There is a moment when every true creator makes
such a leap forward that his audience is left behind. For Renoir,
La Règle du jeu was the sign of maturity, a film so
new that it looks confusingly as if it might be a failure; one of
those failures that leaves you, the morning after, counting your friends
on the fingers of one hand.
-François Truffaut, Cahiers du cinéma
34, April 1954 (1)
In discussing the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, one inevitably arrives at the
question of where exactly to mark this artist's own “leaps forward”
on the timeline of a long and prolific career; and in addressing that question,
one first must decide how to make the distinction between “before”
and “after,” and then how many times to make the distinction.
Could one, for instance, find numerous points of departure through Godard's
body of work, and cite as examples the liberated debut feature À
Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), the serial video works of
the 1970s, and, from the 1980s onward, the advent of the transcendental
film-essays? On the contrary, could one plead the case for a single break
that occurred when, in 1968, Godard dedicated himself to an expressly Marxist
agenda, whereby the next several films stood as aggressively didactic, anti-bourgeois
“blackboards”? The first instance grants a priori that
Godard's body of work can be read as a movement that passes through many
aesthetic phases but never fails to constitute an oeuvre that, examined
from any point, yields a poetic and cinematic value consistent with or building
upon those films that have come before. It is the second standpoint, however,
that has been so consistently adopted by a number of prominent (that is,
visible) film critics and historians. This flank, whose American roster
includes but is not limited to Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, Andrew Sarris,
and David Thomson, have long confused the evolution of the artist Godard
with some kind of fundamental betrayal. For this group, Godard is a filmmaker
who will forever be associated with pop-art palettes, love-and-guns on the
run, and the intellectual exuberance of a breezy pre-Vietnam '60s youth;
but who will never be forgiven for discarding the earlier use of Hollywood
reference points (which the filmmaker's latter-day antagonists had perceived
in any case not as aesthetic critique but as blank cool cultural homage),
exhibiting overtly political (even left-wing) tendencies, exploring in his
two television series the possibilities of a different medium of transmission,
and then settling on a mode of filmmaking that incorporates narrative cadenzas,
historical scrutiny, visual poetry, literary citation, and a dominant mood
of elegiac contemplativeness. In short, Godard has evolved from making films
of great complexity and beauty to making films of even greater complexity
that frequently approach the sublime. If Godard's crime isn't merely that
for which he's been put to task in many of the mainstream U.S. publications
that reviewed his recent Éloge de l'amour (Elegy for Love
/ In Praise of Love, 2001)—an expression of the belief that Steven
Spielberg doesn't make very good films—then it is that which the impatient
soul and the Philistine alike deem the greatest felony of all: that Godard
is an artist of tremendous agency and authority within his medium, and through
the uncompromised expression of his aesthetic and, therefore, moral convictions,
demonstrates as little concern for the satiety of the “audience that
might have been” as Beethoven, Joyce, or Renoir before him.
Incidentally, this idea of “what might have been” is not so far
removed from an examination of Godard's work as one might assume. It does
not, of course, exist within the context of placating a populist movie-going
audience, but rather comes into focus in the first portion of this attempt
to create a reasonable introduction to the work of Jean-Luc Godard—a
body of work that begins not with À Bout de souffle, but with
Godard's film criticism in La Gazette du cinéma, Arts,
and, most famously, Cahiers du cinéma.
(I)
| |
 |
| |
Breathless
|
While attending the Sorbonne in pursuit of a degree in Ethnology, the 20-year-old
Godard spent a great deal of his time frequenting the Ciné-Club du
Quartier Latin, not to mention the cavernous Cinémathèque
française. (2) There were enough ciné-clubs
(or film-societies) in Paris at the time of Godard's schooling to lead Henri
Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque, to proclaim the trend
a “movement” in a written response to a solicitation for prints
from a similarly young François Truffaut. (3) It
would be at these ciné-clubs that Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette,
and Eric Rohmer, among others, would make each other's early acquaintance
and hold forth their views and passions in lively discussions on the subject
of the cinema. By 1956, this circle of friends would cement their reputations
in the pages of both Arts and the Cahiers as the “young
turks” of film criticism, who espoused a loose hierarchy of critical
values collectively referred to as la politique des auteurs,
or “the auteur theory.” The auteur theory can be summarized most
simply as an acknowledgement of the director as the primary and shaping
force behind any film; those directors whose body of work
tends to exhibit the features of any number of recurring themes that might
reveal some personal vision or world-view are especially prized in the auteur-centric
evaluation of cinema, for their work demonstrates an individual and authorial
presence in spite of the outside influence of film-as-commodity production
models or budgetary constraints. In gradually developing this doctrine,
Godard and many of the other critics in the Arts and Cahiers
group were among the first writers about film to make a case for actual
artists existing within the Hollywood system, and it is to these
“young turks” that we owe even today so much gratitude for the
creation of an aesthetic discourse on directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred
Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray. (4) No point-for-point
manifesto existed for the auteur theory, although a general sense of the
politique's nuances would develop over time in pieces like Truffaut's
famous attack on the stale and “literary” French production system
(“Une Certaine Tendance du cinéma français” in Cahiers,
31 January 1954) and in the dialectic between the “turks'”
jeremiads and the more impartial essays of Cahiers pater
familias André Bazin. As such, the importance that we ascribe
today to the Cahiers critics of the 1950s stems perhaps not so much
from the cogency of some singular “auteur theory” as from the
unabashedly polemical stance taken in the group's articles. As Godard stated
in a 1962 Cahiers interview, “The thing that made Cahiers
was its position in the front line of battle. There were two kinds of virtues:
true and false. Cahiers came along saying that the true were false
and the false were true.” (5)
| |
 |
| |
First
Name Carmen
|
For Godard, the forums of Cahiers and Arts allowed the fleshing
out of a conception of the cinema that was closer to an all-encompassing
poetic rumination than the linear Cartesian logic and self-effaced objectivity
that the majority of film criticism tends to require. If one acknowledges
that cinema = life, then 1 + 2 + 3 = 4, (6) therefore,
is it not only natural that in speaking about the cinema, one might also
acknowledge that the hodge-podge of ideas informing our own conceptions
of the world must also apply to that most plastic of arts which, projected
large, can at once both render and arrest? This was Godard's line of inquiry—one
which grants, certainly, the existence of a metaphysics specific to the
cinema (e.g., the power of the film-image and the edit, the ritual of spectacle,
the temporality/ephemerality of the movie-watching experience), but which
also seeks to develop and pursue a higher Truth that is no more immediately
apprehensible in our lives and histories than it is in an even-tempered
recounting of cinema's “highs and lows,” that is, an unscrutinized
hierarchy of aesthetic mores and moments of supposed cinematic privilege.
