Jean-Luc Godard is an interesting figure in film history. His relationship with Hollywood is one of strange symbiosis – a cyclical exchange of inspiration and creative technical extension that has always been unfortunately and inadvertently elusive. Godard and Hollywood are used to tragically missing out on each other. The birth of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine – of the French New Wave – was motivated by “nostalgic regret” for a dying cinema; a cinema of the American genre film, of the Hollywood studio B-movie. Influenced by a generation of Hollywood filmmakers before him, Godard himself became monstrously influential to another few filmmaking generations, including the Hollywood “film brat” generation who would have extensively studied his divine “Godardian” ways. Yet he has never been credited with even one Oscar nomination. Only recently, in 2010, was Godard finally acknowledged by the Academy with an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. But even then Godard wasn’t there to accept the Oscar, claiming that the award meant “nothing” to him. Hollywood has always been out of his reach and/or he has always evaded Hollywood.
Why does Godard interest me? I see two distinct peoples of the film world: filmmakers and film critics. This doesn’t just refer to people as their professions label them. This refers to the way people conduct themselves. The way that viewers interact with films. The way that any given person interacts with the world around them. Two ways of interacting with the world. Two mentalities. Making or breaking. That’s why the Cahiers group are so interesting. They were filmmakers through their film criticism and film critics through their filmmaking. Essentially, they were on the ‘filmmakers’ side. They were cinéphiles. Film enthusiasts.
Godard, inspired by American genre film, began his film career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. For him (and his fellow Cahiers critics), writing is a way of filmmaking. He has always been emphatic on the concept that one shouldn’t just make cinema, one should always be ‘thinking cinema’ and ‘living cinema’.
Writing was already a way of making films, for the difference between writing and directing is quantitative not qualitative. […] As a critic, I thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today, I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them. […] People say we made use of criticism. No. We were thinking cinema and at a certain moment we felt the need to extend that thought.
This philosophical standpoint manifests enormously in his films – highly reflexive works renowned for being chock full of references to other movies. Take Breathless (1960), for example. Godard visually references Forty Guns (1957) in the scene where Patricia looks at Michel through the rolled up poster. Belmondo and Seberg watch Westbound (1959) in a cinema. Michel’s alias, “Laszlo Kovacs” is the name of a character in Leda (1959), also played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Bob le Flambeur (1956) is mentioned in the dialogue as a character – an acquaintance of Michel – who is in jail. Its director, Jean-Pierre Melville, also appears in the film, playing an author that Patricia interviews.
Godard’s notorious film-referencing is something akin to his taste for quotation.
People in life quote as they please, so we [filmmakers] have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me. […] If you want to say something, there is only one solution: say it.
These quotations are often written directly into the dialogue. Sometimes the characters explicitly ‘quote’ and discuss the whereabouts of the quote, as is frequent in Contempt (1963).
Not only does he reference other movies, but Godard’s films appropriate works from all sorts of artists and intellectuals. He considers there to be a “clear continuity between all forms of expression”, often likening the processes of different art forms to the process of filmmaking. His films even incorporate other arts into their content in various ways – for example, in Goodbye to Language (2014) Godard mesmerises us with images of a paintbrush mixing paints together and swirling exotic colours, and hands slowly penning down thoughts in a notebook.
The essayistic quality of these films is how Godard speaks through the characters (whether it’s his words or, more likely, words that he likes from someone else), the camerawork, the cuts. His approach is one of borrowing and building – borrowing from others while building his own perspective. And within that perspective is ample self-interrogation.
Godard has long wrestled with the two intermingling poles of documentary and fiction, reality and imagination, life and theatre, truth and beauty.
Beauty – the splendour of truth – has two poles. There are directors who seek the truth, which, if they find it, will necessarily be beautiful; others seek beauty, which, if they find it, will also be true. One finds these two poles in documentary and fiction. Some directors start from documentary and create fiction […] Others start from fiction and create documentary.
“By being realistic one discovers the theatre, and by being theatrical […] Behind the theatre there is life, and behind life, the theatre. I started from the imaginary and discovered reality; but behind reality, there is again imagination.”
