16 September 2022 – The films of Jean-Luc Godard – the legendary French director who died on 13 September aged 91 – often begin with an enigmatic flash of color and some multilingual wordplay before a beautiful young face emerges on screen in some painterly setting, an apartment or factory, amid signs of love and revolt. Still images – the beginning, middle or end of what might be a film essay – intersperse the narrative, or what passes for narrative. In La Chinoise (“The Chinese”, 1967), for example, intercut between scenes of lackadaisical student protesters in thrall to Chairman Mao, appear new and found images: a frame from a superhero comic; a photograph of Soviet soldiers marching along a grand thoroughfare; the name ‘Marx’; a plunger stuck to an advertisement for Jean-Paul Sartre’s Descartes (1946), which leaves visible only cartes – French for ‘map’.
Witnessing such visual and political pyrotechnics tends to have an astonishing effect, especially when you’re young – well, for me, at least, when I was at film school in NYC so many, many, many years ago – though his influence tends to last well into your adulthood.
And Godard’s love of Paris and the inspiration he drew from it are reflected in almost all of his films, many masterpieces of the New Wave. Throughout his films, the exploration of Paris, through his lens, takes the audience from the Champs Élysées to the Ile de la Cité, via the Rue de Rivoli, the Champ de Mars, the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Campagne-Première. His sublime feature film À bout de souffle, a true masterpiece of the New Wave, beguiled both film critics and just us lovers of the City of Light.
My first – and still favorite – Godard film is from slightly later in his catalogue: Tout va Bien (“Just Great”, 1972), and stars Jane Fonda. It was, for many, a politically “awakening” film (I was 20, at university in Paris at the time) through its combination of politics and stardom. The film portrays the class struggle of post-’68 France as Brechtian theatre, with Fonda playing the role of a young correspondent entangled in an industrial strike. That same year, Godard made the essay film Letter to Jane, which critiqued a single press image taken during Fonda’s controversial (and necessary) anti-war tour of North Vietnam that so rankled the US press.
It is hard to believe Godard is gone; Godard felt forever. Like Queen Elizabeth II. His films – from their visions of young French activists to their close analysis of political causes in countries such as Vietnam and Palestine – simultaneously elevated him into the stratosphere of great artists, rendering his last name synonymous with French New Wave cinema, and subsumed him within the crowds of workers and activists fighting for freedom from the oppression of hegemonic powers.
And while his vast and prolific career spanned seven decades (Godard directed his first feature in 1955, his most recent in 2018) Godard never once shied away from confrontation. Godard was a film brat of the highest order, who used his early New Wave films as a playful, somewhat bitter commentary on the insidious infiltration of cinematic images into our minds. His most celebrated film, “Breathless” (1960), takes place in a world where characters have internalized an ineffable sense of “cool” they learned directly from American movies; in one scene, Jean-Paul Belmondo, sporting a fedora and cigarette, spends a moment to look at a headshot of Humphrey Bogart, a photo he seems to regard like a mirror.
Indeed, it is hard not to comment on his passing without hyperbole, since Godard was a truly astonishing master of his craft, whether in the black and white romance of Bande à part (“Band of Outsiders”, 1964) or the searing critique of Week-end (1967) or Le Mépris (“Contempt”, 1967). And he was one of the few artists whose success was not accompanied by a drift into the complacent centrism favoured by mainstream cinema.
