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Jean-Luc Godard: Truth, 24 Frames a
Second
By Nate Chapman
The French New Wave was one of the
more important movements in the history of film, as it encouraged creativity
and revitalized a movie industry that had grown complacent, and with that
complacency, conservative and predictable. It used new, radical techniques like
long shots and stressed existential themes. It also borrowed heavily from
Italian Neorealism in that it tried to have the actors be realistic in their
dialogue and actions. The story wasn’t always linear, nor was it necessarily
the most important aspect of the film. In a phrase, the New Wave shook up the
cinema status-quo. The leading figure, considered by many to be the instigator
of the movement, was Jean-Luc Godard. Wealthy, young and bored, he found
himself living in Paris amidst a number of young film critics and directors in
an atmosphere that was ripe for innovation. With his first feature film Breathless, Godard set a precedent for a
new, young generation of filmmakers and showed the older ones a new way to
reach indifferent crowds. An early proponent of auteur theory alongside the
original advocate, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard’s films have a distinct
“Godard” feel to them that is shown through different editing techniques, and
of course, a break from the typical Hollywood film formula. Still alive and
well, Godard’s legacy left its mark on directors today; there is a reason he
has been ranked the third greatest director of all time by a Sight & Sound poll.
Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930 in
Paris to a wealthy family; his father was a Swiss physician and his mother came
from a family of bankers who founded the Banque Paribas. When Godard was four,
his family moved to Switzerland, where he would remain for a good portion of
his early years; however, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Godard found
himself in France and encountered some difficulty returning to Switzerland.
Jean-Luc was never truly into film early on. In fact, it was not until he read
Malraux’s Outline of a Psychology of
Cinema that he found it to be an interest he would pursue. He moved to
Paris in 1946 to study at the Lycée
Buffon, a secondary school; here he mixed with members of high society.
However, he failed his baccalaureate exams after two years and returned to
Switzerland. After time in Geneva, he returned to the University of Paris to
pursue a certificate in anthropology, but he didn’t show up for many classes;
instead, he found himself involved with “the young group of film critics at the
cine-clubs that started the New Wave” (Wikipedia, Godard). Here in the fifties
begins Godard’s involvement with film, albeit criticism, as a career path.
Jean-Luc
Godard, living in Paris in the 1950’s, was a frequent attendee of local film
clubs. The clubs would screen films and fuel discussions after the viewing,
many of which reached deep philosophical levels: “At the Cinematheque I
discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about…they’d told us about
Goethe, but not about Dreyer…we dreamed about films” (Wikipedia). Godard found
success as a critic for the magazine Cahiers
du cinema in the early fifties. In his articles he would come to praise
directors like Otto Preminger and Howard Hawks and their “harsh melodramas”,
and blast the “formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles, De Sica and
Wyler”; the aspects of Italian Neorealism that focused on realism
and veracity would find root in Godard’s films later on, much as American film
noir refused to sugar coat their stories. In 1953, while working construction
on a dam project in Switzerland, he had his first major attempt at filming:
“with money from the job, he made a short film about the building of the dam
called Opération béton (Operation Concrete)” (Godard Timeline).
The film was sold to the dam administration and used for publicity. He
continued with several more short films and became friends and associated with
soon-to-be important young directors, mainly Truffaut. In 1955, in an important
collaboration, Truffaut got Godard to help work on “an idea he had for a film
based on the true-crime story of a petty criminal…who had shot a motorcycle
policeman and whose girlfriend had turned him in to the police…” (Wikipedia).
Nothing came of the project at the time, as no producers were interested
(though he would come to revisit the project, to major success as we will soon
find out). In 1958, Godard made his most prominent short, Charlotte et son Jules, shot entirely in his own hotel room. The
film was notable for Godard’s first use of actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who would
become famous for Breathless.
Come
1959, it would seem Jean-Luc Godard had had enough of reporting from the
sidelines. Many of his friends and acquaintances were now well-known filmmakers
themselves. Godard went to the Cannes Film Festival that year and requested
from Francois Truffaut the rights to the story they had collaborated on
previously. Godard secured funding for the film, though not much, and went
about recruiting his cast for what would be his first feature-length film.
Jean-Paul Belmondo was signed on first, but he didn’t have the star power
Godard wanted for the film, so Godard sought out Jean Seberg, an American
actress living in Paris. The stage was set for his first major film, the film
that would usher in a new era in cinema.
