Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022):
The Last
Cinéaste
By Jamie Jobb
Cinéaste is a word seldom spoken these days on these shores as the craft of “filmmaking” has devolved into a mass of dancing broadband digits and selfie-inflicted camera moves. The French word describes the devout filmmaker, toiling in the celluloid motion-picture projection industry. Movies, in other words.
The ultimate Cinéaste, Jean-Luc Godard, passed away on 13 September after ninety-one prolific years outstanding alone on this planet, outliving his contemporaries all-the-while. Some called him “The Bob Dylan of movies”. Certainly his legacy is a “French National Treasure” as Emmanuel Macron has pointed out. Reportedly Godard died by “le suicide assisté”,thus stirring up public debate on that subject and creating controversy even at his final exit.
In late 1950-early 1960, Godard joined François Truffaut (1932-1984), Éric Rohmer (1920-2010), Jacques Rivette (1928-2016) and Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) to bande à part as the “French New Wave” (La Nouvelle Vague). It was a fecund time when filmmakers around the world were learning how to create cinema in new ways after World War II when cameras were liberated from studio confinement.
The New Wave made movies that moved! Films-in-the-streets that thrived on tight budgets. Hand-held cameras capturing their subjects in available light. Studios rejected for actual apartments, storefronts, lobbies and cafes as “sets”. Urban “road films” often improvised on the spot from back-pocket script suggestions scribbled over coffee that morning, ready for quick memory in front of the cameras that afternoon.
Godard and his mates grew up as unequipped filmmakers at the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. They considered themselves “Critics making films with a pen because they couldn’t afford a camera.” That may be difficult to fathom for anyone born after the iPhone and its selfie-induced TikTok teasers. Once they could afford the gear, the New Wave filmmakers were bound for recording the Real on film, Real-to-Reel in other words: no separation between fiction and documentary.
These auteurs were flooded by a glut of American movies after French Prime Minister André Léon Blum traveled to Washington D.C. in 1946 to meet with U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes to work out an agreement (“The Blum-Byrnes Agreement”) to cancel France’s war debt and to open that country’s market for American films. Before that agreement France had imposed quotas on the number of American movies it could import. This post-war glut of “product” hit the New Wave head on. It’s small wonder that Godard’s first feature was a Bogart B-movie wannabe dressed up as Neo-noir thriller running at its own loopy pace.
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Directing feature films from 1960 (“Breathless”) until his 3-D offering in 2014 (“Goodbye to Language”), Godard was prolific to a fault, delivering over his lifetime: 32 full-length features, 31 documentaries, 54 shorts and 13 video projects. His oeuvre includes everything from an eight-episode television mini-series documentary (“Historie(s) du Cinéma”) to his astonishing 1968 studio session with the Rolling Stones as they noodled through their apocalyptic tune “Sympathy for the Devil” which became an uncanny precursor to that band’s bad day at Altamont on 6 December 1969.
With each new film he seemed to challenge his audience. Scenes sprang up out of nowhere then cut off before we knew it. Or some ran on for eight minutes, as in the famous traffic jam tracking shot in “Weekend”. Some were quick clips. The unexpected was to be expected.
With his massive resume, Godard can be impossible for the common film-viewer to comprehend. It may be best for an unfamiliar spectator to slowly fathom any full-length features that look intriguing, like some cautious scuba-diver adjusting air pressure to avoid The Bends. It helps to know that Godard was one of the first filmmakers to use “jump cutting”, much like Brecht used “alienating” theatrical interruptions, to kick his stories down the road.
Live theater audiences were kept upon their toes that way. Many of these films were made before viewers had “home theaters” with access to “pause”, “fast forward” or “rewind”. Those tools are of great assistance to the contemporary viewer who may stop the action to read a too-quick subtitle, for example.
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How to Read a Godard Film
The strange films of Jean-Luc Godard are littered with subtitles, animated inter-titles, tracking shots, cutting jumps, trick audio and multi-lingual voices. It all can be a bit much to take in at once, but a thorough immersion is worthwhile. Here are my capsule reviews of a bakers dozen of uniquely outstanding Godard feature films worthy of screening, although an audient may become confused to know all these works flow from the same “author”.
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Contempt (1963)
“I love you totally. Tenderly. Tragically.” Converging on Cinecittà backlot in high-gear Alfa Romeo convertible, screenwriter Paul Javal aka Ulysses (Michel Piccoli) and his wife Camille aka Penelope (stunning Brigitte Bardot) suddenly arrive at loggerheads with producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) and Fritz Lang (himself) over dailies Paul has rewritten. “You cheated me, Fritz. That’s not what’s in that script.” “Naturally, because in the script it’s written and on the screen it’s pictures. Motion Pictures, it’s called.”
