GODARD: From the Film Revolution to the Digital Revolution
When the name “Jean-Luc Godard” is mentioned, it is quite easy to find the word “pretentious” in the same sentence. Of course, “pretentious” is a word that many love to use as a weapon to bring down certain artists: people like Lars Von Trier, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant, Christopher Nolan, or even Terrence Malick are often described as such. Those who attack these filmmakers with such a strong word are often met with a backlash of sorts. But not Godard.
Even with a career spanning almost 70 years, the French director gets a lot of flak thrown at him by both young cinephiles and more esteemed and veteran critics. It does not help that even some films paint him in a negative light. The comedic biography Godard Mon Amour by Michel Hazanavicius (of The Artist fame) homages its title character in ways that could be seen as flattering, but the man himself (played by Louis Garrel) is shown as an annoying artist with his head far up his behind. Most importantly, Agnès Varda’s Faces Places (coincidentally another 2017 release) has a climax where its director and artist JR try to meet Godard at his home, but he refuses to welcome them in. This ushered much hate from everyone who saw the documentary, and that is Godard’s greatest trick: he gave audiences a villain, someone to root against, as well as a strong emotional ending for Varda’s story.
It is unfortunate that Godard has become a punchline and constant subject of ridicule and hate, with his die-hard fans often being even more insufferable than those who despise him. A shame, because Jean-Luc Godard truly is one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema, and to this day, he continues to be one of the boldest, most ground-breaking artists behind the camera.
Godard, together with other directors like Varda, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy and Alain Resnais, belonged to the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague): cinephiles and film critics that loved and knew the art form so well, they picked up cameras and started filming whatever they wanted. 1960’s Breathless became a true manifesto for this movement and every filmmaker who watched it; Godard broke the rules of the movies he loved, employing a handheld camera, shooting on location without permits, and using both smash cuts and jump cuts in a way that was wholly original at the time.
This deconstruction of cinema would continue for the rest of his career, with the 1960s seeing him focus primarily on playing with camerawork, editing, and performances. Vivre Sa Vie has twelve visually distinct chapters that chronicle a woman’s descent into prostitution, sometimes with lengthy monologues, sometimes with (literal) rapid-fire edits, other times with pure silence. Contempt criticises the Hollywood way of making movies, with money-hungry producers, stubborn filmmakers (Fritz Lang plays himself in his only acting role), and confused performers. Alphaville sees noir private investigator Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine in a long-running series of films) in the titular city on a far-away planet, with minimal sets and clever cinematography to transform Paris into a dystopian science-fiction location.
One key historical event that would change Godard’s cinematic ambitions would be the Vietnam War, especially how easily footage from the conflict started to be projected worldwide thanks to television sets in every living room. It was around 1965 that the Nouvelle Vague filmmaker understood that the movie camera could be used for something more than mere entertainment or deconstruction: it could be a political tool. His output became less experimental and more overtly political at the end of the ‘60s and throughout 1970s, with films like La Chinoise, Weekend, and Tout Va Bien criticising capitalism, praising socialism (Mao Zedong’s infamous Red Book of quotations is often cited), and fully condemning the conflict in Vietnam. He even collaborated on a documentary anthology, Far from Vietnam, that, while not entirely successful in shedding light on what was going on in Asia, managed to portray the North Vietnamese in a sympathetic light compared to their portrayal on TV.
After falling out of love with Mao, suffering his second divorce (the first was from Anna Karina, this one from Anne Wiazemsky, both muses and actresses in his films), and failing to bring much change with Dziga Vertov Group and Sonimage production companies, Jean-Luc Godard closed his so-called revolutionary period and entered an existential crisis. He went back to developing more formal and visually stunning films, often with autobiographical and self-referential elements (characters with his surname, disastrous film productions, romantic betrayals and so on). He started experimenting again not so much with the camera but with the editing, a process that was quite complex with analogue film. Still, he managed to succeed critically with First Name: Carmen, scoring a Golden Lion win at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, and he shocked the Catholic Church by making Hail Mary, a tender retelling of the Virgin Mary’s conception of Jesus set in modern-day France.