Thus, Godard's method of writing about films involves elliptical, round-about
argument, the concatenation of seemingly unrelated disparities,
and frequently coming down on the side of films deemed by critical establishmentarians
as too vulgar or unpolished. A prime example of Godard's strategy can be
found in the conclusion to his review of Frank Tashlin's Hollywood or
Bust (1956):
To sum up. Frank Tashlin has not renovated the Hollywood comedy.
He has done better. There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood
or Bust and It Happened One Night, between The Girl
Can't Help It and Design for Living, but a difference of
kind. Tashlin, in other words, has not renewed but created. And henceforth,
when you talk about a comedy, don't say “It's Chaplinesque”;
say, loud and clear, “It's Tashlinesque.” (7)
Although often singled out as the “theorist” of the Cahiers
group, Godard's penchant for playful allusion and the poignant turn
of phrase establish him more clearly as the journal's resident “poet-critic.”
(8) This role has served Godard, and the history of film
criticism itself, rather well. For when we review the collective body of
Godard's output as film critic, we find that through the practice of his
uniquely rarefied, poetic approach, Godard was in effect carving out a new
“assessment” of cinema that, while alternative, could essentially
stand in for the mainstream or definitive history and conception of the
medium. The cinema as put forth by Godard was therefore a “cinema that
might have been,” a canon (or anti-canon) that existed only as an ideal,
a series of groupings whose relation to each other could only be measured
poetically, yet one whose separate and discrete films did, after all, exist.
As a self-fulfilling prophecy for Godard's own cinema, and as an ontology
(or idea for an ontology) that is inherently cinematographic, the “cinéma
qu'il y aurait” deserves exploration.
The importance of this idea—based around the phrase “qu'il y aurait,”
or “which might have been”—can perhaps best be understood
when put into the context of the work in which it is made most explicit,
more than thirty years on from Godard's time as a full-fledged critic; that
is, his episodic and monumental video work, Histoire(s) du cinéma
(History(s) of the Cinema, 1988-1998). Surely Godard's ample transubstantiation
of the rhetorical into the real in the early writings accounts for the basis
of this argument, but as “qu'il y aurait” is a conception couched
primarily in the language of “hindsight” (projecting backwards
into a memory of cinema/art/world to underscore and poeticize the associations
between the films), we might do best to make that leap into the future,
to those Histoire(s), to explain the concept appropriately suited
to the medium that lays bare in the present a flickering, fleeted past.
| |
 |
| |
Histoire(s)
du cinéma: toutes les Histoire(s)
|
The Histoire(s) implicitly present the argument that the cinema is
both an art, and a history; the cinema records not only directorial mise-en-scène
but also events. With that established, we might acknowledge the cinema
as the only art-form in the history of the world to exist as a living ghost.
In the Histoire(s) the connection is made that the cinema has indeed
always been a record of mourning for that which has passed or that which
has been lost. Human beauty and human suffering alike have thus been chronicled,
captured on celluloid, but why then have these images—cinematographic
evidence—done nothing to dissuade nationalistic tyranny or prevent
genocide? Where lies the disconnect between audience spectatorship (ecstasy
before the projected spectacle) and the ex post facto indifference
and callousness of that same audience/world that once watched? Is the cinema
only a dream after all? Or nothing more than “stories”? (The French
“histoire” can be translated as both “history” and “story”;
I employ the latter connotation here, in the same way a
grandmother might proclaim on any weekday afternoon that it's time to watch
her “stories.”) The rigorous examination of the cinema's role
in world events forms the epicenter of the Histoire(s), but this
same scrutinizing, this same reconstruction of the “pieces” so
as to examine not only where the cinema went wrong but how it can possibly
go right, propelled the critic Godard to wage his aesthetic battle in the
1950s against movie-Philistinism and for a “poetic heightening”
that was missing in all accounts of the history of the cinema. An “attempt”
at criticism, in a sense similar to Godard's frequent remarks that his films
were “attempts at cinema”—but an attempt that acknowledges
the medium as one that is only as “real” as we make it, or can
believe its potential to be. In his preview of Claude Chabrol's Les
Cousins (The Cousins, 1959), Godard writes:
Les Cousins, in short, will be an engaging film which will disengage
you from worldly considerations, a false film which will offer its
home truths, a deeply hollow and therefore profound film. (9)
| |
 |
| |
Le
Petit Soldat
|
The cinema, which disengages us from worldly considerations while engaging
us in its world, that is, our world, ontologically resides in a zone of
paradox. Between action (engagement) and inaction (disengagement), Godard
was to set out on the path of the former, even as the protagonist of his
Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960) would be quick
to express, in the film's opening lines: “The time for action is over;
the time for reflection has just begun.” Godard's criticism posits
that meditation upon and evaluation of the cinema will create the cinema—and
(here hindsight crosses over to become premonition) in
going on to make his own films, the poet-critic Godard would in effect be
making an attempt to bridge the gap between an alternative cinematic history
that “might have been” and the individual films that fit into
that history; in short, he would create a body of work that was aware of
the world, the entirety of the cinema, that same cinema's place in the world,
and its own nature as cinema-and-nothing-more.
A success [Hot Blood (1956)] almost in spite of its director,
I should add; or better, brought off by Nicholas Ray's innate sense
of cinema: in an almost automatic manner, therefore, but less naively
than that writing beloved by the early Surrealists. The whole cinema
and nothing but the cinema, I was saying of Nicholas Ray. This eulogy
entails a reservation. Nothing but cinema may not be the whole cinema.
(10)
(II)
| |
 |
| |
Band
of Outsiders
|
In Godard's film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964),
the three main characters race through the whole of the Louvre in 9 minutes
46 seconds, thereby breaking the record previously held, we are told, by
Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco, U.S.A. Any summary profile of Godard's work
can't help but seem like the same kind of breakneck tour: the sprawling
scope and voluminous nature of the oeuvre ensure that a number of grievous
oversights and undesirable reductions will be made here. That most of Godard's
individual works warrant and deserve their own book-length studies adds
to the difficulty of the task, but, as long as we're willing to leave the
slightings to this profile, and take an oath to watch and re-watch the films
themselves, we might arrive at some conclusion that doesn't leave us, like
Odile, Franz, and Arthur, completely out of breath.
