The Death of Jean-Luc Godard & The End of Cinema?
At the end of the 1967 french film “Week-End”, a placard first reads “fin” denoting the end of Jean-Luc Godard’s fifteenth film in a span of seven years, standing as one of the most prolific runs by a director in the history of cinema. Yet the innovative New Wave director soon adds a twist trademark for his style as an intellectual prankster. “Fin de Cinema” the placard comes to read, which at first was easy to shrug as nothing but a notion signifying the director’s tendency for pretentious declarations. But as was the stylistic norm for Godard, the phrase served as a double entendre, forecasting the radical turn of Godard’s career that consumed the next decade of his life. Simultaneously it noted the director’s growing sentiment toward the failure of cinema, a theme that dominated his later oeuvre. Nevertheless, on September 21, 2022, in a similar Godardian fashion, both alluding to the comical and existential, a placard could be held reading “the end of Godard.” denoting the passing of the director at the age of 91 from assisted suicide. In the post-Godard cinematic landscape, can the phrase Godard plastered at the end of his film be disregarded as nothing more than the cynical view of a cantankerous old cinephile? Or rather coming from the visionary who continually pushed the boundaries of cinema does it bare any merit on the current state of the medium?
Having spent the previous decade as a film critic, Godard’s debut Breathless followed Traffaut’s 400 Blows and signaled a radical development in film understood as the French New Wave. Godard’s film, centering on a petty car thief who after killing a cop hides out in Paris with his American girlfriend, demonstrated the innovations of the French New Wave with his use of jumpcuts and an almost documentarian filming style that gave the film an urgency and an aura of youthful excitement. But while Breathless demonstrated the youthful spirit that catapulted Godard to the forefront of French cinema and the European art film circle it also evoked the defining hallmark of his career, namely his fascination and fixation on cinema and visual media. Breathless was the perfect parable for post-WWII French society, as its main character identifies with the film noir and masculinity portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, so too was France being shaped by Yankee culture after being inundated with American films and products due to the Marshall plan. But it would be the New Wave and Godard’s post-modernist cinematic style that pushed the boundaries of the conventions of American and French cinema. The archetypal post-modernist, Godard was the cinematic equivalent to Thomas Pynchon (whose debut novel, also featuring a wandering lothario, was published three years after Breathless) in that he possessed and utilized his encyclopedic knowledge of film, pop culture, and history alongside a voracious appetite for political theory and existential philosophy. With this style, Godard released a string of films that radically altered the landscape of cinema throughout the 1960s. This included a stark portrayal of the brutal Algerian conflict in Le Petit Soldat (featuring his first collaboration with his soon-to-be wife Anna Karina), the noir science fiction film Alphaville, the influential crime-film Band of Outsiders, and the colorfully stylized existential adventure film Pierrot Le Fou, once again starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina.
In 1967, riding this creative high, Godard released a trio of films, Le Chinoise, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and Week-End that simultaneously hinted at the themes that would dominate his career for the next decade but also as a forecast for political events in France. Le Chinoise focuses on a cadre of self-proclaimed Maoist students in Paris, 2 or 3 Things… documents the life of a married woman who simultaneously works as a prostitute at night (while featuring Godard’s own voiceover concerning the malaise of modern consumer society) and Week-End features a couple traveling through rural France as French society, culture, and history itself seem to be in decay. In May of the following year, the spectre of communism never loomed more closely over Western Europe when student protests in Paris led to a widespread general strike that brought France to a grinding halt. Having hinted at left-leaning politics in his earlier films Goddard alongside his New Wave cadres, including Francois Truffaut, successfully shut down that year’s Canne Film festival in solidarity with the protests. Nevertheless, after having fled the country, President De Gaulle returned and with the backing of the “silent majority” alongside waning public support of the protests won the next election handily, bringing a decisive end to the unrest. In the aftermath of the May ’68 protests, the next chapter of Goddard’s career unfolded, namely a turn towards radically reinventing both what constituted a film and the process of filming in itself. Whereas the first portion of Goddard’s film career had focused on and deconstructed American and French cinema at large, his second and often labeled “radical” or “political” portion of his career deconstructed himself and the cult of personality that had formed around his auteurial style. Embracing Maoism during the period and no longer taking sole credit but releasing films as part of the Dziga-Vertov Group formed alongside Jean-Paul Gorrin, a prominent leftist and influence on Le Chinoise. The collective released a series of overtly political films in the early 70s, including Tout Va Bien, starring Jane Fonda, which highlighted class struggle in post-May ’68 France.
