Jean-Luc Godard

In Paris, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, ciné-clubs (film societies) were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs—the Cinémathèque Française, Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (CCQL), Work and Culture ciné club, and others—which became his regular haunts. The Cinémathèque was founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936; Work and Culture was a workers' education group for which André Bazin had organised wartime film screenings and discussions and which had become a model for the film clubs that had risen throughout France after the Liberation; CCQL, founded in about 1947 or 1948, was animated and intellectually led by Maurice Schérer.[27] At these clubs he met fellow film enthusiasts including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut.[28] Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread—but it isn't the case anymore. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope... a telescope.... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer. ... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs."[29][30]

His foray into films began in the field of criticism. Along with Maurice Schérer (writing under the to-be-famous pseudonym Éric Rohmer) and Jacques Rivette, he founded the short-lived film journal La Gazette du cinéma, which saw the publication of five issues in 1950.[31] When Bazin co-founded the influential critical magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, Godard was the first of the younger critics from the CCQL/Cinémathèque group to be published.[32] The January 1952 issue featured his review of an American melodrama directed by Rudolph Maté, No Sad Songs for Me.[33] His "Defence and Illustration of Classical Découpage" published in September 1952, in which he attacks an earlier article by Bazin and defends the use of the shot–reverse shot technique, is one of his earliest important contributions to cinema criticism.[34] Praising Otto Preminger and "the greatest American artist—Howard Hawks", Godard raises their harsh melodramas above the more "formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles, De Sica, and Wyler which Bazin endorsed".[35] At this point Godard's activities did not include making films. Rather, he watched films, and wrote about them, and helped others make films, notably Rohmer, with whom he worked on Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak.[36]

Having left Paris in the fall of 1952, Godard returned to Switzerland and went to live with his mother in Lausanne. He became friendly with his mother's lover, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, who was a labourer on the Grande Dixence Dam. Through Laubscher he secured work himself as a construction worker at the Plaz Fleuri work site at the dam. He saw the possibility of making a documentary film about the dam; when his initial contract ended, to prolong his time at the dam, he moved to the post of telephone switchboard operator. While on duty, in April 1954, he put through a call to Laubscher which relayed the fact that Odile Monod, Godard's mother, had died in a scooter accident. Thanks to Swiss friends who lent him a 35 mm movie camera, he was able to shoot on 35mm film. He rewrote the commentary that Laubscher had written, and gave his film a rhyming title Opération béton (Operation Concrete). The company that administered the dam bought the film and used it for publicity purposes.[37]

As he continued to work for Cahiers, he made Une femme coquette (1955), a 10-minute short, in Geneva; and in January 1956 he returned to Paris. A plan for a feature film of Goethe's Elective Affinities proved too ambitious and came to nothing. Truffaut enlisted his help to work on an idea he had for a film based on the true-crime story of a petty criminal, Michel Portail, who had shot a motorcycle policeman and whose girlfriend had turned him in to the police, but Truffaut failed to interest any producers. Another project with Truffaut, a comedy about a country girl arriving in Paris, was also abandoned.[38] He worked with Rohmer on a planned series of short films centering on the lives of two young women, Charlotte and Véronique; and in the autumn of 1957, Pierre Braunberger produced the first film in the series, All the Boys Are Called Patrick, directed by Godard from Rohmer's script. A Story of Water (1958) was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut. In 1958, Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, Charlotte et son Jules, a homage to Jean Cocteau. The film was shot in Godard's hotel room on the rue de Rennes and apparently reflected something of the 'romantic austerity' of Godard's own life at this time. His Swiss friend Roland Tolmatchoff noted: "In Paris he had a big Bogart poster on the wall and nothing else."[39] In December 1958, Godard reported from the Festival of Short Films in Tours and praised the work of, and became friends with, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rozier, and Agnès Varda—he already knew Alain Resnais whose entry he praised—but Godard now wanted to make a feature film. He travelled to the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and asked Truffaut to let him use the story on which they had collaborated in 1956, about car thief Michel Portail. He sought money from producer Georges de Beauregard, whom he had met previously while working briefly in the publicity department of Twentieth Century Fox's Paris office, and who was also at the Festival. Beauregard could offer his expertise, but was in debt from two productions based on Pierre Loti stories; hence, financing came instead from a film distributor, René Pignières.[40]

Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, distinctly expressed the French New Wave's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture—specifically American film noir. The film employed various techniques such as the innovative use of jump cuts (which were traditionally considered amateurish), character asides, and breaking the eyeline match in continuity editing.[42][43] Another unique aspect of Breathless was the spontaneous writing of the script on the day of shooting—a technique that the actors found unsettling—which contribute to the spontaneous, documentary-like ambience of the film.[44]

