Senior Project
I've spent the bulk of my senior year studying auteur criticism and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. This has been an incredibly rewarding process thats lead me to write the paper that is posted on this section of the website. The paper begins with reflections on the auteur theory but quickly moves into a close reading of Godard's films. I've included my bibliography in the "Misc" section of this site because it functions as a bibliography both for this paper and my major as a whole.
The Early Films of Jean-Luc Godard:
Truth at 24 Frames per Second
Defining auteur theory is a tricky thing, because to really do it properly it’s important to look at both what it originally meant and what it has come to mean. How the term has evolved over the years. When Truffaut outlined his “politique de auteurs” in 1957 he was using the basic idea as polemic. He wrote that directors should be looked at as more or less the authors of their films. This was a reaction against the current style of French filmmaking, what was called the “cinema of quality (Truffaut 225).” The Young Turks, as the critics at Cahiers du Cinema were often called, latched onto this idea and combined it with the theory of the cinema-stylo, originally developed by Alexandre Astruc, which called for directors to use their cameras as an author would use a pen. This is already far from what auteur theory was designed to describe, however.
At heart, the Young Turks were Hitchcocko-Hawksians; that is, lovers of Hollywood style films, especially those by Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. When Truffaut laid out the auteur theory it was to describe these films. His basic idea was that Hollywood filmmakers working within the confines of the studio system had individual qualities as people that came through in their filmmaking. They had preoccupations that would appear again and again throughout their oeuvre. There are three basic ways in which these preoccupations are presented: technique, personal style, and interior meaning. Perhaps most important to the theory is interior meaning, which Andrew Sarris describes as being “extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material (516).” This places certain aspects of a director’s authorship out of their personal control, in that it arises out of the interplay between themselves and their material. Their preoccupations come to the fore.
It is important to consider not just what auteur theory was intended to mean, but what it has come to mean. In many ways the term auteur has come to be attached to the archetypal “European director,” the art film director working entirely outside of any sort of studio system and crafting films in precisely the way they want. This has also come to be associated with a cult of personality that surrounds the idea of the director. This is markedly different because it places the fundamental tension between the director and the work in the foreground. No longer is it something that exists only in the abstract but because the director has had total creative control in the creation of the final product that tension is explicit and marked. Style is less abstract for these European auteurs in that as they generally only work on one sort of project, their style becomes almost ritualized or stereotyped and certainly more concrete. This oftentimes makes style one of the larger concerns of the critics working with this definition of auteur.
Problems arise, however, when a director buys too much into the auteur theory without the technical skill or developed style of some of the European auteurs. They become entranced with the idea of being thought of as an auteur. As scholars (or bloggers) write about their tiniest signs and symbols they forget that the cinema is essentially a storytelling medium. Their styles are unoriginal and dull or simply flash-in-the-pan. These directors will almost unfailingly be operating with the second understanding of auteur theory, and perhaps an even more romanticized idea than that. They think visual style is first, and to them it is, but this is in itself a perversion of auteur theory. There was a reaction to this sort of thinking in the pages of Cahiers itself: Jacques Rivette wrote in 1961: “There’s not content on the one hand and technique on the other, there’s ‘expression,’ and if the film succeeds, this expression forms a whole” (quoted in Hillier Cahiers 60-68, 3). This is at once discouraging and exciting for one who, Like Sarris would want to split up an auteur’s characteristics into technique, personal style, and internal meaning. It says that all three are inherently intertwined and each is a function of the others. Hillier would correctly say “Style is not just an embellishment; it is the method by which meaning is expressed (2).”