In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard directed his first feature. Coming on the heels
of the short films Charlotte et son Jules (Charlotte and Her Jules,
1958) and Une Histoire d'eau (A History of Water, 1958), À
Bout de souffle completed the trifecta of films that heralded the arrival
of a “New Wave” of young filmmakers on the French cinema scene.
The début feature by Godard, along with Truffaut's Les Quatre
Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and Claude Chabrol's Le
Beau Serge (The Handsome Serge, 1959) all had in common traits
antithetical to the French film industry's “tradition of quality”
that had been lambasted by these same former critics in the pages of Cahiers
du cinéma. The New Wave's pictures dealt with contemporary life
and youth culture, perceived from an unwavering and unsentimental perspective.
They were shot quickly and on low budgets, but the lack of any overt “sheen”
in these films only served to reinforce their directors' points that the
form of a successful film should follow its subject matter; in Truffaut's
film, the gritty day-to-day of a young man with an unhappy home life, and
in Godard's, twenty-something romance mixed up in theft and murder—or,
love-and-guns on the run. À Bout de souffle was notable in
particular among the early New Wave features for its veritable parade of
formal breakthroughs. As one example, a barrage of jump-cuts occur over
and over again in the middle of several scenes in the film, adding to the
off-the-cuff feel of the picture but also truncating and dislocating diegetic
temporality. (Godard later explained that the random jump-cuts were an easy
way of trimming the film's length without removing scenes outright.) Godard
also explodes the “necessity” of the “180-degree rule”
in À Bout de souffle when he places the camera on the opposite
side of the road for one of the shots in the sequence portraying a police
pursuit, and thus transforms a normal cinematic convention of continuity
into poetic montage, as a shot of Jean-Paul Belmondo's auto speeding to
the right of the frame cuts to a shot of the motorcycle cops speeding to
the left of the frame, giving cheeky visual expression to the tête-à-tête
conflict about to erupt. Furthermore, sidewalk tracking-shots
were set up on a rigged wheelchair as a cheap alternative to a conventional
dolly; their inclusion in the film comes replete with passers-by staring
into the lens, lending a documentary realism to a picture that, after all,
aspires to record life (although Godard would later repeat in many interviews
his realization that À Bout de souffle was more akin to a
fairy tale). The film was aware of its status as a movie as few films
had been before: Belmondo's character gains a layer of depth (or, with his
facile conscience, perhaps has one stripped away?) in his aping of Humphrey
Bogart's tough-guy persona, right down to the thumb-on-lip gestures; Jean
Seberg's character retains the pixie-cut worn by the actress in Otto Preminger's
Bonjour Tristesse (1958). (Godard explains: “...The character
played by Jean Seberg was a continuation of her role in Bonjour Tristesse.
I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film and started [À
Bout de souffle] after dissolving to a title, 'Three Years Later'.”)
(11) À Bout de souffle's irreverent poise
and frank characterizations act as testimonials to the life-force native
to the American B-picture—a dedication to Monogram Pictures at the
start of the film makes the connection explicit even before the first cut
to a shot of Belmondo in his Bogart-fedora, while the appearances of one-sheets
and marquees for Ten Seconds to Hell (Robert Aldrich, 1959) and Westbound
(Budd Boetticher, 1958) show up in Godard's film as further nods to the
tradition. But the scene to “borrow” most amusingly from modern
American mythology occurs right at the beginning, when Belmondo hot-wires
then drives away in the giant automobile vacated only moments before by
its owner—the pipe-smoking spitting image of Douglas MacArthur. It's
Godard's/Belmondo's way of saying, “Thanks for the goods. Now I'll
put them to use.”
| |
 |
| |
A
Woman Is a Woman
|
The director followed À Bout de souffle with a string of artistic
(if not commercial) triumphs, turning out two, sometimes three films in
the course of one year. Each of Godard's films of the 1960s represents a
step further in the filmmaker's art and also in the art of filmmaking. Le
Petit Soldat, banned for several years upon its release, presents Michel
Subor as a young photographer for the French Information Bureau who becomes
embroiled in the power-play between the French nationalists and Algerian
independence movement. The film mirrors in its threadbare, elliptical narrative
Subor's confusion and indecision over where exactly his own sympathies should
lie in the struggle. (He informs the audience early on in voice-over, “Our
antiterrorist group was financed by an ex-parliamentarian who had been pro-Vichy.”)
The film's suggestion that both sides of the movement employed torture tactics
contributed to the ban, along with the picture's inclusion of a candid,
systematic bathroom torture sequence, shot with the rest of the film in
the underexposed, off-hand manner of a tendentious underground reel. Le
Petit soldat also marks the screen début of Anna Karina, the
Danish model who would become Godard's muse and regular leading lady throughout
the first half of the 1960s, not to mention the director's first wife. For
many, Karina is the on-screen icon of the French New Wave—her
performances in the films of Godard are by turns sympathetic, uninhibited,
doleful, passionate, conniving, pensive, guileless—often within the
same picture. Yet even in moments of great melancholy Karina's possession
of a near boundless joie de vivre can always be discerned beyond
the tears. Her role as a young woman calculating the days of the month on
which she might be most fertile in the Cinemascope musical Une Femme
est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) gives way to that of
another jeune fille who takes up the mantle of a star-crossed Parisian
prostitute to make ends meet in Vivre sa vie (To Live One's Life
/ My Life to Live, 1962). “A Film in Twelve Tableaux,” Vivre
sa vie builds a tragic momentum across a series of increasingly worldly
episodes in exploration of the confusion of self and the commodification
of the soul. The scene in which Karina attends a revival screening of Carl
Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Jeanne
of Arc, 1928) remains one of the great screen moments, as the cross-cutting
between Falconetti's distracted expressions and Karina's own tear-streaked
face creates an interplay between the two characters' pathetic search for
deliverance, and foreshadows the latter's own doomed end.
| |
 |
| |
Les
Carabiniers
|
The two films that followed stand on opposite ends of the visible spectrum.
Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen, 1963) mixes newsreel footage
and beat-up, intentionally grained black-and-white film-stock to chronicle
the misadventures of two pig-headed mercenaries at war in an imaginary time
and country. The film operates as a damning satire of all that goes on in
war, and punctuates the narrative action with screen-tableaux that quote
anonymous soldiers' actual letters home from the front, indicating an atmosphere
of moral absurdity. Lurid primary colors fill Le Mépris (Contempt,
1963), Jean-Luc Godard's first and final foray into “mainstream”
American co-productions. At once a study of marital breakdown and the prostitution
of the artist, Le Mépris remains a powerfully self-reflexive
comment on Godard's relationship with his own backers for the film and with
his wife/muse, Anna Karina. Although Brigitte Bardot stands in for Karina
in the role of the film's wife, many of the episodes (particularly the extraordinarily
tense middle sequence taking place in the film couple's Italian flat) are
drawn from Godard's own domestic situation. The director himself appears
in the film, as the 1st-AD to the great Fritz Lang (also appearing), whose
struggles to adapt Homer's Odyssey to the screen provide the backdrop
to the marital drama at the center of Le Mépris.
| |
 |
| |
Alphaville
|
Anna Karina would return to Godard's feature films in Bande à
part, a luminous “heist picture” wherein the three heroes
dash through the Louvre, dance the Madison, and flirt with the English language
(Claude Brasseur passes Karina a note during a Shakespeare lesson that reads,
“tou bi or not tou bi, contre votre poitrine, it iz ze question.”)
The director would continue his study of the modern domestic space in Une
Femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), before once again
casting his wife, this time opposite Eddie Constantine, in Alphaville,
une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, A Strange
Case of Lemmy Caution, 1965). Although often lauded for setting the
“standard” for sci-fi cult-film dystopia, Alphaville more
importantly addresses the horrors of the tyrannous state and the eradication
of the individual. The film grounds its critique in a future that has already
come to pass (that the picture was shot on location around Paris with no
sets constructed suggests this anaesthetizing rulership had sprung up over
night, and no-one was looking), and explores the difficulties of communication
in the midst of state—(and self)—imposed semiotic desensitization
in the “society of the future.”
| |
 |
| |
Pierrot
le fou
|
With Pierrot le fou (Pierrot the Mad, 1965), Godard embarked
on the pursuit of a new film form that would blur the line between the cinematic
narrative and the cinematic essay. In truth, the spontaneous plot developments
and self-reflexive critiques that characterized Godard's earlier films also
seem to lend those works to a “new category” of film—let
us say, then, that if those pictures at least held up the pretense of plot,
narrative considerations in Pierrot le fou and onward would be more
overtly abandoned. The characters of Pierrot le fou address the audience
directly, stage an improvisatory Brechtian production for a group of U.S.
sailors on the subject of Hollywood and Vietnam (an intertitle designates
Belmondo's and Karina's roles in the play as “the nephew of Uncle Sam
versus the niece of Uncle Ho”), and share screen-time with static details
of advertisements, paintings, and journal entries. Essentially, the films
would also become more overtly political from this point on; Masculin
féminin (Masculine Feminine, 1966), Made in U.S.A.
(1966) (Karina's last picture with Godard before the couple's divorce
of the same year), and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two
or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966) all announced the shift in Godard's
methodology to a fundamentally Marxist social critique.
Throughout the rest of the 1960s, Godard displayed few reservations about
engaging and sometimes implicating his audience by means of this newly didactic
approach to filmmaking. On the eve of Dr. King's and the Black Panthers'
galvanization of civil rights and the Black Power movement in America, of
the incipient unrest among the French working-classes, and of the darkest
and most horrific period of the war in Vietnam, Godard would release La
Chinoise (1967), a Maoist teach-in set to film, followed by the work
that would stand perhaps as his greatest triumph of the '60s and the culmination
of all his films up to that moment: Week-End (1967).
“A film found on a scrap-heap,” Week-End ties together
the themes of class struggle, environmentalism, body-politics, commercialization,
and the very end of civilization itself into a tour de force evisceration
of modern life that begins with another instance of a bourgeois couple on
the run but ends with the lovers' “crossing over” with a band
of cannibalist para-revolutionaries. The film's famous final title makes
the declaration: “END OF CINEMA / END OF WORLD,” providing a brutal
“last word” to what every viewer of Week-End has just witnessed,
but also representing the period or artist's-signature on Godard's first
era of commercial filmmaking.
| |
 |
| |
Wind
from the East
|
Over the course of the next several years, Godard would direct a number
of “blackboard” films whose leftist, polemical tones remain for
some to this day nothing more than the yellowing political-tracts of a bygone
epoch. Whether the films' attempts to elucidate and revolutionize an audience
are now predominantly and condescendingly dismissed as exercises in socio-political
naïveté, their formal audacity and forensic acumen (sometimes
scientifically so—cf. the visual discourse on bomb-making in Le
Vent d'est (Wind from the East, 1968)) should not be ignored.
Nonetheless, matters of distribution make it is quite easy to do so: most
of Godard's films of the period spanning 1968 to 1971 exist today only in
very limited circulation (with the exception of Le Vent d'est and
One Plus One [1969], both available on Japanese Region 2 DVD), and
rumor has it that Godard himself has in the last few years withheld the
remaining prints of a few of the titles. While Godard accepted directorial
credit for a handful of this era's films—Le Gai savoir (The
Joy of Knowledge, 1968), One Plus One (1969) and British Sounds
(See You at Mao) (1969, co-directed with Jean-Henri Roger)—the
rest bore the collective authorial signature of the Dziga-Vertov Group (named
after the Polish-born Soviet director of the Kino-Pravda shorts [Cinema-Truth,
1925] and Chelovek s kinoapparatom [The Man
with the Movie Camera, 1929] and a father of the idea that cinema could
instill mass revolutionary consciousness). Formed out of an ideological
partnership between Godard and Maoist radical Jean-Pierre Gorin that counted
among its members a number of other young revolutionaries, “the Dziga-Vertov
Group,” a 1970 Grove Press statement explained, “is committed
to producing more films and exhibiting more films differently (economically
and aesthetically).” The press release, issued at the onset of an American
university tour that Godard was to undertake, continues:
Their film theory rests on a perceived cultural and ideological
exchange value in cinema. Each film is a continuation of the one before
and the avant-garde of the one following, but the true reality of
the cinema has, Godard feels, often been perverted in the past 50
years. Godard says: “Producing films at this moment means nothing
else than: studying the changes undergone by the cinema from Lumière
and Eisenstein to the present, and studying them in practice; that
is to say, by making films about the world of today. (12)
| |
 |
| |
My
Life to Live
|
The Dziga-Vertov Group signature would appear on the following films—Un
Film comme les autres (A Film Like the Others, 1968), Pravda
(Truth, 1969), Le Vent d'est, Luttes en Italie (Struggles
in Italy, 1969), and Vladimir et Rosa (Vladimir and Rosa,
1971)—however, in matters as basic as framing and editing, the formal
aspects of the films can be unmistakably ascribed to Godard alone. Godard
and Gorin would work together once more on a dual-project of sorts: Tout
va bien (Everything's Going Fine, 1972) and Lettre à
Jane (Letter to Jane, 1972). Tout va bien sees star-cum-revolutionary
Jane Fonda in the role of a disenchanted American radio reporter stationed
in Paris who attempts to reconcile both her occupation and relationship
with Yves Montand with Marxist ideology. Lettre à Jane, on
the other hand, documents a tag-team analysis between Godard and Gorin in
voice-over of the notorious photo taken of Fonda commiserating with a group
of Communist North Vietnamese. The film brings Fonda's activities and history
into relief as, among other things, just another variety of bourgeois dilettantism;
the same could be (and has been) argued of Lettre à Jane itself,
although the strain of self-questioning that runs through both films signals
perhaps a feeling within Godard (if not Gorin) that he had arrived at an
ideological impasse, whereby the practice of “revolutionary” filmmaking
itself might also be perceived as a form of opportunism.
