JEAN-LUC GODARD Jean-Luc Godard (born 3 December 1930) is a Franco-Swiss filmmaker and a leading member of the "French New Wave”. Known for stylistic innovations that challenged the conventions of Hollywood cinema, he is universally recognized as the most audacious, radical, as well as the most influential of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. His work reflects a fervent knowledge of film history, a comprehensive understanding of existential and Marxist philosophy, and a profound insight into the fragility of human relationships.

JEAN-LUC GODARD BIOGRAPHY

A Happy Childhood

Jean-Luc Godard was born on December 3, 1930, in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. His father, Paul Godard, a Swiss doctor, moved the family to Switzerland four years later. His mother, Odile Monod, was from a wealthy protestant French background. Her father, Julien Monod, was one of the most prominent bankers in France, and a well-connected figure in literary circles, whose closest friend was the writer Paul Valery. The couple had three other children: Rachel, born January 1st 1930, Claude, born in 1933, and Véronique, born in 1937.

The family settled in Nyon on the shores of Lake Geneva. Paul Godard worked in a private medical clinic nearby. The family was prosperous and cultured – Godard later described his childhood as being like “a kind of paradise.” During World War II, the family remained in Switzerland, though they would make occasional trips across to the French side of the lake to visit Julian Monod’s estate. Young Jean-Luc was already an avid reader who, by the age of fourteen, had graduated from children’s adventure stories to works by authors such as André Gide and André Malraux. He was also a keen sports fan who played tennis, skied and enjoyed football.

The Black Sheep

In 1946, Godard went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris, where he intended to study advanced mathematics with the intention of entering engineering school. Instead, he became hooked on the ciné-club boom in the capital and began watching movies day and night. The result was that he failed his baccalaureate exam in 1948 and returned to Switzerland where he studied at a high school in Lausanne and lived with his parents. Relations between father and son were strained so Godard spent most of his spare time hanging around with other cinema enthusiasts in Geneva. He also tried his hand at painting after becoming interested in modern art.

After finally passing his baccalaureate, he returned to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1949. He took courses in ethnology but soon abandoned his studies, applying to become a student at the city’s leading film school, IDHEC, but he was rejected. Instead he studied film by watching movies at Henri Langlois’ Cinématheque Francais and the Ciné-club Quarter Latin. It was here that he first became friends with two other film fanatics, Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. It was standard practice for them to see three or four films per day, or to spend an entire day in a single theatre. As Godard later wrote, “the cinema screen was the wall we had to scale to escape from our lives.”

What Is Cinema?

Post-war Paris was a place of great philosophical and political debate. The dominant intellectual figure was Jean-Paul Sartre, a prolific writer and advocate of “existentialism” who poured forth novels, plays, philosophical essays, literary criticism, and political commentary, becoming a famous public figure in the process. He believed it essential, after the experience of the war, that writers become engaged with politics, taking sides if necessary. In his case, that meant siding with the far left. As a keen filmgoer and commentator on cinema himself, Sartre was opposed, along with most of the left, to the great influx of American films that flooded Paris after the war, seeing it as a sign of American cultural imperialism. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was one of the films he criticised for abandoning the “realist naiveté” of pre-war Hollywood, accusing Welles of making an abstract, intellectual film not rooted in the concerns of the masses.

One critic who opposed this view was André Bazin, who, in an essay entitled “The Technique of Citizen Kane”, praised the film for its artistic richness, arguing that Welles reinvented the artform with his use of deep-focus technique to tell the story. Bazin, who believed passionately in the “objective reality” of the film image, believed that long takes and the use of deep focus, as opposed to the use of editing and montage, produced a more faithful vision of the world. His emphasis on film technique and the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of cinema put him in opposition to the left who were more concerned with a film’s social message.

While both these thinkers influenced Godard, a younger critic proved even more of an inspiration. Maurice Schérer, born in 1920, was a teacher and film enthusiast. He had made his name as a critic with three articles for the magazine La Revue du cinema in which he attempted to formulate an ambitious and comprehensive theoretical definition of the cinema. In these articles he rejected Bazin’s emphasis on the depiction of uninterrupted three-dimensional space, instead arguing that it was the way a director placed objects within that space, including actors, which gave it meaning. He also commended the use of actor’s speech and gesture as a crucial element in bringing the filmed image to life. Having read these essays, Godard began attending the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin where Schérer was the main presiding figure, often introducing the evening’s films and then presiding over the energetic debates that often followed screenings. Towards the end of 1949, he began publishing a magazine called La Gazette du cinema writing under the pseudonym of Eric Rohmer.

La Gazette du cinema lasted for only five editions before it folded. Godard contributed to almost every issue. Still only nineteen years old, he was already writing complex articles and reviews, which revealed an assured and original view of cinema. In his longest article entitled “Towards a Political Cinema”, he argues that cinema is not just a representation of reality, but becomes part of the reality itself – that cinema and reality are one. In another piece, he states: “At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.” Cinema had become for him a transformational experience in which the distance between the viewer and what occurred on the screen no longer existed. By watching films you were already part of them.

A Bohemian Life

But it wasn’t enough for Godard and his friends to simply watch and write about cinema; they wanted to make films themselves. At first Godard was content assisting Rohmer and Rivette with their first short films. In the case of Rivette’s film Quadrille, he actually came up with the money to make it himself, later admitting that the funds came from stealing and selling books from his grandfather Julien Monod’s collection of Paul Valery first editions. It was not the first time he had stolen from his family, a fact that would eventually cause a deep rift with them. In the meantime, he lived a bohemian existence in the left bank St. Germain des Prés area, moving regularly between the apartments of family friends and cheap hotel rooms. Among his closest friends was the charismatic Paul Gégauff, a flamboyant right wing writer whose devil-may-care way of living his life exemplified a kind of daring individuality that Godard admired and aspired to at this time.

In December 1950, in order to avoid the draft, he claimed Swiss citizenship and joined his father on a trip to New York and from there on through the West Indies to South America. Far from relishing these new experiences, by all accounts, Godard spent most of his time abroad alone in his room reading. Nevertheless his wanderings in South America, which he never spoke about, lent him an air of mystery and adventure when he returned to Paris in April 1951. Truffaut was one of those who noticed a change in Godard, who appeared more taciturn and withdrawn than he had been before. His passion for cinema, however, was just as strong as ever. He threw himself into helping others make films, in particular working closely with Eric Rohmer on a short entitled Présentation (later re-titled Charlotte et son steak), in which he starred as Walter, a young man who introduces one young woman to another in the hope of making each jealous of the other.

Cahiers Du Cinéma

For the time being, Godard held back from making his own movies, instead devoting his artistic energies to writing for the new magazine set up by Andre Bazin and his associate Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, which they called Cahiers du cinema. Amongst his most important contributions was an article that came out in the September 1952 issue and amounted to a kind of personal theoretical manifesto, as well as a counter argument to an earlier article by Bazin himself in which the critic attacked the “obsolete play of shot-reverse shot” used in many Hollywood productions. Writing under the pseudonym of Hans Lucas, the piece, titled “Defence and Illustration of Classical Découpage”, praised the use of shot-reverse shot as crucial to conveying a character’s mental point of view, their inner life. He accused Bazin of wanting to sacrifice this essential technique, used so skilfully by directors such as Howard Hawks, in the interest of theoretical prejudice. It was a daring move from a young man to contradict the views of such an esteemed critic and reflects Godard’s already strong sense of self-belief.