The filmmaking of a director like Jean-Luc Godard is rich to explore when one thinks about this idea of “expression.” Godard had been writing for cinema publications in France for the better part of a decade by the time he started work on his first feature. His work at Cahiers was heavily steeped in auteur criticism and by the time he was given his first opportunity to make a film he was chomping at the bit to prove himself as an auteur in his own right. In the first ten years of his career, Godard completed 28 features and shorts. What immediately strikes the viewer watching these films is that Godard’s work during this time became progressively more avant-garde. In this time Godard’s technique and personal style evolved immeasurably. This can be seen most easily by comparing two of his films of the period: “Breathless” and “Contempt.” It’s mind boggling to think that the same director of photography shot these films four the same director just four years apart. Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” is without a doubt his most well known. Released in 1960, “Breathless” is the story of the last days of the life of a small-time crook named Michel Poiccard who kills a policeman outside of Paris and is betrayed by his lover and killed, in the street, by the police. The plot of the film is formulaic at best, clichéd at worst, but focusing on this is missing the point of the movie. What is truly revolutionary about “Breathless” is its style.
Many of the revolutionary techniques used in the making of “Breathless” are a function of the limitations of the budget of the film. Produced for a fraction of the cost of films made at the time Godard chose to shoot the film with handheld cameras and almost no preparatory work. The movie barely had a script, and Godard would write each day’s dialogue the morning of each shooting day. In many ways it resembles a documentary or Cinema Verite film. Working on the fly was not completely new to Raoul Coutard, Godard’s cameraman, who got his start as a war photographer in the French Indochina War (Maccabe 115). Coutard elected to shoot much of the film in close-ups of the lead actors, Jean Seberg and Jean Paul Belondo; in fact, Godard is known to have said on multiple occasions that “Breathless” is really just a documentary about the two actors (Godard, À bout de soufflé).
Godard had been writing for cinema publications in France for the better part of a decade by the time he started work on “Breathless.” His work as a critic didn’t make him many friends in the world of French film, but Godard saw Breathless as a chance to prove his abilities to the global film community, not just his countrymen. His style was self-assured, freeform, and unmistakably his own. This new mode of filmmaking is exemplified by the first few minutes of Breathless.
The film opens with a medium close-up of a man leaning against a storefront gate, a busy street reflected in the window. He holds the newspaper in front of his face and the audience sees an ad selling underwear surrounded by the comics. We hear opening words of the film from the (anti-)hero Michel: “After all, I’m an asshole. After all, yes! I’ve got to. I’ve got to!” This is Godard speaking for himself, professing that the act of filmmaking is a necessary, if sometimes unpleasant, act. The newspaper is lowered to reveal Michel, played by rising star Jean-Paul Belmondo. He has his hat pulled down low over his eyes as he exhales a cloud of smoke. Raoul Coutard’s black and white cinematography makes the smoke pop off the screen, as if coming straight out of a film noir. With this shot Godard is placing himself aesthetically in the tradition of genre filmmaking, but this is one of the only shots in the film that does so. He is saying he began there; he received his “education” watching these genre films, but he wasn’t interested in just churning out genre pictures. Moullet, a colleague at Cahiers, points out that the conventions of the genre are ignored, except for “plot and physical action (40).” Colin MacCabe argues that this even loose faithfulness to a single genres plot structure is itself something that wouldn’t happen again in Godard’s oeuvre (120).
This abandonment of genre’s stylistic conventions is not a passive choice. Much of JLG’s critical writing through the 1950’s had focused on defending the works of so-called “genre-filmmakers.” It would not be an understatement to say that the westerns and screwball comedies of Hawks and the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock were not really taken seriously as art or even as fine films until they were championed by the young Turks at Cahiers, of which Godard was a proud member. This was the moment that Godard was entering the dialogue created by film; and he was doing so with full knowledge that he was doing something new (and more than a little ego telling him it was something great). This is one of the few shots in the film where Michel looks like a film-noir hero. Within a few minutes he’s scrambling around and waxing philosophical. Godard teases the audience with this shot, but within moments it’s clear that he had no reservations about letting his viewers know that they were in for a different kind of film than they’d ever seen before.
