Recently David King sent me a note to inform me that Jean-Luc Godard had died.
Note, I did not say "passed" or use any other euphemism which might be applied.
Jean-Luc was not the sort of person to stand upon niceties and PC stuff, he was a bit like me old mate Henry Miller who liked to call a spade a spade, so I'm sure he would not want me to use "passed" for "died".
In amongst a swarm of death notices and funeral notices what is one more such notice?
It is a season of dying!
There are so many people of about my own age who are dying I'm starting to get a bit worried about it.
And as for funerals, well the Queen is having her medieval magical funeral tour but I've had far too much exposure and can't bear to hear any more of it. This is not meant to be any sort of putdown of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II... I reckon she gave good service to her people for a very long time, all the while having to contend with a world spiraling out of control and a family which is like a TV sitcom.
So I want to put forward the name of Jean-Luc Godard because two or three of his films changed my life as a filmmaker.
Many great filmmakers have affected the course of my life, I'm not going to list them all because the list is far too long and you would fall asleep long before you cane to the end. Most of them are household names, great directors, great filmmakers, from the very beginnings of Cinema. You know all the names so let's just get on with it.
Like David I have great admiration for Godard. My first viewing of "Vivre Sa Vie" knocked me around a bit. I didn't know what to make of it so my first reaction was to call it the worst film I had ever seen even though I had been deeply drawn by some sequences. By the way I was only about 21 when I saw it, but that is not a good enough excuse for hating it, is it?One scene I was totally gobsmacked by was the scene in the cinema and the montage from The Passion of Joan of Arc by Dreyer intercut with Anna Karina as Nana Kleinfrankenheim.
Well I fell in love with Anna as I had with Falconetti and Dreyer and eventually I fell in love with Godard, but it wasn't easy with Jean-Luc... he was "troublesome". He made me think much more and debate with myself what made a film a good film or a not so good film and why I was so upset by various things in "Vivre Sa Vie"
Finally I came to the conclusion that what was wrong was not the film it was me! I was locked into a certain way of viewing films and here he was trying to upset me so I simply could not continue to view them that way. Then it all started to turn around for me, with every new film by Godard I had to accept that I'm in for a new ride. I could not view his films the way I viewed other people's work, even when they were great works, I had to be prepared to adjust my expectations as each film progressed. If a particular sequence like the postcard sequence from Les Carabiniers seemed ridiculously clunky, well I'm sure he intended that we would have that response. And then it became fun.
If Lemmy Caution passed a vending machine in a corridor in Alphaville which instructed/invited him to "put in a coin" and he did, and if the machine gave nothing in return but said "Merci", well what would you expect?
A few years ago David posted a short story of his on Facebook and he created a short video to go with it. Shades of Alphaville!
The other day I read one of the many journalistic pieces about Godard which was a pitiful summary of his life written by someone who simply did not know what it meant to be torn and changed by the experience of viewing one of his early films "at that time". You just can't get the same effect if you see them long after his films have changed the course of cinema. For those who saw his films when first released, they were confrontations with the act of viewing whereas later on the lessons derived from that period were subsumed into the language of cinema. They would not feel so radical.
It may be accurate to say "Godard reinstated the jump cut" but it might be more accurate to say that Godard was questioning why a film should be locked into a specific time frame and why a long take should not be divided into its most important parts so the audience did not have to experience the less important moments. And even that does not describe the effect of viewing a film like "Breathless" while wondering if someone had butchered the brand new print by cutting sections out of a scene.
So now his life has been cut by the Great Cosmic Jester!
Let me now talk about one piece of his which he wrote for "Cahiers du Cinema" on Hitchcock's film "The Wrong Man". What a piece of writing by Jean-Luc Godard. I first saw that film about 1964 and loved it. I was totally blown away by this most unusual Hitchcock film. Ten years later when I shared it with my students I found the article which Godard had written so many years before and it "taught me"! Godard's piece confirmed all that I had felt about the film and a great deal more:
https://monoskop.org/images/7/7c/Godard_Jean-Luc_Godard_On_Godard.pdf
So now you can all read it, or see the film first and then read it.
Like "Rosebud", how can you summarise the life of a person who gave so much!?
pt
