Freedom in Transit: Jean-Luc Godard and Subverting the Movement-image
If you want to say something, there is only one solution: say it.
In an interview with French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema during the release of Pierrot le Fou (1965), director Jean-Luc Godard spoke fervently of the inherent freedom displayed by Russian film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, remarking that “They didn’t ask themselves what cinema should be.” Reflecting on the legacy of cinema as an art form, and the responsibility of a director to champion this legacy, Godard offers up a crucial anecdote which serves to underscore his philosophical view of cinema itself:
There was a more natural way of asking questions. This is what one feels with Picasso. Posing problems is not a critical attitude but a natural function. When a motorist deals with traffic problems, one simply says he is driving; and Picasso paints. (222)
In many ways, this proclivity for interrogating both the traditions of modern cinema and our perceptions of reality with equal force has come to define Godard’s life’s work as an auteur: a prolific career steeped in film criticism, directing, writing and acting, which stretches across half a century and encompasses (at the time of writing) over forty feature films.
Godard’s theory of cinema is one that values raw emotion over mindless entertainment, provoking thought over rigid adherence to theory; a philosophical exercise that’s more concerned with intellectual and affective resonance than wider commercial appeal. Therefore, when philosopher John E. Drabinski asks, “Can philosophy be a kind of cinema?” it seems only natural that this problem is posed with Godard in mind.
While certainly not a frivolous undertaking, clues to a possible resolution are to be found in Godard’s early output during the 1960s: a decade rife with social and political tension — particularly in France — which spawned a cultural revolution that extended to almost every artistic medium, including music, art, literature, and of course, cinema.
Can philosophy be a kind of cinema?
A close reading of two of Godard’s early and most influential works — his film-noir feature début Breathless (1960), and the explosive, apocalyptic vision of Weekend (1967) — provides an understanding of how Godard sought to manipulate the modern traditions of cinema, to illustrate and accentuate the negative spaces that exist within formal “mise-en-scène (the content of individual shots)” (Sterritt 17). As Godard himself acknowledges:
It is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them. The camera is on them, but the film is not centred on them. (211–12)
Central to an understanding of both Breathless and Weekend, is a study of Godard’s use of the automobile as motif (perhaps the most iconic example of capitalistic materialism in the twentieth century), and how the elements of flight and escapism intertwine with narrative explorations of existentialism and Marxism — dominant philosophies which would ultimately collide in Paris during the revolutionary reverie of the May ’68 Movement towards the end of the decade.
Furthermore, analysis of the ‘movement-image,’ a cinematic concept theorised by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, serves to highlight Godard’s reverence for experimentation and disregard for cinematic conventions, solidifying both Breathless and Weekend as subversive and provocative works of art. As Drabinski states:
Godard’s genius and enigma is tightly bound up with the ideas he brings to sound and image. His cinema and cinematic language is philosophical. (1)
Breathless (1960)
The opening scene of Breathless finds Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young French car thief, doing his best Humphrey Bogart impersonation before calmly stealing an automobile from an American military officer. While it may be easy to overlook this minor detail, it becomes significant with Godard’s formative role in the French New Wave: a group of influential and experimental filmmakers during the 1950s and 1960s, who heavily criticised their predecessors and had an “ongoing fascination with Hollywood and American popular culture” (Sterritt 44).
Speaking with Cahiers du Cinema after the film’s release, Godard confessed that, “Filming should be a part of living, something normal and natural” (193). His affinity with Hollywood cinema — which prior to Breathless, Godard had covered extensively in his role as a film critic — becomes clearer with further explanation:
The Americans are real and natural. We in France must find something that means something — find the French attitude as they have found the American attitude. (193)
And in Breathless, there is perhaps no better embodiment of French attitude than Michel: an existentialist, aspiring gangster in a classic film-noir narrative, who boldly “accepts death’s terms not in the self-conscious style of a Hollywood hero but in the casual, taken-for-granted manner of a loner whose divorce from society is so complete he may never have realized there was a choice about the matter” (Sterritt 48).
Driving his stolen car, Michel suggests directly to the audience, “Cars are made to run, not to stop,” echoing his own personal philosophy of flight and escapism. This audacious act of self-reflexivity and the breaking of “classical film’s strict rule against acknowledging the camera,” renders Godard as “impatient with the 1950s mindset of conservatism, consensus, and conformity” (Sterritt 39–40, 46).
Godard’s flair for improvisation is best exemplified by a notorious scene involving Michel’s unmotivated murder of a highway policeman. The use of “extreme close-ups,” sliding from Michel’s arm to his hand and pistol, followed by a “manic jump cut” which dislocates the sound of the gunshot from the image of the falling body of the victim, quickly creates a feeling of apathy and alienation, before cutting “to a distant overhead view as Michel runs frantically away” (Sterritt 40). Godard deliberately denies the psychological connection an audience might have with the act of murder committed on screen, and his aesthetic attack on mise-en-scène simultaneously echoes and rejects the notion of American hegemony in cinema.
