CINEMA

“Jean-Luc Godard’s idea of a musical is, of course, the idea of a musical...
It’s the grande folie of Godard’s early career.”
–J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Deliriously kooky… staccato bursts of adorable visual jokes, precocious editing and in-crowd movie asides (when he’s not asking Jeanne Moreau how JULES AND JIM is coming along, Belmondo is hot to catch a TV airing of BREATHLESS.) Godard’s playful side pops out in subsequent pictures, but in Woman his mischief is front and center. “
– Stephen Garrett, Time Out New York

A Woman Is a Woman: Sex and the Sixties Girl

Review by Anthony Lane from the New Yorker (Excerpt)

By a nice coincidence, something similar is under way downtown. “A Woman Is a Woman” is now being shown at Film Forum in a restored print. That a movie directed by Jean-Luc Godard should well up in a stream of pleasure will mystify those who have followed the output of his later years. In truth, he would never recover (or would choose to outgrow) the larkiness of this picture—his first in color, and the closest that he stepped to the brink of a musical.

The woman in question is Angela (Anna Karina), a part-time stripper who lives in Paris with her lover, Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy). She is, to an intoxicating degree, the definition of a free spirit, although the plot turns on her desire not just to conceive a child but to conceive a child right now. And, if Émile refuses to come up with the goods, she will call upon the chivalrous services of his best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo). From the audience’s viewpoint, there is no contest: Émile is a dry stick in a hat, whose idea of a jape is to ride his bicycle around the apartment. Whereas Alfred (his surname is Lubitsch, in case we don’t get the point)—well, Alfred is Belmondo, which means that he is sexy and simian, sitting Angela down in a bar with an industrial-sized bottle of Dubonnet and a moaning Charles Aznavour on the jukebox.

A double shot of history is on offer here. First, there is the vertiginous realization that more than forty years have passed since “A Woman Is a Woman” won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for “originality, youth, audacity, impertinence.” (When did you last see a movie that might warrant such an award? “Trainspotting,” maybe, in the days when Ewan McGregor wore a buzz cut instead of a suit?) Second, the Paris revealed by Godard was then on the cusp. Its bars and markets, its neighborly grace (Émile and Angela live next to a happy hooker), seem barely altered since the days of René Clair, but then, as if in a tense preview of Godards to come, two nameless policemen knock on the door and browse the apartment for terrorists.

tGoddard directs Belmondo

The film looks back without anger on everything that Godard, the majestic anticapitalist, once loved about America. “I’d like to be in a musical with Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly,” Angela declares. “Choreography by Bob Fosse,” she adds, whereupon she and Alfred strike dancelike poses, yearning to emulate their screen gods and falling comically short. Angela is forever on the move, sticking her bottom out and whistling at herself in the mirror, and the soundtrack keeps rousing itself for what appears to be—what surely must be—a song. No such luck; as in “Down with Love,” we are in the infuriating presence of musical foreplay. (When Angela does chant a short number in the night club, she sounds flat and lonely, bereft of brass and strings.) “A Woman Is a Woman” is a tribute to the Hollywood showstopper, paid by somebody who regrets to inform us that the show of modern life will not stop long enough for us to sing. Does that make Godard an emotional realist, or do we sense the stirrings of a killjoy

If we grant him the benefit of the doubt, it is because of Anna Karina—Godard’s muse, his girlfriend, then his wife, and arguably the best thing that ever happened to him or his art. For those who like to locate Godard’s vision of the world in the cold recesses of the cerebellum, Karina—Danish by birth—delivers the proof, in pictures such as “Vivre Sa Vie,” “Alphaville,” and above all “Pierrot le Fou,” that he can be equally at home on the lips and the fingertips, and even in the heart. Whether Karina is a great actress is beside the point; as she flutters her dark-rimmed eyes or puts a scandalized palm to her cheek, she could be a starlet from the era of early silents, testing the limits of a new medium. But she holds the camera’s attention without strain or scheming, and, in her beret, her white-fur collar, and her patriotic changes of stocking—now red, now blue—she effortlessly tugs us along with her racing moods. In her finest moment, we see her pause at the stove, toss a frying egg so that it sticks to the ceiling, leave the room to answer the phone, say “Just a second,” return to the kitchen in time to catch the egg as it peels away and flops back into the pan, then dish it out and eat it while she picks up the receiver and resumes the conversation—with a man, incidentally, to whom she will very soon make love. Delicious.