And so Godard's “retreat” from film. By 1974, he and Gorin had
parted ways; the one-time filmmaker would now partner with future life-companion
Anne-Marie Miéville to create a series of video-works that were themselves
as formally revolutionary as the films that had come before. The difficulties
that Godard had experienced in finding for the Dziga-Vertov films an outlet
of mass distribution uncompromised by capitalist control would now be circumvented
by the creation of new works meant for broadcast on television. Indeed,
Godard's Marxist proclivities had begun to cool off during this period.
Yet he would still work (with Miéville) to incorporate
footage from the unfinished Dziga-Vertov Group film Jusqu'à la
victoire (Until Victory, 1970) into an exploration of the Palestinian
liberation movement, Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere,
1974). Further preceded by Numéro deux (Number Two,
1975) (described by Godard as his “second first-film”) and Comment
ça va? (How's It Going?, 1976), the Godard-Miéville
television series are described in a 1980 interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum:
About five years ago, there was a six-part series, Six fois
deux / Sur et sous la communication [1976]. The first part of each
program was an hour-long interview with someone in a steady steady
shot—a worker, mathematician, amateur filmmaker—and then
another hour where we tried to do some research related to that. Then
three years ago we did 12 half-hour programs, France/tour/détour/deux/enfants
(1977-78)... In the middle of each was a 15-minute steady shot, speaking
with a girl of eight and a boy of nine, one after the other; the rest
was introduction and commentary. (13)
| |
 |
| |
Contempt
|
In 1979, Godard would return to big-screen narrative cinema with Sauve
qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself). Although Sauve
qui peut (la vie) revisits one of Godard's frequent themes (prostitution,
here embodied by Isabelle Huppert), the director would proceed from this
picture onward with a fresh approach that seemed more awake to the presence
of cadence in life's fabric; there was a new attention to quietude here,
supplemented by a certain sensuality to the film image that perhaps had
not been seen before in Godard's films, one that limned the boundaries between
soft radiance and rich shadow. If critics sometimes describe the films after
Sauve qui peut (la vie) as belonging to Godard's “autumnal”
phase, it is perhaps not simply out of a feeling that their maker has passed
into the measured sagacity of old age, but because they are so softly and
assuredly poetic—the distinctive position of the camera and the way
the characters (peripatetic one and all) move in and out of frame; the ebb-and-flow,
musical rhythms of the cuts; and the musical selections themselves that
comprise the films' soundtracks, which in their idiosyncratic placement
prove Godard's as one of the finest ears in cinema history. Each Godard
feature of the 1980s comes not as plotted or even “elliptical”
narratives, but as “narratives of revelation”: Passion (1981),
Prénom Carmen (First Name Carmen, 1983), Je vous
salue Marie (I Salute Thee Marie / Hail Mary, 1985), Détective
(Detective, 1985), King Lear (1987), Soigne ta droite:
une place sur la terre comme au ciel (Keep Your Right Up: A Place
on the Earth as in Heaven, 1987), and Nouvelle vague (New
Wave, 1990)—all are concerned in some way with desire, love, and
the communion of the soul. Because such close-quarter groupings tend to
belie the individual value of the separate works, it must be stressed that
all of the '80s-features are in varying degrees masterpieces, with each
film defying conventional “synopsis,” and eluding easy classification
by any single or neatly concise subject matter.
| |
 |
| |
Histoire(s)
du cinéma: Fatale beauté
|
Toward the end of the 1980s, Godard would devote much of his attention to
the work whose completion would stretch into the late-'90s and would be
considered by many (or at least many of those lucky enough to see it) to
be the director's magnum opus: the Histoire(s) du cinéma.
A mammoth work whose genesis can be traced to a series of lectures delivered
by Godard in Montreal at the start of the decade (later compiled as Introduction
à une véritable histoire du cinéma, or Introduction
to a Veritable History of the Cinema), the Histoire(s) consist
of eight episodes totaling over 260 minutes in length. Taking the entire
history of film as their subject (or “one history”—as the
inclusion of the “(s)” notifies, one might discern several histories
that “could have been”), the Histoire(s) inhabit a purely
video medium, with which Godard is able to juxtapose on-screen simultaneously
a slew of cinematic fragments, a technique that would be prohibited on celluloid
without the expenditure of a great deal of money and time for outside lab
work. As one image fades into another, Godard further complicates the visual
aspect of the Histoire(s)' segments by throwing quotations and puns
on-screen in fractured supertitle. Additionally, the soundtrack of each
episode supplies the aural corollary to the visual method: chamber music
and film-score collide with dialogue from old films, before being joined
by the voice of a disembodied narrator (usually Godard), hushed by a sudden
caesura, or accelerated into the high-pitched whine of a rewinding tape-reel.