Much like Michel, Godard is best described as “a man who breaks the rules when he feels like it” (Sterritt 40). The appearance of the automobile in Breathless represents the ideals and behaviours that are casually adopted and discarded by the continual onslaught of cultural appropriation, while Michel’s story of murder, love and ultimately death, can be “traced through the cars he steals, uses, and abandons in the naive belief that freedom is a matter of physical transit” (Sterritt 48).
When reviewing Breathless, renowned film critic Roger Ebert famously remarked that, “Modern movies begin here.” And while this statement might seem like overblown hyperbole, Godard’s impact as a film director is felt today “with a roar that still reverberates” (Sterritt 39), and his establishment of a career built on avant-garde improvisation is critical to the intrinsic link between philosophy and modern cinema.
Weekend (1967)
If Breathless announced Godard to the world of cinema with the framing of a single gunshot, then Weekend — his fifteenth feature film, released a year prior to the tumultuous events of the May ’68 Movement — announced the arrival of Godard’s political consciousness with a vicious strike at cinema’s heart. An inviting title seduces the audience with the prospect of “leisure, diversion, and respite from workaday cares” (Sterritt 89), yet the first words on screen conjure far more ominous thoughts, boldly declaring:
“A FILM ADRIFT IN THE COSMOS.”
In Weekend, Godard wholly embraced his “Lettrist mixture of deadpan whimsy and dead-serious outrage,” creating a confrontational mix of sound and imagery, which took “the cinematic and political implications of his earlier work to new extremes” (Sterritt 92). The film follows Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc), a deplorable bourgeois couple who embark on a dark, road-trip journey through the French countryside, encountering the moribund horrors of consumerist civilization. After a farcical altercation with their estranged neighbours in a parking-lot, Roland and Corinne flee in their automobile to the retreating cries of “Bastard! Shit-heap! Communist!” and arrive at “a cinematically stunning traffic-jam scene” which brings together many of Godard’s “most original and subversive ideas” (Sterritt 96–7).
Godard’s manipulation of mise-en-scène here runs counter to the close-ups and edits of Breathless, instead providing a lethargic travelling shot which appears to extend for miles and miles, over several minutes of runtime. While the automobile once again acts as the “main symbolic object” in Weekend, it’s philosophical meaning differs from the vehicle of Michel’s flight and escapism in Breathless, and his “unexamined faith that a different place will bring a different life” (Sterritt 93, 48). Whereas in Weekend, Godard’s traffic-jam serves to illustrate how the automobile has come to embody “the materialism and aggression of a society being crushed by its own fetishized commodities” (Sterritt 93).
Godard’s camera parallels the scene in a laboured crawl, as humanity stretches out before the audience in a horribly dysfunctional microcosm: near-constant arguments; games of cards and chess; upturned cars; a cacophony of horns; public urination; caged animals; a boat with unfurled sails; a horse and cart; the looming presence of a Shell oil tanker. For Ebert, Godard’s “traffic jam shows us a civilization that has gotten clogged up in its own artifacts,” where the “action seems stretched and flattened into a two-dimensional spectacle, as shallow as the society that has allowed everyday life to degenerate so badly” (Sterritt 97).
With Roland and Corinne speeding past the gruesome cause of the traffic-jam with an almost casual indifference, the palpable urgency of Weekend continues to accelerate, with acts of rape, arson, murder and cannibalism alongside fierce, Marxist dialogue and political commentary. As Ebert notes, Weekend is about “violence, hatred, the end of ideology and the approaching cataclysm that will destroy civilization. It is also about the problem of how to make a movie about this.”
Godard’s aesthetic corruption of sound and imagery in Weekend, combined with a deliberate and destructive approach to mise-en-scène, represents a firm rejection of “many social, cultural, and political notions generally accepted as the common sense of our age” (Sterritt 7).
Subverting the Movement-image
In an early piece of film criticism, Godard postulated:
If destiny and death are the cinema’s pet themes, then there must be a definition of the human condition within the carefully controlled presentation which is mise-en-scène. (21)
And while Breathless and Weekend certainly play with these themes (albeit in varied contexts of irreverent humour and morbid fascination), understanding Godard’s notion of ‘control’ in terms of mise-en-scène requires a rigorous understanding of the movement-image and how Godard’s career largely functions as a “war against the tyranny of images” (Sterritt 95).
In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze interpolated modern cinema with philosophy, drawing inspiration from fellow French thinker Henri Bergson and German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Using Bergon’s first thesis as guide, Deleuze defined the ‘movement-image’ as “the movement of translation which is established between … objects and modifies their respective positions” (11).
In the language of cinema, this manifested as the objects in each frame and the movement between each frame, which Deleuze then broke down in to three distinct categories: where “the long shot would be primarily a perception-image” with moving bodies or things being moved; “the medium shot an action-image” relating movement to physical ‘acts’; “and the close-up an affection-image” containing the subject perceiving itself (70).
