Masculine Feminine (1966)

Masculin féminin, France / Sweden, 103 minutes

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Guy de Maupassant

Photography: Willy Kurant

Music: Jean-Jacques Debout

Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, Marlene Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Michel Debord, Elsa Leroy, Evabritt Strandberg, Brigitte Bardot, Francoise Hardy

Guy de Maupassant gets a cowriting credit on Masculine Feminine because the rights to two of his stories, “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” were acquired for the production. But director Jean-Luc Godard barely used them in the picture, which instead is more typical of his shattered approach to filmmaking in the 1960s, with quick setups and improvisation (see also Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Breathless, The Little Soldier, Pierrot le fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend, etc., etc.). Ostensibly broken up into “15 concise parts,” the picture mixes up cryptic textual statements on title cards (“The mole has no consciousness, yet it burrows in a specific direction”) with scenes of the lovely principals bantering and living their Pepsi-Cola Generation lives (or, more accurately, as it were, their ANTI-Pepsi-Cola Generation lives).

Masculine Feminine is only murky about the revolution. It’s a little late for Communism and a little early for Women’s Liberation, which hit harder in the next decade, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published by then and birth control pills were more and more widely available. That’s about the depth of the sexual politics, which are otherwise more libertine. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a 21-year-old political activist and revolutionary, who acquires his own little maybe only emotional harem, with the polyamory playing out as it will, kind of more on the sidelines if anything, off-camera. There’s ye-ye singer Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an aspiring singer. Goya’s songs fill the soundtrack. And there are her two roommates Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) and Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). As much as anything it’s a movie about the Sexual Revolution—no one under 18 was permitted to see it in France—but more than anything it is a freewheeling half-improvised and half-baked intellectualized Godard exercise. I’m hard put for a synopsis. That’s about as good as I can do. Random observations follow.

Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

Film en douze tableaux, France, 85 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Marcel Sacotte, Jean-Luc Godard

Photography: Raoul Coutard

Music: Michel Legrand

Editors: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Guillemot

Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger

In the opening titles Vivre Sa Vie is "dedicated to B movies." It's not the first time director and cowriter Jean-Luc Godard has done it, certainly in spirit, and it's a good reminder that we are entering Jean-Luc Godard-world, where fantasy and reality are all mixed up "playfully" (and/or for reasons of budget). Reality is generally a form of fantasy (notably when machine guns and gangsters appear) but it can also be text and factual information. I learned on IMDb that the script for Vivre Sa Vie is a single page, listing the 12 episodic scenarios, and the players improvised the dialogue from there. Cultural referents include Emile Zola, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Jules and Jim playing a nearby theater (because why not?!).

Confoundingly, Godard's story of a middle-class woman who becomes a prostitute acknowledges but does not satisfy the impulse to project pathos on the story. Nana—yes, that's a big fat Zola shoutout, and she's played by JLG's beautiful wife for five years, Anna Karina—Nana is an obvious if cartoonish victim, eventually (spoiler) gunned down in the streets, in a convenient random meaningless plot development, slaughtered by two-bit movie actors in trench coats for a suitably reflexive existential-type playful bleak ending. Having executed such neat FIN we can ask what Godard may really be doing here, aside from fooling around with movie equipment.

Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998)

France, 267 minutes, documentary
Director / writer / editor / narrator: Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Pierre Binggeli, Hervé Duhamel
With: Alain Cuny, Sabine Azema, Serge Daney, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche

Probably the first thing to decide about director / everything Jean-Luc Godard's epic and deeply personal TV miniseries documentary is how you're going to look at it. It's another long one in total—four and a half hours. The first of eight parts is 52 minutes and was broadcast in 1988. The second is 42 minutes, broadcast in 1989. The next two parts, under 30 minutes each, were broadcast in 1997, and the last four in 1998. All of those are also under 30 minutes, except the eighth and last, which is 38 minutes. I don't recommend taking 10 years to look at it, to replicate the original. In fact, the way I did it the first time, a few years ago, now seems better: stick the first of two discs in the machine one day, hit "Play All," and let it roll for over two hours. Do it again the next day with the second disc. That way it's more trippy, undulating, and immersive. I could never even pick apart the individual episodes. Thinking that was somehow wrong, I wanted to be a little more rigorous for this write-up. I tried to get some sense of the integrity (or even specific point) of each episode, noted the titles and confusing numbering system, and avoided "Play All," spreading the eight pieces across three days.

