le mépris (w&d godard)

I figure it must have been in 1983, there or thereabouts, that my erstwhile friend Jason took me to a double bill at the Electric on Portobello Road of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Le Mépris. Back then the Electric was still a fleapit. I have a vague memory that we entered in daylight and exited into the night. That serendipitous shifting of the spectrum which seems to have been caused by the clash between light and darkness that cinema constructs. I was seventeen, I believe, and that screening of Le Mepris has always remained as a keystone in the process of falling in love with cinema. It has been, entonces, nearly forty years since I last watched the film. I guess it must have been in part Bardot herself, but my greatest memory of the film was of the shimmering Mediterranean which Godard’s film, a film about the making of a film of the Odyssey, a quintessential Mediterranean text, celebrates. The quality of the light from that far-flung world must have dazzled, all the more so to then emerge into the darkness of the London winter night.

How much has altered. When I watched it I would have been younger than all the cast and they would have seemed like gods to me. The trials and tribulations of relationships, around which the narrative is constructed, would still have seemed like a foreign land. I imagine I would have had no idea who Fritz Lang was, let alone Piccoli. Watching it yesterday, only the immortalised Lang would be older than me. The film within a film is about gods and men, although this is part of a sly game, because in the modern world, rather than the grecian one, the film stars have become gods. Bardot is an effigy of beauty, Palance of unredacted masculinity, Lang a sagacious world weariness. If any director filmed actors with an awareness that he was constructing a panoply of Homeric immortals, it was probably Godard, faithful to the first three letters of his surname.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Le Mépris, a story told in three acts, is the way in which Godard reins in his ironic detachment. This is a drama, in the conventional sense, with conventional narrative beats and characterisation. The characters are at once less obviously his puppets than in other films, and more so, subsumed as they are in the meta-drama of his personal narrative which underpins the film. (Filmmakers struggling with the complications of being both ambitious, beautiful, and human.) The extended scene between Bardot and Piccoli, which makes up the second act, foregoes the winks at the camera, permitting the actors to remain absorbed in the budding tragedy of their characters’ failed relationship.

With Delarue’s delirious strings, Raoul Coutard’s crystalline cinematography and the plasticity of the small cast, this is almost a model for what a film might be, a mix of the romantic and the intellectual, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. No wonder it seduced me back then, a young man on the brink of his journey into the big wide world of gods and monsters. 

les carabiniers (w&d godard w. jean gruault, w. beniamino joppolo)

Les Carabiniers, Richard Brody informs us, “In first run, it attracted so few viewers—an estimated 2,000—that its box-office statistics went unreported.” It’s a chaotic mess of a film, in many ways, adapted from a stage play, which sees Godard’s Brechtian instincts pushed to the max, and illustrates the limitations of this approach. The film tells the story of two country boys who are sent off to the war, where they rape and pillage to their heart’s content, only to return home and find that not only are their promised rewards non-existent, but they are also about to be executed, paying the price for defeat. The two protagonists are deliberately painted as two dimensional, and the whole film has the feel of something flat and didactic. Where, perhaps, the spectacle of theatre permits this, cinema, wedded to an idea of psychological truth, feels unconvincing when it goes too far in its abandonment of that notion. Godard might have argued that the film does indeed represent a tortured truth. “If Les Carabiniers had no success in Paris, it’s because people are worms. You show them worms on the screen, they get angry. What they like is a beautiful war à la Zanuck. For three hours they kill lots of Germans. Then they go home happy, heroic. Real war, they don’t want. It isn’t war that is disgusting, it’s ourselves. People are cowards.” Indeed, it’s not hard to think of the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine as one watches the film, and the realities that Godard presents. But the alienating devices that work are so effective when the audience is drawn to Godard’s characters are less so when pegged to characters we have no reason to fall for. Godard messes around with Belmondo and Karina, and it always feels as though they are in on the joke, even if it’s at their expense. Here, the joke is that these characters are, no matter how pretty, essentially heartless monsters, and it’s hard to want to identify with this.

