Detective (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

The trio of films that followed Jean-Luc Godard's return to cinema mirrored, in some cases, his early work. Sauve qui peut (la vie), Passion and First Name: Carmen matched up in thematic and (vague) stylistic terms with Breathless, Contempt and Pierrot le fou. But it is Detective, Godard's lightest since Made in U.S.A., that truly recaptures the spirit of his New Wave material. Filled with cinematic and literary references, populated by existential refinements of various generic types (detectives, mob bosses, black-clad hoods playing billiards with a cigarette dangling from their mouths, disintegrating couples, paid-off boxers), Detective returns the director to his reflexive roots for a lovely throwback tempered only by the slight melancholy of the New Wave performers who now look older.

Confining the action to the Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare, Detective moves between three groups of people whose paths overlaps as they move about the hotel. Godard films static takes that emphasize the boundaries of his setting, rarely able to move his camera far back enough inside a room to go further than a medium long shot. On the occasions that Godard does manage to put some distance between the camera and his actors, it comes in the form of dazzlingly placed high- and low-angle shots of hallways and the expansive ground floor, taking an uncharacteristic pleasure in the shining commercial retreat that lacks the director's typical, ironic assessment of the gold-plated chandeliers and plush carpet. Yet even these big, beautiful shots segment the hotel's layout into a series of locations unto themselves, suites and bars in a void that suggest proximity to each other only because all the characters keep running into each other.

Why, even the individual rooms themselves do not obey the stillness of the camera shots, instead morphing to take on the personalities of whomever occupies their space. Pairing older actors (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Brasseur) with younger lovers (Aurele Doazan, Nathalie Baye) tends to make rooms feel suffocating and morose, but the women on their own add life to these confined areas. Most liberating of all are the scenes that join Baye with "French Elvis" Johnny Hallyday as the fight promoter to whom Baye's husband owes money. The young lovers add a new New Wave spark as an erstwhile youth icon like Léaud gradually reveals his age as his character inherits his disgraced uncle's obsession. There are other tonal modulations as well, such as the claustrophobia that pervades the detectives' suite when Doazan takes the camera they use to spy on people outside and turns it inward to watch the watchmen.

Not much about Detective's narrative makes sense on a first watch, but as Anna Dzenis rightly says, Godard takes more pleasure in the "investigation" than the payoff. If the still camera setups and the sense of regret that pokes through the old men's philosophical and literary proclamations, Detective nevertheless bursts with life. I cannot say how happy I was to see Godard bring back the credits style of his early features, with letters appearing on a black screen. He even spreads out the credits for nearly 20 minutes, devilishly breaking up the film as it builds momentum. The broad genre touches give way to specific reverence when a beautiful scene of lovers entwined together throughout the hotel is juxtaposed with clips from Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Most impressive, however, is Godard's use of stereo, placing each channel in contrapuntal relation to the other and to aurally reproduce the kinetic imagery of Godard's filmography. In the film's best scene, Léaud and Doazan spy on their marks down in the hotel's restaurant, the audio track splits to put the dialogue of the watched in one channel and in the other...music. Classical cues take the place of Léaud's speech, aggressive when a woman blocks his line of sight and makes a bumbling, attention-getting apology and lower as he confers with his colleague. The music fits to the mood of the image, or does it create that mood? Either way, the scene encapsulates this delightfully tossed-off feature, a relatively commercial venture that nevertheless shows off the ways Godard could always innovate.

Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

Hail Mary follows logically from his previous 1980s work even as it marks one of the biggest departures of his always shifting career. The director's "return to cinema" demonstrated a director not returning to filmmaking (he never left that, even if he did become more of a videographer) but returning to cinema as something he believed could change the world. Though such films as Passion and Every Man for Himself use the fragmentary, analytical techniques Godard picked up with video experimentations, they also displays a return to aesthetic beauty for its own sake, poetic evocation given equal weight to the held-over Marxist theory.

But Hail Mary goes one further. Godard strips the film of the political underpinnings that inform nearly all of his films from the mid-'60s (and a few that date back even earlier) to this point, instead turning to matter of the corporeal and incorporeal. In retelling the story of the virgin birth, Godard breaks down the layers of deification and mythos surrounding the story to examine what such an occurrence would mean to the young virgin, to her relationship with Joseph (Thierry Rode), and to her sudden obligation to sacrifice her corporeal desires and wishes to serve something greater. Godard still employs dialectic, but here it focuses entirely on matters of existence, the split between the body and the soul.

Naturally, Godard portrays this dichotomy through the conflict of image and sound. We see Marie (Myriem Roussel) in plain naturalism: watching her play on her high school basketball team and lightly brush aside the sexual advances of her lover. Over such scenes, however, Godard plays Bach and Dvorak, art made in the service of God doubling as His voice singing from her soul. Cutaways to pillow shots of nature—including recurring shots of the phases of the moon that come to represent Marie—poeticize the image, but otherwise the director maintains an honest appraisal of the woman and her figure that always grounds the soaring, sacred beauty of the music.

That Godard films Roussel and her frequently nude body with such straightforward, matter-of-fact openness represents a step forward in his always contentious views of women. One of Godard's most recognizable thematic tics—the elevation of the female prostitute as the ultimate symbol of capitalism and its commodification of everything up to and including the body—made up such a fundamental part of his canon that the director's renewed interest in the topic coincided with that vaunted return to film. But the cut-up manner in which he filmed women's bodies, simultaneously reflecting and critiquing the male gaze as a materialist fetish, is nowhere in sight in Hail Mary. Instead, he films Roussel's body on its own terms, as an instrument of sex and life-bearing. And when Joseph and, less sinisterly, Marie's gynecologist, attempt to invade that body, Godard does not frame their gropings as Marxist analogy but physical reality. As if to further delineate this method from the director's usual style, Hail Mary occasionally cuts away to a teacher and his female student debating matters of sex and religion in theoretical abstracts, their conclusions of the impossibility of Marie's conception hilariously useless when juxtaposed with that impossibility happening before our eyes.

Yet if Hail Mary frames its subject in the most pared-down, apolitical manner of Godard's career to this point, it also emerges one of his most evocative, and humorous. When the Lord needs something a bit more blunt than Bach to communicate, he sends a messenger, here identified as "Uncle" Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste), who looks less like an angel than a vagrant suspiciously toting around a young child. His dubious legitimacy adds an element of extreme discomfort to his instruction on God's will, but he can also be farcical, as when he responds cryptically to a taxi driver and his child companion chides, "That's not your line, Uncle Gabriel!" Shots of women toying with Rubik's cubes make for amusing interludes whose obviousness morphs into density as Godard holds the shots. A placid montage of close-ups inside of flowers would be an almost Hitchcockian visual pun were labias not already so prominently on display, therefore allowing the images to exist as poetic, sumptuous art for its own sake. Joseph's frustrated lack of sexual access gives an insight into how the Biblical Joseph might have reacted to his wife's news, but might his pent-up aggression be an indication of what the "real" Mary might have faced?

Before one can ponder that too long, however, Godard shows Marie gaining the upper hand in their relationship, eventually converting Joseph to the cause of raising the son of God and leaving her untouched. But even this domination comes at a price. Dutifully putting her faith into the idea of bearing a child as a virgin, Marie nevertheless reflects upon what the elevation of her spirit means for the body "I am a soul imprisoned by a body," she says in voiceover, though if she sees her corporeal shell as limiting for her spiritual growth into a goddess, she also recognizes that her beatification will strip her of her natural sexuality. My favorite insight into this aspect of Marie's reflection comes from Christopher Long in a brief review appended to DVDBeaver's analysis New Yorker Video's DVD of the film. He brings up a connection to Roman Polanski's seminal horror film Rosemary's Baby, about a woman bearing Satan's child. Long notes that carrying God's baby could be as harrowing as the devil's, but not why: Polanski's film served as a twisted allegory for women being forced to carry their rapists' children to term, but does Marie have any more say in being the Lord's vessel than Rosemary does being Lucifer's? Polanski plays this for unrelenting terror, but Godard finds elegiac mourning in it. As Marie says right before the film ends on a close-up of her lipstick-rimmed mouth hanging open in the vague memory of desire, "I am of the Virgin, and I didn't want this being. I only left my imprint on the soul who helped me. That's all." In maintaining a platonic relationship with Joseph, Marie retains her independence. In entering into a "sexual" relationship with God, that independence is eradicated. Viewed through that perspective, the story of the Virgin Mother becomes one of subjugation, not exultation.

