Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

 

Cast: Anna Karina, László Szabó, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marianne Faithfull, Yves Afonso. Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, based on a novel by Donald Westlake. Cinematography: Raoul Coutard. Film editing: Françoise Collin, Agnès Guillemot. 

Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. wasn’t released in the titular country until 2009 because Godard failed to secure the rights to the Donald E. Westlake novel on which it was based, although it’s unlikely that even Westlake would recognize the film’s relationship to the novel he published under the pseudonym Richard Stark. It’s an allusive (and some would say elusive) ramble through all manner of detective fiction and film noir, often wearing its sources on its sleeve, with references to fictional characters, movie actors (e.g., Richard Widmark, whose name László Szabó bears in the film), filmmakers (e.g. Otto Preminger), and screenwriters (e.g. Ben Hecht). But it’s also, as the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and bearing the name of the director Don Siegel says, “a political movie. Just like a Disney movie, only with blood.” Anna Karina’s detective Paula Nelson is searching for the killer of one Richard Politzer, except that we never hear the last name in the film: It’s always blocked out by some off-screen sound like a car horn. The reason seems to be that Godard is alluding to the Marxist philosopher Georges Politzer, a figure of some controversy in the  hyperpolitical France of the 1960s. Most of the movie’s literary, cinematic, political, and historical allusions can be ignored, if you just want to let the bright colors of Raoul Coutard’s cinematography dazzle you and the foolery of the film’s parody and nonsense scenes wash over you. (If you want more, there’s a very good short film about the allusions included with the Criterion Collection edition of the movie, which is also currently available on the Criterion Channel.) 

La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

 

Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Michel Semeniako, Lex DeBruijn, Omar Diop, Francis Jeanson, Blandine Jeanson, Eliane Giovagnoli. Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematography: Raoul Coutard. Film editing: Delphine Desfons, Agnès Guillemot. Music: Michel Legrand, Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

Whenever I think the world has gone completely crazy, I think back to the late 1960s and realize that it may have been even crazier then. Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise is a helpful way of remembering that age. It might be worth putting together a double feature of Godard's film along with Haskell Wexler's 1969 film Medium Cool. Together, they bracket that annus horribilis 1968, the year of riots and assassinations. Godard's film is about what he called in his 1966 film Masculin Féminin “the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” a generation of French young people striving to make sense of a world they don't control. In that movie, which also starred Jean-Pierre Léaud, they find no ready outlet for their revolutionary energies. But by the time of La Chinoise they have discovered it in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The five or six young would-be revolutionaries of La Chinoise have come together to form a cell, in which they endlessly discuss the tenets of Marxist-Leninism and fetishize Mao's Little Red Book. It's a film that's alternately funny and scary, especially as the talk finally finds an outlet in action -- suicide and political assassination. It's also a film that will test the patience of anyone who wants to see things happen rather than listen to people talk about ideas that might make them happen. 

Le Petit Soldat (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

Michel Subor and Anna Karina in Le Petit Soldat

Bruno Forestier: Michel Subor
Veronica Dreyer: Anna Karina
Jacques: Henri-Jacques Huet
Paul: Paul Beauvais
Laszlo: László Szabó
Activist Leader: Georges de Beauregard

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman, Nadine Trintignant
Music: Maurice Leroux

