Recalled to Life: After Waiting for Godard
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen RECALLED TO LIFE AFTER WAITING FOR GODARD IN jean-luc godard's Contempt (1963), the characters at one point enter a screening room on whose wall is inscribed a quotation from the movie...
...To equate directing solely with editing this way is a very Eisensteinian notion...
...Both these photographers used stop motion as Godard does, in order to analyze and emphasize physical gestures...
...Parallels of this kind carry the emotion from scene to scene in a film...
...It is a demanding film, as all Godard's have been...
...Keaton and Chaplin both had their films shot at variable speeds to enhance the effects of comedy or pathos they wished to create...
...It is a self-consciously autobiographical film, for the central character is named Paul Godard (Jacques Duytronc) and the concerns of other characters- are also very close to Godard's own...
...One moment where we can sense this is the final scene between Paul and Denise...
...In his way Godard was doing what so many of the best filmmakers have done: repudiating his own best work, talking himself out of movies, which thereby became, once again, an invention without a future...
...Beyond interrupting itself by atomizing the action with slow-motion shots, the whole movie seems to be a process of interruption...
...The most innovative thing about the film is a use of stop-motion/slow-motion photography of the sort to which 21 November 1980: 663 videotape has accustomed us through the instant replays of sports events on television...
...Screen RECALLED TO LIFE AFTER WAITING FOR GODARD IN jean-luc godard's Contempt (1963), the characters at one point enter a screening room on whose wall is inscribed a quotation from the movie pioneer LumieVe:' "The cinema is an invention without a future...
...He has tried to bring history itself to consciousness, to raise both the making and watching of movies to a new level of awareness...
...What Lumiere couldn't foresee, however, is what an incredibly rich past the movies would turn out to have...
...The films from his own past to which this one seems to allude are VivreSa Vie (1962) and, more strongly still, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966...
...In the final scene a car containing Isabelle's sister and a pimp hits Paul as he is arguing with his wife in the street...
...and from Eisenstein to Hitchcock to Francois Truffaut, such parallels have always been present, yet invisible in a way, hidden behind the plot...
...Yet the way that the film constantly leaves one character's story half untold and jumps to somebody else's is one of the things that gives us the sense of dejd vu we have while watching it...
...Among other things it is a reflection on the fact that the precursors of movies were, paradoxically, attempts to freeze motion rather than create the illusion of it...
...Maybe the movies didn't have any future, as LumieVe had said years before Feuillade began making films...
...Every Man for Himself seemed to infuse a number of subsequent screenings at the festival with new life...
...One reason this seems surprising is that the film clearly grows out of his recent thoughts and activities about which we know nothing...
...Having at first been the rarest poetry, it became part of the fundamental grammar of movies...
...They were the experiments of the nineteenth-century Frenchman Marey, and of Eadweard Muybridge, who proved that there's a point where a galloping horse's hooves all leave the ground...
...When I first decided to write about movies, it was Godard's work that made me feel the necessity of doing so...
...If Every Man for Himself reminds us how influential Godard has been, it also reminds us of his own earlier career, and of the history of the movies in general...
...Like Vivre Sa Vie, the new film is divided into numbered, titled sections, and like Two or Three Things, it makes us feel the prostitute's role as an almost allegorical one, a depiction of the culture at large...
...Even the most novel and contemporary aspect of the new film, the video-like use of slow motion, seems at the same time a backward glance...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Along with the story of Paul and Denise, the film contains the story of a prostitute named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) whose life criss-crosses but never quite touches Paul's...
...Denise (Nathalie Baye), for whom Paul has left his family, wants to leave the city but can't decide what to do with herself if she does leave...
...Twenty years ago Godard's style struck us as an audacious kind of poetry, a polemic, a new rhetoric in which to argue about how movies should be made...
...Politics was taking precedence over movies in his life and would soon eclipse them altogether, nearly eliminate them from his activities, as he went to live in a commune where his only filmmaking was a little experimentation with video...
...Godard doesn't run his productions as if they themselves were railroads...
...Part of the reason it is possible for us to come back readily to Godard's sinuous, elliptical style of filmmaking after so long an absence is, we realize, that that style has had an enormous impact on all the movies we see...
...By tearing down plot, Godard attempts to reveal this other, associative structure underneath...
...It is as if Godard's ten-year absence from filmmaking has not been an absence at all, but just a brief period when we left the room...
...When Godard talked during a press conference about his use of slow motion, the continuity between it and Eisenstein's ideas about montage seemed obvious...
...Both those films are about prostitutes like this one...
...Eisenstein was of course another basic grammarian of film...
...This was for Eisenstein both a way to project onto events a Marxist interpretation of history, a sense of determinism in the Potemkin mutiny, and a way to accustom the audience to his new ideas about film montage...
...Moreover, it has a mysterious bearing on the film's last scene, where Paul's wife does not keep him from getting too close to the edge in a similar situation...
...What Godard finally found to pass the time was, as I said, video...
...It has that uncanny ability his films always seem to possess of bringing the whole history of the movies into the present...
...The use of such abrupt, choppy, disconnected narratives is the technique which Godard himself developed and was known for in the sixties...
...It has powerfully affected not only American filmmakers who have great originality of their own, such as Altman, but a whole generation of imitators and popularizers...
...This was very much the situation Godard was in ten or so years ago when he wanted to get away from Paris and decided to go live in the more provincial, rural Clermont-Ferrand district...
...That preoccupation shapes this film, too...
...Now we are able to come back and pick up the threads of what he is saying with no difficulty...
...The astounding thing about the film is how familiar and accessible it seems...
...That is the only structure his films ever have, one created through editing...
...In Every Man for Himself Godard is trying, as always, to work intuitively, to do away with preconceived structures like plot, to be open to chance and improvisation...
...When I say that Every Man for Himself seems familiar, I don't mean that it seems easy...
...She alldws him to back into the street as they are arguing and be hit by a car...
...It even made a seven-hour retrospective of Louis Feuillade's 1918 serial Tih Minh fascinating to watch...
...Godard said that he only began to direct at the point where he started looking at the individual frames in different shots, trying to decide where to put the stops...
...More likely is that the train took everyone, including the actors, by surprise...
...It has percolated down through the whole of film culture...
...They meet on a train platform, and as they talk an express comes through the station so that one of them has to quickly pull the other away from the platform's edge...
...As I was explaining in my previous column, my attitude toward movies had about touched bottom when it again came time to attend the press screening for the New York Film Festival this fall...
...Commonweal: 664...
...It's doubtful that he consulted the timetable in order to be sure a train would come through and occasion this little gesture of rescue...
...The only structure that Godard's film has exists in connections like this between the scenes...
...Doing so has made his role in the history of the movies a rather Hegelian one...
...Going to his films throughout the sixties was what made moviegoing seem that important...
...Little by little over the past ten years, I have come to agree...
...There in Feuillade's loose, aimless story and constant repetitions from one installment to the next were the raw materials from which Eisenstein and Godard were to fashion movie art...
...It was so audacious that it changed the way both filmmakers and audiences thought about movies...
...Godard's own career has provided a kind of frame around my gradual, grudging capitulation to Lumiere's point of view...
...The whole history of the movies was so simple, really, and so thrilling when you thought about it...
...And this, with the American premiere of his new Every Man for Himself, was exactly what happened...
...I was at the point where almost the only thing that could have restored my faith in movies would have been for Godard himself to come back from the dead...
...Before that, he feels, there was only the writing, the script...
...And Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin used a kind of stop action/slow motion at certain crucial moments too...
...But that would be precisely why Godard used it, why it fits...
...Yet at the very moment I began to write, Godard himself was losing interest...
...The implicit emphasis on structure in these remarks may seem odd for a filmmaker whose films were accused often of being wild and chaotic and having no structure of the usual, narrative sort...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 21