Rather than lifting the brim of his hat, Michel cranes his neck upwards to reveal his eyes. He examines his surroundings coolly, obviously calculating his move. He spies something and cocks his head camera right. Michel brings his cigarette down and draws his thumb seductively over his lips. A jazzy tune swells almost insurmountably in the background as this first shot cuts to a medium close up of a woman, presumably the subject of Michel’s gaze.
She is standing on a street corner. A car horn blares on the soundtrack. She looks about until meeting someone with her eyes (off screen right) and nodding. She turns her head back left as we cut back to Michel. Michel begins the shot looking camera right, looks left and exhales another giant puff of smoke before looking right again. The nameless woman looks off to the right again, raising her eyebrows. The horn sounds once more. During all of this Godard is breaking the 180-rule. In traditional Hollywood-style filmmaking one character would look left and the other right and the implication would be that they were looking at one another; this is called eyeline match and it is a convention that is seldom ignored. Eyeline match is not maintained as each character looks to their left to interact with the other. The breaking of this simple rule could foreshadow the fact that Michel will be leaving her behind in a few seconds; that he is simply using her to get the car and is only interested in himself. More likely, however, is that Godard was breaking with cinematic convention for the sake of doing so. It’s a film nerd’s rebel yell to break these little rules.
Godard cuts to a couple exiting their car. The front end of the car is pushing out of the bottom right corner. The couple walks screen right and the camera pans right to follow. The man who has exited from the driver’s side wears the hat of a French military man. We cut back to the medium close-up of Michel who looks up. The next shot has the woman who Michel has been interacting with frantically waving, the couple who have just exited their car walking away in the background. She waves to her left and gestures for Michel to come to her. The camera pans slightly to the right as she turns and follows the couple.
We return to Michel, this time framed in a medium shot, looking to his right. He folds his newspaper and starts to walk forward and right. Godard cuts to a shot of small boats in the harbor and pans left to reveal Michel’s girl watching one boat depart: this is the couple from the car. She walks left as we cut to Michel, framed by the open hood, hotwiring the car. He slams the hood and we cut back to Michel’s girl: right where we left her. She runs left to jump in the car. Godard cuts to a shot from the backseat of the car, panning left to follow Michel as he opens the door and hops in. He slams the door as the girl walks up. He rolls down the windows and listens to her plea to take her with him but snidely remarks: “gotta make tracks, Max.” (This is not the actual line, which is actually a rhyme with the name Alphonse, but the subtitled version most commonly seen preserves the rhyme rather than a more literal translation.)
This entire sequence comprises less than a minute of screen time but a great deal is already revealed about Michel’s character and Godard’s style as a filmmaker. Godard is willing to break the rules: his disregard of the 180-degree rule in the first three cuts would not have gone unnoticed by an experienced cinematographer like Coutard or any self respecting script-girl (a horrible title which has since been replaced by continuity supervisor) but Godard knew what he was doing and was clearly interested in playing with space, and breaking rules. The editing is snappy, the viewer doesn’t have any time to catch their breath trying to figure out anything about this self-proclaimed asshole. She is asked to track four separate characters introduced in very rapid succession. We learn that Michel is more than a little cocky; he has no problem blatantly saying he’s an “asshole” and goes out of his way to raise his head to look at things below the brim of his hat. Rather than adjusting it he tries to look cool. Cool is important for Godard, but more than this the image of cool is important. In this first minute we’ve learned a lot about our hero. We discover that not only is Michel a thief, he is without honor. Willing to ditch the woman who helped him steal the car, he’s the kind of guy who goes on to dismiss her with a cutesy little rhyme.
The music swells as the shot of Michel backing up slowly dissolves into one of the front of the car driving through the country. We can hear Michel singing loudly to himself. There is a medium shot of Michel craning his neck to look behind him saying to himself: “he thinks he’s going to pass me in his crappy little Renault.” We go back to the shot looking out of the windshield at the road as Michel continues to sing. His singing serves as an aural bridge over several jump cuts to different areas of the country. These jump cuts are the stylistic innovation that “Breathless” is most remembered for.