Godard’s sarcastically languid Nude Bardot scene disobeys his producers’ orders for fresh French skin, but belies his modern approach to recasting Homer’s road-rage tragedy where the protagonist parts the sea. “Do you see my bottom in the mirror?” Prokosch likes the gods because “I know exactly how they feel.”
Astute observers will note that in the last act of this film, Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who plays himself) display an inherent mastery of master-shot camera-movement composition – a hallmark of European directors Antonioni, Bergman and others at that time – thus belying the jumpy cuts of their first feature. “Ulysses realized too late that he had lost his love.”
Reoccurring string section theme-and-variations by Georges Delerue and Piero Piccioni haunts the journey from Rome to Capri where Paul’s Odyssey abruptly ends with a defiant kiss at Casa Malaparte. “Whenever I heard the word ‘culture’, I bring out my checkbook.” Written by Godard and Alberto Moravia. “Always finish what you start.” (France-Italy)
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A Woman is a Woman (1961)
“Would you feel awkward undressing in front of men?” Cabaret strip-tease Angela (Anna Karina) is“the girl for every guy” who’s so desperate for motherhood that she wants to conceive her baby “in 24 hours.” But her live-in lover Émile Récamier (Jean-Claude Brialy) says “after we’re married”.
“OK. You’re not the only man in the world,” says Angela. “I’m not without shame … I’m a dame!”
The Other Man is Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who attempts to fulfill Angela’s conceptual request. Alfred: “Is this a comedy or a tragedy?” Emile: “With women you never know.”
Frothy threadbare Brecht-without-Weill “musical” comedy with lush loony-movie tunes chop-sueyed into fits and starts. Godard Lite, see “Weekend” for Godard Heavy. “Why is it always women that suffer?”
“Women have the right to talk in riddles, not men!” Directed by Godard, paying homage to Lubitsch’s “Design for Living”. Written by Geneviève Cluny and Godard. “We should boycott women who don’t cry.” (France).
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Les Carabiniers (1963)
“The rear betrayed the front.” Hapless provincial everymen Ulysses (Marino Masé) and Michelangelo (Patrice Moullet) are drafted to fight for The King on promise that they’ll return from war wealthy men. “Yes, in the time we’re living, when people suffer so many pains, the officers must take into consideration the pleasures of the people.”
The soldiers send postcards home to wives Venus (Geneviève Galéa) and Cleopatra (Catherine Ribeiro) detailing banal idiocy of war: “We leave traces of blood and corpses behind us. We kiss you tenderly.”
Godard shot episodes like newsreel scenes intercut with actual war footage. Ulysses and Michelangelo return home as tourist-soldiers with suitcases stuffed full of treasure – “deed of trust” postcard images of war spoils to be redeemed after The King declares victory. “Dreams are what constitute Paradise.”
Presages “Dr. Strangelove”, “How I Won the War”, “The Bed-Sitting Room”, “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Catch-22” as bitter anti-war satires spawned by Vietnam. “There is no victory, only flags and fallen men.” Written and directed by Godard. (France).
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Band of Outsiders (1964)
“Better happy ‘n rich, than sad ‘n poor.” Louvre art sprints. Learn English lessons. A pile of cash. Aromantic young girl. “A minute of silence”. A sudden loose tiger! What on Earth can be done?
Three students who live “off the cuff” on idyllic île Fanac in the midst of Paris casually plot to steal uncounted hundreds of thousands in cash from wealthy foreign visitor to their urban jungle island villa. “So he robs the government, why shouldn’t we rob him?”
But Odile Monod (Anna Karina) has “events in her mind, not men.” Arthur Rimbaud (Claude Brasseur) has “no use for love-talk”. And Franz (Sami Frey) is “wondering if the world is a dream, or a dream is the world?” So they botch their crime because the loot is hidden in plain sight. “Sometimes if you don’t hide things, nobody notices. I read that in an American book.”
Two scenes here – dancing The Madison in a sad cafe and silly shootout at finale under tree – had huge influence on Hal Hartley among other American filmmakers. “Empires crumble, republics collapse and idiots live on.” Written and directed by Godard based on novel by Dolores Hitchens. (France).
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Alphaville (1965)
“There are usually 50 men to one woman executed.” “But what have they done!?” “They’ve behaved logically.”