First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983)

If Passion juxtaposed a largely aimless narrative with another artform, painting, as a means of offering clues to its solution, First Name: Carmen uses music as its driving artistic counterpoint. Yet Godard does not simply swap out media but inverts the contrast: here the film has a much more pointed, understandable story, but the cutaways to the other artform prove murky and not easily explained. This, of course, can be explained by the different natures of classical music (wordless, united only by evocative compositional themes) and painting (more literal and, obviously, illustrative). Indeed, Godard uses music as an emphasis of emotion and mood, not so much clarifying an abstract story as deepening a coherent one.

Sound is a key element in the film, with the audio track taking on the jump-cut properties normally associated with Godard’s images. This is nothing new; sudden fluctuations of noise and asynchronous play of sight and sound have been part of parcel of Godard’s cinema from the start. But there is something different about the director’s aural play here: where cut-up audio typically plays an intellectual, confrontational role in, say, the Dziga Vertov period, First Name: Carmen features an unorthodox use of fragmented sound to evoke the state of the characters and the overall tone of the action. One of the first lines spoken on the audio track, “It makes terrible waves in me and you,” is immediately followed with the sound of waves rolling onto a beach as seagulls screech. That gull cry is the most distracting noise of the movie, and like the sudden superimposition of the shrieking cockatoo in Citizen Kane, it may partly serve just to take the audience whenever it is used. But its restless, agitated squawk offers as crystalline and instant an insight into the spiky energy of this speaker as the beautiful yet thunderous sound of the ocean roiling underneath.

As the title suggests, First Name: Carmen adapts the Bizet opera. And as one should expect from Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, it does not simply replicate the narrative. They hone in on Carmen as the foremother of the modern femme fatale, building off Passion’s overt linking of cinema to its artistic forebears. In repurposing the opera as a tale of bank robbers and wooed cops, Godard and Miéville stress how little they had to do to make the basic story modern. Maruschka Detmers embodies the timelessly ahead-of-their-time qualities of Bizet’s anti-heroine, and she even channels a bit of Anna Karina’s wild siren in Pierrot le fou. But the changing times can be seen in the way that classic Godard film differs from this one: Pierrot sparks with sexual tension, and its explosions of violence in some ways seem the result of that sexuality having no outlet due to censorship concerns. This film, on the other hand, exhibits nudity freely and features less violence. This freedom to simply cut to the chase likewise marks the most basic yet most profound revision of the opera Carmen, tossing out all the window dressing one had to invent to get around what such stories are truly, always about.

And yet, because that job proved so easy, the filmmaking pair pile two additional narratives on top of the Carmen reworking. Godard himself plays Carmen’s uncle, a washed-up director looking for inspiration, which gives him a reason to intersect with her own story. So does Carmen’s motive, her thefts ostensibly being used to pay for a film. But Godard uses his own thread as an entirely separate issue, one that allows him to take direct aim at himself. Puttering around a hospital, a disheveled Godard makes proclamations one might call pretentious were they not coming from the mouth of a clearly insane person. Many of those thoughts are the sort of spoutings Godard used to make seriously, not farcically: in a later scene, he absent-mindedly compares Mao to a great chef who fed all of China, the asinine nonsense of that statement openly ridiculing his own support of the disastrous Chinese leader’s policies. Even Godard’s schizophrenic, typewritten fragments make for humor, a jumble of random letters and numbers that give way to vague, emptily ponderous words like “unseen” and “unsaid.” Godard also plays himself as a leering lecher, furthering his reevaluation of his early sexism.

The other recurring element involves frequent cutaways to musicians practicing Beethoven’s late quartets. Their frustrated rehearsals match perfectly to the mood of what is happening around them: they attack their strings passionately during, say, the bank robbery Carmen and her cohorts carry out or, more amusingly, when the security guard she seduces during the theft, Joseph (Jacques Bonnafée in the Don José role), tries to get hard for her after they shack up together. Godard further complicates, and lightens, the quartet’s influence upon the visceral direction of the movie by tangling their playing with the aforementioned sound of cawing gulls, occasionally even laying that grating noise over images of the musicians running their bows over strings. The soundtrack even features several “hiccups” of dropped sound, a reminder of Godard’s love of flawed takes

If these distinct stories interact in ways literal and figurative, their collective effect is one of unexpected harmony. The film is frequently distancing, even absurdist, but it represents a key refinement of this new stage in the director’s career, a poetic breakthrough that makes for one of his most expressive works. In an abstract but poignant scene, Joseph warps his arm around a television set broadcasting only blue static as Tom Waits’ “Ruby Arms” plays over the shots of his backlit hand moving sensually over the flickering device. Godard has routinely mixed formally striking shots with analytical commentary, but the beauty of this shot transcends whatever message might be conjured by this image of a man tenderly caressing a TV. Building off the budding humanist streak in his previous two features, Godard now fully trades didacticism for evocation, even when he continues to pose his actors like models and mouthpieces.

Nevertheless, the most moving aspect of First Name: Carmen is the director’s restored faith in youth, or at least his renewed interest in them as a subject matter. In the wake of May ’68 and its failure, Godard’s films slowly drifted away from the revolutionary zeal that led to that event to the disillusionment of its aftermath. Ostensibly writing off that entire generation, Godard returned to them only to share in their defeat or jumped back even further to prepubescent children to look for some measure of hope. But Carmen and her young adult colleagues bring back some of the fervor of developed but idealistic youth; Carmen’s satirical court scene recalls the equally scabrous kangaroo session running through Vladimir et Rosa’s loony tribute to the Chicago Eight. Incidentally, that marked the last time Godard focused intently on Western young adults still waging a struggle. It seems altogether fitting that, as Godard’s parodic self-portrait stumbles about trying to think up a new, intellectually sound film, Carmen’s wildness and sensual immediacy effortlessly lay out an arresting, evocative narrative. The key difference between this and the director’s ‘60s gangster inversions that it recalls is the gender of the protagonist, a significant alteration that suggests that even in repurposing his early work, Godard will not simply repeat himself. When Detmers bluntly announces, “I feel like showing people what a woman can do with a man,” she challenges the director’s own early work as much as the changed social reality of the 1980s.

Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)

If Sauve qui peut (la vie) represented Godard’s return to cinema, Passion illustrates how frustrated he still was with the artform and its limitations, at least its limitations in fulfilling the director’s lofty goals. “It’s hard to have to record everything,” says his stand-in, a director played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz. The line could work in the context of any filmmaking, but it especially speaks to Godard’s aims as a filmmaker. Aesthetically and politically, Godard has long sought to capture everything, and Sauve Qui Peut’s union of cinema and video techniques hinted at the possibility of a deeper, more inclusive form of filmmaking than Godard, or anyone else, had ever achieved. Yet it is Passion, alternately lifeless and one of the director’s funniest, most self-effacing works, that truly shows how the director might look forward to the next stage of his career. Indeed, as I watched it, I thought often not of Godard’s prior work (though it shares a few traits with previous movies, especially Contempt), but his latest, 2010’s Film socialisme.

In many ways, Passion feels like the groundwork for that film, still tied to the idea of a narrative but chafing under the limiting expectation of traditional filmmaking. In fact, what plot Godard assembles for Passion concerns the absence of one for the film-within-the-film, also titled Passion. On-set, we see tableau vivant recreations of various classical paintings, from Rembrandt to Goya to Delacroix. Actors stand still as the camera glides around them, probing the compositions of the paintings and finding new perspectives with which to analyze these pre-existing works of art. But as the camera moves along the first of these recreations, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Godard places over the shots the exasperated discussion of the producers as they ask Jerzy what the story is. Judging from their tone, this is not the first time they have asked the director this, and it certainly will not be the last.