The original running time of the first cut of “Breathless” was two and a half hours. The film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard wanted a 90-minute thriller. Godard obliged by going through his film and strategically cutting out the parts of individual scenes that he felt weren’t exciting or energetic enough, the banal moments. He then spliced the scenes back together. The result is a new kind of film, jazzy and freeform. It is filled with a youthful energy that mirrored the youth culture of Paris and worldwide at the time and that is how Breathless found its audience.
These seemingly small things make the first few minutes of “Breathless” quite unlike those of any other previous movie. Godard plays with what we thought we knew to be true of all films. It is turning convention on its head that leads Godard to make us think that cinematic rules are made to be broken, conventions destroyed. It’s an act of violence and this is important. All of the stylistic innovations and rule-breaking make “Breathless” a new kind of film for a new generation of film viewers. Godard uses jump cuts in “Breathless” to play with traditional notions of time and space in film. In the opening car scene we’re looking at one area of road at one moment and in the next we’re in a completely different place but still looking at the road through Michel’s windshield. The shots seeming arbitrariness leads to the viewer’s perception of improvisation on the part of the filmmakers, and they are Godard firmly asserting that he is determined to make films his own way. These jump cuts are nothing special by today’s standards-watch MTV for 5 minutes and you’ll see them numerous times, but to say that in 1960 this was a radical technique is an understatement- mind-blowing comes a bit closer.
One feels the distinct influence of Bertolt Brecht in Breathless, as with every subsequent Godard film. There are several moves stolen directly from the Brecht playbook, most notably the use of distanciation/alienation. The narrative not only calls attention to the means of production, it is fractured (to say the least) at times. Our understanding of the breaking of the 180-degree rule, use of insufficient and natural lighting sources, and the moments of direct address (where the characters speak directly to the audience or look right at the camera), is deepened when viewed through a Brechtian lens.
Michel’s direct address of the audience calls us to reflection. He not only talks to us, but talks to us hostilely, saying if we don’t love the mountains as he does that we can “go screw ourselves.” During this scene the camera becomes an impersonal narrator, it cedes control to Michel, and makes the spectator active in the filmmaking/film viewing process. Such a move effectively “closes the loop” of the cinematic apparatus, drawing the viewer into an active role. Brecht’s description of Alienation effects in Chinese Acting can be read as describing exactly what is going on here:
The efforts in question were directed to playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the [film]. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s sub-conscious (94).
When the audience cannot identify with the characters directly (in this case because Michel is not only speaking to us directly but in a menacing way) they are forced into action. They have to think about why this is different from what they have internalized as “normal” in filmic terms.
Perhaps the most Brechtian technique in Breathless is the frequent use of jump cuts. When the linearity of the individual scene is interrupted by the jump-cuts, the spectator can no longer identify with the film as a film, or at least as a film like they’ve known previously. They are free to reinterpret it in its own context. Breathless is considered by many to be a masterpiece of post-modernism. It is filled with quotations from literature, as well as other films. It is highly reflexive in no small part because the narrative calls attention to the inherent mediations of the cinema. As the police are giving chase to Michel, Godard himself appears in the film. His character (perhaps he is even appearing as himself) recognizes Michel from his picture, which has appeared in the paper, and points him out to a passing policeman. It’s as if Godard is saying, “I’m the one who’s in charge here. I call the shots.” Wheeler Dixon quotes an interview in which Godard said, “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside of the human body- both go together and cannot be separated (28).” Perhaps the only film of Godard’s that illustrates this quote better than “Breathless” is “Contempt.”
Comparing the directorial style of 1960’s “Breathless” to 1963’s “Contempt” is ultimately the study of a director who is not interested in repeating himself, but one who nonetheless had a great deal of continuity in the themes, settings, and stories of his films.