Somewhere in center of galaxy: No means Yes, Yes means No and “all things weird are normal in this whore of cities” controlled by all-knowing Alpha 60, lofty esophageal-speaking mainframe which dictates “People have become slaves of probability.”
Intergalactic Secret Agent 003, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), arrives from The Outlands in white Ford Galaxy with handgun, flash Instamatic and mission to destroy space-age Dracula, Professor Nosferatu aka von Braun (Howard Vernon) who warns “You’ll become worse than dead –you’ll become a legend.”
Lemmy rescues von Braun’s daughter Natasha (Godard mate Anna Karina) to escape Alphaville with “a single smile between us” and takes her on “night drive across inter-sidereal space” in his old Ford.
Strange and perfectly absurdist sci-fi noir comic strip may be Godard’s most popular work. Written and directed by Godard (France-Italy).
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Pierrot le Fou (1965)
“I wonder what’s keeping the cops. We should be in jail by now.”
“They’re smart. They let people destroy themselves.”
Men like Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) “are always sorry” as he ditches Bastille Day ad-slogan cocktail party banter at home of Mr. and Mrs. Espresso. “Give me the keys to the Lincoln! ”Ferdinand is aka Pierrot, a name he denies, although he nails the part of that classic mime. “I remember a trick from Laurel and Hardy. Get in!”
Pierrot flees to south of France with baby-sitting niece and former Lolita lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina) who is “mysterious as ever” because “all she thinks about is fun”, despite her dim connection with shady characters running guns for Algerian war. “Why do you look so sad?” “Because you talk to me with words, and I look at you with feelings.” “Conversation with you is impossible.”
Spanning rare Riviera vistas of Mediterranean sunrise/sunsets as “feelings slip between our merry mingled bodies”, Godard’s goofy musical and improvisational techniscope screwball comedy gets “all mixed up” as “anti-naturalism” pits studio cyclorama road scenes against deceptively choreographed highway accidents, shifting chromatic characters, neon Las Vegas and lots of blue paint.
So says Samuel Fuller: “A film is like a battleground: Love. Hate. Action. Violence. In one word ... emotions.” Written and directed by Godard. “Travel broadens the mind.” (Italy-France).
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Masculine Feminine (1966)
“It wasn’t the movie of our dreams.” Irreverent, cockeyed look at absurdities of love, pop music, Vietnam and “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”
Opinion-poller Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is out of work and in love with always primping pop-singer Madeleine (actual French pop star Chantal Goya) whose popularity is on the rise. “If you kill a man, you’re a murderer. If you kill a million men, you’re a conqueror. If you kill them all, you’re God.”
Madeleine’s roommates Élisabeth (Marlène Jobert) and Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) have open minds and mouths when it comes to sex and birth control. “We control out thoughts which mean nothing, and not our emotions which mean everything.”
Absurd gags intersect open narrative; husband and wife argue in cafe, she screams “Go find another maid” and shoots him; guy in billiard hall confronts Paul with knife, then stabs himself; man on street borrows matches from Paul to light cigarette, but immolates himself in Vietnam protest. “Eroticism makes me sick.”
“If it’s a joke, I don’t dig it.” Commercial sell-out of music and art collides with impossible gender relations. Directed by Godard, written by Godard, Bruce Goldstein and Guy de Maupassant. “Without tenderness, you’d shoot yourself.” (France).
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Weekend (1967)
“I’m here to inform these modern times of the Grammatical Era’s end and the beginning of Flamboyance, especially in cinema.” Flamboyant Godard shadows ridiculous truths in epic slapstick tragedy. Another wreck, another fire, our heroine screams “My Hermes handbag!”
Greedy Paris couple plot to murder her wealthy parents – and each other – in “the perfect crime”While wife Corinne Durand (Mireille Darc) lets her husband “screw me sometimes so he thinks I love him”, husband Roland (Jean Yanne) must “be careful, after the sleeping pills and the gas”.
As they race their sporty Facel convertible across savage weekend landscape of flammable cars and inflamed carnivores, Corrine comes to realize “We’re totally ignorant of ourselves … we’re both enigmas.” Roland can only lament: “What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people.” But such insights go fleeting as they steal clothes off dead motorists and their Bad Trip becomes road-warrior shopping-spree of consumers consuming themselves. “Bumpers are made to be bumped.”