Jerzy grows weary of his producers’ constant pressure, but even he despairs of the production. Or rather, he despairs of the production forcing him to stay in France and not permit him to return home to Poland to witness the Solidarity movement gaining momentum. Godard splits the film’s attention between Jerzy’s politically homesick stagnation and a farcical French replication of the Polish union uprising epitomized by Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a stuttering, inarticulate factory worker. As with her more serious Polish counterparts, Isabelle does not wish to dismantle the engine of production; she loves her work to the point that she comes into conflict with the factory boss (Michel Piccoli) because her way of doing things stresses the personal satisfaction of workers rather than the production-centric exploitation of them.

Godard shows off a bizarro sense for cross-cutting, switching from Jerzy’s perspective to Isabelle’s seemingly at every point either storyline looks as if it might develop a plot. Yet to say that Passion lacks a story because characters only talk obliquely about their artistic or political frustrations is akin to saying that a painting cannot tell a story because there are no words at all. Godard demonstrates the narrative possibilities of this other artform when he re-stages Delacroix’s epic The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, and in the process he reaffirms cinema’s capacity to tell narratives through images. After all, if a single image, such as Delcroix’s painting, can suggest an entire history and action, surely a film, composed of thousands of images conveyed in two dozen images per second, can do the same.

After a time, it becomes clear that Godard uses his jumps between the film set and factory to flesh out both realms. This can be seen in plain terms in the broader juxtapositions and alignments, especially in the treatment of women in the two settings. The all-female factory team that coalesces around Isabelle gets exploited by Piccoli, while the recreation of classical paintings on the film set necessitates hordes of women in various stages of undress (with an emphasis on full-frontal) being posed precisely by Jerzy and other men. During the Delacroix tableau, the actors playing Crusaders gallop through the miniature-scale Constantinople and chase and abduct the women actresses, who break and flee from the horses and their rapacious riders. When they do so, crew members grab them and place them back in their positions, chastising them for breaking even though their movement helps visualize the story suggested by Delacroix’s painting. In that sense, they are held back from doing their job well in the same way that Isabelle and her comrades are by Piccoli’s limiting, dehumanizing orders in the factory.

But these are the big themes and arcs of the film, and as John Hartzog notes, Godard manages to add color and meaning even to smaller bridges between the two storylines. Hartzog identifies the sly juxtaposition of Isabelle firing up her co-workers into their unorthodox revolt with the recreation of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, its depiction of a rebellion's brutal repression hinting at the fate of a worker revolt. Hartzog likewise identifies the climactic merging of the loss of Isabelle's virginity with a staging of El Greco's Immaculate Conception, though he does not fully illuminate this most puzzling of contrasts. On one level, of course, it is perhaps the most literal of the comparisons, stacking one virgin alongside the virgin, but Hartzog only hints at one possible interpretation when he says Isabelle's "innocent suffering for the dignity of work is given a religious dimension by this association with El Greco's sublime painting of the Virgin." This does not take into account the primary difference between Isabelle and Mary, which is to say the deflowering of the former, which complicates matters somewhat. If Godard compare the two to make Isabelle's struggle seem as spiritual as social, does he not also corrupt the Holy Mother in the process by association with sex? Though matched along several points of connection, the two images diverge enough to confound expectations and easy answers.

That vague disconnect is but one example of a tension between semi- or un-related images and sounds in the film at large. Dialogue is typically spoken over images that never quite line up to the speaker. When Godard does show the speaker as he or she speaks, he deliberately plays the sound out of sync, a playfully irritating gag that distances the viewer as much as the constant Brechtian remove of the film-within-a-film production. The characters get so out of whack that each distinct party starts to take on the technical language and behavior of the other, so that the factory workers use film terms and the film production resembles the industrial work that it really is.

Such alienating techniques display the director’s peevish side, but Passion also works as one of the director’s most inviting, moving films to this point. As the producers argue over what Jerzy could possibly be saying with the Night Watch recreation at the start, a voice warns the others not to “scrutinize” the shots and to pay attention to the actual humanity of the actors frozen in the tableau. This, of course, could be a reminder to Godard himself, who had been abstracting and sociopoliticizing the behavior of his actors and documentary subjects for most of his career, even the mainstream ‘60s work. Sauve qui peut offered the first corrective for this too-removed style, repurposing the slow/stop-motion techniques of his analytical video period into a humanist desire to let the most fleeting gestures linger. Aided by Raoul Coutard in his first collaboration with the cinematographer since Week End, Godard fills Passion with lush images, not only the functional art criticism of the tableaux vivants (an idea later refined by Lech Majewski for his recent The Mill and the Cross) but also diversionary shots like the film’s first, of a jet leaving a white contrail across the sky, the line eventually curving slightly with the Earth itself. As with Godard’s last feature, Passion shows a renewed dedication to capturing these gorgeous images simply for their beauty, a feat as impressive in its own right as Godard’s ability to etch an unexpectedly focused narrative from their ostensibly arbitrary contrast.

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

In a stroke of peevish irony, Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie), touted even by the director as his return to cinema, is a film of reactionary social retardation. Its three main characters represent a regression from the ideals espoused in Godard's first cinematic period and rigorously critiqued in his video projects. There's Paul (Jacques Dutronc)bay, a burned out video director standing in for Godard, even taking his surname; Paul's ex-girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye) who has retreated into the countryside to find idyll and comfort and give up TV production for small-town journalism; and a prostitute (Isabelle Huppert) resurrecting the preferred symbol of capitalism in Godard's films, the ultimate display of the body become labor.

By calling it his "second first film," Godard himself seemed to acknowledge this step backward, casting his work as a look back instead of forward. Yet if both the crisp 35mm texture of the image and some aspects of the "story" (more on those quotation marks later) recall a period the director angrily left behind more than a decade earlier, Every Man for Himself nevertheless shows a considerable maturation and change in the filmmaker's approach and his obsessive themes. Where Godard's '60s films popped with formal revolution and ingenuity, the shots of this film are static like much of his video work. Likewise, the use of freeze-frames and slow motion apply some of the analytical techniques of video back to cinema. But if these attempts to modernize film still constitute a look backward for the director, the mood these techniques capture, of quiet reflection that makes the political human instead of vice-versa, marks a significant new step in Godard's work.

That's not to say that there isn't political content in this film. Paul lives a life surrounded by capitalist glitz. He lives out of gold-plated hotels and roams malls bustling with the inhuman roar of a large crowd, using his good looks to attract and use up women. And even a man, as the bellhop of one hotel is so smitten he outright begs the director to "bugger" him. If he feels uncreative in his actual work, Paul enjoys the tyrannical control of an auteur in the world around him. Godard's autocritical streak is nothing new, but the bourgeois shell into which he places his avatar is one of his most barbed pieces of self-criticism.

Further distinguishing Paul from other forms of the Godard's introspection is the manner in which the director attacks his own chauvinist tendencies. Whether it was Godard's own, constant reevaluation or the influence of Anne-Marie Miéville, the gradual evolution of the director's sexual politics reaches a new level of disgust with the lot of women. Though he works with video, Paul recalls some of the attitudes that dot Godard's work of the 1960s, not '70s. Conversations with other men reveal even darker impulses than the usual sexism. Paul even asks one friend if, because his daughter looks like his wife, he ever fantasizes about sleeping with his daughter. Other men prove even more vile. A scene at a petrol station holds on two men slapping a woman for refusing to choose between them, no one intervening as they wear her down with violence. And when local pimps discover that the prostitute Isabelle (Huppert) is operating on her own, they abduct her and subject her to a perverse spanking for her presumptuousness. "Only banks are independent!" shouts one of the pimps.

