"The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible", David Sterritt

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) is, arguably, not only the most important living filmmaker, but also one of the greatest directors of all-time. A philosopher thinking with a camera, raising questions about cinema, society, politics and History, in innovative and non-conforming ways, his body of work has influenced filmmakers from Europe to America, from the mainstream to the avant-garde, more than any other director. He is best known for being part of the Nouvelle Vague with revolutionary movies as the cinephilic and exuberant noir À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960), the existentialist Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live, 1962) or the disconsolately romantic Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). From the end of the '60s until mid-'70s he entered in a militant phase with Jean-Pierre Gorin and continued a controversial oeuvre with political films as Vladimir et Rosa (1971). In the '80s he returned to, in a way, more commercial pictures as Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (1980) or Prénom: Carmen (1985). In the last decades, his work has gained an elegiacal beauty and melancholically look towards History and the cinema itself, using different resources as video (as in his magnum opus Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998)), digital technology (as in Film Socialisme (2010)) or even 3D (as in Adieu au Language (2014)). The innovative editing, pictorial compositions and mixture of quotes from several literary and cinematographic sources in his films have gained him passionate admirers as well as its detractors.

David Sterritt is a Film Critic of The Christian Science Monitor, author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews. His book The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible analyses six of his key films: À Bout de Souffle, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend (1967), Número Deux (Number Two, 1975), Je Vous Salue, Marie (Hail Mary, 1985) and Nouvelle Vague (1990). Besides, Sterrit gives a brief overview of Godard’s life as a critic (in a very contextualized way), an investigation of his philosophical and aesthetic intentions, and a study of his importance for modernist and postmodernist art.

Excerpts:
“These notions come into play with special force in such late Godard works as Hail Mary, Nouvelle Vague, and Hélas pour moi, which rely less on narrative meanings contained within shots than on suggestions arising in the space between those meanings, so to speak. That is, their most important messages are conveyed not only by the images we would see in a collection of film stills but also by the collisions between those images as they follow one another on the screen.”

"[On Vivre Sa Vie] the music reinforces our impression that this is not a happy woman - the psychological effect is deliberately thrown off kilter by apparent mismatches between sound and picture, which seem to be following their own schedules instead of trudging along in Hollywood style synchronization. The music comes and goes at unexpected times, and much of the sequence passes in silence, focusing attention on the visual image with rare intensity. This all amounts to a bold violation of classical film structure - and a highly effective one, since it signals that although this movie will contain familiar elements of ordinary cinema, these will not assume their conventional roles of soothing, distracting, and entertaining the audience. Instead, each will maintain its own aesthetic integrity even as it contributes to the film as a whole. It will be up to the spectator - the active, participating, Brechtian spectator - to perceive their interrelationships and ferret out their meanings.”

“Hail Mary and subsequent films like Nouvelle Vague and Hélas pour moi take the ineffable as their most immediate concern, yet they remain fully realized cinematic works. Among the rewards they offer is a keen sense of the pleasure Godard feels in playing their material properties (color, composition, texture) against more allusive qualities of theoretical reflectiveness and philosophical, even theological, speculation.”

Link to the complete book in PDF:

Jean-Luc Godard



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