Breathless was, as previously mentioned,
the tale of a cool, indifferent young criminal and his American girlfriend. It
convolutedly followed him over the course of a few days, from his murder of a
policeman to his betrayal by the girl and his subsequent death. The film was
envisioned as a documentary of sorts; it took many techniques from the previous
Italian Neorealism movement. Godard filmed on location in Paris, used a
hand-held camera to shoot the entire film, and used natural lighting. One
famous scene involved Belmondo and Seberg meeting for the first time, walking
down a boulevard in Paris. With the handheld camera in front of them as they
stroll, the viewer gets a very realistic feel and an impression that you are
right there with them. Godard also wrote lines of dialogue in a private book
that no one else was allowed to look at. He would give his actors a few lines
at a time and only allow a few rehearsals before attempting a take; this led to
a more authentic and genuine feel to the dialogue of the movie. He also never
got permission to film in any of the locations used. This meant they had to be
in and out after a few takes, lest authorities come in and hamper his process.
The film was also notable for its jump cuts, which were used “at every single
break in the sentence to give his (Belmondo) language a rhythm and a flow”
(Defining French New Wave).
The film was also a strong anti-Hollywood film in
the fact that it eschewed typical Hollywood narrative structure of a strong
character-driven story. Breathless
jumped from frame to frame suddenly, and wasn’t perfectly linear. There is a
strong, personal touch in the film as well, showing Godard as one of the early
“auteurs”. “Truffaut states ‘Jean-Luc chose a violent end because by nature he
was sadder than I…he was in the depths of despair when he made that film”
(Defining French New Wave). The original story of Truffaut’s had a much happier
ending, with Michel, Belmondo’s character, living at the end. Also, Godard,
living in Paris at the time, probably felt a connection between himself and his
character Michel, which makes the character that much more important to the
viewer.
The
next major film of Jean-Luc Godard’s was Le
Petit Soldat, or The Little Soldier.
The second film in what many consider to be Godard’s cinematic period of
filmmaking, it follows a French intelligence agency who is coerced into agreeing
to assassinate a National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN) agent. The FLN had
been waging a war for the liberation of Algeria from France. The character
eventually falls in love with a woman who had, at one point previously, helped
the FLN. The two conspire to escape to Brazil together, but are of course
captured. The main character escapes imprisonment and agrees to kill the FLN
agent in exchange for safe passage to Brazil for him and his lover. However,
French agents discover her connections to the FLN and torture her, eventually
leading to her death.
In
order to truly understand why this film is so important, one must look at 1960
France. Algeria had had independence movements as early as 1954, during a time
in which many African nations were shrugging off their imperial European
“colonizers”. Algeria was to France as India was to Britain; it was the crown
jewel of what had been a French empire. When open fighting did break out, it
was analogous to today’s wars in the Middle East: insurgents drawn from the
native population facing off against a modern army. The fighting was dirty on
both sides, with assassination attempts and civilian bombings abound. At one
point Frenchmen living in Algeria flooded to France after the killing and
lynching of native loyalists. Another marked aspect of the war was the use of
torture and illegal executions. France found itself in a moral dilemma and
Charles De Gaulle decided to give up Algeria to its people in 1962. Le Petit Soldat came out in 1960, right
in the middle of the Algerian War. The film was subsequently banned in France
until 1963 due to the nature of its premise.
Godard
again shows himself to be an auteur with this film. He certainly overwhelms his
studio and industry by making a film that everyone knew would be immediately
controversial. An avowed Marxist, Godard shows his contempt for French imperial
ambitions in Africa by making his main character someone who flees France to
avoid the draft, out of fear for his life and out of disdain for the cause of
the war. The entire plot of the film is based on an illegal assassination,
something that French intelligence used many times over in the war despite it
being expressly prohibited in the Geneva Convention. These anti-establishment,
anti-status-quo themes found in the film are important, but there is another
theme in the movie that helped stir the pot and get banned: the explicit
torture scenes.
For
the movie’s time, the scenes depicting torture were wildly violent. One scene
has an interrogator lighting a book of matches on fire and burns the main
character’s palms with them. In order to obtain realism, “the actor actually
endured, for a brief moment, the torture” (Godard’s Truthful Torture Scene).
The actor, and thus character, are forcefully held under water for extended
periods of time; he is even electrically shocked as well. The French
interrogators appear resigned to this method of questioning, as if it was the
only choice they had left and were devoid of morality; another swing by Godard
at the French authorities. In all, it was no wonder the film was banned at the
time. Torture scenes would not be shown as graphically as this until movies
like Marathon Man. The entire project
was Godard’s own vision; there is no way any studio, French especially, would
have allowed those scenes and themes in a French movie at the time: thus,
Godard’s force of personality bent them to his own creative will.
Godard
continued making films throughout the sixties, including a homage to American
musicals, another anti-war movie, and even a science fiction film. Many of his
films had political themes based in the current events going on in France and
the rest of the world. His film La
Chinoise featured a group of students and a number of their left-wing
ideas. Coming out in 1967, it immediately preceded the May 1968 events
involving the student rebellions and the collapse of the Republic. It was
another film of Godard’s that expressly showed his Marxist leanings.
Following
the late 1960’s, Jean-Luc Godard moved into what has been labeled his
“Revolutionary” or “Radical” period. Films from this era showed Godard’s
intense interest in Maoist ideology and featured collaboration with Jean-Pierre
Gorin, a young Maoist student. Many of his films from this time were considered
extreme, even compared to the Hollywood New Wave films coming out at the time. “Save
for small groups of committed militants…most audiences found the combination of
recondite ideological hectoring and austere formal rigor all but unwatchable”
(Criterion). Godard and his partner Gorin decided to return to a more populist
political perspective, moving away from their radical ideas. Come Tout Va Bien.
Tout Va Bien, or Everything Is Fine (All’s Well in the United States), was another
political film (yes, another) of Godard’s, coming to theaters in 1972. Godard’s
purpose for the film was “to consider the class struggle in France four years
on from 1968” (Criterion). It took place in France and centers on a sausage
factory under strike. An American reporter played by Jane Fonda is caught up in
the strike and becomes radicalized and joins the movement. Fonda, a radical
feminist at the time, was the perfect female socialist to play the part in the
not-so-subtly Marxist film. Godard took another page from the Neorealism book
and hired unemployed, no-name actors to play the factory workers; one way in
which he injects a sense of the class-conflict rebounding throughout France at
the time into the film. The entire film is based on Fonda’s character and her
husband being radicalized over the course of a few nights stuck in the factory,
after witnessing the “horrors” of capitalism and its effects on the lower classes.
The film even ends with a riot of the workers! If this isn’t classic radical
Godard, nothing is.
The
film did contain a number of innovative filming techniques. The factory set was
actually a cross-sectioned building, allowing the camera to zoom in on one
room, then zoom back out and be able to see activity in all rooms, before
centering on another. The actors break the fourth wall several times throughout
the film as well, talking directly to the camera. There were also a number of
long takes and uses montage editing to portray the excitement and chaos of the
strike and later riot. The film is important in the Jean-Luc Godard timeline as
it was a major “critical and commercial disaster” according to critic Colin
MacCabe. Audiences weren’t as enchanted with the extreme Fonda character as
Godard hoped. The American premiere didn’t fare much better. The film forced
Jean-Luc to recognize that his films weren’t having the political impact he had
hoped they were.
Godard
made a few more tame political movies later in the seventies, but eventually
returned to a more traditional format and mass-appealing source material. In
1987 Godard filmed King Lear, about
as clear cut of source material as one can get. Histoire(s) du cinema,
completed in 1998, was an extremely long “examination of the history of the
concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century”
(Wikipedia). In some ways it was a return to his roots as a critic.
Jean-Luc Godard is
still alive and well today, his most recent film being a short called The
Three Disasters. He is and always has been an auteur, of the theory
developed by his close friend Francois Truffaut, in the sense that his films
were always his own. They were creative and framed many of his own political
and personal beliefs and ideologies. Pursuing this auteur idea is what lead him
to Breathless, the film that would start it all. Many consider him to be
a living legend, and in many ways this is true. Without Godard, there would be
no Woody Allen, no Scorsese, or Tarantino. The edgy films we know and love
today all are possible because of Jean-Luc Godard and his breaking of the mold with
Breathless, over fifty years ago.
Works Cited
Wikipedia:
Jean Seberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, The Little Soldier, French New Wave,
All’s Well
Biographical
Timeline http://www.carleton.edu/curricular/MEDA/classes/media110/Friesema/intro.html
Criterion:
Tout va bien revisited
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/356-tout-va-bien-revisited
Godard’s
Truthful Torture Scene
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/03/le-petit-soldat-zdt-1960-and-more.html
The
New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette by James Monaco
Jean-Luc
Godard’s Breathless: Defining the French New Wave
http://voices.yahoo.com/jean-luc-godards-breathless-defining-french-new-78824.html?cat=40