From the beginning of his career, Godard included more film references in his movies than any of his New Wave colleagues. In Breathless, his citations include a movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart—from The Harder They Fall, his last film[45] (whose expression the lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo tries reverently to imitate)—visual quotations from films of Ingmar Bergman, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, and others; and an onscreen dedication to Monogram Pictures,[46] an American B-movie studio. Quotations from, and references to literature, include William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Louis Aragon, Rilke, Françoise Sagan, and Maurice Sachs. The film also contains citations in images or on the soundtrack—Mozart, Picasso, J. S. Bach, Paul Klee, and Auguste Renoir. "This first-person cinema invoked not the director's experience but his presence".[47]

Godard wanted to hire the American actress Jean Seberg, who was living in Paris with her husband François Moreuil, a lawyer, to play the American woman. Seberg had become famous in 1956 when Otto Preminger had chosen her to play Joan of Arc in his Saint Joan, and had then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse.[48] Her performance in this film had not been generally regarded as a success—The New York Times's critic called her a "misplaced amateur"—but Truffaut and Godard disagreed. In the role of Michel Poiccard, Godard cast Belmondo, an actor he had already called, writing in Arts in 1958, "the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow."[49] The cameraman was Raoul Coutard, choice of the producer Beauregard. Godard wanted Breathless to be shot like a documentary, with a lightweight handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting; Coutard had experience as a documentary cameraman while working for the French army's information service in Indochina during the French-Indochina War. Tracking shots were filmed by Coutard from a wheelchair pushed by Godard. Though Godard had prepared a traditional screenplay, he dispensed with it and wrote the dialogue day by day as the production went ahead.[50] The film's importance was recognised immediately, and in January 1960 Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded "to encourage an auteur of the future". One reviewer mentioned Alexandre Astruc's prophecy of the age of the caméra-stylo, the camera that a new generation would use with the efficacy with which a writer uses his pen—"here is in fact the first work authentically written with a caméra-stylo".[51]

Anna Karina, having rejected a role in Breathless, appeared in the next film shot by Godard, Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier), which concerned France's war in Algeria.

In 1960 Godard shot Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier). The cast included Godard's future wife Anna Karina. At this time Karina had virtually no experience as an actress. Godard used her awkwardness as an element of her performance. Godard and Karina were a couple by the end of the shoot. She appeared again, along with Belmondo, in Godard's first color film, A Woman Is a Woman (1961), their first project to be released. The film was intended as a homage to the American musical. Adjustments that Godard made to the original version of the story gave it autobiographical resonances, "specifically in regard to his relationship with Anna Karina." The film revealed "the confinement within the four walls of domestic life" and "the emotional and artistic fault lines that threatened their relationship".[52]

Godard's next film, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962), was one of his most popular among critics. Karina starred as Nana, an errant mother and aspiring actress whose financially strained circumstances lead her to the life of a streetwalker. It is an episodic account of her rationalisations to prove she is free, even though she is tethered at the end of her pimp's short leash. In one scene, within a café, she spreads her arms out and announces she is free to raise or lower them as she wishes.[53]

The film was a popular success and led to Columbia Pictures giving him a deal where he would be provided with $100,000 to make a movie, with complete artistic control.[53]

Le petit soldat was not released until 1963, the first of three films he released that year. Le petit soldat dealt with the Algerian War of Independence. It was banned by the French government for the next two years due to its political nature.[54] The 'little soldier' Bruno Forestier was played by Michel Subor. Forestier was a character close to Godard himself, an image-maker and intellectual, 'more or less my spokesman, but not totally' Godard told an interviewer.[55]

The film begins on 13 May 1958, the date of the attempted putsch in Algeria, and ends later the same month. In the film, Bruno Forestier, a photojournalist who has links with a right-wing paramilitary group working for the French government, is ordered to murder a professor accused of aiding the Algerian resistance. He is in love with Veronica Dreyer, a young woman who has worked with the Algerian fighters. He is captured by Algerian militants and tortured. His organisation captures and tortures her. In making Le petit soldat, Godard took the unusual step of writing dialogue every day and calling the lines to the actors during filming – a technique made possible by filming without direct sound and dubbing dialogue in post-production.[56][57]

His following film was Les Carabiniers, based on a story by Roberto Rossellini, one of Godard's influences.[58] The film follows two peasants who join the army of a king, only to find futility in the whole thing as the king reveals the deception of war-administrating leaders.