Mad highway exterminating angel Joseph Balsamo (Daniel Pommereulle) draws a rabbit out of dashboard, turns wrecks into sheep, believes he’s God “because I’m lazy” and admits “even God has His Police”. Wandering Emily Bronte (Blandine Jeanson) also burns while Gros Poucet (Yves Afonso) reads familiar quotations as crib notes posted on his clothes. “Can’t you see they’re only imaginary characters?” “Why is she crying then?”
Stark “reality of contradictions” exposes Shell truck stuck in one-reel traffic jam, spare-tire wielded as shield, tire-iron drawn as sword, snare-drumbeats of civil war, eggs-between-legs, tennis balls served in self-defense, and an airplane hung from tree.
“A film adrift in the cosmos/A film found on a dump” A road-rage nightmare in broad daylight: lyric, horrific, sardonic, ironic, barbaric and appallingly funny. “Well, it wasn’t like a women’s magazine romance.” Written and directed by Godard. (France)
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Tout va Bien (1972)
“This is an era of evolutionary revolution, through a form of class collaboration.”
Yank radio-journalist Susan Dewitt (Jane Fonda) is “an American correspondent in France, but I correspond to nothing.” Her husband Jacques (Yves Montand) is ex-New Wave filmmaker now shooting silly corporate commercials. “It was as if I had a part in a play, but I’d forgotten my lines.”
Taken hostage by revolting workers in salami factory, the couple attempts to interview plant manager Marco Guidotti (Vittorio Caprioli) who is “not one to negotiate under threats of violence” but understands “management should keep trim, tanned and healthy”. Union shop steward (Jean Pignol) only planned one-hour worker sit-down “but nothing like this”!
Godard’s radical “gun-point bargaining” anti-narrative seems brutally ridiculous, particularly in astounding ten-minute supermarket tracking shot of riot police beating rowdy radical shoppers. “Some have the will to fight. Others just clown around.”
Jane Fonda took those words to heart and after she completed work on this film, she traveled to North Vietnam – the visit that would compel her nickname “Hanoi Jane” and years of American political antipathy toward her.
“The class struggle is not a dinner party, cha-cha-cha.” Written and directed by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. (France-Italy).
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First Name: Carmen (1983)
“Let’s do like Dillinger. I read it in a comic strip: he held up a bank, pretending to be making a movie. So with this video craze nowadays that seemed to be the thing to do.”
Carmen X (beautiful Maruschka Detmers) is bank-role mugger posing as auteur femme fatal who has “a talent for doom” but knows Tough Love when she feels it. “Youth! They have great memories, but they forget everything.”
Falling fatally for Carmen in mid-heist is jitterbug security guard Joseph Bonaffe (Jacques Bonaffe) who has “no friends, male or female” … but knows his knots. “I’ll tie you up. It’ll look more real.”
Scruffy but “famous film director” Uncle Jean Jeannot (Godard himself) is “washed up” and lodged in backwater asylum to write his own legacy. “Badly seen, badly said”. Carmen: “He’s really nuts, there’s a tape recorder in the fridge!”
Unfinished string quartet suddenly sounds like circled seagulls as Beethoven bogs in calm sea/rough sea of “To Be Or Not To Be ... that’s not really a question.” Loosely based on Bizet’s opera. Godard's simply complex slapstick tragedy beats to bounce of serious music and shines “in memoriam (to) small movies” that savor moments of “Everything shakes.” “Act don’t ask.” and “Lovers are often cowards”.
Carmen: “I never get over things”. Written by Anne-Marie Mieville. Directed by Godard. “Yes, times are hard-boiled for eggs like us.” (France-Switzerland).
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Detective (1985)
“What is truth like?” “Part appearance and disappearance.” “A transparency, then?”
Unsolved Paris Hotel Concorde murder forces house-dick William Prospero (Laurent Terzieff) to quote Shakespeare. His nephew, inspector Neveu (outrageous Jean-Pierre Leaud) understands “I’m not hard, it’s a hard case!” Although impresario Jim Fox-Warner (Johnny Hallyday, France’s Elvis) owes everyone money, he knows “money belongs to no one. It’s like people, they come and go.”
Air-taxi pilot Emil Chenal (Claude Brasseur) and wife Francoise (Nathalie Baye) may separate when their ship comes in. Boxer Tiger Jones (Stephane Ferrara) says “Don’t worry, Mister Jim. I’ll K.O. Tiger Jones.”
Francoise: “Isn’t HE Tiger Jones?”
Jim: “Yes, but a champion’s fight is always against himself!”