Switzerland and the First Shorts

Towards the end of 1952, tired of living from hand to mouth and hoping for a more direct route into the cinema, Godard stole money from the Cahiers’ till and made his way back to Switzerland, where, with his mother’s help, he managed to get a job with Swiss television in Zurich. However, after stealing money from the company safe, he was sent first to jail and then, after his father’s intervention, transferred to a psychiatric clinic where he spent a couple of weeks. Following his release he went to live with his mother, who, through the help a friend, managed to get Jean-Luc a job doing manual labour on a dam construction site. While working on the dam, Godard had the idea of making a film about it. He financed the film from his wages, hired a cameraman to film it, edited it and voiced the commentary himself. As he hoped, the corporation behind the building of the dam bought the film for publicity purposes and he was able to quit his job there.

With the money he earned Godard moved to Geneva and made a low budget short, Une Femme coquette. The film, based on the story Le Signe by Maupassant, tells the story of a married woman who imitates the gesture of a prostitute in order it pick up a man. It starred Godard’s close friend Roland Tolmatchoff as the man and Maria Lysandre as the woman. The theme of prostitution is one Godard would return to again and again in his career.

Rise of the Hitchcocko-Hawksians

With two films under his belt and some money in his pocket, Godard was ready to return to Paris. On arriving in the city at the start of 1956, he discovered things had changed profoundly for his circle of friends and colleagues. Lead by Francois Truffaut, they had established Cahiers du cinema as the leading film publication in the country. Truffaut’s article “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” had aroused shock and outrage amongst the film establishment, and at the same time made a star of its young author who was now hammering out articles for a variety of other publications as well. He and the other critics at the magazine who included Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, were known for their love of American cinema, especially the work of hitherto unrecognised directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and their promotion of the “politique des auteurs”.

Godard wasted no time in contributing articles of his own to Cahiers on some of his favourite auteurs such as Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray. He also continued his theoretical debate with André Bazin within the pages of the magazine. While Bazin continued to commend the long take for its approximation to physical reality, Godard praised editing for rendering the subjective essence of reality. A well-edited film, he asserted, was more truthful to life than the uninterrupted scene – rather than portraying a close representation of reality, it seemed to provide the experience of reality itself.

Still seeking to establish himself as a filmmaker in his own right, Godard had returned to Paris with a 250-page screenplay under his arm entitled Odile (the name of his mother who had recently tragically died in a road accident), but the producer Pierre Braunberger read it and advised him it was unfilmable. Instead, in common with his Cahiers colleagues, he took advice from Roberto Rossellini, the Italian neo-realist director who had befriended the group and exhorted them to follow neorealist principles and base their films on the reality of their own lives.

Developing A Style

Working with Rohmer, Godard sketched out a series of short films revolving around a pair of young women, Charlotte and Veronique. The first of these, Charlotte et Veronique, ou Tous les garcons s’appellent Patrick (All the Boys are Called Patrick), was directed by Godard from a script by Rohmer, and featured Anne Colette and Jean-Claude Brialy as Patrick who picks up two women in quick succession. Unknown to him the two women are roommates who discover his duplicity the next day when they are walking in the park together and catch Patrick picking up a third girl. A second film, Charlotte et son Jules (Charlotte and her Jules), again starred Anne Colette, this time opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo as the jilted Jules who berates his lover when he thinks she’s come back to him, only to discover that she only returned to pick up a toothbrush. Both films are full of personal references to Godard’s own life, although the womanizer of the first was inspired by the exploits of Paul Gégauff rather than from his own experiences. Godard, at this time, was known for his naiveté, throwing himself into unrealistic romantic pursuits that always seemed to end badly.

Godard’s next short came to him unexpectedly. Truffaut had filmed an improvised comedy in and around the floodwaters that briefly surrounded Paris in February 1958. Embarrassed to be making a comedy amidst the devastation and unsure how to finish the film, Truffaut handed it over to Godard, who, later in the year, edited the footage into some kind of continuity and wrote dialogue and a voice over which was later dubbed. This text, rich in puns, references and quotations, combined with unexpected editing and soundtrack juxtapositions, make the film a surprisingly prescient forerunner of his future film style.

A Waiting Game

While Godard experimented on shorts, his friends were making increasing inroads into the professional film business. Claude Chabrol, who had been working in the publicity department of Twentieth Century Fox’s Paris office since 1955, quit his post after two year to make his debut feature Le Beau Serge. Chabrol arranged to have Godard hired in his place, a move that proved fortuitous in a number of ways. Working in the publicity department of a major studio, Godard learnt the strategies that would help À bout de souffle (Breathless) become an unexpected success on its release two years later. He also met and befriended the producer Georges de Beauregard, an association crucial to his future career.

In the summer of 1958, after leaving Fox, Godard took over from Truffaut – who was about to make his own first feature – as film critic at the magazine Arts. Through other contacts he also picked up additional freelance work as an editor and scriptwriter. However, finding anyone willing to fund his own feature projects proved more difficult and as his Cahiers colleagues, including now Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, went into production on their own full-length films, he become increasingly frustrated at his own lack of progress.

Then, in the spring of 1959, everything changed overnight. At the Cannes film festival Francois Truffaut’s Les Quartre cents coups (The 400 Blows) was greeted with universal acclaim, winning the best director award and endorsements from a number of high profile figures. Suddenly everybody was talking about the New Wave. Sensing that Truffaut’s success could open doors for him, Godard immediately took the train down to Cannes.

Breathless

A couple of years previously, Truffaut had sketched out an idea for a low budget film based on the true-crime story of Michel Portail, a petty criminal who had stolen a car, shot a motorcycle policeman who pulled him over, and hid out for almost two weeks until he was found in a canoe docked in the centre of Paris. One aspect of the story that had appealed to Truffaut was the fact that Portail had an American journalist girlfriend who he had tried to convince to run away with him. Instead she turned him into the police. Truffaut had collaborated with both Chabrol and Godard on the story but had failed to interest any producers. Now Godard asked if he might revive the project as a feature. Truffaut not only agreed but also helped to convince Georges de Beauregard to produce the film. Beauregard, in debt after two flops, managed to persuade a distributor to come up with a small amount of money with which to make the film.

On his return to Paris, Godard immediately began casting for the film. He suggested to Beauregard that they hire Jean Seberg, the young actress who had made an uncertain start in pictures on Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, as the American woman. Although most critics had disparaged both films, Godard had written admiringly about Seberg in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. Unimpressed by the director on their first meeting, describing him as “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn’t look her in the eye when she talked,” she was, nevertheless, encouraged by her husband, a French attorney with directing ambitions of his own, to accept the role. Persuading Columbia to lend her out for the film was less easy, but again her husband stepped in and managed to convince the studio to accept a small cash payment for her participation. As for Jean-Paul Belmondo, Godard had already promised him the lead role in his first film. Belmondo, who was beginning to get lucrative offers from the mainstream film industry, ignored the warning words of agent who told him “you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” and accepted the part.

With his cast in place, Godard set about knocking Truffaut’s story outline into a screenplay. His original plan had been to use the outline as it was and merely add dialogue to it. Instead he rewrote the entire story, shifting the emphasis away from Truffaut’s portrayal of an anguished young man who turns to crime out of despair to that of a young hoodlum with an existential indifference to common morality and the rule of law.

Most crucially, in Godard’s new version, the American woman comes into the narrative near the beginning and their love story dominates the film. On the page the screenplay resembled a classic American film noir, but Godard, after years of making films in his head, would transform it, principally through the way he filmed it, into something radically different.

Filming took place over the summer of 1959. Behind the camera was Raoul Coutard, originally a documentary cameraman for the French army’s information service in Indochina during the war. Coutard’s background suited Godard who wanted the film to be shot, as much as possible, like a documentary, with a handheld camera and the minimum of lighting. This decision was taken for both aesthetic reasons – making the film look like a newsreel – and practical reasons – saving the time setting up lights and tripod. Flexibility was very important to Godard, who wanted the freedom to improvise and shoot whenever and wherever he wanted without too many technical constraints. He and Coutard devised ways – such as using a wheelchair for tracking shots and a specialist lowlight filmstock for night-time scenes – to make this possible.

