything. So I lit the scene, with the lamps placed on the gantries which
overhung the set – the sequence with Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy
getting ready for bed. Godard sent me away, thought it over, called me back,
told me a thousand or so new things, kept breaking off in the middle of
sentences, referred to 20 films I hadn’t seen. I straightened out a few things,
and we began. After a few seconds, Godard stopped everything. He said to Anna:
“What on earth’s the matter with you? You don’t go to bed like that at home.”
He put himself in
Anna’s place. Then he said: “We’re absolutely mad. We’re trying to film Anna going
to bed in her room and there’s no ceiling. Anna has never slept in a room that
hasn’t got a ceiling.” A ceiling, of course, is expensive. The producer asked
Godard: “Will we see much of your ceiling in the film? Can’t you possibly do
without it?” “We won’t see it,” Godard said, “but if there isn’t a ceiling Anna
can’t do the scene. We must have a ceiling.”
So we had a ceiling.
I had no more gantries, to light the room from; we couldn’t move the walls about;
the set was fixed; we couldn’t have any lights. In fact, all the advantages of
the studio had vanished, and in the end what we found ourselves left with was a
real room, with all its problems. That is the last time that we went to the
trouble and expense of a studio; because in the long run, in a real room, with
someone like Godard, one has more of a free hand.
* * *
Godard is even more
incisive when deciding matters of film stock and laboratory techniques. Here I
am going to be technical: I haven’t any choice. The stock and the laboratory
are 80 per cent of the film image – its finesse and subtlety, its effect or
lack of effect, its punch and emotion. These, however, are points of which the
public is never aware.
People often tell me
that Lola was
brilliantly shot. “Was it due to your own mood?” they ask. “Or to Demy? Or the
light of Nantes? Or the look of Anouk Aimée?” It
was partly all of these things, but first and foremost, and above everything
else, the images of Lola came from
the film stock – Gevaert 36, which the factory has now stopped making. So I
have never been able to recapture those unsaturated blacks, those extraordinary
whites, that grainy texture of real and unreal which in my opinion accounted
for at least 70 per cent of the lyricism of Lola.
Godard knows this.
And when it’s a question of film stock, he is no longer hesitant. That first
time, on A Bout de souffle, he said
to me: “No more confectionery: we’re going to shoot in real light. You’ve been
a photographer. Which stock do you prefer?” I told him I liked to work with
Ilford H.P.S. Godard then had me take photographs on this stock. He compared
them with others, and we made a number of tests. Finally he said: “That’s
exactly what I want.”
We got on to the
Ilford works in England, and they told us that they were very sorry, but their
H.P.S. wasn’t made for motion picture cameras, only for still photographs: we
would have to give up. But Godard doesn’t give up. For still camera spools
Ilford made the stock in reels of 17½ metres. The perforations weren’t the same
as for cinema cameras. Godard decided to stick together as many 17½ metre reels
as he would need to make up a reel of motion picture film, and to use the
camera whose sprocket holes corresponded most closely with those of the Leica –
luckily, the Cameflex. The professionals were horrified.
But that wasn’t the
end of it. One photo-developer got particularly good results with H.P.S. stock,
and that was Phenidone. With Godard and the chemist Dubois of the G.T.C.
Laboratories, we ran several series of tests. We ended up by doubling the speed
of the emulsion, which gave us a very good result. Godard asked the laboratory
to use a Phenidone bath in developing the film. But the laboratory wouldn’t
play. The machines of the G.T.C. and L.T.C. laboratories handle 3,000 metres of
film stock an hour, with everything going through the same developing process,
and with the equipment geared to standard Kodak practice. A laboratory could
not effectively take one machine out of the circuit to process film stock for
M. Jean-Luc Godard, who at the very most would probably want no more than some
1,000 metres a day.
On A Bout de souffle, however, we had a
stroke of luck. Tucked away in a corner, the G.T.C. laboratories had a little
supplementary machine, more or less out of service, which they used for running
tests. They allowed us to borrow this little machine so that we could develop
our stuck-together lengths of llford film in a solution of our own making, and
at whatever rate we chose. There’s one thing that ought to be understood: the
fantastic success of A Bout de souffle,
and the turning point that this film marked in cinema history, was clearly due
mainly to Godard’s imagination, and especially (what to my mind is the film’s
major quality) to its sense of living in the moment. But it also had to do with
the fact that Godard stuck together these 17½ metre lengths of llford stock in
the teeth of everyone’s advice, and miraculously obtained the use of this
machine at the G.T.C. laboratories.
After that, we were
able to use this machine once more, on Le Petit Soldat.
When we reappeared, however, like the flowers in the spring, to ask for it for Les Carabiniers,
it wasn’t there any more.
But Les Carabiniers was something else
again. Godard said: “I have my scenario in my head. I know how to film the war,
but to develop it I need a special developing bath. Why is there something so
unsatisfactory about war films?” (There followed the stammered description of
45 shots or bits of shots, this shot and that one, which, when, where, etc…)
“They are unsatisfactory because the greys are too soft. For Les Carabiniers I want the film
processed in such a way that I get true whites and true blacks, and I want at
the most three or four greys, sprinkled here and there. [Here Coutard added
Godard’s untranslatable pun: “vous allez
me faire un vrai bain de guerre, et un vrai temps de développement de guerre.”]
Otherwise, we will be wasting our time and we won’t be filming war.” This time,
Godard had somehow or other persuaded the laboratory to change its usual
methods for him so long as our work lasted. We had permission to use a special
processing method and a special developing schedule. And Godard got his four
strong greys. But that was an exception.
Pierrot le fou meant colour. A cameraman’s worries over
colour are growing steadily less, as the stocks become more flexible every
year. But all the same: it’s when he is working with colour film that the
cameraman is most aware of the fact that no film stock is as sensitive as the
human eye. The problem comes from the fact that any number of techniques and
working practices were developed for work with early colour stock, such as
Technicolor, which was not very flexible. And people have got stuck there.
Here I’ll only
mention the problem of make-up. Make-up is essential in a colour film, for a
reason which is easy enough to understand. As the film stock is unstable, the
laboratories need something to use as a fixed point from which to work in
re-establishing the true colours; and what they work from are the actors’
faces. (They also base their colour justification firstly on a range of greys
which one films right after shooting the scene and then after that on the faces
of the actors.)
All make-up men,
however, have been trained in the American techniques which date back to the
early days of Technicolor. They make up the actors very red, a practice which
apparently was necessary for Technicolor. When the laboratory wants to correct
this red, it will probably add some blue; and with someone like Godard, who has
a passion for filming against white walls, everything goes to pieces if the
walls turn blue.
This red make-up is
a pointless habit. Amateur photographers know that they can get excellent
results if they photograph their wives and children in Kodachrome without
putting any make-up on them at all. On Une
Femme est une femme Godard asked for a neutral make-up, very light and
clear. If there were moments when we had to add a bit of colour to correct one
or two lighting effects, we decided to have a clear grey over it. We tried it
out; and it worked. It’s the same thing, however, as with the laboratories:
make-up men have their habits, their normal working methods, and it is a
crusade to get a more naturalistic kind of make-up out of them. Godard needed
to say to them as well: “Gentlemen, keep it simple.”
Jean-Luc
Godard: the artist and his muse | Film | The Guardian
Michael Newton, January 8, 2016
Jean-Luc Godard’s
early films were distinct from each other in tone and form – romantic comedies,
outlaw-chic, dystopian visions – connected only by the ‘shifting centre’ of his
cinematic world, his wife and muse, Anna Karina
Jean-Luc Godard had
a problem with endings. His early films often finish with a throwaway closure,
a death, not quite real, distantly presented. His films are all middle, yet a sense
of ending imbues them. For Godard, even love itself is something that is always
winding down and his lover, his wife, the muse of the best of his early movies,
Anna Karina, embodies this problem. Watching Bande à Part (1964) and Pierrot
le Fou (1965), I really didn’t want these films ever to finish; the deep
pleasure of being in the company of Karina, and Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey
and Jean-Paul Belmondo, is so beguiling that you want the fun to last a little
longer. These are films in which people simply kill time, delightfully. There’s
an energy there, a yearning restlessness of youth; people dance, or are
running, even, as in Breathless
(1960), as the life ebbs from them. The films play to a musical sense of
rhythm, carried by a beat, a melody connecting the images. Here improvisation
is liberty; plot is control. Karina acts as the living symbol of someone caught
between her own spontaneity and others’ constraint. She’s living her life, but
nonetheless stands as the victim of the directorial process, bartered by pimps,
controlled, bullied and photographed.
Karina ran away from
home at the age of 17, hitchhiking from Denmark to France. In Paris, she lived
on the streets until she was spotted in the cafe Les Deux Magots by a woman
from an ad agency, and was launched on a career as a model. Godard first caught
sight of her advertising soap, apparently naked in a bath. When he cast her in
a leading role in Le Petit Soldat
(released in 1963, but made in 1960), as a “minor” she still required her
estranged mother’s signature on the contract. During the making of the film
Karina and Godard began an affair, and in 1961 a passionate, desperate marriage
that ended in 1965. Between 1960 and 1966, prompted by affection and despair,
Godard made seven films with Karina, as well as Le Mépris (1963) in which Brigitte Bardot effectively impersonates
her. Together they form one of the glories of 20th-century cinema, a testament
to love and art.
Each film is
distinct in tone and form, moving from the romantic comedy of Une Femme Est une Femme (1961) to the
dystopian Alphaville (1965), from the
skewed documentary impulse in Vivre sa
vie (1962) to the melancholy comedy of Bande
à part. Karina does not inhabit a continuing cinematic image in the way
that Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe do in their films. Belmondo is more or
less constantly Belmondo, but Karina can be anything or anyone, and yet remains
herself, a person and not a persona.
