Hélas pour moi

Jean-Luc Godard's Hélas pour moi opens with the title "based on a legend," while a voiceover recounts a story that has the rhythms and symmetry of myth: a certain ritual is passed down from generation to generation, with each subsequent generation forgetting more and more parts of the ritual, but finding that it still achieves its intended purpose even in debased form. Finally, every detail of the ritual has been forgotten, and the only recourse left to the last generation is to tell a story about the ritual. It's a progression from action to thought, from the world to the abstract, from the spiritual to the theoretical. This is Godard's treatise on the idea of history as myth, a fitting way to open a film which takes as its premise a story from Greek mythology. This opening speech is melancholy and moving, the weary proclamation of a man saddened by the disconnection from spirituality implied in these words. And yet it's also a somewhat hopeful sentiment, emphasizing the importance of stories (and by extension art) to a culture increasingly out of touch with its history and its spiritual roots. The similarity in the French words histoire (history) and histoires (stories) is more than semantics or wordplay for Godard; it's a deeply symbiotic relationship in which the essential single truth of history fractures into multifaceted storytelling and endless variations on stories. It's this resonance that caused the filmmaker to title his historical video project Histoire(s) du cinema, indicating the tension between historical truth and cinematic narrativizing, and it's a resonance that is every bit as present in this film.

As this meandering introduction should make clear, Hélas pour moi is a typically confounding and multi-layered late work from Godard. The promise of the opening titles, the "legend" on which the film is ostensibly based, only emerges slowly from a dense web of allusions, quotations, and overlapping verbal confusion. It is only after roughly an hour of this material, in which characters come and go in seemingly random vignettes, that the actual story takes shape: a story of a god visiting Earth in the guise of a man, adapted not from any Christian fable (though this is unmistakably a Christian god) but from one of many myths in which the Greek god Zeus took on disguises in order to make love to a mortal woman. It's a perfect framework for Godard's characteristically gnomic exploration of spirituality, love, and storytelling — this last theme a perverse joke from a filmmaker who has never been as obtuse or willfully obscure as he is in this film. The film is structured around a large cast who are largely indeterminate in their relationships, roles, and purposes. There are a group of students and their professors, a video store owner and his staff, a tennis star (Jean-Louis Loca), a doctor (Marc Betton), and many others, who wander in and out of the film, speaking in philosophical and political fragments mingled with overly polite chit-chat. There is perhaps no film in which the words "Monsieur," "Madame," and "Mademoiselle" appear more frequently, because characters are continually greeting each other in passing, with a formality and a head nod, as they roam from one ambiguous scene to the next, often accompanied by Godard's sideways tracking shots. The only concession to the likely adrift audience is the investigator Abraham Klimt (Bernard Verley), who in trying to figure out what exactly is going on here mirrors the journey of the audience into Godard's baffling film.

The narrative only achieves clarity and coherence in the final half-hour, in which Godard finally winnows the cast down to mostly just two: Simon (Gérard Depardieu) and Rachel (Laurence Masliah), a married couple who get in their first fight when Simon decides to leave on a business trip. Along the way, he is possessed by a deity (Harry Cleven), a shambling nomad with long hair and a raspy, distorted voice, a character who existed on the edges of the film previously, occasionally narrating scenes with his voicebox-processed speech. In a remarkable shot, Godard has this very ordinary icon of God sneak up behind Simon. Simon's face fills the frame in close-up, while the god is hazy and out-of-focus in the background; as he steps up behind Simon, he puts his hat on the other man's head and then ducks down behind him, and a low-budget possession has taken place. Simon has been taken over by the spirit of God. Such unassuming miracles are not only a budgetary necessity for Godard, but an expression of his very practical understanding of spirituality as something intimately connected with the physical world, rather than beyond it. This very physical, human spirituality earned him accusations of profanity and blasphemy for Hail Mary, in which his retelling of the story of the Virgin Mary explored very similar issues of carnality, religious feeling, and human love. For Godard, spiritual and physical love are, if not exactly the same thing, then very closely related — the love of God for humanity is redefined as the love of two people for each other. In one scene, Rachel expresses this connection when she identifies the gesture of an embrace, locking one's hands together around a lover's body, as being the same as the folded hands of prayer.


Godard's spirituality is also expressed in his appreciation of natural beauty, so it is appropriate that this is one of Godard's most landscape-obsessed films. Some of these landscapes recur at intervals. A single curvy stretch of road, a thin snake of concrete amidst a sea of green dotted with bright red flowers, appears several times, at various times of day, its lonely beauty altered by the quality of the light that illuminates it. Time is an undercurrent in all of Godard's most recent work, and here especially he is more concerned with time at a micro-level, rather than the historical sense of time that animates his more politically motivated films. In one scene, a woman's face is initially illuminated by bright, white light, an overexposed image that is soon softened through digital manipulation that restores a more natural daylight aura, and then continues dimming into a blackened twilight where the woman's face is obscured in shadows. This is cinema as time, the artificiality of cinematic techniques recreating the passage of a day from noontime glare to evening's shadowy gloom. There is an emotional quality to Godard's treatment of time, as when God, posing as Simon, tells Rachel that mortal creatures first smiled when they understood the concept of time — and by extension, gained the knowledge of mortality. This is a frequent theme in Godard's cinema, how pleasure is intimately linked with death. Godard, always intrigued by opposites and dialectics, instinctively knows how impending mortality intensifies human emotion. This is, perhaps, what an immortal god could never understand about his creations.

Godard's use of landscape is also intriguing to the extent that he repurposes nature as a frame for the film's sometimes obscure human drama. Godard uses insert shots of landscapes, sunsets, and flowers as structural foundations, oblique connections between scenes within a structure whose overall boundaries are anything but clear. But he also uses the natural world to provide frames within the frame. Trees are especially important in this regard, frequently appearing as dividers. Godard shoots many scenes from around, behind, or between trees that frame the action, cutting up the film frame into smaller divisions created by natural boundaries. In some shots, an explosion of leaves from a tree branch obscures a corner of the landscape, while in others the intervals between trees seem to represent cells of film. This is especially true of an otherwise puzzling and non-narrative scene in which a group of people walk through a forest, led by a young boy. The shot starts frozen, completely still, with the boy visible between the vertical stalks of two trees. As he walks forward, Godard's camera begins to pan to the left to follow the boy, as behind him some more people walk into view; they were previously hidden behind the framing trees. As the boy and his followers walk to the left, with Godard's camera tracking them, trees placed at regular intervals define open spaces in which the people can be seen. The effect is like letting one's eye trace along a strip of film in sequence, watching an action develop from one frame to the next. It is cinema capturing the cinematic in the natural world.

This is really a tangent in a film structured around tangents, but the playfulness and subtlety with which this idea is executed is typical of Godard at his best. Always inscrutable and often confusing, his elliptical, layered verbal and visual aesthetic is the product of a restless imagination that tends to think in circles and patterns rather than in straight lines. The result is a film dense with meaning and content, which will obviously reward subsequent viewings by opening up in greater depth. Hélas pour moi is one of Godard's most confounding late films, but its formal beauty and thematic richness more than make up for its occasional incoherence.