The net effect is one of oceanic, almost overwhelming proportions. Jonathan
Rosenbaum has on several occasions correctly drawn comparison of the Histoire(s)
du cinéma to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, in part because
the seemingly amorphous “Babel”-effect of both works tends initially
to disorient their viewer or reader, but also because the intensely recondite
nature of both the Histoire(s) and the Wake demand more “outside
work” from their audience than almost anything else in cinema or literature
respectively. Yet the authors of both have stressed that a viewer or reader
should not worry about catching all of the references at play, suggesting
of course that these are works which should be lived with or returned to
over and over again across decades.
| |
 |
| |
Histoire(s)
du cinéma: Une
Histoire seule
|
The two works also share the trait that, in their own way, their individual
chapters or episodes contain pieces of or stand in for the whole. For Joyce,
this structure lent itself to the Viconian theme of accumulated experience
admist history's cyclical repetitions; but for Godard, one suspects the
positioning and repositioning of images, sounds, and titles throughout the
episodes supplements a thesis that the history of the cinema—how it
failed to respond adequately to outside history, and instead how outside
history projected back onto it, resulting in a cinematic Great Fall—must
be reconstructed without the use of any easy historical fulcrum to enable
a single “definite” perspective. Accordingly, a sense of investigation
seems to run throughout the whole of the Histoire(s). In the work's
first part, which is divided into two episodes entitled 1A: Toutes les
Histoire(s) (1A: All the History(s), 1988) and 1B: Une Histoire
seule (1B: A Single History, 1988), we apprehend a number of
elements that will recur throughout the rest of the series: the sound of
Godard's electric Brother typewriter banging out in rapid staccato measures
the titles of old films; close-ups on the reel of an editing bay, through
which hundreds of feet of film speed, and then halt; and the swift alternation
between two clips of films, one fading into another and back in a kind of
flicker effect. We might understand these components like such: In any attempt
to elucidate a history of the cinema, we must find the associations between
the films and investigate their middle ground; if the flicker-effect of
projected film, moving at a rate of 24 frames per second, is what largely
accounts for the ecstasy or elucidation of the spectator, then the flicker-effect
created by fading rapidly in and out between two films via video technology
will allow us to discover a similar Truth in the associations and connections
making up an ostensible history of the cinema. The noise of the automated
typewriter emphasizes the pursuit of a “hidden history” by reminding
us at once of the material models behind production and global economics,
of the rapid-fire machine-gun bursts of the noir or war film and
war itself, and of a sewing machine that stitches together two separate
elements to form a third “whole.” The lengths of film threaded
through the editing reel underscore this notion of “stitching together”
in an attempt to reconstitute a history of the cinema, with the entire investigatory
element further suggested by the rewind's occasional cessation, so that
we can scrutinize the individual frames on the celluloid—the primary
“slides” in an assessment of evidence.
| |
 |
| |
Germany
Year 90 Nine Zero
|
A deep concern over history and its relationship with collective and individual
memory would permeate the films that followed those opening episodes of
the Histoire(s) and indeed remains in place all the way up to the
artist's most recent feature. Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro
(Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991) sees Cold War agent Lemmy Caution
(Eddie Constantine revisiting his Alphaville role) roaming a newly
reunified Germany to survey the transition from one epoch to another and
discover his own role in the post-Communist climate. For Ever Mozart
(1996) situates itself in the dialogue on the atrocities of Sarajevo
and Bosnia, while the latest feature, Éloge de l'amour, affirms
the “privilege” of memory as it portrays the negotiations of “Steven
Spielberg and Associates” to co-opt the life story of aged participants
in the French Resistance. Éloge de l'amour sets at its forefront
the importance of attaching a name to an act, whether that act be benevolent
or reprehensible. Godard proposes that moments of history categorizable
by the latter must be committed to memory and their perpetrators in effect
indicted; as Don DeLillo might remark, there is a power in this,
the calling by name or citation by image of the figures behind historical
atrocity, or even of atrocity itself. When Godard turns toward the camera
near the close of JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG:
Self-Portrait in December, 1994), his gesture and outward gaze seem
to suggest that we are all implicated to some degree in the turbulence of
history—and that even on the scale of one's personal existence, we
are still capable of making good on the covenant drawn between man and his
world to live, with all good faith, “contre l'oubli”—that
is, against oblivion.
“I said I love. That is the promise. Now, I have to sacrifice
myself so that through me the word 'love' means something. As a reward,
at the end of of this long undertaking, I will end up being he who
loves. That is, I will merit the name I gave myself. A man, nothing
but a man, no better than any other, but no other better than he.”
- Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre
© Craig Keller, January 2003
Endnotes:
- Truffaut, “The Rogues Are Weary” in Jim
Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism,
Hollywood, New Wave, Translated by Liz Heron, Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 30.
- Tom Milne and Jean Narboni (eds.), Godard on Godard,
New York, Da Capo Press, 1972, p. 12
- Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut,
trans. Catherine Termerson, Berkeley, California, University of California
Press, p. 37. The “movement” had in fact drawn enough attention
to influence the creation of a body known as the Fédération
française des ciné-clubs, whose charge was in part to
regulate the rental of feature prints from the Cinémathèque
to desiring film-societies.
- Indeed, these four were the subjects of much focus
in the early days of Cahiers, but the writers also made regular
cases for substance within the work of D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin,
Samuel Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Elia Kazan, King Vidor,
Robert Aldrich, John Ford, Stanley Donen, George Cukor, and Frank Tashlin,
to name a few—in addition to championing the Hollywood periods
of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim,
F. W. Murnau, and Jean Renoir.
- Milne and Narboni (eds.), p.195. Translated by Milne
from original article: “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”, Cahiers
du cinéma, 128, February 1962
- Milne and Narboni (eds.), p. 242. Translated by Milne
from original article: Jean-Luc Godard, “My Approach in Four Movements”,
L'Avant-scène du cinéma, 70, May 1967
- Milne and Narboni (eds.), p. 59. Translated by Milne
from original article: Jean-Luc Godard, “Hollywood or Bust”,
Cahiers du cinéma, 73, July 1957
- For a more accurately “theoretical” stance
one would be well disposed referring to André Bazin, What
Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley, University of California
Press, vol 1 (1967), vol 2 (1971).
- Milne and Narboni (eds.), p. 99. Translated by Milne
from original article: Jean-Luc Godard, “Les Cousins”,
Cahiers du cinéma, 89, November 1958
- Milne and Narboni (eds.), p. 45. Translated by Milne
from original article: Jean-Luc Godard, “Hot Blood”,
Cahiers du cinéma, 68, February 1957
- Milne and Narboni (eds.), p. 173. Translated by Milne
from original article: “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”, Cahiers
du cinéma, 138, December 1962
- David Sterritt (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard Interviews,
Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1998, p. 51. The quotation
originally appeared in Andrew Sarris, “Godard and the Revolution”,
The Village Voice, April 30 1970.
