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In the book Hollywood Voices, Andrew Sarris describes one of the differences between Hollywood directors and European directors:
In the following discussion, I want to elaborate on Sarris's precise characterization of one of the fundamental differences between the American and European film cultures, in terms of the film director's attitude to the audiences, with the visible director in many European films on the one hand, and the invisible director in most Hollywood films on the other. In order to do this, I have chosen to compare the self-aware cinema of the mythopoeic French film director Jean-Luc Godard with the almost anonymous storytelling in the majority of American films. The aim is to expose the role of the artist in two different film cultures: Europe versus Hollywood - represented by Godard as the sometimes difficult to comprehend "film auteur," and the seductive Hollywood storyteller who hides himself behind his narration. This is characteristic of American film history, from the genre traditions in the 40s and 50s, to contemporary Hollywood productions in the 80s and 90s. Hollywood never did stop making films based on plots and genres, and will never renounce traditional storytelling based on these aspects. Film modernism exists in Hollywood, but more as the exception that proves the rule. The Writing Camera
Astruc continues his presentation of the new status of cinema in the era of "The Camera-Pen" by saying that: "The creation of this language has preoccupied all the theoreticians and writers in the history of cinema." But a lot of film directors who were active in the 50s and 60s were also preoccupied with this vision of a cinematic language, "by which an artist can express his thoughts" - primarily European directors such as Antonioni, Bresson, Fellini, Bunuel, Resnais, Rohmer, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette and Godard. For these directors cinema was more or less a language, a personal means of expression. This is particularly true of Godard, whose film career has been a passionate study of how to express oneself in a language - in paintings, poems, novels, music and films. Language is the House Man Lives In The meaning of language is an important issue in Godard's cinematic philosophy, as seen most directly in My Life to Live (1962), in the scene between Nana (Anna Karina) and the linguistic philosopher Brice Parain (playing himself) where they converse about language and the necessity of talking. Sitting in a café, they discuss the nature of words and speaking. Nana prefers not to talk, longing for a life in silence without words. Because the more you talk, the less the words mean, she explains. Words should express exactly what you want to say. But they don't. They betray us, she argues. Parain understands Nana's longing for a wordless life in silence, but as a linguistic philosopher he does not agree with her. According to Brice Parain, you cannot live without thinking. You have to think, and in order to think you have to speak. Thinking demands words, because you cannot think in any other way. Such is human life, concludes Parain in his lecture on our dependence on language as human beings.
And such is life for a filmmaker, one might add, with reference to Godard's numerous reflections on the essence of the cinematic language in his articles, films and interviews. "Language is the house man lives in", as Juliette (Marina Vlady) says in Two or Three Things I Know About Her. About thirty years later, Godard repeats this linguistic reflection in JLG/JLG - Self-Portrait in December (1995) as the narrator of the polyphonic inner dialogue in his film: "Where do you live? In language, and I cannot keep silent. When I am talking I throw myself into an unknown order for which I then become responsible. I must become universal." In the late 40s and early 50s, Godard studied anthropology and ethnology at the Sorbonne, and also read a lot of linguistic subjects, including the linguistic philosophy of Brice Parain. Parain already appeared in one of Godard's first articles, "Towards a Political Cinema," in September 1950. In this article Godard quotes Brice Parain: "The sign forces us to see an object through its significance." According to James Monaco, Parain's phrase ("Le signe nous oblige à nous figurer un objet de sa signification") became Godard's motto as a filmmaker ten years later: "[...] it urgently wants to state a basic axiom: that there is no way we can sense the objective world without first understanding how our systems of signs - our languages, both verbal and non-verbal - "signify," what they mean, and how they thereby change our perceptions. Godard's career can be seen as a long struggle to work out the multiple possible meanings of Parain's deceptively simple sentence. He began this work in his criticism" (Monaco, p. 105). Godard is a kind of linguist, looking for the common denominator in all forms of expression: language, signs and meaning. Linguistic philosophical reflections appear in many of his films, often as a kind of key to his artistic universe. Sometimes very poetically, as in Pierrot le Fou (1965), where Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) explores the meaning of words in his literary diary. And sometimes very specifically, linguistically so to speak, as in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), where Godard reflects on the scenes we are looking at in 28 off-screen commentaries. The scene with a close-up of a coffee cup with froth swirling round on the surface is a particularly good illustration of the linguistic aspects. On the soundtrack we hear Godard's voice:
This is apparently a philosophy that makes the artist master of reality. The director creates the world through his language and consciousness, brings into the world a collection of signs and meanings that change our perceptions. But it is at the same time a linguistic philosophy, giving the artist a bit of a problem with his spontaneous experience of reality. Just listen to Godard's later off-screen commentary:
Thus, Two or Three Things I Know About Her ends up with an insight into the dialectics and nature of language that is quite similar to Brice Parain's lesson to Nana in My Life to Live. Nana wants to live in peace without using words that betray her, but learns that she cannot live without talking. She has to communicate to get in touch with reality. Godard confronts himself with the same dilemma: on the one hand he is searching for a spontaneous perception of reality outside of language, and on the other he recognizes that the limits of his language are the limits of his world. The world both appears and disappears when he uses his camera. But he has to use it to stay in contact with reality. He has to bring words and images into the world as a filmmaker.
