Godard: a portrait of the artist at 70
Colin MacCabe Bloomsbury, 432pp, £25
ISBN 0747563187
Many years have passed since news of the imminent release of a film by Jean-Luc Godard would quicken the pulse of cinemagoers. Of all the directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague - Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer - he was the most revered. His landmark films, among them A Bout de Souffle (1960), Le Mepris (1963) and Alphaville (1965), were as clever as anything by Sartre, as sophisticated and swinging as Coltrane, and fashioned icons out of actresses such as Jean Seberg and Anna Karina.
By the late 1960s, however, Godard had thrown in his lot with the French Maoist movement. Truffaut, his former colleague at the Parisian film journal Cahiers du Cinema, told him: "You're the Ursula Andress of militancy - you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery." The actor and director Jean-Pierre Melville described his work as "anything shot anyhow". L'Humanite called him a "parlour nihilist".
Godard still has his fans. Martin Scorsese has sponsored new work by him and Quentin Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart, after Bande a Part (1964). But Godard's recent films have been poorly distributed and, perhaps deservedly, are little known. He is in danger of becoming a director who appeals only to critics and historians.
Colin MacCabe's thoughtful book is misleadingly titled (Godard will be 73 in December). No conventional biography, it offers a "series of angles" on the director's life and work, including Lutheran theology and its impact on French society; reflections on the philosophy of language; and the history of Switzerland. For MacCabe, the Nouvelle Vague was part of "the last wave of Parisian intellectual and cultural dominance of the west".
Godard came from a cosmopolitan and well-connected Franco-Swiss family. "I have a feeling that I'm not asking for power or riches or anything, because I had more than plenty until I was 15," he claimed. He became a thief, and spent three days in jail in Zurich in 1952. At his father's request, he checked himself in to a mental hospital. According to Jacques Rivette, Godard always kept a razor blade in his wallet in case he wanted to kill himself. Yet far from being an isolated aesthete, he went on to work as a camera operator and gossip columnist.
Although not an intellectual, Godard was impressed by the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss, the structural anthropologist, who made him think it might be possible to unmask the hidden wiring that underpinned the chaos of quotidian life. He came to believe that cinematic form was an issue of the utmost importance, and denounced French directors who thought that films were simply about telling well-crafted stories. Embracing the energy and non-literary values of American B-movies, he added to them an aesthetic of jagged discontinuity - full of jump cuts, showy lighting and improvised dialogue - that seemed to mock the staidness of the French bourgeoisie.
Godard never stopped pushing the boundaries of film. He became involved with collective film-making, showing "cine-tracts" at factories and student assemblies rather than movie theatres. He saw his pictures as "UVOs" (unidentified visual objects), tried to get John Lennon to play Trotsky in a film about the Russian revolutionary, and made such fascinating but little-known works as British Sounds (featuring ranting neo-fascists, car workers and a woman wandering around naked while Sheila Rowbotham reads from feminist texts).
MacCabe describes Godard as a "number theorist, conjugating the prime numbers of social reality in an attempt to provide a comprehensible pattern". When it turned out that the audience for his conjugated cinema was limited, he drifted even further away from the mainstream, turning his back on those American influences that had vitalised his early work. MacCabe dismisses his most recent full-length feature, Eloge de l'amour (2001), as "the crudest kind of chauvinism".
A year earlier, Godard's old friend Agnes Varda made The Gleaners and I, a magnificently funny and moving film about marginal and dispossessed people in contemporary France that is as formally inventive as it is politically revelatory. It makes clear that the inequalities of capitalism are just as pressing today as in 1954, when Godard shot his first film. Alas, the result of his truculent isolationism is that few people now care what he has to say on the subject.
Sukhdev Sandhu is the Daily Telegraph's film critic
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