Godard then folds these misogynistic traits back into his larger political dissatisfaction, suggesting that Paul's misogyny is a manifestation of his failure to live up to his own ideals. Godard's previous work with Miéville gradually introduced an almost Joycean view of women into the director's canon, one that posits the woman as the true revolutionary force of the world. This idea was almost explicitly stated in France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants, and Godard here links a failure of the revolution with the failure of men to adapt their attitudes toward and treatment of women. "You mock the heritage system, yet now you act just like your father," Denise says to a friend, encapsulating the greatest cop-out of a generation that wanted to change everything but was about to enter a decade of rampant capitalistic excess (though France would elect a socialist to see them through the decade defined by Reagan and Thatcher).

Denise is a breath of fresh air, not only for her narrations that blend sexual and social rhetoric but for the imagery Godard associates with her. Where Paul roams over-lit, gilded constructs, Denise has retreated to the countryside, at once a reactionary surrender from modernity and a reflection of the elemental force of woman that cannot be fully tamed. The juxtaposition of Denise against sumptuous shots of nature bring to mind the water imagery of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake. Denise may have run away from it all, but Godard does not seem to begrudge her the way he chastises Paul for selling out his ideals.

Nevertheless, the director devotes most of his attention to the prostitute, clearly back on familiar ground with one of his favored types. Where the prostitutes in Godard's '60s films displayed some level of uncertainty in their lives, a pained struggle between what they want and what society has forced them into, Huppert plays Isabelle as a woman used to the capitalistic takeover of sex still in its infancy during Godard's early days. She approaches her job with such professional remove and micro-planning she could call herself an entrepreneur. She even holds something of a job interview with her sister, who is interested in her sibling's profession. Isabelle makes her sister undress and asks personal questions about her "qualifications" and "goals." And if local pimps accosted the woman to punish her independence, Isabelle herself is not too different from them, quickly clarifying that she would take half her sister's earnings.

The mordant humor of this sibling exchange is but one example of the strong return of Godard's sense of humor after inconsistently dotting the video period. Paul gives a lecture at a school where he writes a note on the chalkboard comparing cinema and video to Abel and Cain, a lofty, militant declaration that is deliberately deflated by its scribbling in a classroom before a group of uninterested students. In so doing, Godard pokes fun at his own flat rhetoric and its myopia: at the turn of the previous decade, Godard would only show his works for students, but now he parodies how useless such an academic circle jerk could be. Smaller jokes abound, whether it be Paul's suggestive cigar smoking or random, hilarious gags like a tired man asking his horny girlfriend to put her panties back on before they go inside a theater because he really does want to see a movie.

The funniest, darkest scene of all involves an elaborate bit of sex play that a studio producer and his assistant foist upon Isabelle and another prostitute. The producer makes increasingly insane, perverse demands of the women, and his assistant, as the scene plunges ever deeper into horror and black comedy. The whole sequence works as a grotesque indictment of men, capitalist power and, of course, the movie industry, a more direct and blunt attack than the intellectually rigorous deconstructions of all these in Godard's work with the DVG and Miéville, but also a more accessible and amusing one. In the middle of it all, Isabelle even calls to check on the apartment she's been eyeing, emphasizing the want-driven nature of it all even as it suggests Isabelle's method of reassurance and morale-boosting, her way of keeping her eye on the prize.

Scenes like these, and others, communicate a vast sense of sociopolitical dissatisfaction, and it's easy to see Godard as cynical. "It's all tricks," one character says. "There are no heroes. There are no winners. It's all bullshit." One shot even frames a photo of a Communist Chinese kid drinking a soda, literalizing Godard's once-incendiary notion of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola with an "Is that it?" letdown. Paul's disillusionment is underscored in the statement, "Even in a dream, one keeps looking for solutions." He longs for dreamless sleep, so that he might forget about the manner in which he abandoned the dreams he used to have.

Yet for all the anger and disenchantment running through Every Man for Himself, there is also a sense of great artistic hope. Godard brings video techniques back to cinema, but his slow motion and freeze frames do not break down social processes as they did in video works. Instead, Godard merely studies gestures or actions for their own sake, often highlighting nothing more than the beauty of an image. Even objects that clearly fill Godard with righteous scorn, such as a gas station, are captured with such splendid color that the polluting capitalism the setting represents is at least partially offset. (Godard would mine a gas station for even more stunning visual poetry in his latest Film Socialisme.) The aforementioned release the film finds in nature likewise offers a more complex side of a filmmaker previously seeking to out-modernize modernity. Perhaps the director considers a move to the countryside analogous to a return to cinema, at once a reactionary step backward and an open-minded inclusion of the old with the new. Godard's own career trajectory reflects this contradictory step forward: to see Godard get a director's credit that reads "un film composé" throws back to more than a decade earlier, before Godard started sharing creative credit with collaborators and before he stopped using film altogether. Yet that same credit also announces the start of yet another major phase in the career of a director constantly reinventing himself, a bold new start that would oversee a significant change in stylistic and thematic approach. Godard was "back," as they say, but would he be recognizable even to those who'd followed him through the video wilderness?

France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

In The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie's alien offers a sadly poignant insight into the limitations of television, the manner in which he and his family learned of Earth. They saw the look and stylized behavior on TV, but as "Thomas Jerome Newton" gets caught up in emotions and interactions he does not understand, he laments to one person that TV leaves so much uncaptured, so much unexplained. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants, a 12-part miniseries made for French television, attempts to rectify this shortcoming. They use typical TV techniques and formats—shooting interviews like any other TV news crew, returning to the studio for commentary—but they do so in such a way as to critique those conventions and dissect the false social image TV itself helps to create and perpetuate.

Godard and Miéville divide the 12 episodes, or "movements," into dialectical pairings. Therefore, the first episode, subtitled "Dark/Chemistry," matches up with the second, "Light/Physics." Later, "Violence/Grammar" contrasts with "Disorder/Calculation." The format for each episode is the same: it opens on some aspect of French social life that corresponds (however loosely) with the subject of each , whether it's a commute to work or the labor itself, with a narration caught somewhere between Marxist rhetoric and a bedtime story. Then, there's a section titled "Verité," in which an off-screen Godard poses questions to one of two child subjects, Camille and Arnaud, in an unbroken take lasting the majority of the 25-minute runtime. Finally, a "Télevision" segment goes back to a TV studio as actors standing in for Godard (Albert Dray) and Miéville (Betty Berr) debate what was said in the interview before throwing to a "Histoire" (both story and history) only tangentially related to what has preceded it. Compared to the radical video experimentations that preceded it, this is pleasantly relaxed, downright accessible by Godard's post-Week End standards. Even the montages are easily followable!

None of this is to say that the miniseries isn't as rigorously formal and intellectually challenging as the rest of Godard's video period. Instead, France/Tour/Détour serves more as a culmination of this time in the filmmaker's career, its refined techniques an advancement over the primordial soup of images and noise even as its focus on children nearing the cusp of social integration marks Godard's most literal "return to zero." The episodes all operate under this overarching dialectic, a contrast of Godard's serious, mature questions to the children and the overall playfulness of his rapport with the children and the steady deconstruction of the series as it continues.

By this time Godard had alienated practically everyone. The "hip" critics who championed one of their own had given him up as a pretentious, aimless bore (a consensus that continues to this day), and on the rare occasion anyone even reviewed his new work, it was to lament that he'd lost the spark from his early work. It is therefore not only fascinating but deeply funny that these two prepubescent children, still in the early stages of education and wholly unprepared for Godard's social and philosophical probings, respond more earnestly and thoughtfully to the director's advanced notions than all the grown-ups.

Godard asks such questions as whether night is space or time, what the revolution means to the girl, and what parts of the body are matter and what, like memory, isn't. Camille and Arnaud frequently look puzzled, and sometimes they either sit in silence trying to parse out the question or deflect with a "yes, no, I don't know" answer. The director clearly prods the children toward the answer he wants, his Socratic dialogue compounding each initial question so that the children contradict themselves or at least acknowledge that simple either/or questions are more complex. (This is as much autocritique as critique of the kids' answers, Godard proving that he knows dialectic has its limits and that it must be used in opposition to itself for the full image.) But the kids sometimes offer surprises: Godard asks Arnaud some space/time questions, and the boy offers an almost profound idea when he says of himself, "I'm more of a moving point in space."

