Case Study: Jean-Luc Godard
For many countries around the world the 1960s was a decade
of enormous cultural transformation, if not revolution. Cinema was just one
area of rapid change with widespread experimentation and innovation taking
place and a new generation of filmmakers emerging. Several ‘new waves’ and ‘new
cinemas’ emerged in every continent. To pick out one director is by no means to
suggest that a single personality could lead changes of such magnitude. It is
merely to broadly indicate the approaches and concerns of a single director who
was, and is, regarded by his international contemporaries as a key figure.
Jean-Luc Godard has been, perhaps, the most consistently challenging and innovative New Wave filmmaker and his impact on contemporary cinema theory and practice is widely recognised. He began writing his film criticism for Les Cahiers du Cinéma in 1952 and had amassed, by the end of the decade, a body of writings that placed him in the vanguard of the New Wave aesthetic. A few low budget films preceded his first success ‘A Bout de souffle’ (‘Breathless’) based on a story suggested to him by Truffaut, which was premiered in Paris in 1959. The film won instant critical and box-office success and became a landmark film in the French New Wave. Of all Godard’s films ‘Breathless’, in which an American woman falls in love and then betrays a gangster who has shot a policeman, is the most realistic and has the strongest narrative. Nevertheless it also has an anarchic, unpredictable quality that came to characterise Godard: jumbled editing and disorientating jump cuts, sudden and abrupt events, changes in film speed and Brechtian distancing techniques. Examples of the latter include the highly detatched manner in which we witness the shooting of the policeman in long shot, or the use of the ‘direct address’ when the hero talks to the audience.
Godard's reputation is that of an unpredictable rebel. He has run into trouble with producers and censors on many occasions. French and British television have both commissioned the director and then refused to screen his work and some of his controversial productions such as 'Jusque à la Victoire' (Until Victory 1970) made for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) have been refused distribution. For Dixon (1997) Godard is a 'philosopher renegade' who converted an entertainment medium into a 'cinema of resistance'. Dixon argues that in form and polemic Godard's films have proved to be 'the prototype of postmodernism and postnarrativism'. Godard's loathing for much about conventional feature film production is evident in his fiercely independent production methods and frequent disregard for public acceptance. He turned down the opportunity to direct, what would become the highly popular, 'Bonnie and Clyde' due to his mistrust of Hollywood and has repeatedly attacked all that is conventional and commercial in modern cinema.
These attacks are frequent in both his critical writings and in his films. In ‘Le Mépris’ (Contempt 1963) we see a writer (played by Michel Piccoli) 'selling out' to a vulgar German producer, Prokosch, (played by Jack Palance) who wants to direct ‘The Odyssey’. 'When someone mentions the word ‘culture’' Prokosch says, ‘I know it’s time to pay someone.’ The producer rushes around the film studio in a flashy red sports car and shows contempt for the director Fritz Lang (played by himself) when he knocks film cans out of the assistant’s hands or throws them across the screening room. In fact, ‘Contempt’, which also starred Brigitte Bardot as the writer's demanding wife, was a cheap looking rip-off of Godard’s backers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine who had paid a million dollars and expected a spectacular wide-screen adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel set on the island of Capri . What they got instead was an ironically-titled, low-budget satire of their greed. William Bayer (1973) comments:
‘Godard had used the million dollars of his unsuspecting backers to tell the story of his relationship with them, and he had done so with the help of the most famous sex kitten of all time, within the confines of a story they had approved, and in a way best contrived to make the whole thing fail at the box office, and make their millions forever irretrievable.'
Godard would return to the themes of 'Contempt' several times in his films, but most directly in 'Passion' (1982) in which Michel Piccoli plays a documentary filmmaker (and Godard's alter-ego) plagued by producers who bombard him with stupid queries and challenge his every decision as he tries to complete a film about classical paintings by Rembrant and Delacroix.
Godard, who took an active part in the French worker/student riots of 1968, is an explicitly political filmmaker. His work veers from coldly analytical treatises stripped of any narrative appeal, to humorous guerrilla attacks on classic Hollywood genres. While many of Godard's films, particularly in the 1970s, are intellectual 'ciné-tracts' with an austere, hectoring style: allegory, metaphor and parable are also very much a part of his cinematic world. This is most clear in his revolutionary work from the 1960s which has had the most lasting influence and which includes Alphaville (1965), 'Pierrot le Fou' (1965) and 'Weekend' (1967). These films are subversive, radical and unpredictable in form and content, qualities that Godard consistently strove for.
In ‘Alphaville’, a science fiction thriller filmed in contemporary Paris using high contrast, black and white film, the hero private eye Lemmy Caution must destroy a powerful computer that controls the minds of society. ‘Pierrot le fou’, apparently made without a script, is a zany and provocative road movie with a fragmentary structure in which the French film industry, Hollywood, advertising, the Vietnam War, American imperialism and a whole variety of issues are obliquely satirised. In ‘Weekend’ a couple set off by car to visit the woman’s mother to borrow money. They are involved in a giant apocalyptic traffic jam that is full of crashed vehicles and mutilated bodies. The couple escapes from this war zone where civilisation has apparently broken down only to violently murder the mother and steal her money. They then return to Paris that has been taken over by Maoist revolutionaries who have become cannibals in order to survive. The husband is killed and the wife joins the renegades in eating his corpse. ‘Alphaville’ 'Pierrot le fou' and ‘Weekend’ employ different strategies to critique contemporary capitalism and the violence that lies beneath its surface.
Godard’s films are, in the words of Gerald Mast, ‘consistent in their inconsistency, their eclecticism, their mixing of so many different kinds of ideas and cinematic principles.’ He finds human experience irrational and inexplicable in some moments (the chance murder of the policeman in ‘Breathless’) while at others he allies himself very firmly to a rhetorical Marxist tradition, sometimes giving his characters long, somewhat tedious speeches of abstract rational argument, as in ‘La Chinoise’. In 1968 Godard broke away from ‘narrative’ art cinema altogether working with the explicitly political Dziga-Vertov Group to make experimental film ‘essays’ about such matters as language and ideology.
In the 1970s Godard worked with experimental video from his television studio in Switzerland before returning to narrative cinema in a variety of guises in the 1980s. His late films and video programmes (‘Passion’ (1981), ‘Détective’ (1985), ‘Nouvelle Vague’ (1990), ‘Histoire du cinéma’ (1989)) frequently concentrate on the politics of representation and ‘take the complex and illusionistic business of image making as their serious and sometimes comic central themes’ (Drummond 1996). Godard has remained the most radical director, politically and aesthetically, of the French New Wave. He has striven, with variable success, to dismantle every conventional dramatic and technical norm in filmmaking in a bid to revolutionise the medium and comment on the process of what is taking place. His influence on a generation of international directors and contemporary film practices is undisputed.