Her first movie with
Godard, Le Petit Soldat, is a tale of
the Algerian war, an echo of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes set in a Geneva filled with spies and double
agents. It’s a film of surveillance and interrogation. In a remarkable scene,
the rightwing secret agent, the hero of the film, photographs a withdrawn
Karina, directing her, trying to provoke her into opening up before him. Yet
for all we are invited to stare at her, she remains elusive, reserved. Later,
in an extended sequence, Algerian terrorists torture the hero to extract
information from him and we are compelled to share his sufferings. It’s a
distressing illustration of the film’s main theme: what goes on in another
person’s head? This query would become Godard’s preoccupation with regard to
Karina, the elusive beloved, the shifting centre of each movie. Photographing
Karina, intruding on her privacy, the spy gives us Godard’s famous line:
“Photography shows the truth. Cinema shows the truth at a rate of 24 frames per
second.” But where, these films want to know, is the truth present in another’s
face?
In Une Femme Est une Femme Karina plays a
stripper, and could have become objectified, merely looked at; in practice,
she’s too much herself for that. When she strips, half the punters are too
preoccupied to bother looking at her. In Vivre
Sa Vie, Godard plays again with our desire to watch his star, to trace the
sorrows of her changing face. The film begins with Karina splitting up with her
partner, the whole scene shot from behind. “What’s that look for?” she says,
but with their backs to us it’s a look we can’t ourselves see. Her husband, a
teacher, quotes a child’s essay to her: “A bird is an animal with an interior
and an exterior; remove the exterior you see the interior; remove the interior,
you see the soul.” From then on, Godard constructs a portrait of Karina,
putting a life, his love for her, on screen, trying to find that soul by way of
the exterior. The character she plays, Nana, is after all an anagram of Anna.
The film toys with a
long-standing slur that connects the actor to the prostitute. Playing a frustrated
actress, Karina allows us to entertain the thought that Rimbaud’s ungrammatical
paradox (during the film she quotes it), “I is an other”, may be, for the
actor, a literal truth. She is caught between a set of contradictions: that she
is a uniquely valuable person, and still she may be just a pretty face, no more
than the sum of the reactions she provokes. Her lover wants to go to the
Louvre; paintings bore Nana, but he attempts to persuade her, saying “art and
beauty are life”. Yet he reads her a story by Poe in which a man’s painting of
his beloved robs her of life, art supplanting the real woman it attempts to
memorialise. At the movie’s end, in another of Godard’s apparently offhand
conclusions, she’s trapped between men, shot by both sides. It’s both melodrama
and a political point, the woman’s symbolic fate.
In one of the
greatest moments in this great film, Nana dances. It’s a solitary surrender to
movement in a film that laments and records her isolation. There’s a wonderful,
uninhibited silliness to it; we enjoy, from outside, that freshness in Karina,
the camera prowling the room with her, following the impulse of the loping bass
guitar. And then, for a moment, we’re inside her point of view, playing the
room until the pimps catch sight of her, and we’re onlookers once again.
In an astonishing
transformation, Karina followed the alienated poise of Nana with the gauche,
gamine Odile in Bande à Part. Here
she frowns, ineptly flirts, large-eyed and troubled. There’s a dance sequence
too, the Madison performed in the cafe by Odile and her two boyfriends. This
time Karina dances with others, but still remains alone; the three of them
mirror each other, and remain separate, Godard’s voiceover reminding us of
their concealed, private thoughts. Remembered as a movie about companionship,
it exposes the separation and disjunction, the coercion and rivalry that shadow
the trio’s inconsequential idyll of togetherness. For most of the film they
remain on formal “vous” terms. As everywhere in these early films, Godard
invests the movie with an irony that nonetheless evokes the poetry that it
resists. While it is drenched with melancholy, it nonetheless exudes a fragile
joy; you finish it feeling that bit more reconciled to life.
Bande à Part also lays bare one essential fact of cinema;
in the absence of plot, the time must pass somehow, and so the trio help it
pass, dancing, holding a minute’s silence, breaking the speed record for
getting through the Louvre, playing cops and robbers. Pierrot le Fou is even more invested in this thought: it’s a movie
that struggles with (and overcomes) the fact that films and life are boring. It
flirts with the duty to entertain, its characters and the audience both wanting
distraction, all the more necessary in view of the absence of connected plot.
Saturated with outlaw-chic, Belmondo and Karina move between a Jules Verne
idyll and a hardboiled thriller, taking up or dropping the frame provided by
genre. It’s a very funny and very desperate film; it closes with murder and
suicide, because it has to close somehow.
At the end of
Godard’s time with Karina comes Made in
USA (1966), firmly at the start of a new phase in his career. Experimental,
Maoist, committed, these later 60s films are no doubt intellectually
stimulating, but, to this viewer at least, they’re a misery to watch. The joy
has departed; Karina and Godard were already divorced, and it shows. In a
sense, Alphaville provides a more
fitting coda to the films they made together. It’s a strange precursor of Blade Runner, a noiresque
science-fiction film, similarly preoccupied with a flight from feeling. Here
perhaps more than anywhere else, Godard frames Karina as an actor with the
power to move us. Inhabiting a society where feeling is alien and coldness is
all people learn, she nonetheless moves towards gentleness. The film shows her
discovery onscreen of the human qualities of compassion, of love; in the
coldness of film, she makes a space for human warmth. It’s a small miracle, and
a miracle repeated in nearly all her movies with Godard, a frail embrace of
tenderness that we never want to end.
Film:
50 years of Jean‑Luc Godard's Breathless | Film | The Guardian
Philip French extensive essay from The
Observer, June 5, 2010, also seen here:
Breathless
Continues to Shock and Surprise 50 Years On
Two trailers bookend
my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the
career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my
lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while
waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French
picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I’d never come
across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of
Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of
Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed
with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was
like no other trailer I’d seen, and I was captivated. Not until my return to
London did I discover that the broken-nosed actor was Jean-Paul Belmondo and
the film was the debut feature of the Cahiers du Cinéma critic Jean-Luc Godard.
It had opened in Paris six weeks before to considerable acclaim and had been
made with the help of two fellow critics-turned-directors, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, whose first
films I’d seen. When A Bout de souffle
(aka Breathless) opened in London a
year later, it did live up to my expectations.
Eighty years old
this November, Godard has just compiled another trailer for his latest
(according to him, his last) picture, Film
Socialisme. As provocative and original as ever, the two-minute
trailer can be viewed online. It is in fact the whole film, speeded up for
an audience too impatient to concentrate for two hours. The movie, premiered at
Cannes last month, has subtitles that are deliberately unintelligible to anyone
who doesn't understand the various languages in which it’s made. In an
interview with that other onetime revolutionary firebrand of the 1960s, Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, Godard said simply: “Don’t translate, learn languages.” For nearly
40 years I’ve been convinced that whenever a Godard movie is shown at Cannes,
everybody in the world interested in seeing it is present at the Palais du Festival,
elbowing other critics aside as they struggle to get into the early-morning
press show. Nowadays, I only see a new film by the aloof, hectoring, didactic
Godard when wild horses turn up at my front gate to drag me to a London press
screening.
How, then, to
explain what Godard meant to us back in the 60s? Why did I put on the
dustjacket of my first book a photograph of myself scowling in a leather jacket
and dark glasses, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth, because I thought it
made me look like Godard? Why was I thrilled when Truffaut, as the director in
his La Nuit américaine, eagerly tears
open a parcel of books on the cinema, one of which is a symposium on Godard
containing my 1965 essay on Une Femme
mariée? Why did we sit around discussing the ideas and innovations of
Godard the way young filmgoers today talk about box-office grosses, special
effects and continuity errors?
Since the mid-50s
we'd been looking for the new in the arts, society and politics, and our latest
hopes were being invested in our cinema's working-class realism, which came out
of fiction and the theatre, and in the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague from
across the Channel. The latter term was coined in L'Express in 1957 by Françoise Giroud to describe the whole
postwar generation and was applied to the cinema the following year by Pierre
Billard in Cinéma 58. Talk of the new
wave dominated Cannes in 1959, when films as different from each other as
Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, Alain
Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and Truffaut’s
Les Quatre cents coups were perceived
as characteristic examples of the new movement. Of the three, only Truffaut was
a critic, and along with Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques
Rivette wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma.
Their polemical writings were devoted to overthrowing the cinematic old guard
they called “Le cinéma du papa”
(Dad’s cinema) and promoting the politique
des auteurs. They saw directors (or at least a select group of them) as
auteurs, a term soon introduced into worldwide usage. These omniscient figures,
whose ranks they sought to join, were seen as imposing their personalities, at
times almost mystically, on every film they made, wielding what the moviemaker
and theorist Alexandre Astruc called “le
camera stylo” or cinematic pen.
Between 1958 and
1963 an astonishing 170 French filmmakers directed their first features,
happily marching under the new wave banner, which was as vague as it was in
vogue. But few were truly radical and innovative. The chief exception was
Godard, the 30-year-old Franco-Swiss intellectual, as passionate about Hegel as
he was about Hitchcock, an artist bent on transforming the nature of cinema and
with it the world. “Godard is not merely an iconoclast,” that prophet of
modernism Susan Sontag declared in 1968, “he is a deliberate ‘destroyer’ of
cinema.”
Breathless was the real thing. It was what wed been waiting for, and it
has taken its place alongside 20th-century works that have become familiar
landmarks yet not lost their ability to shock and surprise: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, Picasso’s Guernica, Welles’s Citizen Kane, Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.
They are what Ezra Pound was talking about when he said that “great literature
is news that remains news.”
Claude Chabrol, who
served as supervising producer on Breathless,
famously warned that great subjects rarely make great films. And Godard, the
master of the gnomic epigram and perceptive paradox, once said: “All you need
for a movie is a gun and a girl.” This was the basis of the brief scenario that
Truffaut, a fellow admirer of film noir and série noire pulp fiction, provided
for Breathless. Its antihero, the
swaggering, misogynistic petty criminal Michel (Belmondo), steals a car in the
south of France and kills a policeman on the road to Paris, where he takes up
with an old girlfriend, the well-heeled American, Patricia (Seberg). They talk
of life and literature (in particular Faulkner’s The Wild Palms) in a seedy hotel, make love and visit the movies
while he tries to get money owed him by criminal associates. The police close
in, Patricia betrays him. Hardboiled B-feature stuff. But the style is
everything, a calculated destruction and remaking of traditional film grammar,
and Godard formulated his much-quoted idea that “a film should have a
beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
The film is
dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the celebrated B-movie studio on Hollywood’s
Poverty Row, the camera is handheld, the editing is abrupt and inconsistent,
Raoul Coutard’s masterly monochrome photography is harsh, hard-edged, reliant
on natural light. The much-admired director of existential gangster pictures,
Jean-Pierre Melville, makes an appearance as himself, the first of such cameos
in a Godard picture. The work of other directors is evoked or alluded to, among
them Budd Boetticher (Westbound),
Samuel Fuller (Forty Guns), Otto
Preminger (Whirlpool), Robert Aldrich
(Ten Seconds to Hell), and Bogart is
a looming presence. We are constantly distanced in the manner of Brecht’s
alienation effect, told that what we are watching is a film, but also that
movies, like our lives, are halls of mirrors.
