Jean-Luc Godard
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Jean-Luc Godard (photograph by David Horvitz) |
Jean-Luc Godard (born
3 December,
1930 in
Paris) is a Franco-Swiss
filmmaker and one of the most influential members of the
Nouvelle Vague, or "
French New Wave".
Born in
Paris to Franco-Swiss parents, he was educated in
Nyon, later studying at the Lycée Rohmer, and the
Sorbonne in Paris. During his time at the Sorbonne, he became involved with the young group of filmmakers and theorists that gave birth to the New Wave.
Known for stylistic implementations that challenged, at their focus, the conventions of
Hollywood cinema, he became universally recognized as the most audacious and most radical of the New Wave filmmakers. He adopted a position in filmmaking that was unambiguously political. His work reflected a fervent knowledge of
film history, a comprehensive understanding of
existential and
Marxist philosophy, and a scholarly disposition that placed him as the lone filmmaker among the public
intellectuals of the
Rive Gauche.
After attending school in
Nyon, Switzerland, Godard returned to Paris in 1948 and began to attend the Lycée Rohmer, a year before enrolling at the
Sorbonne to study
anthropology. It was there, in the
Latin Quarter of Paris just prior to 1950, that Paris
ciné-clubs were gaining prominence. Godard began attending, where he soon met the man who was perhaps most responsible for the birth of the New Wave,
André Bazin, as well as those who would become his contemporaries, including
Jacques Rivette,
Claude Chabrol,
François Truffaut,
Jacques Rozier, and
Jacques Demy.
Despite its intricate manifesto, the guiding principle behind the movement was that "Realism is the essence of cinema." According to Bazin and other members of the New Wave, cinematic realism could be achieved through various aesthetic and contextual mediums. They favored long, deep-focus shots that embodied a more complete scene, where visual information could be transmitted consistently, and avoided "unnecessary editing"; they did not want to disrupt the illusion of reality by constantly taking cuts. This technique can be seen in some of Godard's most celebrated action sequences.
An interesting aspect of Godard's philosophy on filmmaking was his inherent and deliberate embrace of contradiction. In short, Godard used "mass-market" aesthetics in his film to make a statement about capitalism and consequent societal decline. This analysis can be closely reviewed in the book,
The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the invisible, by David Sterritt.
His approach to film began in the field of
criticism. Along with
Éric Rohmer and Rivette, he founded the film journal,
Gazette du cinéma, which saw publication of five issues in
1950. When
André Bazin founded his critical magazine
Cahiers du cinéma in
1951, Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, were among the first writers. Most of the writers for
Cahiers du cinéma started making some brief forays into film direction in the years before
1960.
Godard, while taking a job as a construction worker on a dam in 1953, shot a documentary about the building,
Opération béton (1955). As he continued to work for
Cahiers, he made
Une femme coquette (1956), a ten-minute black and white picture;
Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (1957) another short fiction piece; and
Une histoire d'eau (1958), which was created largely out of footage shot by Truffaut that had gone unused.
In 1958 Godard, with a cast that included
Jean-Paul Belmondo and
Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining notoriety as a filmmaker,
Charlotte et son Jules, a homage to
Jean Cocteau.
The Godard canon has never been able to escape the critical desire to distinguish between, and in turn label, its most visible periods. The first and most celebrated period roughly spanned from his first feature,
À bout de souffle (
1960), through
Week End (
1967) and focused on narrative and somewhat conventional works that often refer to different aspects of film history. This cinematic period stands in contrast to the revolutionary period that immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema's history as "bourgeois" and therefore without merit.
Films
Godard's first major feature film,
À bout de souffle (1960), starring
Jean-Paul Belmondo and
Jean Seberg, was a seminal work of the
French New Wave. It was a key determiner of the French New Wave's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture — specifically
American cinema. The distinct style of the film manifested in its numerous
jump cuts, use of real locations rather than sets, and freedom from movie convention with
character asides and broken eye line matches. François Truffaut, who co-wrote
À bout de souffle with Godard, suggested its concept and introduced Godard to the producer who ultimately funded it,
Georges de Beauregard.
The same year, Godard made
Le Petit Soldat, which dealt with the
Algerian War of Independence. Most notably, it was the first collaboration between Godard and Danish-born actress
Anna Karina, whom he later married in 1961 (and divorced in 1964). The film, due to its political nature, was banned from French theaters until
1963. Karina appeared again, along with Belmondo, in
Une femme est une femme (1961), which was in many ways an homage to the
American musical. Karina desires a child, prompting her to leave her boyfriend, played by actor Jean-Claude Brialy, and seek out his best friend (Belmondo) as its father.
Godard's next film,
Vivre sa vie (1962) was one of his most popular among critics. Karina starred as Nana, a mother and aspiring actress whose poor circumstances lead her to the life of a streetwalker. It is an episodic account of her trials. The film's style, much like that of
À bout de souffle, boasted the type of experimentation that made the French New Wave so influential.
Les Carabiniers (1963) was about the horror of war and its inherent injustice. It was the influence and suggestion of
Roberto Rossellini that led Godard to make the film. It follows two peasants who join the army of a king, only to find futility in the whole thing as the king reveals the deception of war-administrating leaders.
