---------------------------------------------------------
Looking Forward to Godard
Hassan Melehy
University of Vermont
hmelehy@zoo.uvm.edu
© 1998 Hassan Melehy.
All rights reserved.
---------------------------------------------------------
Review of:
Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
1. At a time when Hollywood is as formulaic as ever, when
the representatives of French cinema we receive in the
U.S. seem to be attacking critical thought (Luc Besson's
The Fifth Element [1997] could by itself constitute a
Ministry of Anti-Education), it is refreshing to read a
book that considers with seriousness and a highly
contemporary disposition the work of this enigmatic and
brilliant director. Jean-Luc Godard took French and
international cinema by surprise in the sixties, yet
today may easily be relegated to the status of a quaint
intellectual from a bygone era. Wheeler Winston Dixon
opens his book with quiet applause for Godard's
relentless pursuit of the social and political
implications of cinema aesthetics, convincing this
reader that even Godard's early work is far from
exhausted and still poses major challenges to both
criticism and cinematic practice. Paradoxically, Dixon
also faces with full rigor the French director's
pronouncements, beginning with Le Week-end in 1967, of
the death of cinema.
2. This "death" is what makes the cinema impossible as a
critical experience, and yet it is precisely such
experience that Dixon demonstrates is at the heart of
Godard's filmmaking from first to last. The studios
offer "blockbuster films" (1) that aim for the "lowest
common denominator"; (2) while at the same time, visual
entertainment is given over to the relentlessly
expanding worlds of cybernetics, multimedia, and cable
TV. Nothing that risks the disturbing, insistent
involvement with the image that Godard has continually
worked at may make an entrance for more than a moment or
two. In this book that very adeptly combines biography,
history, description and summary of films, theoretical
analysis, and a vast knowledge of the film industry,
Dixon situates Godard's films as both objects and
projects in the present situation, through the
perspective of how this situation has taken shape over
the last forty years. He offers an explanation of
capital as it manifests itself in the film industry--a
favorite target of Godardian critique--to show how it
was in the fluctuations of capital itself that Godard
was first able to present his images to the public.
The exigencies of 1960s theatrical film
distribution constituted a series of paradoxically
liberating strictures; for a film to make a profit
at all, it had to appear in a theater.... Thus
distributors were forced to seek the widest
possible theatrical release pattern for even the
most marginal of films, and it is this way that
Godard achieved and consolidated his initial
reputation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such
a project would be impossible today. (3)
3. In the well-wrought historical narrative Dixon provides,
it becomes apparent that Godard's work, though perhaps
more widely viewed, better funded, and more appreciated
by critics in the sixties, is of greater importance
today. This would be true of both Godard's early
work--which tends to be better known because of its
place in film studies curricula--and his more recent
efforts, which bear directly on the contemporary state
of cinema and television. Dixon characterizes Godard as
an electronic-age prophet who saw the destiny of cinema
in a global culture where the visual image dominates,
and who, along with his collaborators, "seek[s] to
hasten its demise" (xvi)--precisely for the purpose of
educating the public as to the role of the image in
their culture and its manipulating force in consumer
society. "Godard is a moralist--perhaps the last
moralist that the medium of cinema will ever possess"
(5).
4. Dixon lays out the major themes he wishes to
illuminate--the social, political, moral, aesthetic, and
pedagogical aspects of Godard's work--in the first
chapter, "The Theory of Production." The subsequent
chapters, "The Exhaustion of Narrative," "Jean-Pierre
Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group," "Anne-Marie MiÈville
and the Sonimage Workshop," and "Fin de CinÈma," each
elaborate these themes by addressing a period in
Godard's work in which they become prominent. Dixon
submits in the first chapter that the challenge to
today's situation may be found even at the beginning of
the filmmaker's career. On A bout de souffle
(Breathless, 1959), Dixon is downright ecstatic, saying
that "an opportunity came knocking that would
permanently alter the course of Godard's life, and
change the face of cinema forever" (13). One may wonder
how the cinema could be changed forever if it is dying
or dead, but Dixon's presentation of the "shattering"
effects the film had on cinematic tradition is so
compelling that such hyperbole is justified. The
following is an example of this presentation; it also
illustrates Dixon's capacity as a film analyst,
conversant with theory but not dogmatic in his concepts
or vocabulary.