Godard’s methods of
work on Breathless were purposefully
chaotic. He admitted that he deliberately created confusion to achieve “a
greater possibility of invention.” Shooting in the busy streets of Paris, he
avoided crowd control, and at one point a policeman leapt from a passing bus to
assist an apparently dying Belmondo.
Over the next eight
years Godard made a dozen feature films and contributed to several portmanteau
pictures that defined and refined his art, and they’ve influenced several
generations of cineastes from Nagisa Oshima through Wim Wenders to Quentin
Tarantino. Yet the playfulness, the apparent sheer love of the movies,
eventually gave way to a deep ambivalence, as his doubts about Hollywood
changed to loathing and his sceptical attitude towards the States became unabashed
anti-Americanism. “Do you love the cinema?” he was asked around the time of Breathless. He replied: “I have contempt
for it. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it yet at the
same time I have contempt for it.”
Most of his 1960s films
are masterpieces or near-masterpieces. Several ran into trouble with the
censors. Some didn't get released in Britain until years after they were made.
Godard managed to attract major stars both then and later. He was constantly at
the centre of controversy, debate and even scandal, ever ready with a quote for
the press or a quotable line in a film. He mocked the film business in Le Mépris, subverted the musical in Une Femme est une femme, questioned the
very basis of marriage in Une Femme
mariée, showed present-day Paris as a horrific, depersonalised city of the
future in his bleak sci-fi film Alphaville.
But none of the later films had an impact comparable with Breathless, and as the decade progressed, his characters turned
from nihilistic outsiders to slogan-mouthing revolutionaries. His farewell to
anything resembling the mainstream came in 1967 with Weekend, which ended with the title “Fin du cinema.” He then worked within a leftwing collective on
low-budget pictures, most of them on video, before moving with his collaborator
and third wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, to Switzerland, which has been his base
ever since.
Yet if Godard was
ever a mainstream director, then he started to paddle rapidly towards the
river's parallel tributaries as early as 1963. That was when he made Le Mépris, a million-dollar production
financed by American producer Joseph Levine and the Italian tycoon Carlo Ponti.
They wanted a combination of art-house chic and upmarket sexploitation that
would show off the naked charms of Brigitte Bardot. She was cast as the wife of
a French screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) working on an Italian version of The Odyssey directed by Fritz Lang and
produced by a snarling Hollywood mogul played by Jack Palance. The producers
didn’t like the fractured masterpiece they were given, edited their own
versions, and were denounced as “King Kong Levine” and “Mussolini Ponti.”
Godard slapped Ponti’s 69-year-old Paris representative in public and got a 500
franc fine.
This was the first
of a string of confrontations and demolitions that included helping to close
down the Cannes film festival in May 1968 as an act
of solidarity with demonstrating students and striking workers. Six months
later he punched Iain Quarrier, the British co-producer of his One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil), in the face and stomach on the stage of
the National Film Theatre. Richard Roud, author of the first book in English on
Godard and director of the London film festival, had brought Quarrier and
Godard together for a public discussion on the film’s re-editing, and the
assault was preceded by Godard advising the spectators to demand their money
back.
The worst conflict,
however, was the split between Godard and his oldest friend and collaborator,
François Truffaut, the man whose first act on gaining a certain industrial
muscle by winning a prize at Cannes with Les
Quatre cents coups was to help his colleague get his feet on the feature
film ladder. There was jealousy and principle on Godard’s side, a mixture of
guilt and exasperation on Truffaut’s. They traded public insults during the
1970s and their irreconcilable differences were never repaired. When Truffaut
died in 1984, Godard praised his criticism but refused to make any favourable
comments on his films. Truffaut had come to terms with the film industry,
Godard would never consider such a compromise. Not until the publication in
1988 of Truffaut’s collected letters, which contained a 1973 exchange between
the two, did most of us understand the depth of the breach between them.
Godard’s letter pointed out what he considered the dishonesty of La Nuit américaine, calling Truffaut a
liar for not mentioning his affair with its star Jacqueline Bisset. He then
demanded as his right that Truffaut should invest 10m francs in his new
low-budget movie, Un simple film.
Truffaut’s scathing
reply, which occupies six full pages of the book, lists a succession of
slights, insults and betrayals, calls Godard a shit several times, and begins
with the statement: “Jean-Luc. Just so you won't be obliged to read this
unpleasant letter right to the end, I’m starting with the essential point: I
will not co-produce your film.” It has to be added, however, that Godard wrote
an affectionate introduction for the Truffaut book, a characteristic mixture of
eloquence and obscurity, in which he said, looking back on their youth: “The
cinema had taught us how to live; but life, like Glenn Ford in The Big Heat, was to take its revenge.”
Vivre
sa vie Blu-ray review - Part 1 | Cine Outsider
Jerry Whyte, BFI Blu-Ray
Jean-Luc Godard is not the only director for whom
filming is like breathing, but he’s the one who breathes best. He is rapid like Rossellini, sly like Sacha
Guitry, musical like Orson Welles, simple like Pagnol, wounded like Nicholas
Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman, and insolent like nobody
else.
―Francois Truffaut, Text on Jean-Luc Godard: Two or Three Things
I Know About Him, 1966,
Sprawl is the
quality/of the man who cut down his Rolls Royce/into a farm utility truck, and
sprawl/is what the company lacked when it made its repeated efforts to buy the
vehicle back and repair its image . . . Sprawl occurs in art . . . Sprawl gets
up the nose of many people/(every kind that comes in kinds) whose future does
not include it . . . Sprawl leans on things/It is loose-limbed in its mind/
Reprimanded and dismissed/it listens with a grin and a boot on the rail/of
possibility.
―Les Murray, from The Quality of Sprawl, 1986
In 2011,
Bernardo Bertolucci was awarded the rare honour of an Honorary Palme D'Or at
Cannes. Half a century earlier, he had stood beside Richard Roud, who was
director of the London Film Festival at the time, as he tremulously awaited an
introduction to Jean-Luc Godard. Bertolucci's awed reaction to meeting Godard
for the first time was identical to that of the great French critic Serge
Daney: he vomited. I fully understand that response. Others, perhaps perplexed
by Godard's elliptical style or irked by his political and philosophical
discursiveness, may understand it for different reasons. We walk (gingerly at
times) in the footsteps of giants and for many of us Godard, for all his myriad
character flaws and contradictions, is the one who stands tallest; the keeper
of film's flame; cinema's archivist, educator, inventor, philosopher and
historian sans pareil; simply the
most daring and exciting, passionate and poetic, ingenious and important artist
of the modern age working in any form.
Ever since his first
film, Opération Béton (1955) – a 17
minute-long short about the construction of the Grand-Dixence dam, Godard has
also been among the most prolific of directors. In 1967, the BFI published Godard, Richard Roud's monogram on the
Franco-Swiss visionary. The first English language book on Godard and the first
in Sight & Sound's seminal 'Cinema
One' series, it traced Godard's development from his first shorts through to
his fourteenth feature, La Chinoise,
an extraordinary film that prefigured, even to an extent precipitated the
events of May 1968. In an appendix on that film, which was still being
completed as his book went to press, Roud says: "No book on Godard can
hope to be up to date for long; no other important director makes as many films
a year as he. All the more reason, however, I thought, to try to make this one
up to date for at least a month or two after its publication." Soon after
Roud wrote those words, the portmanteau film Loin du Viêtnam appeared (featuring Godard's contribution, titled Caméra-oeil in homage to Dziga Vertov),
and then Weekend were released. In
the same period, Godard was shooting L'amour,
his segment of the Italian anthology film Vangelo
70. Godard has made over a hundred films since then.
For obvious reasons,
Godard was particularly productive in the period following the collapse of his
marriage to Anna Karina, but he never stopped making films. His extraordinary
productivity is one of many reasons he is also among the most discussed of
directors. There is a lot to discuss. And to discuss Godard is, still, to take
sides. Few directors have divided opinion as sharply he has: where some see a
playful profundity, others see pretentious prolixity, others again see an
intoxicating, often irritating admixture of both; where some see a succession
of astonishing films equally successful in their own terms, others see a
bafflingly overrated body of work punctuated by failures, and others see an
understandably uneven oeuvre marked by discernible continuities. Godard even
divides his admirers: some find his accessible early films dazzlingly
successful, others prefer his 'political' films, others again regard his later
experiments in video and 3-D as the best of his vast output.
Godard's admirers
will hope he is still making films at 103, as the late Manoel de Oliveira was,
and that he continues to interrogate the world at large, and audio-visual
culture in particular, with his characteristic vigour and invention. Those
annoyed by his politics and philosophy, his contradictions and intransigence
may wish Godard would just drop dead. Gerturde Stein famously described Ezra
Pound as "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you
were not, not." Godard is, among other things an explainer of and for the
global village of cinephiles. It is easy to see why those poor souls living
beyond our boundaries do not always share our enthusiasm for Godard. Much
online coverage of film is derisively referred to as 'fan' content, as if
enthusiasm were a weakness not a virtue. I make no apologies for declaring my
passionately partisan predilection for Godard.