That first time I saw Histoire(s) du cinéma I was surprised and delighted by the saturation of classic film clips, with memorable scenes from The Searchers, The Night of the Hunter, Bicycle Thieves, Nosferatu, etc., including a few from Godard's own pictures. They are recognizable, and often recognizable as wonderful, even as they may also be lost in the gloomy welter of other images, a muttering voiceover, floating words, clacking typewriter sounds, and editing effects such as flashing dissolves. In fact, the profusion of clips is all I remembered about it the first time. I thought that's what it mostly was. This second time I was more aware what a churning internal cerebral explosion it is, a kind of stroke event, personal and thus incoherent. I came away with the sense there was little point in even trying to separate the episodes, and this time the clips felt drowned in the rest, which actively resists understanding, a cacophony of words, literally words, and images, photographs, film clips, and some shots of Godard at work. Toward the end of Histoire(s) du cinéma, in the eighth part, Godard articulates his aesthetic in a throwaway line. It has actually been a constant across much of his career: "This is what I like about cinema, generally speaking," he grumbles like Henry Kissinger. "A saturation of wonderful signs, that swim in the light of their lack of explanation."

Pierrot le fou (1965)

France / Italy, 110 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Remo Forlani, Jean-Luc Godard, Lionel White
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Antoine Duhamel
Editor: Francoise Collin
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Dirk Sanders, Raymond Devos, Graziella Galvani, Samuel Fuller, Jean-Pierre Leaud

If it's possible to name a movie that is a generic version of director Jean-Luc Godard's body of work, Pierrot le fou might be it. It's not in black and white (but neither is Contempt) and otherwise it has many of the signs: Jean-Paul Belmondo as a gangster-loving aesthete, Anna Karina as his beautiful disaffected girlfriend. Guns and cars all over the place. Arch and intellectual dialogue, encompassing multiple languages. Punctuations of images from great paintings and other cultural markers. Sound, image, and words which can all be at odds suddenly with one another, yet produce intriguing paradoxes of synchronicity—they work as montage, in other words. It loves Hollywood but hates America. It's full of literary and cinema references and it's playful beyond all reason. If you're not delighted you're only baffled, and that's OK too, seems to be the idea.

If it's given me any new insight into Godard, it's the degree to which he's shambolic, like a drunken rock band that turns to playing covers of pop songs others claim they would rather forget. This loose and freewheeling sloppiness may be Godard's single greatest charm, reflecting some kind of opposition to professionalism as inhuman, perhaps, as mere artifact of capitalism and Coca-Cola marketing, as he might put it. But it's a deliberate choice on his part, because it's obvious from the images he casually sows through all his films, this one no less than any others, that he's a gifted visualist. As a filmmaker, he's a natural.

Contempt (1963)

Le mepris, France/Italy, 102 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Alberto Moravia
Photography: Raoul Cotard
Music: Georges Delerue (Piero Piccioni, Italian/Spanish version)
Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan
Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll, Jean-Luc Godard

The first thing that always surprises me about Contempt is how beautiful it is. That's a natural enough result of setting much of it in the daylight of Rome and Capri, casting Brigitte Bardot, and shooting in color—magnificent color. In fact, according to the consensus view revealed at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, it's now considered director Jean-Luc Godard's best after Breathless. I know Contempt was the Godard that left me most impressed walking out of the theater after seeing it for the first time (in a '90s rerelease). But the more I look at it the more frozen in stasis it seems to become, immobilized, inert, dare I say impotent, like the classical statuary on which it loves to linger.

It's a lot less playful than most Godard I know from the '60s, for one thing. In fact, it's almost stately, pitched at a snail's-crawl pace with Georges Delerue's remarkable score swelling like ripened fruit, intruding at will across anything in our field of vision. More money seems to be involved with this project too. The early '60s was a heroic era of art film, remember, one of those periods when money materializes for all kinds of crazy things. Godard and producer Carlo Ponti were kicking around names like Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni before settling on Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Jack Palance plays a leering, smacking American movie producer. And really, any movie that's about making a movie and has the wherewithal to cast Fritz Lang as Fritz Lang definitely has something going for it.

Breathless (1960)

À bout de soufflé, France, 90 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Martial Solal
Editors: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville

I better cop to a problem with Jean-Luc Godard right up front, if only as a matter of fair warning: hidebound conventions (and spoilers) directly ahead. Godard is and remains, for me, an acknowledged blind spot, likely weighed down as much as anything by the imposing reputation that has preceded him practically since the day I first heard of him. His most widely hailed pictures—and Breathless, his feature debut, is the first among them in many ways, along with Pierrot le fou, which affects me similarly, and Contempt, which seems slightly a bit of a different animal, but all that in due time—tend to strike me as monumentally silly or academically pretentious or both, the result of children playacting with motion picture technology.

I will grant these are no ordinary children—they have levels of aesthetic sophistication, and no small degree of high critical argle-bargle, to back themselves up. Godard seems to me to be continually about finding ways to demonstrate he is a million times smarter than anyone else in the (darkened) room, which his followers are as much at pains to defend seemingly on any terms within reach, on grounds of avant-garde experimentalism, defiant anti-convention, unique vision, I-know-you-are-but-what-is-he, the continuing perception of a widespread and penetrating influence, and as many others as can be and are adduced in seminar environments. And all that may be true enough. But they do tend to derive almost purely from the cerebrum. My problem is more acutely with the overall experience his pictures tend to deliver for me, which is narrow and small.