Godard called audience attention to the inherent
reflexivity of his enterprise, and the manipulative
and plastic nature of the cinema. A bout de souffle
is everywhere a construct aware of its own
constructedness. It is a film which follows the
format of the traditional narrative only insofar as
this adherence serves Godard's true critical
project: the "reactivation" of the people and
things he photographs within a glyphic framework of
hyperreal jump-cuts, editorial elisions, sweeping
tracking shots which call attention to their
structural audaciousness, and characters whose
entire existence lies in a series of gestures,
motions, appearances, and escapes, all to disguise
the essentially phantom nature of their ephemeral
existence. (22-24)
5. Even though Dixon wishes to demonstrate a thematic
coherency running through Godard's work over four
decades, he is careful to mark the major changes in the
director's orientations, especially those concerning his
approach to politics. In response to Godard's 1994
affirmation that "I never read Marx," Dixon states: "In
view of Godard's total immersion in the highly charged
political events of the 1960s, this statement seems
disingenuous in the extreme. Godard was, in fact,
changing radically as a filmmaker, becoming colder and
less romantic" (84-85). From the romances of the early
days--notably A bout de souffle and Le MÈpris (Contempt,
1963)--Godard turns toward a pronounced political
orientation in the mid-sixties, with statements on
consumer society, gender politics, class relations, the
student movement, and imperialism making their way into
the dialogue and images of movies such as Alphaville
(1965), Une femme mariÈe (A Married Woman, 1964), and
Masculin fÈminin (Masculine Feminine, 1966). But already
with Le MÈpris, there is an examination of politics: the
politics of image production, of film financing, of the
studios, and of the commodification of cinema through,
among other things, the imposition of reassuring
narrative.
6. Dixon begins chapter 2, "The Exhaustion of Narrative,"
with an excellent account of the making of Le MÈpris:
its status as an international hit with Brigitte Bardot,
its funding, the day-to-day events of its production,
and the relation between the film's storyline and
Godard's own work situation. The movie, Dixon states,
"is about compromise, the creation of art within the
sphere of commercial enterprise, the struggle to hold on
to one's individual vision in an industry dedicated to
pleasing an anonymous public" (45-46). One of Godard's
major compromises in this production, funded by French
and Italian groups, involved the requirement that
versions of the film circulated in Italy, Britain, and
the United States be dubbed: so much of the story line
has to do with the miscommunication occurring in an
international production, when the producers' interests
are completely at odds with the director's and
screenwriter's. Jack Palance plays Jeremy Prokosch, the
American producer whose "monolingual arrogance" suggests
the cultural imperialism of Hollywood. Fritz Lang plays
Fritz Lang, the director of the film-within-a-film, an
adaptation of the Odyssey; he is the "moral center of Le
MÈpris" (47), exercising an "omni-lingual authority"
(45). Many conversations in the movie are in several
languages, Lang alone able to converse without the aid
of the interpreter Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll).
7. The "end of cinema" is here figured as the death of the
megalomaniacal Prokosch, along with that of Camille
Javal, Bardot's character, in a violent car crash. (It
was to the criticism of similar bloodiness in Pierrot le
fou [1965] that Godard responded by saying very
suggestively, "Ce n'est pas du sang, c'est du
rouge--it's not blood, it's red." This is one of
Godard's interesting and aphoristic invitations to
consider the complex relation between reality and
representation.) Dixon remarks that Godard shows only
the aftermath of the accident, not the crash itself, and
so takes issue with accepted narrative conventions in
cinema, to the astonishment of, among others, Lang.
Dixon explains, "In many ways, as we have seen, Godard
works against audience expectations, showing us not that
which we wish or expect to see, but only those actions
and results that he deems necessary to create the world
as he sees it" (51). Subsequently, with movies such as
Une femme mariÈe and Alphaville, Dixon demonstrates
Godard's increasing focus on politics and pedagogy, as
the themes extend from reflection on the cinema itself
to the images of consumer society. But Dixon sees
limitations in Godard's vision at the time, which result
from the director's own situation: "Moving in a world of
white, middle-class patriarchal privilege, Godard echoes
the values of the society he partakes of" (62). It is
with Masculin fÈminin that Godard begins to extend his
perspective.
8. Dixon completes his account of this period in Godard's
work, during which the filmmaker realized that his
cinematic pedagogy would be most effective only with the
disruption and eventual abandonment of narrative, with
mention of "the revolutionary narrative of Le Week-end"
(88). The following chapter treats the most intensively
political work in Godard's career, the collaborative
efforts he undertook with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the
Dziga Vertov group. This is the work Dixon finds the
most interesting, even if it is less well-known than
Godard's early projects; at the outset of the book he
remarks, "Godard, it seems to me, has always functioned
best within the context of a collaborative enterprise,
and another critical project of this volume was the
acknowledgment of the considerable input both Anne-Marie
MiÈville and Jean-Pierre Gorin have had in Godard's
works" (xv-xvi). In chapter 3 we find an excellent
account of the making and the significance of Le
Week-end, in which Godard criticizes consumer society,
the role of the cinema in it, the commodification of
women's bodies, and imperialism. May 1968 moved Godard,
along with many other French intellectuals, to a
primarily political orientation, from which he
represented the activity of students and workers during
the upheavals of that month and presented them in a way
that had very little commercial viability. Dixon twice
notes with a certain admiration that this project, Un
film comme les autres (A Film Like All the Others;
1968), almost incited a riot at its New York premiere
(95, 104).
