Jean-Luc Godard Films | Jean-Luc Godard Filmography | Jean-Luc Godard Biography | Jean-Luc Godard Career | Jean-Luc Godard Awards

If influence on the development of world cinema is the criterion, then Jean-Luc Godard is certainly the most important filmmaker of the past thirty years; he is also one of the most problematic.

Godard?s career so far falls roughly into three periods: the early works from About de souffle to Weekend (1959-68), a period whose end is marked decisively by the latter film?s final caption, ?Fin de Cin?ma"; the period of intense politicization, during which Godard collaborated (mainly though not exclusively) with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov group (1968-72); and the subsequent work, divided between attempts to renew communication with a wider, more "mainstream? cinema audience and explorations of the potentialities of video (in collaboration with Anne-Marie Mi?ville). One might also separate the films from Masculin-F?minin to Weekend as representing a transitional phase from the first to the Dziga Vertov period, although in a sense all Godard?s work is transitional.

What marks the middle period off from its neighbours is above all the difference in intended audience: the Dziga Vertov films were never meant to reach the general public. They were instead aimed at already committed Marxist or leftist groups, campus student groups, and so on, to stimulate discussion of revolutionary politics and aesthetics, and, crucially, the relationship between the two.

Godard?s importance lies in his development of an authentic modernist cinema in opposition to (though, during the early period, at the same time within) mainstream cinema; it is with his work that film becomes central to our century?s major aesthetic debate, the controversy developed through such figures as Luk?cs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno as to whether realism or modernism is the more progressive form. As ex-Cabiers du cin?ma critic and New Wave filmmaker, Godard was initially linked with Truffaut and Chabrol in a kind of revolutionary triumvirate; it is easy, in retrospect, to see that Godard was from the start the truly radical figure, the ?revolution? of his colleagues operating purely on the aesthetic level and easily assimilable into the mainstream.

A simple way of demonstrating the essential thrust of Godard?s work is to juxtapose his first feature, Breathless, with the excellent American remake. Jim McBride?s film follows the original fairly closely, with the fundamental difference that in it all other elements are subordinated to the narrative and the characters. In Godard?s film, on the contrary, this traditional relationship between signifier and signified shows a continuous tendency to come adrift, so that the process of narration (which mainstream cinema strives everywhere to conceal) becomes foregrounded; About de souffle is ?about? a story and characters, certainly, but it is also about the cinema, about film techniques, about Jean Seberg, etc.

This foregrounding of the process?and the means?of narration is developed much further in subsequent films, in which Godard systematically breaks down the traditional barrier between fiction/documentary, actor/character, narrative film/experimental film to create freer, ?open? forms. Persons appear as themselves in works of fiction, actors address the camera/audience in monologues or as if being interviewed, materiality of film is made explicit (the switches from positive to negative in Une Femme mari?e, the turning on and off of the soundtrack in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, the showing of the clapper-board in La Chinoisc). The initial motivation for this seems to have been the assertion of personal freedom: the filmmaker shatters the bonds of traditional realism in order to be able to say and do whatever he wants, creating films spontaneously. (Pierrot le fou?significantly, one of Godard?s most popular films?is the most extreme expression of this impulse.) Gradually, however, a political motivation (connected especially with the influence of Brecht) takes over. There is a marked sociological interest in the early films (especially Vivre sa vie and Une Femme mari?e), but the turning-point is Masculin-f?minin with its two male protagonists, one seeking fulfillment through personal relations, the other a political activist. The former?s suicide at the end of the film can be read as marking a decisive choice: from here on, Godard increasingly listens to the voice of revolutionary politics and eventually (in the Dziga Vertov films) adopts it as his own voice.

The films of the Dziga Vertov group (named after the great Russian documentarist who anticipated their work in making films that foreground the means of production and are continuously self-reflexive) were the direct consequence of the events of May 1968. More than ever before the films are directly concerned with their own process, so that the ostensible subjects?the political scene in Czechoslovakia (Pravdd) or Italy (Lotte in Italia), the trial of the Chicago Eight (Vladimir and Rosa)?become secondary to the urgent, actual subject: how does one make a revolutionary film? It was at this time that Godard distinguished between making political films (i.e. films on political subjects: Costa-Gavras?s Z is a typical example) and making films politically, the basic assumption being that one cannot put radical content into traditional form without seriously compromising, perhaps negating, it. Hence the attack on realism initiated at the outset of Godard?s career manifests its full political significance: realism is a bourgeois art form, the means whereby the bourgeoisie endlessly reassures itself, validating its own ideology as "true," "natural," "real"; its power must be destroyed. Of the films from this period, Vent d'est (the occasion for Peter Wollen?s seminal essay on "Counter-Cinema" in Afterimage) most fully realized this aesthetic: the original pretext (the pastiche of a western) recedes into the background, and the film becomes a discussion about itself?about the relationship between sound and image, the materiality of film, the destruction of bourgeois forms, the necessity for continuous self-criticism and self-awareness.

The assumption behind the Dziga Vertov films is clearly that the revolutionary impetus of May 1968 would be sustained, and it has not been easy for Godard to adjust to its collapse. That difficulty is the subject of one of his finest works, Tout va bien (again in collaboration with Gorin), an attempt to return to commercial filmmaking without abandoning the principles (both aesthetic and political) of the preceding years. Beginning by foregrounding Godard?s own problem (how does a radical make a film within the capitalist production system?), the film is strongest in its complex use of Yves Montand and Jane Fonda (simultaneously fictional characters/personalities/star images) and its exploration of the issues to which they are central. These issues include the relationship of intellectuals to the class struggle; the relationship between professional work, personal commitment, and political position; and the problem of sustaining a radical impulse in a non-revolutionary age. Tout va bien is Godard?s most authentically Brechtian film, achieving radical force and analytical clarity without sacrificing pleasure and a degree of emotional involvement.

Godard?s relationship to Brecht has not always been so clear-cut. While the justification for Brecht?s distanciation principles was always the communication of clarity, Godard?s films often leave the spectator in a state of confusion and frustration. He continues to seem by temperament more anarchist than Marxist. One is troubled by the continuity between the criminal drop-outs of the earlier films and the political activists of the later. The insistent intellectualism of the films is often offset by a wilful abeyance of systematic thinking, the abeyance, precisely, of that self-awareness and self-criticism the political works advocate. Even in Tout va bien, what emerges from the political analysis as the film?s own position is an irresponsible and ultimately desperate belief in spontaneity. Desperation, indeed, is never far from the Godardian surface, and seems closely related to the treatment of heterosexual relations: even through the apparent feminist awareness of the recent work runs a strain of unwitting misogyny (most evident, perhaps, in Sauve qui peut). The central task of Godard criticism, in fact, is to sort out the remarkable and salutary nature of the positive achievement from the temperamental limitations that flaw it.

From 1980 on, Godard commenced the second phase of his directorial career. Unfortunately, far too many of his films have become increasingly inaccessible to the audiences who had championed him in his heyday during the 1960s. Sauve qui peut (La Vie) (Every Man for Himself), Godard?s comeback film, portended his future work. It is an awkward account of three characters whose lives become entwined: a man who has left his wife for a woman; the woman, who is in the process of leaving the man for a rural life; and a country girl who has become a prostitute.

In fact, several of Godard?s works might best be described as anti-movies. Passion, for example, features characters named Isabelle, Michel, Hanna, Laszlo, and Jerzy (played respectively by Isabelle Huppert, Michel Piccoli, Hanna Schygulla, Laszlo Szabo, and Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who are involved in the shooting of a movie titled Passion. The latter appears to be not so much a structured narrative as a series of scenes which are visions of a Renaissance painting. The film serves as a cynical condemnation of the business of moviemaking-for-profit, as the extras are poorly treated and the art of cinema is stained by commercial considerations.

Pr?nom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen) is Godard?s best latter-career effort, a delightfully subversive though no less pessimistic mirror of the filmmaker?s disenchantment with the cinema. His Carmen is a character straight out of his earlier work: a combination seductress/terrorist/wannabe movie maker. Her uncle, played by Godard, is a once-celebrated but now weary and faded film director named, not surprisingly, Jean-Luc Godard.

It seemed that Godard had simply set out to shock in Hail, Mary, a redo of the birth of Christ set in contemporary France. His Mary is a young student and gas station attendant; even though she has never had sex with Joseph, her taxi-driving boyfriend, she discovers she is pregnant. Along with Scorsese?s The Last Temptation of Christ, this became a cause celebre among Catholics and even was censured by the Pope. However, the film is eminently forgettable; far superior is The Book of Mary, a perceptive short about a girl and her constantly quarrelling parents. It accompanied showings of Hail, Mary, and is directed by long-time Godard colleague Anne-Marie Mi?ville.

Detective, dedicated to auteur heroes John Cassavetes, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Clint Eastwood, is a verbose, muddled film noir. Despite its title, Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), an observance of the lives of a wealthy and influential couple, only makes one yearn for the days of the real ?Nouvelle Vague.? The narrative, which focuses on the sexual and political issues that are constants in Godard?s films, is barely discernable; the dialogue?including such lines as ?Love doesn't die, it leaves you,? "One man isn't enough for a woman?or too much," ?A critic is a soldier who fires at his own regiment,? "Have you ever been stung by a dead bee?"?is superficially profound.

King Lear, an excessive, grotesque updating of Shakespeare, is of note for its oddball, once-in-a-lifetime cast: Godard; Woody Allen; Norman and Kate Mailer; stage director Peter Sellars; Burgess Meredith; and Molly Ringwald. The political thriller Allemagne Neuf Zero (Germany Nine Zero), although as confusing as any latter-day Godard film, works as nostalgia because of the presence of Eddie Constantine. He is recast as private eye Lemmy Caution, who last appeared in Alphaville. Here, he encounters various characters in a reunified Germany.

Helas Pour Moi (Oh, Woe Is Me), based on the Greek legend of Alcmene and Amphitryon and a text penned by the Italian poet Leopardi, is a long-winded bore about a God who wants to perceive human feeling; those intrigued by the subject matter would be advised to see Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close. JLG/JLG-Autoportrait de Decembre (JLG/JLG-Self-Portrait in December), filmed in and near Godard's Swiss home, is a semi-abstract biography of the filmmaker. Its structure is appropriate, given the development of Godard's cinematic style. Ultimately, it is of interest mostly to those still concerned with Godard's life and career.?ROBIN WOOD and ROB EDELMAN