His most commercially successful film was
Le Mépris (1963), starring
Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars,
Brigitte Bardot. A coproduction between
Italy and France,
Le Mépris became known as a pinnacle in filmic
modernism with its profound self-reflexivity. The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by the arrogant American movie producer Prokosch (
Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for an adaptation of
Homer's
The Odyssey, which German director
Fritz Lang has been filming. Lang's "
high culture" interpretation of the story is lost on Prokosch, whose character is a firm indictment of the commercial motion picture hierarchy. Another prominent theme is the inability to reconcile love and labor, which is illustrated by Paul's crumbling marriage to Camille (Bardot) during the course of shooting.
In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films. He directed
Bande à part, another collaboration between the two and described by Godard as "
Alice in Wonderland meets
Franz Kafka." It follows two young men, looking to score on a heist, that both fall in love with Karina, and quotes from several
gangster film conventions.
Une femme mariée (1964) followed
Bande à part. Godard made the film while he acquired funding for
Pierrot le fou (1965). It was a slow, deliberate, toned-down black and white picture without a real story. The film was entirely produced over the period of one month and exhibited a loose quality unique to Godard.
In
1965, Godard directed
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, a futuristic blend of
science fiction,
film noir, and
satire.
Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution, a detective who is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer named Alpha 60. His mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun (
Howard Vernon), a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and is believed to be suppressed by the computer. Later on in the movie, Lemmy Caution discovers that the scientist designed and implemented Alpha 60.
Pierrot le fou (1965) was one of his most cinematic pictures in terms of its complex storyline, distinctive personalities, and apocalyptic ending.
Gilles Jacob, an author, critic, and president of the
Cannes Film Festival, called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation in the way it played on so many of Godard's earlier characters and themes. With an extensive cast and variety of locations, the film was expensive enough to warrant significant problems with funding. Shot in color, it departed from Godard's usual black and white minimalist works (typified by
À bout de souffle,
Vivre sa vie, and
Une femme mariée). He solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo, by then a famous actor, in order to guarantee the necessary amount of capital.
Masculin, féminin (1966), based on two
Guy de Maupassant stories,
La Femme de Paul and
Le Signe, was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as "The children of
Marx and
Coca-Cola."
Godard followed with
Made in U.S.A (1966), whose source material was
Richard Stark's
The Jugger; and
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967, in which
Marina Vlady portrays a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute.
La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright yet. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Released just before the
May 1968 events, the film is thought to foreshadow the student rebellions that took place.
That same year, Godard made a more colorful and political film,
Week End. It follows a Parisian couple as they leave on a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie. The film contains some of the most written-about scenes in cinema's history. One of them, a ten-minute
tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, is often cited as a new technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends.
Week End's enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema," appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard filmmaking career.
Politics
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Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live) |
Politics are never far from the surface in Godard's films. One of his earliest features,
Le Petit Soldat, dealt with the
Algerian War of Independence, and was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute rather than pursue any specific ideological agenda. Along these lines,
Les Caribiniers presents a fictional war that is initially romanticized in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes a stiff anti-war metanym. In addition to the international conflicts Godard sought an artistic response to, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in
Vivre sa vie.
In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as the colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. The side that opposed such colonization included the intellectual elite, the upstart university youth, and the Parisian artists and writers who positioned themselves on the side of social reform and class equality. A large portion of this group had a particular affinity for the teachings of
Karl Marx.
Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until
La Chinoise and
Week End, but is evident in several films — namely
Pierrot and
Une femme mariée.
=Vietnam
=Godard produced several pieces that directly address the
Vietnam conflict. Furthermore, there are two scenes in
Pierrot le fou that tackle the issue. The first is a scene that takes place in the initial car ride between Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). Over the car radio, the two hear the message "garrison massacred by the
Viet Cong who lost 115 men". Marianne responds with an extended musing on the way the radio dehumanizes the
Northern Vietnamese combatants.
In the same film, the lovers are accosted by a group of American sailors along the course of their liberating crime spree. The two's immediate reaction, expressed by Marianne, is "Damn Americans!" an obvious outlet of the frustration so much of
leftist France felt towards
American hegemony. Ferdinand then reconsiders, "That's OK, we'll change our politics. We can put on a play. Maybe they'll give us some dollars." Marianne is puzzled but Ferdinand suggests that something the Americans would like would be the
Vietnam War. The ensuing sequence is a makeshift play where Marianne dresses up as a stereotype Vietnamese woman and Ferdinand as an
American sailor.
Notably, he also participated in
Loin du Vietnam (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from
La Chinoise),
Claude Lelouche,
Joris Ivens,
William Klein,
Chris Marker,
Alain Resnais and
Agnés Varda.
Bertolt Brecht
Godard's engagement with German
playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of
epic theatre and its prospect of alienating the viewer (
Verfremdungseffekt) through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (in Brecht's case theater, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before
1980, when Godard used filmic expression for specific political ends.