These moments of stirring insight and inadvertent philosophy stand in sharp contrast to the socialization Godard and Miéville show at work on the children. Occasionally, Godard accompanies the children to school, where we can see Arnaud sitting silently, attentive but removed as his teacher idly instructs through recitation, his stiffness a sharp contrast to the fidgety cleverness he displays in the interviews. Similarly, a late episode devotes its Verité segment not to an interview of Camille but an unbroken shot of her in medium-close-up as she sits at the dinner table, her parents having a conversation with each other as she quietly eats. In both cases, the institutions that shape a child into a member of society—school, family—do not encourage growth but restrain it, mold it, limit it. In the interviews, the children seem so alive, curious, and unbounded. But in society, they are caged, and even a schoolyard at recess, drowned in echoing noise of happy screams and conversations, seems like a prison.

But Godard and Miéville don't stop there. Tracing their political obsessions to social roots and beyond, the pair extrapolate the intimate focus of the show ever outwards. A shot of Camille being punished at school by being forced to copy lines grows into an indictment of an education system that forbids plagiarism but teaches only through copying, not originality. But language itself is a binding, repetitive structure. A playful episode opening of two lovers describing each others and themselves with adjectives reveals both the sumptuously descriptive possibilities of language and its frustrating limitations. And of all languages, French is one of the most rigidly hidebound, with its grammatical rules held in check by its own institution, the Academie Française. So even communication, then, can be a form of indoctrination, learning all the verb tenses of grammar as much a means of controlling and shaping the children as making them line up in formation like a military squad or teaching them basic work functions.

These are lofty ideas, and even loftier ones come out in the Histoire segments. Here, the challenging polemics and philosophies of Godard and Miéville get to run riot. These sections feature asides such as a radical leftist cell madly deciding to make up for the failure of their hostage taking to produce change by planning higher-profile hostage taking. Elsewhere, a nude pregnant woman, a recurring figure in superimpositions as the symbol for humanity's hope and the possibility of engendering change, can be seen as a secretary, nonchalantly taking dictation and fetching things as men boss her around. The metaphor is clear, visualizing the one force capable of reshaping the world and how it is thus treated worst of all by that system. Montage also pops up from time to time, but Godard slows down the battery of images seen in various Dziga Vertov productions, instead focusing specifically on one idea. For example, the duo branch out of the discussion of light and dark to meditate on how some images, such as brightly lit photographs of Nixon and Mao, actually obscure the truth of their subjects where darkness would do them justice.

France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants routinely recalls the great Numéro Deux in its social inspection, but also in its giving spirit. Miéville's admonishment in that film that Godard stop reducing everything to either/or dialectics carries over to the questions he asks the children, all of them binary but posed in such a way as to disrupt binary systems. Furthermore, the Godard and Miéville stand-ins often critique themselves and the entire show, not only for deeper questions not asked but what they want out of the series. "Instead of keeping watch, the camera will transmit," comes an early, idealistic hope for the show's potential. By the end, however, "Miéville" is despondent that their questions give the impression that they want the last word in the discussion, when what they really want is the first. The two even end the series avoiding any kind of summary, the humorous anticlimax keeping with the delicate touch of the entire series. Taken with Numéro Deux, the miniseries returns Godard to the aesthetic and intellectual openness of his 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Godard's Dziga Vertov and video years married radical content with radical form, but it seems, at last, that the director finally realized that the best way to attain a socialist cinema was, as he concluded in 2 or 3 Things, to give it to everyone, even two schoolchildren.

[This post marks the shamefully belated return to my ongoing attempt to see as much of Jean-Luc Godard's filmography as I can (not the easiest of tasks for nearly anything made after 1967). I am skipping over Six Fois Deux, the first TV miniseries Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made for French television, only because I am having a hard time finding a copy to download. The only place I can find it is on a private torrenting site where it would likely get me expelled for ruining my seed:leech ratio (for some reason my Internet connection almost completely blocks uploading). If I can get my hands on that series, I'll double back later and cover it. For now, though, I'm pressing ahead with this retrospective and Godard's subsequent "return to cinema."]

Film Socialisme — First Thoughts

I had planned to hold off on seeing Jean-Luc Godard's latest feature until I had caught up with the director's filmography. However, my Godard retrospective got incredibly side-tracked, and my impatience got the better of me, even as I knew I should have waited. Having stalled out in Godard's mid-'70s period, I am unfamiliar with his subsequent "return" to cinema and the more poetic and autobiographical tone his work from the '90s-on purportedly evokes. As such, I was unprepared for the sheer beauty of Film Socialisme, as well as some of its more obscure touches, some of which, I'm told, have roots in the filmmaker's epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma while others appear to be things one simply must know about the director and the philosophies and personal information he's parsed out over the decades in interviews.

Ergo, this will be merely a preliminary assortment of thoughts, largely aided by the invaluable annotations of David Phelps, whose relatively brief but dense article is a necessary acknowledgment of the film's rich tapestry of allusions, which are impossible to sort out even with the fully translated subtitles. I know some will instantly reject the notion of having to read notes on a film to understand it, but I have no issue asking for help. I could not read Ulysses without the help of three consistent sources and scattered support for certain sections, so why should I be so arrogant as to dismiss Film Socialisme for not being "gettable" enough for me? (People can be quick to assert superiority over anything that exists outside their reach.) Phelps' annotations were a fantastic launchpad to figuring out some of the film's stranger moments, yet even without the benefit of Spark Notes—hell, even without the benefit of understood language—Godard's most recent feature is such a work of art that it mesmerized me from the start.

Split into three sections, Film Socialisme begins and ends with a tour of Mediterranean hotspots aboard a tacky cruise liner (is there any other kind?). Shot with breathtaking HD digital, the first section vividly captures the yellow, blue and occasionally red hues of the ship's deck, recalling the pop art infusions of Godard's mid-'60s color films. The people who roam the decks and cabins come from all over Europe, resulting in a dizzying collage of languages with nary but a broken, pidgin subtitling called "Navajo English" to help the audience. But then, the full translation doesn't help much more, as Godard clearly uses his non-actors as mouthpieces to voice his political and aesthetic concerns; besides, the use of other languages allows the filmmaker to engage in multilingual puns on the level of Joyce (at all times, this film offers reminders that Godard is to cinema what Joyce is to literature). Godard knows translation can never capture the textures and nuances of the original language, and the filmmaker's unsympathetic treatment of those confused enough without the Navajo impediment should recall Vladimir's warning to the audience in Pravda: "If you don't know Czech, you better learn it fast."

But if the first section casts the cruise ship as a microcosm of Europe, it also presents the setting as a parody of the continent's present and past: characters speak of great historical failings while Godard films the asinine activities the tourists use to amuse themselves. He especially likes to film scenes in the dance hall with something approximating a cell phone camera, resulting in heavily pixellated image that sounds like hell opening up as dance music blasts into a low-grade microphone. It looks, and sounds, like every quick bootleg on YouTube, and Godard holds these unbearably cacophonous shots so long that I began not only to process the commentary of bourgeois Europeans drowning out reality with white noise but simply to wonder if contemporary dance music is made intentionally abrasive to be accurately reflected by phone recordings.

The characters who do focus on serious matters, at least beyond merely namechecking past atrocities, search for the truth of the Moscow Gold, which Godard has re-imagined into a symbol of Europe's history from colonialism to the present. The gold is the closest thing the film has to a narrative motivation, with Palestinians, Russians, Mossad agents and others trying to uncover what happened to the Spanish reserves. The many ways in which that wealth has passed hands is manifested in the character of Goldberg, who has many names and alliances. Goldberg's Jewish name and clear association with money raises questions of anti-Semitism, but Godard's backstory for the man casts him first as a Nazi and later as a supporter of Algeria's FLN movement. Besides, I don't think I caught a single reference to Judaism or even Israel that wasn't matched with another visual or spoken comment on Palestine. One title card lays Hebrew over Arabic, and when Godard says Jews invented Hollywood, his preceding statement of Hollywood being the "Mecca of cinema" turns a casual piece of anti-Semitism into a juxtaposition he finds ironic. Likewise, given Godard's cinephilia, albeit a lapsed one, to say that the legendary producers and studio heads who built the town were Jewish does not inherently strike me as an insult. Goldberg himself certainly doesn't seem to be a bad man in any way, and his potential ethnic identity seems to speak more to the links of venality and betrayal that connect all peoples.