To illustrate the
divergent opinions that crystallize around Godard, I'll begin by scratching an
itch on a long-healed wound. My jaw dropped and my pulse quickened, earlier
this year, when I clicked on 'Perfect! Let's Do It Again', a boldly provocative
article on this site, in which 'Camus', our 'unofficial Hollywood
correspondent', considered great directors and what makes them great. It was
New Year's Day and the disorientating after-effects of bacchanalian excess
intensified as I absorbed his engaging thoughts. The period we make merry with
lists was still upon us and he duly obliged with a 'Top Ten' of Bergman,
Fellini, Ford, Hitchcock, Kubrik, Kurosawa, Ray, Renoir, Welles and Wilder. I
momentarily wondered whether he meant Nicholas or Sajit Ray, weighed In a Lonely Place against The Apu Trilogy, and then instinctively
reacted by reaching for Godard – Godard and Antonioni, Bresson, Dreyer,
Eisenstein, Gance, Resnais, Tarkovsky, Vertov and Visconti. To my huge relief,
my colleague granted Andrew Sarris space to flesh out the pantheon with another
ten canonical names. Take a bow Chaplin, Flaherty, Griffith, Hawks, Keaton,
Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Ophüls and von Sternberg. He also shoehorned in a nod
to Scorsese and a wink to Truffaut. By then, I'd revised my first thoughts and
plumped, instead, for Cassavetes, Chytilová, Erice, Jennings, Marker, Pialat,
Pasolini, Pudovkin, Rossellini ("one cannot live without Rossellini")
and Vláčil. The names fell fast, randomly, sometimes alliteratively,
occasionally associatively, as I worked my way through the alphabet or the
revered masters of cinema.
My mind was bursting
with names. It nearly exploded when my colleague asserted that no living
director could make the cut. "You cannot," he wrote, "be great
and still be alive (time is the first judge of greatness)." Again, I
screamed out -"'Godard! Godard for fuck's sake!" – before selecting
ten alive and kicking also- greats who've stood time's test: Bertolucci, Hou
Hsiao-Hsien, Kaurismäki, Kiarostami, Kieślowski, Sissako, Sukarov, Tarr, Varda
and Wadja. I then blushed and hurriedly added Akerman, Clarke, Deren, Holland,
Ramsey, Reichardt, Reiniger, Shepitko, Shub and von Trotta. The front cover of Sight & Sound's October issue
announces a special feature, The Female Gaze, which contains a list, spread
over twenty pages, of "100 overlooked films directed by women." In
the same issue, Marc Cousins throws his weight behind this long-overdue act of
reclamation. He argues against the assumption that partriachy successfully
excluded female directors. "Luckily," he says, "there are lot's
of people - researchers, curators, festivals, publications - who, now and for
years, have been naming and celebrating the great female directors from the
past." All of which goes to show how blinkered the lists I offer above
are, how shamefully sexist as well as Eurocentric I am, how nonsensical lists
(particularly lists of ten) are; and what irresistible, useful fun lists are
too. The critics' lists appall and enthrall me in equal measure. Lists are a double-edged
sword, they are two-faced: they are both the enemy of criticism and its
lifeblood, they force us to think while thinking for us, they consolidate the
idea of a canon while seeming to confront it, they guide us towards films while
steering us away from them. Although I appreciate a canon of 'greats' is an
accretion of persuasive reviews and, yes, lists, I still baulk at the way
critical consensus marginalizes often more interesting work.
My colleague ended
with ten moderns of his own and concluded by inviting us to let him know if
he'd missed anyone "really obvious (we're talking about directors with a
significant body of quality work, men and women all agreed by most critics and
commentators to be in possession of a unique voice)." Godard! Godard for
fuck's sake, I screamed, and Apitchaptong, Ceylan, Davies, Diaz, Guzmán,
Haneke, Mekas, Olmi, Wenders and Zvyagintsev. The list may not be endless but
it's always incomplete. Is it all, though, as he suggested, all merely a matter
of opinion? In How to Read Literature,
Terry Eagleton provides a ready-made repost to the argument that criticism can
only ever be subjective. "Whether you prefer peaches to pears is a
question of taste," he says, "which is not true of whether you think
Dostoevsky a more accomplished novelist than John Grisham. Dostoevsky is better
than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady
Gaga." Godard is a more accomplished filmmaker than (pick a name, any
name), let's say, Spielberg, in the sense that Gina Rowlands was a better actor
than, oh, I don't know, Muffin the Mule.
If few remain
neutral about Godard it's partly because he represents a certain way of making
and thinking about films; a certain tendency in European cinema earthed in the
iconoclasm of the avant-garde, shaped by the politics of the anti-Fascist
European left, aspiring to art, unashamed of philosophy, and defiantly at odds
with Hollywood. In his views on Hollywood, as in many other senses, Godard's
career can been seen as a lurching from extreme to another. He fought his first
battles with the 'Hitchcocko-Hawksians' of Cahiers
du cinéma as they rallied to the flag of Hollywood and then defended it
against the enormous condescension of European film critics during the politique des auteurs period. Later, the
arch anti-Americanism of Le mépris
(1963) and Bande à part (1963),
which had already intensified with Made
in USA (1966) and Deux ou trois
choses que je sais d'elle (1967), gradually hardened into virulent disgust.
His attitude towards American cultural imperialism and Hollywood is now
expressed through a narrative of European resistance and American occupation.
Despite or because
of that stance, Godard still has legions of admirers on both sides of the
Atlantic. At 85, he bestrides two competing cultures like a colossus. His
latest film, Adieu au langage
(2014), a typically daring experiment in DIY 3-D, was unlikely either to win an
Oscar or find favour with mainstream audiences but it won both the Jury Prize
at Cannes and the U.S. National Film Critics award. Given Godard's stature, the
scale of his achievements, and my profound respect for him, my stomach tightens
at the mere thought even of offering these few short thoughts on him. In the
preface to his indispensible biography Godard:
A Portrait of the Artist at 70, Colin MacCabe says: "In its range of
reference – the history of cinema, the history of art, the history of Marxism –
the work is as daunting as the life. It would be a fool who thought they had
all the necessary competencies to comment fully on this extraordinarily rich
œuvre." I'm no such fool, not least because, a decade and half after the
release of MacCabe's book, the challenge is larger than ever. The BFI's
dual-format release of a newly restored, pristine print of Vivre sa vie (1962) may not, offer much that is new (the BFI
themselves released a new print of the film in 2004), but it does present an
irresistible opportunity not only to consider one of the most influential films
of its era but also to think out loud about Godard and his incomparable,
sprawling, inevitably uneven, enviably vast body of work.
What drew me and
continues to draw me to Godard? What is it in his work that profoundly moves
me? His restless fecundity and ferocious intelligence but perhaps above all,
his sly, sharp wit and contrarian cheek. It's funny to think that the thing I
love most about Godard might be his elusive, acerbic sense of humour. There's
something anarchic and impish in him that corresponds to what Australian poet
Les Murray called "The quality of sprawl" – that fiercely
independent, rudely democratic Larrikin impulse Murray detected in the outback
outlook; something tinged with the spirit of May 1968 and the Maquis but also
oddly reminiscent of the anti-authoritarian humour glimpsed in certain Ealing
films. For a generally dark, deadly serious director Godard can be very funny.
To pick up the
strand of Godard's anti-Americanism again, there's the exhilarating and
hilarious scene in Bande à part in
which Godard has the three musketeers Claude Brasseur, Sammy Frey, and Anna
Karina race through the Louvre in an attempt to beat the speed record set by
American tourists. There's the use to which Godard puts TWA and PAN AM flight
bags in Deux ou trois choses.
There's Belmondo's deadpan, impatient "My name is Ferdinand" in Pierrot le fou. Or the scene in which
Belmondo 'bumps into' Jeanne Moreau in a bar in Une Femme est une femme and asks her "How's it going with
Jules et Jim?" There's the scene in Éloge
de l'amour (2001) in which two women dressed in the folk costume of
Brittany canvass signatures for a petition to dub The Matrix (1999) into Breton.
Then again, there's
the scene in Le mépris, shot at the
legendary Cinecittà studios, in which a European director (Fritz Lang 'as himself')
clashes with a philistine Yank producer (Jack Palance as Jerry Prokosch). It
tickles me pink when Prokosch hurls a can of celluloid across the screening
room as if he were a Greek Olympian hurling a discus. And it always makes me
laugh when Lang vainly attempts to explain the adaptation of The Odyssey they're working on. Prokosch
asks: "Now what great stuff are we seeing today Fritz?" Lang says:
"Each picture should have a definite point of view Jerry . . . here it's
the fight of the individual against circumstances. The eternal problem of the
old Greeks." To which the American derisively snorts, "Oh,
please!"
If Godard's sense of
humour passes many people by, it may be because it doesn't announce itself with
crashing cymbals and a roll of drums; it seeps, silently and subtly, out of his
seriousness. Running alongside the humour, there's Godard's depth of knowledge,
his reach and range, his poetics and politics of citation. In a moment
characteristic of the cultural layering at
play in Godard's work that same scene in Le mépris is reprised, to equally hilarious satiric effect, in Éloge de l'amour. As James Quant
(Senior Programmer for the increasingly important Toronto International Film
Festival) says: "In both films, European myth, history, and culture are
sold, plundered, and falsified by an American producer." Godard, of
course, has always 'plundered' American and European culture at will himself,
while looking both ways, sometimes three ways at once. For example, Éloge de l'amour also reworks Otto
Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
and, therefore, À bout de souffle
(1960), which reworked the American's film first.
Even if Godard
doesn't, as his old Cahiers comrade
Luc Moullet claims, always read books whole but, rather, "pecks at books like
a hen in the garden," he is the ultimate cultural magpie. He has
appropriated material from his contemporaries as well as from literary,
philosophical, and cinematic sources, but tends to bend, amend and transform
quotations. Witness his inversion of Moullet's claim that "Morality is a
question of tracking shots": Godard's oft-quoted aphorism that
"Tracking shots are a question of morality" adds aesthetic and
political bite to a reactionary phrase initially suggesting that tracking shots
are all morality consists of.
Godard's work has been compared to Walter Benjamin's unfinished magnus opus The Arcades Project, which was envisaged
as a comprehensive, compendious survey of Paris in the 19th century built
entirely of quotations that would converse and interact with one another,
igniting an almost endless number of associative chain reactions. Godard's work
operates that way. Taken as a whole, it is as wide reaching, spacious and
monumental as anything in cinema.