For example,
À bout de souffle's elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content. Godard employs this device as well as several others, including asynchronous sound and alarming title frames, with perhaps his favorite being the character aside. In so many of his most political pieces, specifically
Week End,
Pierrot le fou, and
La Chinoise, characters address the audience with thoughts, feelings, and instructions.
Marxism
A
Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard's early work. Godard's direct interaction with
Marxism does not become explicitly apparent, however, until
Week End, where the name
Karl Marx is cited in conjunction with figures such as
Jesus Christ. A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie's
consumerism, the commodification of daily life and activity, and man's
alienation — all central issues of Marx's condemning analysis of capitalism.
In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar
Jacques Ranciere states, "When in
Pierrot le fou, 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism and of a feminist denunciation of women's false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story". The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticizing the Marxist rhetoric, rather than solely being tools of education.
Une femme mariée is also structured around Marx's concept of
commodity fetishism. Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis". He was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being. His efforts is overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analyzing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity.
Georges Sadoul, in his short rumination on the film, describes it as a "sociological study of the alienation of the modern woman".
The period that spans from May 1968 indistinctly into the 1970s has been subject to an even larger volume of inaccurate labeling. They include everything from his
militant period, to his
radical period, along with terms as precise as
Maoist and vague as
political. The term
revolutionary, however, gives a more accurate impression than any other. The period saw Godard align himself with a specific revolution and employ a consistent revolutionary rhetoric.
Films
Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s Godard became interested in
Maoist ideology. He formed the socialist-idealist
Dziga-Vertov cinema group with
Jean-Pierre Gorin and produced a number of shorts outlining his politics. In that period he travelled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings, but the dazzling anti-
consumerist Week End was released in 1967. His films became intensely politicized and experimental, a phase that lasted until 1980.
According to
Elliott Gould, he and Godard met to discuss the possibility of Godard directing
Jules Feiffer's 1971 surrealist play
Little Murders. During this meeting Godard said his two favorite
American writers were
Feiffer and
Charles M. Schulz. Godard soon declined the opportunity to direct; the job later going to
Alan Arkin.
Jean-Pierre Gorin
After the events of May 1968, when the city of Paris saw total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle republic", and Godard's professional objective was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like minded individuals in the filmmaking arena. The most notable of these collaborations was with a young Maoist student,
Jean-Pierre Gorin, who displayed a passion for cinema that grabbed Godard's attention.
Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make a total of five films with strong Maoist messages. The most prominent film from the collaboration was
Tout va bien, which starred
Jane Fonda and
Yves Montand against their respective wills.
The Dziga Vertov group
The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name
Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in
Vertov, a filmmaker and contemporary of both the great Soviet
montage theorists, as well as the Russian
constructivist and
avant-garde artists such as
Alexander Rodchenko and
Vladimir Tatlin. Part of Godard's evidently political shift after May 1968 was toward a proactive participation in the class struggle. Vertov's films, particularly his most famous work,
Man with the Movie Camera (1929), were very much centered on class struggles.
His return to somewhat more traditional fiction was marked with
Sauve qui peut (1980), the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: for example
Passion (1982),
Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982),
Prénom Carmen (1984), and
Grandeur et décadence (1986). There was, though, another flurry of controversy with
Je vous salue, Marie (1985), which was condemned by the Catholic Church for alleged heresy, and also with
King Lear (1987), an extraordinary but much-excoriated essay on
William Shakespeare and language.
His later films have been marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem — films such as
Nouvelle Vague (1990), the autobiographical
JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre (1995), and
For Ever Mozart (1996).
Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) was a quasi-sequel to
Alphaville but done with an elegiac tone and focus on the inevitable decay of age. During the 1990s he also produced perhaps the most important work of his career in the multi-part series
Histoires du Cinema, which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and the history of film itself.
For a list of all films directed by Jean-Luc Godard, see Jean-Luc Godard filmography.*
Godard Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)*Almeida, Jane.
Dziga Vertov Group. Sao Paulo: witz, 2005. ISBN 85-98100-05-6.
*Loshitzky, Yosefa.
The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci.
*MacCabe, Colin. 2003.
Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury.
*MacCabe, Colin. 1980.
Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. London: Macmillan.
*Morrey, Douglas. 2005.
Jean-Luc Godard. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6759-6
*Silverman, Kaja and Farocki, Harun. 1998.
Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press.
*Sterrit, David. 1999.
The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Temple, Michael and Williams, James S. (eds). 2000.
The Cinema alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
*
A "score" of Histoire(s) du cinéma by Céline Scemama :
1a Toutes les histoires,
1b Une histoire seule,
2a Seul le cinéma,
2b Fatale beauté,
3a La monnaie de l'absolu,
3b Une vague nouvelle,
4a Le contrôle de l'univers,
4b Les signes parmi nous*
Jean-luc Godard Timeline*
The Role of Godard*
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database*
A Girl And A Gun: Sans Pareil, a personal run through of Godard's 60s output.*
Godard and Epistemology in Alphaville*
Telegraph Interview (05/2001)*
Guardian Interview (04/2005)*
Essay about "Hail, Mary" that's also an overview of Godard's films