Everything Is Cinema and Criticism Is Nothing

Earlier this month, Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek published a review of Richard Brody's new 700-page opus about Godard, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. I haven't yet read the book, which has been receiving mixed but mostly positive-leaning notices, but my outrage over Zacharek's article has been steadily growing over the weeks since I first read it. Every once in a while I stumble across another reference to it and am reminded anew how a major critic for one of the major cultural purveyors of our time published, in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, an utterly misconceived and poorly argued piece about how one of the great living directors has become an "intolerable gasbag." This, apparently, is what passes for cultural criticism these days. The breaking point was a must-read post by Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity, who briefly mentions Zacharek's anti-intellectual Godard takedown in the midst of his passionate advocacy of leftism. I decided that Zacharek's melange of unchallenged assertions and snide insinuations deserved some of the close critical examination that she so steadfastly refused to extend to either Godard's films or Brody's biography. I'll start with her opening paragraphs:

Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers — the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, Breathless — became an intolerable gasbag. That probably wasn't Brody's aim in writing this exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, critical biography. As Brody, a film critic and editor at The New Yorker, makes clear in the preface, he still believes in Godard's relevance, claiming that the resolutely not-retired filmmaker... continues to work "at an extraordinarily high level of artistic achievement."

That's a lovely, optimistic sentiment, but one that much of Godard’s post-1967 output doesn't deserve: Empty shadowboxes like First Name: Carmen (1983) or Notre musique (2004) seem designed to alienate viewers rather than draw them closer, which is what happens when any artist begins to live entirely inside his or her own head.

Pay attention to that offhand Breathless reference, the first of many; Zacharek really loves that film. Now you might think I'm being uncharitable here by cutting off the article when I do, that I'm trimming out Zacharek's next few sentences, which presumably explain just why the later films she mentions are "empty," or why for that matter it's a bad thing when a filmmaker decides to "alienate viewers." For the sake of completeness, and assuaging such fears of bad faith, I'll quote her next few sentences as well:

It's the artists we love best who are most capable of disappointing us, and anyone who has taken pleasure in the boldness of the movies Godard made from 1959 through 1967 — he produced an astonishing 15 full-length features in that period, beginning with Breathless and including Contempt, Pierrot le fou and Weekend — would have to know that pain is part of love. If we didn't, how carefully could we have been watching his movies in the first place?

To paraphrase Zacharek on Brody, that's a lovely sentiment, but what exactly does it have to do with anything? She establishes, fairly quickly, her approach to argumentation: make an assertion, and then move on. So far, she's laid down, through this inarguably efficient method of rhetoric, a few points that she then takes as givens for the rest of the piece, so it is worthwhile to point out just what these assumptions are, and discuss why they shouldn't be assumed with such cavalier inattention. 1) Godard's films became worse after the arbitrary cutoff point of 1967, over 40 years ago. 2) Godard's post-1967 films "alienate viewers" instead of inviting them in. 3) It's a bad thing for art to alienate and challenge viewers. Each of these assumptions merits some further questioning.

Zacharek's first assumption is that Godard's films went downhill after 1967. I'll be blunt here: Zacharek musters absolutely no defense or evidence for this position. In the course of the article, she mentions by name four Godard films made after 1967 (in addition to the two cited above, King Lear and Nouvelle Vague), but doesn't deign to actually discuss the content of any of these films. Granted, she is reviewing Brody's book and not Godard's oeuvre, but since she's apparently decided that broad pronouncements about the subject's films were appropriate in this context, then surely some critical discussion of the films in question might've been shoehorned in as well. This omission becomes even more galling when juxtaposed against the things that Zacharek does choose to criticize: Godard's working relationships with collaborators, his political beliefs, and his integrity. She doesn't have room for a sentence about what makes First Name: Carmen "empty," but she does recount that Norman Mailer found Godard rude, and that in the early 90s Godard made commercials for Nike. I'll address these inane asides later; the point for now is that Zacharek makes a broad contention about the last 40 years of Godard's filmmaking, and then does nothing to support it.

I'll be charitable for the moment and assume that she could actually support it if she wanted to, that she's not merely repeating the critical consensus that seems to have calcified around Godard in many circles. The question then becomes, why doesn't she want to? Is it that she doesn't think she needs to? Certainly, what Zacharek is offering in this piece is nothing startlingly original, and I'm sure she realizes that she isn't exactly taking down a sacred cow by dissing late Godard. The piece as a whole has a tone of smug back-patting, as though Zacharek and her audience have collectively seen through Godard. It's clearly targeted at readers who will feel flattered by the article's confirmation of what they've probably read elsewhere about Godard: that his later films are difficult, and that they needn't bother as long as they've seen the fun genre pictures he made in the 60s. Zacharek doesn't defend her assertions about Godard because, for too many people, they don't really need defending. Anti-intellectualism seldom does; its adherents are legion. The standard narrative of Godard's career, the narrative that Zacharek accepts so readily, is that he descended into entirely inaccessible, joyless polemics after 1967, and that he never really recovered.

One of the chief problems with this narrative is that it ignores the profound divisions in Godard's career within the rather large timespan covered by the phrase "after 1967." The very phrase implies halving, as though Godard's career was being divided into two parts, one good and one bad. They're very unequal halves, of course, what with one covering not even a decade and the other so far stretching to over 40 years. And within those 40 years, Godard's films have gone through some prodigious changes. The heavily politicized, experimental films of the late 60s and early 70s were followed by a long period of retreat from cinema for the rest of the 70s. During this time, he experimented with TV productions, collaborated with Anne-Marie Miéville, and made his first videos. Taken together, the work he made between 1967 and 1979 represents a period of prolonged experimentation, time spent rethinking his approach to cinema, first in terms of content and politics, and then in terms of form and medium. His return to the cinema in 1980 with Sauve qui peut (la vie) was informed by this period of experimentation, and the result in his 80s films is a newly reconsidered approach to narrative, character, politics, and genre. Any account of Godard's post-60s career is further complicated by his mammoth video project Histoire(s) du cinema and its ancillary video essays, undertaken between 1988 and 1998. This project, Godard's highly personal attempt to grapple with the political and cinematic history of the previous century, is a glaring omission from Zacharek's tossed-off dismissal of the director's later work.

But then again, it's doubtful that Zachrek was really thinking about the complexity and variety of Godard's post-1967 career. The films he made immediately after 1967 seem to be the films that have made the greatest impression for those critics dismissing Godard's later work. In the aftermath of the protests and political upheavals of that time, Godard's filmmaking was intensely politicized, in dialectical films like Le gai savoir and One Plus One, and later in the films made with the Dziga Vertov Group, experimental works intended as attempts to create a new, revolutionary form of filmmaking. Godard's films from this period are undeniably challenging, and also undeniably not fully successful. They could justifiably be called failures by those less sympathetic to their aims, and Godard himself might have deemed them well-meaning failures as well. This is without a doubt the most experimental phase of his career, in the most literal sense of the word; these films are works in progress in which political and ethical debates are worked out right there on the screen. And yet, their polemical content is countered by their profound humor and visual playfulness. Zacharek obliquely criticizes these films for their lack of "emotional depth," but apparently can't see that emotion can exist as deeply in a passionate young couple discussing politics as in a passionate young couple discussing love.

