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Jean-Luc Godard was cherished by successive generations of theory nerds. But Charlotte Raven discovers a much funnier side to this serious artist
Before I do anything else, I must thank my friends Tim and Ed for making me see Jean-Luc Godard. This was by no means an easy task. Such as it was, my knowledge of the great French director gave me the distinct impression that a summer evening spent watching his work would be worthwhile, rather than fun. The recommendation from Tim and Ed did nothing to make me change my position. It was simply further proof that Monsieur Godard made films for people who can't bear the sound of popcorn. Although I now place myself in this category, having been shocked back into the art house by the unbearable lightness of the mainstream flicks to which I was briefly subjected as the NS's film critic, I am still wary of theory boy fare.
Never having heard Godard's dictum that "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun", I had him down as a seminar-friendly auteur whose purchase on the "brutality and opacity of the human condition"(Susan Sontag) made him more Tim and Ed than me. The impression was not founded on prejudice. I've read a lot of stuff about Godard and none of it gave a hint of the director I was to discover when I was finally dragged down to the National Film Theatre last month. This Godard was an altogether different prospect from the fellow whose "emotionless" and "dry" technique fed the myth that he was simply unable to create convincing characters. Although he does not do so conventionally - there is no psychological depth to his portraits of the lost and lonely who live, either literally or metaphorically, on society's outer edges - the people in his early films, at least, are somehow more vivid because they have been stripped of motivation. The scriptwriter's need to supply some bogus reason why X does Y is resolved by Godard's insight that most of us conduct our business in the dark. If his characters seem alienated, that does not make them less recognisable as human beings - quite the contrary. Their actions may make no sense either to themselves or to the viewer, but their bafflement is truer than any amount of pseudo self-awareness. Given that life, under modern conditions, is a ritual whose contours are defined by obscure social forces, all we can do is hang on and hope that chance throws in the possibility of some small directional shift.
Like Godard's boys and girls, we hang out playing pinball until we bump into someone who will take us for a cup of coffee. If this sounds "dry", it isn't. It may not be usual for a social critique of Godard's breadth and intensity to have any lighter moments, but he is much more of a laugh than anyone seems willing to let on. As far as I can tell, there has been a campaign of deliberate misinformation, waged by the turtlenecked boys who cleaved to our man in the Seventies, with the aim of putting girls like me off him. They succeeded, and no one has yet pointed out that the only reason they and successive generations of theory nerds did not find the early films comical had less to do with Godard than that none of them had a sense of humour.
The sense that this director is a "serious" artist whose stock would be diminished by admitting that he could "do" funny may provide Godard audiences with suitable faces to take to the work of his mature years, but it leaves them struggling to find the right expressions for his other pictures. When I went to see Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, I could not work out why no one but me thought it hilarious each time the director's whispered voice-over, with its high academic tone, was counterpoised with scenes of the purest banality. Or why they weren't cracking up at the sight of two housewife prostitutes being directed across a still frame by a client who has ordered them to walk about with TWA flight bags on their heads. It might have seemed degrading if the people inside the bags had not been dead already. Those members of the audience who sat gravely through the scene clearly took them for human beings, a mistake contradicted by every second of what had gone before.
All Godard's humour, visual or verbal, serves his artistic purpose. In Une femme est une femme, the two lovers, who have gone to bed not talking to each other - as lovers do - are forced to express their feelings by pointing at words in books they have retrieved from the shelf. This works well enough, until they run out of appropriate insults. "Executioner!" one charges. "Sardine!" counters the other. It's a neat and charming way of getting to the point that lovers always speak in a language that is not theirs. Words create life, says Godard, and yet they also destroy the possibility of living authentically.
Take away the linguistic theory and you could almost imagine seeing the sardine gag in a costly US sitcom. But the reason why it works in Godard, while it wouldn't on, say, Friends, is the spirit in which it was fashioned. Every joke on American TV is spoilt by the knowledge that teams of anxious gagmen are all struggling to hit a home run before the person sitting next to them does. All this effort and unhappiness contributes to the strange phenomenon whereby the paciest bits of dialogue still come across as stolid and static. The writers have got the words in the right places, but somehow their overinvestment in what is, after all, only a TV show taints the result of their labours with the unmistakable stain of desperation.
Godard's jokes don't feel like that, because they were conceived in a minute. His films were made with a speed that would make the blood of today's film and television directors turn to ice. It was not that he didn't care about them. Quite the converse: he cared too much about them to let their souls congeal for reasons which, in his mind, could only be self-indulgent. He could have written scripts before he started filming, but the verite style, which was so important to his artistic vision, would have been compromised by that process. For this reason, great chunks of his works are improvised and filmed as if there were no second chance to capture what was happening. And, therefore, every shot in his early pictures feels urgent.
Even the longer scenes - for example, the bathroom sequence in Masculin, feminin, where the two lovers, Madeleine and Paul, try to work out what each makes of the other - have that quality which makes you want to hold your breath. Why this should be the case, when so many of Godard's techniques are now staples of mainstream cinema, is a matter for speculation. We are so used to seeing jump cuts, hand-held camera-work and scenes shot from crazy perspectives that, by rights, a Godard film should seem like old hat.
It does not, for the simple reason that the stylistic effects with which we are now so familiar have no artistic substance. When lazy contemporary directors use these tricks, it is as just another layer of artifice - a look that has no purpose, other than to fool the audience into thinking that the work is less slick than it is. Godard was doing the opposite. His stylistic experiments were not contrived to win over the viewer, but rather to challenge his idea of what the cinema is, by refusing, disconcertingly, to use the cinematic deceptions that would place him in a complacent relation to the work.
Think of A bout de souffle and consider the excitement generated by the jump cuts, which, in this instance, are about adding resonance by leaving more ellipses in the surface of the narrative. Godard's films jump, but they never judder - one is always sure that the hand on the tiller knows where it is going, even if it has thrown away the map.
The Godard films will be touring to Bradford, Norwich, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Nottingham, Derby, Cardiff, Manchester, Leicester, Belfast, Sheffield, York, Oxford and Southampton. They will also be showing in Hampstead, Brixton and Dalston in London
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