“All means of expression are connected. And life itself is one of them.”
“Cinema, Truffaut said, is spectacle – Méliès – and research – Lumière. […] I have always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of a spectacle.”
The Godardian style was born out of this discourse. Jump cuts, disregard for continuity, addressing the camera, iris transitions, breaking the 180-degree rule, theatrical musical tracks, long take tracking shots, conspicuously dynamic camera movements, reflections as secondary frames, point-of-view shots, long dialogue jarirngly interrupted by the radio or a passing train… These are some techniques that I’ve noticed in his earlier work, anyway. These self-reflexive techniques play with the notion of spectatorship – not bothering to disguise that the film is a film, not feigning reality, yet possessing a sense of effortless realism.
One way that Godard does this so well is by often using realistic dialogue. Realistic in the sense that it’s not succinct. It’s long-winded and circular and digressive at times. It doesn’t function to advance the plot. Many filmmakers would deem it superfluous. Excessive. Tortuous. It’s naturalistic conversation. People talking. We sit and watch and wait and see how characters interact with one another. We fall into whatever profound philosophical subject matter they discuss with meandering sentences (life, death, men, women, relationships, love, hate). We are pulled out of this as we notice a jump cut. Or as a passing train envelops the sync sound (as in Breathless). Godard engages the viewer in two conversations. One of those occurs between the characters (/ Godard speaking through his characters who quote other intellectuals). The other is a conversation about cinematic language. About Godard’s reigning preoccupation with realism and fiction. About spectatorship.
A film world is developed and then it is broken and then we are asked to nimbly return to the film world. Disruptions remind us to engage in the second conversation. To interrogate ourselves as viewers like the film interrogates itself as a film.
Godard will often pair a long-winded dialogue scene with a long take tracking shot – his famously labelled “question of morality”. It has been debated what he means by this. The question is said to be directed at the viewer. A long-take tracking shot of two characters conversing may begin with a sense of immediacy, but it soon becomes an extended investigation of the characters and an enquiry into the extent to which a viewer is willing to engage in the on-screen happenings. Time is allowed for the viewer to understand the protagonists’ qualities – whether they be good/bad, shallow/deep – how the characters interact with each other, and so on. Time is allowed for the viewer to decide who to sympathise with, and then to reflect upon their decision – what does it make them if they are sympathising with a selfishly-motivated character?
A key part of this ‘realism’ that Godard is fascinated with is cinema’s ability to capture and eternalise living moments.
One is filming a moment of death at work. […] the cinema is interesting because it seizes life and the mortal side of life.
This concept may translate to Godard’s illustrious ellipses – his jump cuts (despite their origin being practical limitation) place emphasis on the moment. A scene will leap from moment to moment – from cause to effect – without any warning or explanation for the audience. Suddenly, the audience will have missed out on a particular amount of time. They will then have to interpret this gap in time based on the events that occurred before and after. Suddenly, they’ll take more care to pay attention to and appreciate those moments that they are shown. Then there’s the long-take tracking shot, which reinforces the importance of ‘the moment’ in a different way. Screen time is equivalent to real time in these long-takes. Godard’s renowned long-takes often also show life playing out in the background of the shot – streets and roads and shops and people and cars. His long-winded dialogue similarly indulges in the moment, deviating and meandering and not immediately trying to get from one step to the next. Godard recognises that cinema, however fabricated, will record life – its actors, its historical context, thoughts/ideas of the director and of others involved.
Of course, it is important to note that many of Godard’s praised techniques were born out of necessity. Practical limitations gave way to what were later deemed innovations. Budget constraints, limited access to equipment, etc. were factors that yielded new inventions. In Breathless, for example, tracking shots were done by pushing the camera operator around in a wheelchair. Everything was rough because that was the only way they could do it. They didn’t have the resources or money. Jump cuts were implemented because the film was originally far too long, and they didn’t have the means to re-shoot, and Godard refused to cut whole scenes. These inventions may have roughened up the cinema, but they made this roughness acceptable and palatable. That is the legacy of Breathless, anyway.
