“At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought,” wrote the 19-year-old critic and future filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1950. This is how strongly Godard responded to the screen, his future canvas. And our eternal wonder.
Like Picasso, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, the French-Swiss provocateur who died Tuesday at 91 made people see and experience the familiar, the death-haunted and the stubbornly life-affirming in a new way, whether they wanted the new way or not.
Consider the “jump cut,” the sudden visual transition, like an eye-blink, popularized — immortalized, really — by Godard’s 1960 sensation “Breathless.” (Godard dedicated “Breathless” to Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row Hollywood studio he and his fellow cinematheque devotees adored.)
Jean-Paul Belmondo is the glamorous, amorous thug in love with Humphrey Bogart and Hollywood gangster films. Jean Seberg is his newfound, enigmatic lover, a Sorbonne-bound American in Paris hawking the New York Herald Tribune.
“I want to know the future,” he tells her on the boulevard one day, looking in vain for his horoscope in the paper. “Don’t you?” That future doesn’t end well for one of them. The future of movies, meantime, is being born all around them in “Breathless.”
The first cut of Godard’s debut feature ran two-and-a-half hours. The producer required a nice, quick 90-minute picture instead. How to whack it down to size?
Richard Brody’s excellent Godard book, “Everything is Cinema,” recounts in fascinating detail how “Breathless” became the brazen film of the future in the editing room. Godard’s fellow filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, who appeared in Godard’s film, told him to “remove all unnecessary scenes.” Simple, yes?
But “he didn’t listen to me,” Melville said.
Instead, as Brody writes, Godard and his editor, Cecile Decugis, took out “all moments — within scenes, even within shots — that seemed to (Godard) to lack vigor. He kept in the film only what he thought was strongest, regardless of dramatic import or conventional continuity, thus producing many jump cuts, where characters, anything else that moves within the shot, seem to jump from one position to another in a relatively fixed frame.”
Establishing shots, introductory scene-setting bits, expository bearings: gone, gone, gone. “Breathless” became a film of middles and fabulous, pungent, unpredicted “found” moments usually kept off-screen.
Watching it today is like watching Godard think through the endless possibilities of filmmaking, and editing, as he’s filming.
Then Godard was famous, and off in a new direction, and then another. Decades later, Godard had become the Godot of the international film festival circuit, frequently anticipated but, in the end, rarely if ever showing up at his own press conferences.
The late period included a wonderful go at low-fi 3D for “Goodbye to Language” (2014), rightly awarded the prize for best picture by the National Society of Film Critics. Like his beloved Hollywood giants, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Godard perpetually circled a discrete set of themes and obsessions across a variety of genres: disconnection, ideology as weaponry, cinema as poetry in motion.
But generalizing about Godard’s approach defies rational sense. Films as disparate as “Band of Outsiders” (1964), “Alphaville” (1965) and the skeptical Marxist-Leninist anti-romance ”La Chinoise” (1967) reveal wondrous contrasts in a very short burst of creativity. Far-left politics? Not-so-hidden reactionary worldview? Depending on the moment, and the dialectical tensions in Godard’s work, yes and yes. It’s all true.
New Waves come but once. Godard’s fellow Cahiers du Cinema critics, including Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, belonged to a highly competitive boys’ club of aspiring filmmakers and sometime-geniuses. No “sometime” about it, though, when it came to Godard, certainly not for French President Emmanuel Macron, who tweeted Tuesday: “Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the New Wave filmmakers, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We have lost a national treasure, one regarded as a genius.”
In Chicago, Facets Film Program Director Charles Coleman had this to say Tuesday: “Godard was an artist who had a perseverance of delight in his defiance of conventional thought.” He added: “He may very well be the most important director and purveyor of influence who profoundly shaped my perspective on cinema, as well as motivated me to see it as a force in the world.”
Preceding Godard in death: the film culture and ferment that paved the way for a less provincial, more international cinema (though for too many decades, “international” meant mostly “European”). Godard was dogged for decades by charges of antisemitism; in a 1980 interview, he said: “I don’t like to choose between Cain and Abel, between the Nazis and the Jews — one too dreadful torturers, the other too dreadful martyrs.” A self-imposed outcast frequently courting, and defying, reputational disaster, he made films until very near the end.
He has no more future, as Belmondo’s character feared in “Breathless.” But Godard leaves behind a singular cinematic past, ever spoiling for debate and argument with a new audience.
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