Le Petit Soldat was Jean-Luc Godard's second feature film, made in 1960 but held up by French censorship because of its political content until 1963. Its characters are dour and talky, but there's a great deal of life stirring in the film as they try to navigate the existential dilemmas they find themselves in. The protagonist, Bruno Forestier, is a kind of freelance soldier of fortune, a Frenchman exiled in Switzerland, not coincidentally Godard's country of birth. He poses as a photographer, and utters Godard's famous statement, "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second." Bruno woos the pretty Veronica Dreyer, a Danish woman who shares the surname of the great film director Carl Theodor Dreyer, by taking pictures of her. Blackmailed by French intelligence into assassinating a pro-Arab leader, he gets caught and tortured in scenes that are quite graphic: He's handcuffed in a bathtub and his hands are singed by the flame of a lighter, he's waterboarded, and he's given electric shocks. (Michel Subor, the actor who plays Bruno, evidently underwent all of these tortures, though not for the extended periods Bruno experiences.) Eventually he gets free and goes through with the planned assassination, having struck a deal with the French that he and Veronica can escape to Brazil, but in the meantime the French have discovered that she's been working with the Arabs and she's tortured to death. All of this is staged in the deadpan manner characteristic of early Godard, and with a certain amount of ironic humor, especially in the scenes in which a frustrated Bruno pursues his target in a car down two-lane French roads, never quite able to get alongside the target to take the shot. Clearly, there's a lot to chew on in Le Petit Soldat, a Godardian mélange of politics and sex and alienation -- Bruno says, looking in a mirror, "When I look myself in the face, I get the feeling I don't match what I think is inside." Whether you think it's worth watching -- and I do -- probably depends on your taste for mid-20th-century Angst.

Tout Va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

Him, Jacques: Yves Montand
Her, Susan: Jane Fonda
Factory Manager: Vittorio Caprioli
Genevieve: Elizabeth Chauvin
Jacques: Castel Casti
Lucien: Éric Chartier
Georges: Louis Bugette
Léon: Yves Gabrielli
Frederic: Pierre Oudrey

Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Cinematography: Armand Marco
Production design: Jacques Duguied
Film editing: Claudine Merlin, Kenout Peltier

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's sardonic look at what happened to the leftist intellectuals who were on the forefront of the May 1968 protests in France has two great cinematic showpieces. The first is the multi-chambered two-decker set on which we watch the employees of a sausage factory play out their messy, scattered, and mostly ineffectual efforts at a strike. Though the set is often described as an hommage to Jerry Lewis's similar set for The Ladies' Man (1961), the concept goes back to the era of silent comedy. The other remarkable sequence takes place in an enormous supermarket, in which the camera, placed behind the row of cashiers ringing up purchases, tracks back and forth as shoppers wheel up their goods, a communist hawks his book with a newly marked-down price, and a small revolution starts in which people are told that everything is free. It's a nightmare of consumer capitalism run amok. Godard and Gorin's satire is directed at the complacency into which everyone has sunk in the four years since May 1968, while attempting to demonstrate that the class struggle is still viable. It's conceived as a kind of film about a film, with off-camera voices discussing the need to cast stars -- i.e. Jane Fonda and Yves Montand -- to guarantee the money needed to make the movie. As a demonstration of Godardian film technique, it has moments of brilliance, but even though it scores some points, as political filmmaking it feels inert and now inescapably dated.

Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)

Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie

Nana Kleinfrankenheim: Anna Karina
Raoul: Sady Rebbot
Paul: André S. Labarthe
Yvette: Guylaine Schlumberger
Le chef: Gérard Hoffman
Elisabeth: Monique Messine
Journaliste: Paul Pavel
Dimitri: Dimitri Dineff
Jeune homme: Peter Kassovitz
Luigi: Eric Schlumberger
Le philosophe: Brice Parain

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Guillemot
Music: Michel Legrand

The essential tension of Vivre Sa Vie comes from Jean-Luc Godard's dry intellectual detachment and self-conscious filmmaking set against his exquisitely passionate involvement with Anna Karina. It shows itself at the very beginning, when Godard gives us almost a mug shot treatment of Karina's face -- frontal, right profile, left profile -- and then follows with an extended scene that features only the back of her head. And it continues through to the end in which Edgar Allan Poe's story about an artist who sucks the life out of his beloved by painting her portrait foreshadows the death of Karina's character, Nana. On one level, the film posits art as the enemy of life, while on the other, art becomes a source of life. In the latter case, I'm thinking of the celebrated scene in which Nana is brought to tears by watching Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). It can be argued that Nana identifies with Joan as a fellow martyr: Joan to her faith in God, Nana to her faith in herself -- viz., the speech in which she claims "responsibility" for everything she does. Vivre Sa Vie is full of such intellectual puzzles, including the extended conversation between Nana and the philosopher Brice Parain. But it's Karina's performance that lifts the film out of the thicket of mid-century existentialism that it threatens to become ensnared by. She makes Nana one of the essential characters not just of the French New Wave but of the entire history of movies.

Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc in Weekend

Corinne Durand: Mireille Darc
Roland Durand: Jean Yanne
Head of the Front de Libération de la Seine et Oise: Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Saint-Just: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Tom Thumb: Yves Afonso
Emily Brontë: Blandine Jeanson
Joseph Balsamo: Daniel Pommereulle
Pianist: Paul Gégauff
African: Omar Diop
Arab: László Szabó

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Based on a story by Julio Cortázar
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Antoine Duhamel

"You say you want a revolution / Well, you know, / We all want to change the world." I'm old enough to remember when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were denounced as capitalist reactionaries for that song, especially for lines like "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." So watching Jean-Luc Godard's satire Weekend takes me back to the days of a revolutionary fervor that now seems naive, especially since the violent year of 1968 culminated in the election of Richard Nixon, and Mao has been relegated to the ranks of history's more odious tyrants. Still, there's nothing naive about Weekend, which although it now looks less like a great film than a self-indulgent one at least demonstrates the indulgence of a great self, i.e., Jean-Luc Godard's. Is Godard celebrating the revolutionary spirit or sending it up? Weekend ranges from fascinating to stupefying, from bravura filmmaking like the pan along the traffic jam and the repeated 360-degree pan around a farmyard where a pianist is playing a Mozart sonata, to the eye-glazing extended readings from the works of Stokely Carmichael and Frantz Fanon and the drum solo accompanied by a Whitmanesque poem by Lautréamont. Pauline Kael got it right when she called Weekend a "vision of Hell," but what seems most significant now is that it's a hell that lies just beneath us, covered by the veneer of civilization. In Weekend, civilization is showing cracks being widened by unbridled consumerism. And who's to say in the age of climate change denial, abrogation of human rights, and raging corporate globalization that those cracks haven't widened still further? This is a film made by a man who definitely doesn't "know that it's gonna be all right."

Watched on the Filmstruck Criterion Channel

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Marina Vlady in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Juliette Jeanson: Marina Vlady
Marianne: Anny Duperey
Robert Jeanson: Roger Montseret
John Bogus, the American: Raoul Lévy
Roger: Jean Narboni

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Based on an article by Catherine Vimenet
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

At the beginning of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, we see a beautiful woman on the screen and the narrator (Jean-Luc Godard) whispers to us some things that he knows about her: that she is the actress Marina Vlady and that she is looking to the right. And yes, she is Marina Vlady, but in a moment the narrator is whispering again that she is Juliette Jeanson, which is the role Vlady is playing in the film. And yes, she is looking to the right, except that it's our right; she is looking to her left. So immediately Godard has launched us into some conundrums involving actor and role as well as subject and object. Godard will insistently whisper his comments on these and other epistemological questions throughout the film, as we watch Marina/Juliette move through a day in which Juliette takes her daughter to a very strange day care center, has her car washed, buys a dress, meets a friend, and turns a few tricks. We also watch the work at construction sites and contemplate the swirling foam on the surface of a cup of coffee. And throughout we are not only whispered to by Godard, but also hear Juliette's thoughts and the conversation of other characters on the nature and limitations of language and art and philosophy, as well as the psychic disturbance and political significance of the Vietnam War. For some, all this will constitute an hour and a half of pretentious and boring fiddle-faddle, the cinematic equivalent of the philosophical bull sessions we had in our college dorms. But let me hasten to defend the philosophical bull session: It stretched our minds at the right time in our lives, when we had the patience for ideas. Too few of us have the patience for ideas anymore, and that may be an incalculable loss. It's easy to mock films like 2 or 3 Things, to ignore their essential playfulness, their overturning of the complacent expectation that a movie should tell a story or excite or entertain us. But pause to gnaw on some of the some of the things that are said in the film, such as "To say that the limits of language, of my language, are those of the world, of my world, and that in speaking, I limit the world, I end it." Or contemplate the fact that the surface of a stirred cup of coffee looks like the spiraling of a galaxy. Or engage your eyes with cinematographer Raoul Coutard's widescreen compositions. Or question the film's obsession with commercialism, which echoes Andy Warhol's exaltation of soup cans and Brillo boxes into art. Or do anything else that the film prods you to do, including wonder why Juliette leads the life she does, and you've got at the heart of what makes Godard such a radically important filmmaker.