Daunted as I am at
the prospect of reviewing a Godard film, I'll continue to edge, nervously,
toward the task, on safe ground and home turf, by delineating my lifelong
relationship with his work. Initially, my intense personal connection to Godard
was exclusively emotional and hormonal. An adolescent crush on Charlotte Brontë
was, I confess, superseded by a teenage infatuation with Anna Karina. Even as
that limited ardour cooled slightly, Godard's early films, so suffused with the
energy and excitement of youth, slipped deep into my bloodstream like
amphetamine. I was hooked as soon as I saw À
bout de souffle, which sat alongside Colin McInnes's Absolute Beginners, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye among the sacred objects of adolescence and the
symbols of several generations' rites of passage into adulthood.
The adrenaline rush
of my teenage encounters with Godard returns each time I watch Vivre sa vie, Band à part, Une femme est
femme (1961) and Masculin/Feminin
(1966). For me back then, these were films of Swinging Paris as surely as Blow Up (1966) was a film of Swinging
London. All are now like love songs carried on the breeze, bearing with them
memories of naïve dreams and teenage kicks. The charge those stylish,
irreverent films transmitted was bound up with a love of mod culture
inseparable from a deepening cinephilia that was itself inseparable from
Francophilia. Just as the 'young Turks' of Cahiers
du cinéma had championed Hollywood's finest as a reaction against the
moribund, stultifying cinéma de papa
or cinéma de qualité, so the young
punks of my university days rallied to Godard and the European New Waves as an
alternative to increasingly repulsive and formulaic mainstream Hollywood films
and a fusty, generally reactionary British film culture.
Growing up, it
seemed to me in my late teens, meant coming to prefer, better say, claiming to
prefer Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965), Made in USA (1966), Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle
(1967), and Weekend (1967) to the
superficially slighter early films, though the depth of those films only
revealed itself gradually. Interestingly, Anna Karina says in No. 13 of Faber
& Faber's 'Projections series, "The young people I meet at film
festivals tell me their favourites are Vivre
sa vie or Une femme est une femme,
but mostly Pierrot le fou. In
England and Brazil they love Alphaville,
and in Germany they prefer Une femme est
une femme." Uhm.
As the buds of my
mind opened, I deserted Literature for Film, after belatedly realising, halfway
through my degree, that I could actually study Godard. And as I explored his
work he hastened my politicisation, even shaped my worldview, to the same
extent reading Orwell (another formative influence) did. As with Orwell, the
more I learned of the man, the less I liked him; the more I learned of the
work, the more I respected him as an 'artist'. I was surprised to find marked
similarities between Orwell and Godard: both worked from a deep-seated European
suspicion of American culture and power; both were outspoken socialists,
critics of the status quo, fearless in presenting unpleasant truths, and
eloquent proselytizers for their respective forms and politics. There were
similarities in their personalities too: both men, for instance, surmounted
their early misogyny and both were initially unsuccessful serial mariage
proposers. Of course, while Orwell lacked Godard's sense of humour, he more
than made up for it in other ways. Godard, for his part, stretched his form to
breaking point. His long-since co-opted co-option of genres, his encyclopaedic
cultural references, his political insight and idiocy, his entire extraordinary
work pointed me in extracurricular directions of which most of my tutors seemed
to have scant knowledge. Godard taught me in ways they didn't.
And when I
eventually watched the films of Godard's 'militant' or 'Maoist' phase (the
Dziga Vertov/Sonimage period when he worked primarily with Jean-Pierre Gorin),
I did so with a new kind of excitement, as an ardent convert to the
old-fashioned idea that money isn't everything and as one persuaded that
humankind faced a stark choice between socialism and barbarism. This was in the
eighties – a period when, as I saw it, folk had begun to give high-sounding
names to sordid instincts. As a grasping love of money was elevated to the
highest social virtue and the iron fist of monetarism began battering
communities to death, films like One
Plus One (1968), Vent d'est
(1969), British Sounds (1969), Lotte in Italia (1970), Vladimir et Rosa (1971), and Tout va bien (1972) struck a different
chord with me. They chimed with my rising anger. They offered an alternative
narrative about the catastrophic changes unfolding before my very eyes, a
refuge from the depredations of neo-liberalism and the piles of human misery on
which Thatcher's Britain were built.
If I sensed the
futility of a retreat into the past, I think I reasoned that, as someone once
said, withdrawal in disgust isn't the same as apathy. And anyway, hadn't Godard
himself retreated from political realities? That's the million-dollar question.
It might be argued that he has been in hiding since the seventies; initially,
because confronted by the dead-end of Maoism, recoiling from the shock of
shattered dreams, perhaps embarrassed by things said at the height of the
fighting; later, increasingly hermetic as a sense of alienation from and
generalised revulsion at the world set in. Godard paid a heavy price for the
loss of audience his urge to invention entailed: a collapse into individual
subjectivity characterised by meditative melancholia and elegiac interiority.
He often seems like a devoted mediaeval anchorite who has withdrawn to a cell
(in Rolle), communicating his religious fervour for cinema, and his findings on
it, to the outside world through a thin slit in the wall of distribution. In Je vous salue, Marie (1985), a woman
called Eva, asks a professor what he's thinking. He might be speaking for
Godard when he replies: "I think politics, today, must be the voice of
horror."
Then there's Serge
Daney's argument that "There has never been anything revolutionary about
Godard, rather he is more interested in radical reformism . . . His own utopia
is to demand that people open themselves up to the possibility of doing things
'differently' even while continuing as before. This utopia is less about doing
something different than about doing the same things, differently."
Daney has a point.
There was an air of adventurism and exhibitionism in Godard's revolutionary
posturings and pronouncements. He continued to travel first-class, literally
and metaphorically, throughout his Maoist phase. Jean-Pierre Gorin's
description of himself as "the Yoko Ono of cinema" logically makes
Godard 'the John Lennon of cinema', and it could be argued that Godard's politics
were always more Lennonist than Leninist (even, or especially around May 1968).
Not for nothing did Truffaut call his estranged mate "the Ursula Andress
of militancy," and not for nothing did he suggest that Godard's
autobiography be called "A Shit is a Shit."
It might equally be
argued, against Daney and Truffaut, that the sincerity of Godard's politics and
his revolutionary impulses are evident in every film he's ever made. Although
he seemed to vanish after the political possibilities of May 1968 were contained,
and although he moved from France to Switzerland (first to Grenoble and then
Rolle), he continued his investigations into politics and the politics of the
image, just in new forms incompatible with conventional methods of film
production and distribution. His apparent disappearance enabled him to pursue
'politics by other means'. It could be viewed as a sane response to an insane
world and to his own dictum that the challenge for radical filmmakers was not
to make political films but to make films politically.
Vivre
sa vie Blu-ray review - Part 2 | Cine Outsider
Jerry Whyte, BFI Blu-Ray
In Film After Film, critic J. Hoberman calls
Godard "the first filmmaker to recognize that cinema's classical period
was over." Godard was anticipating and precipitating that moment of
rupture from as early as 1965: when Cahiers
du cinéma asked him what he thought of the immediate and the long-term
future of cinema, he replied, "I await the end of cinema with
optimism." He prepared for it in the video-editing suite, which, as
Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, was, in a sense, the graveyard of cinema and of
the history of the 20th Century. Having already re-invented cinema several
times over, he catalogued the 'death' of cinema while inventing modern cinema.
This is what Daney called "The Godard paradox": "He advances
back-to-front, apprehensively, facing what he is leaving behind . . . caught
between a recent past and a near future . . . doomed to the present."
In an interview with
Daney, Godard said: "People who love cinema today are like the Greeks who
loved stories of Zeus . . . if they still like the idea of films on television,
so shrunk, it is because there is still a vague memory . . . We no longer have
our own identity, but if we turn on the television there is a small and distant
signal which tells us that we may still have one. And someday, films will
disappear from television too." Godard recognised that change was in the
air and, as he had in the late sixites, he hastened change. Working mainly with
his new partner Anne-Marie Miéville, from 1972 onwards he produced a series of
experimental, politically analytical videos made primarily for television.
Sadly, Godard's break with traditional cinema meant his work was inaccessible,
even to film students desperate to explore his canon. So, it definitely felt as
if Godard had emerged from hiding in the eighties when I watched Sauve qui peut (1980), Passion (1982), Prènom Carmen (1983), Je
vous salue, Marie (1985), Détective
(1985), and King Lear (1987).
It felt that way
until the summer of 2001, when two events coincided that enabled me to view Godard's
work (almost) in its entirety: the BFI's two-month long Godard retrospective
(advertised under the rubric 'Jean-Luc Godard. Master of modern Cinema – A
Definitive Tribute') and Tate Modern's 'For Ever Godard', an international
conference addressed by Jean-Pierre Gorin as well as Godard aficionados such as
Raymond Bellour, Richard Brody (author of the excellent Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard), Adrian
Martin (whose commentary on Vivre sa vie
enhances the BFI release), Colin MacCabe, Laura Mulvey, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and
Peter Wollen, among many others.
During the
retrospective and the conference, I saw many of Godard's video shorts for the
first time and the continuities in his work emerged clearly. As an added bonus,
the conference inspired the subsequent publication of For Ever Godard (Black Dog Publishing, 2004), a well designed,
lavishly illustrated collection of erudite, scholarly essays. Godard's video
films, in particular, came into to focus at that time. When he returned to the
video-editing suite in the late eighties, all the skills and techniques he'd
mastered in the seventies began to bear fruit, firstly in his epic masterpiece Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), and
subsequently in Éloge de l'amour, Film
Socialisme (2010), and, most recently, Adieu
au langage.
Video afforded
Godard independence, the opportunity to work from home, and new tools with
which to make films and write about films. Nobody has embodied Alexander
Astruc's notions of 'La caméra-stylo' more completely than Godard, and nowhere
more so than in Histoire(s) du cinéma. A
paean to and panegyric on cinema, the consolidation and concentration of all
his hard-earned, profound knowledge about cinema, it is a dazzling, dizzying
montage of sight and sound, feeling and thinking, a unique 'attempt at visual
criticism'.