- Sterritt (ed.), p. 101. Originally appeared in Jonathan
Rosenbaum, “Bringing Godard Back Home”, The Soho News,
24-30 September 1980.
| |
 |
| |
Jean-Luc
Godard
|
Filmography
Opération
béton (Operation Concrete) (1954) short
Une Femme coquette (A Coquettish Woman) (1955) short
Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (All the Boys Are
Called Patrick) (1957) short
Une Histoire d'eau (A History of Water) (1958) co-directed
with François Truffaut; short
Charlotte et son Jules (Charlotte and Her Jules) (1958)
short
À Bout de souffle (Breathless) (1959)
Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier) (1960)
| |
 |
| |
Band
of Outsiders
|
Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman) (1961)
La Paresse (Sloth) (1961) sketch, from Les Sept
Péchés capitaux (The Seven Capital Sins)
Vivre sa vie (To Live One's Life / My Life to Live) (1962)
Le Nouveau monde (The New World) (1962) sketch, from
RoGoPaG
Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen) (1963)
Le Grand escroc (The Big Swindler) (1963) sketch, from
Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde (The Most Beautiful Scams
in the World)
Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963)
Reportage sur Orly (Reporting on Orly) (1964) short
Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)
Une Femme mariée (A Married Woman) (1964)
| |
 |
| |
My
Life to Live
|
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville,
A Strange Case of Lemmy Caution) (1965)
Montparnasse-Levallois (1965) sketch, from Paris vu par...
(Paris as Seen by... / Six in Paris)
Pierrot le fou (Pierrot the Mad) (1965)
Masculin féminin (Masculine Feminine) (1966)
Made in U.S.A. (1966)
Deux out trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things
I Know About Her) (1966)
Anticipation, ou: l'amour en l'an 2000 (Anticipation, or: Love
in the Year 2000) (1967) sketch, from Le Plus Vieux Métier
du monde (The World's Oldest Profession)
Caméra-oeil (Camera-Eye) (1967) sketch, from
Loin du Viêt-nam (Far from Vietnam)
La Chinoise, ou: plutôt à la Chinoise (The “Chinese,”
or: Something Like the Chinese) (1967)
L'Aller et retour des enfants prodigues (The Departure and
Return of the Prodigal Children) (1967) sketch, from Amore e
rabbia / Vangelo 70 (Love and Anger / Vangelo 70)
Week-End (1967)
| |
 |
| |
Wind
from the East
|
Le Gai savoir (The Joy of Knowledge) (1968)
Ciné-tracts (Cine-Tracts) (1968) short films,
directed anonymously with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker
Un Film comme les autres (A Film Like the Others) (1968)
as Dziga-Vertov Group
One Plus One (1968)
One American Movie (One A.M.) (1968) unfinished; incorporated
into One P.M. (One Parallel Movie) by D. A. Pennebaker (1971)
Communications (1969) unfinished
British Sounds (See You at Mao) (1969) co-directed with Jean-Henri
Roger
Pravda (Truth) (1969) as Dziga-Vertov Group
Le Vent d'est (Wind from the East) (1969) as Dziga-Vertov
Group
Luttes en Italie (Struggles in Italy) (1969) as Dziga-Vertov
Group
Jusqu'à la victoire (Until Victory) (1970) as
Dziga-Vertov Group; unfinished
| |
 |
| |
Les
Carabiniers
|
Vladimir et Rosa
(Vladimir and Rosa) (1971) as Dziga-Vertov Group
Tout va bien (Everything's Going Fine) (1972) co-directed
with Jean-Pierre Gorin
Lettre à Jane (Letter to Jane) (1972) co-directed
with Jean-Pierre Gorin
Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (1974) –
co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville; incorporates footage from the
unfinished Jusqu'à la Victoire (Until Victory) (1970)
Numéro deux (Number Two) (1975)
Comment ça va? (How's It Going?) (1976) co-directed
with Anne-Marie Miéville
Six fois deux / Sur et sous la communication (Six Times Two
/ On and Beneath Communication) (1976) co-directed with Anne-Marie
Miéville; television series:
1A / 1B: Y a personne / Louison (1A / 1B: Somebody's There
/ Louison)
2A / 2B: Leçons des choses / Jean-Luc (2A / 2B: Lessons
About Things / Jean-Luc)
3A / 3B: Photos et cie / Marcel (3A / 3B: Photos and Company /
Marcel)
4A / 4B: Pas d'histoire / Nanas (4A / 4B: No History / Nanas)
5A / 5B: Nous trois / René(e)s (5A / 5B: We Three / René(e)s)
6A / 6B: Avant et après / Jacqueline et Ludovic (6A / 6B:
Before and After / Jacqueline and Ludovic)
France / tour / détour / deux / enfants (France / Tour
/ Detour / Two / Children) (1977-78) co-directed with Anne-Marie
Miéville; television series:
Obscur / Chimie (Dark / Chemistry)
Lumière / Physique (Light / Physics)
Connu / Géométrie / Géographie (Known / Geometry
/ Geography)
Inconnu / Technique (Unknown / Technique)
Impression / Dictée (Impression / Dictation)
Expression / Français (Expression / French)
Violence / Grammaire (Violence / Grammar)
Désordre / Calcul (Disorder / Calculus)
Pouvoir / Musique (Potential / Music)
Roman / Économie (Romance / Economy)
Réalité / Logique (Reality / Logic)
Rêve / Morale (Dream / Morale)
Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Scenario for Every
Man for Himself (Life) [US] / Slow Motion [UK]) (1979) video
short
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself (Life) [US]
/ Slow Motion [UK]) (1979)
Lettre à Freddy Buache (Letter to Freddy Buache)
(1981) short video (transferred to 35mm)
Changer d'image (To Alter the Image) (1982) segment
in Le Changement a plus d'un titre (Change Has More Than One Title)
Passion (Passion) (1982)
Scénario du film Passion (Scenario for the Film
Passion) (1982)
Prénom Carmen (First Name Carmen) (1983)
Petites notes à propos du film Je vous salue Marie (Small
Notes About the Film I Salute Thee Marie / Hail Mary) (1983)
video short
Je vous salue Marie (I Salute Thee Marie / Hail Mary)
(1985)
Détective (1985)
Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce du cinéma
(Grandeur and Decadence of a Small Cinematic Trade) (1986)
“Série noire” television
Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject)
(1986)
Meetin' WA (1986) video short
| |
 |
| |
Keep
Your Right Up
|
Armide (1987) sketch, from Aria
King Lear (1987)
Soigne ta droite, ou: une place sur la terre comme au ciel (Keep
Your Right Up, or: A Place on the Earth as in Heaven) (1987)
On s'est tous défilé (We Have All Defiled Ourselves)
(1988) video short
Closed (1988) commercials for Marithé and François
Girbaud Jeans
La Puissance de la parole (The Power of Speech) (1988)
video short
Le Dernier mot / Les Français entendus par... (The Last
Word / The French as Understood by...) (1988) segment from Les
Français vus par... (The French as Seen by...)