The Cinematic Essay The same applies to Godard's films, which oscillate between the genres of fiction and reality. A genre mixture which Louis D. Giannetti describes as follows: "Many of his movies cut across "genre" distinctions, combining documentary realism, stylised tableaux, propaganda, whimsical digressions on art, culture, and sociology in a bizarre and often bewildering mixture" (Giannetti, p. 20). This kind of cinema is incompatible with conventional storytelling and plots, creating quite another narrative style. Or as Godard proclaimed in an interview: "The Americans are good at story-telling, the French are not. Flaubert and Proust can't tell stories. They do something else" (Narboni, p. 223). What he said in 1965 about Flaubert's and Proust's inability to tell stories and interest in doing something else, was also aimed at Godard himself: "I don't know how to tell stories. I want to cover the whole ground, from all possible angles, saying everything at once" (Giannetti, p. 19). So he tried something else in the late 50s and early 60s, when he entered the film arena with his world of controversial, paradoxical, and poetic fragments. Gradually, he developed the cinematic essay for his own purpose: creating the artistic freedom to express oneself on all levels, by using all kinds of artistic expressions, all kinds of narrative structures and genres. In 1962, after having made four feature films, Godard described as follows his approach to the double role of a critic becoming a filmmaker:
A famous, but still very provocative and astonishing statement, expressed with Godard's characteristic sense of paradox: a critic, a filmmaker, an essayist, and a novelist, all at the same time. But of course, this is not enough for him. He also regarded himself as a painter: "I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything" (Brown, p. 95). According to Giannetti, "an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author" (Giannetti, p. 26). So the cinematic essay gave Godard a kind of artistic elasticity that suited the kinds of films he wanted to make. "Audiences are not supposed to be conscious that a movie is directed; the movie just happens by some mysterious conjunction of the players with their plot," Sarris wrote in his portrait of the style in Hollywood movies. In contrast, Godard wants audiences to be conscious of the actual filmmaking. In 1966, after his thirteenth film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, he described this in more detail: "Basically, what I am doing is making the spectator share the arbitrary nature of my choices, and the quest for general rules which might justify a particular choice. Why am I making this film, why am I making it this way? [...] I am constantly asking questions. I watch myself filming, and you hear me thinking aloud. In other words it isn't a film, it's an attempt at film and is presented as such" (Narboni, p. 239). Thus, in Godard's first thirteen films one can detect a dialectical search for a cinematic style enabling him to investigate and improvise - an attempt to deconstruct fiction and reality, and assemble all the fragments into new artistic units. First chaos, then cosmos. Godard's films are neither fiction films nor documentaries, but passionate essays including both genres, filtered through his nostalgic and romantic artistic soul. Or, as Godard puts it in his paradoxical style of writing: "Generally speaking, reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context. The Nouvelle Vague, in fact, may be defined in part by this new relationship between fiction and reality, as well as through nostalgic regret for a cinema that no longer exists. When we were at last able to make films, we could no longer make the kind of films which had made us want to make films" (Narboni, p. 192). The Plotless Cinema
Godard developed his own film genre: the cinematic essay and the plotless cinema. In doing so, he became present in his own films, almost visible as the director behind the films. A person who could express himself and comment on his own filmmaking. When making Breathless (1959), Godard used many of the conventional props and clichés of the gangster movie: guns, cars, cigarettes, and the characters' way of dressing and talking - imitating all the outward characteristics of the genre. But this did not make it a real gangster film, because the logical storyline was missing in Breathless, and the plot was "rather rambling compared to most American thrillers" (Giannetti, p. 22). In spite of the fact that Breathless was clearly indebted to American genre films as a kind of gangster film, it is not an American genre film, but a typical Godard film inscribed in a European cultural tradition. It is a plotless film compared to Hollywood movies, trying out all the different means of expression using cinematic language, and inventing new means of expression: the famous jump cuts, the fragmentation of the plot, the use of a hand-held camera with edgy camera movements, long unbroken takes, tracking shots, the use of natural light, shots taken on location, and the hero Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) speaking directly to the camera, so that we cannot forget the fact that we are watching a movie. Godard's rage of expression can be seen most clearly in his taste for quotation: "People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me" (Narboni, p. 173). So Godard quotes what pleases him, taking what he can use from the variety of artists and works of art he loves and admires. Robin Wood describes Godard's passion for cultural references and quotations as follows:
