2 or 3 things I'm not sure I know about Jean-Luc Godard

Godard directing Breathless: He is in the jacket standing in the corner. Jean Seberg is sitting in front of the window, looking as if she's nervously reading the script Godard has just handed her, whereas by contrast Jean-Paul Belmondo seems to be killing time, flipping through a magazine on the bed. That's Raoul Coutard at the camera, no mention of who the woman in the white sweater is, and Picasso is stuck on the wall.

My little homage to French film director Jean-Luc Godard, who died Sept. 13 last year. This was originally posted on Sept. 23.

We are still burying the 20^th century. Lots of famous people have been dying off recently, and in some cases (Gorbachev, the Royal Turd) the less said the better. But one death that deserves marking is Jean-Luc Godard. First the irony of how he made his exit: via assisted suicide. Of course there is something admirable in that: he was 91, exhausted by living according to reports, and chose to shuffle off on his own terms. Becoming myself increasingly acquainted with the physical and spiritual indignities of old age, I sympathize. I’m also nowadays of the opinion that there is no such thing as ‘a good death’, that this is a fairy tale we tell ourselves, that dying is always a violence, always a painful rupture. At the end of Breathless, Belmondo’s character Michel Poiccard, has been shot by the cops and is lying on the street dying; his last words are: “Makes me want to puke.” Maybe Godard thought this way about death too. But what’s ironic is that his career is impossible to separate from the Sixties, the Nouvelle Vague, even though he continued working far into old age and the new century. Impossible, in other words, to separate him from the excitement of that era, the dizzying feeling that anything was possible. The characters in his movies are never happy, terrible things happen to them or they make them happen - but Belmondo, Leaud, Seberg, Karina: they were so beautifully youthful and vibrant, and that belies their fate. It's as if they were figures out of Botticelli fucked up by modern life. That’s the irony: that this conjurer of irrepressible youth fades out in a small, sad death in a nothing Swiss town.

I watched Breathless again recently. It’s enough to make you want to jump off the couch and make a movie. Over sixty years old and it still has that Dziga Vertov/Man With A Movie Camera kick: everything is new under the sun. What was ‘breathless’ was how much fun Godard and Raoul Coutard were having in making the movie and breaking all the rules doing it. But is there anybody around today making movies with that kind of kick to them? I’m not talking about the technical stuff like jump cuts and hand-held cameras which quickly got copied and done to death. I’m guessing there aren’t many (or any?) such movie-makers because if you make it through the wringer of a ‘film studies’ department and then, worse still, the ‘industry’, you’re bred not to be breathless but to always be looking over your shoulder. And Godard bears some responsibility for that, he and his Cahiers pals like Truffaut and Rohmer: they’re the seed that spawned ‘film studies’. I suppose I should add that there’s nothing inherently wrong with studying film, on the contrary; rather it’s that such studies, predictably, got deadened into a scholasticism, a lot of it trivial and/or monumentally boring. Predictably because the social context went sour, utopian hopes evaporated and the intellectual deep-freeze of postmodernism set in. Also the movies got shittier. Anyway you can’t invent a revolutionary era and you can’t fake it. Still it’s heartening to see that Breathless is still a joy to watch, it’s not just a time capsule. Maybe also a little heart-breaking because it reminds us – or at any rate reminds me – of how few of that era’s possibilities panned out. As for instance: nobody who’s young today seems Breathless-ly young anymore. 

I don’t want to make it sound as if Godard is uncritical about his characters, especially the guy played by Belmondo: he’s shown as being screwed up, violent, lost in a maze of stealing cars and chasing after (and never finding) other guys who supposedly owe him money; his one big aspiration seems to be to go off to Italy on a vacation with Seberg’s character. In other words, he’s on a treadmill going nowhere. But it’s done with such a light touch, with elan, that his ‘tragic fate’ doesn’t hit you over the head. On the most obvious level – so obvious I never noticed before – the movie is full of sunlight, there’s not a dark room or hallway anywhere. If this was supposed to be Godard’s version of a gangster flic, all that light turns it into … not a parody exactly but a subversion. It’s a film noir theme made as a film blanc. And in that light we get less caught up in feeling and more in thought.

I also don’t want to overdo it about Breathless, it isn’t Godard’s best. I’d say that’s Vivre Sa Vie, the closest I think he ever came to melodrama. Even in movies I don’t like (e.g. Alphaville, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her) there are moments that register. And I like some of his later films, like Every Man for Himself. I like his un-laughtrack sense of humor and his coolness when it comes to matters like sex: he doesn’t sentimentalize or indulge in masturbatory fantasies (as per Hollywood romances and romcoms) but he also doesn’t ignore it. In Breathless there’s a long scene in Seberg’s bedroom where Belmondo is trying to have sex with her and she keeps putting him off, unsure herself whether she wants to keep seeing this guy; finally he gets her under the sheets, you see only the outlines of their bodies doing some innocent tousling, as if they were kids fooling around after lights out, while ‘Music While You Work’ blares from the radio. It’s all over quickly, and when he asks her if it was good, she replies stiffly (in English): Yes sir. Which is pretty remarkable for 1960, and even for today frankly. In Every Man for Himself, from twenty years later, there’s a scene of a creepy businessman, constantly smoking and on the phone (to Montreal, of all places!), who has his gofer guy arrange for a Rube Goldberg type sexual tryst with two prostitutes, including one played by Isabelle Huppert. It’s a bit Marquis de Sade until the boss decides he wants a soundtrack. Each of the ‘paid’ bodies (prostitutes and gofer) gets their own sound to make – “Ai, Oh, Hey” – whenever they are touched, and then the last of the trio (Huppert) has to put lipstick on the boss’s face. Nothing deflates sexual fantasy more effectively than ridicule, but my guess is that Godard is up to more here. Among his technical innovations is the disruptive way he used soundtracks, jarring with the action instead of melting into it (as for instance: cue the violins for the big kiss). Here he takes this a step further, the characters themselves make the sounds that undermine the fantasy. But this is a double distancing since within the fiction of the film, the ‘paid’ bodies are just playing along with the boss’s fantasy. And for me at any rate, that works to widen the lens, to see not only a pathetic creep of a boss but also a telling image of degraded sex in a bosses’ world. Too bad we’ll never get to see what Godard could have done with internet porn. 

I’ll leave it at that. This isn’t a proper appreciation but just a few, somewhat scattered thoughts. To which I’ll add one more, in this case a prediction: that film isn’t going to be in the 21^st century what it was to Godard and his pals in the 20^th – the great modern art form. I doubt I’m risking much in saying this. Of course film still has lots of cachet, popularity, glamour, but so did theatre over a century ago, until it was overtaken by film. One possibility (which I favour) is that film will be overtaken by an older art – photography – and the prime evidence I offer is that 5 billion people are currently walking around with cameras in their pockets. But this is probably just wishful thinking on my part, since I’m a photographer. A safer bet would be to say that the big breakthrough in this century will be a breakdown: of the distinctions between the ‘specialists’ who make art and the masses who consume it. Photography already has to contend with such a breakdown, and movies won’t be far behind. Which might end up being a total disaster for art or it might end up being a harbinger of a new kind of culture, one that I don’t think Godard would have found discouraging.