Perhaps for this reason, if anything Les Carabiniers could be used as a study in the significance of charisma as an actuarial trait. Godard was more than aware of the importance of beauty and charm as weapons to be utilised by both actor and director. He repeatedly took full advantage of his actors’ charismatic qualities in order to rope the audience into an unconventional way of seeing. He tries the same thing here, but it doesn’t quite work, no matter how pressing and significant the subject matter of the film. 

une femme est une femme (w&d godard, w. geneviève cluny)

Back into Godard world, which will never die. Sit down in the cinema, having forgotten how the film opens. Think, Dios Mio, how destacado era ese pibe. Out there. Doing his shit like no-one else, before or after, no matter how imitated. The ebullience of the cinematic vision, ripping up the rule book like he’s one of the Lumiere brothers all over again, reinventing cinema for the masses. Yeah, sure, the whole film is balefully self-indulgent. Yeah, sure the vision of femininity is balefully masculine. Yeah, sure so the director gets to make a paean to the girl he’s crazy about. Probably knowing that it’s never going to last for ever, that all good things come to an end. Yeah sure, it’s got a soggy middle, which is basically Angela (Karina) and Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) cosplaying being Karina and Godard. There’s a hundred reasons to dislike or at least have reservations about this film, but there’s a million reasons to love it. Which is the same sort of thing that could be said about any child, and there is something so gloriously childlike about this film, with its dippy creativity, its gauche gender wars, its naive iconoclasm that you can’t help adoring it, no matter what. Children don’t respect rules and neither does Godard, playing with sound, image, character like a kid in the biggest, best playground on earth, aka making a film. 

sauve qui peut (d. godard, w. anne-marie miéville, jean-claude carrière)

Godard’s mid-period film, which Richard Brody says he described as his second first film, is a rambling box of tricks and sighs. The tricks are beautiful, the sighs are ugly. The tricks are ugly, the sighs are beautiful. A trick might be the use of slow motion, as Nathalie Baye’s progress on a bicycle through the Swiss countryside is slowed down into a sequence of digital movement, frame by frame, discovering a poetry in the simplest of actions, a trick he repeats at other moments throughout the film. Another trick might be the imposition of the most lyrical music, for a few seconds, propelling the film towards a dreamy romantic level, only to cut the music off before the viewer can get lost in it. Another trick, the ugly tricks, are the turns that seedy men ask Isabelle Huppert to perform as a prostitute. Godard pushes the ugliness towards Centipedal lengths, confronting the viewer. The sighs are the human moments, when the characters who so often feel like marionettes in Godard’s psycho-sexual landscape suddenly step out of character and become real people, with real concerns. Something Baye excels out, inveighing her lost character with a pathos that seems to go against the filmmaker’s grain. Brody’s comments on Huppert’s thoughts on Godard’s direction are great in this regard: “She spoke of Godard’s control of her diction and of her gestures, of his sense that “one must imprison the actor so that his true soul can emerge.” She felt that Godard’s methods brought her closer to herself and, paradoxically, to the character she was embodying, and she found the experience artistically gratifying.” The complexity of the process the actors faced is complemented by the complexity of everything in Sauve Qui Peut: the narrative; the blurred urban/rural division; the mash-up of visual styles; the mash-up of tones. In this sense it feels, as perhaps all Godard’s work feels, like the predicted apex of a modernity which has already passed. His bricolage was ahead of its time, the time came, it went, leaving a film from the future firmly in the past. In this sense it’s a commentary on a world on the eve of the digital. Innocent pleasures of the kind to be found in his earlier films are banished, we are now in the aseptic land of sex, lies and videotape. Identity begins to fracture, the director is Godard, the lead character is called Godard, people’s lives will not flow in straight lines, they will be broken down with slow motion and out-of-synch musical interludes. Emotion no longer comes naturally, it will be constructed in spite of moral indifference. 

everything is cinema (richard brody)

Richard Brody’s biography of Godard is monumental. It’s an epic journey through the life of a filmmaker via his films. One feels as though Godard ought to be grateful to the gods for granting him such a dedicated, comprehensive biographer, although one also feels that he, Godard, probably doesn’t give a shit. The tension between Godard’s professional and working life is constantly in play, and Brody delineates this tension forensically. From his relationships with his leading actresses to his squabbles with contemporaries (most notably Truffaut) to the fraught working conditions on set. For Godard, film-making would appear to become, increasingly, a calvary, an inexhaustible source of both suffering and joy. Brody traces the evolution of this process film by film, both reawakening the reader’s fascination with the films themselves but also the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the process.