Godard examines American moviemaking in “Contempt,” an adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo. Jack Palance plays an American movie producer who brings scriptwriter and failed psuedo-intellectual Michel Piccoli in to salvage an adaptation of the Odyssey being directed by Fritz Lang (playing himself) at Cinecitta. An early scene takes place in a screening room at the fabled cinematic home of the Italian giants. Present in the room are Lang, Palance’s character Prokosch, Piccoli’s Paul, and Palance’s secretary/translator (played by Georgia Moll). None of the characters present in the screening room have the same native tongue. Lang screens his dailies for all present but his version of Homer’s epic turns out to be too “high concept” for profit minded Palance. Palance goes on a rampage and throws reels of film around the screening room. He insists that what he is seeing is not what was in the script. When he orders the translator to bring him a script he concedes that it is all, in fact, in there, but he still points accusingly at Lang and says, “You cheated me, Fritz.” Lang replies, “Naturally, because in the script it is written, on the screen it’s pictures.” Lang wryly dumbs down his previous hyper-intellectualism to get Palance to understand. This is Godard’s way of commenting on the relationship between director and producer; the director is always forced to explain his vision to the bean counters. Throughout this entire scene the translator is furiously trying to keep Piccoli in the loop as Palance and Lang argue in English.
This translation becomes a major theme throughout the film. There are three languages being spoken regularly throughout the film: English, Italian, and French. It is not a coincidence that Contempt had three executive producers: Joseph Levine of the U.S., Carlo Ponti from Italy, and Godard’s old friend Georges de Beauregard. There were orders being barked at Godard from all sides through translators as he was trying to adapt a novel to the screen about adapting a novel to the screen. Translation is a key element throughout all of this. Nothing would be possible had the novel not been translated from Italian to French, or had Godard’s people not contacted Jack Palance’s through a translator. Most importantly perhaps, the film would have never been made had Godard not translated the book to the cinematic medium.
Needless to say the film has a complex relationship to the idea of translation. Translation is what has made the international co-production possible and also made things difficult for everyone involved. In Godard’s typically modernist fashion he worked this into the film thematically; every major character is dependent on the translator to convey their simplest ideas to the others. Paul and Lang are asked to translate to the screen a novel translated from an ancient text. In a film that is essentially about the dissolution of communication destroying a relationship, translation is just another obstacle between people. It gets in the way.
Lang has to this point spoken almost entirely in quotes, much to the chagrin of the Palance character who cannot ever truly understand the German master. Palance, ever the angry American that he is caricaturing, realizes that he is being patronized and takes a can of film and hurls it like a discus into the wall. He comes to represent all the producers that Godard had come to know, demanding and ambivalent to any creative process. He’s only interested in money. Lang says, “Finally you get the feel of Greek culture.” Palance is furious but solves the problem in the only way he knows. He takes out his checkbook. He violently bends the translator over and writes the check on her lower back. His violence and lack of any sort of morals are emphasized through his characterization in this scene. As this is happening Lang says: “Some years ago - some horrible years ago - the Nazis used to take out a pistol instead of a checkbook.” This is not the only time Prokosch is compared to a Nazi. Time and again the producer is painted as a fascist but in the end it is Paul who accepts the job, implicating the French filmmakers as well.
This scene encapsulates many of the themes of the film as a whole. Godard is commenting on the American movie industry’s way of solving problems and relating to the world. They throw money at problems and disrespect the work of the masters by throwing around their work indiscriminately. This is distinctively self-reflexive for “Contempt” itself was a big budget international production (that Jack Palance tried to quit daily.) But it is the act of the character Paul that is most significant. He takes the check and rewrites the film and, in doing so, is implicit in the desecration of Lang’s art. He has prostituted himself, abandoned his dreams for money. Prostitution is a theme JLG would return to time and again. Both Nana in “Vivre sa Vie” and Juliet in “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” are actual prostitutes, while the heroes of “Les Carabiniers” prostitute themselves to the military and Bruno in “Le Petit Soldat” prostitutes himself to French Intelligence. Nothing good comes of this. All of these characters are tragically cut down.
