Godard

Richard Roud

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Richard Roud's Godard, first published in 1967 as 'Number One' in the seminal Cinema One series, was the first monograph on the great film-maker to be published in English, and one that reveals a unique intimacy between the author and his subject. Roud's provocative and far-reaching analysis shows an intuitive understanding of the aesthetic, intellectual and political context in which Godard worked, paying particular attention to his 'political' cinema, including the ferocious masterpiece Weekend (1967). In his foreword to this reissue, Michael Temple provides an overview of film criticism on Godard, arguing that, more than forty years since its publication, Roud's book remains at the forefront of writings on the director. Temple pinpoints how Roud was uniquely placed as a contemporary of Godard's to follow the film-maker's career from one explosive film to the next, charting the course of the Godardian star even as Roud's own career as a critic and festival programmer was unfolding. He contends that Roud's study was 'a pure product – and a faithful reflection – of a certain tendency in British film culture at the end of the 1960s: cinéphile, progressive, European, intellectual, metropolitan.' For Temple, Roud's work remains a lucid summary of what Godard had already achieved by the end of the 1960s, and provides a suggestive model of cultural criticism with which to approach subsequent aspects of Godard's multimedia artistic adventure.

1: The Outsider

More, perhaps, than in the work of any other director, Godard’s subjects and themes are rooted in the world in which they are set; or conversely, perhaps, their setting has conditioned the choice of themes. Godard’s world is a very special one: it is urban, transient, grey. In his films the country is simply a space you have to go through to get to another city. The one important exception to this rule is the idyll on the island of Porquerolles in Pierrot le fou, but of course it is just that – an idyll, and one which, given his other films, one knew to be doomed. And so it was.

His City is Paris, and it is the Paris of hotel rooms, chambres de bonnes, and, above all, cafés, with their pin-ballmachines and the endless conversations nursing the lait chaud against the inevitable moment when one has to go out on the streets or back to the dreary hotel room. So one drinks and eats and talks; one stands at the bar or sits down at a table. No one in his films has a flat, a home. Or if they do, they have either just moved in or are just about to move out. In Le Mépris, the Roman flat of Camille and Paul has got barely a few sticks of furniture, no curtains, no carpets. In the flat to which Marianne Renoir takes Ferdinand/Pierrot, there is hardly any furniture – just a divan-bed in a corner. Une femme est une femme has the most solidly furnished apartment of them all, but even there one feels that Angéla and Emile could move out tomorrow, leaving no trace behind – nor would they want to leave any signs of their passing. His characters are nomadic in every sense; one oasis looks like any other; all are equally indifferent, equally transitory.

Vivre sa vie; Bande à part

Nature is present only in that obscene parody of it, the suburbs, as in Bande à part with its long dreary avenues, its canals and rivers, its empty lots where no tree ever blossoms. Even more depressing is the locale of Les Carabiniers – the zone, that dreary terrain vague that encircles Paris, with its corrugated-iron huts and its pitiful scrub.

No, Paris is his world, and it is the Paris of the outsiders. Foreigners, gangsters, prostitutes, students: all those on the fringes of society in any city, and made to feel even more so in what Godard finds at its height in Paris, the crushing presence of a bourgeois society. A bande à part, a group of outsiders, even though Godard paradoxically claimed that it is the world which is the outsider; his characters represent life; the world is just a bad movie.

In this urban society, the underground, the overhead railway, the peripheral boulevards, the arcades and passageways play an important part. Particularly the overhead railway, which cuts through Paris and at the same time bears down heavily upon it – of the city, but not part of it. He even uses a shot of the métro aérien in Bande à part to symbolise the doom which is awaiting his characters, their inescapable fatality. Passageways, such as in À bout de souffle, and arcades, as in Masculin Féminin, represent the secret ways his exiles get around the great ant-hill, privileged corridors which avoid the menacing streets.

Hardly any of his characters seem to have families. No fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Occasionally an uncle or an aunt, as in Bande à part, and then not very much imbued with family feeling. Many of his characters are literally outsiders, foreigners: Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle and Le Grand Escroc; Anna Karina throughout; Marina Vlady in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle; Laszlo Szabo, etc. Resnais once said jokingly that the only element linking all his films is the presence of at least one actor speaking with an accent, and Godard might well say the same. Godard has advanced another, purely formal reason for his continued use of accents: ‘I like people, especially women, who speak French with a foreign accent. It’s always rather pretty, and it gives to ordinary words a certain freshness and value that they normally have lost.’

Occasionally this grim world is lit up by a kind of urban epiphany, a moment or two of pure joy, or, as he puts it, ‘a nostalgic moment of spontaneous gaiety and simplicity,’ such as the scene where Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur do an impromptu Madison in a café at the gates of Paris, or even Anna Karina’s ‘mating dance’ in the billiard-room of Vivre sa vie. Occasionally there are moments of tenderness, and of friendship, but not often. Otherwise, Paris is Eluard’s Capitale de la douleur, and that is why one was not surprised when Godard chose to shoot Alphaville there: Alphaville, nightmare city of the future in the Paris of today. The sense of menace was already there for Godard, and the pain, too.