In Breathless, Godard (along with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard, whose talents also featured on Weekend) used non-traditional techniques such as hand-held camera shooting and rapid-fire, montage editing to disrupt and reinvigorate cinema itself. This is in line with Deleuze’s notion that cinema only truly becomes cinema when the camera is moved — in pure ‘movement-image’ — and where the construction of individual shots creates a “multiplicity which corresponds to the unity of the shot, as mobile section or temporal perspective” (26).
During Michel’s murder of the highway policeman in Breathless, Godard swiftly carries the audience through a cavalcade of extreme close-ups (affection-images), a medium shot of the falling body (action-image) and Michel fleeing across an open field (perception-image) — the whole experience lasting less than ten seconds of runtime.
Conversely, the traffic-jam travelling shot in Weekend shows Godard placing emphasis on the perception-image above all others, paralysing the simultaneous action of things and drawing out the audience’s perception of the ‘movement-image’; a long, panning shot cluttered with fleeting and ephemeral distractions, which in turn forces the gaze of the subject (in this case, the audience) inward, invoking awareness of the self. As Ebert indicates in his review, “the technique itself makes the point.”
In discussing the ‘movement-image,’ Deleuze framed a clash between materialism and idealism, and went on to suggest a deeper connection between the phenomenological concept of ‘natural perception’ and cinema itself, stating:
The cinema can, with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them … it supresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world … it substitutes an implicit knowledge and a second intentionality for the conditions of natural perception. (57)
In this mode, Godard’s career as an auteur can be viewed as part of an intellectual pursuit to manipulate and subvert (through mise-en-scène) the verisimilitude of cinema, “where the real and the imaginary are clearly distinct and yet are one, like the Moebius curve which has at the same time one side and two” (214–15).
Freedom in Transit
While Godard’s cinematic legacy borders on legendary — one sees his stylistic influence resonating in the works of directors such as Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and many more — his films are not always received with universal acclaim, especially among his peers.
Werner Herzog, a pioneer of New German cinema, once described Godard’s films as “intellectual counterfeit money” when compared to kung-fu action cinema (138). Orson Welles was also scathing in his critique of Godard, declaring that his movie-messages “could be written on the head of a pin.” Meanwhile outspoken American director Quentin Tarantino, whose production company A Band Apart is named after Godard’s Bande à part (1964), stated that:
Godard was so influential to me at the beginning of my aesthetic as a director … Godard is the one who taught me the fun and the freedom and the joy of breaking the rules; just fucking around with the entire medium.
After exploring Godard’s thorough deconstruction of mise-en-scène in Breathless and Weekend, alongside the automobile as a central motif and his subversion of Deleuze’s ‘movement-image,’ it does not seem radical to suggest that “Cinema is … a candidate for a medium that does, and therefore invents, philosophy” (Drabinski 4).
In assessing the impact of Godard’s work as an auteur and evaluating his vast catalogue of films, Drabinski is forthright in acknowledging:
Who would pretend to have exhausted the meaning of his films? No one. There is more to be said, more films to see, more nuance to explode into fully developed aesthetics and politics. (2–3)
Discussing the intent behind Breathless, Godard writes:
À Bout de Souffle [Breathless] was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about … I wanted to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. I wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of film-making had just been discovered or experienced for the first time. (193)
With this notion of experimentation, there are striking similarities between the creative outputs of the New Wave directors like Godard and the Beat Generation of American authors such as William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. As Sterritt notes, Godard’s early films had “an awareness of the Beat sensibility” which “provides important clues to the making of Breathless and its galvanizing impact on international cinema” (45).
Prior to the political turmoil of the May ’68 Movement, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would declare in Existentialism and Human Emotions (1957), that “every truth and every action implies a human setting and a human subjectivity” (9). And while films like Breathless and Weekend are clearly indebted to the influence philosophies such as existentialism and Marxism exerted on Godard, his own sentiment and approach to film-making is rather succinct: “If you want to say something, there is only one solution: say it” (173).
In recognising Godard’s lasting impact on modern cinema and future auteurs, it becomes logical to advocate that through the constant subversion and improvisation of the ‘movement-image’, philosophy can be a kind of cinema:
Philosophy is not wielded as an interpretative instrument, overwhelming the unicity of the cinematic work with an alien set of ideas. Rather, cinema is a kind of philosophy. Philosophy is a kind of cinema. (Drabinski 4)
Indeed, both philosophy and cinema interact in a process of infinite regression not unlike Godard’s Moebius curve, simultaneously both one side and two.
A version of this article was originally published in print for The University of Queensland’s Jacaranda journal in 2017.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated and edited by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Athlone, 1992.
Drabinski, John E. “Philosophy As A Kind Of Cinema: Introducing Godard And Philosophy”. Journal Of French And Francophone Philosophy 18, no. 2, 2010, 1–8.
Godard, Jean-Luc, Godard On Godard. Translated and edited by Tom Milne and Jean Narboni, Secker & Warburg, 1972.
Herzog, Werner, Herzog On Herzog. Edited by Paul Cronin, Faber & Faber, 2002.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Human Emotions. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Philosophical Library, 1957.
Sterritt, David. The Films Of Jean-Luc Goddard: Seeing The Invisible. Cambridge UP, 1999.