By 1980, Goddard returned to relatively conventional filmmaking with what he deemed his “second first film” Every Man for Himself, arguably a thematical sequel to his 1963 film Contempt. Both centered on a director, loosely based on Godard, named “Paul” (in Every Man… the main character even bares the same last name) as they navigate their career and deteriorating and alienated personal lives. Thus began the latter portion of Godard’s career, which spanned four decades. The release of Historie(s) du Cinema in 1998, a monumental documentary that he began in the ’80s but wasn’t complete almost a decade later served as a meditation on cinema’s place in the 20th century and demonstrated that Godard’s adoration for the medium remained as strong as it had been in the early portion of his career. Godard continued his penchant for innovation, no better example of this than 2013’s Goodbye to Language featuring an experimental use of 3D technology. Yet in exchange for the youthful exuberance of his 60’s films, pervading this later period was a somber and cryptic tone towards an alienated human condition in the closing years of the Cold War and within society under late capitalism at the turn of the millennium.
Godard once compared himself to the musician Bob Dylan in that his artistic output in the 60s was truly lightning in the bottle. It was that body of work that inspired a whole generation of filmmakers both in his own home country, such as Chantal Akerman and across the globe, including young American directors such as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Woody Allen, amongst others who belonged to the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers in the 60’s and 70’s. Just as Godard infused his work with a deluge of references to the films and genres that inspired him, so too has his work been referenced by his acolytes, such as in the films of Quentin Tarantino. His freewheeling style and tone were often alluded to and imitated but Godard’s inclination towards radically pushing the boundaries of the medium made him a truly unique visionary. While lauding his innovations in cinema and the influence of filmmakers, it is easy to denounce Godard as pretentious, self-important, and navel-gazing, all of which may be apt terms. Yet personal art can not help but be a reflection of the individual artist, which is a welcomed respite from the films by committee made in the boardrooms in Hollywood that have only gotten worse in the current mainstream environment.
Now that he has passed, we must consider his sweeping indictment of the medium, namely in its failure to truly deconstruct the normative ways of seeing and how it became a tool of indoctrination by the conventional sources of power. Godard noted that film had a glaring blind spot, in that it did not capture many of the horrific tragedies of the 20th century, from the Holocaust during the Second World War to the engrossing bombing campaigns of Indochina by Western powers, amongst countless other examples. Furthermore, even when they were captured it seemed that their imagery was absorbed into the narrative of Western imperialism and capitalist conventions. One of the most famous of Godard’s declarations was “that cinema was truth twenty-four times per second” and if this is considered to be true, then there is no wonder why he considered modern cinema to be an overt failure. The current mainstream cinema, especially those of Hollywood prioritizes spectacle over art and bares little to no relationship to truth or reality. No better representation of this can be found than the domination of the film world by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has constructed an entirely new reality to supplant our own in the fashion of Baudrillard’s simulacrum theory. Furthermore, streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime (whose owning company Amazon serves as the figurehead for the dehumanizing labor conditions of the current neoliberal order) churn out “streaming content” in an almost assembled lined made fashion.
Similar to the concept of the “end of history” Godard’s sentiment of the end of cinema may be too sweeping of a generalization. Godard never stopped innovating in his later career, even when he fell out of the orbit of mainstream cinema. His later work included Notre Musique (2004), a meditation on violence in media in the post-Cold War landscape. Goodbye to Language (2013) is a testament to Godard’s continued experimental nature as he used the in-vogue but kitschy 3D technology of the early 2010s to explore a marital affair. In his final film, The Image Book (2018), his attention is turned toward the Middle East, re-contextualizing how the region is misunderstood by portrayals in Western media in the wake of the War on Terror and the European migrant crisis. Furthermore, a generation of European and Global directors such as Julia Ducournau, Lars Von Tier, and Nicholas Winding Refn, amongst many others continue to explore the medium of cinema and push its boundaries, in the stylistic vein of the French New Wave over half a century later. “To become immortal and then die.” declared Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless, and considering that almost all of what we consider a motion picture, no matter how avante-gard or mainstream, is in significant debt to the stylistic innovations in his career spanning over half a century since his debut in 1960, it may be safe to say that Godard achieved that immortality himself.