Godard’s method of directing A bout de souffle was even more radical than his technical innovations. Much to the producer Beauregard’s disapproval, he often only filmed for a couple of hours a day. Sometimes, when lacking the necessary inspiration, he would cancel the day’s filming altogether. Early on in the shoot, he discarded the screenplay he had written and decided to write the dialogue day by day as the production went along. The actors found this procedure strange and sometimes forgot their lines, however, since the soundtrack was to be post-synchronized later, when the actor’s were lost for words, Godard would call out their lines to them from behind the camera. For Godard the act of making a film was as much a part of its meaning as its content and style. He felt a film reflected the conditions under which it was made and that a film’s technique was the method by which a director made a film personal.

Godard’s unorthodox methods continued in the editing suite. His first cut of À bout de souffle was two-and-a-half hours long but Beauregard had required he deliver a ninety-minute film. Rather than cutting out whole scenes, he decided to cut within scenes, even within shots. This use of deliberate jump cuts was unheard of in professional filmmaking where edits were designed to be as seamless as possible. He also cut between shots from intentionally disorienting angles that broke all the traditional rules of continuity. By deliberately appearing amateurish Godard drew attention to the conventions of classic cinema, revealing them for what they were, merely conventions.

It wasn’t only in the montage of images that Godard expressed his personality, but also through the rich depth of references to cinema and literature. À bout de souffle abounded with quotations of movies by directors such as Samuel Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, Otto Preminger and any number of classic film noirs. The film is even dedicated to Monogram Films, an American “B-movie” studio. There were also quotations and references to writers such as Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, and Louis Aragon, as well as painters like Picasso, Renoir and Klee.

À bout de souffle was an immediate success. In January 1960, just before the films release, it won the Jean Vigo Prize. The critics were unanimous in their praise, recognising the film as the greatest accomplishment yet to come out of the New Wave. One wrote: “The terms ‘old cinema’ and ‘new cinema’ now have meaning… with À bout de souffle, the generation gap can suddenly be felt.” When it opened in four commercial cinemas in Paris, it immediately drew large crowds. In the end its profits were estimated to be fifty times the original investment. Part of the film’s success was due to a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign that made Godard himself the centre of attention. Journalists visiting the set had written articles about this young director’s unusual methods, building up a legend around Godard before the film was even released. After only one film he had established himself as an important new director and an auteur in his own right.

Anna and Le Petit Soldat

Even before the success of À bout de souffle, Godard had been anxious to sign up with Beauregard for a second film. He had already announced the project in the press: “I’ll shoot my next film in Switzerland. With three times less money: an assistant, a cameraman, that’s all. It will be something about torture.” Beauregard stepped up the advance publicity by placing an ad in the trade journal La Cinématographie francaise proclaiming in Godard’s distinctive handwriting: “Jean-Luc Godard, who has completed ‘Breathless’ and is preparing ‘Le Petit Soldat,’ seeks young woman between 18 and 27 to make her both his actress and his friend.” In fact the ad was more of a stunt than anything because the director already had a firm idea in mind of the actress he wanted to star in his next movie, a young woman who had rejected a role in À bout de souffle – Anna Karina.

Godard had first seen Anna Karina, then a successful young model, in a soap ad for Palmolive. She had come to Beauregard’s office in response to the director’s telegram for an interview but had turned down the small part when she learned she would have to appear topless. Now Godard sent her a second telegram: ‘Mademoiselle, this time it’s for the principal role.” Anna was initially reluctant, but on the advice of a friend who had seen an early screening of À bout de souffle, she went to the audition. Godard looked her up and down and told her to come back the next day to sign a contract. She could not sign, however, because she was only nineteen and a minor under French law. Godard arranged for her mother to fly down from Denmark, where Karina was born and grew up, to sign it on her behalf.

The film in which Karina would star and which Godard had been planning for some time concerned France’s war in Algeria. A French colony since 1830, Algeria was in a state of revolt, with militants fighting a guerrilla war for independence since 1955. The position of French citizens and soldiers in the country was becoming increasingly difficult as they came under sustained attack from the Algerian resistance. Meanwhile the army responded with escalating brutality as did the militantly nationalist OAS who were determined that Algeria would remain French. Godard’s absorption in the cinema to the exclusion of all else, including politics, meant that he remained largely oblivious to what was going on in Algeria until the early 1960s. This did not go unnoticed by the intellectual left who attacked the early films of all the New Wave directors for their narrow concern with private and intimate matters. In addition the friendships of Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard with right-wing figures like Lucien Rebatet and Paul Gégauff lead to accusations that the cinematic movement was a supporter of extreme rightism. Godard himself had been attacked by at least one critic for À bout de souffle’s “fascist arrogance”. Aware that at the very least the New Wave was perceived as lacking any political commitment, Godard took it on himself to engage with the most pressing political situation of the day – the war in Algeria.

Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) was shot in the spring of 1960 in Geneva. Bruno Forestier, played by Michel Subor, is a supporter of the right-wing OAS on the run in France and engaged in an undercover war in Switzerland. Anna Karina is Veronica Dreyer, a pro-Algerian activist who falls in love with him. Bruno is blackmailed into committing an assassination but before he can carry it through, he is captured and tortured by Algerian militants. Inspired by Arthur Koestler’s anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon, Godard’s theme was the nature of freedom: “My prisoner is someone who is asked a thing and who doesn’t want to do it. Just doesn’t want to, and he resists, on principle. That’s how I see liberty: from a practical point of view. Being free is being able to do what you want, when you want.” It was this broader question that Godard planned to explore with the film, rather than the story’s particular political context in terms of the war in Algeria, which he admitted was incidental to the film.

The production was long and drawn out with Godard often calling off the day’s filming owing to a lack of inspiration. Some observers believed Godard was taking his time so that he could spend more time with Karina. In the middle of the shoot the whole crew came together for a dinner in Lausanne. Anna’s boyfriend, who had been employed as the unit photographer, was at the head of the table with Godard on his left and Anna on his right. Halfway through dinner, Anna felt a hand grasp hers under the table and put something in it. Godard then stood up and said he was leaving. No sooner had he left, than Anna rushed into the next room, desperate to see what he had given her. The message on the paper read, “I love you. Rendez-vous at the Café de la Paix at midnight.” When she arrived at the café, Godard was reading the paper; Anna sat down in front of him and waited for him to lower it. Finally he did. “So here you are,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The couple were inseparable for the rest of the shoot. When it wrapped, Godard drove her back to Paris. As they reached the city, Godard asked: “Where should I leave you?” Anna replied, “You can’t leave me. I’ve only got you in the world.” Anna moved into the Alesia, the hotel on the rue Chateaubriand where Godard lived. After a few weeks, he asked her to find them an apartment. Their first year together was the happiest of their relationship. They would drive or walk around Paris at night; watch movies and visit friends. At the same time character traits emerged – Godard’s jealousy and Karina’s desperate need for affection – which would ultimately tear them apart.

Anna later recalled that Godard wanted her to give up acting completely after they moved in together, however, when the mainstream director Michel Deville offered her a leading role in the comedy he was about to start filming, she jumped at the chance and accepted. Godard was contemptuous of the screenplay for Ce Soir ou jamais (Tonight or Never), nevertheless he drove her to the set each day, and when he saw the rushes realized that she would be perfect for his next film too.