9. In the next chapter, on Godard's collaboration with
Anne-Marie MiÈville and the Sonimage Workshop, Dixon
continues his account of a Godard doing what he wishes
to do, with little regard for commercial success. Even
so, Passion (1982), PrÈnom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen,
1983), and Je vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary, 1985), some
of Godard's better-known films, belong to this period.
The most interesting turning point Dixon notes in this
chapter involves Je vous salue, Marie, the notorious
retelling of the story of the birth of Christ in a
contemporary setting that was widely protested by
Christian groups from a number of different sects. Dixon
writes that the charge of blasphemy and obscenity (a
"porny little flick," said one bishop who refused to see
the movie on that ground alone) "seems difficult to
support when one sees the film itself" (154). Indeed,
Dixon believes that "Godard, the hard-line Marxist of
the late 1960s and 1970s, was now in the mid-1980s
re-anchoring his faith in the divine" (154). He notes
that Godard undertook this project with "absolute
seriousness" and "intensity" (156). A professor lectures
in the film, arguing for the notion of a "divine
structure to all events on earth" (158); Dixon deems
that Godard is speaking through the professor.
This makes the furor of the religious right in this
matter all the more unfathomable; in Je vous salue,
Marie, Godard performs the astonishing feat of
bringing religion into the classroom, something
that fundamentalist Christians have been attempting
to do in recent years with great insistence. Godard
here has become their ally in this effort; it seems
to me altogether remarkable that so few have
noticed this. (158)
Dixon is not equating Godard's attitude with that of
fundamentalists, the religious right, or any organized
church group, but is rather attempting to examine the
ways in which Godard experiments with new perspectives
from which to address the problems that have always
obsessed him: "it seems that in three decades Godard has
worked through the personal and the political to come
back to the divine" (162).
10. In the fifth and last chapter, "Fin de CinÈma," Dixon
makes it quite evident that Godard remains politically
committed, especially to the politics of image
production in cultures that are increasingly bombarded
with all manner of images. Movies are always a matter of
money; and if Godard wants to continue his critique of
the Hollywood juggernaut and the omnipresence of "video
games and CD-ROM interactive programs" (195), he must be
willing to risk complete marginalization in the film
industry. Dixon presents an amusing anecdote of Godard's
response to the American filmmakers who usually give a
small nod to his greatness: for that quality, Godard
asks them to give him $10. The only American filmmaker
ever to make the contribution was Mel Brooks (207).
Dixon also mentions the way that Godard assures himself
an income as long as he is working, by building his
salary into the budget (206). Finally, "He has
transformed the cinema from a bourgeois medium of
popular entertainment into a zone of study, reflection,
and renewal" (209). The current system of production is
one in which large profit margins are required, most if
not all movies are seen primarily on video, and interest
in them is usually displaced by computerized imagery--in
short, in which the cinema has died. Godard nonetheless
continues a cinema that reflects on and analyzes this
death, looks at the old images in order to bring them
into the process of reflection, and so offers a kind of
rebirth for the production of the image. Dixon
concludes, "Godard thus belongs to both the old and the
new, the living and the dead, the sign and the
signifier, the domain of the creator and the realm of
the museum guide" (210). Godard offers a long and as yet
continuing sequence of images through which viewers may
come to grips with the functioning of the image, with
the death of the cinema.
11. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard is eminently readable and
highly engaging. It will be of great interest to those
who wish to learn about Godard and much of the aesthetic
of the French New Wave, as well as those who are already
well versed in these areas. The filmography Dixon
appends to the book, covering everything Godard did from
1954 to 1995 in great detail, will be invaluable to
anyone wishing to watch or study Godard's films. The
book is illustrated with numerous photos, stills, and
frames from Godard's projects; one of these is the basis
for a beautiful cover design using metallic grey and
black ink that thus maximizes SUNY Press's two-color
limitation. For the most part the book is well written,
but there are notable lapses in copyediting: twice the
word "cinematographic" is rendered as "cinema to
graphic," and there are a few overly long and not quite
grammatically correct sentences. These small problems
are a reflection not so much on the author as on the
requirement imposed on many university presses to run on
decreased subventions and increased profit margins--a
situation that one may reflect on in connection with the
vast commodification of artistic and intellectual
activity that both Jean-Luc Godard and Wheeler Winston
Dixon address so very effectively.
Department of Romance Languages
University of Vermont
hmelehy@zoo.uvm.edu
---------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT (c) 1998 BY HASSAN MELEHY. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE
WITH THE FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. ANY
USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES
THE CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.
THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE
AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT
ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO
AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO
BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE
FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO
PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.
---------------------------------------------------------
Référence: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.198/8.2.r_melehy