If Godard was
reflecting on the passing of his century and his form, by implication he was
also reflecting on his own passing, for he is enmeshed with and enshrined
within those histories. At the time, he seemed like a lonely man in an empty
cinema; a man adrift of our times and deserted by his mentors, his art form and
his friends – Astruc, Bazin and Langlois left long ago, then Antonioni and
Bergman left together, on the same day (30 July, 2007), Jean-Pierre Leaud went
mad, Truffaut didn't even say goodbye . . . and so on. Godard seemed lonely and
adrift then, he seems even more so now. That, I think, is why the tone of the
late work is primarily melancholic and elegiac. Godard seemed to be saying
goodbye to cinema and himself in Histoire(s)
du cinema, and again in Adieu au
langage.
Mercifully, neither
Godard nor cinema are dead yet. As Michael Temple and James S. Williams said,
prophetically, in the introductory chapter of their collection The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of
Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000: "It seems clear that cinema is barely
emerging from 'the infancy of the art . . . Godard's project remains live and
direct, unpredictably changing and always in search of fresh subjects and
forms. His is an ingenuity of vision, a curiosity for the world. Isn't that
also what cinema is, from before the cinematograph to those digital means and
motifs which the future will soon outwit? . . . There is a long way to go. And
Godard is still one of cinema's brightest hopes and promises for the new
century."
Or as Daniel Morgan
put it in the final sentence of his brilliant book Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema: "Still drawing on
the history of cinema, but also creating new directions for its future, Godard
continues his effort to discover and invent new possibilities for cinema."
As Godard himself says in Bande à part,
it is "better to carry on than to give up." So, we move on, always
move on, as Godard has consistently done; in this instance, finally, to Vivre sa vie.
I have no grand
theory about Vivre sa vie to offer,
and there cannot remain much to say of a film that has been as extensively
discussed as any in film history. I'll keep my remarks brief, therefore, and
recommend the following close readings of the film that stand out from the
crowd: Susan Sontag's 1964 review in Moviegoer,
Adrian's Martin's exemplary commentary on the Extras of the BFI re-release, the
sections on the film in Richard Roud's Godard,
the chapter on it that opens Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki's Speaking about Godard, and Frieda
Grafe's piece on it in the late, lamented Vertigo
magazine.
In the booklet
accompanying the BFI re-release of Godard's fourth feature, critic David
Thompson says: "It remains the most important film of Godard's career, the
first in which he achieved a brilliant aesthetic blend of the worlds of
documentary and fiction. It is also one of his most tender and moving, words
not often associated with a cinema largely devoted to ideas and
provocation." It is certainly one
of Godard's most important films, representing as it does a decisive shift in
his work and a turning point for cinema. The film's exquisitely composed
tableaux and lengthy dialogue scenes revolutionised cinema. With Vivre sa vie, which won the Critics' and
Jury Prizes at the Venice Film Festival, Godard established the talkies writ
large and inaugurated a new, endlessly imitated discursive style.
Despite the explicit
political content of Le petit soldat
(1960), which was banned for many years in France, Vivre sa vie is not only Godard's most deliberately composted film
but also his first step toward political cinema and the creation of a
counter-cinema at odds with the values of orthodox cinema. It bears all the
hallmarks of the radical oppositional style delineated by Peter Wollen in his
essay on Godard in Readings and Writing:
Semiotic Counter-Strategies: the fragmentation of narrative continuity, the
disruption of traditional forms of emotional identification with characters,
the foregrounding of language and the mechanics of filmmaking, the
intertextuality and overspill, the rupture with 'entertainment' cinema that
privileges the reality-reality principle over the pleasure-principle. It
amounts to Godard's first frontal attack on the society of the spectacle.
Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux, to give the film its full title, tells the
story of Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina), a single mother working in a
record shop and struggling to pay her rent. When we first meet her she is
giving her ex-lover, the father of her child, Paul (André S. Labarthe), the
brush off. She longs to be an actress (like Anna Karina) but gradually slides
into prostitution. She falls into the clutches of a pimp, Raoul (Sady Rebot)
who ultimately sells her to other pimps, with tragic consequences. Despite her
wretched circumstances, Nana finds short-lived happiness after falling in love
with an unnamed 'young man' (Peter Kassovitz), in a pool hall. She wins his
heart with one of the most joyous dance sequences in film history. In the same
scene, an acquaintance of Raoul's, Luigi (Eric Schlumberger) relieves Anna's
boredom by miming a child blowing up a balloon to the point it bursts. Although
joy and humour burst out of Godard's films like fireworks, his pessimistic
insistence on the impossibility of love precludes happy endings. We are denied
one in Vivre sa vie: having begun
with a loving close-up of Nana, the film ends with a close-up of her, as a
corpse.
In this film of
light and shade, walls and windows, Godard uses a single melodic refrain and
recurring moments of silence to disrupt synchronicity. As he moves between the
streets and boulevards of Paris and the hired hotel rooms and brothels where
Nana's 'business' is conducted, he uses direct sound, recorded on a single
tape, throughout. He also deploys debased Brechtianism and sub Satrean
existentialism, an unwieldy seventy-pound Mitchell camera and quickfire
interviews, the structure of the epistolary novel and the words of an official
report. He cites Bresson and Zola, Dumas and Dreyer, Ophüls and Poe,
Jean-Pierre Melville and Montaigne, Rossellini and Truffaut. Most
significantly, he shoots Karina's flawless porcelain complexion and perfect
ebony bob in close-up, from angles, from behind, in rising and fading black and
white. There have been few more ravishing sights in cinema than Karina; Godard
knew it and exploited her beauty to full effect.
Susan Sontag called
Vivre sa vie "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works
of art that I know of," – and she knew a few. She objected to its ending
but felt it was, otherwise, "a perfect film." She says: "It
triumphs because it is intelligent, discreet, delicate to the touch. It both
edifies and gives pleasure because it is about what is most important . . . the
nature of humanity." In Sontag's opinion, Godard is "perhaps the only
director today who is interested in 'philosophical' films and possesses an
intelligence and discretion equal to the task." Here, Godard is ably
abetted by philosopher Brice Parain. As Roland-Francois Lack notes in his
useful A-Z primer on the film, Godard has Parain quoting from his book Black on White during a carefully edited
'conversation' with Nana/Karina ("We haven't yet found the means to live
without speaking."). Conversation, Parain suggests, is a necessity of all
human beings. We are social animals so we must communicate, but in order to do
so we must move, as Vivre sa vie does,
from speech into silence and back again.
In the opening scene
of Vivre sa vie we find Nana and
Paul in a bar, talking. Initially, we see only their collars and the backs of
their heads. According to Adrian Martin, critic V.F. Perkins described Vivre sa vie as "a series of
propositions about how to film a conversation." If that is so, those
propositions were sound. Parain paraphrases Alexander Dumas' story Twenty Years Later, in which the
Musketeer Portos plants a bomb in a cellar, thinks for the first time in his
life, stops in his tracks, and subsequently dies beneath a pile of rubble. To
live fully, to talk and think clearly, is to put oneself at risk. Parain says,
"Error is necessary to truth." Godard, like Renoir and Rossellini,
constantly reinvents himself and his form because he's always prepared to risk
error in search of cinematic truth. With the help of his preternaturally gifted
cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, Godard drove cinema forward to new levels of
verisimilitude by flouting pre-existent conventions of filming conversations.
Despite the switch from the light, portable Caméflex Éclair camera of his first
feature to the weighty, unwieldy Mitchell, we feel we're hovering on Nana and
Paul's shoulders, eavesdropping. This feeling of intimacy and proximity recurs
throughout the film and is one of the many 'documentary' qualities that, along
with the tragic narrative and Karina's magnificent acting, make it so moving.
In the film, Paul is
played by Cahiers critic André S.
Labarthe, who went on to make a series of exemplary documentaries on important
directors for the Cinéastes de notre
temps series he established with Janine Bazin in 1963. Labarthe filmed
Godard in conversation with Fritz Lang for the series shortly after the two men
had finished working together on Le
mépris. In the resulting film, Le
dinosaur et le bébé, Godard and Lang discuss the great pioneers of silent
cinema. Lang says: "Almost no one from that time when we started out is
still with us." Godard interjects: "There's Dreyer, Abel Gance, and
you." They agree that Gance's Napoléon
(1927), Dreyer's La
Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), and Lang's own M (1931) stand
out as imperishable works of art also capable of appealing to mass audiences.
Fortunately, Godard is still with us, and we can add Vivre sa vie to that hallowed number: it was one of Godard's few
commercial successes (if only due to its tiny 400,000 franc budget) and
received widespread, if not unanimous praise.
Watching a Godard
film is a little like unpeeling an onion; it may soothe as well as sting the eyes,
but it reveals layer upon layer of meaning the closer one gets to its core. We
must always untie the Gordian knot of Godardian references, cross-references,
and references within references to penetrate to the heart of his
multi-layered, multivalent work. The naming of Nana, for example, is at the
root of a characteristic cornucopia of citations. It reveals the debt the film
owes to Zola's Nana (his novel of
1880 that also features a prostitute who meets a sticky end), to Jean Renoir's Nana (1926), and to silent cinema. As
is often noted 'Nana' is an 'Anna-gram', alerting us to various
director-muse/director-star relationships, most notably Renoir's relationship
with Catherine Hessling (née Andrée Madelaine Heuschling), which prefigures
Godard's relationship with Anna Karina (née Hanne Karin Bayer).
Coincidentally, Pierre Braunberger produced not only Vivre sa vie but also both Renoir's Nana and his short silent film Charleston
Parade (1926). As if to highlight the dubious sexual politics of Vivre sa vie, the latter short can be
seen as a documentary on the director's wife avant la lettre: Hessling spends most of that film dancing,
semi-naked, for the benefit of a gorilla and a time-travelling black and white
minstrel. In Godard's case, Karina plays a prostitute, which disturbingly makes
Godard both her client and her pimp. We'll come to that soon.