Une Femme est une Femme

After a crime thriller and a spy film, Godard’s next film was a surprising change of mood. Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman) was a musical comedy but with a realistic setting and an unsentimental storyline about a stripper who is determined to have a baby and blackmails her boyfriend into committing to marriage and parenthood by having an affair with his friend. The film was budgeted at 2,177,00 francs (more than four times the budget of À bout de souffle), and would be Godard’s first Cinemascope and colour film. Taking the three staring roles were Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The shoot was originally to have begun on November 21, 1960, in a real apartment in the rue St. Martin, but when the owners discovered what changes were planned for their home, they refused permission, and the shoot had to be relocated to a studio. Again Godard wrote the dialogue at the last minute, although this time he was unable to call out the lines to the actors from behind the camera because of the necessity of recording direct sound. This meant the actors had to learn their lines immediately, which when combined with the pressure of limited studio time made for a demanding shoot, not least for Godard himself. The stress was further heightened by the stormy relationship between he and Karina. “They tore each other apart,” Brialy later recalled, “argued, loved each other, hated each other, screamed at each other.” Godard had sketched out the scenerio to the film long before he met Karina, originally intending it to be a light-hearted comedy, but the adjustments he made during filming made the story much more autobiographical, especially in regard to his relationship with Karina.

The parallels between real life and the movie were further underlined when Karina became pregnant. A wedding in Begnins, Switzerland was hastily arranged taking place on March 3, 1961, followed three weeks later by another in Paris for the benefit of the couple’s Parisian friends and the press. The couple now had a regular social life, frequently visiting friends like Agnes Varda and her husband Jacques Demy to play cards on Sundays, and joining Karina’s friends on trips to nightclubs. Godard often seemed uneasy in these gatherings and rarely spoke. Obsessed with work, he would spend his time at the Cahiers offices, or say he was going out for some cigarettes and return three weeks later. Meanwhile, Anna was often left alone in the apartment waiting for the phone to ring. One night in the spring of 1961, Godard returned home to find her in great distress and covered in blood. She had miscarried, and her health was in danger. After a stay in hospital, she recuperated at home. However, Godard, unable to deal with the situation, left her in the care of friends for several weeks. On his return, he tried to make amends by renting a villa in the south of France, but while driving there he turned the car around saying he didn’t have time for it as he had too much work to do.

End of the Honeymoon

In June of 1961, Godard and Karina were at the opening of Une femme est une femme at the Berlin Film Festival. Both Karina and the film won prizes. The positive reviews the film received, however, did not translate into box-office success. Godard’s unorthodox approach to genre and audacious mix of sound and image perplexed the mainstream audience. This film’s failure came at a time when the New Wave directors were coming under increasingly hostile attacks in the press for being overhyped and willfully obscure. In this climate, Godard struggled to set up his next movie. A number of projects fell through, including a collaboration with Richard Burton and Jeanne Moreau. To add to his difficulties, Le Petit Soldat was banned from release in France and abroad by the Commission de contrôle on the grounds that it showed torture and because it was perceived to be pro-Algerian (the ban was finally lifted in December 1962 and the film released the following month).

While Godard battled the censors, Anna Karina continued to establish herself as a professional actress. In September 1961, she started work on Le Soleil dans l’oeil (Sun in the Eyes) directed by Jacques Bourdon. During the course of the shoot, she began an affair with her co-star Jacques Perrin and decided she wanted to marry him. When she told Godard of her intention to leave him, he destroyed all their possessions in their apartment and left. Later that night, she took an overdose of barbiturates. She was found by Perrin who called an ambulance. After a few days in hospital she was released. The papers reported that Godard and Karina would divorce and that Karina would marry Perrin. But in January of 1962, it was announced that Godard and Karina had reconciled and that he would direct her in a new film.

Vivre Sa Vie

Filming began just six weeks after the announcement on a low budget of only 400,000 francs. The genre this time was tragedy; the bleak tale of a young woman’s descent into prostitution and eventual murder. Godard conceived the film as a showcase for Karina’s talent; an attempt also, perhaps, to save their marriage through cinematic collaboration. At the same time, after a year of indecision in which he had increasingly begun to question and criticize his own filmmaking methods and the content of his work, the movie would be an attempt to redefine his new cinematic and philosophical vision.

From its opening scene, filmed in long, carefully composed shots of Nana played by Anna Karina, showing her only from behind at the bar of a café as she talks with her husband who she is leaving for another man, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962) marked a significant change of technical approach for Godard from his first three films. Feeling now that he had moved the camera too much in À bout de souffle, he used heavier equipment under more traditional conditions, lit locations correctly, and captured direct sound at the time of filming, rather than overdubbing later. These more conventional methods required a larger crew, which made each set-up more time consuming to prepare. To save time, he worked more carefully; shooting long takes, many lasting more than three minutes. Godard told an interviewer that he wanted “to shoot on location, in natural settings, but without making a film of reportage. It will rather be a film in the theatrical spirit.” This way of filming, he knew would allow Karina to give a sustained performance, which the camera would frame and allow to unfold in its own time. The statement also acknowledges the key influence of the German playwright and theatrical theorist, Bertolt Brecht, on the film’s style. Godard got the idea of dividing the narrative into twelve distinct chapters or theatrical tableaux from The Threepenny Opera and Brecht’s concept of epic theatre and his use of “distancing effects” would become increasingly important in Godard’s work from this film onwards.

Vivre sa vie proved a breakthrough for Godard. It differed radically in subject matter, style, form and technique from his first three films, but in the long run would prove as equally influential as his much-heralded debut. At the 1962 Venice Film Festival, despite being booed after the screening, the film won two prizes: the Critics Prize and the Special Jury Prize. Most critics immediately recognized the film’s achievement. One heralded the film as “a new masterpiece” and ranked it alongside the films of Rossellini and Bresson, while another called it “the first absolute flawless film by Godard.” The film’s brilliance put the director at the forefront of the New Wave and helped to re-establish the movement as an intellectual and aesthetic force just at the moment when its future seemed most in doubt.

Division and Collaboration

At the same time the original members of the New Wave were no longer as close as they once had been, a fact acknowledged by Godard in a postcard he sent to Truffaut sometime in 1962:

“We never see each other any more, it’s completely stupid. Yesterday I went to see Claude shoot, it was terrible, we had nothing to say to each other. Like in the song: in the pale light of dawn there isn’t even any friendship. We’ve each taken off for our own planet and we no longer see each other in close up but only in long shot.”

In a variety of publications a debate took place between Truffaut and Godard over what in fact the New Wave was and what could and should be done to rescue it. Truffaut argued that the application of the Hollywood formulas that he and the other Cahiers critics had adsorbed was the only way for the New Wave to reach the mainstream. For Godard, the historical and critical orientation that defined the New Wave was a contradiction. “At the moment that we can do cinema, we can no longer do the cinema that gave us the desire to do it.” For him the cinematic canon defined by Hitchcock and Hawks was a point of departure, a lost paradise that could never be regained. One of the former colleagues who Godard continued to see regularly was Jacques Rivette who was at this time was attempting to raise money for a cinematic adaptation of Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun). Keen to help fulfill Karina’s desire to become a famous actress, Godard paid for a theatrical staging of the work at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in the autumn of 1962. Her performance was a triumph, winning prizes and compliments from leading theatrical lights.

In order to pay for the staging, Godard had signed contracts with three different producers and now proceeded to film the three commissions in quick succession. The first was a short film Le Nouveau Monde (The New World) for an Italian compilation called RoGoPaG after the four directors involved – Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Gregoretti. Godard’s contribution, set in Paris after a nuclear explosion, tells the story of a man who notices strange changes in all the people around him, including his girlfriend. The second film was another collaboration with Roberto Rossellini who co-wrote the screenplay. Based on a stage play, Les Carabiniers was about the horror and pointlessness of war and showed the influence of both Rossellini and Brecht. Its two peasant protagonists enlist in the army of the king to pillage the world. They send postcards home to their wives telling tales of their exploits but gradually become disillusioned as they find themselves still poor and now wounded. The third project, a medium length film Le Grand Escroc, made up another compilation film Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde (The Greatest Swindles in the World), and featured Jean Seberg as a cinema verité director who is arrested for passing on a counterfeit note.

