TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT JEAN-LUC GODARD
A BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END - JUST NOT IN THAT ORDER.
Rational to the last, the film director Jean-Luc Godard died this week by assisted suicide, aged 91: a Socratic death, forced not, however, by the power of public opinion – something with which he was little concerned – but by what Yeats called “the black oxen” of physical decay.
As Peter Bradshaw said in the Guardian "There is, and was, no one like Godard, and his loss makes this a sombre day." That’s not to say he was greater that everyone else; just that he existed sui generis :in a category of his own. “He tore up the rule book,” says Bradshaw, “but didn’t bother to read it first.”
Almost everyone got Godard wrong – the effect for which he strove. Kenneth Tynan was one of the few who saw early what we were up against. "The image I get from his films,” he wrote at the time of Bande à Part, “is that of a young man in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets; a cigarette droops from one corner of his mouth while he talks in snatches, plentifully interrupted with shrugs, out of the other. He speaks softly and swiftly, in an undertone made eloquent by deadpan wit, superbly timed pauses, audacious changes of tempo and persistent narrative zest: we recognize the born spell-binder who does not need to raise his voice."
He wasn’t the trench coat type but in every other respect Tynan was right. He did indeed speak softly and swiftly, in both French and English. And if he did hesitate, it was as characters do in a Pinter play – to let the silence speak for itself.
And “audacious changes of tempo”? I’ll say. He could turn on a sixpence, and stand amused as we struggled to follow him on his new track.
In his films there is always that sense of “What did he just say?” Michel Subor, photographing Anna Karina in Le Petit Soldat, thinks to himself “She isn’t as pretty as yesterday,” then, to reassure her about the accuracy of his pictures, tells her “Photography is the truth,” takes another shot, and continues, as if he’s just thought of it, “So cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second.”
It’s nothing to do with the story, but we have abruptly darted off in a different direction. As Godard observed in another of his aperçus, “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end – just not necessarily in that order.”
With the ill-prepared or the sycophantic, he took no prisoners. There is a painful conversation with Woody Allen that makes one want to crawl under the sofa, and another, worse, with a fawning Dick Cavett, who observes that five critics called Sauve Qui Peut: La Vie “despairing.”
“How many were women?” Godard asks mildly.
Leaving Cavett a few seconds to flounder – “honestly I don’t really notice…” – he resumes the conversation by suggesting the film would have special relevance for women. One feels he could just as well have asked “How many reviewers had red hair” or “…voted Republican?” and come up with a no less apt exegesis.
On the other hand, it’s an interesting question: do women see films differently to men? And Sauve qui Peut: La Vie does have a special interest for women – as do many of his films. He was above all a director of women and made many of his later films in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville. As well, Le Mepris remade Brigitte Bardot’s image, and he turned Anna Karina into what Cahiers du Cinéma in its heyday would have called “an axiom of the screen.” The shot from Alphaville of her standing at the window with a copy of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la Douleur reminds one of Josef von Sternberg’s order to Marlene Dietrich: “Count to six, then look at that light as if you can’t live without it.
That shot - and Godard directing it.
I met him a few times. On one occasion I asked when he decided to make films rather than write about them. “I was always making films,” he said, “even when I was writing about them.” While I wrestled with this apparent contradiction, he explained that it was almost literally true. His first paid job was in the publicity department of a distributor of American films. He wrote biographical pieces about actors and actresses. “I didn’t know anything about these people,” he said, “so I just made them up. They were my first movies.”
His work tailed off as his health declined, but occasionally one saw flashes of what Levi-Strauss saw in the fox, a knowledge of many small things. Presented with an honorary César, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, he wandered on stage at the glitzy presentation ceremony looking, as usual, as if he’d just got out of bed and dressed in the dark. From one jacket pocket dangled a bedraggled scarf. Not noticed by him? Or, rather, artfully placed so as to trail behind him across the stage? You decide.
True to his dictum about stories, his hasn’t ended with his death. He still pervades Paris. It isn’t only that his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, used to jog by me in the Luxembourg Gardens, that his first, Anna Karina, shopped at our local supermarket – she and my wife commiserated about the declining quality of its plastic bags – or that a rather vulgar sign painted on the sidewalk near rue Campagne-Première indicates where Belmondo dies in Au Bout de Souffle. It’s more than I can’t look at a stretch of freeway along the Seine near the Gare d’Austerlitz without thinking of Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution driving through sidereal space in a Cadillac convertible to the futuristic city of Alphaville. As is written on the tomb of Christopher Wren, who designed St. Paul’s, Si monumentum requiris circumspice. If you seek his monument, look around.