It’s interesting to look at Godard’s relationship with Hollywood as he became more established. It’s a complicated relationship – his adoration for the studio B-movie and admiration for fellow American filmmakers competes with his distaste for producers and the commercially-oriented Hollywood production system. This is largely due to experiences where his higher-budget films were hijacked by producers who, unlike most of his French producers, had little respect for the concept of auteurism. Godard’s 1963 film Contempt epitomises this struggle. The film (about making a film)’s storyline drew a considerable number of parallels to the circumstances of its own making – high-budget film that had unwelcome influence from its producer. Nonetheless, Godard demonstrated his talent at speaking through his work, quietly and cleverly managing to have the last word. As Godard sees, the cinema “is all money” but at any moment can also become “the air of confusion… the smell of rain and of fields bathed in mist.”
Godard’s most recent film, Goodbye to Language (2014), extends his techniques for roughness and his philosophical experimentation with realism-fiction even further. It’s a blatantly self-reflexive and film-essay-like piece – a collage of jarring, broken, fleeting fragments that challenges the audience’s natural tendency to ‘seek narrative’ or make things whole. Godard abstracts qualities of sound and image and word and delivers them to us raw. Bits of dialogue are used musically; on-screen text is manipulated for visual poeticism. Godard uses words as image and sound, and image and sound as language. Ideas arise suddenly and are replaced just as suddenly. We look at raw, broken characters. Raw, disjointed relationships. We see the same thing shot in extremely different ways. We see attractive cinematic images paired with unpleasant, grotesque images. We notice fragments of realism mixed with fragments of fiction. Godard’s own pet dog is the glue in this dense montage.
It is a truly Godardian film – full of appropriation of others’ work, full of meditation about truth/beauty/relationships/nature/language/spectatorship, full of disruptions in the film world that remind us to engage in conversation with Godard. There are even hidden allusions to his love of early American cinema written into the very narrative form – Goodbye to Language seems to be structured around what Godard calls “Hitchcock’s theory”. The idea is that “if you want something to be understood, you say it at least twice.” Two similar-looking couples act out variations of the same events in two interchanging sections titled “Nature” and “Metaphor”.
The film was shot in 3D. But Godard’s motivation for doing this was that he finds the effect uninteresting – according to him, it adds nothing extra. He even tries to flatten the 3D images by shooting shadows and mirror reflections. Perhaps this disdain for 3D is linked to Godard’s complicated relationship with Hollywood, since 3D sometimes serves as no more than a commercial investment for Hollywood productions.
Essentially, Goodbye to Language is another of what Godard calls “research in the form of a spectacle”.
References:
Aumont, Jacques. “The Fall of the Gods: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris.” French Film: Texts & Contexts. Ed. Susan Hayward & Ginette Vincendeau. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. 217-229.
Baumbach, N. 2014. Starting over. Film Comment, 50(6), 34-38,40-41. <http://search.proquest.com/docview/1628646601?accountid=13552>
Godard, Jean-Luc. “‘From Critic to Filmmaker’: Godard in Interview (extracts).” Cahiers du Cinéma Vol. 2 – 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood. Ed. Jim Hillier. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. 59-67.
Lopate, Phillip. “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film” The Threepenny Review, No. 48 (Winter, 1992), pp. 19-22. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384052>
Neupert, Richard. “Introduction.” A History of the French New Wave. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. xv-xxix.
Vaughan, Hunter 2012, Where Film Meets Philosophy : Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking, e-book, <http://RMIT.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1028101>.
Verrone, William 2011, The Avant-Garde Feature Film : A Critical History, e-book, <http://RMIT.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=800728>.
http://variety.com/2010/film/news/godard-inspired-today-s-greats-1118027118/
http://www.film.com/movies/whats-the-big-deal-breathless-1960
http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_12/section_1/artc5A.html
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/21/jean-luc-godard-goodbye-to-language-cannes-review
http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/Outlaw-Cinema.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/movies/film-in-its-fiery-pages-a-french-revolution.html