Bardot and Le Mepris

Towards the end of 1962, Georges de Beauregard learned that France’s biggest movie star, Brigitte Bardot, had expressed a desire to work with Godard. The producer offered her the lead role in Godard’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, about a screenwriter and his failing marriage. Bardot signed the contract in January of 1963 to play the part of Camille, the screenwriter’s wife. With such a huge star attached, Beauregard and his Italian partner Carlo Ponti were able to raise a budget of $1 million, much of it from the American producer Joseph E. Levine. For Godard the sum was unprecedented but meant working within the constraints of normal production, as well as dealing with the intense press and media activity that surrounded Bardot.

In the event, the shoot which took place in and around Rome and Capri, proved much more difficult than anyone could have anticipated. Bardot was the principle target of Italy’s paparazzi who created relentless commotion around the set. Meanwhile the mutual appreciation between star and director soon turned to disillusionment. Bardot felt unable to forge any kind of personal relationship with Godard, and she detached herself by locking herself in her hotel with her friends and entourage. Godard’s relations with Jack Palance, who played the fictional producer Prokosch, were even worse. The American actor became frustrated by Godard’s hands off method of directing actors and openly voiced his exasperation to a journalist: “We never know in advance what we’re going to do. There’s almost no dialogue. It’s the worst experience I’ve ever had! It’s madness!” After a while, Palance refused to speak to Godard, passing his remarks through an Italian set decorator who spoke no English instead.

Godard’s stormy relationship with Karina added to his woes. During the shoot she visited him in Rome, where one evening they went to a nightclub. Someone invited Karina to dance and when she sat back down, Godard gave her a slap in the face in front of everyone. Their experience of marriage became the inspiration for the fictional characters in the film. The character of Camille was determined more by Karina’s personality than Bardot’s. Many of the lines spoken by Bardot were things that Karina herself had said to Godard. In one scene, Bardot wore the short dark wig that Karina had worn in Vivre sa vie and Godard even asked her to walk like Karina. At the same time Michel Piccoli, who played the husband, looked and behaved like Godard, even down to wearing his clothes.

When the producers saw the first cut of the film they were disappointed. In particular they were disappointed that Bardot was not shown in the nude often enough. After a protracted battle lasting several months, during which the producers threatened to re-edit the film to their own satisfaction, Godard finally agreed to shoot some new scenes for the film. At a cost of twenty thousand dollars an exact studio replica of the apartment in Rome where he had filmed was created. Here he shot the famous opening scene in which Camille lies naked on the bed and names the parts of her body and asks her husband whether he loves them all.

Le Mepris was the closest thing to a conventional movie that Godard had made and has remained one of his best- known and most celebrated works. As a reflexive commentary on the end of Hollywood’s classic era, it represented Godard’s view that the golden age of auteur directors working within the studio system was over. “Our tragedy,” Godard said, “was thinking that we were coming in the middle of something when in fact we were coming at the end of it.”

A Story of Gold

Late in 1963, Godard and Karina again separated, and he again sought reconciliation through a shared film project. It had been almost two years since Godard and Karina had worked together in Vivre sa vie. Since then, she had appeared in a number of commercial vehicles and had become a well-known actress. However she was by no means a star, and despite the acclaim she had received for some of these roles, had failed to reach the artistic heights achieved through collaborations with her husband. The new film, Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), based on an American crime novel called Fool’s Gold, had much riding on it for Godard. Success would help to establish his new production company, Anouchka Films, as well as re-establishing him as a commercial director. Even more importantly it would give Karina the kind of success she craved, and by doing so, help secure their marriage.

That winter, as Godard worked on pre-production for the new film, Karina tried to commit suicide again. This time she was alone for a whole weekend and would have died if the Italian painter who was decorating the house had not forgotten his keys and come back to retrieve them. At this point Godard had her committed to a mental hospital. After a nightmarish spell inside, she found herself talking with a doctor about why she wanted to die, and for the first time began to come to terms with the death of her child. When Godard picked her up at the end of February, he told her they would begin shooting the new movie in three days.

Staring alongside Karina were Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, as a couple of petty criminals searching for a big score. Shot in stark black and white on location in a grey, wintry Paris, the film is rooted in the concrete reality of billboards, cafes and the metro, and yet has an exuberance in keeping with the movie-inspired fantasies of the three lead characters. The film’s freewheeling, casual air was no accident however. According to Sami Frey, “Everything was very precise, decided in advance – even the details.” This included the famous sequence in which the three leads dance the Madison in a café (the actors, who were not skilled dancers, rehearsed daily for a month to get it right).

When the film was shown at the 1964 Cannes Festival, Godard, in his role as producer, promoted it dutifully but couldn’t disguise his personal feeling that he had compromised himself to please other people. In an ad in Le Film Francaise he wrote: “What does the movie-going public want? said Griffith. A revolver and a girl! It is in response to this desire that I have shot and Columbia is distributing Band of Outsiders, a story of gold which will sell lots of tickets.” However, when the film was released in the summer of that year, not only did it fail at the box office, but it was rejected by critics, including those who had previously championed the director’s work.

During the making of Bande à part, Godard and Karina reconciled, moving into a new apartment in the Latin Quarter. Karina continued working, accepting a supporting role in Jean Aurel’s De l’amour, filmed in April 1964, and a starring role opposite Maurice Ronet in Le Voleur de Tibidabo (The Thief of Tibidado). During filming, Ronet and Karina had an affair. In the resulting fallout, Godard and Karina separated and filed for divorce.

A Modern Love Affair

While at Cannes, the programmer of the Venice Film Festival had told Godard how disappointed he was that Bande à part had premiered there instead of at his festival. In response, Godard offered to make another film that would be finished in three months, in time to debut at Venice. He then took a germ of an idea about a married woman having an affair who becomes pregnant and wonders who the father is, and, according to Raoul Coutard, filmed and edited the film, entitled Une Femme mariée (A Married Woman), from first day of pre-production to final edit in a month. This in itself was an awesome achievement; that the film is nothing short of a masterpiece makes it even more astonishing.

Taking the classic love triangle as his theme, Godard created an unequivocally modernist film, substituting melodrama for a startlingly abstract style of filmmaking. It was his most openly philosophical film to date, depicting ideas familiar from the work of Antonioni, such as communication breakdown and identity crisis, and setting them against the modern malaise of consumerism and advertising. It also represented Godard’s own anguished feelings about infidelity and contained a number of personal references to himself, Karina and her lover, Maurice Ronet.

When Une Femme mariée was shown at the Venice festival it was very well received. French critics fell over themselves to hail the film as a major achievement. When the film was released nationally in December 1964, Georges Sadoul of Les Lettres francaises praised the film extravagantly and proclaimed Godard to be both a great artist and one of the most important thinkers of the age: “It is even more by his ideas than by his rhetoric that Godard belongs, profoundly and consciously to our times. Yesterday, he asked himself questions. Today, he answers them.” Ironically, despite the acclaim, Godard felt increasingly lost as a filmmaker. Just at the moment when he was becoming progressively more engaged with the political, social and intellectual concerns of the time, he was becoming increasingly unsure of how best to portray them on screen.

American Acclaim

In America Godard’s reputation was in the ascendent too. The esteemed critic Pauline Kael had praised his early films, as had Andrew Sarris whose influential article in Film Culture, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” was inspired by the Cahiers du Cinema critics and their view that popular directors such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray were as much artists as any of the more traditionally revered art film directors. In September 1964, Godard came to New York to present Une femme est une femme and Bande à part at the Philharmonic Hall to great acclaim. Les Mépris and Une femme mariée were released for the first time in America soon after.

