By Wilson Honório da Silva, PSTU Brazil National Secretary of Education
The French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard passed away on the morning of Tuesday, September 13, 2022. At the age of 91, his death was, to a large extent, deeply consistent with both his personal and artistic trajectories. By opting for assisted suicide (i.e. a medically-prescribed lethal injection, legal in Switzerland since the 1940s), the director reaffirmed his adamant independence from the matters of the world and, at the same time, reminded us of the unpredictability of his cinematic narratives.
Godard was more than a brilliant director – he was one of the most important theorists of world cinema, having worked on one of its most preeminent publications, the magazine “Cahiers du Cinéma” (Notebooks on Cinema), and participated in “la Nouvelle Vague” (the New Wave) which, like a tsunami, influenced the “New Cinemas” of all corners of the world: from Brazil to Africa, the US to Asia, and across the entire European continent.
It is impossible not to grieve the director’s passing. Nevertheless, long before, he had already reached an “immortal” status, one achieved not only through his films, but also through his influence on world cinema and groundbreaking writings on filmmaking, culture, and the arts.
A passionate cinephile
Born to a wealthy family in 1930, Switzerland, Godard always felt somewhat out of place in his milieu. For example, his university days, spent in an Anthropology course he never completed, were a time that served only as a springboard for his immersion in the hectic life of the “Quartier Latin” (Latin Quarter), the bohemian neighborhood of Paris, where political and cultural movements boomed, such as “May 1968” and many other countercultural demonstrations of the time.
Godard’s inadequacy in the eyes of the elite world ended up merging with his passion for cinema in a somewhat unusual way when, in the 1950s, he began to work in the building industry, in the construction of one of the largest dams in Switzerland, which was an experience he also wanted to capture in a kind of documentary.
An avid reader and cinephile of the first order, Godard met some of his major associates, as well as the filmmakers Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, as early as the 1950s, a period in which he also spent hours and hours at “cineclubs” which permeated the “Quartier” and provided space for both the classics and avant-garde of world cinema. It was also during this period that he began his career as a critic and theoretician of the seventh art.
These experiences were fundamental to his cinema, which always incorporated reflections taken from the literature (both theoretical and fictional), overflowed with references to films of vastly different styles, and conversed openly with other artistic languages, such as music and painting, referencing the works of Mozart, Bach, Picasso, Goya, and avant-garde painters of early 20th century or contemporary movements, such as Pop Art (known for the vibrant, colorful works of Andy Warhol).
Breaking from dominant cinematic aesthetics and ideology
After producing some short films, Godard released the film “Breathless” in 1959, a real watershed in the history of cinema. The plot, based on real events, is quite simple: a young woman gets involved with an “outcast,” who is persecuted for having shot a policeman, but she ends up betraying him, leading to his murder by forces of repression.
However, the ways in which Godard constructed his film are much more important than the script, as was his message beyond the narrative. And such innovations of form were some of the main revolutions Godard propelled in world cinema, which since the 1920s (and, unfortunately, even today), had been chained to the so-called “classical or narrative cinema” aesthetic.
Not coincidentally, also known as “Hollywood cinema,” the predominant style on screen focuses on the plot. Though a narrative focus is not a problem in itself, it may serve to seduce the audience through stories almost always soaked in the dominant ideology (such as the illusion of the “happy ending”), the identification with protagonists who live by the “stars and heavens,” personifying bourgeois values, or the emphasis on individual action, rather than the collective which concerns all of humanity.
But it’s not just that. A cinema whose language (the use of the camera, the sound effects, the acting of the characters, etc.) insists on trying to create an “illusion of reality,” as if what we see on the screen were “real life,” has always been used to impact the hearts and minds of the spectators and intoxicate us with a “truth” almost always in tune with that which suits the political and economic interests of the millionaire film industry and its sponsors.
“Breathless” and its successors in the many “New Cinemas” worldwide were not the first to break with this structure. Godard had a passion for the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s (including Surrealism) and Soviet cinema. However, in post-World War II, a time when the U.S. was also consolidating its imperialist power in the Arts, Godard’s answer was to invert the logic of cinema, in both form and content.