It's also important to note that these films are not polemics. Zacharek criticizes Godard for his Maoism and says, in her conclusion, "Godard's political ideas have never been the strongest elements of his movies. Unfortunately, after 1968, they often became their focal point." In fact, Zacharek misses a subtle distinction here. Political ideas undoubtedly became the focal point of Godard's films between, roughly speaking, 1966 and 1972. But not necessarily Godard's political ideas. Many of Godard's films from this period are structured as dialectics or dialogues, conversations between two conflicting political ideas which are allowed to interact and argue against one another. Zacharek seems to have little problem with the very radical La Chinoise, presumably because it's still part of Godard's 60s oeuvre, but it's structured in a very similar way, in terms of a dialogue between peaceful and violent methods of revolutionary action, with neither quite coming out on top. A similar tension between talk and action exists at the core of Le gai savoir, and it's questionable to what extent Godard actually believes in any of the mutually contradictory polemical texts that are read aloud in One Plus One. The material may be polemical, but its presentation is not; the juxtaposition of all these un-reconcilable texts and ideas encourages critical thought and audience engagement, the enemies of propaganda.

This brings me to Zacharek's second and third assumptions about Godard, which I'll discuss together. She asserts that Godard's post-Weekend films "alienate viewers" (as if Weekend itself didn't?) and implies that the films are bad because of this. To start with, it's somewhat debatable whether these films are actually alienating or not. They're challenging, no doubt about it, and they'll certainly turn off the average cinemagoer who's just looking to be entertained by a good movie. But then again, Band of Outsiders would probably alienate the average cinemagoer as well, and that's Godard's most straightforward and fun 60s genre flick. In some ways, Zacharek is posing a false dichotomy between the emotional engagement of Godard's genre deconstructions and the more distanced approach to narrative he increasingly took in his later films. Zacharek doesn't come right out and say it, but the obvious subtext of her review is a yearning for characters and stories she can relate to and be emotionally engaged by. Godard's later films are increasingly uninterested in such things, but does this mean that his films are unengaging, that they don't draw viewers in? Or is Zacharek actually admitting that she feels engaged by emotions but not by ideas?

The other aspect of this point that warrants examination is Zacharek's contention that late Godard fails because it alienates the audience. If alienation is essentially Zacharek's coded complaint about the films' challenging aesthetics and lack of narrative grounding, then the question remains: why is this a bad thing? It's a question that the critic, as usual, does not even attempt to answer. Once more, she seems to think that her readers will agree wholeheartedly. Her tone is indignant: how dare this director force me out of my comfort zone? Her language is telling, as she laments that Godard's films no longer "draw [viewers] closer." Implied in this criticism is the assumption that a good film is one that does the work for the viewer, whereas Godard's later films ask viewers to bring their own thoughts and critical facilities to the table. I would hope that Zacharek is not advocating for moviegoing audiences even more passive and mindless than they already are, but what other conclusion can be drawn from her phrasing? It's a defense of escapism, tucked into an offhand denunciation of Godard's entire way of making films.

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The problems with Zacharek's article begin with the assumptions outlined above, but unfortunately they don't end there. More broadly, she seems to have an issue with the very idea of applying serious criticism to Godard's films:

The second half of Everything Is Cinema covers the films Godard made after 1967, and it's a very long half. Brody tries to energize us for this interminable home stretch. He acknowledges that post-1967, Godard, who at the time considered himself a Maoist, was trapped in an "ideological straitjacket," but adds that the ideas behind that ideology "provided the foundation for a new, cooperative form of filmmaking" that would inform the rest of Godard’s career.

Nice try. If only the movies were better. Brody himself dislikes some of them (Notre Musique) and greatly admires others (Nouvelle Vague). But his enthusiasm for late Godard feels scholarly and tempered rather than passionate, and his extended clinical explications of these films (and the television work Godard did at the time) weigh the book down.

What comes through most strongly in this passage is Zacharek's contempt for Brody's "scholarly" discussion of Godard, for the in-depth analyses that fill Brody's book and which are entirely absent from the critic's own discussion of these films. One can imagine the impatience she must have felt at seeing films she so easily dismissed subjected to rigorous and considered analysis, presumably including a discussion of themes, ideas, and aesthetics. In other cultures, and at other times in our own culture's history, this kind of thing has usually been called "criticism." Zacharek will have none of it; she doesn't care that Brody essentially agrees with her on Notre Musique while disagreeing on other films. What annoys her is not so much the author's opinions as the very fact that he expends so much time and so many pages on discussing these films at all. She moans that Godard's post-1967 output constitutes "a very long half" of the book, but is it really so unusual that a biography should devote so much space to a period of time lasting 40 years? Zacharek's assumption that later Godard is not worth exploring is mirrored in her cavalier dismissal of the parts of Brody's book corresponding to these worthless films. This is not, to say the least, a critical mindset.

So if Zacharek does not have much to say about Godard's late films, and wishes that Brody didn't have so much to say either, what exactly does she want to talk about? For one thing, she wants to personally impugn Godard and his working methods:

When Brody speaks of that "cooperative form of filmmaking" adopted by Godard, he's referring specifically to Godard's collaborations first with his friend, the journalist and fellow Maoist Jean-Pierre Gorin, and later with his partner, the writer and filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville. Otherwise, though, the mode of filmmaking Brody describes in the last half of Everything Is Cinema is more like a dictatorship than a cooperative: Brody's narrative is peppered with quotations from actors, cinematographers and others (among them Norman Mailer, who worked briefly with Godard on the 1987 King Lear) attesting to the director's rudeness and willful refusal to communicate what he wanted from them.

The observant reader will doubtless have noticed that the above passage turns on a rather bold usage of the word "otherwise," which makes the following point about Godard: The filmmaker has had two prolonged and very intense collaborative relationships, one of which has lasted for over 30 years and is still going strong today, but otherwise he is not much of a collaborator. It's an odd turn of phrase that mentions Godard's two sustained collaborations only to pivot completely into talking about what a horrible dictator he is. But Gorin and Miéville are not so easily dismissed, even if they represent inconvenient truths for Zacharek's argument. For one thing, one need only watch the fascinating video essay Soft and Hard to get a glimpse of just how intimate and reciprocal a working relationship Godard has with his long-time partner Miéville. This film, a collaboration between the two filmmakers, consists mostly of them sitting together at home, talking about philosophy, language, and filmmaking itself. It's a genuinely collaborative discussion, with each of them contributing and bouncing off one another's ideas. One gets a sense from this video, not of a dictatorial director imposing his will, but of two genuinely curious and quick-witted minds enjoying a dialogue as equals. This interplay is carried through in the duo's other video essays together, in which their often overlapping voiceovers play off one another and the images in similar ways.