Histoire(s) du cinéma (History(s) of the Cinema) (1988-98):
1A: Toutes les Histoire(s) (All the History(s))
1B: Une Histoire seule (A Single History)
2A: Seul le cinéma (Only the Cinema)
2B: Fatale beauté (Fatal Beauty)
3A: La Monnaie de l'absolu (The Currency of the Absolute)
3B: Une Vague nouvelle (A Vague Novel / A New Wave)
4A: Le Contrôle de l'univers (Control of the Universe)
4B: Les Signes parmi nous (The Signs Among Us)
Le Rapport Darty (The Darty Report) (1989) co-directed
with Anne-Marie Miéville
Nouvelle vague (New Wave) (1990)
L'Enfance de l'art (The Infancy of Art) (1990) co-directed
with Anne-Marie Miéville; sketch, from Comment vont les enfants?
(How Are the Kids?)
Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine
Zero) (1991)
Pour Thomas Wainggai (For Thomas Wainggai) (1991) sketch,
from Contre l'Oubli (Against Oblivion / Lest We Forget)
| |
 |
| |
JLG/JLG:
Self-Portrait in December
|
Hélas pour moi (Alas for Me / Woe Is Me) (1993)
Les Enfants jouent à la russie (The Kids Play Russian)
(1993)
JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait
in December) (1994)
Je vous salue Sarajevo (I Salute Thee Sarajevo) (1994)
video short
2 x 50 Ans du cinéma français (2 x 50 Years of
French Cinema) (1995)
Adieu au TNS (Farewell to the TNS) (1996) short film
Plus Haut (Higher) (1996) music video for France
Gall
For Ever Mozart (1996)
The Old Place (1998) co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville
L'Origine du XXIème siècle (The Origin of the
XXIst Century) (2000) video short
Éloge de l'amour (Elegy for Love / In Praise of Love)
(2001)
Dans la noir du temps (In the Blackness of Time) (2002)
sketch, for Ten Minutes Older: The Cello
Liberté et patrie (Liberty and Country) (2002)
short film
Notre musique (Our Music) (2004)
Moments choisis
des Histoire(s) du cinéma (2004)
Compact
Discs:
Nouvelle vague (ECM
Records, 1997) complete soundtrack on 2 discs
Histoire(s) du cinéma (ECM Records, 1999) complete soundtrack
on 5 discs
Select
Bibliography
Antoine de Baecque
and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut (translated by Catherine Temerson),
University of California Press, 1999
Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (eds.), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image
1974-1991, Museum of Modern Art, 1992
Cahiers du cinéma: Spécial Godard: Trente Ans depuis,
Cahiers du cinéma livres, 1991
Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire
du cinéma, Éditions Albatros, 1977
Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, eds. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne,
Da Capo Press, 1972
Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984-1998,
ed. Alain Bergala, Cahiers du cinéma livres, 1998
Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism,
Hollywood, New Wave, Harvard University Press, 1985
Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du cinéma: The 1960s: New Wave, New
Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, Harvard University Press, 1986
Tom Milne and Jean Narboni (eds.), Godard on Godard, New York,
Da Capo Press, 1972
Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard, New York,
New York University Press, 1998
David Sterritt, (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard Interviews (Conversations
with Filmmakers Series), University Press of Mississippi, 1998
David Wills, (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (Cambridge
Film Handbooks), Cambridge University Press, 2000
| |
 |
| |
Alphaville
|
Articles
in Senses of Cinema
A
Beautiful Exception: Godard's For Ever Mozart by
Fergus Daly
À
Bout De Souffle
(Breathless) by Jonathan Dawson
A
Tale of Two Conferences: For Ever Godard and Garrel Éternel
by Maximilian Le Cain
Before
and After: Origins and Death in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard
by André Habib
Between
Seeing and Reading - A Report on the Reading Godard Conference
by Glen Norton
Détective
by Anna Dzenis
End
Game: Some Thoughts Provoked by Recent Exhibitions, and Godard’s
Eloge de l’amour by Jon Jost
For
Ever Godard reviewed by Hilary Radner
Germany
Year 90 Nine Zero by Megan Carrigy
Godard's
Histoire(s) du cinema, Parts 1A & 1B: Tales From the Crypt
by Adrian Martin
The
Godard Streak Or Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder by Geoff
Gardner
Le
Petit Soldat by Tim Palmer
Letter
to Jane by Jonathan Dawson
The
Man With The Magnétoscope – Jean-Luc Godard's monumental
Histoire(s) du cinéma as SoundImageTextBook by
Alexander Horwath
Der
Mann mit dem Magnetoskop – Jean-Luc Godards monumentale„Geschichte(n)
des Kinos" als TonBildTextBuch by Alexander Horwath (in
German)
Only
the Cinema by John Conomos
Thanatos
ex Machina: Godard Caresses the Dead by David Sterritt
Vivre
sa vie by Adrian Danks
Nostalgia
for the Present: The Godard Renaissance Continued by Glen W.
Norton
Web
Resources Compiled
by Albert Fung
Cinema=Jean-Luc
Godard=Cinema
Page with
many Godard related links, including recent news, conferences and video
clips.
Film
Directors – Articles on the Internet
Links to numerous Godard articles on the web.
Histoire(s) du cinéma images
18 screen captures. Please be patient while it loads, it's worth the wait.
Jean-Luc
Godard, Inbetween Delueze
A piece on the influence of Delueze on Godard's work.
| Click
here
to search for Jean-Luc Godard DVDs, videos and books at |
|
Back
to Great Directors index page
|
