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.
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
Wonderful encapsulation of what made Godard great, Peter. It was that 'being knocked around' by his films which I loved and which drew me to him right from my early days at university when most of my fellow students would just get up and walk out of those lunch-time screenings put on by the Student Union. Not that there was anything unusual about them walking out of anything slightly unusual. They walked out on Pasolini, Fellini and Antonioni, and even Woody Allen to name but a few, preferring, I suppose more conventional and easily-digested dreck such as that playing on any given day at the local twin cinema (this being a time before megaplexes). It's a great pity that the Australian mainstream media has relegated JL-G's death to (mostly) small pieces reprinted from European newspapers. down the back of the arts section where few people will even notice it. If that's what one of the single most iconic filmmakers in the world gets in recognition of his services to cinema, what can the rest of us experimentalists expect? Not much, I assume.
ReplyDeleteDavid, people like us are are very fortunate if we get noticed at all. And that's why I value so much the contribution that you, Bill Mousoulis, and Chris Luscri have made to local independent filmmakers. Without your efforts our films would be unknown.
DeleteWell put Peter. It's quite true that seeing the Godards as they came out, each a threat and a challenge, was a vastly different experience to catching up with them later. It's interesting that almost everything being written is mostly about the streak of films from Breathless through to Weekend and La Chinoise around the end of the 60s. After that he made dozens more films but very few had any wide circulation.
ReplyDeleteTrue, Geoff. But many of us cinephiles (and as combined cinephiles/cineastes) were acutely aware of all the films he made, including the small projects, even if we didn't have access to view the smaller ones in particular. In the '80s I was blown away by the essay-videos he would make, some to accompany the features. Films like SOFT AND HARD, GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE, and SCENARIO DU FILM PASSION. In GRANDEUR, Dylan gets a play on the turntable, and I always liken Godard to Dylan - the groovy '60s period followed by weird digressions into politics or religion, to then return finally to more rounded and mature works in their mid to late period. For me, personally, my holy trinity of cinema is Godard, Bresson and Rossellini. It's been like that for over 20 years, no-one else has come even close in my estimation.
DeleteI've never seen those 3 films you mention Bill, in fact I have not even heard of them.
DeleteIf you felt inclined to write something a bit more detailed about them I think it would be appreciated by our friends.
SOFT AND HARD in particular is a great conversation between himself ("hard") and his partner Anne-Marie Mieville ("soft"). Mainly in their home, and there are skits interspersed like Godard grabbing a tennis racquet and doing various swings of it. He was one of a kind ! There are other shorts, I haven't seen, like MEETING W.A. (that's Woody Allen!). I see that is on Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/80563257. Ah, great films, great director, "what can one say" indeed !
DeletePondering Jean-Luc Godard's death - MADE IN USA (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966)
ReplyDeletePondering Godard’s death I watched Made In USA (J-L G, 1966) again yesterday. Incoherent narrative, as usual, but brilliant ending with a speech about politics by Karina/Paula Nelson that still rings true.
The DVD had an intro of about 3.5 minutes by Godard biographer Colin McCabe which I think gets one important piece of the narrative completely wrong!
Extras include excellent 10 min interview with Anna Karina.
Absolutely beautiful colour photography by Coutard.
Another appearance by Ernest Menzer, as Edgar Typhus. We used to think he must have been Godard’s father judging by the frequency of his cameo roles, usually as some kind of nuisance.
Marianne Faithfull is credited as a lead. She gets to sing 'As Tears Go By' unaccompanied. That's it.
Kyôko Kosaka as Doris Mizoguchi, Anna Karina as Paula Nelson, Made in USA
As far as I know it was never commercially released in Australia. It is the least known of the pre-1970 winning streak. This arose because Godard credited a novel by Donald Westlake as the source but didn’t bother to buy the rights. Westlake held up the US release for decades. The film finally opened in 2009, after Westlake died. Not that anyone would have the remotest idea of the ‘source’ novel but for it being specifically stated in the credits.
Subtitles at one stage translate a loudspeaker announcement asking for “Daisy Canion to come to the front desk…”
I say no more.
Thanks for that Geoff. I always wanted to see it. If I'm not mistaken it was made about the same time as "Two Or Three Things I Know Of Her" which Godard edited along with "Made in USA" in 2 separate editing rooms, at the same time, going from one film to the other in post -production. But I heard that very many years ago so I may have got it wrong.
DeletePeter, there were certainly were two films made at the exact same time, in that period. It's probably those two. Heady stuff. Before the communist windchange and denunciation of mainstream bourgeois capitalist cinema ! (you gotta love the guy)
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