CINEMA: ESSAYS EDITED BY MAXIMILLIEN de LAFAYETTE

THE MASTERPIECES OF GODARD

Photo: Karina.

One of Godard’s masterpieces, in which Marianne Renoir (Karina, who was divorcing the director at the time), accompanies Belmondo’s Pierrot, who has abandoned his wife and children in Paris, on a doomed escape to the Mediterranean. The movie is important for its themes of alienation and brooding narcissism, especially revealed in a party where mannequin-like capitalists spout American TV ad copy instead of conversation. Sam Fuller makes an appearance, proclaiming that film is like a battleground because it contains "love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotions." The girl, the gun, the sports car, they’re all there. But now they’re emblematic of insurmountable ennui, the knowledge that everything must end. In the final scene, Belmondo wraps dynamite around his head, lights the fuse, then changes his mind. But he can’t stamp out the inevitable.

Karina is a stripper who wants to have a baby and settle down, in one of Godard's most buoyant and charming films, A Woman Is a Woman(1961), and a lonely, pathetic Paris prostitute in My Life to Live (1962). Les Carabiniers (1963) was an antiwar allegory that provoked violently hostile reaction from audiences. The wide-screen polished color cinematography of Contempt (1963) stood in sharp contrast to the grainy dreariness of Les Carabiniers. With Band of Outsiders (1964), Godard returned to the world of the gangster for the first time since Breathless. As in most of his films, the protagonists here are uprooted people, outsiders who defy the boundary between the real and the imagined. A Married Woman (1964) was a conventionally structured sociological study of the alienation of a modern Parisian woman who can relate only on the physical level to both her husband and her lover. Alphaville (1965), Godard's excursion into science fiction fantasy was followed by in the same year by Pierrot le Fou (1965). Gradually, Godard's films were becoming stripped of structure and conventional dramatic form, with an increasing emphasis on film as an essay, and cinema as a political and social instrument. Masculine-Feminine (1966) was a free-form study of mores of Parisian youth. Made in USA (1966) had a crime story for an apparent plot. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) told the story of a Paris housewife who indulges in prostitution for extra income. La Chinoise (1967) featured in the leading role actress Anne Wiazemsky, who became Godard's second wife in June of 1967 and later appeared regularly in the director's films. This marriage, too, ended in divorce.

 

CINEMA

Godard's impact on the cinema of the 60s was cataclysmal and sweeping and his contribution to the art, thought, and language of the cinema significant. He used the camera not only creatively and inventively, rewriting the syntax of film grammar along the way, but also as a means of personal expression to tell "the truth 24 times a second." After Weekend (1968), a new Godard surfaced, a revolutionary, didactic filmmaker who became obsessed with the spoken word and increasingly apathetic to cinema as a visual medium. He turned his back not only on the American films that had inspired the dreams of his youth but also on his own films. He dedicated himself to making "revolutionary films for revolutionary audiences," to expounding radical political ideas "as a secondary task in the struggle to liberate the oppressed from Capitalism.' He began making films as a collective effort, working in groups named after such Soviet film figures as Dziga Vertov and Alexander Medvedkin. In the late 60s and early 70s he collaborated regularly with Jean-Pierre Gorin, a young Parisian rebel who became the revolutionary guru of the politically naive Godard. In the late 70s and early 80s Godard underwent yet another metamorphosis.

OTHER MASTERPIECES

Abandoning his political wars and video experimentations, as well as his revolutionary base of operations in Grenoble, he moved to the Swiss town of Rolle in 1978, rediscovering himself and his love of film in the process. More restrained and philosophical in middle age, he refocused his sights on themes of universal humanistic concern in Every Man for Himself (1980), Passion (1982), and First Name: Carmen (1983). He even paid a renewed homage to American cinema in Detective (1985) but caused massive controversy with his updated story of Christ's birth Hail Mary! (1985), inciting the condemnation of the Catholic Church. Although he seemed to be inching back to the fringes of the mainstream, Godard remained inaccessible to general audiences and even seasoned cinema sophisticates seemed puzzled by and less than wholly comfortable with his films of the late 80s and 90s. King Lear (1987) was more famous for the conditions in which it was contracted ó roughed out on a napkin and signed during a lunch with Godard and producer Menachem Golan at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival ó than for the resulting film briefly seen two years later on the Croisette. Soigne ta droite (1987) featured top French pop tandem Les Rita Mitsouko, Nouvelle Vague (1990) boasted Alain Delon, and Hèlas pour moi (1994) Gèrard Depardieu, but Godard seemed to remain a highly rarefied taste. His For Ever Mozart (1997), with its typically Godardian disquisition on art and war, was better received. In 1998, Godard completed his long-gestating Histoire(s) du Cinèma, a highly personal video-based meditation of 100 years of cinema, which was released on video and in book form. Other works of the 90s include Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, and his self-portrait JLG by JLG (1995). If Every Man for Himself was described by Godard as his "second first film," and proved to be the most accessible film of his middle period, then Godard's first film of the new millennium, Eloge de l'amour, may well be considered his "third first film" and perhaps the beginning of his last and most mature creative period. Rhapsodically received at the Cannes Film Festival this year by the international press (including many confirmed "non-Godardians"), this surprisingly moving study of art, history, memory and exploitation was immediately bought for many overseas territories, including the U.S. and Great Britain, something not seen for a Godard film in decades. Godard won the best director award at the Berlin Festival for Breathless and the Golden Lion (best film) at Venice for First Name: Carmen. In 1986, he was honored with a Special French Cèsar Award for lifetime achievement. Masculine-Feminine (1966): Godard’s catalogue of 15 observations on "The Pepsi Generation." Although the politics are unfocused and the film’s structure is more rambling than inventive, there is an undeniable charm and naivete about the Parisian youth depicted here. Jean-Pierre Leaud is smitten with Chantal Goya, but finds himself in competition with American ad propaganda, Bob Dylan, and soda pop. Thirty years later, in the LA Times interview, Godard decried the end results he first chronicled. "Little by little, America has taken over world culture. Blue jeans, cigarettes…"Efraim Katzz, Leny Bourger. About Her (1966): A film about human and cultural prostitution, with another tremendous performance from one of Godard’s women. Marina Vlady plays the housewife/mother/hooker who reveals her interior musings on sex and self-esteem directly to the camera. This was one of the first of Godard’s "essay" films, and it touches on consumerism, urban sprawl, and the sense that life is smothering under the weight of desire. Hail Mary! (1984): The scandalous, the profane, the irritable. Godard’s parable about the immaculate conception is funny, scatterbrained, brilliant, and even coherent at times. It should be seen to appreciate all the fuss made upon its release.