Godard's working relationship with Gorin was briefer, confined to a few years during the former's most politically radicalized period, but it was every bit as much a collaborative venture. This is especially obvious in the duo's final film together, the relatively minor Letter to Jane, which is a fairly ugly and misogynist film that nevertheless demonstrates the interplay of the Godard/Gorin collaborations. As the two of them trade ideas in voiceover, the images riff on a famous photo of actress Jane Fonda in Vietnam; the film is structured by the conversation the two filmmakers are having. Godard may have been less accommodating towards his actors, as evidenced by his rather shabby treatment of Fonda, but then this is not a particularly uncommon phenomenon amongst directors. Hitchcock famously compared actors to cattle, and treated them accordingly. It's a viewpoint that Godard seems to share, for better or worse, but of what relevance is Godard's "rudeness" to the quality of his films? Zacharek brings up Jacques Rivette's openness to improvisation as a contrast to Godard's more controlled methods, and it certainly is a different way of doing things. But as usual she can't come up with any compelling reasons why a more acting-friendly approach should be intrinsically better; she merely states it as a self-evident fact.

Brody is hardly blind to his subject's foibles: he calls Godard on his flimsier political ideas, particularly his devotion to Maoism (a trend among French intellectuals in the late 60s that Brody identifies, rightly, as thinly veiled fascism) and, later, the anti-Semitism that repeatedly surfaced in his work. It's also worth noting that Godard, the committed Maoist and spewer of anti-capitalist, anti-American rhetoric, made two commercials for Nike in the early 1990s. They were never broadcast, though presumably Godard cashed the checks.

Now we get to the meat of some of Zacharek's most offensive and poorly developed swipes at Godard. The reviewer who, earlier in the piece, devotes only the most dismissive of phrases to Godard's actual films and Brody's evaluations of them, here slows down to repeat some of Brody's most questionable assertions about the director. What is the net effect of a review that, in the space of two sentences, calls an artist a Maoist, a fascist, an anti-Semite, and a hypocrite? In this context, it amounts to a cheap smear tactic, especially since Zacharek never expands on any of this any more than she did with her negative assessments of individual films. It's undeniable that Godard's fascination with Maoism was problematic and overly naïve, but what Zacharek doesn't mention is that this was also a very brief phase for a man who has been continually thinking about political questions. Moreover, even at his most committed, Godard's Maoism probably wouldn't have earned much praise from Mao himself — La Chinoise is a deeply ambivalent and ambiguous film that never really settles the question of what to do about societal problems and how to achieve change. His most political films, including his Maoist films, always contain both point and counterpoint within the same structure, encouraging free thought and political engagement in ways that go beyond one particular political identification. Godard's Maoism is an unfortunate phase, an admitted mistake, but it's probably important to keep in mind that it was a mistake shared by many among the 1960s French youth, who saw in Maoism not the atrocities committed by Mao himself, but the idealist philosophy of the movement.

Zacharek's other contentions are equally lacking in context or supporting references. Where is the anti-Semitism in Godard's work? It's certainly not in the deeply moving examinations of the Holocaust that weave through Histoire(s) du cinema, nor can it be found in Éloge de l'amour, in which Godard criticizes Hollywood-slick presentations of the Holocaust and advocates for more genuine attempts at understanding this atrocity. B. Kite, in an excellent review of the Brody book, quotes Godard self-identifying as "anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic." It's a distinction that should be preserved, especially in light of Godard's continuing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people in films like Ici et ailleurs and Notre musique. As Kite notes, one could certainly make a nominal case for Godard's anti-Semitism by cherry-picking quotes from his late films, but it would require a willful blindness to other quotes and ideas that lead to the opposite impression. And what of Godard's supposed fascism? Is he guilty by association with Mao, despite his distance and abstraction from the events going on in Red China? Godard's Maoism seems less dictatorial and more utopian, based on a hopeful confidence in youth's potential to effect social change and promote equality. This certainly makes Godard an idealist, as well as somewhat unrealistic and ignorant, but the idea that his political beliefs were ever fascist is, frankly, difficult to reconcile with any of the man's actual films. Of course, the films themselves are exactly the one topic relating to Godard that Zacharek has little interest in. She'd much rather cast doubt on his ethics by bringing up his commercial work, as though he was the only artist to ever bankroll his personal and obscure art by cashing a corporate check.

Zacharek's conclusion provides more evidence of her selective interest in what Brody has to say:

Brody is at his best when he's describing how Godard's technique — so dazzling, particularly in the early years — intensifies the charge of the stories he's telling, opening us up to new ways of seeing. "Even now," Brody writes, "Breathless feels like a high-energy fusion of jazz and philosophy. After Breathless, most other new films seemed instantly old-fashioned." He's got that right. Breathless is Godard's most readily comprehensible film, the access point for many future devotees. And its freshness never abates: to watch it, even today, is to feel present at the birth of something new. Beginning of story. Beginning of cinema. If Godard had given us nothing more, that would be enough.

What Zacharek cherishes in Godard, what she looks for, is "dazzling" technique that "intensifies the charge of the stories he's telling." It's no surprise, then, that the critic would lose interest in Godard at precisely the point when he himself began to lose interest in stories — or at least, in telling those stories directly. There's no shame in holding a particular set of aesthetic principles, and Zacharek clearly believes that film is a narrative medium, and that a great portion of what she sees as failure in Godard's later films is a result of his tendency to move away from storytelling. Why then, does she never come right out and say this? Why is it necessary to infer the critic's perspective from her phrasing, rather than simply read her straightforward pronouncements? To some degree, it must certainly be because she wishes to appear objective, to present her dismissals of Godard with a forceful authority. It would not have the same kick to admit that Godard's aesthetics thrill her when they intensify his stories, and bore her when they intensify his ideas.

This perspective, with its pronounced biases, informs Zacharek's response to both Godard and Brody. In the case of the latter, the critic seems to be approaching his unfortunate book exclusively for confirmation of her own viewpoint. Where she finds something she agrees with, she praises the author's insight and discusses it at length. Where she runs into material she's disinterested by, she makes snide remarks about Brody's slavishness to his subject. She thus cites him liberally when he's providing material unfavorable to Godard, praising the rare moments when the biographer sees the light and questions the director. She seems positively gleeful at the high praise he heaps on Breathless, a film that's brought up so often in this review you'd think it was the only film Godard ever made, or the only one that mattered, anyway. Zacharek is quite content to limit Godard's legacy to his first film, something she feels so strongly she even makes it the final thought of her article: "that would be enough."

Quite frankly, it's not enough, and neither is Zacharek's anti-intellectual pandering. Her article, like much of the discourse surrounding Brody's book so far, amounts to a self-satisfied smirk at Godard's decline from the public eye. It's an endorsement of ignorance, an ill-considered swipe at films that have, as it is, been rarely screened or seen in the past few decades. Zacharek brings her blinkered perspective on Godard, and her painfully limited conception of criticism, to Brody's book and turns the occasion of a book review into an opportunity for a polemic on what irritates her about Godard. It has the angry, disappointed tone of a jilted lover, a reference that Zacharek even explicitly makes when she says that Godard's early films posited the idea that "pain is part of love." Godard's films of the last few decades comprise one of the most remarkable and consistently challenging bodies of work in the cinema, stretching from the poignant spiritual twists on his 60s genre pictures in First Name: Carmen and Hail Mary, to the historical and political collages of Histoire(s) du cinema and Notre Musique. These films deserve attention, and careful analysis, and intelligent debate. They don't deserve the kind of mindless dismissal they receive here.