Abrupt cuts or “excessively” long sequences, image superimposition, the introduction of “foreign” elements (such as graphics, photos, excerpts from other films and posters), techniques usually used in documentaries, unusual camera angles, scripts open to improvisation and actor collaboration, sound effects dissonant with the action, intentionally unrealistic performances (with actors often speaking directly to the camera, i.e., to the viewer), and breaks in continuity, among other devices, remind the viewer that they are watching a “narrative creation,” opening space for reflection and even “forcing” the audience to make associations between what they are seeing on the screen and the world around them.
It is also worth recalling that many of these techniques, as Godard himself insisted on emphasizing, were adaptations of the “Epic Theater” developed by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), which was also based on making explicit the mechanisms of language (in theater, in this case), putting the spectator in a position that demands a more critical and reflective attitude towards the spectacle.
It is also important to note that, always attentive to innovations, in the 2000s, Godard integrated digital media techniques in the service of this same project, as is particularly evident in “Film Socialism” (2010), which incorporates images captured by cell phones.
A fierce critic of capitalism
As one of Godard’s last films, “Film Socialism” is emblematic of his ideology, dedicated to a strong interrogation of the lack of paths forward for contemporary civilization. To a large extent, the film is a synthesis of his aesthetic and political concerns. It is not by chance that the film was made after the 2008 crisis – a time when the entrails of modern capitalism were particularly exposed.
Structured in “three acts,” the film opens with a luxury cruise ship travelling through Egypt, Odessa, Palestine, Barcelona, Naples and Greece, which serves as a backdrop for conflicts between the anonymous and the “celebrities”, between the economic, social, cultural and political cruelty that affects most of humanity and the disinterest of a few who benefit from the evils of the system.
Along the way, there are brilliant passages, from a recreation of the famous Odesa Staircase scene from the classic Soviet revolutionary film “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), to a surprising dialogue between two children who dissect and dispel the motto of the Bourgeois Revolution (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity).
But the fact is that Godard never abstained politically, never hid his strong anti-capitalist stance. Even at the beginning of his career, in 1963, he directed “The Little Soldier”, a visceral critique of the “dirty war” promoted by France against the people of Algeria in their struggle for independence, unmasking torture and imperialism, which led to the film being banned by the French government.
In the same year, he released another shot against the injustices of the system, “The Carabineers,” a powerful metaphor for the horrors of war and the hypocrisy of the powerful (unmasked by the two peasants who star in the film), strongly influenced by Italian Neorealism, a movement likewise identified with the leftist ideology that had exploded in Italy in the immediate post-war period.
Two years later appeared the fantastic “Alphaville,” an acidic political satire, packaged in a style that combines “film noir” (typical of the 1940s United States, with cunning detectives, mysterious spies and seductive “Femme Fatales”) and science fiction to tell the story of a dystopian civilization (oppressive and authoritarian) dominated by a robot/computer, the Alpha 60, responsible for the banishment of emotion, poetry, love and other manifestations of free thought.
In 1966, when the youth rebellion took the world by storm in episodes such as protests against the Vietnam War, support for the struggle for decolonization in Africa, the Cuban Revolution, Black liberation and women’s movements, Godard made “Masculine, Feminine,” whose subtitle appears repeatedly in the film, “The sons of Marx and Coca-Cola,” embedding a provocative tone in the love story between a naive and idealistic young man and a cool female “pop” singer who does not comply with the rules.
The relationship, evolving into a “ménage à quatre” with the introduction of the singer’s two friends, serves as a backdrop for questioning the limits of gender and sexuality and even for a reference to the recently installed dictatorship in Brazil, through the circulation of a petition demanding the freedom of a group of artists and writers imprisoned in Rio de Janeiro.
At the barricades of “May ’68”
The following year came one of his masterpieces, “La Chinoise,” a loose adaptation of “Demons” (1872) by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Shot almost entirely inside an apartment, the film features five young Maoists (along with the brief appearance of a young black man known as “Comrade X”) in an intense and tense dialogue on the ideological manipulation of Education and Culture, the contemporary political situation and, above all, the role of violence in the revolutionary process, all while probing the anxieties and longings of youth on subjects ranging from love to depression and solidarity.