Prostitution,
literal and figurative, is, of course, a recurring theme in Godard's work. Most
obviously, it's embodied by Anna Karina in Vivre
sa vie, Marina Vlady in Deux ou
trois choses, and Isabelle Huppert in Sauve
qui peut, but it's there, too, in Le
mépris (the writer who prostitutes his talent), in Une femme mariée (marriage as legalised prostitution), in Alphaville (dystopian-state-sponsored-prostitution),
and so on. For Godard, we're all trapped in the cash nexus; advertising is a
form of prostitution that moulds us all; we work, clock off, and then begin
working again, for the industries of the night. The Frank Tashlin he loved most
was the Tashlin of Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) – a barbed satire on Madison Avenue ad
men that spoke to Godard's contempt for American consumer capitalism . In Vivre sa vie, though, that contempt is
muted and there are still traces in the film of the love of Americana and
Hollywood that underpinned the Cahiers
critics' politique des auteurs
position.
The film is
dedicated to B-movies and its grand finale is straight out of a Hollywood
gangster flick. Fittingly, it was filmed around the corner from Jean-Pierre
Melville's suburban studios and replicates a scene, shot on exactly the same
spot, in Melville's Bob le flambeur
(1956). In a sense, it is fitting, too, that the ostentatious American car (a
Ford Galaxie Sunliner) driven by the pimps who kill Nana was actually one of
Melville's own: Melville was a witness at Godard and Karina's wedding, but it
was he who had introduced Godard to the brothels and striptease clubs of Paris
in the fifties. The trailer for Melville's film announces: "From the
nightclubs of Pigalle to Deauville's 'private' rooms, everyone knows Bob."
Although Godard and Melville had bonded around a shared cinephilia and
pronounced passion for Hollywood as well as similarly pecuniary lecherous
habits, they fell out over Vivre sa vie.
In Everything is Cinema, Richard
Brody notes that Melville's widow, Florence, remembered Melville saying to
Godard: "You are making a lazy man's cinema . . . you put down the camera
and you have people talk, nothing more. For me this isn't cinema."
Melville wasn't the
only one to take against the film's formal innovations. As Richard Brody again
reports, Roberto Rossellini, whom Godard revered, was equally unimpressed. In
late 1962, when screenwriter Jean Gruault brought Rossellini to a screening of
Vivre sa vie, the Italian reprimanded the Frenchman for having "made him
waste his time." Gruault recounts the conversation he overheard the
following day when Godard drove Rossellini to Orly airport: "On the road
to the airport, [Rossellini] maintained a silence that was heavy with danger.
Suddenly he proclaimed, in a deep, prophetic voice, like that of Cassandra
announcing the fall of Troy or Isaiah threatening an impious people with the
gravest harm: 'Jean-Luc, you are on the verge of Antonioni-ism!' The insult was
such that the unfortunate Godard lost control of the car for an instant and
almost sent into the landscape." This incident, in addition to giving another
meaning to the idea of cinema as matter of life and death, reflected
Rossellini's discomfort with what he saw as Godard's imitation of Antonioni's
arid formalism and tendency to trap his characters in a prison of inescapable
alienation, specifically by denying Nana agency and presenting her descent into
prostitution as inevitable and inexplicable.
Vivre sa vie was
not, of course, either the first or last word on prostitutes or prostitution in
cinema. Anna Karina's Nana send us
back to Louis Brooks in Pabst's Pandora's
Box (1929) and Greta Garbo in Clarence Brown's Anna Christie (1930) while anticipating Shirley MacLaine in
Wilder's Irma la douce (1963) and
Catherine Deneuve in Buñuel's Belle de
jour (1967). Godard's interest in prostitution as a theme, which would
intensify with his politicisation, may have been precipitated by evenings spent
with Jean-Pierre Melville but it primarily arose from his bibliophilia and
cinephilia, specifically from his admiration of Guy de Maupassant and Max
Ophüls.
Two Ophüls' films,
in particular, left their mark on Godard: Le
Plaisir (1952) and Lola Montès
(1955). While promoting Vivre sa vie,
he made repeated references to the latter. "Nana," Godard said,
"like Lola Montes, is able to safeguard her soul while selling her
body." Elsewhere, he seems to predict and forestall Rossellini's
criticism: "Nana does not pervert herself, she just accepts what comes –
whatever happens she continues to exist (like in the Lola Montès song). What interests me is how her situation is the
result of the world around her; how her freedom is tied to the freedom of
others."
Godard defied
bourgeois hypocrisy and male chauvinism (sins of which he himself was guility)
when he called Ophüls' Le Plaisir "the greatest French film made since the
Liberation." The influence of Ophüls magisterial adaptation of three short
stories by Guy de Mauppasant is evident in the nonjudgemental way Godard treats
prostitution in Vivre sa vie. There
can be no doubt that Godard was emboldened by Ophüls' daring approach to the
subject of prostitution. In La Ronde
(1950), the first film Ophüls made after his return to Europe after working in
Hollywood during the war, Simon Signoret plays Leocadie, a street-walking
prostitute ordered by the master of ceremonies to proposition the sixth soldier
who comes her way. The third part of Le
Plaisir, his follow-up to the hugely successful La Ronde, features a rejected lover who cripples herself in a
suicide attempt. Astonishingly when one considers the repressive mores of that
period, Ophüls had intended to tell the story of a young man who drowns himself
after his girlfriend is seduced by lesbians. Sadly, the producers of the film
weren't as progressive as Ophüls.
As Roland-François
Lack says, the comment that opens tableau 10 ("There's no gaiety in
happiness") is a direct quote from Le Plaisir. In the central story, La Maison Tellier, the sailors of a port
town and its local male bourgeoisie go into shock when the local brothel
temporarily closes to enable the women who work there to attend a rural first
communion. The women are shown to be intelligent and vivacious. They insist on
their right to live their lives as they see fit. They lend themselves to others
but give themselves to themselves. [The film, incidentally, stars Simone Simon,
who had earlier appeared in Robert Wise's Mademoiselle
Fifi (1944) – which itself amalgamates two other Maupassant stories
concerning prostitutes: Mademoiselle Fifi
and Boule de Suif (1945) – with the latter
being the source text not only for Christian Jacque's Boule de suif (1945) but also for John Ford's Stagecoach (1939)].
In addition to the
influence of Maupassant, Melville, Ophüls and Renoir, the figure of
Bresson looms large. Discussing Vivre sa
vie in Contintental Film Review,
Godard said: "I've a great admiration for Bresson. I hope in a way that Vivre sa vie is for the prostitute what
Pickpocket (1959) was to the world
of the thief. But while Bresson probes the interior, I want to express the
interior by revealing the exterior behavior. I show the everyday details of
Nana's existence because I want the spectator to understand why she follows
this evolution (into prostitution)." The famous scene in which Nana
watches Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne
d'Arc in a cinema was initially intended to feature excerpts from Bresson's
Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962). He
had Bresson's permission and the extracts lined-up, but changed his mind at the
last minute.
Godard's decision to
use Dreyer's film instead was a good call. The close-ups of Karina replicate
Dreyer's close-ups of Falconetti; the parallels between two women at the mercy
of men, interrogated by men, and ultimately killed by them is clearer in
Dreyer's film; and, anyway, Dreyer's version is far superior. Bresson was as
important to Godard as Dryer, in life as in films. It was Bresson who
introduced him to his next 'Anna': Godard and his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky,
first met on the set of Bresson's Au
hasard, Balthazar (1966), which Godard would famously described as
"The world in an hour and a half." Wiazemsky subsequently appeared in
several Godard films, which sit between art and life and are built from both.
Life and art are
inseparable in Godard's work because for him cinema is life. Without the chance
to film, he was like a little boy lost. Interviewed by Michel Vianey during the
shooting of Pierrot le fou, Godard
said: "If I shoot films, it's because I'm alone. I have no family. Nobody.
It's a means of seeing people. Of going places." It is that deep need to make films and his interrelated
insistence on the real that makes Godard tick. In Jean-Luc Godard (Editions Seghers, 1963), the first book on the
director, Jean Collet suggests that the key to Godard's work lies in the
interplay of documentary and fiction. "My starting point is
documentary," Godard said, "to which I try to give the truth of
fiction."
Of course, Godard's
starting point was documentary in a literal sense: he began with Opération Béton and made his
breakthrough with À bout de souffle
– of which Raoul Coutard said: "Producer Georges de Beauregard told
Jean-Luc he had to work with me. I was cheap and Godard was determined this was
going to be the cheapest film ever made, shooting in the street, with no sound,
no lights, no crew. He told me it would be like shooting a reportage."
In the opening
sequence of the film, Paul tells Nana a story written by one of his father's
pupils: "A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Remove the
outside, there's the inside. Remove the inside and you see the soul."
"How can you render the inside?" asked Godard during an interview
about Vivre sa vie, before replying
"Precisely by staying prudently outside." Godard could tell a story
when he wanted to. He just generally chose not to. The film alternates between
documentary and fiction while Anna moves between being in possession of herself
and at the disposal of others. Tableau 8 is taken up by a verbatim reading from
Judge Marcel Sacotte's report, Où en est
la prostitution? Nana/Karina writes a letter applying for work as a
prostitute, copying verbatim the text of a sample letter in Sacotte's survey.
The film, then, is a
story with a beginning, middle, and end, in
that order, but opens with a documentary of a face (one of the most
beautiful, photogenic faces ever to grace the screen), has a documentary on
prostitution at its centre, and ends with a documentary on the collapse of a
marriage. Cahiers du cinéma described
Une Femme et une femme, as a
documentary on Anna Karina. Vivre sa vie
is another one. It is, I think, impossible to fully understand the film without
reference to Godard's relationship with Karina.
Vivre
sa vie Blu-ray review - Part 3 | Cine Outsider
Jerry Whyte, BFI Blu-Ray
While Godard's
treatment of prostitution isn't explicit or exploitative, his relationship with
Karina complicates matters, to say the least. In Images of Women, Images of Sexuality, an essay co-written with Colin
MacCabe, Laura Mulvey says: "More than any other single film-maker Godard
has shown up the exploitation of woman as an image in consumer society . . .
but his own relation to that image raises further problems . . . Godard slides
continually between an investigation of the images of woman and an
investigation that uses those images."
