Looking Forward to Godard

Hassan Melehy

Department of Romance Languages
University of Vermont
hmelehy@zoo.uvm.edu

 

Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.

 

At a time when Hollywood is as formulaic as ever, when the representatives of French cinema we receive in the U.S. seem to be attacking critical thought (Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element [1997] could by itself constitute a Ministry of Anti-Education), it is refreshing to read a book that considers with seriousness and a highly contemporary disposition the work of this enigmatic and brilliant director. Jean-Luc Godard took French and international cinema by surprise in the sixties, yet today may easily be relegated to the status of a quaint intellectual from a bygone era. Wheeler Winston Dixon opens his book with quiet applause for Godard’s relentless pursuit of the social and political implications of cinema aesthetics, convincing this reader that even Godard’s early work is far from exhausted and still poses major challenges to both criticism and cinematic practice. Paradoxically, Dixon also faces with full rigor the French director’s pronouncements, beginning with Le Week-end in 1967, of the death of cinema.

 

This “death” is what makes the cinema impossible as a critical experience, and yet it is precisely such experience that Dixon demonstrates is at the heart of Godard’s filmmaking from first to last. The studios offer “blockbuster films” (1) that aim for the “lowest common denominator”; (2) while at the same time, visual entertainment is given over to the relentlessly expanding worlds of cybernetics, multimedia, and cable TV. Nothing that risks the disturbing, insistent involvement with the image that Godard has continually worked at may make an entrance for more than a moment or two. In this book that very adeptly combines biography, history, description and summary of films, theoretical analysis, and a vast knowledge of the film industry, Dixon situates Godard’s films as both objects and projects in the present situation, through the perspective of how this situation has taken shape over the last forty years. He offers an explanation of capital as it manifests itself in the film industry–a favorite target of Godardian critique–to show how it was in the fluctuations of capital itself that Godard was first able to present his images to the public.

 

The exigencies of 1960s theatrical film distribution constituted a series of paradoxically liberating strictures; for a film to make a profit at all, it had to appear in a theater.... Thus distributors were forced to seek the widest possible theatrical release pattern for even the most marginal of films, and it is this way that Godard achieved and consolidated his initial reputation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such a project would be impossible today. (3)

 

In the well-wrought historical narrative Dixon provides, it becomes apparent that Godard’s work, though perhaps more widely viewed, better funded, and more appreciated by critics in the sixties, is of greater importance today. This would be true of both Godard’s early work–which tends to be better known because of its place in film studies curricula–and his more recent efforts, which bear directly on the contemporary state of cinema and television. Dixon characterizes Godard as an electronic-age prophet who saw the destiny of cinema in a global culture where the visual image dominates, and who, along with his collaborators, “seek[s] to hasten its demise” (xvi)–precisely for the purpose of educating the public as to the role of the image in their culture and its manipulating force in consumer society. “Godard is a moralist–perhaps the last moralist that the medium of cinema will ever possess” (5).

 

Dixon lays out the major themes he wishes to illuminate–the social, political, moral, aesthetic, and pedagogical aspects of Godard’s work–in the first chapter, “The Theory of Production.” The subsequent chapters, “The Exhaustion of Narrative,” “Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group,” “Anne-Marie Miéville and the Sonimage Workshop,” and “Fin de Cinéma,” each elaborate these themes by addressing a period in Godard’s work in which they become prominent. Dixon submits in the first chapter that the challenge to today’s situation may be found even at the beginning of the filmmaker’s career. On A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), Dixon is downright ecstatic, saying that “an opportunity came knocking that would permanently alter the course of Godard’s life, and change the face of cinema forever” (13). One may wonder how the cinema could be changed forever if it is dying or dead, but Dixon’s presentation of the “shattering” effects the film had on cinematic tradition is so compelling that such hyperbole is justified. The following is an example of this presentation; it also illustrates Dixon’s capacity as a film analyst, conversant with theory but not dogmatic in his concepts or vocabulary.