Le gai savoir

Le gai savoir falls at an absolutely critical position in the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, as the final film he made before embarking on his radical experiment in communal, revolutionary filmmaking with the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is Godard's attempt to "return to zero" at the end of the 60s, an attempt to both erase and rethink the 17 features he'd made during the previous decade. Godard said at several points in his career that he felt like he was making his "first film" over again, and it's clear that after the radical deconstruction of cinema down to its constituent elements in Le gai savoir, whatever he made after this would have to be a "first," starting from scratch after this minimalist manifesto clears the ground. The film consists entirely of a series of dialogues and conversations between Emile (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Patricia (Juliet Berto), two young revolutionaries who meet on an empty soundstage every night in order to discuss the nature of sound, images, words, and the multiple relationships possible between them.

Godard's basic tactic in approaching these broad, weighty, and yet entirely basic questions is to experiment as freely as possible with as many different techniques and ideas as he can splatter across the screen. This is his messiest and most confounding pre-70s feature, deliberately grating and challenging in its overlapping sounds, with narrative and character stripped completely away in favor of a freewheeling investigation of the component parts of cinematic representation. Godard had, of course, been working steadily towards this investigation of sound/image relationships throughout the 60s, and not one of his films, even from his very first, had failed to undermine in one way or another the supposed "fundamentals" of cinematic language. But nowhere prior to this had the director so rigorously and intently broken down film, or approached it from so many angles. In one scene, the images cut rapidly between opposing closeup profiles of Emile and Patricia, suggesting the editing rhythms of a dialogue, two people facing each other and speaking to one another. Indeed, the soundtrack also contains a dialogue between the pair, but the images of the actors onscreen are not actually speaking or even moving, and moreover the images don't correspond at all to who's speaking at any particular moment. In subtle ways like this, Godard suggests the ways in which, even when image and sound appear to be working in concert towards representing the same thing, they may in fact be detached or distanced from one another.

In other places, image and sound are truly independent. There are images, the two radicals explain, for which no sound exists, and sounds for which there are no images. In both cases, government censorship and repression are usually responsible for the missing pieces, and the film represents these examples of incomplete reality by presenting silent still photos or black screens accompanied by tape recordings of protest rallies. In another memorable sequence, Godard turns the idea of the onscreen interview on its head with a set of bizarre games. In the first, Emile and Patricia provide words for a child to free associate off of, though it's by no means clear from the presentation whether the child is actually hearing them speak, being prompted by someone else, or simply speaking randomly. There's a profound disconnect in the cinematic spaces inhabited by the two sets of people, who are supposedly conversing with each other. The child sits in a brightly lit room against a colorful background, while the two interviewers are in the shadowy blackness of the empty studio, which provides an entirely featureless backdrop for most of the film. This disconnection in images calls into question the soundtrack, creating a scene that can be read multiple ways depending on how the individual viewer decides to interpret the communication or lack of communication flowing between these two entirely separate cinematic spaces. This effect becomes even more pronounced in a sequence where the duo interviews a grizzled old man. This time, not only do Emile and Patricia ask him questions and give him words to free associate on, but Godard himself joins in on the act, speaking in his whispery growl from a tape recorder which also plays a distracting soundtrack of synthesizer beeps and mechanical grinding. Godard's voice, never associated with any onscreen presence in the film (except, very briefly, in a still photo of the director), is even more distanced from the usual relationship of interviewer to interviewee. This distance grows even greater when, at one point, the tape is wound back, so that the old man hears both Godard's question repeated, and his own answer as well — he seems not to recognize his own voice, suggesting the inevitable disconnection from reality that occurs in the mechanical processes of capturing sound and images.

The difficulty of capturing the quality of a sound is emphasized in a scene where Emile and Patricia discuss an incident that happened among their friends, when one made a half-joking comment and the other responded with an enthusiastic, "Oh, yes!" They try, in vain, to recapture the specific quality of this exclamation, which obviously conveyed something to them in the moment that cannot be either explained or reproduced (least of all by mechanical means like a tape recorder, had they had one handy when it was first said). This gets at the way that the mere meaning of words, even mundane syllables, do not contain the full possibilities of communication. The nuances of expression, context, phrasing, the voice of the speaker, and a thousand other variables coincide to produce the unique qualities of every utterance. It is this multiplicity of language and communication that Godard is getting at in the very form of his film, which veers through every possible permutation of cinematic expression without ever settling into one for very long. There is realist cinema, in which the sound and image coincide in ways roughly corresponding to reality, at least to the extent that when someone is moving their mouth onscreen, words are coming out on the soundtrack. But several times even this seeming realism is undermined, as in the scene where Patricia mouths the words onscreen while Emile speaks them on the soundtrack. Is this realist?


More typically Godardian is the use of collage, both aural and visual. The soundtrack is a confusion of noise, music, and speech, piling up fragments of protest speeches, the voiceovers of Godard, Berto, and Léaud, and snippets of television broadcasts. Similarly, the visuals switch between the darkened minimalist studio set and a polyphony of still photos, candid street scenes, and collaged magazine images and cartoons, often with Godard's slogans and enigmatic fragments of phrases scrawled over the image in pen. In one of the film's funnier images, a magazine photo of a naked model is accompanied by two labels: "Freud" with an arrow pointing to her head, and "Marx" with an arrow pointing between her legs. While the former is concerned with understanding the mind, the latter is busy worrying about the body; the labels invert the popular understanding of Freudianism but make intuitive humorous sense anyway. The same can be said for the scene where Patricia, dressed in a ludicrous purple dress that looks like it came straight from a period film set, reads mangled nonsense language from a book of poetry against a white backdrop painted with images of comic book characters, while Emile reads over her with a more coherent text. This scene is collage in motion, in sound, and even in ideas, creating juxtapositions between time periods (historical versus modern), between forms of art (pop versus classical), and in language (meaning versus incoherence).

These kinds of dialectics are, as anyone familiar with Godard's work knows, his essential tactic of discussion. He loves to encompass both sides of a contradiction within the same framework. In this way, the image of the magazine nude, torn between mind and body, is indicative of a larger structural theme within Le gai savoir: the split between theory (represented by Berto) and action (Léaud). Early on, the duo agrees to divide their study of image/sound relationships into three phases, each lasting a year, and though the film is not quite as rigorous as you'd expect in following through on this separation, it does provide a framework for discussion throughout. The first phase is one of complete uncritical study, in which they will simply watch and listen, collecting sounds and images and examining them, both in isolation and in concert. Only in the second phase can they begin to critique their collected sounds and images, as well as conducting an auto-critique of their own ideas and responses to these stimuli. And the third phase, naturally enough, begins the action stage, in which they will, having been informed by theory, put their ideas into practice and produce their own images and sounds.

Of course, this is just the duo's theory, and it's one of Godard's most subtle jokes that he quickly reveals all this talk of separating theory and action as, itself, still just theoretical. Godard's own view of the relationship between the two is infinitely more complex, and this film represents both the elucidation of his theories and the proof of his action. For Godard, as he says in voiceover, correcting his actors' misconceptions, form and content, like theory and action, are not stages in a process but parts of a circle, continually informing and devouring one another in an eternal process. There is no film that demonstrates this better than Le gai savoir, in which the form and the content are nearly identical. After all, what would the film's discussions of image/sound relationships and the language of bourgeoisie versus radical cinema be without Godard's restless visual and aural imagination to illustrate them? In this way, the film's clarion call of "returning to zero" is misleading, despite the blank black backgrounds and minimalist characters that populate this void. Godard's idea of a "return to zero" is in actuality not empty, but densely populated, full of possibilities; full of all possibilities, in fact. In creating a new idea of cinema from scratch here, Godard is not so much erasing the cinema of the past as erasing the limitations of that cinema, restoring the openness of thought and imagination that can see a cinema without arbitrary boundaries on "acceptable" images and "acceptable" ways of using sound — or "acceptable" ways of combining them.