There are some narrative similarities between “Contempt” and “Breathless.” Throughout his career Godard sought new techniques to tell his stories and he was largely successful in this endeavor. In his audio commentary for “Contempt” film scholar Robert Stam refers to this as Godard’s constant search for new ways of filming banal situations (Le Mépris). There is a scene in “Contempt” that in many ways resembles the longest sequence in “Breathless,” the 27-minute apartment sequence. The key difference is that while the scene in the earlier film is at its core a seduction scene, “Contempt’s” apartment sequence is about the dissolution of communication in a relationship, the end rather than the beginning. Both scenes last for roughly half an hour in one apartment and are the most stylistically daring in their respective films.
There is a particularly beautiful shot in “Contempt”: Paul and Camille sit across from one another at a table with a lamp between them. The camera slowly pans from one character to the other as they argue. Sometimes the camera is looking at the one who is doing the talking; sometimes it is not. Godard returns to familiar waters in the seeming arbitrariness of his pans, but it’s the space that lies between them that is telling. There is a physical and emotional space between Paul and Camille. Their lack of communication puts them in different frames. Even when they appear in the frame together, they seem to hug the opposite edges of the wide Franscope shots. In this way it is the framing of “Contempt” that pushes the lovers apart.
The beautiful shot in Breathless comes a bit into the bedroom scene, when Patricia rolls up a poster and looks at Michel through it. She creates an iris-shot that zooms in on his face. We cut to the two of them passionately kissing. The sex follows soon after. Where aesthetics push Paul and Camille apart in Contempt it is the editing and framing bring Michel and Patricia together. He is all she sees in that moment and the cut to the kiss is almost jarring it is so sudden. It’s a much more playful scene, but Breathless is a much more playful film. These two scenes could almost be films onto themselves except for the fact that they have little if any payoff. In “Breathless” the sex is only ever implied, and in “Contempt” the conversation is ended, nearly mid-sentence, when Camille declares that she has nothing but contempt for her husband Paul just as she is leaving the apartment. This lack of definitive endings is important to Godard. What’s more important than sex or reasons for hating one’s spouse are the little moments in between the big revelations: the ordinary squabbles or flirting, and the conversations they have. These two scenes provide second act’s which in a way touch on almost all of the thematic content of the film from the safety of an apartment. They are ordinary moments that describe the entirety of the film. The space is electrified by the naturalistic performances that Godard demands from his actors (or in the case of “Breathless,” with its dialogue written the day it was shot, he had little choice but to accept.)
These two films are by no means the end of Godard’s career and in reality are just the beginning of a further radicalization on the part of the filmmaker, both aesthetically and politically. Brian Henderson’s “Towards a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style” examines a trend in Godard’s camerawork beginning in the late sixties and continuing into the early seventies. It dissects the lateral tracking shot, most clearly seen in “Le Week-end,” and describes it in relation to other filmmaker’s camera styles. He posits that that the shot is Eisensteinian in nature, in that Godard denies the “individualist conception of the bourgeois hero (58).” Henderson points out that these tracking shots “serve no individual and prefer none to another. (The camera) never initiates movement to follow a character and if it picks one up as it moves it leaves him behind as haphazardly.”
There is a distinctive shot in “Le Week-end” where the couple are sitting by the side of the road in long shot, straight on, the camera slowly tracks to the right, abandoning the couple. It moves about twenty feet up the road, stops, and then returns to the couple. The sound of all of the couple’s conversation, obviously recorded in postproduction, remains at the same level. This shot (stolen and used perhaps more effectively by Scorsese in Taxi Driver) doesn’t reveal some sort of visual ADHD on the part of Godard or Coutard; it is rather, another example of the intentional use of Brecht’s alienation effect. It is not enough that we never identify with his characters on any human level; he chooses to use his camera to alienate us from them as well. He alienates us very intentionally to detach us from the couple, who are themselves quite despicable characters, as they discuss the possibility of murdering her father to gain her inheritance.
