Review of Godard's 60s

Godard at Film Forum

The recent Godard retrospective at Film Forum arrives at a time when a sweep of sentiments and feelings for that period known as the Sixties has sparked on the radar of New York’s cinema culture. “Godard’s 60s,” as this series of nineteen feature films and three shorts by the French filmmaker is named, coincides with two other showcases of films from forty years past: the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s “1968: An International Perspective,” and the Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing “Jazz Score” (a series that counts nearly half of its features as having been made between 1960 and 1968). But because the Sixties that Film Forum has on display this month belongs to Godard – that is, a certain cultural moment becomes Godard’s own - a more personal relationship is struck between these films and their respective decade. I am left curious about how this selection is exemplary of the filmmaker’s energies and attitudes, and what effects the retrospective might have on our conceptions of Godard as an important purveyor of cinematic innovation and expressiveness within the period.

This period begins, however, in 1959. Breathless is Godard’s initiation into the Sixties, and secures a playful, impulsive style through which the rest of the filmmaker’s work is viewed: jump cuts, violations of the continuity system, direct address close-ups, affected monologues and musings, etc. For Godard, these stylistic combinations are not used only for aesthetic amusement or pleasure; they also evolve a complicated and sophisticated grappling with ideas, forming an intellectual project that questions the medium, that calls attention to its construction and artifice. They make Godard’s ideological positions workable on screen, as well. (The ideological use of style is never more so apparent than in 1967’s La Chinoise, a film that makes the activities of a group of young Maoist sympathizers seem just as mannered, just as theatrical and stilted as the aesthetic with which Godard uses to frame them.)

A self-imploding cinema excited by the intellectual and stylistic possibilities of being dissected, torn apart, and demystified is also the exemplary cinema of the Sixties. It creates all kinds of effects that the decade interpreted as culturally and politically valuable: the raising of consciousness, the dethroning of established ideas, their replacement by a more radical and contemporary sensibility, the transformation of aesthetics into something subversive and provocative. The Sixties of Godard saw the cinema as an opportunity for moral action, and as an immensely fertile period wherein movie houses existed as spaces of discussion and debate; Godard was - and remains - perhaps the most significant, transformative contributor to this discussion.

If there is such a thing as a legacy of the Sixties, and if Godard can be canonized within it, then Film Forum’s retrospective is a glimpse at an era when the right to be difficult (as a filmmaker, as an artist, as a thinker) formed the peak of the cultural bell curve. Since the complexity of Godard’s Sixties, we have undergone a steady slump into a deadened cinema that often re-visits Godard the Stylist, but rarely ever pays attention to Godard the Innovator, or Godard the Thinker, or Godard (heaven forbid, at least in America) the Intellectual. All twenty-two of these films present themselves as ruminations, as tangible experiences to be thought about and retrieved pleasure from. Viewed sequentially as they are here, each of Godard’s films from the Sixties also seem to converse with one another, as works participating in the same procession of ideas and sensations, without the risk of seeming too ambiguous or incomprehensible when viewed individually.

As anxieties about the status and direction of the cinema increasingly cause discussions within the film community, Godard seems like a refreshing counterpoint, a moment for contemplation. The considerations that are needed (now, more than ever, perhaps) require that we view these films as what they are: passionate, serious and difficult contributions to a cinema culture that no longer exists. I would advise that we approach Film Forum’s retrospective as an opportunity to think about Godard’s significance as both transformer and innovator of cinematic experience. The tendency to make Godard a fashionable icon of film school sensibility needs to be re-worked, and the opportune moment for this kind of re-evaluation of Godard – a re-evaluation of what these films mean, what their significance is for the cinema at large – is now available. As works that are provocative and passionately engaged, they reveal a filmmaker who is a traveler in his own time, a collector of ideas and possibilities for the renovation of the medium.

Posted on 05/20/08 by: Ricky D'Ambrose 02:27 PM