Pierrot le fou

Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is a road movie, but one in which the characters move, not through any physical geography, but across the well-traveled terrain of Godard's own cinematic corpus, revisiting key themes and familiar scenarios from the nine feature films that Godard made in the five years preceding Pierrot. The film's pivotal placement at a turning point in Godard's career — after his most successful Nouvelle Vague hits but still before his increasingly radical Maoist period — makes it particularly ripe for analysis in terms of Godard's filmography as a whole. It features two of Godard's finest actors and his most iconic figures, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, the latter appearing in her penultimate role in a Godard film, with their divorce still looming ahead. Godard is also revisiting one of his key concerns from his pre-Maoist period, namely the nature of romance and the adversarial relationships that society sets up between man and woman. Not least of the film's echoes of earlier Godard ventures is the way its plot and denouement mirror the feminine betrayal at the core of Godard's first feature Breathless, in which Belmondo was also led to his death by romance and female duplicity. What's different here, and what may help Godard avoid the charges of misogyny that (often justifiably) have been brought against his films, is the extent to which Pierrot interrogates and examines this archetypal relationship.

At the start of the film, Ferdinand (Belmondo) is a discontented bourgeoisie, married to an heiress and himself unemployed after an unsuccessful career in television. He goes to a party where, in a brilliant parody of both TV advertising and Godard's own earlier commercial work, all the characters speak in lingo apparently stolen from ads, extolling the virtues of cars, naked women, and deodorants with the same antiseptic language. Ferdinand wanders through the party, and as he moves from one room to the next Godard arbitrarily applies garish color filters to delineate one space and set of characters from the next. The arbitrariness of the color-switching underlines the extent to which these people are, despite superficial differences in favored topics, all the same; their language, the language of corporate culture, erases all distinctions. The filters also inevitably bring to mind Godard's one big-budget production, Contempt, in which the producers demanded more nude scenes for star Brigitte Bardot, and Godard famously obliged with a lengthy bedroom scene, during which color filters similarly rotated at random across Bardot's bare butt. The device's recurrence here is a subtle in-joke, a reminder that Godard too had sold out and spoken with the language of commerce — and also a reminder of how a device of commercial necessity had been transformed into art.

In any event, Ferdinand soon leaves the party and returns home, where he encounters the evening's babysitter, Marianne (Karina), who is by chance also his ex-lover. The duo set off on an absurdist road trip that seems ill-fated from the start, triggered as it is by Marianne's never-explained murder of a man in her apartment and their flight from a gang of gun-runners looking for the money and weapons she'd been stashing for them. This sequence plays out with Godard's typical wit and obscurity, the actual visuals reminiscent of a slapstick Keystone Kops routine, with the lovers dashing in circles, grabbing the blatantly fake prop guns, and running in and out of cars. Godard fragments the scene, repeating key moments again and again, destroying the moment-to-moment coherence in favor of a vague sensation of danger, hilarity, and action. The voiceover track, meanwhile, further exacerbates the confusion, as Belmondo and Karina take turns narrating the events, sometimes finishing each other's sentences in a contradictory manner and sometimes looping back to something already said. Repetition is a key component of Godard's aesthetic, and it comes into its own in this film, a central element in the film's deconstruction of the road movie's place-to-place narrative.

Indeed, this film doesn't follow a trajectory from place to place so much as from idea to idea. Places are mentioned, but only rarely as concrete markers of locations. More often places and their names are representative of abstract ideas: America, Vietnam, the Riviera (which, as Godard points out, contains the word vie for "life"), Las Vegas. Oftentimes, when Ferdinand and Marianne are traveling, they seem to be moving from one Godard film to the next. Pierrot is littered with remnants of earlier films, especially Le Petit Soldat (a bathroom torture sequence and constant references to the Algerian War), A Woman is a Woman (a few ragtag musical numbers with Karina at her most charming), and variations on Godard's oft-reused trope of enumerating a lover's body parts to declare one's love, first seen in the previously mentioned opening of Contempt. Pierrot also looks forward in interesting ways to the next half-decade of Godard's work, already containing hints of the apocalyptic road movie vibe of Week-end in the staged car crash where Marianne and Ferdinand fake their deaths. More broadly, the theatrical undercurrent of the film, its brilliant use of color and blatantly manufactured settings, is the first suggestion of the Brechtian agitprop theater that Godard would incorporate into his work more and more with films like Made In U.S.A. and La Chinoise. And if the landscape of Pierrot is a microcosm of Godard's films, it's also a pastiche of world literature and pop culture, as the characters themselves sometimes make explicit. When Marianne gets bored of staying in one place for too long, languishing in a seaside hideaway surrounded by friendly animals, she suggests that they ditch this Jules Verne scene and get back to the gangster novel they'd been living earlier.

It's typical of Godard's concern with language that he has taken the tenuous relationship between words and things to its extreme, ignoring the "thing" altogether in favor of the word and the meanings it has taken on. Marianne and Ferdinand both distrust language, but nevertheless acknowledge that it is the only way to communicate, even imperfectly, and so they continuously attempt to understand each other despite the seeming impossibility of it. In fact, for perhaps the first time in these earlier films, Godard seems to be actually interested in teasing out the why of male/female relationships, rather than simply presenting their tortured façades. He occasionally seems to be falling into typically sexist dichotomies — Marianne speaks in terms of feelings, Ferdinand of ideas and art — but here he does so primarily to disrupt and question such bipolar divisions. In one key exchange, Ferdinand and Marianne position themselves along the emotion/thinking divide as they discuss what they like in life, but the actual words they use to describe their supposedly different outlooks turn out to be quite similar. This seeming verbal agreement of course doesn't stop them from reiterating their incompatibility and lack of understanding, but the question has nevertheless been broached. Are male/female disjunctions primarily a result of social strictures that enforce such separateness? Does language help or hinder attempts to eradicate these divisions? Why don't Marianne and Ferdinand understand each other if they seem to be speaking similar words? As usual, Godard doesn't answer any of these questions, he simply leaves them hanging in the air as just one element in this sprawling film.