We’re further alienated by the realization that this strange camera move is entirely non-subjective. Henderson is quick to point out that the movement of the “camera does not affect the reality it unfolds and is not affected by it (58).” It is camera movement for camera movement’s sake and does not represent an eyeline match for any character. There is another important connection to Eisenstein here. In a 1962 interview, Godard was quoted saying he had started in an essentially documentarian mode, which he said was exemplified in the films of Robert Flaherty, and could see himself moving into a more constructed fictional way of creating films, like Eisenstein and Hitchcock for whom he said “shooting is merely a practical application.” He characterized these saying they “seek beauty, which, if they find it, will…be true (Godard, Critic to Filmmaker).” He said that he “started from the imaginary and discovered reality; [and] behind reality, there is again imagination (63).” By filming reality in a completely alienating way Godard forces us to reflect on the inherent mediations of the cinema.
This is a shocking camera move in that it could never be written off as anything less than completely intentional and completely in opposition to traditional modes of Hollywood-style filmmaking. The rules that Godard begins to break at the end of the sixties with films like “Le Week-end” are the most basic cinematic and storytelling rules until he seems to abandon causality entirely in the seventies. These changes in his style are reflections of his aesthetic and political radicalization. Godard had long ago declared that Hollywood was dead, and that 1963 marked “the end of cinema (Le Mepris),” and as such any cinematic rules were out. He had also become a staunch leftist, and considered his films of this time to be violent outbursts against the bourgeoisie.
Peter Wollen seeks to reveal all of Godard’s tricks with his essay “Godard and Counter Cinema” by placing the “seven deadly sins of the cinema” (as perpetrated by Hollywood-Mosfilm” in contrast to the “seven cardinal virtues,” as championed by Godard. He describes Godard’s commitment to narrative intransitivity as inherent in his films from the mid-sixties. This denial of traditional narrative techniques is shown in the story structure of films like “Le Week-end” but I would argue that narrative intransitivity is present stylistically from “Breathless” on. The jump cuts and breaks from the 180-degree line in “Breathless” can make for a confused viewer (this feeling could have only been worse in 1960.) They also leave the viewer estranged (another of Wollen’s virtues.) Not only are we not meant to identify with the characters as entities in themselves; the editing alienates the audience. It almost seems like a logical progression to have the camera begin to abandon them as it does in “Le Week-end” and eventually to simply ignore character entirely as in “Histoire(s) Du Cinema.”
Wollen’s analysis of the struggle between closure and aperture is telling. He looks at the different approaches, the latter being the one the Godard prefers using these terms: “(A self-contained object, harmonized within its own bounds, v. open-endedness, overspill, intertextuality-allusion, quotation and parody.)” Intertextuality is present from the beginning, when JLG has “Breathless’” Michel refuse to buy a copy of Cahiers and we see an Italian poster for Vivre sa Vie on the walls of Cinecitta in “Contempt.” Intertexuality is further reinforced by Godard’s use of quotation; which is interestingly textured by Godard’s working methods. His characters quote, at length. They quote from film and literature, ad-campaigns and political campaigns. Godard quotes with his camera, stealing moves from Eisenstein and Fellini. But it is the manner in which these films are made that makes this quoting fascinating to me. For many of Godard’s early films, the sound was not recorded directly and the actors were simply repeating after their director, who would pace behind the camera calling out lines as they occurred to him or as he had written them that morning. This achieves as close to stream of consciousness filmmaking as seems possible within the (semi) traditional narrative form. The content reflects the way the films were made.
To me this is representative of Godard’s work as a whole. Content, style, and mode of production all get jumbled together into a beautiful mess. A film is not just a film, but a way of looking at the world through a lens that can make it so much clearer. Godard received his education in the cinema and spent years both quoting and reinventing his medium. He had the unique ability to use the past to shape the future and that’s exciting for the viewer and the scholar alike. It’s understandable that after accomplishing this feat for years he went on to other pastures, and I think it’s history that will ultimately judge if they are greener in the end.