In this way, Godard's first film intended to make a break with Hollywood's traditional storyline, and attack the conventional ways of handling a plot: "What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of film-making had just been discovered or experienced for the first time" (Narboni, p. 173). The following twelve films intensified this approach to film history and filmmaking, creating Godard's very distinctive dialectic narrative style by focusing on the relationship between documentary and fiction. His films were plotless compared to Hollywood movies in general. They rejected an advancing and continuous cinematic language based on logical plots and psychological delineations of character, as it is known from most American films, and replaced it with a discontinuous and fragmentary narrative style that breaks up time and space, thereby forming a collage of letters, words, images, sounds, music, voices, paintings, quotations, and references to art and cinema. Godard integrated all these expressive aesthetic fragments into his films in an attempt to create a new order of totality, harmony and beauty out of chaos: a union of all the arts. Godard has always been a bit of a romantic, looking for the continuity between poetry, music, literature, painting, dance, architecture, theatre and cinema. He adopted a new way of writing about films, a new way of making films, and a new way of describing the work of the film director in all his interviews, which diverged completely from the Hollywood tradition. As an artist he broke all the existing rules and conventions in filmmaking - like Fellini, like Bergman, like Resnais, and like Antonioni - all those famous "modernists" in European cinema of the 60s. The Cinema of Comment In Godard, "the idea precedes the image". His films do not correspond to reality. He has to comment on reality, constantly asking questions - thereby transforming it into something else, filtered through both verbal language and cinematic language. His aphoristic narrative style violates the traditional Hollywood storyline with its carefully devised plots, established genre conventions and narrative continuity. "Movies are a world of fragments," as Godard once said. He could agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order, as he claimed in one of his famous paradoxes, in an attack on Aristotle's classical trisection of a drama or story. He prefers paradoxes, aphorisms and proverbs to storytelling: "To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated" (Giannetti, p. 13). In an interview in the French magazine Lire, Godard described the particular nature of the aphorism as follows: "It is a different kind of thought to the thought with a beginning, a middle and an end. It doesn't tell a story, it is a small part of the story" (Assouline, p.35). This was said in 1997, as proof of the older Godard's loyalty to the younger Godard's concept of storytelling. Generally speaking, American cinema is based on storytelling and the development of plots, on physical gestures and actions, on fluent dialogue, on charismatic film acting, and on genre traditions. Godard's cinema is the opposite of American cinema, or as Andrew Sarris puts it in his review of A Woman Is a Woman (1961):
Jean-Luc Godard is the incarnation of the introspective European artist, and the self-conscious film director par excellence. A linguistically oriented film philosopher extremely familiar with classical music, literature, poetry, painting, philosophy and film history - a cultural heritage constantly referred to in his films. His tribute to composers, writers, poets, painters, philosophers and film directors is obvious. As a film critic at Cahiers du Cinéma during the 50s, before he became a filmmaker, Godard loved all kinds of cinema, not forgetting the Russians, the Americans, the neo-realists and Dreyer. He was a film enthusiast ("cinéphile"), admitting that he knew nothing of life except through the films he saw and wrote about: "I mean that I didn't see things in relation to the world, to life or history, but in relation to the cinema" (Mussman, p. 82). And in relation to art, philosophy and language, one might add. His films are, in a way, "documentaries on the making of a film. Godard's interest in the cinema is such that his work can have no other subject" (Braudy, p. 365). This attitude might explain his untameable urge to make references to artistic and cultural subjects. All of his films, his articles and the numerous interviews he has given throughout his career are, without exception, full of suggestive references to art, culture and cinema - and full of paradoxical statements. In A Married Woman (1964) there is a defence of the paradox in the monologue by the French film director Roger Leenhardt (1903-1985), playing himself like Brice Parain did in My Life to Live. His speech praises intelligence and the paradox as a philosophy, probably on behalf of Godard:
Coutard's Light of Day
- A little anecdote which emphasizes both The New Wave's preference for using daylight shots, and Godard's boundless admiration of three of the great directors in the history of cinema: Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir and D.W. Griffith.