Mulvey is best known
for her iconic essay, Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema, which invented the notion of 'the male gaze'. In it, she
says: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has
been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze
projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In
their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and
displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so
that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
Woman displayed as sexual object is the
lietmotif of erotic spectacle."
For all that
Godard's treatment of prostitution is serious-minded and far from salacious,
Mulvey's formulation fits Vivre sa vie
like a glove: Godard is the active/male gaze, Karina passive/female object of
desire. Earlier this year, I attended Birbeck's inaugural Essay Film Festival.
In among the many films shown was one by Constaze Ruhm and Roland-François Lack
called La difficulté d'une
perspective/Une femme est une femme/Godard (2013). Introduced by Laura
Mulvey, the film reversed the spectator's gaze by showing locations from Une femme est une femme and Vivre sa vie as they would have been
seen from Nana/Anna Karina's perspective. It is a productive exercise in
radical cinephilia that raised serious questions about Godard's use of Karina.
As Adrian Martin
notes in his commentary on the BFI release, Vivre sa vie may not be salacious but the psychosexual dynamic of
Godard's relationship with Karina raises troubling questions. Here is a
director filming his wife, who has recently had a miscarriage and is suicidal,
as a prostitute and casting her as a character killed at the end of the film.
It cries out for a forensic feminist and psychoanalytical reading (which I lack
the skills to conduct), so I offer a few biographical details – in the hope
that they speak for themselves or that the (more capable) reader will fill in
the gaps left by my analytical inadequacies.
Godard, whose
parents separated in his teens, was a 'troubled' youth. Although he came from haute bourgeois stock, he was a
peripatetic misfit, a committed kleptomaniac who stole from colleagues,
employers, friends and family alike. Godard is being disingenuous when he talks
of a happy childhood. His relationship with family, particularly his father,
was fraught. Father and son were estranged by the mid-fifties. While discussing
Emmanuel Laurent's Deux de la vague
(2010), I noted the role figures like André Bazin and Henri Langlois played in
Godard and Truffaut's world as surrogate father figures.
Most of the
directors most admired by the Cahiers
critics –Bresson, Fuller, Hitchcock, Lang, Mizoguchi, Ray, Renoir and
Rossellini – grew fond, in their turn, of the Young Turks. The respect
was mutual. It amounted to a series of successful father-son relationships
within the family of cinema. More precisely, it was a series of surrogate father-son relationships, as
the experienced masters often 'replaced' actual fathers. As film theorist
Thomas Elsaesser suggests in his essay Cinephilia
or the Uses of Disenchantment, the Young Turks' insolent oedipal revolt
against the 'cinéma de papa'
represented a rejection of papa as
much as a declaration of war on the New Wave's cinematic enemies.
After Godard was
caught stealing from a Swiss TV company he spent three nights in jail and,
subsequently, his father consigned him to a few months in a mental hospital, Le
Grangette near Lausanne. This did not stop Godard stealing. He was soon in
trouble again, after being caught filching and flogging his grandfather's
valuable signed first edition copies of Valéry (who was a family friend). The
clinician who treated Godard, Dr Mueller, considered him neurotic. It can't
have helped that his parents split up during this crisis his life, his mother
was killed in a car crash two years later, and he wasn't allowed to attend the
funeral.
Little wonder that
Godard's sister was concerned that he kept a razor blade on his person at all
time, should he ever feel the need to commit suicide. You don't have to be a
qualified psychologist to see Godard's kleptomania as a desire to be caught and
punished or his razor blade as a sign-posted cry for help. It is surely
significant that Godard advertised his possession of the razor blade and that
he sold the stolen Valéry titles at a local bookshop close to home.
After Karina fell
pregnant during the shooting of Une
Femme et une femme (in which Karina plays a woman desperate for a child),
Godard and Karina decided to marry. They did so twice: first in Switzerland and
then in France. On 3 March, 1961, in Begnins near Nyon, where Godard père practised medicine and Godard fils studied classics during the war,
and, again, three weeks later, in Paris.
It is unsurprising
that their relationship was tempestuous from the start because both had
unsettled upbringings and were emotionally insecure, even 'damaged'. Karina
grew up feeling unloved and unwanted: in the absence of her biological father,
she was raised first by her maternal grandparents, then in various foster
homes, and finally in the house her mother shared with her second husband. In
1958, after a blazing row with her mother, Karina left for Paris. The 18
year-old Dane found love almost immediately when she met Godard, but his
tendency to disappear without warning for weeks on end can only have done
serious damage to her emotional stability and exacerbated her suicidal
tendencies.
Karina, too, had her
neuroses and they were intensified during the shooting of Vivre sa vie by a miscarriage that lead to several suicide
attempts. After she narrowly survived an overdose of barbiturates, Godard
committed her to a mental asylum. What can one say of a man who portrays his
young wife first as a stripper and then as a prostitute, whom he films being
killed; of a man who, having come through an asylum himself, imposes that
experience on his wife and asks others to pick up the pieces of problems he
himself partly precipitated? At minimum, that he probably wasn't as supportive
as he might have been.
All the evidence
suggests that Godard damaged the lovely woman he loved and who loved him. I'll
neither forget nor forgive one particular moment of cold-hearted cruelty. In
Michel Royer's film Godard à la télé:
1960-2000 (1999), we watch archive footage of a sofa appearance by Godard and
Karina on a primetime TV chat show in the eighties. When the invasive
interviewer presses the estranged couple about their relationship, Godard says:
"Well, I said to myself, after all, there was Orson Welles and Rita
Hayworth, Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Renoir and Catherine Hessling, so I
thought to myself, 'I want that too! . . . and tomorrow is always a new
day." Karina is reduced to tears. Godard spurns the opportunity for
tenderness. He even throws out an arm to restrain his ex-wife. He makes no
attempt to console her and she flees the set in pieces.
Controversially, I
don't think Godard's early views of women and his contemptuous treatment of
Karina, the cinematic misogyny and the general odiousness of his behaviour,
negate the brilliance of his work. Nor does Louis-Ferdinand Céline's virulent
anti-Semitism negate the genius of Journey
to the End of Night or the Nazi sympathies of Francis Stuart and Knut
Hamsun invalidate the achievements of Black
List, Section H or Hunger. It may
be in bad taste to rake through the coals of Godard and Karina's personal past,
as that interviewer did and I am doing, but it is surely legitimate to do so
given the ways that relationship is stitched into the films.
Karina said of her
relationship with Godard: "It was amour
fou. Love. Jealously. Revenge. We adored each other. We were passionate,
but we had crises of jealousy." Godard and Karina, in fact, had frequent
violent rows in which flats and their contents were destroyed. Their
relationship was punctuated by repeated separations and reconciliations. Under
such chaotic circumstances, with infidelities on both sides placing additional
strain on the marriage, it surprising that Vivre sa vie it is so well ordered,
unsurprising that it becomes increasingly dark. The block colours, the bright
reds and blues of Une femme est une
femme are replaced by sombre black and white, the score shifts from jaunty
jazz to melancholic neo-classical fugues, the tone becomes dour.
Although Godard
returned to colour in Le mépris –
which delineates the disintegrating marriage of Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul
(Michel Piccoli) – he deliberately and subconsciously continued to draw his
fraught relationship with Karina into his work. Bardot wore black bobs à la
Karina, delivers dialogue that includes things Karina had said to Godard, and
was even asked to walk like Karina. Piccoli wore Godard's hat. The film
features a poster of Vivre sa vie
juxtaposed with one for Psycho. By
the time of Band à part, a crisis
point had been reached. As Karina says: "That film saved my life. I had no
desire to live. I was doing very, very badly." Pierrot le fou is Godard's angry farewell letter to Karina. The
atmosphere during the shooting of that film was famously bitter, poisoned by
Godard and Karina's constant fights. Karina's co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo says
they were "like a cobra and a mongoose, always glaring at each
other." Godard was lucky to find Karina and foolish to lose her; she was
lucky to find him too and equally lucky to survive him; we are lucky that,
together, they produced several of the finest, most beautiful films made,
anywhere, by anyone.
Anna Karina's
stunning looks meant she didn't receive the credit she deserved for her acting.
Her timing was perfect, her capacity to act naturally in front of a camera
almost unsurpassed. Above, I touched on a few of the reasons I was drawn to
Godard. I'll close with another couple of reasons: Nana/Karina's delightful
'mating' dance in the pool hall and the single imperishable scene in which
Nana/Karina weeps while watching Maria Falconetti weep in Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928). In
his book The Films of Jean-Luc Godard:
Seeing the Invisible, David Sterritt says: "Nana's tears are for Joan,
for herself, and for a world in which the pitiless have a monopoly on power . .
. Nana's double becomes the threatened and imprisoned Joan, so Karina's double
becomes Maria Falconetti." Godard himself said: The film has a Satrean
character in that it develops the idea that purity exists in everyone
regardless of the way they have chosen to live. That's why I've inserted a sequence
from Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne
d'Arc, to make plain the parallels between the heroine burning at the stake
and the heroine of my film."
That ravishingly
beautiful, heart-rending scene fits perfectly into the film. It shows Nana's
inner sadness, it shows her pity and self-pity, but it goes beyond that. For
me, it is a symbol of all cinema. Dreyer and Falconetti plus Godard and Karina
equal cinematic heaven. Nana reflects the commonplace that the tears of others
make us cry, but her tears are also those of rapture before the sublime. As
surely as the majestic scene in Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives in which Eileen and Maisie dab at their
tears with hankies while watching Love
is a Many-Splendoured Thing (1955), this scene in Vivre sa vie is emblematic of cinema's capacity to move us to tears
of joy and pain. It is symbolic of that love of classical cinema that the film
itself both acknowledges and dismantles. I've come to see Nana's tears as a
requiem for the bygone era of celluloid cinema and for the ineffable joy of
opening up and letting it out, alone with others, in darkened rooms. For this
reason alone, Vivre sa vie is, like
every film Godard has ever made (even the less successful ones), worth watching
time and time again.
Films reviewed
Contempt
(Le Mépris) 1963
Alphaville
1965
Pierrot
le Fou 1965
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