Everything is Cinema
Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930 and has been operational since
1950 as a critic, essayist, director, writer and performer of cinema. Godard, along with D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles is one
of the great grammarians of the cinema.
The unfortunate outcome of Godard’s Olympian quest however, is
widespread ignorance of the ultimate findings of his study of cinematic
language from within, as represented by the last 30 years of his output;
compared with an over familiarity and concentration on his first 8 years of
filmmaking. This is put in context by
Godard’s most recent biographer, Richard Brody, as the equivalent of painters,
critics, collectors, the media and the general public ignoring the works of Picasso
after he abandoned Cubism.
Those left listening and watching are left in an
unavoidable elitism which is not only contrary to many of Godard’s beliefs but
also represents a cul-de-sac ending for this great journey, reminiscent of
Godard’s final feature of his early years, Weekend
(1967). The medium of cinema cannot be
completely overhauled by one man in almost total isolation, and unless
filmmakers critics and audience together conspire to end the dominance of
narrative, lowest-common-denominator, mass-entertainment driven cinema, then
Godard’s fulfilment of the nouvelle vague’s original promise to give the world
a new cinematic language (la camera stylo) which would help cinema to achieve
its potential as an art form that would rival painting, literature or music
will be in vain for the time being. Like
an echo of the now towering presence of Friederich Nietzsche, Godard remains an
almost embarrassing prophet in his own time.
Susan Sontag in 1968 also likened Godard’s influence on
his chosen medium to be similar to that of Picasso in painting and Schoenberg
in music. To this list, the former head
of production at the BFI (and Godard producer and biographer) Colin MacCabe,
has added the writer James Joyce whose novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake
were to change literature forever. Paris Match also in 1968 compared a
world without Godard, to one without Bob Dylan.
This might all seem like it’s putting too much empahasis on the “great
men” of each medium, but Godard did not create the cult of the great artist or
the cult of celebrity, they are simply two more dialogues which he has entered
into and which add yet more layers for his audience to assimilate and process.
The many layers of Godard’s cinematic output offers
another Nietzschean echo, for similar to the great German philosopher, Godard
has attempted from the outset to mix his media in order to radically alter the
modes of discourse in the darkened if not hallowed space of the cinema
theatre. Nietzsche had come to his
philosophical theories through the example and inspiration of the composer
Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamkunstwerk, or total-work-of-art, which saw
opera as the art work of the future and if produced to the height of its
potential to offer a totalising experience for the audience, who could hope for
spiritual, emotional and intellectual enrichment as opposed to a mere evening’s
entertainment. Nietzsche looked to many
disciplines outside of philosophy to try and reconstitute human morality,
having already torn down the twin towers of idealism and metaphysics. Similarly, Godard has mixed a knowledge of
classical Hollywood cinema, with a similar awareness of the european art-house
tradition, a love of literature and music with an insatiable lust for all
things cultural from dance to painting and sculpture, philosophy and politics,
aesthetics and anthropology all the time worrying about the encroachment of
American imperialism and its detrimental effect on the culture of Europe. He is also in recent years more and more
concerned with cinema’s relationship to memory and its role in not allowing
certain attrocities to be forgotten, especially those perpetrated by the Nazi’s
in the concentration camps of World War 2, and its role in tackling
contemporary atrocities such as the abadonment by the West of the city of
Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. All of
this mixture is framed by Godard’s complete willingness to offer himself and
his own humanity in all its strength’s and weaknesses as subject matter in his
own cinema and in his own on-going creation of Jean-Luc Godard, media star, as
evidenced by a fascination with the interview process from the outset of his
career. He has clearly, in a paraphrase
of Pasolini, thrown his body into the struggle.