So, the opening third uses this constant overlap of nationalities, loyalties, languages, and past and present to stress, above all, the separations between the peoples of Europe. The second section, titled "Quo Vadis Europa," moves the "action" to a gas station in rural France, populated only by the Martin family and a handful of people who unsuccessfully attempt to interact with them. Yet the isolation proves ironic, the family, and particularly its children, resembling the tiny seed that may one day germinate into a mighty plant. Well, maybe not the whole family. One of the parents (or maybe both, or maybe neither) seems to be running for office, but it is the children who seem most poised for change. Then again, maybe they are the ones running for election.

The adolescent son, Lucien, is cantankerous and unformed: he violently conducts an imaginary orchestra while wearing an old CCCP T-shirt, mixing a vague understanding of art with a disastrous example of misapplied socialism but nevertheless a starting point away from the capitalism Godard hates. The teenage daughter, Florine, is more developed, and it is through her that Godard lays out a radical, confrontational, yet strangely poignant and hopeful view of the future. Flo haughtily commands chastises potentially paying customers who use the verb être ("to be"), admonishing them to use avoir ("to have") instead, believing the more active verb to be "better for France." She challenges her parents' views and asserts the need for more youth involvement. Asked what it is she wants, she responds with characteristically Godardian fragments that are nevertheless evocative and powerful: "To be 20 years old. To have reason. To maintain hope. To have rights where governments only have wrongs." This message is even more resonant upon reading Phelps' notes, which explain that the French New Wave was kicked off by a similar pronouncement by Charles Péguy in 1957.

Needless to say, this section is borderline infuriating with the Navajo titles, and I had to switch over full-time to a proper translation. Nevertheless, the section remains visually transgressive, with that saturated color more consistently calm than the use of multiple image qualities. Yet Godard still toys with the look, in one shot altering the color balance to such a radical degree that a banal shot of Lucien sitting on some stairs drawing becomes a fauvist painting of exploded yellows, turquoises and neon greens.

That shot reveals Lucien to be drawing on a Renoir painting, suggesting a liberation and redistribution of art itself that will be more forcibly referenced in the penultimate shot of the film, where an FBI anti-piracy warning fades to reveal a quote: "When the law is unjust, justice bypasses the law." The documentation of everything by people in this film, whether touristy snapshots or the TV crew frantically trying to interview the Martins, points to a world where everything is recorded (surveillance cameras and Google appear in the first section to also stress this), and Godard believes that the old forms of recording should be made equally accessible. This very film seems to have been uploaded to torrents almost immediately, if not with the director's consent then at least without his open disapproval. Godard actually donated €1,000 to the case of an alleged music thief recently, suggesting his support for the "liberation" of copyright.

By titling the work Film Socialisme, Godard seems to be mourning the passing of both, the former replaced by digital video of varying quality, the latter never having truly blossomed to deal with a world that still revolves around money. The apocalyptic howl of wind and waves on the cheap recording mics and the concluding montage of Europe's failings is expressly pessimistic, although, amusingly, the greatest tragedy may be the comparison of the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin with a group of children standing on those same steps in the present saying they've never even heard of that film. The ignorance of artistic history thus joins with that of sociopolitical change. But to dismiss the film as some kind of old man's rant—which so many have done even as they obliviously cite the film's intoxicating visual beauty—is to misunderstand or outright ignore the clear display of fairness and even hope. The oblique approach to the movie, located somewhere in the nebula between essay and narrative film, may seem removed, even elegiac, but socialism, through the medium of film, can still right the wrongs, if both are applied correctly.

In separating out the stereo tracks into an aural dialectic, Godard returns to some of the more challenging aspects of the DVG, but his juxtapositions here make analytical debates out of rhetorical flourishes, and his willingness to leave in the mistakes (the jump cuts of yore now appear to be the buffering of today) and to even hand off his camera to others opens up untold possibilities I have only begun to examine. Godard's hyperintellectual, referential modernism is still on display, but the old-fashioned octogenarian nevertheless shows a curiosity for new technologies and means of communication. Hell, he even demonstrates his understanding of the Internet by making his very own cat video, one of many moments in the film so disarmingly funny that even the densest segments don't feel so self-serious. The endless punning in particular shall take me eons to sort through.

I will need to return again and again to Film Socialisme to truly unpack it, and I dare not write about it again until I've filled the gaps of knowledge in his filmography. But I was as excited and enthralled by Film Socialisme as any other masterpiece I saw this year, and its ability to make dialectic of the emotional states of weary surrender and renewed, more-powerful-than-ever optimism is one of the most intriguing, complex, potentially rewarding arguments Godard has ever mounted for art, politics, and the union of both.

Comment Ça Va (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

Despite the blatant reflexivity of the film's premise, Comment ça va might have been a remarkably straightforward film about a newspaperman making an instructional video about the paper business with his partner. But as much as Godard has always been fascinated with process, the single question out of the journalistic "Five Ws" that is truly addressed here is "Why?" The complexity that will eventually push the film into some of the director's most challenging work to this point (no mean feat) is prompted by an almost childlike simplicity on behalf of the radical woman, Odette (Miéville), who oversees this project with the Communist newspaper editor (Michel Marot). Though her questions are complex, political, philosophical and aesthetic, they ultimately boil down to that simplest yet most agonizing of queries.

The editor considers himself a radical but, as Odette points out, he pays little heed to the process of his video editing beyond utilitarian and populist concerns; what's more, he also routinely comes into conflict with the more commercialized and tepid mainstream media, which always finds a way to soften and bury his more radical stories. He shows her a workprint, and immediately Odette asks why the film cut over information, demanding to see all of the footage first. Naturally, this results in a flood of imagery and explanatory text, but even that is soon challenged by the silhouetted Odette as she criticizes the imagery of Portuguese and French worker uprisings shown within the educational film Marot put together. After all, can text really break down an image, or can it only propose one interpretation, usually prompted by a narrow focus on but one aspect of the image?

Godard and Miéville, through Odette and a slowly contemplating Marot, delve into that theme with exacting analysis of the primary film stills of the workers. For the editor, he believes that showing such scenes while cutting out the fluff hones his statement into its clearest form. Odette, however, uses the still images to point out how one's interpretation is often formed by preconceived notions, and that to edit together only these striking images only serves to make the meaning more ambiguous. For example, Odette asks, is the gesture of raised fists a show of solidarity or a precursor to violence? For already-converted radicals and leftists, a glance at such an image would provoke the former interpretation. But what of the conservatives? Would they not view the fearsome collection of angered workers as a mob? But even then, Godard moves beyond dialectics to show even more observations that arise from the image: Odette points out that, without any context, the one worker with his mouth agape looks almost like a pop singer in gesture and body language.

And once text gets placed over the image, the meaning only further obscures. Marot, by now wise to what Odette is arguing, types "To go on strike, that is joy" onto the screen, the word "joie" making him view that same worker's open mouth as a smile or laugh. Then, he muses about removing the letters r-e-v-e from "grève" (strike). In French, "rêve" is dream, suggesting that Marot just robbed his interpretation of its optimism. This being 1976, the primitive computer equipment that allows for Godard and Miéville's image manipulation throws up text via a giant pixel of a cursor, a block that darts over the screen as it types out the letters and simply moves according to the whims of the computer operator. Perhaps this signifies the movement of the eye over the image and how importance of the mise-en-scène is subconsciously imparted to the viewer, that same ordering of importance defining meaning for the viewer before he or she truly has time to think about it. Godard had pursued a democratized film image since at least 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and here we see a refinement of the philosophy and motivation behind that push, a desire to parcel out how we perceive images, and indeed whether auterial intent, however intellectually reasoned and intricate, matters at all the second someone else views the product.