One of Brody’s theories is that Godard’s later films, far less well known than those which established him back in the day, are in many ways more profound and deserving of praise than those earlier gobstoppers. (He’s particularly harsh on Bande Á Part). Of course, these films, as the book acknowledges never reached the audiences of Breathless, La Chinoise, Weekend, Contempt, etcetera. Most readers won’t have seen the later films, and I belong to that most readers category. It feels, as we enter this zone when Godard struggled more and more to get films made, and struggled more and more in the making of them, as though the second half of the book occupies a darker, sadder process, albeit one which Brody assures us, in our ignorance (or at least mine) is one whose artistic richness has been neglected.

From a filmmaker’s point of view, the book is inspirational. It highlights how Godard’s quest for innovation meant he was always at the forefront of new cinematic possibilities, sometimes as a result of his own investment (in the development of hand-held cameras, for example), and sometimes as a result of good old fashioned ingenuity. Making cinema is a technological process but the gurus of technology so frequently blind with science that it can start to feel like an exclusive process, one that belongs to those with access to vast funds and equipment. Godard made films like this, but he also concocted films out of the bits and pieces lying around in his Swiss back yard. There are dozens of ways of creating cinema, and Godard’s enthusiasm for trying all of them shines through, and inspires. Similarly, if anything comes across in Brody’s book, it is that Godard was a filmmaker in the sense that he couldn’t not make film. He was/ is constantly in the process of creation. Some of the ideas come to fruition, some don’t, many are recycled to emerge years even decades later. Scraps of footage for one project appear in another. We have now reached the iPhone epoch of filmmaking and as ever, Godard was there decades earlier, working out how to transform the stuff of daily life into the stuff of art or cinema. 

le livre d'image (godard)

Cinema comes thick and fast at the end of the year. Nothing more appropriate than late Godard as a way of trying to review and summarise not merely a year of cinema and its interaction with the news, but the whole history of cinema and its relationship to just about everything. There’s no way to process late Godard except on a transparently subjective level. The multiple possible interpretations of the bricolage he assembles seems to demand subjectivity. As cultural experiences go, the closest comparison might be reading Derrida. Why is this edit next to that edit? Why has he chopped the world up in this way? Why is there sound here and silence there? You could spend a month deciphering and debating the filmmaker’s choices and be none the wiser, and much the wiser at the same time. 

As if to emphasis this, there’s a curious moment in the screening. About half way through the film, someone shouts out, in the style of the old Cinemateca, that there must be a problem with the sound, which cuts in and out. Someone else calls back, out of the darkness, that this is Godard and he’s doing it on purpose. Someone leaves the auditorium to check. At the end, this little community of Sunday evening filmgoers talk among themselves - is the sound part of Godard’s game, or is it the cinema’s new speakers? People check on-line, ask the attendants, but no-one seems any the wiser. It’s tempting to think of Godard chuckling at this wonderful ambiguity, where even the process of watching the film is put in question. We can’t even trust our five senses, which the film has taken note of in the opening reel.

This confusion is part of the game. A glass bead game, perhaps. However, there’s a stitching going on, a mind at work, a constant juxtaposition. It’s like studying the inside of the engine, what’s under the bonnet. Godard is the mechanic who is also the magician, operating in a dimension whose workings we can barely follow. 

vivre sa vie (w&d godard, w marcel sacotte)

Godard, for a third time in as many months. Godard, which is like watching a brand new way of making cinema every time. No matter that the film is nearly 60 years old. It feels like it could have been made yesterday and still knock spots off the most avant-garde cineasta out there today. Maybe the avant garde has eaten itself. There’s no room left in the multiplex. And those with avant-garde predilections have no option but to shut the system down, adapt, meet the market criteria. Does anyone today use sound with the creative dexterity that Godard did? With the brash, assertive dislocation? Does the notion of playfulness even exist anymore? Watching Godard is like watching a lost innocence, the joy of film still vibrant, still singing. Coutard’s darting, swirling camera work has undoubtably been imitated a million times, but the overall tone of reckless esprit de jeu has been consigned to the cutting room floor. And to think that Godard became a byword for pretension? When his creative impulse stems from a childlike delight in the medium’s creative and iconographic possibilities. Perhaps children are secretly the most pretentious of them all.