À bout de souffle: Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo

Bande à part: The Madison (Claude Brasseur, Anna Karina, Sami Frey)

However depressing this world may seem, Godard has nevertheless penetrated its beauty as well. Indeed, his whole aesthetic is based on finding the paradoxical beauty of these squalid surroundings. His world may be grey but within this greyness he and his faithful cameraman, Raoul Coutard, have found an almost inexhaustible spectrum of colour. From this architectural poverty, they have created, or rather found, the beauty of bare walls, curtainless windows and garish neon-lit cafés. It is a very modern, austere kind of beauty which does not depend upon ‘art direction’, but rather on an almost puritanical study of form. Even window-frames and handles can look like monumental sculpture, Godard seems to be saying, if one looks at them with a fresh and unprejudiced eye.

A parenthesis: I prefer Godard’s films in black and white for this very reason. To be sure, the colour in Une femme est une femme, Le Mépris and Pierrot le fou is beautiful, but it somehow seems an easier kind of beauty and one which others have also achieved. His last two colour films, Made in U.S.A. and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, are rather more special cases, as we shall see.

Therefore, considering the world in which Godard’s films are set, it should come as no surprise that his main, all-penetrating theme is the impossibility of love, the impossibility of it lasting. (‘Et réciproquement,’ as his characters never tire of saying; perhaps the choice – in so far as there is a conscious choice – of theme dictated the settings.) Almost without exception, this theme is present in each of his films. Sometimes a relationship is destroyed by cowardice, as in À bout de souffle; sometimes by political considerations, as in Le Petit Soldat, and partly in Pierrot le fou. But most often it is simply life, the human condition. Not social conditions, however, although they do play some part in Vivre sa vie, Bande à part and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. Nor is it Godard’s much talked of misogyny for, after all, his female characters are just as often the victims.

However, it should be said that there is always a victim: the couples are never equal in strength. One is weak, the other strong, either basically or momentarily. In Masculin Féminin, Paul and Madeleine are united by physical bonds alone and these prove to be insufficient – in any case, it is clear that Paul is much more in love than is Madeleine. In Le Mépris, it is perhaps Paul’s cowardice that leads Camille to despise him, although we never really know why their marriage breaks up, except that perhaps it was never a true marriage in the first place. In Made in U.S.A. Paula, while trying to avenge her lover’s death, discovers that it may have been caused by a sordid affair with a girl; political considerations may have played little part.

There are four apparent exceptions to this rule: Une femme est une femme, Alphaville, Bande à part and Les Carabiniers. In the first three, the relationship is saved at the end of the film by a stylistic pirouette which carries little conviction. To be sure, Lemmy Caution takes Natacha away from Alphaville and she learns to pronounce the forbidden words ‘I love you’, but one has little confidence in this happy end. The machines would really have won out, just as, Godard would say, they actually are winning already. Une femme est une femme really is an exception, except that one cannot take very seriously the affair between Angéla and Emile. Only in Les Carabiniers do we find two happily married couples but they are on such a low social and intellectual level that Godard might well be saying that it is only on this brutish level that love can survive, that between ordinarily intelligent people it is doomed.

However, as I have suggested, the themes of Godard’s films are alternatively and simultaneously both personal and social, and in order to examine fully the personal themes, one must also take into account the social aspects of his work. His films are both essay and diary, and one cannot be separated from the other. And, indeed, we discover that the purely personal themes tend to be subsumed and absorbed by the social ones.

Alphaville: capitale de la douleur (Anna Karina)

For example, a very important theme, and one that comes up over and over again, is that of prostitution – a subject which is both personal and social at the same time. The treatment of prostitution begins on the personal level and slowly spreads, or rather enlarges itself, to take in social considerations as well. Or perhaps Godard simply discovered that the two are inseparable, as in fact they are. The tightest bond which links any of us to the social structure is what the Marxists call the cash nexus. We all have to eat, and to earn money in order to do so. And one of Godard’s main contentions is that many of us earn that money by doing things we don’t want to do. ‘More and more the people I see, and I meet many different kinds in the film milieu (one comes into contact with every level of society when one makes films, from the banker to the electrician), don’t really enjoy what they’re doing. Like prostitutes, they just do it. All they really want is a car to take them to the seaside. Except that when they get the car there won’t be enough roads to get to the sea, and if they do, the beaches will be too crowded. I don’t think,’ he adds, ‘that you can find a single carpenter or plumber today who likes his job.’ Theremay be a certain naïveté in these ideas, which we will consider later in discussing his most recent film, but they are obviously deeply felt.

In Vivre sa vie, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’e...