Complementing this obsession with perspective and interpretation is Godard's pointed critique of the gap between ideological beliefs and commitments to those beliefs. Marot and his estranged son believe themselves to be radicals, but we see the son primarily getting his news through half-heard newscasts in the morning when he eats breakfast in his comfortable apartment with his lover. Meanwhile, Marot's aforementioned ignorance of the full power of his editing and film construction blinds him to the potential impact of his sloth. For him, he wants to edit the shortest distance between two idea-affirming images, but Odette demonstrates the folly of his approach.

She (and by extension the filmmakers) also subtly critiques the repression of women among these so-called radicals, showing how they assign stereotypical roles to women: the son's lover appears almost solely as a homemaker, while Odette herself gets roped into stenographer work typing out print copy, something that annoys her almost visibly (amusing, since we never see her unobscured by shadow) to the point that she slowly types and even later replays the scene in an attempt to get the man to see the error of his ways. But by then Marot's already dropped a line about women being "copying machines," effectively spitting out genetic duplicates of, erm, let's call it input data.

It is important to note that the profession Godard uses to prompt this film is journalism, a profession nominally dedicated to publicizing the truth. But religion was quick to teach the concept of lying by omission, and Godard wishes to show how casual editing for the sake of legibility and flow can undermine the power of journalism even as it makes the profession more esoteric and unappealing to the common reader. He does let on an understanding for the complicated, self-defeating position in which that places everyone, and he wryly notes "Language is the place where the executioner transforms the victim into another executioner." But if Godard finally works out that success in his quest to democratize the film image will obliterate meaning in the flood of interpretation, he suggests a path back to full directorial control by having Odette say, "What is unseen is what directs." However slowly, Godard is working his way back to narrative cinema even as he consolidates his more radical experimentation of the decade.

The first text of the film, projected on a black screen, dubs Comment ça va "A film between active and passive," and Godard shows how easy it is to lean back into passivity. Even Odette notes how she can switch her brain off while typing up copies of polemics, arguing that even a blind man can do this job. Godard shows how life itself gets in the way of full dedication to one's beliefs: can a mother be a full-time radical if she must worry about the health and progress of her children? Can someone in even the most liberal profession not devote a portion of his time to ensuring some form of paycheck to survive? It is, however, unclear whether Godard has fully accepted the truth he has uncovered, for he still suggests irritation with passive commitment. Still, the fury and autocritique of the DVG years is cooling into more a measured response to his frustrations, and if Comment ça va is not as stunning a work as Numéro deux, it is at least a refined insight into Godard's thought process as he navigates ever headier waters.

Numéro Deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975)

Numéro deux represents Godard's first fully successful attempt to include the elements of his previous films into a cohesive whole. Ironically, it may also be his most abstract and jumbled film yet. Shown entirely on video monitors (even the two establishing shots showing Godard in his studio contain running images on screens), Numéro deux takes his Brechtian distance to a new extreme, creating such an aesthetic distance that the cold abstraction of his characters can be attributed as much to the blatant falsity of it all as it can to Godard's philosophical and political musings.

And yet, the film represents the best-yet examination of Godard's obsession with the line between discussing politics and embodying them. Despite its formal minimalism -- employing nothing but static shots of video monitors themselves displaying solely static shots -- Numéro deux at last emerges as the true heir to the poetic 2 or Things I Know About Her, a film that partially informed every Godard film that came after it, as well as a further exploration of not only the ideas behind the Dziga Vertov Group but of the reasons that collective failed. It represents a better meditation and autocritique than Here and Elsewhere, and somewhere in its brutal asceticism is a poetry I'd begun to think Godard lost.

After a brief play with images on two video monitors, the film cuts to Godard in his editing suite giving a monologue about his move from Paris to a smaller home outside the city, which then leads into a discussion of money and the difficulty of financing movies. Purportedly, Godard made this film when the producer of his landmark debut, Georges de Beauregard, proposed that the director remake that film. Godard agreed but naturally had no interest in returning to Breathless. Instead, he used the money to get the equipment needed finish Here and Elsewhere, then made this movie, which examines a French family suffering a bourgeois implosion. Not exactly a jazzy genre exercise.

With voyeuristic still shots of the family in their social housing complex, Godard takes the contradictions and metaphors of his monologue and examines them in action. In his speech, he referred to his editing studio as a factory, where he is both boss and worker, a semi-equal but nevertheless distinct dichotomy that speaks to socialism as it turned out, not in its fully egalitarian utopian model. For the film's subjects, their bodies are themselves machines in a factory; I don't know of a film with a less romantic vision of sex.

The young couple between the other pairs of the film -- two children, two grandparents -- use sex as an empty means of power and brief pleasure. The father caught the mother with another man, but only one part of him reacts with anger. Another part is turned on, and his internal struggle occasionally explodes in physical and sexual violence against his wife. Yet he still idealizes the act: in bed, Pierre and Sandrine compare men and women. Pierre romantically speaks of woman as a river crashing into the shore that is man. Known for washing away the shore, the river does not receive much consideration for the effects of the shore upon it, limiting its graceful flow and span. Sandrine's views of Pierre are far less rosy: she notes that she sees his ass every morning when he goes to work and leaves her to do chores and his dick when he comes home expecting some action.

These harsh, clashing dualities comprise the film's philosophical conflicts, as well as its aesthetic framing. Using two monitors, Godard juxtaposes sight and sound against each other, creating jarring miniature compositions. Before the film turns to the family, Godard experiments with the two screens, juxtaposing news broadcasts concerning revolutionary activity and Establishment crackdowns of same with light TV programming, suggesting television's capacity for indoctrination and how it's used to retard mental growth and independence with endless fluff. Anne-Marie Miéville, who co-wrote the film but did not share a direction credit, speaks in a voiceover as these two screens keep going, discussing how all images, including those in a film, are manufactured just as TV images and ads are. At one point, she drifts into a tangent where she speaks of Numéro deux as if it were a coming attraction, thus exposing how film can be its own advertisement. She also amusingly wonders whether the film is political or pornographic, placing the two as flip sides of the same coin.

Tempering these comparisons and dualities is a written-in admonishment to this dialectical approach. "Why do you always ask 'either/or?'" ponders Miéville. "Maybe it's both at once." Though the characters of the movie often talk politics, the true focus is on the mundanity of their lives, hence the presentation through the smaller scope of television. From their quotidian routines come questions on many of the same topics Godard explored with the DVG, delivered without the collective's polemics.

Despite the stark framing, Godard clearly put care into his compositions, and they betray some of the higher ambitions of this essay film. He shows the grandmother doing chores, her head either cut out of the frame or so far away we cannot read it. He then lays a monologue on top of these images of her reflecting not only on mortality but feminism. She speaks bitterly about gender struggle as the video shows her ironing and cleaning, and one gets the feeling that she's voicing a suppressed cry she never got to vent to another person. The grandfather, far more steeped in self-pity, summarizes his life (one that coincides with various radical movements and their failures) as he sits nude from the waist down, his own chilling conflation of the death of rebellion with his own mortality sending shivers down the spine.

Perhaps this is still too polemical despite Godard's efforts to present politics through human interaction and emotion, however abstract. Indeed, some parts challenge the audience's patience, if not its sense of propriety. The two children pose a number of those simple-but-deep questions children always ask -- a precursor to Godard's TV series France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants? -- and, since sex takes up so much room in the film, their questions naturally gravitate in that direction. Eventually, the parents invite the kids into the bedroom to explain sex by pointing to their exposed genitals. Even a liberal viewer might question the necessity of this, particularly when Godard had already effectively used dissolves to layer the kids' faces over shots of the couple screwing.


However, there's a perverse beauty in the moment. The parents refer to their genitals as mouths and portray sex as a form of kissing and silent communication. It's a poetic view of sex, and one the parents certainly don't believe, but they at least try to put intercourse on the pedestal for the next generation. Even then, Godard can undercut the moment: part of the reason the sex in this film is so unerotic is that it has been abstracted to the point of objectivity and obscurity. Like Howells' anti-romantic point about the ideal grasshopper, Godard demonstrates how losing track of the actual object or action robs it of its true meaning, a lesson he might need to re-learn after the radical analysis of the DVG.

