He was born on this day.
Coincidentally, the year before Jean-Luc Godard died, I decided to watch his filmography in chronological order, starting with his shorts (many of which are on YouTube). I wrote about this experience in my December 2021 viewing diary. Of course I’ve seen all of his major films, in some cases many many times. His politics were atrocious – Mao? Really? – and while I didn’t “engage” with his films on a political level, I appreciated the presence of politics in his love stories or domestic dramas. Politics are the air we breathe. American films totally ignore this very obvious fact, so much so it can be extremely alienating the first time you watch a Godard films. Why are young runaway lovers talking about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and reading out loud to each other? Well, you know, that’s what young people do. I mean, they take it a bit FAR in Godard’s world … uhm …
One of my first thoughts when I heard the news he had passed was a sense of gratitude and thankfulness – thankfulness directed towards him, and his spirit, or where he is right now, thankfulness for Breathless. Contempt. Pierrot le fou. Masculin Féminin. 2 or 3 Three Things I Know About Her. La Chinoise. Sympathy for the Devil. Weekend. Band of Outsiders. I return to these films again and again and again. I first saw most of them decades ago. They never get old. They have enriched my life enormously just by existing.
I don’t know quite how to say it except in blunt language: I’m not sure who I’d be without this moment …
in my life.
Or this:
Or this shot:
There are so many more. These moments, scenes, images, aren’t outside of me. They’re in me. Godard is great to discover as a teenager: in fact, I think teenage yearning/outrage is his ideal demographic, as opposed to adult ennui. Godard was rebellious, self-consciously smart, etc. He flaunted his reading. Etc. All things teenagers do – perhaps obnoxiously, but it’s important. God forbid a teenager DOESN’T do that. If a teenager doesn’t question the structures set up around him/her, then they’re just passive “consumers” and … we should just let the world burn then. Godard’s stuff STICKS, and for me these images have the same sticking power – although it’s more cerebral and abstract – as James Dean in his red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause… or Brando on his knees screaming in Streetcar… or Bette Davis walking across a room in … anything. It’s like Al Pacino on the sidewalk in front of the bank in Dog Day Afternoon, or Elvis sliding down the seesaw in the “Jailhouse Rock” number. It’s Joan Crawford’s silhouette. These things have significance and meaning for me and they come up again and again as references – cultural, emotional …
Godard was fully aware of his frame of references and how these references impacted him, and worked on him subconsciously and consciously. He put all of it into his movies. Check out the girls’ bathroom in his 1957 short All the Boys are Called Patrick.
You could see this as “ironic”, I suppose. And, of course, Godard employed irony. Lots of it. But part of his seismic impact was the enthusiasm behind the irony. It wasn’t JUST a post-modern piecing together of disconnected fragments from the past. That bathroom is the landscape of our 20th century dreams.
There are *so many* Godard moments that operate like this for me. Anna Karina’s FACE, for example. It’s not just a beautiful face. It’s an important face. It’s a Helen of Troy face. Once you see it, you are a little bit altered. Things won’t be the same again, because now you have to incorporate her face into your worldview.
Godard revolutionized the movies – in the same way John Cassavetes did, or the Beatles did with music (or … the Stones: no wonder Godard worked with them!) – Breathless went off like a BOMB across the water, and the reverberations shook Hollywood out of its stupor. Breathless inspired a generation. The most amazing thing is that the French New Wave people took our (meaning: American Hollywood directors) so-called trash – our B-movies, our crime noirs, our rock ‘n roll bobby-sox “we hate our parents” movies, our Westerns – they took all this and redeemed it, they loved it more than our “serious” movies, they reflected our “trash” back to us and showed us the brightness of its gleam. The French saved for us what was special about what we were doing, until we were ready to claim it as our own and perceive its value. All of these super hip Marxist French directors adored Johnny Guitar, which was written off by most American critics, but fetishized totally – and rightly so – by the French. I mean, check this out. Banging the drum for Johnny Guitar.
The French New Wave pre-dates my life on the planet, but as soon as I “got into” cinema, I became aware of this crowd – Godard and Truffaut and Agnes Varda and Chabrol and etc. You can’t avoid them, not if you’re into movies. In the same way you can’t avoid Kurosawa or Bergman or etc. I may have been a child of the 80s, but I paid very close attention to Roger Ebert’s writing and these names came up all the time and I wanted to learn: Who is that?
I found out.
And I discovered Breathless, and Band of Outsiders and Contempt and Weekend and, and and …..
It’s Godard’s world. We’re just living in it.