Released shortly before the eruption of May 1968, many went so far as to claim that the film “fueled” the youth rebellion and even the General Strike that paralyzed France. Likewise, to this day, such claims are made in relation to some productions released shortly prior to the processes of mobilization.
However, the truth, as always, is otherwise, and only confirms one of the best aspects of Godard’s genius. As the work of an artist truly concerned with humanity and attuned to the matters of the world, the film managed to capture that which was already floating in the air, giving form and content to growing dissatisfaction and revolt that would burst in the streets months later.
Godard played a role in the revolt beyond that of a militant, which even resulted in his arrest while he was filming the protests. However, the greatest symbol of his commitment to the French May was that he took the lead, along with François Truffaut, in an unprecedented and never repeated episode: the occupation and shutdown of the Cannes International Film Festival, one of the most prestigious festivals in the world.
The Festival was taking place while the streets literally went up in flames, ravaged by repression. On May 10, known as “The Night of the Barricades,” a march with tens of thousands of students and workers had been heavily repressed, resulting in 367 arrests and more than 500 injured.
Dissatisfied with the alienated stance of the world cinema elite, Godard, accompanied by other filmmakers and a committee of students, stormed into the theater, provoking a general uproar that eventually became an assembly. “There isn’t a single film showing the problems going on today among workers and students. Not one, whether by Milos Forman, myself, Polanski, or François. There are none. We’re behind the times,” said Godard, demanding the cessation of the Festival.
The heated debate lasted all night, but resulted in the suspension of all activities and, later, in a manifesto of solidarity with the struggle in France that gained the support of around 700 personalities from the film industry, including names like Charlie Chaplin, Roberto Rossellini, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa.
Consistent with his position, Godard was also a convinced anti-imperialist and particularly anti-Zionist activist (which, of course, wrongly, led him to be accused of being “anti-Jewish”). An open supporter of the Palestinian cause, he supported initiatives of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and even began developing, in 1976, a film on the subject, which was never completed.
In dialogue with Marxism
Still under the influence of the French May, in 1968, Godard released another film with strong political content, “Weekend.” In the film, a Parisian couple travels through the French countryside to collect an inheritance, which serves as a starting point for a sharp critique of consumerism and the values of an increasingly decadent and parasitic bourgeoisie.
This film, like many of the times which immediately followed, conveys the filmmaker’s sympathy for Maoism, the ultra-distorted Chinese version of Marxism that had gained many adherents in Europe and the United States.
Theoretical and practical distortions aside, Godard’s alignment with Maoism was responsible for his attempt to introduce Marxist concepts into his work, which were generally also mixed with aspects of Existentialism (popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre), among which the concept of alienation, perhaps the best-elaborated theme in his filmography, stands out.
This concern was already present in previous films, including “A Married Woman” (1964). Breaking almost completely from the structure of “classic cinema”, the film is composed of snippets of everyday life presented in a sequence of isolated shots, generally against a completely white background, showing only the characters’ faces or body parts, provoking a feeling of complete estrangement that led film historian and theorist George Sadoul to synthesize the film as “a sociological study of the alienation of modern women” (published in “Dictionary of Films”, 1976).
This was a very intentional effect for the director who stated that this film, like some of his others, was concerned with denouncing a society where “individuals are transformed into things.” For this same reason, his work includes constant reflections on fetishism, the commodification of human relationships, consumerism and, most interestingly, the false illusion of freedom under capitalism.
These themes were even more present in the films made between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, when Godard, somewhat irritated by the “cult of personality” that developed around him, moved away from more commercial productions, and invested in “independent cinema,” with films made in former Czechoslovakia, Mozambique, and countries in the Americas.
Most of these films were made in collaboration with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin (heavily influenced by the ideas of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, before he broke with Marxism), with whom Godard founded the “Dziga Vertov Group,” in reference to the revolutionary Soviet filmmaker, who directed the films “Man with a Camera” (1929) and “Three Songs for Lenin” (1934).