Young filmmakers in America were already looking up to Godard as the most important director of his generation. Two of them, Robert Benton and David Newman, asked him to direct their screenplay about the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. Godard liked the script and was ready to commit to the project and to begin filming almost immediately but it turned out the producers didn’t have the money in place and Godard had to return to France to make his next film (the film eventually went into production two years later with Arthur Penn as director and its star Warren Beatty as producer).

City of Pain

The film that Godard made instead of Bonnie and Clyde was Alphaville, an audacious mix of the Sci-Fi and Film Noir genres that would become one of his most iconic movies. It starred the iconic Eddie Constantine as the trench-coat wearing secret agent Lemmy Caution who travels to the dark, dystopian city of Alphaville, in which life is governed by a giant computer and emotion is a crime punishable by death. The futuristic city was actually shot in contemporary Paris, in the studios of French national radio, in the vast computer research complex of Bull, in the new modern office and residential complex of La Défense, and on newly built roads running through tunnels glowing with eerie banks of lights. Adding to the otherwordly atmosphere, Godard asked Raoul Coutard to create a look of extreme high contrast without using any lights regardless of low-light conditions. Much of the film was shot at night adding to the sense of alienating darkness. “I wanted an expressionistic style,” Godard explained. “In filming things that we see every day, I wanted them to arouse fear. Without cheating. The things are there. One looks at them. And suddenly, one discovers that they are not at all as one thought.”

Just a few weeks before filming began on Alphaville, Godard and Karina’s divorce was finalized. Karina remained as Natasha, the film’s female lead however, and once again Godard instilled the story with his own personal concerns. The tough guy secret agent is in fact a romantic who seeks to liberate through poetry and heroism a ruthlessly logical yet misguided woman from the external forces that have control over her mind, and in doing so, teach her what it feels to truly love someone. In other words, it was an allegory for how Godard saw his own struggles with Anna Karina. His next film would be an even more explicit outpouring of his feelings about his ex-wife.

Pierrot le fou

Pierrot le fou was based on a novel by Lionel White. Jean-Paul Belmondo took the title role of Ferdinand/Pierrot, who runs away from his comfortable but boring bourgeois life in Paris with the family babysitter played by Anna Karina, who herself is being pursued by Algerian gangsters. Travelling south in stolen cars they reach the sea where they find sanctuary on an island, but their idyllic life is soon threatened by their conflicting desires.

Godard declared that, in making Pierrot le fou, he felt as if he were making his ‘first film’; tearing up the old road map and setting out for unknown territory. Despite this declaration of a new beginning, however, Pierrot was in many ways a culmination of everything that had come before. Once again the story featured a love affair that leads to disillusionment and death, quotations from literature and other movies, musical interludes, self-referential jokiness, coloured filters and car crashes. Characteristically Godard filmed the genre elements of the story with a conspicuous lack of interest, focusing instead on the creation of unforgettable images and arresting sequences. He described the creation of the film as ‘completely unconscious’ and the shoot as ‘a kind of happening.’ The freedom of this approach allowed Godard to turn a standard pulp thriller into a deeply personal and emotionally raw statement about the state of the world, the nature of art, and most importantly, the breakdown of his marriage.

That the film turned out as well as it did was something of a miracle considering the difficulties of the shoot. Godard later recalled: “When I began Pierrot le fou, one week before, I was completely panicked. I didn’t know what to do. Based on the book, we had already established all the locations, we had hired the people… and I was wondering what we were going to do with it all.” Complicating matters, Godard had chosen to film in a new widescreen process, Techniscope, which brought with it many inconveniences, including the need to shoot with high-contrast side-lighting in order to give the image definition. The resulting constraints slowed down the production and restrained Godard’s spontaneity. The director, known for his irritability on set even at the best of times, was unusually bad-tempered throughout the shoot. He was particularly venomous towards Karina – at one point during a scene she asked him what she should do and he said, “You have a mouth to talk with, don’t you?” Belmondo described them as “like a cobra and a mongoose, always glaring at each other.”

Pierrot le fou was booed when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and unsuccessful at the box office when released in Paris in 1966, though it was not without its supporters. Michel Cournot described it as ‘the most beautiful film I’ve seen in my life’ and Andrew Sarris, writing in 1969, called it ‘the kind of last film a director can make only once in his career.’ With the benefit of hindsight, the film now looks like Godard’s fond farewell to the first part of his career, a last madcap romantic escapade before engaging with more serious concerns. It is also a farewell to Karina, and in a way a resigned acknowledgement that they were never meant to be together. Although Marianne betrays Ferdinand there is no malice in her portrayal, and in the final voice-over there is a suggestion that perhaps they are together in eternity.

The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

Underlining the fact that Pierrot marked a break with the past, Godard’s next film found him working with a new producer (Anatole Dauman), new actors (Jean-Pierre Leaud and Chantel Goya) a new cameraman (Willy Kurant) and production team. Masculin Féminin was based on two Guy de Maupassant short stories, but for Godard, the real motivation for making the film was the chance to explore the lives and attitudes of the younger generation. “I chose young people because I no longer know where I am from the point of view of cinema. I am in search of the cinema. I have the sense of having lost it. Chatting with young people to find myself again was easier than with adults, because adults have too many personal problems and to get to the bottom of things there is an immense amount of work that one doesn’t have time to do in the course of a film… This film is thus a need to speak with people who are more open. Who have their lives before them.”

Godard cast Jean-Pierre Leaud, the star of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), as Paul, a romantic young idealist and writer who chases budding pop star, Madeleine (Chantel Goya, a real life Yé-yé girl). Despite markedly different musical tastes and political leanings, the two soon become romantically involved and begin a ménage à quatre with Madeleine’s two roommates, Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) and Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert). Within the simple narrative framework, the film mixed off-the-cuff reportage, inventive mise en scène, satire and tragedy, to create a strikingly honest portrait of youth and sex in mid-60s Paris. Pauline Kael, writing in the New Republic, pointed out the difference from the earlier films: “Using neither crime nor the romance of crime but a simple kind of romance for a kind of interwoven story line, Godard has, at last, created the form he needed. It is a combination of essay, journalistic sketches, news and portraiture, love lyric and satire.”

Double Visions

Soon after Masculin Féminin, Godard made another film with producer Anatole Dauman that took this new conception of cinema another stage further. Deux ou trios choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I know About Her) was inspired by a magazine story about a new breed of part-time amateur prostitutes – women living in the vast housing complexes springing up around Paris, who had begun selling themselves to help pay for bills and the consumer goods, which, according to advertisements, were absolute necessities of modern life. The story Godard outlined for the film was built around a day in the life of a young woman, Juliette, who lives in a new apartment complex with her husband and young children, who prostitutes herself by picking up men from a luxury hotel. Marina Vlady, an established star who Godard had become increasingly close to since the beginning of 1966, was cast as Juliette.

As the project advanced toward production, Godard was approached by Georges de Beauregard to make another film. Beauregard was deep in debt, however he was eligible for loans and credits if he made a film, and so he needed to start shooting something immediately. He flattered Godard with the claim that he was the only director capable of conceiving and setting up a film quickly enough. Godard took up the challenge, disappearing into a bookshop and emerging with a detective novel by Richard Stark called The Jugger about a tough criminal named Parker who goes looking for an old associate who knows too much. Godard described the film, renamed Made in USA, as “the conjunction in my mind of three desires: to do a favor for a friend, to highlight the Americanization of French life, and to make use of one of the episodes in the Ben Barka affair.” This last reference was to a left-wing Moroccan dissident who had disappeared from the streets of Paris. The rumors were that the French secret police had conspired with the criminal underworld to deliver Barka to Moroccan agents.