Ultimately, what all this adds up to is the same thing that nearly every other Godard film adds up to: a dense knot of questions, inquiries, and ideas, tied around a much looser core of plot points and character sketches. It's the perfect summation for his early 60s oeuvre, not only because it draws so many of those earlier films into its orbit, but because it is the epitome of his filmmaking at that time. It's clear, in the sure, sharp aesthetic of the film — its jaw-dropping widescreen vistas, its crisp primary colors — that Godard's filmmaking had reached a new pinnacle and a new stage. Here, he trades in the ragged and jumpy aesthetic of the earlier films, with their endearingly stitched-together quality, and on his first color feature since Contempt, proves himself a master not only of the use of color but of the widescreen frame. In one particularly brilliant shot, he maintains a long view of Ferdinand frantically running along a beach, quickly panning back to accentuate the urgency and then, as though to undermine this atmosphere, executes a leisurely pan to the left, meandering away in the opposite direction from Ferdinand's racing form. As the camera pans up and left across the fluffy clouds and pale blue sky, it eventually reveals Marianne standing on a balcony, held at gunpoint, thereby further accentuating the urgency of the shot and linking the lovers across the expanse of sky. The way in which Godard toys with emotions and meanings in this shot, simply through the movement of the camera, is carried out throughout the film. Despite his continuing (and sometimes overriding) interest in words and ideas, Godard is also among the most visual and sensual of filmmakers, and it is this dichotomy of ideas and sensations that exists at the core of Godard's filmmaking.

Paris vu par...

Paris vu par... is a portmanteau film from 1965, part of a brief vogue for such multi-director compilations in the 60s. Anyone who's made an attempt to go through the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, in particular, will certainly have encountered their fair share of these films, since Godard seemingly contributed to almost all of them. And anyone who's seen a few will know that in general they're a terribly uneven lot, marred by many lackluster efforts, with maybe a gem or two (usually from Godard!) sparkling amidst all the muck. This film, in which six different French directors contribute six shorts about Paris, is no exception to the general rule. Each director focuses his short on a different neighborhood of the city, a conceptually slight idea that allows them pretty much free rein to choose their own stories. The results, though, are largely disappointing.

In Jean Douchet's Saint Germain-des-Pres, the American girl Katherine (Barbara Wilkin), gets involved with a French boy who's pretending to be an ambassador's son. She sleeps with him once, only to have him throw her out the next morning, telling her he needs to go to Mexico to see his father. Obviously, she sees him the next day and uncovers the ruse, then runs into the boy who he was pretending to be. All of this plays out with little enough visual flair, but worse still virtually no sense of the purpose behind it. Douchet's film is utterly dull and pointless, even though it obviously aspires to the witty boy/girl dynamics of Godard's seminal Breathless. Leaving aside the issue of originality, this short is missing several crucial components from its blueprint, namely the underlying sexual politics, playfulness, and inventive use of filmic formal elements that made Godard's film what it was. Douchet seems to have taken Godard's old catch phrase about a girl and a gun to heart, seemingly believing that all you need is a guy, a girl, and a camera, and then you've got a film. Not so, as this paper-thin trifle of a film proves.

Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord is a small improvement, a similarly flimsy premise which is at least teased out into a story of actual consequence, bringing out the subtexts and potential meanings of the material in a way that Douchet fails to even attempt. In Rouch's short, a married couple (Nadine Ballot and Barbet Schroeder) living in a lousy apartment adjacent to a construction site spend the morning fighting, until she storms out and says she won't be back anytime soon. At this point, Rouch interrupts the overexposed quality of the visuals from the apartment, where everything looked washed-out and glistening with harsh sunlight, with a very dark and moody shot as the wife descends in the elevator. This lovely shot provides an interlude, a point of stasis and contemplation, with Ballot's profile shrouded in darkness, the elevator grate casting moving shadows across her face, as her husband's voice grows ever fainter, echoing with a metallic ring from above. It's a beautiful moment, well worth the film's brief length for that alone.

In the second half of this film, Ballot walks towards work and is accosted on the way by a stranger (Gilles Quéant) who abruptly offers her nearly everything that she was just complaining was lacking from her life with her husband: material wealth, a comfortable home in a nice neighborhood, world travel. This is a film about discontentment, especially with class status. But this man, a metaphorical stand-in for the upper class, and also a parodic one — he is so rich he doesn't think twice about leaving his expensive car idling in the middle of the road while he walks with this girl — is also discontented. He has left his suburban rich neighborhood in search of something different for himself, finding his own life too quiet and dull. In fact, he threatens to kill himself unless Ballot goes off with on a vacation, but she refuses and he follows through on his threat. This puzzling ending to some extent defuses the short's potential, which until this melodramatic turn of events, had seemed quite good. Rouch raises some interesting questions in terms of the relationship between the working classes and the bourgeoisie, and the profound dissatisfactions that can affect both classes. But while the portrait of working class life here is firmly fixed in social realities and the ordinary, the stranger's depiction of the upper-class borders on fantasy, with no similar understanding of class pressures. And the story resolves itself in such a ridiculous manner that it's ultimately hard to take any of it too seriously.

Jean-Daniel Pollet's Rue Saint-Denis is quite possibly this film's weakest segment, a totally pointless vignette that goes nowhere and says nothing, in the dullest manner possible. A man (Claude Melki) hires a slightly aged prostitute (Micheline Dax), and takes her back to his cluttered and tiny apartment. The two of them awkwardly talk, eat dinner together, and read the paper. Pollet certainly captures the uncomfortable and impersonal nature of the prostitute relationship — well there's a news flash, huh? — but otherwise it's hard to figure out what exactly this is supposed to be. It's too minimalist and distanced for a character study, and we never learn anything about the characters anyway. But it's also too deadpan to be a comedy, too lightweight to be a social exposé, and too event-less to be a drama. It's simply a moment, captured for its own sake, but it's not substantial enough to justify a film, not even one barely longer than ten minutes.

Eric Rohmer's Place de l'Etoile is one of his weaker efforts, even if in most of this company it winds up looking comparatively strong. The film opens with a documentary segment, in which Rohmer describes the area after which his segment is titled, a section of 12 streets arranged in a star pattern around the perimeter of the Arc de Triomphe. This area is carefully established in the opening minutes, particularly the way that the layout of streets leads to a situation where pedestrians circling the Arc are continually forced to cross busy intersections formed by the crisscrossing network of streets. This informative establishing material pays off when Rohmer's narrative reaches its climax, allowing the viewer to place the protagonist's movements within the context of the space he's moving in. It's a simple thing, but this is the only segment so far to truly establish a sense of location and spatial logistics for the neighborhood that gives its name to the segment. Despite the nominal theme of this project, most of the other directors chose stories that could take place anywhere, that use the neighborhoods they're located in as backgrounds at best. Only Rohmer, always detail-oriented, understands that character is at least partially defined by space. Just as in his features he always pays inordinate attention to the decoration of his characters' living spaces, here he takes great pains to set up the environment in which his character will be moving.

Once the narrative gets going, though, it's a simple enough little story, about a haughty and fastidious clothing shop clerk (Jean-Michel Rouzière) who believes that he's accidentally killed a bum who accosted him on the street. The payoff of the documentary sequence that opened the feature is Rouzière's mad dash away from the scene of the crime through the entire Place de l'Etoile, running across intersections filled with cars and weaving among the other pedestrians. The slow, leisurely tour of the opening minutes is now repeated at a much brisker pace, as the man runs frantically from his imagined pursuers. They never catch him, and months later he runs across the bum on the train, and thus realizes that he didn't kill him after all. It's a slight story, obviously, as minimal and pointless as many of the others in this compilation film. The only difference is that Rohmer's characteristic attention to mise en scène allows him to inflect even this undistinguished narrative with at least a hint of cinematic interest.