Rather than focus on the dichotomies between each pair of characters, Godard and Miéville show how each group, however emotionally isolated from each other through their self-absorbed worldviews and the aesthetic oppression of Godard's editing, links with each other. The grandparents resemble less the previous generation than futuristic visions of the young couple currently mired in acrimony, aged and bitter endpoints for these post-radicals burned out on politics after the failure of May '68. In turn, the kids' inquisitiveness about sex reflects the moments of innocence in Pierre and Sandrine's sexual play, and perhaps they will internalize their parents' more beautiful talk of sex instead of the brutal reality of their acts.

Godard's attempts to tie these people together are but one facet of his desire to link threads: he might have burned his old producer by making this film, but he drops a vague reference to Breathless in the form of a gangster story the two children tell each other, bits of which recall the plot of Godard's first feature. Likewise, Godard's wordplay reveals a respect for puns as a means of experimenting with, and expressing a love for, language. As Miéville says, "Numéro Deux isn't a rightist or leftist film but a before and behind film." It sees what lies before it, but it takes care to incorporate the past as well.

In Godard's rambling monologue, he briefly touches upon the idea that "there's too much DNA not enough RNA." I interpreted that to mean he sees too many completed thoughts that cannot be manipulated. He wants to get a hold of the half-strands, the ones that leave space for learning and exploration. Numéro deux looks to the past (its Breathless reference, its abstract reflections on May '68) and the future (paving the way for both Godard's miniseries and Histoire(s) du Cinéma), but the most striking revelations it contains deal with the present. Godard has not quite returned aesthetically to cinema, but he certainly believes in it once more: in one shot of the typed text intertitles frequently placed in-between scenes, "cinema" changes into "possible," as if to say film can make anything happen. That reinvigorated look at film fits nicely with my favorite summary of the film courtesy of this capsule review: "If we look at the 1960's as Godard's childlike enjoyment of pop culture, genre cinema, and primary colors, and if we look at the Dziga Vertov Group as Godard's rebel without a cause years, then Numéro deux is when Godard finally becomes an adult."

Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975)

Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of the group's material but because Godard uses the opportunity to investigate why the group failed. Predictably, he cannot go into such details without making a movie as messy as one of the DVG films.

Though five years removed from his time in Palestine, Godard clearly has not forgotten his outrage, and as Miéville translates the revolutionaries' anti-Zionist rhetoric, it becomes clear Godard agrees with them even before he starts visually comparing Hitler to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. As ever, Godard thinks in terms of the Marxist class struggle, and when he cuts to a petit bourgeois family in France watching these images on their TV the connection -- Palestinians and Westerners held down by the same capitalist powers -- is obvious. Too obvious, in fact; Godard does not account for religious tension, and his equation of Hitler with Meir is but one example of his single-mindedness getting the better of him.

And yet, Here and Elsewhere also serves as a response to that dogmatic commitment Godard displayed even at his most open and considerate during the DVG years. Godard and Miéville discuss collecting all the footage and feeling confident in relating the story and its currents of theory and practice, only to return to France and see how all the careful ordering was inherently false, no matter how pure Godard's intentions were. Adding further sobriety to this autocritique is the reason Godard and co. left Palestine before completing their original film in the first place: so many of the natives involved had been killed. Shots of children training in a camp to fight in the insurgency may once have convinced Godard of the commitment of the Palestinians to their cause, but as he looks back he clearly wonders how many of them are dead now, and the images seem tragic and mournful. By filming these people at all, Godard ensured he would present their struggle against Western domination through Western means and interpretations of art. All filmmaking is interpretive, meaning that, for all the elements the director stripped from his style during his Dziga Vertov years, he always retained the most bourgeois one.

Still, he presses on in search of a universal form, and the film largely serves as his attempt to sift through his failure and learn from the mistakes. The text on the monitor at the start reads "Mon/Ton/Son Image," communicating that everyone can lay claim to the image, not merely the filmmakers who believe they are getting the full story. As frustratingly didactic as the film can be, Here and Elsewhere is yet another fascinating peek into Godard's insecurity and self-doubt in his lofty goals. He considers images in both time and space and seeks a way to put images in the same space at the same time instead of having one follow the other as it must in film. Multiple monitors and new editing equipment allow Godard the freedom to juxtapose more images than ever, and he uses these toys, these capitalistic innovations, to try to get a more accurate representation of his Marxist aesthetic.


More than any of his preceding late-'60s/early-'70s work, Here and Elsewhere captures and further develops the ideas and desires that motivated 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which he first surrendered autonomy of the image to seek all around him. By finding methods of not only cutting up images to fit them all in the frame -- which he does here using video technology that allows him to blur, overlap and melt images -- he instead places all these monitors on the screen, so that we are in effect watching others watch the movie, sitting in the editing suite with the filmmakers as they judge which images to use. Thus, Here and Elsewhere transcends Godard's efforts to find a Marxist image by not only showing more freedom in the selection of images beyond those that serve Godard's narrative means to making the viewer a semi-equal participant in viewing the complete footage. Of course, Godard still has the power to interpret it, but now he starts to leave

Here and Elsewhere expands the scope of Godard's attempts to capture the world on film, delineating all around one's vicinity from the images we ultimately receive on TV or in film, all of which were shot "elsewhere." Because of this, the images and sound lack their full power. The family in France look no different watching Godard's imposed images of horror and war than they do watching an ad with a catchy jingle play in-between the Palestinian footage. By, however unwisely, tossing out religious considerations, Godard can frame the Palestinian cause as class struggle and draw comparisons from the families elsewhere who grew fed up with their station and began organizing to the Western drones who can start their own revolution on a similarly small scale before expanding. But since he does leave out all that vital information when compiling his thoughts, Godard's conclusions can be messy and taxing, like the worst of Dziga Vertov output.

I admit I got a bit lost with this film and felt I were missing something in between what Godard was aiming for and the final product, so I looked to Ed Howard (one of the people chiefly responsible for me deciding to go through Godard's canon in the first place and a fantastic resource for where to find so many of the director's forgotten films) to see if he made anything out of it. I think we largely agree, but one of the passages of his review of the film caught my eye:

"It is not so much a political film as it is about political films, about the ways in which images, sounds, and their combinations can contribute to or impede understanding. It is also a study in contrasts, with the title's dual concepts the central dichotomy at work: "here" for the familiar, the domestic; "elsewhere" for the unfamiliar, the foreign.

That's a spot-on observation, though I find it amusing that Godard would divide locations into "here" and "elsewhere" given the time he devotes to criticizing his obsession with Marxist dialectic. "It is too easy and too simple," Miéville repeats, "to simply divide the world into two." In fairness, his dichotomy here is flexible and relative as opposed to the more hardline "good/bad" splits of earlier rhetoric. However, the key component of the film's title (and the filmmakers' focus) is neither on "here" or "elsewhere" but on the "and." Godard stresses the "and" in comparisons as if stuttering, and a giant "Et" fills the screen when he does so. He wants to bury into the "and," the conjunction taken for granted, to find the mysteries it contains. Godard notes that even the most quotidian, insignificant image becomes part of "a vague and complicated system," and Godard desperately wants to map that system.

Despite these humanistic aims, Here and Elsewhere still contains the frustrating limitations it criticizes, including its moments of rigid condescension. "There are no more simple images, only simple people, who will be forced to stay quiet, like an image," the filmmakers say. And yet, Godard and Miéville do internalize some of their inclusive aesthetic lessons, lumping themselves in with the crowd when Miéville posits "It seems we do not know how to see or listen." The solution, it seems, is to "learn to see here in order to understand elsewhere." I can't say I'm not glad to finally emerge from Godard's political period (barring the chance to catch up with a few of the DVG films I couldn't track down). But as many issues I have with Here and Elsewhere's pacing and contradictions, its mature evaluation of those politics and the human motivations and limitations behind them make the film a surprisingly moving elegy for an ambitious but misguided period for the world's most ambitious filmmaker.