was only two years old when Breathless was released. I probably first saw it in a cinema studies class. I may have seen it again at a revival house. I’ve rented it a few times. But still, even though all of the movie’s revolutionary elements—its narrative inventions and seat-of-the-pants mise en scéne—are now on view in hundreds of other movies, Breathless excites like no film since, and should be required viewing for anyone thinking of making a movie. In fact, it should be required viewing for anyone thinking of even "thinking" about movies. Everything you could possibly come up with, every fresh idea, is right there in 89 minutes. Godard beat you to it. Watch Breathless and you’ll see the birth of guerrilla cinema: jump cuts, handheld shots, long unbroken takes, tracking moves accomplished with a wheelchair; scenes filmed in natural light; street sequences shot without permits or lights or craft services; gunshots and off-screen crashes. Godard can be credited (or blamed) for the movies’ current obsession with self-ironic hipness, that knowing wink to the camera. His characters were the first to turn and speak directly to the lens, implicating us in the fictional ruse that we all know moviemaking is. The way they dress and smoke and talk is for our pleasure. They are cool and they know it. Godard’s lovers and gangsters are paeans to the B-movies he and his fellow critics at Cahiers du Cinema sensed were disappearing. They want to act and talk like characters they’ve seen in the movies.Godard also embraced clichés and re-contextualized them. The gun, the cigarette, the sports car: these became the props of unrequited love and political commentary, not the ingredients of plot. He once said that "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." When the gun showed up in a Godard film, usually in the last reel, it was taken no more seriously than Belmondo’s cocked hat.

And there are the popular songs, the cultural references, the brand names. This is Godard at his most referential, risking obsolescence by making his films for and about the "Pepsi Generation," yet his generation is just as obsessed as Generation X with love, movies, and product. Godard also broke ground with his use of intertitles, dividing a film’s structure into segments. There are the random bursts of narrative anarchy, the endless sequences of talk. And there are the silences—the moments when all sound vanishes... It is here that the sadness of Godard’s legacy emerges, because so much in his movies has disappeared from contemporary cinema. Consider that silence for a moment. It leaves us anchorless, groping for clues. What was the last film you saw that let the screen go aurally blank? How can a movie today even consider silence, since what films do now is tell us exactly how to think. Godard used silence as an interstice in his thoughts to allow our thoughts to enter. Thinking was what his movies were supposed to make us do. Within the genre confines of the gangster and heist films, his characters brooded about love and the state of the culture, not about how many rounds they had in their clip. Within the familiar bedrooms and cafes of the love story, lovers broke apart because their philosophies of love were opposed, not because they were mopey and narcissistic. The full frontal nudity of Maruschka Detmars in First Name: Carmen and of Myriem Roussel in Hail Mary! was used to eroticize situations. The anticipation of sex was more arousing than the act. When we see a naked woman on screen today we can be sure that intercourse will follow. Female characters today wear costumes that invite leers, but their appeal is a banal sexiness, a prurient guise in a puritanical society. Godard filmed women naked because, like Velazquez or Weston, he appreciated the line and curve of the body. Their beauty and power transfix us because we are simply asked to gaze upon it, as in the opening scene of Contempt, when the camera lingers on Brigitte Bardot’s naked body and she invites Michel Piccoli to review her assets: "What about my ankles? Do you like them? And my thighs, too?"Today’s filmmakers use Godard’s language, but too often they garble it. Jump-cuts, irony, clichés, non-linear plots. They are the means and the ends. There is very little attempt to comment on art, politics, culture, or love. The movies themselves are the comments, self-contained and precious. Contemporary movies are Godardian in their cosmetics, but not in their polemics. Controversy and argument, dialogue and disagreements—all gone. Moviemakers have co-opted Godard’s cool, but want nothing to do with his iconoclasm or his reverence. In order to pay homage to the old movies he loved, Godard overthrew the old ideas of making movies.