For his contribution to this film, Montparnasse-Levallois, Jean-Luc Godard enlisted the help of documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, whose films with his brother David comprise one of the central bodies of work in the American cinéma-vérité movement. With Maysles handling the camerawork and Godard providing the scenario, direction, and editing, this short represents the meeting of two very different cinematic minds. The contrast results in a film that doesn't quite feel like a true Godard film, since it's very rare that Godard ever worked with another creative intelligence who could exercise this much influence over the aesthetic qualities of his films — even his collaborations with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Miéville always feel very much like Godard films. Indeed, Maysles' dodging, shifting handheld camera defines this film, which follows Monica (Joanna Shimkus) as she mixes up the letters she sent to her two lovers, and goes to each in turn to try to straighten things out. Maysles keeps the camera almost constantly in motion, diving in for shaky closeups and snaking around within the confines of the cramped workplaces where Monica visits the two men. Even in relatively stable shots, the camera is slightly shaking from side to side, zooming in for closer views, and abruptly panning between the two people in a conversation.

The opening titles inform that this is an "action-film," and Godard has one of his characters indirectly explain what this means early on. Monica's first lover is an "action-sculptor," which he says means that he takes whatever pieces of metal happen to be lying at hand and combines them through improvisation. Obviously, this applies equally well to the loose quality of Maysles' cinematography, which seems to sample the images in front of it at random, arriving at semi-stable compositions only through continual adjustment and tweaking. This jittery, nervous energy in the camerawork is very different from the smooth, sinewy motion and dispassionate pans usually favored in Godard's work. Maysles' camera lends itself to the kind of psychological and emotional character identification that Godard usually disdains in favor of more formal and intellectual elements. For this reason alone, Montparnasse-Levallois feels very different from Godard's other work, and especially his work from this point in his career, when he was beginning his transformation into a truly radical filmmaker.

Camerawork aside, though, this isn't a particularly radical film to begin with, and it's perhaps the first throwaway film that Godard made since some of his pre-Breathless shorts. It's not a bad short by any means, and just in terms of the cleverness of the writing, the deft handling of the symmetrical plot, and the charming female lead, it elevates itself above some of the other dreck in this compilation, despite the similar romantic themes. The symmetry of the visits to the two men also brings up an interesting parallel in terms of the two men's occupations — one is a sculptor who welds metal in order to create semi-abstract statues of women, while the other is a mechanic who does bodywork on cars. Both are welders and molders of metal, both shape bodies made of steel. Godard doesn't go much further than that with the parallel, unfortunately, but it's an interesting formal echo at least, and a highly suggestive thematic subtext. Still, this is pretty neutered and empty for 60s Godard, a very minor entry in his most fertile and famous creative period.

Claude Chabrol's La Muette is the most visually striking of the films here, dominated by odd camera angles and disorienting setups that turn a simple domestic space into something cold, alien, and even frightening. A young boy (Gilles Chusseau) is traumatized and aggravated by the constant bickering of his parents (Stéphane Audran and Chabrol himself), as well as his father's unsubtle dalliances with the family's sexy maid (Dany Saril). The family is obviously upper class, and their life is presented as a rhythmic and unvarying series of similar events, especially centered around the dinner table, where they all stuff their faces and fight. Chabrol rhythmically returns to the same or similar images again and again, panning around the dinner table to show each member of the family shoving food into their mouths and chewing exaggeratedly. Then a cut, and the pan sequence repeats, maybe with subtle differences, but with the same basic emphasis on eating and mastication. This cycling quality of domestic life is both numbing and painful, and Chabrol expertly draws out the obvious anguish, boredom, and antagonism lurking beneath the surface.

When the boy has had enough, he unleashes a rampage around the house — curiously unpunished and unmentioned afterwards, which makes me wonder if he just fantasized it — and discovers that he can dampen his hearing with some ear plugs he steals from his mother. From then on, the boy walks around his house in a curtain of total silence, not hearing the petty arguments of his parents. Chabrol obliges by shutting off the soundtrack as well, cloaking the viewer in that same eerie stillness and silence. It's an effective (and affecting) portrait of alienation and isolation, whether self-imposed or not. The segment's ending leaves a lot to be desired, resorting to cheap shocks in order to bring the situation to a quick close, but Chabrol redeems the film by inserting a final shot of the boy out on the streets, in the center of a crowd, totally silent, looking confused and lost. It's a haunting final image of desperation and loneliness, as the boy is very much alone even in the center of the crowd of people from whom he's sealed off by a wall of silence.

As a whole, Paris vu par... is a flawed and mediocre collection of shorts, with even some of the more well-known directors here turning in subpar efforts. With the exception of the completely worthless Douchet and Pollet shorts, all of these films have at least moments or aspects of interest, and fans of Godard, Chabrol, or Rohmer would certainly want to fill in their knowledge of those directors' key 60s period with the shorts included here. Otherwise, this is a disappointing collection of utterly average films, and the periodic moments of interest and engagement don't do too much to elevate it above this low level.

9/20: Les Carabiniers

From Godard's 1960s run of films stretching from Breathless to Week-end, possibly the least well-known is his 1963 fifth film, Les Carabiniers. There's possibly a good reason for that, though. I'm of the opinion that Godard didn't make a bad film in this period from 1959-1967, but Les Carabiniers is the least fully formed of these movies, more of a transitional work in which Godard could experiment with form. Taken on its own merits, outside of the canon of Godard's 60s filmography, it's a bit boring — especially the lengthy postcard-viewing scene which forms its climax — and its ideas work far better on paper than they do on the screen.

It's only as a part of Godard's 60s work that Les Carabiniers takes on greater significance. Many of the political ideas which would come to dominate his filmmaking as the decade wore on received their first, tentative airing here. The film follows two peasants who are enticed, by promises of wealth and power, into joining the King's army and going to war. The bulk of the film, after they enlist, shows their wartime exploits, with scenes of carnage and violence alternated with text screens showing the soldiers' letters to the women waiting for them back home. The letters flippantly and casually describe rape, pillaging, mass executions, and battles, then offhandedly add that "it was a nice summer nevertheless." The film's premise — that war is an exploitation of the poor for the goals of the rich — clearly originates in Marxist thought. This becomes especially apparent in a scene where the soldiers come across a young woman who berates them for not understanding the role they play in the class struggle. Of course, they execute her, though not without hesitation.

Les Carabiniers bogs down a bit in the prolonged symbolic scene where the two young soldiers, freshly returned from war, show the women the spoils of war: a suitcase full of postcards cataloguing the full contents of the world. The satirical point is obvious, but the scene drags on too long without much of Godard's characteristic wit and subtlety. There are flashes, though, even here, in references to Felix the Cat and Rin Tin Tin. But this scene mostly demonstrates the problems of this early film from Godard. Its ideas are continually interesting and indicative of the director's future areas of examination: war, capitalism and socialism, the proletarian classes, the strained relationships between the genders caused by social and political forces. These ideas, though, aren't realized with the precision and depth and visual brilliance that Godard would bring to bear on his later efforts. Les Carabiniers remains primarily interesting as a transitional work, a deconstruction of the war film genre just as his other films from this period deconstructed noirs, musicals, and spy thrillers.