A Story of a Film Being Made
Godard was once asked why he used a strange quotation from Hölderlin spoken by Fritz Lang in Contempt, and he answered: "Because it is a text called "La Vocation du Poète," and Lang in Contempt symbolizes the poet, the artist, the creator. It was good therefore that he says a line of poetry from the "Vocation of the Poet". [...] I chose Hölderlin because Lang is German and also because Hölderlin wrote a number of poems on Greece. (Three-quarters of the people who see the movie do not know this). But I wanted it to imply something on The Odyssey and Greece. I chose Hölderlin because of the fascination that Greece and the Mediterranean had for him" (Mussman, pp. 149-150). This answer shows Godard's defence of European culture from Homer's The Odyssey to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Paul Eluard (1895-1952), who is mentioned later on in Godard's answer. It is obvious that Godard identifies with the spirit and essence of this culture, whether it is Homer's classic story, Hölderlin's romantic longing for ancient Greece, or Eluard's modernism. A significant identification that indirectly describes the substance of Godard's artistic universe: an exciting mixture of classicism, romanticism and modernism. In any case, the longing for a new Renaissance is obvious. In spite of its apparently classical Hollywood-like style, "Contempt" is a thoroughly European film, dealing with the problems of art, the problems of creating, and the problems of finding an adequate language, an artistic style. According to Godard, style is the most important thing for an artist, and he undoubtedly found this adequate artistic language in the world of Hölderlin and Lang, which is why they both appear in Godard's meta-film on the shooting of a film. Contempt is a fictive documentary on the production of a film, just like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), François Truffaut's Day for Night (1973), Bo Widerberg's Love 65 (1965), and Nils Malmros's Aarhus by Night (1989). A collection of meta-films that constitute a typically European genre, focusing on the genesis of the work of art, thereby rendering visible the fact "that a movie is directed." The Many Faces of Anna Karina There is no doubt that in his statement about Sternberg-Dietrich, Godard was also indirectly referring to his own relationship with Anna Karina, as her husband, and as her director in six films portraying the many faces of Anna Karina playing: Veronica Dreyer in The Little Soldier (1960), Angela Récamier in A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Nana Kleinfrankenheim in My Life to Live (1962), Odile in Band of Outsiders (1964), Natacha von Braun in Alphaville (1965), and Marianne Renoir in Pierrot le Fou (1965). Thus, in a slight paraphrase of Godard's comment on von Sternberg's invention of studio lighting, one might say that Godard invented natural lighting "the better to reveal to the world the face of the woman he loved". Still, Godard's attitude to Karina is different from von Sternberg's to Dietrich, especially in his portrait of Nana in My Life to Live. In twelve episodes, or tableaux, Godard's camera catches Nana's figure - her face, her eyes. Filmed on location, in daylight and evening light without using artificial light, from behind, from in front, from the side, from below, and from above - from all sides and angles, as a declaration of love from the director in love. Impressive close-ups of a sensitive face with shy and wary eyes. A face with black hair and effectual makeup. The camera follows her gestures when she is walking in the street, talking with the linguistic philosopher Brice Parain, smoking a cigarette, writing a letter, embracing a customer at the brothel without kissing him, or dancing on her own. The camera adheres to Nana's face to catch her soul behind her hiding look, at the same time as it gently caresses her smooth skin, forcing her to lower her eyes in front of the camera. It is Nana's face that steals the picture. The story about prostitution could be a pretext for telling the story of the beauty of her face.