What would fully change Godard as an artist was his interest in a project that would become his magnum opus. Originally conceived to be a simple video project yet later expanded into a staggering 8-part documentary series clocking in at 266 minutes, Histoire(s) du cinéma sees all of the director’s obsessions in full effect. Made between 1988 and 1998, this documentary is not your typical history lesson. Godard blends his love for classic cinema and ongoing politics into an intoxicating montage, a borderline literal assault of the senses. It is no surprise that it took him many years to complete this gargantuan project: the use of archival footage, mixed with film clips, a soundtrack whose tracks bleed into each other or are abruptly cut out, and scarce narration that only adds to the confusion, is the definition of “do not understand this, feel it.”
Academics and critics far better than yours truly have dived deep into the many meanings of each chapter, but part of the magic of Histoire(s) du cinéma is to give in to the erratic editing. It is cinema as a pure visual medium, the kind that his Soviet idols Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov popularised in the beginning of cinema: meaning is inferred from the connection between one cut and the other, regardless of what might be said in the background. Disappointments are to be expected if one wants a straightforward lecture on filmmaking à la The Story of Film: An Odyssey, but Godard’s version of film history is far more layered or intriguing than could be anticipated. The use of intertitles alone presents many untranslatable jokes and puns that would fly over the head of non-French speakers, further alienating audiences in a cheeky and dastardly way that only Godard could pull off.
Histoire(s) du cinéma showed Godard that he had fully stopped caring about conventional storytelling techniques and fiction stories. In a way, that documentary was meant to be an elegy for his favourite art form. What saved the legendary director from falling into irrelevance and slowing down his body of work was a new approach to filmmaking: the introduction of digital cameras and editing. While many filmmakers were slow in accepting this new means of making films, Godard dove headfirst into this technology, blending it with 35mm film in Éloge de l'amour and showing the endless possibilities at his disposal. Digital cameras made it so that he could freely shoot anything he wanted, whenever he wanted, however long he wanted it to be, provided he had a battery and disk space. No more need for big film crews to light everything. No more weeks spent at the editing bay, snipping away and paining himself with film strips. All that was needed was a camera and a computer, and he was ready to go.
A so-called “Digital trilogy” came to be in the 2010s. Film Socialisme is both fiction and documentary, showcasing the multilingual and multicultural beauty of Europe in its first movement (“Des choses comme ça”), calling into question the three pillars of France (liberty, equality, and fraternity) in “Our Europe”, and ultimately reminding audiences of how Europe and six of its main cities were born out of conflicts, blood, discrimination, and hatred.
Such heavy themes were abandoned in 2014’s Goodbye to Language: Godard almost literally discards the importance of language in this. After all, dialogues lead to conflicts which lead to violence (both in the personal and political spheres), and the world is so much simpler when boiled down to images and emotions alone. This was his only foray into 3D filmmaking, using digital cameras of varying quality and looks, teasing a narrative that is ultimately pointless. Lastly, he made The Image Book, a sort of sequel to Histoire(s) du cinéma exploring film history and its failure to tackle issues in the Middle East, in a way pointing to Western art’s disinterest towards the goings-on of other countries as a direct reason as to why Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the conflict in Palestine managed to grow out of proportions until it was too late for many innocent civilians to perish.
So far, this is the bitter, sour, final film from Jean-Luc Godard. There are very few filmmakers, if any, who have grown, changed, evolved, and reinvented themselves as much as he has, going from an enthusiastic cinephile wanting to revolutionise the art form, to a 90-year-old jaded artist who is not afraid of understanding the modern world, putting a mirror in its face, and consequently calling himself into question too. Of course, his more political and philosophical pieces are made in a way that alienates most audiences due to the need for extensive knowledge of certain thinkers, but his other works manage to break this intellectual barrier to deliver inherently emotional and human stories, with his latter era featuring films that work almost subliminally.
There are two key things that young critics and aspiring filmmakers should learn from Godard, rather than hating him for giving Faces Places the ending it deserved: that living in the digital age has made cinema much more accessible for everyone to both study and produce, hopefully pushing to take bolder risks; and that words are ultimately meaningless over time. The real power of the seventh art lies in pure, unadulterated images.