Jean-Luc Godard
(b. December 3, 1930)
Jean-Luc Godard Vs. Cinema: The Filmmaker as Critic, Activist, and Auteur
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
© December 2010
In many ways the history of cinema is the history of 20th century Western modernism itself as far as theoretical, philosophical, and creative conceptions and representations of the Real are concerned. As such the filmmaker as both director and writer has always been compelled to at least acknowledge if not openly struggle with the corresponding yet often antagonistic challenges of aesthetic and social criticism as an integral part of the very process and realization of the actual experience of making film itself--especially in a genre driven and narrative based medium rooted in the structural and institutional context of monopoly capitalist economics and thus a commercial profit system. As a result the social, ideological, and political dimensions of the art were never really divorced from the consumerist demands, desires, and expectations of its audience(s) or the economic machinations of the system of production that undergirds its existence.
It is in this sense that modernism in film as exemplified by the rise and eventual domination of the industrialized studio system of producing and distributing film as both art object and cultural commodity became synonymous with the aesthetic examination, creative manipulation, and expressive redeployment of social and cultural history. Thus from the very beginning of its emergence as a self consciously cultural and social force after 1915 (via the rise of the American director D.W. Griffith and his aggressively revisionist take on U.S. history in 'The Birth of A Nation' through his simultaneously innovative uses of the moving image and the mise-en-scene as social commentary, populist propaganda, and epic theatre) the imaginative and interpretive power and influence of film as a mass based social and cultural phenomenon and expression shaped our collective perceptions and consciousness of the often contentious relationship of modern art to society via various forms of institutionalized social authority and cultural traditions. It was in this larger historical context that cinema became a fecund and self reflexive source for its creative artists to actively intervene on and transform these given social, cultural, and political traditions and orthodoxies. This intervention took place not only at the level of the composition of the visual image and production design but the expressive dimensions of acting and screen dialogue. With the transformative rise of sound, music, and the human voice as corresponding aspects of the image onscreen the role of the cinematic artist as individual aesthetic force began to assert itself. As a result the commercial rise of the 'star system' for actors found a parallel correspondence in the critical and commercial awareness and celebration of the director-as-auteur (author) in the cinematic marketplace. These developments in the art of filmmaking began to have a profound effect of the mass audience's reception of the work of these artists and also was the impetus for new intellectual and critical discourses to emerge about the purpose, worth, and intentions of film as an artistic medium.
The convergence of these creative, critical, and industrial realities after World War I led to an explosion of film production on a global scale following the technological innovation of sound in movies in 1927. From the 1930s on this convergence of the aesthetic, economic, and cultural/social dimensions of the mass cinematic experience quickly led to a veritable revolution among directors, writers, and critics throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America (and later in Africa) who embraced the film auteur/author template as their own. This international community of writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, technicians, composers, and designers often saw themselves as film artists from other sovereign nation-states sought to position themselves and their work as either localized vernacular extensions of the commercial Hollywood genre film tradition or as stylistically ironic neorealist critics of the U.S. studio system.
Thus from the late 1930s to the late 1950s this international bifircation of institutionalized genre cinema and independent neorealist auteurism led to the precipitous rise of an innovative new generation of filmmakers who influenced by both stylistic tendencies began to emerge after the second World War and followed directly in the footsteps of such major directors and writers of the 1940s and '50s era as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, and Alfred Hitchcock (U.S.), Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, and Luchino Visconti (Italy), Satyajit Ray (India), Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan), Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo (France), among a select number of other filmmakers from Europe, Asia, and South America who also sought a new artistic, critical, and ideological relationship with cinema and its history.
It was this critical historical legacy of the modern cinema as an assertive aesthetic and social force in the expansion of discourses available to the artist as both technician and poet, as well as narrator and documentarian, that attracted the rapt attention of a number of young Parisian cineastes, intellectuals, and social critics in France during the mid and late 1950s to create what became known popularly as the French 'New Wave' (Nouvelle Vague). This movement of young film buffs and aspiring writers and directors who spent many long hours together in the many cineaste club theatres of Paris after the second World War was led by a small but highly dedicated group, many of whom became world famous as a result as producing, writing, and directing their own films from 1959 on. Many of their names are now legion in global film history: Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and perhaps the most influential and famous/infamous of them all, Jean-Luc Godard.