So in many ways, My Life to Live is a tribute to the many faces of Anna Karina: her sad face, her melancholy face, her smiling face, her face with tears in the cinema, watching the suffering face of Falconetti in Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), her face when she is smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee, or selling a record in the record store where she works before becoming a prostitute - filmed in Coutard's light of day, "the better to reveal to the world the face of the woman" Godard loved. His film is a documentary of all those faces, a catalogue of the different facial expressions of Anna Karina. "When you photograph a face... you photograph the soul behind it... Photography is truth... and the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second" (Monaco, p. 115), as the reporter and photographer Bruno Forestier says in The Little Soldier. This is one of the most commonly cited Godard quotes. But at the same time, Godard breaks the illusion by commenting on the scenes in the film, and on his job as the director of the film. There is another side to the portrait of his wife, which appears in the scene between Nana and her lover, the young man Luigi, where he reads aloud from Charles Baudelaire's translation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait," "a story about an artist engaged in painting a portrait of his wife; he strives for the perfect likeness, but at the moment he finally achieves it his wife dies" (Mussman, p. 98). In parallel with his documentary portraits of Anna Karina, Godard stands out as the maker of his own film, underlining the resemblance between the artist and his wife in Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and his own portrait of his beloved. Godard is present in the film through his voice, which is used when Luigi reads aloud. Thus, Godard recognizes his responsibility for Nana's death at the end of the film. Von Sternberg would never have done this. He would never have demonstrated how art steals the beauty of life for its own purpose, thereby killing life itself. Something like that would have been unthinkable in Hollywood. In My Life to Live Godard constantly reminds us that we are in the process of watching a film. He starts with a proverb by Montaigne: "Lend yourself to others but give yourself to yourself." He reveals himself to us as the director of the film by lending his voice to the young man's reading of Poe's story about the oval portrait, and then he sends his compliments to Truffaut, by letting the moving camera pan over a queue in front of a cinema in Paris that is showing Jules and Jim (1961). He also experiments with the sound, changing demonstratively between silent scenes and scenes with sounds, just as he lets Nana look into the camera. All of these things deviate from Hollywood's storytelling technique where the director hides behind the story. In contrast, Godard makes his presence felt all the time as the person behind the film, thus breaking Hollywood's unwritten rule about not revealing oneself as the director. He never lets us forget that we are in the process of seeing a film.
Godard's Significance in Film History Godard, or Hans Lucas as he called himself in a period as a critic in the 50s, himself often answers all the questions one can ask of his films, and of cinematic art and art as a whole, in his films, articles and interviews. Occasionally he can be caught in nonsensical contradictions and completely unintelligible formulations, but as a rule he is accurate and penetrating in his interpretation of things. Sometimes seductive, at other times poetically subdued, but always relevant and challenging in his cinematic art and as a writer. Godard always has an opinion about this or that, possessed by an undiminished rage of expression over the years: an opinion about the metaphysical, melancholy and magical tone of Mozart's clarinet, or about Griffith's genius. The most recent reference to Mozart was in the film For Ever Mozart (1996). In 1959 Godard proclaimed: "[...] I think one should mention Griffith in all articles about the cinema: everyone agrees, but everyone forgets none the less. Griffith, therefore, and André Bazin too, for the same reasons [...]" (Narboni, p. 135). And this is what he did in many of his writings. "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl," is another of Godard's proclamations, referring to Griffith's simplicity in his early experimental cinema, consisting of hundreds of short films made between 1908 and 1913. And this: "My grandmother knew Mozart but not Griffith. Nor my sister. In thirty years all the world will know Griffith because he will be in all the textbooks" (Mussmann, p. 145). This is a funny and poetical statement, but also an eloquent one, especially when you know that Mozart and Griffith are two of the artists Godard admires most. For ever Mozart. For ever Griffith. For ever Godard. NB. The stills appearing in this article were taken from My Life to Live and Alphaville.
BibliographyAssouline, Pierre. "Entretien - Godard Jean-Luc." Lire (Mai 1997), pp. 30-37. Braudy, Leo and Morris Dickstein (eds.). Great film directors : a critical anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Brown, Royal S. (ed.). Focus on Godard. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Giannetti, Louis D. Godard and others: essays on film form. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975. Godard, Jean-Luc. 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle. Paris: Seuil. Avant-Scène, 1971. Godard, Jean-Luc. A woman is a woman; A married woman; Two or three things I know about her : three films. London: Lorrimer, 1975. Grøngaard, Peder. "Godards paradokser." MacGuffin 18 (1976), pp. 24-42. Grøngaard, Peder. Fra Eisenstein til Truffaut: teorier om filmen som kunstart. København: Akademisk Forlag, 1981. Monaco, James. The New Wave : Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Mussman, Toby (ed.). Jean-Luc Godard: a critical anthology. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968. Narboni, Jean and Tom Milne (eds.). Godard on Godard: critical writings by Jean-Luc Godard. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972. Roud, Richard. Jean-Luc Godard. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Sarris, Andrew (ed.). Hollywood Voices. London: Secker & Warburg, 1971. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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