Godard is as revolutionary and influential a hinge-figure in cinema as Joyce was to literature and the cubists were to painting. He saw a rule and broke it. Every day, in every movie. Incorporating what professionals thought of as mistakes (jump-cuts were only the most famous instance), mixing high culture and low without snobbish distinctions, demolishing the fourth wall between viewing himself as a maker of fictional documentaries, essay movies, and viewing his movies as an inseparable extension of his pioneering work as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.
Here are six films from his enormously productive 1960s period, when he ground out one masterpiece after another, 14 in a mere seven years. Don’t feel limited to this one decade, though, the rest of his career is no less fascinating, infuriating and masterly.
À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)The revolution starts here. A barely-there sub-Série Noire plot involving a vain and nihilistic petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) with a Bogie fetish, and his sometime American girlfriend (Jean Seberg). He shoots a cop and goes on the run – sort of – and then gets shot himself. The real revolution is formal, stylistic. Just as the Velvet Underground incorporated the “accident” of feedback, Godard used the flaws and formal no-nos of conventional cinema to reinvent cinema. Shooting without permits, using no real script (dialogue was post-dubbed), and liberated by the same new lightweight cameras that powered the 60s documentary boom, Godard achieved an off-the-cuff, free-form documentary feel that felt totally new and invigorating in 1960. He also shattered notions of high culture and low, proving that you could infuse seedy B-movie trash with Apollinaire and The Wild Palms, Shakespeare and teddy bears, Dovzhenko and Frank Tashlin. And nothing was ever the same again.
Le Mépris (Contempt)At Cinecittà Studios in Rome, a film of The Odyssey, directed by Fritz Lang himself (one of the four or five giants who locked down the grammar of cinema, lest we forget), and funded by Jack Palance’s crude American producer, is slowly failing to get made. The screenwriter’s (Michel Piccoli) marriage to a frequently naked Brigitte Bardot, meanwhile, is slowly being unmade. Shot in widescreen and color by Coutard, Contempt is almost ridiculously gorgeous to look at, inflected primarily by Godard’s career-long obsession with the color red (JLG loves red almost as much as Michael Powell did), and graced with enviably smooth and elegant tracking shots, some of enormous length and complexity. And despite working with a higher budget (from Carlo Ponti, of all people), one never loses the impression that Godard showed up in the morning with an idea or two, found a pre-existing set or locale, and just started shooting. The result, however, is one of the masterpieces of French cinema.
Bande à partThe “cutest” and most accessible of all Godard’s early movies, Bande à part has ingrained itself into the international folk-memory of cinema, and is referenced in dozens of other movies, whether directly, as in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which re-enacts Bande’s famous nine-minute race through the Louvre, or indirectly, as in Tarantino’s production outfit, A Band Apart Films. At the centre is Godard’s then wife and 1960s muse, the utterly beguiling Anna Karina, who takes up with two criminals who plan to rob her rich employer. Mostly they just lark about in the perfect Paris of 1964, riding cars, bullshitting in cafes – including one moment when one character asks for a minute’s silence, and the entire soundtrack drops out for that period – and generally failing at being crooks. This is the approachable, antic, fun-loving Godard who largely vanished during his radical Maoist decade after May 68. Still a joy to devour.
Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman)Godard made a number of intriguing and provocative films about women’s lives in the 60s: Une Femme est Une Femme, Vivre Sa Vie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and this long out-of-circulation 1964 portrait of a woman being slowly but steadily eclipsed by advertising, consumer goods, fashion spreads and consumerism in general. Into the mix are thrown the early-60s Auschwitz trials in West Germany, extended montages of fashion photography, and the fetishization of leading lady Macha Meril’s body, which gradually becomes indistinguishable from the advertising that constantly assails her. For reasons not made public, A Married Woman was initially banned by the French censors. Godard believed that the ban arose not from the mild instances of nudity in the film, but because it was “an attack on a certain mode of life, that of air-conditioning, that of the prefabricated, of advertising”. All the horrors of modern life, in other words, made into great art.
AlphavilleA magical and bizarre sci-fi fantasy, somewhere between Cocteau’s Orphée and Lang’s Dr Mabuse movies, starring American expatriate actor Eddie Constantine – with his Warner Bros private-eye face and manner – as Lemmy Caution, an investigator sent to destroy the notorious Alpha 60, a sentient computer, half HAL 9000, half the computer in The Prisoner, much given to quoting Borges, that controls the city of Alphaville, absorbing the soul of the individual into the mindless mass of the collective. With his legendary cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Godard discovered the future – unevenly distributed, then as now – in contemporary Paris without building a single set. In Alphaville one can summon up a “Seductress Third Class” for assignations, but no one understands the meaning of “love” or “conscience”. Lemmy’s weapons are poetry and literature, their meanings ambiguous and ever in flux, and thus intolerable and rebarbative to Alpha 60, which is finally destroyed by the words “I love you.”
La ChinoiseLa Chinoise – along with Weekend, another masterpiece from 1967 – closed off the first period of Godard’s career – the approachable era – and foreshadowed his politically committed, near-Maoist Dziga Vertov period in partnership with Jean-Pierre Gorin, during which he seemed determined to alienate anyone who’d ever loved his early work. La Chinoise (very loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed) is a black comedy about political commitment, starring Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud and Godard’s future second wife Anne Wiazemsky (star of Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar), and is rife with visual jokes and audacious editing (keep an eye on the ever growing and shrinking quantities of Mao’s Little Red Book that appear on the shelves behind the direct-to-camera speakers). Weekend, which is extremely formally aggressive, contains one of the most striking and hilarious tracking shots in movie history, an endless traffic jam that somehow contains all of life – birth, meals, fist-fights, philosophical arguments, sex and death.