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

Is Goodbye to Language the autumnal masterwork of a genius filmmaker? Or is it just an exercise in playing with old techniques -- montage, jump cuts, oblique and fragmented narrative -- in a new (at least to Godard) medium -- 3D? Not having seen the film in 3D, I'm not perhaps fully qualified to comment, but I have to say that it didn't open any new insights for me into the potential of film or the Godard oeuvre as a whole. That in the film Godard makes the wanderings of a dog more coherent and interesting than the conflicts of his human characters is telling: He is obviously more emotionally invested in the dog, played by his own pet, Roxy Miéville, than in the people, whose story can only be pieced together from the fragments of what they do and say to each other. Language, as the title suggests, is subordinate to direct sensation, in which the dog has an advantage over the incessantly chattering and analyzing humans. Godard suggests this through a barrage of quotations from philosophers and novelists, which keep tantalizing us away from simply absorbing the images that he also floods the film with -- the cinematographer, responsible for many of the novel 3D effects, is Fabrice Aragno. Even without 3D, Goodbye to Language is often quite beautiful, with its saturated colors, but I'm not convinced that it adds up to anything novel or revelatory.

A Woman Is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)

Jean-Claude Brialy and Anna Karina in A Woman Is a Woman

Émile Récamier: Jean-Claude Brialy
Angela: Anna Karina
Alfred Lubitsch: Jean-Paul Belmondo

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Bernard Evein
Music: Michel Legrand

Orson Welles is often quoted as having said, when he saw the production facilities available to him at RKO, "This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!" I imagine Jean-Luc Godard saying something like that when he was told that he could make his second feature film, after the success of Breathless (1960), in color and Franscope (an anamorphic wide-screen process like Cinemascope). But of course Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, had no intention of using the wide screen for its conventional purpose, the epic and spectacular. Instead, many of the tricks the director and the cinematographer pulled off in A Woman Is a Woman were playful ones, like filming the tiny, cramped apartment of Angela and Émile in a medium more suited to Versailles. The effect is not only slightly giddy, but it also serves to emphasize the difficulties the couple are having in their relationship. The movie is brightly inconsequential, the kind of colorful musicalized nonsense that Jacques Demy would master a few years later with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), using the same composer Godard does, Michel Legrand. The success of Breathless seems to have gone to Godard's head a bit: He enlists its star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, as the third leg of the movie's romantic triangle, and has him speak a line about not wanting to miss Breathless on TV. Belmondo also encounters Jeanne Moreau in a cameo bit, asking her how Jules and Jim is going -- Godard's fellow New Wave sensation, François Truffaut, was in the midst of filming it with Moreau. The best thing A Woman Is a Woman has going for it is Karina, who was about to become Godard's muse and for a while his wife.

Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

Eddie Constantine in Alphaville

Lemmy Caution: Eddie Constantine
Natacha von Braun: Anna Karina
Henri Dickson: Akim Tamiroff
Professor von Braun: Howard Vernon

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Music: Paul Misraki

I think Alphaville may have been responsible for my former distaste for Godard movies: When I saw it on its first American run -- probably at that temple of Harvard hip, the Brattle Theater -- I couldn't figure out why anyone would make a sci-fi movie starring an American-French B-movie actor as a trenchcoated secret agent in a future that looked a lot like contemporary Paris. Or why the beautiful Natacha Von Braun should fall in love with anyone who looks like Eddie Constantine -- the apparent survivor of a close encounter with a cheese grater. But time and experience teach you a lot about what's really witty, and Alphaville is that. Yes, it's a spoof on both sci-fi and spy movies, with Paul Misraki's score providing the familiar dun-dun-DUNN! underscoring of suspenseful moments as Lemmy Caution slugs and shoots his way out of ridiculously staged confrontations. But how many spoofs have we seen that fall flat because they're so self-conscious about their spoofery? Godard's spoof  succeeds because Constantine, Karina, and that great slab of Armenian ham Akim Tamiroff take their roles so seriously. Like most Godard movies, it's often absurdly talky, but the talk is provocative. And even though it seems to be designed to make a point about the way contemporary design and architecture have a way of alienating us from the human, it doesn't hammer the point. My one complaint in this recent viewing is that Turner Classic Movies showed a muddy print in which the subtitles had their feet cut off.