Godard offered his take on the state of things in a 1997 interview with the LA Times, saying, "Pictures no longer bring anything new to the audience, because they have it 100 times a day on TV ... the only thing left is to show more truth about people’s lives, but they don’t want truth about that." The directors who were willing to forge their own paths on the ground Godard broke are few in number: Cassavetes, certainly, although he was working his own turf with Shadows before Breathless became an international sensation; (Both men shared an obsession with the camera as fact-finder. They were both willing to let scenes play in order to shake out the truth.) Scorsese, definitely, with his hand-held camera, his use of pop songs, and the naturalistic dialogue in Mean Streets. You can see Godard’s influence in Altman’s early work, especially in the meandering dialogues of Nashville, and the post-modernist twist on the cowboy and the gumshoe in McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye. Wenders loved American movies as much as Godard. Both men put Sam Fuller in their films (Pierrot le Fou; The State of Things), both were fans of the road movie, and where Godard playfully exploited classic genres, Wenders found in them a sense of alienation. The synthesis of detachment and alacrity in Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man represent a distillation of both Wenders and Godard. Hartley’s fondness for oddball dialogue in Trust and The Unbelievable Truth, and Soderbergh’s recent structural experiments in Schizopolis and The Limey recall Godard. Tarantino’s films are loaded with Godardian touches. My favorite is in Reservoir Dogs, when Harvey Kietel attempts to ignite his lighter by snapping his fingers across it, which recalls Jean-Pierre Leaud’s trick of tossing a cigarette into his mouth in Masculine-Feminine. But Tarantino’s quoting of Godard is nothing like Godard’s quoting of Fuller, Hawks, Boetticher, and Penn. Where Godard referenced film history as a springboard to themes of cultural dislocation and revolution, Tarantino references Godard for his, and our, amusement. Nothing wrong with that, except we end up stuck in a room full of guys with skinny ties. There’s nowhere to go.Godard, at least in his early films, could be funny, literate, artful, and substantive all at once. He proved that movies could be intellectually challenging and watchable at the same time. The closest movies come to that ideal these days is to adapt Jane Austen or Patricia Highsmith. God forbid a character should quote Jack London (Band of Outsiders), be caught reading a biography of Velazquez (Pierrot le Fou), or go see Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (My Life to Live). Any mention of art, poetry, novels, or politics leads to a charge of esotericism or, even worse, pretension. A filmmaker is okay with quoting Obi Wan Kenobi, but not Homer. Would a line like the following, from First Name: Carmen, make it into a mainstream movie today: "When shit’s worth money, the poor won’t have assholes."? Would a writer dare to write such a thing, which is smart, funny, vulgar, and editorial all at once?

Moviemakers today, in their quest for originality, often ignore what the past can teach them, and instead opt for busting taboos or, in efforts to outdo each other, shoot on digital and transfer to 16mm black-and-white and dub to Betacam and digitize to an Avid and output to Hi-8 and blow-up to Super 35mm. Godard simply embraced the past. He shot his first color film, A Woman is a Woman (1961), in Cinemascope set to a lush score that recalled MGM musicals from the ’40s. He shot it on a studio set, with breakaway walls and key lights dangling from the ceiling. Godard’s genius was to manipulate the tried-and-true tools of moviemaking into a fresh syntax. He didn’t need to invent a new film stock, or shock us with violence or pornography, or affect a downbeat, cynical pose by turning off all of his lights and letting his characters speak in monotones. While watching Contempt or Pierrot Le Fou or Band of Outsiders, you get the sense that Godard honored the very medium of film, that he was thankful for the gifts film could bring to him and to moviegoers. Even within the romantic nihilism of Pierrot Le Fou and the doomed atmosphere of Contempt, there is consistent joy and enthusiasm. It’s unlikely a Godard film will ever lead you to heartbreak or tears, but it will invigorate your love of movies.

Godard could also be infuriating. If we honor him as the father of modern cinema, we must also hold him responsible for all the charges leveled against the art film in general, and French art films in particular. His work could be maddeningly obtuse, incomprehensible, tedious, or just plain slow and silly. His riffs on capitalism could often veer into meaninglessness. His jarring use of neon-like intertitles could sometimes be mannered and unnecessary. His insertion of snippets of classical music to break the flow of a sequence or dialogue became a wearisome habit.

In the mid-’60s, with Made in the USA and Weekend, he grew bored with his tenuous interest in narrative conventions. Weekend is the type of bewildering work that would get parodied on early Saturday Night Live episodes. A woman copulates with a fish; another watches her car burn and screams, "My Hermés handbag!" A man wanders the countryside in the outfit of a Musketeer. A vision of the apocalypse this absurd can only end in cannibalism, which it does. Weekend offered up a severe view of life as a cynical riot of mayhem and amorality. After it, Godard dropped all pretensions to narrative structure and began a phase of his career which resulted in didactic, political tracts. His revolutionary goals became overt. His love of films—both his own and the American films he drew upon—now embarrassed him. He made films in collectives under the name of Dziga Vertov, the Russian director who experimented with cinema verité. His activism lost him his fans and his influence. He re-emerged in the ’70s with works like Detective, First Name: Carmen, and Hail Mary!, structurally difficult movies in which his politics had mellowed and his joy of filmmaking returned. The Book of Mary, the short that precedes Hail Mary!, is perhaps Godard’s most straightforward, sweet-natured film. First Name: Carmen contains languid shots of the sky and sea that resemble the contemplative passages in Ozu. Godard was now both reflective and challenging. Nearly all of Godard’s films leading up to Weekend are essential viewing. The political essays of the late ’60s and most of the ’70s are difficult to find on video; his later pictures are alternately fascinating and boring. While worth studying as another stage in the evolution of one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, they’re also difficult, talky, and lacking the ebullience of his early years.

