| R E
S O U R C E S
F O R
( 1 6 m m ) S T U D E N T F I L M M A K E R S |
 |
| R E
S O U R C E S
F O R
( 1 6 m m ) S T U D E N T F I L M M A K E R S |
|
Godard's first feature film, À bout de souffle (1959; Breathless), which was produced by François Truffaut, his colleague on the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, won the Jean Vigo Prize. It inaugurated a long series of features, all celebrated for the often drastic nonchalance of Godard's improvisatory filmmaking procedures. Breathless was shot without a script; Godard sketched the dialogue overnight and revised it between and during rehearsals. In subsequent films he even resorted to speaking the characters' replies to the actors from behind the camera during takes. Thus, he used improvisatory techniques sometimes to observe reality, sometimes to impose his own vision, and often to interrelate the two so as to create a strangely abstract effect.
His 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt), based on a story by the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, marked his only venture into orthodox and comparatively expensive filmmaking. Afterward, he maintained an almost unique position as an absolute, independent creator, using extraordinarily cheap alfresco production methods and enjoying repeated success on the international "art cinema" circuit.
Breathless recounts the misadventures of a petty crook (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, often Godard's alter ego on screen) who admires Humphrey Bogart and is betrayed to the police by an American girl. Being uncertain whether or not she loves him, she informs on him simply to see if she can. For some years, Godard's work showed an increasingly desperate obsession with themes of fickleness (both male and female), indignity, caprice, and the impossibility of distinguishing a meaningful reality from the imposture perpetrated by others, by one's own mind, by ideology, and by art. Godard used the face of the actress who was then his wife, Anna Karina, as a sphinxlike icon representing this existential duplicity in several films, notably Le Petit Soldat (1960; The Little Soldier), an ironically flippant tragedy, banned for many years, about torture and countertorture. Vivre sa vie (1962; My Life to Live), a study of a young Parisian prostitute, used, with ironical solipsism, pastiches of documentary form and clinical jargon. And on the strength of Pierrot le fou (1965), he was asked to direct what was to be an immensely successful American film, Bonnie and Clyde (he refused it because of his suspicion of the Hollywood system).
Godard offered his visual and verbal images as delusive counterfeits for a life whose meaning has become irretrievably lost, or perhaps was always intrinsically absurd. These images are endowed with additional depth by his extensive culture. Increasingly, his films came to include shots of books brandished or read from and suggestive street signs or posters and dialogue that is delivered as if the performers were alienated from their roles, merely reading texts. Historically impossible or subtly fantastic settings are juxtaposed, and his films compel a disrupting awareness of the medium itself. His allusions to other films in themselves constitute an intricate maze. The heroine of The Little Soldier, for instance, is surnamed "Dreyer" after Carl Dreyer, a director whom Godard admires; an extract from one of Dreyer's films is watched by the heroine of My Life to Live. Alphaville (1965) features scenes from Metropolis (1926), whose director, Fritz Lang, plays a film director in Contempt. In these ways, Godard's films become intellectual essays: in them, the acted, experienced fictions of earlier motion pictures are transformed into the illustrative ideological cinema of the late 1960s. In 1966 two features--Made in U.S.A., devoted to America, and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), devoted to Paris--marked a nadir of Godard's generalized despair, which by then was aimed at society as well as at interpersonal relationships. An increasing interest in left-wing thought was implicit in La Chinoise (1967; its title is slang for Parisian Maoists) and was confirmed by Godard's active participation in the Paris student riots of 1968 and other demonstrations. Weekend, also made in 1967, was a hard-hitting denunciation of modern French society.
By then married to the actress Anne Wiazemsky, he moved from fiction and aesthetic preoccupation to the Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and others. Le Gai Savoir (1968) is a flatly illustrated text spoken by two students named Émile Rousseau and Patricia Lumumba. His texts for the next decade exhibited a complete indifference to their appeal to the public and were intended as intellectual agitprop (i.e., agitation-propaganda): in Godard's own words, they are "not a show, a struggle." With this ideological twist Godard disconcerted those who had admired him, whether their particular enthusiasm was for the dexterity of his film form, for his skill in posing complex cultural riddles, or for his cool but sad recording of Western man's crises of identity. His evolution posed a problem, also, for his detractors, whether they criticized him for solipsism, for nihilism, or for his suspiciously complacent celebration of the ignominies of bourgeois man under the shadow of revolution. Even the minority that declared his earlier films to be honourable failures, or exercises in intellectual tedium, had to agree that, of all directors, he remained the most recklessly volatile, and his development the most fascinatingly unpredictable.
During the 1970s he became more involved with politically militant television. Numéro Deux, for example, was a video experiment about family life in contemporary France and the power of ideology and the media--and was commercially unsuccessful. Godard began making successful narrative feature films again in 1979 with Sauve qui peut/La vie (Every Man for Himself), a story of three young Swiss people and their problems of work and love. In the early 1980s he was involved in film projects at home as well as in California and Mozambique. (R.Du.)
From "Godard, Jean-Luc" Britannica Online. <http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/237/93.html>
[Accessed 24 August 1998].
E S S E N T I A L W
A T C H I N G
You can purchase some of the following in NTSC
VHS from 
| A Bout De Souffle
(Breathless)
Buy
It !
1959. Black and White. 90 minutes. With Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Written by Godard and Truffaut. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Production design by Claude Chabrol! IMDB
entry for Breathless.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
IMDB entry for Pierrot Le Fou.
|
|
|
|
E S S E N T I A L
R E A D I N G
You can purchase these books online from
Godard on Godard: Critical Writings
by Jean-Luc Godard. Buy
it !
Edited by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne.
Both as maddening and as completely beautiful as some of his films,
Godard's writing offers unbelievable insights into the person - the
ideas,
the motivations, the style - behind masterpieces such as Breathless,
Pierrot Le Fou, and Vivre Sa Vie. Not didactic like, say, Tarkovsky's
Sculpting in Time, this is not a book for "tips" on filmmaking. Rather,
it is an "outrageous self-portrait"of Godard, a portrait whose true
reward
is an, at times, puzzling but mostly revelatory companion to his ouevre.
A must-read for film-lovers.
Speaking About Godard
Buy
it !
By Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
Those familiar with contemporary visual theory will find this book
a compelling and persuasive political read. If the name Jacques Lacan
sets
off alarm bells in your head, however, stay away from Speaking About
Godard! For theory students, an endless source of wonderful papers
about the man and his movies.
A complete filmography courtesy of the IMDB
Film Notes from the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive. Search for particular films or, under directors, for Godard.
Godard Interview with Henri Behar on, among other things, the role of a filmmaker in a world where bombs exploding are a daily occurence.
Meta-Site
on Jean-Luc Godard with links to essays (some of which are achingly awful)
and pictures.