“I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts...”
-Jean-Luc Godard
Perhaps no filmmaker understands his own career as much as Godard does. He didn’t believe that all of his films were brilliant, and he was right about that. He also didn’t believe that any of Truffaut’s films were brilliant, and about that he was dead wrong. So it can be said that this critic turned filmmaker didn’t have a perfect record in either of his professions. Still, this level of comfort, or at least acknowledgement, with risk and failure lead Godard down the occasional right “pathway” of which he spoke. Several of his films are masterpieces, and of course he is one of the driving forces of the French New Wave that revolutionized cinema in the late fifties and sixties.
Two of his earliest works, Breathless (1960) and Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live; 1962) are so visceral, even today, that viewing them is to watch the possibility of cinema change before your eyes. It has been said by many critics that the history of movies could almost simply be divided into two volumes: films before Breathless and films which followed it. Without question it is a brilliant film, but it’s sad that it came so early in Godard’s career, or rather that no film therein as good ever followed it. It was revolutionary in that it introduced to audiences new ways of life and new ways of projecting that life through camera and editing, and it did so through two vivid characters, both lost souls searching for salvation in each other.
As Godard continued his career he kept up with these first two elements, the alternate lifestyles and projections, but dropped affiliations with strong central characters, and thus lost the heart of his cinema. Essentially, movies are about two things: stories and the people live them. Within this context any number of combinations is possible, and the potential for the exposure of truth through the ideas presented is infinite. Godard decided along his pathway to discard this context, to stop filming stories and characters, and to simply film the ideas. Memorable movies are rarely about what they are about, but about whom they are about instead (or who directed them for you auteurists). Ask any 3rd grade critic what any movie they’ve seen was about and you’ll inevitably hear, “it’s about this guy/girl who…”
Movies about ideas are risky and Godard’s comment speaks to the fact that he understood this. In thinking over the canon of cinema, or at east successful cinema, only one major director whose films are more about ideas than characters and stories comes to mind. Even Stanley Kubrick needed some pretty good actors and narrative contexts to convey those lofty concepts. Thinking about his two best films, Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), you’ll find no strong central character. Instead, Strangelove feature multiple memorable supporting characters (three of which are played by Peter Sellers) which lend to the director’s humorous and ironic point. Likewise, 2001 intentionally shies away from human stories to make the point that the race has become uninteresting and bland, leaving room for the only real character, HAL 9000, and thus conveying Kubrick’s concept. In whatever case, regardless of the validity of the idea central to a film, it is typically ineffective if not conveyed through a central character that engenders sympathy from the audience.
So what does all this mean? Did Godard never make another good film? Of course he did. Band of Outsiders (1964) and Masculine Feminine (1966) are both very good pictures, but it is largely because of their characters, as shallow as the may be, that they succeed. Unfortunately, Godard also choose to make films like Contempt (1963), and Alphaville (1965), and Week End (1967) that feel like their floating from one idea to another so quickly that they don’t have time to bother with their characters. 2 or 3 Things I know About Her (also 1967) feels much the same way. Godard whispers on the soundtrack about philosophy and religion and truth but doesn’t seem to speak much life into Juliette (Marina Vlady), the woman who the film is ostensibly about. He introduces the audience to her as both the actress and the character in voiceover, but then all but disregards her for the remainder of the picture. We simply view her life, and small snippets of the lives of the other women she encounters, never feeling like we know any of them. When Juliette leaves her child for the afternoon to make a few extra dollars hooking, we hardly care. I understand what Godard is trying to say here. He is making a comment on the distance we all keep from one another in our contemporary and consumerist society, but he never gives us reason to want to know his characters, even if it is only two or three things. He intercuts the day-to-day events of Juliette’s life with images brand-name labels, hinting at the ultimate irony that in her quest to gain the money to buy these things, she has made herself the product. Scenes are book-ended with static shots of the construction of bleak block housing around Paris
Grade: 1.5 Hats Off
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