 

Godard called audience attention to the inherent reflexivity of his enterprise, and the manipulative and plastic nature of the cinema. A bout de souffle is everywhere a construct aware of its own constructedness. It is a film which follows the format of the traditional narrative only insofar as this adherence serves Godard's true critical project: the "reactivation" of the people and things he photographs within a glyphic framework of hyperreal jump-cuts, editorial elisions, sweeping tracking shots which call attention to their structural audaciousness, and characters whose entire existence lies in a series of gestures, motions, appearances, and escapes, all to disguise the essentially phantom nature of their ephemeral existence. (22-24)

 

Even though Dixon wishes to demonstrate a thematic coherency running through Godard’s work over four decades, he is careful to mark the major changes in the director’s orientations, especially those concerning his approach to politics. In response to Godard’s 1994 affirmation that “I never read Marx,” Dixon states: “In view of Godard’s total immersion in the highly charged political events of the 1960s, this statement seems disingenuous in the extreme. Godard was, in fact, changing radically as a filmmaker, becoming colder and less romantic” (84-85). From the romances of the early days–notably A bout de souffle and Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963)–Godard turns toward a pronounced political orientation in the mid-sixties, with statements on consumer society, gender politics, class relations, the student movement, and imperialism making their way into the dialogue and images of movies such as Alphaville (1965), Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), and Masculin féminin (Masculine Feminine, 1966). But already with Le Mépris, there is an examination of politics: the politics of image production, of film financing, of the studios, and of the commodification of cinema through, among other things, the imposition of reassuring narrative.

 

Dixon begins chapter 2, “The Exhaustion of Narrative,” with an excellent account of the making of Le Mépris: its status as an international hit with Brigitte Bardot, its funding, the day-to-day events of its production, and the relation between the film’s storyline and Godard’s own work situation. The movie, Dixon states, “is about compromise, the creation of art within the sphere of commercial enterprise, the struggle to hold on to one’s individual vision in an industry dedicated to pleasing an anonymous public” (45-46). One of Godard’s major compromises in this production, funded by French and Italian groups, involved the requirement that versions of the film circulated in Italy, Britain, and the United States be dubbed: so much of the story line has to do with the miscommunication occurring in an international production, when the producers’ interests are completely at odds with the director’s and screenwriter’s. Jack Palance plays Jeremy Prokosch, the American producer whose “monolingual arrogance” suggests the cultural imperialism of Hollywood. Fritz Lang plays Fritz Lang, the director of the film-within-a-film, an adaptation of the Odyssey; he is the “moral center of Le Mépris” (47), exercising an “omni-lingual authority” (45). Many conversations in the movie are in several languages, Lang alone able to converse without the aid of the interpreter Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll).

 

The “end of cinema” is here figured as the death of the megalomaniacal Prokosch, along with that of Camille Javal, Bardot’s character, in a violent car crash. (It was to the criticism of similar bloodiness in Pierrot le fou [1965] that Godard responded by saying very suggestively, “Ce n’est pas du sang, c’est du rouge–it’s not blood, it’s red.” This is one of Godard’s interesting and aphoristic invitations to consider the complex relation between reality and representation.) Dixon remarks that Godard shows only the aftermath of the accident, not the crash itself, and so takes issue with accepted narrative conventions in cinema, to the astonishment of, among others, Lang. Dixon explains, “In many ways, as we have seen, Godard works against audience expectations, showing us not that which we wish or expect to see, but only those actions and results that he deems necessary to create the world as he sees it” (51). Subsequently, with movies such as Une femme mariée and Alphaville, Dixon demonstrates Godard’s increasing focus on politics and pedagogy, as the themes extend from reflection on the cinema itself to the images of consumer society. But Dixon sees limitations in Godard’s vision at the time, which result from the director’s own situation: “Moving in a world of white, middle-class patriarchal privilege, Godard echoes the values of the society he partakes of” (62). It is with Masculin féminin that Godard begins to extend his perspective.

 

Dixon completes his account of this period in Godard’s work, during which the filmmaker realized that his cinematic pedagogy would be most effective only with the disruption and eventual abandonment of narrative, with mention of “the revolutionary narrative of Le Week-end” (88). The following chapter treats the most intensively political work in Godard’s career, the collaborative efforts he undertook with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov group. This is the work Dixon finds the most interesting, even if it is less well-known than Godard’s early projects; at the outset of the book he remarks, “Godard, it seems to me, has always functioned best within the context of a collaborative enterprise, and another critical project of this volume was the acknowledgment of the considerable input both Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Pierre Gorin have had in Godard’s works” (xv-xvi). In chapter 3 we find an excellent account of the making and the significance of Le Week-end, in which Godard criticizes consumer society, the role of the cinema in it, the commodification of women’s bodies, and imperialism. May 1968 moved Godard, along with many other French intellectuals, to a primarily political orientation, from which he represented the activity of students and workers during the upheavals of that month and presented them in a way that had very little commercial viability. Dixon twice notes with a certain admiration that this project, Un film comme les autres (A Film Like All the Others; 1968), almost incited a riot at its New York premiere (95, 104).