What the 'New Wave' of filmmakers sought was nothing short of an entirely new social, economic, creative, and ideological contract with the technical, industrial, and corporate apparatus that was largely responsible for film's production, distribution, and institutional role in the larger matrix of cultural relations that determined and in many ways overdetermined one's public access to cinema. In seeking both an implicit and explicit critique of this structural and thus philosophical framework of what constituted cinema Godard and his comrades, colleagues, co-conspirators, and fellow artists/critics not only wrote about, sponsored, promoted, investigated, supported, and/or dismissed what they saw as either worthy of their interest or inimical to it. Within that vast sphere of often highly spirited contentious debates and socially engaged activity vis-a-vis the massive commercial apparatus that governed most cinematic production and distribution on a global scale lay the larger contextual reality and creative agenda of what constituted the very form(s) and content of what Godard and his New Wave colleagues (and their often highly personal and aesthetically competitive visions) not only thought cinema was and wasn't but most importantly could be.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hlDrHp02kAqTZXx_aZfyUZH8CFqQ?docId=CNG.94591e60ea7188c66e691af71595f0f4.351
'New Wave' film legend Godard turns 80
By Emma Charlton (AFP)
PARIS — "New Wave" director Jean-Luc Godard, who turned European filmmaking upside-down in the 1960s and who counts the likes of Pedro Almodovar and Quentin Tarantino as his modern-day heirs, turns 80 on Friday.
The French-Swiss director shot to fame in 1960 with "Breathless" in which Jean Seberg played a cropped-haired American in Paris, following up with such classics as "Alphaville" and "Contempt" starring screen icon Brigitte Bardot.
Leader of the "New Wave" generation of filmmakers along with the likes of Francois Truffaut, Godard re-wrote the film rulebook with movies that shunned studio sets in to shoot outside, using improvised scripts and natural sound.
"In the mid-60s, Godard was Picasso: they were the two most famous artists in the world," summed up Jean-Michel Frodon, former head of the Cahiers du Cinema film review that nurtured the "New Wave".
"He was the star of his generation. And even today, you can't talk 20 minutes with David Lynch without him mentioning Godard. Or with David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch."
But after a decade of glory, Godard made a clean break with the film establishment in May 1968, after he and a band of fellows hijacked the Cannes festival to draw attention to the student revolt taking place outside.
For the past 30 years Godard has lived as a semi-recluse in the Swiss village of Rolle, from where he sporadically releases auteur films for an audience of die-hard fans.
This year he showed a film at Cannes, "Film Socialisme", a kaleidoscope of image, sound and text journeys through history and ideas, from ancient times to the Holocaust -- but stayed away from the glitzy Riviera festival itself.
Godard's image has also been tarred of late -- especially in the United States -- by charges of anti-Semitism, fuelled by a staunch anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian stance and by interviews on the Jewish influence in Hollywood.
But his work at the top of his game left a lasting mark on world filmmaking: at this year's Oscars, he received a lifetime achievement award for creating "a new kind of cinema" -- although true to his reputation he stayed at home.
"In Brazil, Japan or China, filmmakers all say Godard helps them think about their own work," said Frodon.
"Pedro Almodovar, for instance, told me how Godard was a sort of intellectual companion who helps him think when he is on a shoot. It helps him, just as it helps Lars von Trier."
And Tarantino's production company "Band apart" is a direct tribute to the director's 1964 movie "Band of Outsiders".
What exactly did Godard bring to filmmaking? "A new way of telling a story, the length of his shots, the rythmic use of editing," said Frodon. "And a way of asking what it means to show a woman's face, her body."
"But more than anything, in each of Godard's shots there is an extraordinary beauty. He is without a doubt the director who best filmed the sky, the trees, nature -- and women too, although in that area he had more competition."
Godard, who acquired Swiss nationality at the age of 21, has said he chose the village of Rolle to settle 30 years ago with his Swiss partner the director Anne-Marie Mieville, "because it is nowhere."
"People here leave him alone," Daniel Belotti, mayor of the village of 6,000 inhabitants, told AFP. "He has his habits, he walks his dog, goes to the cafe on main street, buys a newspaper or cigars."
"I get the sense he does not really want us to celebrate this moment in time," said Frederic Maire of the Swiss cinematheque. "He thinks of the future, his last film is incredibly modern... when you look at his work, it seems he is 20 years old."
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.
