Radical monarch of French new wave cinema
By Abdul Ghaffar

JEAN-LUC-GODARD, born in Paris in 1930, discovered his passion for cinema during his university days and, began his film career by writing about it. Godard is considered as the most prolific and stylistically radical of all the directors who came to prominence during the new wave and he made over 40 feature films. He has achieved the status of being among the most influential figures in the world cinema today. Godard is a militantly intellectual and ideologically committed film-maker whose films almost always involve some form of autocritique or interrogation of cinema itself.

From the very beginning, he considered himself an essayist rather than a story teller. "I write essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays. Instead of writing criticism, I now film it", he wrote. Most of these "essays" are personal to the point of being idiosyncratic, and Godard maintained his independence by producing them quickly and cheaply.

His films therefore, are not carefully crafted, and frequently appear to be less finished films than unpolished journals about the making of a film. They are full of technical blunders and undigested facts. Godard broke every known cinematic convention, even those established by the New Wave itself — in a ceaseless attempt to expand the medium’s form and pursue its potential for artistic, intellectual and political self-expression.

The French Cultural Center in Delhi held a six-film retrospective on Godard some time back. (In this article only English titles of the films have been given). The festival started with his second feature film, The Small Soldiers (1960), first French film to attempt to deal with the Algerian War and it was banned by the French Government until 1963. Set in 1958, the protagonist of the film is at the receiving end from both the sides. Finally, he consoles himself on death by torture of his (sympathetic to the Algerian cause) girlfriend by the French extremists. The film graphically depicts the use of torture and has the form of a gangster film like his first film Breathless (1959). Written by Francois Truffaut, Breathless, is not much different from any of the American thriller novels Godard was later to adopt — D. Hitchen’s Fool’s Gold for The Outsiders (1964), and L. White’s Obsession for Mad Pete (1965). In Mad Pete, a man and woman run away from a Parsian gang to live an idyllic existence in the south of France, until a series of betrayals causes their violent deaths. The film is avantgarde in treatment.

Even when he adapted work of higher level, A. Moravia’s A Ghost at Noon, as Contempt (1963), he always transformed the original material with a massive injection of documentary material. This is even true of Alphaville (1965), a film set in the future. A private eye, Lemmy Caution, travels through the galaxy to the city of Alphaville with a mission to destroy Dr Von Braun, the inventor of a computer that runs the desensitised and lobotomised society of the city. The film is a parable about the alienating effect of the technology. It is one of the Godard’s most sustained and disciplined works. He makes brilliant use of contemporary Paris to evoke the future.

His film, A Woman is A Woman (1961), which Godard described as a neorealist musical, is in contrast to his thrillers Breathless and The Small Soldier is a studio produced tribute to American Musical Comedy and shakes the classical comedy standards. My Life to Live (1962), is as much a study of prostitution as the study of its heroine Nana. In between these two later films he made The Soldiers (1963), an adaptation of Joppolo’s play I Carabinieri, Godard created a fable about the nature of the war that is both parody of and homage to the early documentary style of Lumiere. It is clearly among Godard’s most important works and first of his critical essays.

Even his more intimate films Married Woman (1964), can be called studies in micropolitics, the politics of the couple, the politics of sex. Masculine-Feminine (1966), marks a definitive turning away from narrative. Like My Life To Live and A Married Woman, it is a film of sociological inquiry hung upon a slender plot. The plot here is irrelevant to the inquiry. With this film, his films became increasingly ideological. As he wrote in 1966, "Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution — turn one’s back on American cinema." The ironic result of this logic was Made in USA (1966). Though it is loosely based on a detective thriller, Made in USA, has no narrative thread at all and is a film intent upon destroying virtually every illusion of which traditional American cinema is capable. Two or three things I know about her (1966), is collage of images and interviews centering around a Parisian housewife, who has turned to casual prostitution to sustain herself in middle-class luxury. It is a radical indictment of the capitalist technocracy in the West. So too is The Chinese Girl (1967). This film depicts five students who set up a Maoist cell and fail, each in his or her separate way, to achieve cultural revolution. But Godard’s more savage attack upon the values of western capitalist society was Weekend (1967), a film that begins as a recognisable, if violent, narration and ends as an apocalyptic version of the collapse of civilisation in the West.

After Weekend, Godard attempted to abandon narrative altogether, considering it a bourgeois form. In the 70s Godard gave up both stories and the stars. He deliberately attempted to make unpopular films and succeeded. Almost all of his films from seventies are too abstract and are, at best, be mulled over by cineastes and critics for widening their horizon.

Godard is too brilliant, as he sees new ways of doing film that is still beyond the generality of directions and audiences. The aura of Godard will always hang thick and will fill the vacuum he will leave after his death. For, "Godardianism" has come to stay forever.