Masculin Féminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

In an intertitle during the film, Godard suggested that his portrait of French (or anyway Parisian) youth in the mid-1960s "could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola." But the movie kept reminding me of Lena Dunham's portrait of American youth in the early 2010s, the TV series Girls, which might be called "The Children of Milton Friedman and Xanax." Godard's young Parisians find themselves in a time bursting with revolutionary energy but no particular channel in which to direct it other than sex and pop culture. The political activity of Godard's protagonist, Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), largely consists of pranks: distracting the driver of a parked military staff car so an accomplice can write an anti-war slogan along its side, and ordering a staff car on the phone under the guise of "General Doinel" -- a cheeky allusion to the role of Antoine Doinel, which Léaud played in The 400 Blows (1959) and four other films directed by François Truffaut. But most of the young people in the film are as shy of committing themselves to anything political or social as the beauty queen called "Mlle 19" (Elsa Leroy) whom Paul interviews at some length in one of the film's more spot-on satirical moments. This is a movie of fits and starts: moments of great energy interrupted by stretches of talk. As usual, Godard plays with viewers' expectations throughout, staging a sequence near the beginning in which a woman guns down her husband, only to ignore any follow-up action, and having a political protester immolate himself off-screen with only the somewhat indifferent reports of Paul and his girlfriend, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), as reactions to the event. The soundtrack is spiced with what sound like gunshots but turn out to be only billiard balls clashing against each other in a neighboring room. Some people dislike Godard because of his uncompromising resistance to conventional story-telling and scene-framing, and there is some rather self-conscious "movieness" about Masculin Féminin, as when the characters go to a film within the film and Paul has to make a special trip to the projection booth to complain that it's being shown in the wrong aspect ratio. But on the whole I find Godard's movies provide a necessary tonic against complacency.

Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

Roger Ebert did something critics seldom do: He changed his opinion of a movie. (Think about it: How many of us would like to be held to our original opinions of some films that were fun to watch the first time but haven't held up -- like, say, Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) or Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)?) Ebert gave Pierrot le Fou three and a half stars when he reviewed it in 1966, lauding Godard's "virtuoso display of his mastery of Hollywood genres." But in 2007, reviewing a re-release of the film, he reduced the assessment to two and a half stars: "I now see it," he wrote, "as the story of silly characters who have seen too many Hollywood movies." I think my opinion of the film might have been the reverse of Ebert's: If I had seen it 20 or 30 years ago, I might have dismissed it as a pretentious and arty example of the French New Wave at its worst, mixing silly antics with facile social and political satire. Instead, it now strikes me as a brilliant deconstruction of Hollywood film noir, gangster movies, and romantic adventure, almost perverse in its opening up of the traditional claustrophobic black-and-white atmosphere of noir with its bright wide-screen Eastmancolor images. And without Pierrot le Fou, or other Godard films like Breathless (1960) or Bande à Part (1964), would Hollywood have had the inspiration or the nerve to make movies like Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)? Yes, the characters played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are silly, but Godard makes us see through their eyes the absurdity of the commerce-ridden milieu in which they exist. There is no core to their lives, no matter how much Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina) may try to establish one with art and literature on his part or with a pursuit of fun on hers. The French have always loved to épater le bourgeoisie, and Godard plants himself firmly in that tradition, but the absurdity of Ferdinand's self-immolation (or -detonation), painting his face blue and wrapping his head in explosives, suggests that there is a price to be paid for shaking up the squares. But until we reach that point, Allons-y, Alonso!