Breathless and Timeless

Godard’s ’60s at Film Forum through June 5

Behind the 1960s Godard legend is the fact of the films themselves: the most beautifully rigorous movies ever made. Form and feeling were never better matched. Now that we’re midway through Film Forum’s “ Godard’s ’60s,” a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard’s first 18 feature films (all made within a single, tumultuous decade), it is time to ask, “Why Godard?” And “Why now?” After all, in the current “indie” movement, personal, artsy films are commonplace. Yet few of them are as challenging as these 40-year-old trailblazers.

The French New Wave movement Godard was part of changed the way we look at movies. His influence (jump-cuts, pop tunes, audience address) is everywhere; but apart from Fassbinder and De Palma, ironically, he has no absolute followers. In her 1968 review of Weekend, Pauline Kael warned that other filmmakers could not repeat Godard’s advances: “They can’t walk behind him. They’ve got to find other ways, because he’s burned up the ground.” Yet the fact is, Godard’s innovations (the analytical view of sex, violence, film history) have been widely misunderstood—ask Hal Hartley, Quentin Tarantino or Todd Haynes.

Today, the Godard legend—that radical filmmaking could also be hip and romantic—has become mere admiration of form. Critics and directors ignore that even his most politically strident movies always probed the human spiritual condition. It’s axiomatic to say that Godard’s 1960s films exalted freewheeling youth and questing students, but La Chinoise wasn’t very flattering (that’s why its recent re-release was a flop among nostalgic liberals). Investigating a new social class meant capturing the zeitgeist of ’60s revolt and pop revolution. But going deeper into that cultural explosion explains why Godard’s movies are still fascinating. No new films are more captivating, challenging nor as moving or exhilarating. Godard combined satirical skits, essays and personal ruminations with phenomenal speed and ingenuity—which also holds for his post-’60s movies about older characters and contemporary existential issues.

It is crucial that we correct The New York Times’ recent misinformation that Godard’s later work became “a bitter, desiccated shambles.” Truth is, in Detective, King Lear, Nouvelle Vauge, JLG by JLG, In Praise of Love, Godard’s intensely poetic, perplexing and mature style runs up against today’s closed-off, obtuse zeitgeist. His experiments (replacing consumerist critique with spiritual reflection) now breeds indifference while Godard-lite copycats from Hou Hsiao Hsien to Lars Von Trier win praise. Returning to “Godard’s ’60s” reveals the fact that film culture still hasn’t kept up. (“He’s ahead of us all,” Martin Scorsese recently told critic Gregory Solman.) If Godard’s most famous films—Breathless, Contempt, Vivre Sa Vie, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot Le Fou, Masculine Feminine—couldn’t stop Hartley, Tarantino and Haynes’ self-absorption and superficiality, maybe his lesser-known masterworks can finally change hearts, minds and eyes.

We need a moral and aesthetic road map: The chance to see Le Petit Soldat, A Married Woman, Les Carabiniers, Made in U.S.A. and La Chinoise on the big screen again provides an opportunity to rescue movie art and revive film enthusiasm. Cinephilia shouldn’t just be the province of comic-book and videogame consumer culture—or elitists. Godard’s lesser-known films point the way past genre conventions and into the modern soul. Le Petit Soldat (1960) deals with colonialism and terrorism, but it is mostly concerned with Bruno (Michel Subor), a photojournalist attempting to realize himself as a moral being while in love with gorgeous Natasha (Anna Karina) and trapped between the ethics of the Algerian struggle for independence. Subor’s morose presence disguises that this might be Godard’s most purely romantic, self-revealing movie—though it unmistakably deals with political distress. (Critics never mention how Subol’s swarthy skin complicates Bruno’s dilemma; adding extra difficulty to his social-identity crisis.)

How Godard invented new ways of exploring character and experience is perfectly represented by A Married Woman (1964)—the definitive screen expression of feminist consciousness. This masterpiece could only have gone unappreciated because Godard’s depiction of duplicitous Charlotte (Macha Meril)—stretched between husband and lover but brainwashed by a beguiling, omnipresent consumer culture—was too disturbingly predicted feminism’s media co-optation. It now looks like a keystone of feminist-humanism and a linchpin of the romantic, spiritual inquiry of Godard’s entire career.

Bruno and Charlotte’s intricate dilemmas X-ray the skeletons beneath the profound charm of Belmondo, Seberg and the great Anna Karina. Like Charlotte visiting an obstetrician and flipping the leaves of a biology book that reveals deeper layers of the human body, Godard’s rigorous formalism configures humanity and the world around it. The construction work montages that punctuate Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966) not only address the social edifices controlling the life of its actress/prostitute heroine (Marina Vlady), but force us to look at the world skeptically and analytically. The brilliant shot of red and white construction cranes against blue sky—teasing France’s tricolor flag—exemplifies the wit, beauty and challenge of Godard’s vision. Through images complex as that, Godard proves how other filmmakers waste shots. Similarly, the compressed noir plot of Made in U.S.A. (1966) presumes a familiarity with genre structures that might no longer be true. Naive moviegoers who enjoy the jittery, barbaric simplistic Bourne movies are unnerved, even scandalized, by Godard’s elegant, joyous craft—not his savoir faire but his gai savoir.

It used to be commonplace to see walkouts at theatrical showings of Godard films; that’s how his unconventional narratives (essayistic digressions, poetic tangents, fragmented though lovely montages) aggravated casual moviegoers. But several decades of this impatience—bred by stubborn, pandering, commercial style—means filmgoers have accustomed themselves to the orthodox inanity of most movies. Not only do they seek out the fatuous mannerisms of the Romanian New Wave or Gus Van Sant, but they settle for less. Godard deconstructed film conventions to reveal the depth—the truth—of our feelings. When you accept the unconventional style of La Chinoise, Les Carabiniers and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, generic storytelling comes to seem absolutely inferior. After Godard, most other movies look uninspired and flabby.

Why were Godard’s ’60s films so great? Because they didn’t succumb to the weak-minded, self-congratulatory smugness of today’s hipster filmmakers (Southland Tales, Inland Empire, 4 Weeks, 3 Months, 2 Days, I’m Not There, There Will Be Blood) who’ve lost their way—whether or not Godard actually burned up the ground. Godard invigorated cinema by challenging himself to question and critique the received opinions of mainstream culture, highbrow philosophers and fashionable political rhetoric. No other filmmaker so thoroughly re-examined pop media or related it to the way people lived their lives—what Richard Brody’s just-published book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, calls, “the truth of their own feelings.” Today’s critically approved films are examples of self-coddling nonsense. Yet, decades later, Godard’s A Married Woman and La Chinoise illustrate how to incisively and honestly regard one’s own sentiments, prejudices and desire. Even Les Carabiniers, his abstract war burlesque, puts every politically biased Iraq War movie to shame. Above all, these films are lively and extraordinarily beautiful to behold.

It’s also stunning to see how well Godard’s films survive the transfer to DVD in Koch Lorber’s La Chinoise and Le Gai Savoir, Abkco’s Sympathy for the Devil, Criterion’s Pierot Le Fou, Wellspring’s Vivre Sa Vie and Lionsgate’s Detective and Passion. It’s as if they were made for future media—prophetically designed to extend Godard’s scrutiny of the human condition even into the era when Van Sant, Haynes, P.T. Anderson, David Fincher, the Wachowski Brothers and Cronenberg trivialized cinematic potential. Godard’s first TV production, 1969’s Le Gai Savoir, is ideally viewed on DVD—its TV-look being as sui generis as the Neverland sequences of Spielberg’s Hook.

Isolating Godard’s ’60s films makes for a good introduction, but they should be seen in connection with his later work. He progressed from one multi-leveled style of fiction film to a style of cinema poetry. Brody’s book provides a good companion syllabus, but unlike such definitive filmmaker studies as Alexander Sesonske’s Jean Renoir and Tag Gallagher’s John Ford, Brody subordinates Godard’s films’ narrative beauty to an overly biographical thesis—even venturing some politically disingenuous chastisement toward the end. It proves that the challenge today, as in the ’60s, is to keep up with Godard’s talent, ingenuity and ruthless honesty. He’s a very good filmmaker, but matching moral inquiry to aesthetic discovery is Godard’s great gift to civilization.