Movie Enthusiast Issue 73: Godard in the 60s
Watching
A few years after Jean-Luc Godard finally goes to his eternal rest, someone will likely make a documentary about his life and legacy. It will probably premiere out of competition at Cannes before making its North American premiere at New York Film Festival. Some distributor, probably Kino Lorber, will cut together a trailer for its theatrical release, to be screened in university-adjacent movie houses across North America and to gross something to the effect of $38,000. If it’s a talking heads kind of documentary—and in ironic contradistinction to Godard’s status as an innovator, I’m absolutely certain it will be—there will probably be some screentime with the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who I’m equally certain will be featured in the trailer saying: “He changed…[beat]…everything.”
It’s easy to imagine because most people already seem to talk about Godard this way, even if most people’s familiarity with him extends no further than having watched Breathless in college. Clearly that movie made an impact; you want to talk about milestones in jump cuts and the devil-may-care radicalized French youth archetype, that’s your go-to. But what about the rest of his filmography? Between 1960 and 1967 alone Godard made an astonishing 15 movies, a pace of output that few directors since have attempted to match (though Rainer Werner Fassbinder bested him in the 70s with a combination of some 20 big-screen and made-for-TV productions).
My own college encounter with Breathless, which I liked at the time, was followed by a randomly selected encounter with 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a movie I found so odiously pretentious that I swore off voluntary excursions to Godardland indefinitely. I was forced to return for a film class screening of Vivre sa vie (too Brechtian) and, years later, I hazarded a night out on the town for a Bastille Day screening of Pierrot le fou at a hipster theater that adds an artificial intermission into every movie to drive up concessions sales. At least this last film was done a good service by its screening environment, Pierrot’s vaguely surrealist nonsense and political agitprop made bearable by its contextualization in a theater full of government-adjacent potheads.
Earlier this year I found myself inexplicably deciding to watch the rest of Godard’s pre-1968 output, and this even before Criterion Channel announced that they had added all his movies to their streaming library to encourage subscribers to do the same. I don’t know what I had expected going into this marathon. In my head I had formed a story which felt true on the basis of impressions alone, evidence be damned: Breathless was the only movie of its kind that Godard made; all his following films were wildly, anarchically innovative; each dispensed with traditional notions of narrative coherence and human psychology; and Godard would waste no time after his debut in assuming much more ferocious political agendas.
Well, some of those ideas ended up applying to some of his movies. I was surprised, for example, to discover how much Bande à part reminded me of Breathless in look, feel, and tone, the sole “innovation” I could place a figure on being the occasional voice over describing the characters’ inner lives. This was one of the few films to hold my full attention, the other being the incomparable Weekend, his final film before 1968. Weekend kicks off with an uncomfortably long psychosexual monologue, reminiscent of the one from Bergman’s Persona, which then gives way to a truly excruciatingly long, though justly famous, scene of cinema’s longest traffic jam, a horrid 10 minutes of high-pitched honking and controlled chaos filmed in a single, patient dolly shot. From there the film changes gears as the main characters begin to demonstrate passing awareness of the fact that they are in a film. Obligatory warring political speeches about Vietnam are had to I don’t know whose edification, and, eventually, civilization perfunctorily collapses, leading us to a cannibalistic conclusion.
In contrast to the unforgettable Weekend I find that, several weeks after the fact, I can really only vividly recall one or two scenes from any of the other films. There’s the DIY torture in Le petit soldat, the upbeat trailer at the end of La Chinoise for…the movie you just finished watching, the Bogart trenchcoat and the Japanese woman cringily chilling in the bathtub playing guitar in Made in U.S.A. Others leave stronger stylistic impressions: the breeziness of A Woman is a Woman, the foreboding of Alphaville, the familiarty of Masculin Féminin, the way that Le mépris seems to just be an excuse for Godard to ogle Brigitte Bardot (toss Fritz Lang in there for a few minutes and it’s an Incisive Commentary on the Nature of Cinema).
Perhaps the film that struck me most of all was A Married Woman, incidentally one of Godard’s least known
early features. Here you can find much of the same commentary on politics, consumerism, and ye olde bourgeois institution of marriage that you would in other Godard films, along with many of the same unconventional and envelope-pushing tics—typographic cutaways aplenty, unabashed discussion of sex, the works. Yet everything is slightly more polished here; the off-kilter elements don’t draw attention to themselves. It’s as though someone else watched a bunch of Godard movies and then did their take on one…and it turned out better than the real thing. Except, of course, A Married Woman is the real thing, because Godard really did direct it, and he would, unfortunately, decide not to return that same level of refinement again.
Ultimately I found most of these movies tedious. My attention would wane after about the halfway mark, as it became clear, in most cases, that whatever surprises may await me in the next 40–50 minutes would be matched by Godard’s unflagging enthusiasm for deconstructive filmmaking, the female form, and whatever leftist philosopher or theorist he happened to be particularly high on that month. Maybe I just need to smoke more? (I do not need to smoke more.) Even as I was well underway with this project, I was aware that I was not the audience for these films. Maybe no one truly is except Godard himself.
So did these movies change anything? Well certainly, if Brody’s book on Godard is to be believed. Yet it’s difficult for me, today, to imagine the impact Godard would have been having on cinema as he was making it. Now, most people take it as a forgone conclusion that Godard’s contributions—if not the Nouvelle Vague’s—changed the way everyone else made movies. Were the changes perceptible at the time, though? You don’t hear people talking about any of the filmmakers of the Romanian New Wave as epoch-defining actors in contemporary cinema, yet the long takes popularized by this movement’s directors are everywhere nowadays. Is it perhaps that today’s filmmakers have simply too many channels by which to receive inspiration? What was it about Godard and his particular moment in history that led to his outsize influence and name recognition (over and above, say, Jacques Rivette, his contemporary and no less an innovator)? I’m more interested in finding that out than I am in the movies themselves.
Reading
Of course, you can’t talk about Godard’s 60s films without talking about one other person…
The story of Karina, born Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer in 1940 in Solbjerg, a suburb on Denmark’s east coast, has been turned into a fairy tale. Abandoned by her father and neglected by her mother, she found solace in the pizzazz of dance numbers and American jazz, often going to the movies at the invitation of her mother’s boyfriends. At the age of seventeen, she hitchhiked from Copenhagen to Paris to follow her dream of becoming a performer. Her first break: a modeling agent spotted her at Les Deux Magots, the Left Bank café of the Tout-Paris. “She was really dirty,” the agent later said. “But she had an incredible gaze that seemed to devour everything around her.” Soon after, she landed the cover of Elle. Coco Chanel gave her the screen name, or so the legend goes, the singsong ANN-a kar-IN-a a syllable off from Tolstoy’s heroine, as if she’d go on to live a life out of a Russian saga.
Coming Soon
Kino Lorber has begun partnering with independent movie theaters across the country to virtually distribute their scheduled spring new releases so that you can continue to support your local cinema while quarantined. This week they’re rolling out Bacurau; check their website to see when you can watch to benefit your theater of choice.