Much has been written about Godard’s classic works of the 1960s and ‘70s, when he was at his peak. But I especially love his difficult late films, which slowly, inexorably bid farewell to cinema – a medium he had begun to view as fatally compromised by its own conciliatory, forgetful politics. Writing for the London Review of Books in 1998, Peter Wollen observed that, by the 1980s and ’90s, with the bulk of his cinematic achievements seemingly behind him, Godard had become a poète maudit, a cranky raconteur of hard truths:
“The story [Godard] had to tell was a cruel and melancholy one – how the cinema, despite its moments of glory, ultimately failed us and was doomed to die.’ [After Godard’s death, this wonderful essay circulated widely online – it’s well worth the read]. Of course, Godard had always used his camera to address the movement and motivations of power – especially vis-à-vis the manufacturing of images – as well as those who stood in its way, from student revolutionaries and guerrilla fighters to lovers and movie stars. In his 70s, while shooting the eight-part project Histoire(s) du cinéma (Histories of cinema, 1998), Godard laid bare film’s decline since the advent of the soundtrack in the 1920s, and its lack of revolutionary potential; the propulsive celluloid force he had hoped would advance left-wing politics in Europe in the 1960s and early ’70s was nearly gone. Steven Spielberg – whose particularly shallow Schindler’s List (1993), which sentimentalized the Holocaust and incensed Godard – as well as the absurd demands of the commercial box office were, he posited, at least partly to blame.
As Wollen further noted:
“Godard could tell this particular story with conviction because he knew it was true and because, although he may have been seen often enough as a charlatan and a provocateur and a Pied Piper, he knew that he had never been, like many of his accusers, a collaborator”.
His final major quasi-narrative feature, Filme Socialisme (“Socialism”, 2010), strove to upset cinematic convention one last time, through his usual misdirection and love of recursive structure.
Although it was not well-received by critics, I loved it. When one of its principal locations, the cruise ship Costa Concordia, sunk off the coast of Italy, it became a colossal metaphor for cinema and capitalism that Godard’s film anticipates, but could not quite realize, in its vision of a Europe sundered by predictable economic crisis and spiritual emptiness.
His two other late works, Adieu au Langage (“Goodbye to Language”, 2014) and Le Livre d’image (“The Image Book”, 2018), are, to quote from a 2020 note in The New Yorker by the artist John Kelsey:
“bitter, spiny and cantankerously difficult works. They are also the most formally adventurous essay-films he has ever produced […] Godard pushes fragmentation to a fractal extreme, as shards of image and sound – sourced from the early days of cinema to the present – are blasted loose from narrative coherence and propelled through a sort of compositional supercollider”.
As time passed, the problem was that Godard movies seemed to require more and more study to be understood. Some of his more recent films — 2014’s “Goodbye to Language” springs immediately to mind, as does 2004’s “Notre Musique” — are so oblique as to be obnoxious. As such, Godard garnered a reputation — at least in film schools — for being “too arty” or “too difficult.”
The irony is, Godard was a punk.
One can see Godard’s confrontational attitudes take shape in his early Cahier writings, wherein he frequently spoke out against modern film’s tendency to provide comfort and clarity and ease of consumption for a complacent audience. Godard sought to rattle, to tear down, to raise a middle finger. He wasn’t a classicist who sought to build out cinematic formalism. He was an idle youth with a sledgehammer.
Words like “experimental” and “avant-garde” began to crop up in essays about his work, and reviews became decidedly mixed. His reputation was sealed. Of the New Wave filmmakers, Godard was the “difficult” one. The one you dreaded watching.
The ultimate irony, is that Godard, even into his 90s, was playing a young man’s game. He was dissatisfied. He wanted to tear down conventions. He wanted to assure that an audience kept their minds open to broad cinematic possibilities. He wanted to piss people off. Godard was not some lazy nihilist in a black turtleneck expounding on Marxism and the meaning of modern, tech-dominated life — those were his characters. Godard was a lively wrecking ball.
I will leave the last word to Witney Seibold, who has been writing about films professionally since 1996, and has been podcasting professionally about film since 2011 and is one of my main follows in the film industry. On his blog he noted:
Godard may have a reputation for making brainy, mannered, inscrutable movies, but his work remains so much more alive than that. Godard’s body of work is a constantly shifting and active argument against the establishment. In the 2010s, Godard was still fighting “The Man”. In an over-commercialized cinema world, voices like that should be cherished.