In Breathless, Godard steps into a mode of practice which
at the time had more in common with the Beat Generation of writers and the jazz
musicians associated with them. The main
stylistic trait which Godard’s early features were to share with the Beats, was
that of improvisation. This is clearly
evidenced in the wandering up and down of the Champs Elysées of Michel and
Patricia which was simply made up as they went along. This improvisational feel is maintained in
the next few films by the shear speed at which Godard made them, after all he
completed 15 in 8 years. This use of
American culture to attack it from within, is a Nietzschean act of creative
destruction with Godard aligning himself with those artists most marginalized
by the contemporary American political and social realities. The spirit of Breathless and the Beats were
to coalesce at the end of the 1960s with such films as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy
Pieces where the central anti-hero is alienated from all traditional forms of
human organisation whether they be work or family related. For Godard, and in the context of being a
practising European artist, the influences of popular American culture are
juxtaposed with Brechtian alienation techniques in breaking down the fourth
wall and shouting at the audience to wake them from their consenting slumber.
If the professional world of film has taken little or no
notice of Godard since the 1960s then the 15 feature films he made in the eight
year period from Breathless in 1959 to Weekend in 1967 represent the single
most influential ouevre of the last 50 years.
Breathless with its fusion of jazz and philosophy was according to
Richard Brody the film which inspired other directors to make films in a
different way, sparking young people’s desire to make cinema, showing the
possibilities and the excitement of the art form of a new generation, and
Godard’s influence can be seen all over the best of the other new waves which
grew up in the wake of the nouvelle vague.
We can see him in the best of Wim Wenders and others of the New German
Cinema in their reworking of lessons learned from American cinema, and even in
the wayward genius of Werner Herzog, who certainly manages to make films in a
different way. Most tellingly of all,
are the lessons learned from Godard by the directors of the New Hollywood, who
saw in Godard a filmmaker of intellectual and political courage and an obvious
example to look to in an America deeply divided by the war in Vietnam. Godard’s reworking of classic American genres
can be seen in films as diverse as Bonnie
and Clyde and Chelsea Girls, but
probably reaches its zenith with Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver in 1976. Here was a film which confused genres but
also mixed jazz and philosophy, religion and psychosis to give America a window
through which to examine itself in the wake of its failures in Vietnam and a
decade of social unrest. Here, in the
spirit of Godard was a film which took the idea of ordinary decent American
hero and turned it on its head mercilessly.
Godard’s Nietzschean aphorisms were to be the inspiration for one of the
biggest commercial hits for the generation which followed in Scorsese’s wake,
with Quentin Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction
in 1994. Tarrantino turned the mixing of
genres into an art form all its own and dressed it up with some of the smartest
dialogue since the days of Billy Wilder, but it was all a bit too slick, with
the dialogue more clever than intelligent, and ultimately a triumph of style
over substance.
Ultimately, cinema is Godard’s vocation. His is a secular conversion according to
Brody, firstly to art but specifically to cinema, and his holy city was Paris,
birthplace of theatrical cinema. The
depth of this conversion can be seen in another aphorism from his early
critical writing: “At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.” In this phrase the barriers between cinema,
its audience and its makers disappear and Godard’s existence and that of the
cinema are already fused (Brody p3).
This fusion can be seen in full flight in Godard’s official cinematic
autobiography over forty years later, JLG/JLG:autoportrait
de Decembre (1994).
In Praise of Eloge
de L’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001)
Watching this again it is clear to see its logical
placement at the end of the Histoire(s) journey, as Godard begins in the
present in beautiful classical black and white celluloid and ends up in the
past in painterly saturated high definition video. The ironies abound as usual but the message
is very clear, the classical western search for meaning is pointless for their
is no meaning to life, only love. For
Godard, like Nietzsche and Weil before him, we must fall in love with loving
not try to understand it as this is something which we will simply and
spectacularly fail at. The levels of
discussion engaged by Godard in this film are quite astounding as he examines
to varying degrees the creative process, the French Resistance movement, Nazi
Art theft, Christian Mysticism, American Imperialism and of course love in its
many guises.
Quotes:
“I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything
up and say everything.”
“Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like A bout de souffle very much, but now I
see where it belongs – along with Alice
in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface.”
“Cinema is truth, twenty four frames a second.”
“Only violence helps where violence rules.” Bertolt
Brecht
“And if cinema today still works on television, it’s
because television itself has no love ... On television you can find power in
its pure state, and the only things that people like seeing on TV at all are
sports and cinema films, and that is because they seek love ...”