Both films went into production almost simultaneously in the summer of 1966. For several weeks Godard was shooting Made in USA in the morning and Deux ou trois choses in the afternoon. While Made in USA was a conscious farewell to Anna Karina who stars as the trenchcoat-wearing detective hero of the story, investigating the death of her former lover and getting tangled up in the murky world of French post-colonial politics; Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle had been planned as a showcase for the new woman in Godard’s life, Marina Vlady. However the actress – used to working in the mainstream cinema – found Godard’s style of direction very difficult. He wanted her to behave as naturally as she did in real life. When he called ‘Cut,’ she relaxed and became more open, but he was unable to get her in this state during the shoot. Instead she appeared tense and unconvincing on camera. The best scenes in the film didn’t feature her at all but focused instead on cityscapes and objects. The film’s most famous scene was a series of extreme close ups of a cup of bubbling espresso, seen from above, evoking a cosmos in microcosm with Godard himself speaking the voice over.

Despite the problems of its production, Deux ou trous choses received good reviews when it was released. One reviewer recognized it as “a painful confession, a contained rage, an anguished reflection.” Godard later referred to it as his first film not dominated by the previous history of cinema. Made in USA was also well received in most publications with one commentator comparing it to Picasso’s Guernica. However Godard himself felt the film had been rejected by the audience he most wanted to reach: the young left. They included the new generation at Cahiers du cinema. Here the response had been much more reserved. The young Bernardo Bertolucci called Made in USA “a film that betrays politics, that is paralyzed in its great liberty by ideological conformism.” With hindsight the film can be seen as less about politics and more of an allegory of Godard’s romantic trials with Anna Karina. Paradoxically, despite his great bitterness towards her, the only images in the film that he put real creative energy into were the many extreme, beautifully composed colour close-ups of Karina. Nevertheless Godard was so unpleasant to her that even Raoul Coutard commented that he shouldn’t treat her so badly. Many bitter words were spoken between them. Their troubled relationship was finally over.

Anne Wiazemsky and Le Chinoise

Godard’s close relationship with Marina Vlady had also come to an end. Shortly before production of Deux ou trous choses, he had proposed marriage to her but she had turned him down. Consolation came in the form of Anne Waizemsky, the eighteen-year-old star of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. He had first seen a photograph of her on the set of Bresson’s film and was intrigued enough to arrange a visit to the set to meet her. She was wary at first but became fascinated by him after seeing Pierrot le fou and Masculin Féminin. By the late summer of 1966 they were a couple. He would drop her off and pick her up each day from Nanterre University on the outskirts of Paris where she was studying philosophy. In the evenings he would take her to the cinema where they would watch movies. Through Wiazemsky, Godard met a new breed of radicalized students deeply dissatisfied with the society in which they lived and the university in which they studied. Some of these labeled themselves Anarchists. Others were turning to the teachings of Mao Tse Tung, whose Cultural Revolution in China they saw as being closer to true Marxist-Leninism than the Soviet Union’s brand of communism. Godard, who now defined himself as an artist of the left, in opposition to the Vietnam War and American influence in politics, economics, and culture, became intrigued by these students and their beliefs and decided he would make his next film about them with Anne Wiazemsky as the star.

La Chinoise focused on five university students lead by Veronique (Wiazemsky) and Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who spend their summer vacation in Paris holed up in an apartment borrowed from a friend’s wealthy parents. They spend their time studying political texts, delivering lectures to each other, and eventually plan and carry out an assassination. The film was shot with a wildness unusual even for Godard. Many scenes were improvised and reshot a number of times, allowing a wide range of choices in the editing room. He explained in an interview that the film was “exclusively a film of montage,” and added, “I shot autonomous sequences, without any order, and I organized them later.” It’s an approach that works perfectly for the film’s subject matter, emphasizing the rebellious attitude and moral confusion of the five protagonists.

Stylistically the film is as exhilarating and provocative as any of his films. Portraits of Marx and Mao, modernist paintings, political slogans, an engraving from Alice in Wonderland, are just some of the flood of images cut into the action like some kind of cinematic Pop Art montage. In line with Brecht, the fourth wall is frequently broken: actors address the camera head on, Godard’s own voice can be heard offscreen on several occasions asking the actors questions, the opening slate is left in a number of shots, and Raoul Coutard is filmed filming the action. La Chinoise is in every way an astonishing work of cinema and marked a turning point in Godard’s work. The romanticism and genre playfulness of his earlier films would henceforth be replaced by a commitment to exploring political ideology in an increasingly abstract and fragmented style.

In between shooting La Chinoise in the spring of 1967 and its screening in Venice in August, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky were married in Begins in Switzerland. The Swiss official who had also conducted the previous wedding with Karina toasted the couple with the words, “Here’s to the next time”, causing himself embarrassment but amusing the bride and groom. The marriage hit the headlines when Wiazemsky’s mother announced it in the populist newspaper Le Figaro. The prospect of the 36-year-old revolutionary of French cinema, recently revealed to be an extreme leftist, getting married to the teenage daughter of Francois Mauriac, a scion of right wing Gaullism, lead to much comment in the press. Wiazemsky hated the intrusion into her personal life; she had already dropped out of university to pursue her acting career, and soon after accepted an invitation to go to Italy to act in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s new film, Teorema.

While making La Chinoise, Godard said that the most important thing about it was “what young people will make of it.” It soon became clear that those he had most wanted to impress were less than happy. The Marxist-Leninist students who had inspired it were furious with Godard for making them look ridiculous. Others called the film “a provocation,” which showed Maoists to be irresponsible terrorists.” Older critics were more impressed. Jean de Baroncelli writing in Le Monde wrote that the film illustrated “the eternal revolt of youth, of that irresistible élan for an ideal of purity, propriety, and nobility, that is the trait of all the adolescents of the world (at least, of those who have some soul and some heart).”

End of Cinema

After contributing two politically charged shorts to the compilation films Far From Vietnam and Vangelo 70, Godard began shooting his next feature entitled, Week End, in September 1967. If La Chinoise took a romantic view of how idealists might change future society, Week End offered a nightmarish vision of contemporary society on the verge of total collapse. The story follows a bickering bourgeois couple traveling by car from Paris to the countryside to ensure their inheritance through murder. Along the way they encounter cataclysmic traffic jams, rape, murder, pillage and cannibalism. Godard called the film “closer to a cry” than a movie. It depicts a France in which people murder each other over right of way or the latest consumer goods, where blood-soaked automobile wrecks are commonplace and people are as indifferent to the suffering of others as they are to the music of Mozart. The film was indeed a cry of pain and despair at the casual cruelty of contemporary society from a man who felt he’d reached the end of the road.

Week End concluded with the statements “end of story” and “end of cinema”. This was no act of mere artistic provocation; Godard was serious. At the end of the shoot, he gathered his crew together and told them they should look for other work, because he was going to stop making films for a while. He had come to the conclusion that the world as it was had to change, and as the commercial film industry was part of that world, he no longer wanted to contribute to it. The years of uncertainty and despair in which he had increasingly questioned the value of what he was doing were over. Now he had a cause to believe in and a renewed sense of purpose in his work. A chapter in his life had ended and a new one was about to begin. As it turned out, this was true not just for Godard, but also for France and the rest of the world too.

1968

Lessons in Aesthetics

The first of these films came about as the result of a commission from an unexpected quarter, namely French television. Le Gai savoir (Joyful Knowledge, 1968) was based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile – though bore very little resemblance to its source material. It starred Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto as two students engaged in a series of discussions about the creation, analysis, and re-composition of some basic images and sounds in an effort to understand cinema better. This concern with the language of cinema would be a central theme of Godard’s work in the years to come. As would the film’s funding and ultimate rejection by a television company.