His final film of 1963 and the most commercially successful film of his career was Le Mépris (Contempt), starring Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars, Brigitte Bardot.[59][60] The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by Prokosch (Jack Palance), an arrogant American movie producer, to rewrite the script for an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, which the Austrian director Fritz Lang has been filming. Lang's 'high culture' interpretation of the story is lost on Prokosch, whose character is a firm indictment of the commercial motion picture hierarchy.[61]

In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films.[62] He directed Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), another collaboration between the two and described by him as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka."[63] It follows two young men, looking to score on a heist, who both fall in love with Karina, and quotes from several gangster film conventions.[64][63] While promoting the film, Godard wrote that according to D. W. Griffith, all one needs to make a film is "a girl and a gun."[65]

Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964) followed Band of Outsiders. It was a slow, deliberate, toned-down black-and-white picture without a real story. The film was shot in four weeks[66] and was "an explicitly and stringently modernist film". It showed Godard's "engagement with the most advanced thinking of the day, as expressed in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes" and its fragmentation and abstraction reflected also "his loss of faith in the familiar Hollywood styles."[67] Godard made the film during the planning phase for Pierrot le Fou (1965).[68]

In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville, a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire.[69] Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution, a detective who is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer named Alpha 60. His mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and is believed to be suppressed by the computer.[70][71] His next film was Pierrot le Fou (1965). Gilles Jacob, an author, critic, and president of the Cannes Film Festival, called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation.[72] He solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo, by then a famous actor, to guarantee the necessary amount of funding for the expensive film.[73] Godard said the film was "connected with the violence and loneliness that lie so close to happiness today. It's very much a film about France."[74]

Masculin Féminin (1966), based on two Guy de Maupassant stories, La Femme de Paul and Le Signe, was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola." Although Godard's cinema is sometimes thought to depict a wholly masculine point of view, Phillip John Usher has demonstrated how the film, by the way it connects images and disparate events, seems to blur gender lines.[75]

Godard followed with Made in U.S.A (1966), the source material for which was Richard Stark's The Jugger. A classic New Wave crime thriller, it was inspired by American Noir films. Anna Karina stars as the anti-hero searching for her murdered lover and the film includes a cameo by Marianne Faithfull.[76][77] A year later came Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), in which Marina Vlady portrays a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute, considered to be "among the greatest achievements in filmmaking."[78]

La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright so far. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Released just before the May 1968 events, the film is thought by some to have foreshadowed the student rebellions that took place.[79][80]

That same year, Godard made a more colourful and political film, Week End. It follows a Parisian couple as they leave on a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie. The film contains an eight-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, cited as a technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends.[81] Startlingly, a few shots contain extra footage from, as it were, before the beginning of the take (while the actors are preparing) and after the end of the take (while the actors are coming out of character). Week End's enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema", appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard's filmmaking career.[82]

Godard was known for his "highly political voice", and regularly featured political content in his films.[83][84] One of his earliest features, Le petit soldat, which dealt with the Algerian War of Independence, was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute; the film was perceived as equivocating and as drawing a "moral equivalence" between the French forces and the National Liberation Front.[85] Along these lines, Les Carabiniers presents a fictional war that is initially romanticised in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes a stiff anti-war metonym.[86] In addition to the international conflicts to which Godard sought an artistic response, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in Vivre sa vie.[41][87][88] In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until La Chinoise and Week End, but is evident in several films—namely Pierrot and Une femme mariée.[41][89]

Godard was accused by some of harbouring anti-Semitic views: in 2010, in the lead-up to the presentation of Godard's honorary Oscar, a prominent article in The New York Times by Michael Cieply drew attention to the idea, which had been circulating through the press in previous weeks, that Godard might be an anti-Semite, and thus undeserving of the accolade. Cieply makes reference to Richard Brody's book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, and alluded to a previous, longer article published by the Jewish Journal as lying near the origin of the debate.[90] The article also draws upon Brody's book, for example in the following quotation, which Godard made on television in 1981: "Moses is my principal enemy...Moses, when he received the commandments, he saw images and translated them. Then he brought the texts, he didn't show what he had seen. That's why the Jewish people are accursed."[91]

Immediately after Cieply's article was published, Brody made a clear point of criticising the "extremely selective and narrow use" of passages in his book, and noted that Godard's work approached the Holocaust with "the greatest moral seriousness".[92] Indeed, his documentaries feature images from the Holocaust in a context suggesting he considers Nazism and the Holocaust as the nadir of human history. Godard's views become more complex regarding the State of Israel. In 1970, Godard travelled to the Middle East to make a pro-Palestinian film he did not complete and whose footage eventually became part of the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs. In this film, Godard seems to view the Palestinians' cause as one of many worldwide Leftist revolutionary movements. Elsewhere, Godard explicitly identified himself as an anti-Zionist but denied the accusations of anti-Semitism.[93]

Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam War. Furthermore, there are two scenes in Pierrot le fou that tackle the issue. The first is a scene that takes place in the initial car ride between Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). Over the car radio, the two hear the message "garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men". Marianne responds with an extended musing on the way the radio dehumanises the Northern Vietnamese combatants.[94] The war is present throughout the film in mentions, allusions, and depictions in newsreel footage, and the film's style was affected by Godard's political anger at the war, upsetting his ability to draw from earlier cinematic styles.[95]

Notably, he also participated in Loin du Vietnam (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from La Chinoise), Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda.[96][97]

Godard's engagement with German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of epic theatre and its prospect of alienating the viewer (Verfremdungseffekt) through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (theatre in Brecht's case, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before 1980, when Godard used cinematic expression for specific political ends.[41][98]

For example, Breathless's elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content.[99] In many of his most political pieces, specifically Week-end, Pierrot le Fou, and La Chinoise, characters address the audience with thoughts, feelings, and instructions.[41]

A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard's early work. Godard's direct interaction with Marxism does not become explicitly apparent, however, until Week End, where the name Karl Marx is cited in conjunction with figures such as Jesus Christ. A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie's consumerism, the commodification of daily life and activity, and man's alienation—all central features of Marx's critique of capitalism.[8]

In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar Jacques Rancière states, "When in Pierrot le fou, 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism, and of a feminist denunciation of women's false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story." The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticising the Marxist rhetoric, rather than being solely tools of education.[100]

Une femme mariée is also structured around Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis". He was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being. His efforts are overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analysing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity. Georges Sadoul, in his short rumination on the film, describes it as a "sociological study of the alienation of the modern woman".[101]

Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s, Godard became passionate about "making political films politically." Though many of his films from 1968 to 1972 are feature-length films, they are low-budget and challenge the notion of what a film can be. In addition to abandoning mainstream filmmaking, Godard also tried to escape the cult of personality that had formed around him. He worked anonymously in collaboration with other filmmakers, most notably Jean-Pierre Gorin, with whom he formed the Dziga-Vertov cinema collective. During this period Godard made films in England, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Palestine, and the U.S., as well as France. He and Gorin toured with their work, attempting to create discussion, mainly on college campuses. This period came to a climax with the big-budget production Tout Va Bien, which starred Yves Montand and Jane Fonda. Owing to a motorcycle accident that severely incapacitated Godard, Gorin ended up directing this most celebrated of their work together almost single-handedly. As a companion piece to Tout va bien, the pair made Letter to Jane, a 50-minute "examination of a still" showing Jane Fonda visiting with the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The film is a deconstruction of Western imperialist ideology. This was the last film that Godard and Gorin made together.[102]

In 1978 Godard was commissioned by the Mozambican government to make a short film. During this time his experience with Kodak film led him to criticise the film stock as "inherently racist" since it did not reflect the variety, nuance or complexity in dark brown or dark skin. This was because Kodak Shirley cards were only made for Caucasian subjects, a problem that was not rectified until 1995.[104]

In 1972, Godard and his life partner and future wife, Swiss filmmaker, Anne-Marie Miéville started the alternative video production and distribution company Sonimage, based in Grenoble. Under Sonimage, Godard produced Comment ca va, Numéro Deux (1975) and Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980).[105] In 1976, Godard and Miéville, his future wife, collaborated on a series of innovative video works for European broadcast television, titled Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication (1976) and France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1978).[106] From the time that Godard returned to mainstream filmmaking in 1980, Anne-Marie Miéville remained an important collaborator.[105]

After the events of May 1968, when the city of Paris saw a total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle", and Godard's professional objective was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like-minded individuals in the filmmaking arena. His most notable collaborator was Jean-Pierre Gorin, a Maoist student of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, who later became a professor of Film Studies at the University of California at San Diego, with a passion for cinema that attracted Godard's attention.[102]

Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make a total of five films with strong Maoist messages. The most prominent film from the collaboration was Tout Va Bien (1972). The film starred Jane Fonda, who was, at the time, the wife of French filmmaker Roger Vadim. Fonda was at the height of her acting career, having won an Academy Award for her performance in Klute (1971), and has gained notoriety as a left-wing anti-war activist. The male lead was the legendary French singer and actor Yves Montand, who had appeared in prestigious films by Georges Clouzot, Alain Résnais, Sacha Guitry, Vincente Minelli, George Cukor, and Costa-Gavras.[102]

The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in Dziga Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker—who was known for a series of radical documentaries titled "Kino Pravda" (literally, "film truth") and the late silent-era feature film Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Vertov was also a contemporary of both Soviet montage theorists, notably Sergei Eisenstein, and Russian constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Part of Godard's political shift after May 1968 was toward a proactive participation in the class struggle and he drew inspiration from filmmakers associated with the Russian Revolution.[107]

Towards the end of this period of his life, Godard began to feel disappointed with his Maoist ideals and was abandoned by his wife at the time, Anne Wiazemsky. In this context, according to biographer Antoine de Baecque, Godard attempted suicide on two occasions.[108]