 

In the next chapter, on Godard’s collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville and the Sonimage Workshop, Dixon continues his account of a Godard doing what he wishes to do, with little regard for commercial success. Even so, Passion (1982), Prénom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen, 1983), and Je vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary, 1985), some of Godard’s better-known films, belong to this period. The most interesting turning point Dixon notes in this chapter involves Je vous salue, Marie, the notorious retelling of the story of the birth of Christ in a contemporary setting that was widely protested by Christian groups from a number of different sects. Dixon writes that the charge of blasphemy and obscenity (a “porny little flick,” said one bishop who refused to see the movie on that ground alone) “seems difficult to support when one sees the film itself” (154). Indeed, Dixon believes that “Godard, the hard-line Marxist of the late 1960s and 1970s, was now in the mid-1980s re-anchoring his faith in the divine” (154). He notes that Godard undertook this project with “absolute seriousness” and “intensity” (156). A professor lectures in the film, arguing for the notion of a “divine structure to all events on earth” (158); Dixon deems that Godard is speaking through the professor.

 

This makes the furor of the religious right in this matter all the more unfathomable; in Je vous salue, Marie, Godard performs the astonishing feat of bringing religion into the classroom, something that fundamentalist Christians have been attempting to do in recent years with great insistence. Godard here has become their ally in this effort; it seems to me altogether remarkable that so few have noticed this. (158)

 

Dixon is not equating Godard’s attitude with that of fundamentalists, the religious right, or any organized church group, but is rather attempting to examine the ways in which Godard experiments with new perspectives from which to address the problems that have always obsessed him: “it seems that in three decades Godard has worked through the personal and the political to come back to the divine” (162).

 

In the fifth and last chapter, “Fin de Cinéma,” Dixon makes it quite evident that Godard remains politically committed, especially to the politics of image production in cultures that are increasingly bombarded with all manner of images. Movies are always a matter of money; and if Godard wants to continue his critique of the Hollywood juggernaut and the omnipresence of “video games and CD-ROM interactive programs” (195), he must be willing to risk complete marginalization in the film industry. Dixon presents an amusing anecdote of Godard’s response to the American filmmakers who usually give a small nod to his greatness: for that quality, Godard asks them to give him $10. The only American filmmaker ever to make the contribution was Mel Brooks (207). Dixon also mentions the way that Godard assures himself an income as long as he is working, by building his salary into the budget (206). Finally, “He has transformed the cinema from a bourgeois medium of popular entertainment into a zone of study, reflection, and renewal” (209). The current system of production is one in which large profit margins are required, most if not all movies are seen primarily on video, and interest in them is usually displaced by computerized imagery–in short, in which the cinema has died. Godard nonetheless continues a cinema that reflects on and analyzes this death, looks at the old images in order to bring them into the process of reflection, and so offers a kind of rebirth for the production of the image. Dixon concludes, “Godard thus belongs to both the old and the new, the living and the dead, the sign and the signifier, the domain of the creator and the realm of the museum guide” (210). Godard offers a long and as yet continuing sequence of images through which viewers may come to grips with the functioning of the image, with the death of the cinema.

 

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard is eminently readable and highly engaging. It will be of great interest to those who wish to learn about Godard and much of the aesthetic of the French New Wave, as well as those who are already well versed in these areas. The filmography Dixon appends to the book, covering everything Godard did from 1954 to 1995 in great detail, will be invaluable to anyone wishing to watch or study Godard’s films. The book is illustrated with numerous photos, stills, and frames from Godard’s projects; one of these is the basis for a beautiful cover design using metallic grey and black ink that thus maximizes SUNY Press’s two-color limitation. For the most part the book is well written, but there are notable lapses in copyediting: twice the word “cinematographic” is rendered as “cinema to graphic,” and there are a few overly long and not quite grammatically correct sentences. These small problems are a reflection not so much on the author as on the requirement imposed on many university presses to run on decreased subventions and increased profit margins–a situation that one may reflect on in connection with the vast commodification of artistic and intellectual activity that both Jean-Luc Godard and Wheeler Winston Dixon address so very effectively.