The great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard died this week. Keele’s Neil Archer gives three good reasons to return to his films.
I have to confess that I haven’t watched a new Godard film for years. In an alternate universe, such a confession might send me to the Bastille for heresy. But let me qualify it. Jean-Luc Godard, who died this week at the age of 91, was one of the reasons I ended up writing about films.
I first came across Godard’s work as an undergraduate student. The film was A Bout de souffle (1960), Breathless in English; a film that would sometimes embarrass the director in later life, but which is still a manifesto for Godard’s early ideas. Even though the film was several decades old, I felt I was still watching something new. Perhaps it was the way the film, shot on location in Paris, looked like it was being made up on the hoof (which in some respects, it was). I loved the fact that the film’s dreamy protagonist, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard, acts like he’s a character in his own movie (which in fact, he is).
Breathless turned out to be the first film on which I ever gave a public talk (for which, I recall, my ‘payment’ was a bottle of Beaujolais). And watching films like Breathless and Godard’s later Pierrot le fou (1965) encouraged me to abandon my original ambition – to study 19th-century French novels – and look at films instead.
Anyway. Even if, to borrow a line from Woody Allen, I still prefer Godard’s ‘early, funny films’ to the more stringent, political and experimental works he would go on to make, there are many good reasons to go back to the former. Here are just three:
1. Godard’s films are edited like comics
I like comics a lot; they also feature in some of Godard’s films. One of the reasons Breathless looked so novel was that it broke the ‘rules’ of the so-called ‘continuity editing’ system: the film has ‘gaps’ and ‘jumps’ where you would expect more action to be. It’s a style I like to link to comics, with their natural elisions between each panel – as seen here, in the Tintin book The Black Island.
I don’t know if Godard ever read Tintin. It doesn’t matter. They’re both on the same page.
2. Godard’s characters talk to the camera
Godard’s films are famous for what is sometimes called their ‘self-reflexivity’, or in simple terms, the way they remind the audience they’re watching a film, not real life. Godard didn’t invent this. As long before as 1940, it was being used by Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks (one of Godard’s favourites), in His Girl Friday – when Cary Grant, describing a character played by Ralph Bellamy, says: ‘he looks like that fellow in the movies. You know… Ralph Bellamy!’
Godard takes this rule-breaking a bit further still, having characters ‘break the fourth wall’ and talk out to the audience. For some, this is a Brechtian alienation device, reminding us of the film’s status as fiction. Personally, I think it just adds to the fun: the surprise, in fact, is that characters talking to the camera doesn’t make us care for them, or their stories, any less.
I also see the link to Godard in what is (to my mind), another great moment in 20th century film comedy (and also, oddly enough, featuring Ralph Bellamy):
3. Godard’s films have great dance sequences
In Godard’s early films, the only thing more magical than a Hollywood song-and-dance number is one sung and danced by people who… can’t really sing and dance that well. What might look amateurish for some proves charming for others. Why? Because it’s relatable? Because they want to believe it? I don’t know. But the look certainly appealed to Damien Chazelle, who made it a guiding principle in La La Land (2016):
It’s the celebrated, quasi-improvised dance in Bande à part (1964), though, that epitomises the spirit of Godard’s early films, and now looks like the template for a certain kind of 1960s French cinematic ‘cool’. So cool, in fact, that Quentin Tarantino borrowed the film’s title for his production company, and paid the dance scene homage in Pulp Fiction (1994).
With all due respect to Quentin, I’ll play out with the original.
Adieu, Jean-Luc, et merci.
Keele Film Studies 