le petit soldat (w&d godard)

More Godard. In the highly appropriate surroundings of Cine Universitario, a cinema that feels as though it continues to exist in a mid 70’s timewarp. (20 pesos for a cup of tea, something that reminded me of pre-Picture House carrot cake at the Ritzy in Brixton.) 

Le Petit Soldat is a strange, frenetic film. People are always running everywhere. They run to their cars, they run away from their cars, they’re constantly in a hurry, never getting anywhere. The camera indulges in sudden, swinging pans, from one character to another, or up the side of a building. The restless energy suggests a director chasing something down, without knowing exactly what. All the classic Godard tropes are there: moody boys, pretty girls, metaphysical conversation, outlandish US automobiles, slapstick gun-play, pretension, misogyny, but all of this is allied to an unwieldy political consciousness. It’s a bit like watching the natural history footage of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, that frantic struggle which ends in a brilliant fluttering of wings, only in reverse. This is a film that gets dirtier, less funny, uglier, as it unfolds. The torture scenes in the last fifteen minutes, whilst perhaps soft fare compared to what we are permitted to see now, nevertheless still pack a punch, especially the waterboarding. The film documents techniques of cruelty which will be repeated ad nauseam over the coming decades. Images which had never been shown before with such vivid, manic clarity. A man with a wet T-shirt over his head, explaining how the air is being sucked out of his lungs, an image of grotesque beauty, stuff to make a CIA or KGB agent weep with joy, whilst the resistance screams with anger.

There’s nothing new about torture, but there was something new in presenting it so pornographically, like a Bataille novel brought to life. The director himself seems caught in the paradox of the seductive power of his camera to create images beyond the pale. How does he react? He pans, he cuts, he runs, he desperately seeks the seriousness that might be permitted in his crazy world of make-believe. 

à bout de souffle (d godard, w truffaut)

Who would have thought I had never actually seen Breathless in its entirety? Clips galore, a million posters or stills on bedroom walls, Belmondo and Seberg, as iconic as Bogart and Bergman, Godard’s vainglorious ambition realised. Perhaps even more so, as Bogart gradually fades into the cinematic palaeolithic age. Who has stepped into the breach to follow Seberg and Belmondo? Or has romantic cool been killed off, once and for all? Answers on a postcard.

My friend, Jason, had stills from À Bout de Souffle on his study wall. (We had individual studies where I went to school, that was how it was.) If Godard understood one thing that Anglo-Saxon filmmakers didn’t, until then, it was the seductive power of the image, cinema’s secret weapon, a weapon whose potency can still elevate cinema above and beyond the Dickensian nouvel vague of the boxset series. The irony being that once they cottoned on, every Anglo-Saxon film school, and film school student, began to follow in Godard’s footsteps, so that the image has now acquired, within the arcane corners of subsidised cinema, the breeding ground for the mainstream, an almost religious devotion. As a result delivering films which are a collection of moments, like misshaped pearls strung together on a string, each one struggling for transcendence, rarely coming together to form a collective whole.

Or perhaps Tarkovsky is to blame. Still, the experience of watching a film that one has imagined already watched, but one hasn’t actually seen, is disconcerting. Every moment a predictable surprise. What I didn’t expect, perhaps, was the amorality of Belmondo’s anti-hero. He’s an unreconstructed bastard and he’s proud of it. Populist existentialism. This is one aspect of Hazanavicius’ film, Redoubtable, which feels spot-on, as the commoners approach his Godard and ask when he’s going to start making entertaining movies again, like À Bout De Souffle. The film exudes a rip-it-up delight, which goes hand-in-hand with the slapstick violence sequences, as though cast and crew are giving two fingers to the values of their elders. (Not without justification, given what the French were up to in Algeria etc). This is proto-punk, guitar-smashing par excellence. Albeit carried off with a breathless Parisian charm.