Godard’s indictment of the Algerian conflict, in which a secret agent is manipulated by both sides but feels allegiance to neither. This is the movie that gave us Godard’s immortal dictum: "Film is truth 24 times a second." Like so many of his male protagonists, the "little soldier" of the title is in love with Anna Karina, and more concerned with earnest philosophical and aesthetic questions than bravery and commitment.

Anna Karina stars as a woman who tells her boyfriend, "Loving you is exhausting. I’m always having to beg." So she turns to prostitution, preferring the cold transactions of sex for money. Her behavior is in sharp contrast to Godard’s approach in photographing her, allowing the camera to linger rapturously on her face. In one exquisite scene, Karina watches Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Godard cuts between Falconetti and Karina as if the women existed on the same exalted plane. Karina’s character claims we must all take responsibility for ourselves. She’s cut down by bullets in the film’s final scene.

A screenwriter sells his self-respect to please his wife in this searing, sad tale of marriage and betrayal and the corruptible influence of Hollywood. It’s an appreciation of filmmaking, of Fritz Lang (who plays a director), of the emotional complexities of color, and of Bardot’s luminous flesh.

"It is time to open another parenthesis and describe our characters’ feelings," says Godard himself, playing the omniscient narrator in this joyous ode to youthful anarchy and the dime store novel. Karina again stars as the ingenue seduced, corrupted, and dumped by a couple of would-be toughs. "Arthur said they’d wait for night to do the job, out of respect for second-rate thrillers," says the narrator seriously. A carefree buoyancy carries this movie through its many marvelous scenes, which include a visit to the Louvre and a long, single-take dance that must have been a helluva lot of fun to shoot.

Godard’s catalogue of 15 observations on "The Pepsi Generation." Although the politics are unfocused and the film’s structure is more rambling than inventive, there is an undeniable charm and naivete about the Parisian youth depicted here. Jean-Pierre Leaud is smitten with Chantal Goya, but finds himself in competition with American ad propaganda, Bob Dylan, and soda pop. Thirty years later, in the LA Times interview, Godard decried the end results he first chronicled. "Little by little, America has taken over world culture. Blue jeans, cigarettes…"

A film about human and cultural prostitution, with another tremendous performance from one of Godard’s women. Marina Vlady plays the housewife/mother/hooker who reveals her interior musings on sex and self-esteem directly to the camera. This was one of the first of Godard’s "essay" films, and it touches on consumerism, urban sprawl, and the sense that life is smothering under the weight of desire.

The scandalous, the profane, the irritable. Godard’s parable about the immaculate conception is funny, scatterbrained, brilliant, and even coherent at times. It should be seen to appreciate all the fuss made upon its release.

JEAN-LUC GODARD: Biography

In 1951, Godard toured North and South America. Supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs, he continued watching films at a fanatical rate, and his articles for Cahiers began reflecting an enthusiastic admiration of the work of little-known American directors of action films and at the same time a deep contempt for the traditional cinema, especially the commercial French film. In 1954, Godard went back to Switzerland to attend services for his mother, who had been killed there in a car accident. He remained in that country to work as a laborer on a dam project. With his earnings he bought himself a 35mm camera and made his first film, Opèration Beton, a 20-minute short about the construction of the dam. In 1955, following a spurt of renewed activity in Paris as a contributor to Cahiers, he was back in Switzerland shooting a second short, Une Femme coquette, an adaptation of a de Maupassant story. Working as a one-man band, he produced, directed, and acted in the film as Jean-Luc Godard and wrote the screenplay and photographed and edited the film under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. Returning to Paris in 1956, Godard collaborated on films by Rohmer and Rivette. Following three more shorts, Godard stunned the world with his first feature film, Breathless, made in 1959 on a shoestring budget and released early in 1960.

The film marked a significant break from orthodox cinema techniques, reshaping the traditional film syntax with its astonishing jump cuts and unsteady hand-held moving shots. It was a spontaneous, impulsive, vibrant, and totally original film that reflected the director's enchantment with the immediacy of the American gangster movie and his impatience with the laboriousness of the traditional techniques of "quality" cinema. It immediately established Godard as a leading spokesman of the Nouvelle Vague movement. Godard's next film, Le Petit Soldat, was a savage exposition of the Algerian conflict. The feminine lead in Le Petit Soldat and in several of Godard's subsequent films was played by Anna Karina, who became the director's wife in 1961. They divorced in 1967.

Karina is a stripper who wants to have a baby and settle down, in one of Godard's most buoyant and charming films, A Woman Is a Woman(1961), and a lonely, pathetic Paris prostitute in My Life to Live (1962). Les Carabiniers (1963) was an antiwar allegory that provoked violently hostile reaction from audiences. The wide-screen polished color cinematography of Contempt (1963) stood in sharp contrast to the grainy dreariness of Les Carabiniers. With Band of Outsiders (1964), Godard returned to the world of the gangster for the first time since Breathless. As in most of his films, the protagonists here are uprooted people, outsiders who defy the boundary between the real and the imagined. A Married Woman (1964) was a conventionally structured sociological study of the alienation of a modern Parisian woman who can relate only on the physical level to both her husband and her lover. Alphaville (1965), Godard's excursion into science fiction fantasy was followed by in the same year by Pierrot le Fou (1965). Gradually, Godard's films were becoming stripped of structure and conventional dramatic form, with an increasing emphasis on film as an essay, and cinema as a political and social instrument. Masculine-Feminine (1966) was a free-form study of mores of Parisian youth. Made in USA (1966) had a crime story for an apparent plot. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) told the story of a Paris housewife who indulges in prostitution for extra income. La Chinoise (1967) featured in the leading role actress Anne Wiazemsky, who became Godard's second wife in June of 1967 and later appeared regularly in the director's films. This marriage, too, ended in divorce.

Godard's impact on the cinema of the 60s was cataclysmal and sweeping and his contribution to the art, thought, and language of the cinema significant. He used the camera not only creatively and inventively, rewriting the syntax of film grammar along the way, but also as a means of personal expression to tell "the truth 24 times a second." After Weekend (1968), a new Godard surfaced, a revolutionary, didactic filmmaker who became obsessed with the spoken word and increasingly apathetic to cinema as a visual medium. He turned his back not only on the American films that had inspired the dreams of his youth but also on his own films. He dedicated himself to making "revolutionary films for revolutionary audiences," to expounding radical political ideas "as a secondary task in the struggle to liberate the oppressed from Capitalism.' He began making films as a collective effort, working in groups named after such Soviet film figures as Dziga Vertov and Alexander Medvedkin. In the late 60s and early 70s he collaborated regularly with Jean-Pierre Gorin, a young Parisian rebel who became the revolutionary guru of the politically naive Godard. In the late 70s and early 80s Godard underwent yet another metamorphosis.

Abandoning his political wars and

video experimentations, as well as his revolutionary base of operations in Grenoble, he moved to the Swiss town of Rolle in 1978, rediscovering himself and his love of film in the process. More restrained and philosophical in middle age, he refocused his sights on themes of universal humanistic concern in Every Man for Himself (1980), Passion (1982), and First Name: Carmen (1983). He even paid a renewed homage to American cinema in Detective (1985) but caused massive controversy with his updated story of Christ's birth Hail Mary! (1985), inciting the condemnation of the Catholic Church. Although he seemed to be inching back to the fringes of the mainstream, Godard remained inaccessible to general audiences and even seasoned cinema sophisticates seemed puzzled by and less than wholly comfortable with his films of the late 80s and 90s. King Lear (1987) was more famous for the conditions in which it was contracted ó roughed out on a napkin and signed during a lunch with Godard and producer Menachem Golan at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival ó than for the resulting film briefly seen two years later on the Croisette. Soigne ta droite (1987) featured top French pop tandem Les Rita Mitsouko, Nouvelle Vague (1990) boasted Alain Delon, and Hèlas pour moi (1994) Gèrard Depardieu, but Godard seemed to remain a highly rarefied taste. His For Ever Mozart (1997), with its typically Godardian disquisition on art and war, was better received. In 1998, Godard completed his long-gestating Histoire(s) du Cinèma, a highly personal video-based meditation of 100 years of cinema, which was released on video and in book form. Other works of the 90s include Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, and his self-portrait JLG by JLG (1995). If Every Man for Himself was described by Godard as his "second first film," and proved to be the most accessible film of his middle period, then Godard's first film of the new millennium, Eloge de l'amour, may well be considered his "third first film" and perhaps the beginning of his last and most mature creative period. Rhapsodically received at the Cannes Film Festival this year by the international press (including many confirmed "non-Godardians"), this surprisingly moving study of art, history, memory and exploitation was immediately bought for many overseas territories, including the U.S. and Great Britain, something not seen for a Godard film in decades. Godard won the best director award at the Berlin Festival for Breathless and the Golden Lion (best film) at Venice for First Name: Carmen. In 1986, he was honored with a Special French Cèsar Award for lifetime achievement.