Meanwhile nobody needs warning: “My kid’ll fix your kid if your kid calls my kid ‘Kid’ again!” Godard’s slapdash homage to American B-movie gangster word-play recalls his earlier black and white work – “Breathless” “Masculine Feminine” and “A Woman is a Woman” – while posing canny candid questions like: “Why are porn movies X-rated – that’s mathematics?”
Answers are not forthcoming from punching-bag breasts, billiard balls, “Belle et le Bete”, “a poet who stopped writing” and “legs, Italian style!” Of course, “All Frenchmen seem crazy if you really start looking at them.” But then, “seeing is deceiving.” Written by Godard, Alain Sarde, Philippe Setbon and Anne-Marie Mieville. (France).
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Notre Musique (2004)
“If anyone understands me, then I wasn’t clear.” Recasting Dante’s three-act structure of The Divine Comedy, Godard as a scruffy version of himself lectures inattentive authors and students on the nuance of shot/counter-shot in difficult times. Is he a poet? A journalist? A philosopher? A conference con-man?
Opening upon a striking montage of modern warfare (Hell), moving to war-torn Sarajevo (Purgatory), then landing on a beach with Marines (Paradise), Godard holds up a photograph of a devastated city and asks where it was taken: Stalingrad? Hiroshima? Sarajevo? … no, Richmond Virginia. Civil War, 1865. “Does a country that has great poets have the right to defeat a people that doesn’t have poets?”
Franco-Russian Nade Dieu (Olga Brodsky) is a Jewish woman who tackles the Palestinian question head-on and dies disguised as a suicide bomber. Meanwhile, a lone man sits at a table flipping through a book in a bombed out Sarajevo library. “Humane people don’t start revolutions. They start libraries.”
Painstaking stone-by-stone reconstruction of ruined Mostar Bridge in Bosnia begs Godard to ask the question: Is it now the same bridge or a simulacrum – a gaslit image of the bridge which pretends the original damage did not happen. “Communism existed once, during two forty-five minute half-times, when Honved from Budapest won over England by 6-3. The English played individually and the Hungarians ... collectively.”
Written and directed by Godard, his own lyric 21st Century tone poem reflects upon war through the ages and recalls everything from “Battleship Potemkin” to “Apocalypse Now”. “Killing a man to defend an idea isn’t defending an idea, it’s killing a man.” (France-Switzerland)
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Film socialisme (2010)
Aboard the ill-fated Mediterranean liner Costa Concordia – which would capsize off the Tuscany coast two years after this production – Godard conducts an HD tone-poem symphony of casino chaos, all-day buffets and stuffed night clubs as worldly-wiseass passengers float through history from Egypt to Palestine to Odessa to Hellas to Naples to Barcelona on a sea-cruise to rival The Battleship Potemkin “I don’t love any people, I love only my friends.”
Meanwhile people hurl themselves into the swimming pool or plate-glass walls, as cards and one-armed bandits rule. “Money is a public good.” “Like water, then?” “Exactly.” Or as translated in Tonto English: “Money. Public. Water.”
What goes around, stays around. Spoken words are broken, repeated. Scenes are disjointed, like jump cuts in reverse. “You don’t approve of the plan of the gods?”
Faceless fictionalized characters float alongside real people like singer-songwriter Patti Smith,economist Bernard Maris and musician Lenny Kaye. Certainly the work is a non-narrated, non-documentary floating metaphoric sea tome. Roger Ebert called the film “an affront. Incoherent, maddening and deliberately opaque.” It certainly is a mash of “Navajo English” subtitles and “Freedom is Expensive” sloganizing. Not to mention: A mule. A llama. Kittens. Parrots. A filling station. “No comment”.
Written by Godard with assistance Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Leon Bruchvicg. “What’s changing these days is that the bastards are sincere.” (France-Italy)
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“Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect Godard to meet the viewer halfway,
part of the way—or at all. From the moment he eschewed established
editing techniques in Breathless, it was clear that Godard was not here
to entertain moviegoers looking for a good time.”
– Greg Ferrara, The Bulwark
“To say his style changed from movie to movie is an understatement. His style sometimes changed within the same movie, or within a scene. It was not uncommon for a musical number to appear in a non-musical, or to watch characters point to the titles of books as a substitute for conversation, or for the entire color palette of a scene to shift from room to room.”
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Roud, Richard. Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Doubleday (1968).
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany NY: SUNY Press (1997).
Silverman, Kaja and Farocki, Harun. Speaking about Godard. New York University Press (1998).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/film-socialisme-2011
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