Less known to the general public, this period features some particularly rare “gems”, such as the priceless “Vladimir and Rosa” (1971), a brilliant satirical political essay where Godard plays Lenin and Gorin plays Rosa Luxemburg, and “Tout Va Bien” (1972), where Jane Fonda and Yves Montand play a couple going through a domestic crisis who, during a strike at a meat packing plant, become the workers’ hostages.
Godard among us
Godard’s influence on the Brazilian “Cinema Novo” is unquestionable, even through direct dialogue with our directors or texts on our films, such as “Vidas Secas” (“Barren Lives”) (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963), which he considered one of the best films of the 1960s, “Deus e o diabo na terra do sol” (“Black God, White Devil”) and “Terra em transe” (“Entranced Earth”) (Glauber Rocha, 1964 and 1967, respectively).
But the echoes of the French-Swiss filmmaker’s thought and work are not limited to Cinema Novo. They were also present in the “Tropicália” movement, as Caetano Veloso admitted several times, and in “Marginal Cinema,” in films by Rogério Sganzerla (“O bandido da luz vermelha”, 1968), Júlio Bressane (“Matou a família e foi ao cinema”, 1969) and Neville D’Almeida (“Jardim de Guerra”, 1970).
However, somewhat unintentionally, Godard also became an important figure in the negotiated and always unfinished process of Brazilian re-democratization, thanks to the censorship of “Je vous salue, Marie” (“Hail Mary”), his provocative film which uses the myth of the Immaculate Conception of Christ to discuss the situation of women in the world.
In 1985, the nefarious José Sarney, in response to the requests of Pope John Paul II, prohibited the exhibition of the film in national territory, which ended up turning it into an instrument of struggle against censorship, of defense of the secular State and of criticism against the cultural “mask” [hypocrisy], provoking actions throughout the country and mobilizing thousands of people who organized screenings of the film in unions, schools, universities and other public spaces.
The immortality of “God-Art”
Godard was never very fond of the nickname he was given, a play on the words “God” and “Art.” However, whether he wanted it or not, the fact remains that he became immortal, even while he was still alive. This was also proven by his influence on the works of directors who revere him in their films: from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Quentin Tarantino; from Brian de Palma to Wim Wenders.
An immortal, however, is far from the creeping sanctification that exempts people from mistakes or criticism. Firstly, it must be said that his films are not always “easy.” On the contrary. For example, not everyone has the willingness and sensitivity to go along with the strongly discursive character of his films or the immobility of his camera, as in the famous scene in “Weekend” in which the camera records, for eight minutes, two characters stuck in a traffic jam.
But the question that viewers must face is whether they prefer to go to the movies to have their hearts and minds carried away by a narrative and language which manipulate their senses to sell them an illusion of reality, or to go through an aesthetic experience that sharpens their sensibility and provokes reflection.
Moreover, it cannot be said that he always got it right. Some aspects of his work are more than questionable, as is fortunately common for those who dare and experiment. And Godard experimented almost obsessively. He reinterpreted literary classics, as in the fantastic “First Name: Carmen” (1983), in which he draws from Bizet’s opera to discuss, once again, the situation of women; he visited Fernando Pessoa to discuss the horrors of the Bosnian War in “For Ever Mozart” (1995); he rescued Shakespeare to talk about the tragedy at Chernobyl (“King Lear”, 1987); and discussed his own artistic and cinematic work in films such as “Goodbye to Language” (2014) and “The Image Book” (2018).
And, in light of his death, what really matters is that Godard managed to maintain an enormous political and artistic coherence with what he set out to accomplish in his filmography, which consists of more than 100 productions (between shorts and feature films). This coherence, by the way, led to his refusal to participate in the 2010 Oscars, which awarded him an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award, though he did “politely” express thanks for the award and congratulate other winners.
When announcing his death, Godard’s relatives reported that “he was not sick, he was just exhausted.” He was weary, surely, like all sensitive human beings, of the many ills of the world in which we live; but he was also depleted by the series of health problems that had long debilitated him. “I am not anxious to continue at any cost. If I were very sick, I would have no desire to be hauled around in a cart,” he said in a 2014 interview.
This was a coherent position for someone who had made his work and creative capacity the very essence of his long and productive life, a legacy which will doubtlessly survive the ills of the present and will continue to inspire many people to think critically and creatively about the world.