A Supportive Friend

Paradoxically, Godard’s withdrawal from commercial cinema came at a time when the other New Wave filmmakers – Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette – were enjoying new levels of success and stability in their careers. Godard’s friendship with Truffaut was still strong at this time and he continued to see Rivette regularly. His vigorous defence of the latter’s breakthrough film Le Religieuse, initially banned by the French censor for its perceived anti-catholic sentiment, saw him orchestrate a campaign in support of the film and publish a letter to Minister of Culture, André Malraux, in which he described the celebrated writer as a coward for not speaking out against the ban.

Early in 1968, Godard joined his erstwhile colleagues in the crusade to reinstate Henri Langlois, who had been dismissed from his post as director of the Cinémathèque by government officials unhappy with his disregard for administrative norms. This resulted, they claimed, in deficits, unexplained expenses, and chaotic warehousing of films. Within hours of Langlois’s sacking, filmmakers from France and abroad, made their support for Langlois clear by refusing to allow their films to be shown at the Cinémathéque. On February 14, 2,500 people protested the removal of Langlois, with Godard and Truffaut in the front lines. Police charged and in the ensuing mêlée, Truffaut was clubbed on the head and Godard’s glasses were broken. At a press conference two days later, Godard suggested that if the new administrators dared to reopen the Cinémathèque, audience members should engage in “perpetual sabotage.” The mounting pressure from all parts of the motion picture industry finally paid off. On 22 April an extraordinary general assembly of the Cinémathèque reinstated Langlois.

Ideals into Action

In late February Godard, accompanied by his wife Anne Wiazemsky, flew to New York to begin a lecture tour of American universities organized by the documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. The tour, coinciding with screenings of La Chinoise, was a great success. The filmmaker was the cinematic idol of American university students. A young George Lucas, interviewed at the time by a Newsweek correspondent voiced what many felt, “When you find someone who’s going the same direction as you, you don’t feel so alone.” At Berkeley, La Chinoise played to twelve sold-out houses and Godard was cheered for commenting that he wouldn’t try again to get a visa to go to North Vietnam “because I think that the North Vietnamese will have won the war before I get it.”

During May 1968, as France erupted in a series of strikes and confrontations between students and workers and the police, Godard threw himself into the centre of the action. He took part in demonstrations and filmed at the same time, contributing to the multi-authored Film-tracts – short 3 minute films of still photographs designed to contribute directly to the struggle. He also shot a film called Un Film comme les autres (A Film Like The Others), which recorded workers and students discussing their views on the political situation.

Cannes 68

The Cannes Film Festival became part of the protests when most of the filmmakers in competition withdrew their films and Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Monica Vitti, and Terence Young resigned from the jury. Godard and Truffaut were amongst those who took part in a debate in the main hall calling for the festival to be shut down. Godard argued that instead of showing festival films, the forum should be used to screen militant films and documentary footage of the events taking place. When the festival administration decided that a screening of Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé would go ahead as planned, Godard, Truffaut and Saura himself, jumped up on the stage and held onto the curtain to prevent it from opening.

Ultimately the festival was abandoned, but this would be the last time Godard and Truffaut would join together in a common cause. That summer there was a very violent argument between them when Godard tried to persuade Truffaut to lend his backing to the campaign to close the Avignon festival. Truffaut refused citing his friendship with the director of the festival Jean Vilar, and pointing out that he could not support bourgeois students against working-class National Guardsmen. Godard became furious saying, “I thought you were a brother, you are a traitor.” He also broke off relations with old friends and collaborators Antoine Bourseiller and Suzanne Schiffman at this time.

Postcards from the Counter-Culture

The Dziga Vertov Group

Starting Over

Anne-Marie Miéville was born on 11 November 1945 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She moved to Paris as a young woman where she enjoyed a brief career as a singer. Godard met her in 1970, by which time she had become a photographer and had a young daughter. Their close relationship deepened after Godard’s crash, when she gave him much needed support. They became partners, both personal and professional -- an alliance that has continued to the present day.

Between 1972 and 1974, Godard’s usual rate of productivity stalled as he recuperated from his accident, set up a new production company, Sonimages, relocated to the provincial town of Grenoble with Miéville, and began putting into practice the video techniques and methods that would inform his work in the future. Godard’s fascination with the possibilities presented by video would transform his work from this time forward. He believed video was a superior medium because editing on film was limited to placing images sequentially, whereas video allowed the possibility of superimposing multiple images. This, he felt, was essential to visual analysis, since it permitted, “thinking two aspects together, to think montage, to think mixing.” Video was also a cheaper medium to work in and would therefore allow him to make more personal stories.

An important collaborator was the brilliant inventor of cameras, Jean-Pierre Beauviala, whose company Aaton was based in the town. Godard was so impressed with Aaton that he planned to make a film about the company but financing fell through. Instead, he and Miéville began trawling through abandoned footage from Jusqu’à la victoire shot by himself and Gorin in 1970. The film they created from the fragments, Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) took the form of a conversation between a man and a woman as they discuss the images that unwind on the screen. Intercut with the scenes from the Middle East, Miéville and Godard add footage of contemporary France: a working-class man, woman and their children in a mundane modern apartment. The suggestion being that, in order to understand the “elsewhere”, we need to first understand the reality of “here”. In form and substance, Ici et ailleurs marked a transition from the radical-era films to the more personal, video-centred work that was to follow.

Aware too that he had become isolated from the wider filmmaking community, Godard sought out a dialogue with Francois Truffaut, but if his wish was to reconcile with his old cinephile comrade his approach was singularly unsuccessful. In a three-page letter he called Truffaut a “liar” for what he had chosen to leave out of Day for Night (1973), and demanded money to make a film in response. “You should help me, so that viewers don’t think that films are only made your way,” he wrote. Truffaut responded with a twenty-page letter in which he gave vent to years of unexpressed bitterness towards Godard. He brought up offhand remarks from years previously that had stung him, accused Godard of hypocrisy and political publicity-seeking, criticized him for his treatment of actresses and crew, of not turning up at film festivals he had promised to attend, of calling producer Pierre Braunberger a “dirty Jew”, and of chickening out of selling La Cause du people when there was danger of arrest. He reproached Godard for being “both jealous and envious” of him, despite his own desire “to remain friends” and offered a ruthless critique of Tout va bien which he compared unfavourably to A bout de souffle. The two men were never on friendly terms again.

Towards the end of 1974, the producer Georges de Beauregard went to Grenoble to meet Godard and to propose they remake À bout de souffle (Breathless). Godard accepted. Beauregard raised the money from distributor René Pignières who had financed the original film. Godard, however, had no intention of filming a remake. In an interview with a French publication in March 1975 he talked about the project: “To the contrary of what has been announced, the film will not be called Breathless Number Two but rather Number Two (Breathless). I am not doing a remake, but I am posing a reflection on the basis of Breathless.” As it turned out the film was as far from the director’s 1960 debut as anyone could have imagined. Using non-professional actors and video technology, Godard made what amounted to a home movie on the subject of modern family life, examining the relationship between love, work, sex, gender and children. Images originally shot on video and then transferred to film are shown, often simultaneously on the screen, leading to multiple interpretations of the story.

After completing Numéro Deux, Godard and Miéville made a second film financed by Beauregard, Comment ca va? (How’s It Going?), which examines through a long discussion between a communist newspaper editor and his typist the use of the image in society. Their disagreements about how to edit a video for their newspaper leads onto an extended conversation about how images are chosen by the media and the differences between words and pictures.

Television

Return to “Cinema Cinema”

Art and Commerce

Mystery Stories

At Home with the Godards

Screwball

Powerplay

Magnum Opus

A Twice Told Tale

The Last Spy

A Failed Experiment

“Quit Talking, Start Chalking”

Self Portrait

Love and War

In Praise of Love

Leading Roles

Cine-poems

“Violence Leaves a Deep Scar”

Lost at Sea

A Controversial Award

Godard at 80

As Director:

Major Acting Credits: