(Out of the past: JLG at a previous Cannes film festival. Images courtesy of Cannes Film festival.)
"Without cinema, I would not have had a history of my own."
Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema
Even more problematic is to consider a history of cinema without Godard. I said in my previous post Godard’s newest film, Film Socialisme was one of my personal favorites at Cannes.
Some other prominent American writers and critics had a much less forgiving take on the movie. I thought it interesting, for instance, both Todd McCarthy and Roger Ebert, threw down the gauntlet and asked others to step up and make concrete and persuasive their defense.
Godard emphatically does not stand outside history. But there’s not another working filmmaker I know whose meaning, value and importance is less tethered to the vagaries of the system. Since pretty much the end of his commercially viable period, the time of Weekend, with a couple of exceptions Godard has flagrantly discarded the very possibility of commercial relevance. Godard knows his audience has fragmented.
It’s not that he doesn’t care, but the point is irrelevant to the way he thinks, feels and works. If he wants to make a movie, he’s going to have the means and wherewithal to get it done. I made the point recently of saying that, like Orson Welles, Godard gave up an audience to refine his art. Unlike Welles, movie moguls and financiers still give Godard the money (begrudgingly and no doubt fully aware he’s not going to deliver what he promised).
I’m not sure how much it cost to make the film, but it has a powerful sales agent (Wild Bunch). Even though the film was made available as a download or video on demand, the movie was playing commercial theaters (like one in Nice, where I spent the better part of the day after the festival).
(In the very perverse interview, conducted by “Renault Delfins,” with the filmmaker and published at the back of the official press book, Godard responds to the query “production, distribution, exploitation,” by answering: “Since the end of the big studios, after the Second World War, the order inverted, with the aristocracy henceforth coming first, and the ‘third estate’ last.”)
Film Socialisme is an essay film constructed in three (unequal) movements: the first and longest section, set aboard a Mediterranean cruise, is a meditation on contemporary European history; the second section unfolds in an anonymous regional stretch of France, and concerns a television crew following the brother and sister whose parents operate a small gas station; the conclusion section is a dialectical montage, moving between Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Naples, Barcelona and Odessa.
French is the dominant language, but the work has significant (and wholly untranslated) parts in Russian, German and Arabic. Like Histoire(s) du cinema, the magisterial multipart essay film he worked on and off for about a decade, the governing shape of Film Socialisme is a rapturous, spellbinding contemplation of movie history; it’s simultaneously contradictory, discordant, thrilling. The movie references through imagery, snatches of dialogue and Godard‘s typical slithery context a range of works and attitudes, the montage theories of Eisenstein, the Odessa steps massacre from Potemkin, the vital philosophical inquiry of Roberto Rosselini’s Voyage to Italy, the mournful landscapes of John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, the serene, poetic contemplation of Jean-Daniel Pollet’s still astonishing Méditerranée.
(Playful and open: a beautiful young woman caught in flux, at the family business.)
My French is very far from what is necessary to understand the puns, the aphoristic asides and the quotations Godard brilliantly entwines off and against the imagery. But fortunately, I knew a lot (though far from all) of the references. Paradoxically, an artist who filters his work with a great deal of text, Godard has said over and over the history of movies is the history of images.
That’s where Film Socialisme thrills. Godard’s unorthodox visual imagination is what has sustained his work for now five decades. Histoire(s) du cinema, textually, flows from the ambiguous meaning, in French, of the word, histoire, to mean either history or story.
The work is also very much about video as a technical format, cold, severe, and distancing. Godard was the perhaps the first to understand the profound formal differences of film and video. He emphatically conceived many of the key Sixties titles, frontal camera placement, direct address, as “reportage.” Talking about Bachelard’s theory about implicit and explicit images, Godard said he has made it his art to traffic exclusively in the implicit image. Video makes that, in some levels, all but impossible.
In the interview from the press book, he says: “We might cite Jules Renard’s image of silence: snow falling on the water.” Why Godard remains vital, whether in front of an audience of one or a million, is his nearly unsurpassable talent for image and sound. In Film Socialisme, particularly the strongest first hour, the images are mystical, powerful and secure. The quality of the video is quite radical and ranges from sharp, pristine high definition to smudgy, smeary low cost consumer grade or cell phone quality.
But it’s the contrast of water and air, matter and objects, that the work gathers a force and power.
Even the middle section, which otherwise lacks the power and visual cohesion of the opening and closing parts, has moments of jaw dropping wonder, like the young blonde haired boy wearing the USSR shirt as he unfurls violently a series of movements and poses, like a symphony conductor. As the black cameraman stands before the boy, posing as a kind of subject as the kid draws on his sketchbook, Godard does a reverse slow pain, suddenly the colors vibrant and deeply saturated as we look on the boy’s sketchbook, a sharp and lively reproduction of a Renoir.
Godard has threatened to stop making films before. If this is his final work, it is a fitting one: difficult, dense, impolite, prickly and audacious.
Last week I caught the dazzling new print of Godard’s first feature, Breathless. That was the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen the movie projected. I’ve never seen it so radiant. (It’s also the first print I’ve ever seen with the burnt in French subtitles of a key scene, Jean Seberg’s conversation with the American journalist and prospective suitor that happens about halfway through the movie.)
Lenny Borger (with Robert Gray), the best French to English translator I know, does the new, updated translation. I believe, though not certain, Borger did the translation for Criterion’s 2007 transfer.
My friend Jonathan Rosenbaum, certainly one of the most open and gifted of the Godardians, has a superb video essay about the movie as criticism. He extrapolates on a point he has made several times, like this review of Contemp, that “[m]uch as William Faulkner once credited his success as a novelist to his failure as a lyric poet and Dizzy Gillespie explained his early trumpet style as an abortive attempt to imitate Roy Eldridge, what Godard can’t do is fundamental to what he winds up doing.”
As Breathless gloriously proved, Godard is a deceiver, a trickster. Even then he was constitutionally incapable of shooting a scene straight. The jump cuts are not just discontinuous; they flaunt space and time. When the amoral thief and lady-killer Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots the cop near the beginning, we hear the cop come right up on Michel and say, “Ne bouge pas.” Michel swings around and fires the fatal shot, the police officer’s body is shown suddenly thrown into the shrubbery.
The movie’s a pastiche, with little seeming originality or anything dynamic or interesting on its own terms. Godard transforms it into art, the ineluctable. The standard definition Criterion is quite impressive and provocative on its own terms. Still, the new print seems even more revealing and open to possibility, imbued with a freshness and tenacity. Lines that in the past seemed a throwaway, like “I love France,” now stick.
Then, as now, Godard is a mass of contradictions. The man who dedicated the first feature to Monogram Pictures, and stuffs the movie with references to Bogart, Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, Budd Boetticher and Otto Preminger is today routinely taken to task for his flagrant anti-Americanism. He quotes, very approvingly, in Film Socialisme the observation of Malaparte: “The Americans liberated Europe by making it dependent.”
(This perhaps explains his deep sympathy with Ford, whose own politics have always been crudely misunderstood. It is also perhaps the most self-critical of all of Ford's features.)
He is derided an anti-Semite, with some disturbances examples, if true, to back up the claims (I recoiled at several things attributed to him in Richard Brody’s biography). With Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and to a lesser extent Marcel Ophuls, what other major filmmaker has returned repeatedly to the unanswerable moral, political and aesthetic absence linking life, vitality, in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Breathless testifies to the early egalitarian nature of the nouvelle vague, the story developed from a treatment by Truffaut and Chabrol attached as an artistic and technical consultant. Godard could be so chilling and contemptuous of Truffaut later; he refused, even after the artist’s death to give him his due as a filmmaker (that’s a piece for another day: Truffaut was not Godard, or even Rivette, but he was better than a lot of people give him credit for.) He did acknowledge Truffaut’s talent as a thinker, a polemicist, a critic.
Yet, I did not for a moment disbelieve Godard in Histoire(s) du cinema when asked about a group of French directors no longer with us, including Truffaut, when he says: “They were my friends.”
The history of movies, he has suggested, is men filming women. Jean Seberg’s sexual treachery and emotional manipulation is the first of many similarly annotated women. (In Film Socialisme, Godard avidly looks on the young, nubile body of the Russian teenager who makes one of the more compelling presences of the first section.)
Godard, notoriously, skipped out on his previously announced press conference at Cannes. As such he could not respond to the rumor that Film Socialisme is to be his final work. Responding to a similar posed question, he said: “Nothing more than a title: ‘Farewell to language.’”
Amen.
(End of time: melancholy, serene and accelerated.)
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