Jean-Luc Godard: 1930-2022
Trond Lundemo
Jean-Luc Godard decided to end his life on Sept. 13. According to his family, he was not ill but exhausted. In many of the hundreds of obituaries written these last days, the death of Godard is equated with the death of cinema. Such a dramatic statement depends on what one understands as ‘cinema’ today, but no other director has personified cinema as an art form and as a mode of thinking as Godard. What disappears with Godard is the bond to cinema history in the present.
Godard wrote history in moving images through quotation and montage. If Godard is known to the general public as one of the initiators of the French New Wave, his work that has spurred most academic and critical discourse is the video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). The eight episodes not only writes the history and the stories of cinema, but of the whole Western 20th Century. This is done through the quotations and montage of film clips, literary excerpts, pieces of music, paintings, etc. Godard pursues this technique also in the national histories of France (2 x 50 ans de cinéma français), Germany (Allémagne 90 neuf zéro) and the Soviet Union (Les enfants jouent à la Russie). His last film distributed in the cinemas (but of course not in Sweden) is Livre d’image (2018), which revisits the Histoire(s) project through highly distorted digital formats.
These later history projects are not disconnected from Godard’s beginnings in the New Wave, however. This generation of filmmakers, among whom Godard was the last, were the first to think of their work historically. The historical approach came from the fact that they didn’t come from the film industry, as previous generations, but from the cinema. They were shaped by the screenings by Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque française, from where they proceeded to write film criticism at the Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s.
The legendary archive curator Langlois is famous for the archival position of privileging screening over preservation, which may have been detrimental to some film prints but was very stimulating for the French film culture. Through Langlois, together with his disciples Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, etc., cinema became a way of thinking and a way of living. The key role of cinema for this generation of cinephiles can be exemplified by the riots and demonstrations caused by minister of culture André Malraux when he fired Langlois in early 1968. The protests forced Malraux to re-install Langlois, who could jokingly brag about having started the May 68 events in France (which is not totally untrue).
Langlois’ position as the personification of cinema as a mode of life and thinking was soon exported to other countries and formed a global cinephilia in the post-war years. Upon Langlois’ premature death in 1977 at the age of 62, it fell on Godard to take on his legacy. Godard came to embody cinema like none other, even if had left conventional filmmaking in the Maoist years, and continued in video and television during the 70s. This relay is demonstrated by a series of screenings and talks by Godard at the Montreal Cinémathèque in 1978. When Langlois dies, Godard continues where he left off, already making a historiographic montage in programming excerpts from canonical films together with one of his own for each event. The ensuing discussions after the screenings are published as Introduction à une veritable histoire du cinéma (1980), and this project is in many ways the beginning of the Histoire(s) series. When Godard terminated his life on September 13, it was this pseudo-religious legacy of the embodiment of cinema stretching back to Langlois that ended. But this legacy may also be what has kept him alive until he was almost 92.
The Medium is the Message
Godard also embodied the shifting techniques and dispositives of cinema history. He started out with the light and portable film equipment which enabled the new waves in his short films of the 1950s and feature films of the 1960. The films made together with Jean-Pierre Gorin, or the Groupe Dziga Vertov as they called themselves post-68, were mostly shot on 16 mm, until Godard turns to video with Numéro deux in 1975. He will continue with video for the rest of the 1970s, until he returns to 35 mm film in 1979. For the rest of his filmmaking, Godard will always work on video in parallel with film, until the dispositives converge in Digital Video in 2010’s Film Socialisme. Always keen to explore new technologies, Godard shoots Adieu au langage (2014) in digital 3D, breaking up the illusory depth of the conventional use of the technique. His first use of Digital Video, in the second half of Eloge de l’amour (2001) completely estranges the technique through colour grading.
Where younger generations have adapted to the new techniques of digital video in a media unconscious way, adopting the technology simply as a tool, Godard has always probed the political dimensions of the dispositives he takes on. The use of 16 mm in the Vertov years served fast and cheap productions where little funding could be obtained, and also facilitated distribution outside cinemas for political struggles. Godard teamed up with the technician of cinema Jean-Pierre Beauviala to create a camera that could serve another image politics, and he went to Mozambique after the revolution in order to implement a technology that would allow for a revolutionary aesthetics in TV, and not just reproducing the bourgeois TV of the West.
When he leaves the militant and often dogmatic cinema of the Vertov years, he moves to analog video in order to film in ordinary people’s small apartments and work places, which also allows for a dissemination in the same places. Gender politics is a key topic of many of these works. Digital video is a medium of estrangement and distortion in Godard’s work, rather just a new tool for making the same images. The distorted cellphone shots at the Costa Concordia cruise boat (later to famously capsize outside the Italian coast), where Alain Badiou gives an unattended lecture(!) in Film Socialisme, or the jerky excerpts from films in Livre d’image, could perhaps only have been made by someone from the nouvelle vague. (Agnes Varda had the same qualities in her digital video films from the 2000s, starting with Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)).
Godard is for these reasons the filmmaker setting the agenda for much of the 1970s ‘apparatus’ theory, and remains a key point of orientation for a media archaeological approach today. Godard is not the last political filmmaker – he has a neighbour in his village Rolle in Switzerland called Jean-Marie Straub – but hardly any political filmmaker in the proper sense, i.e. someone who also reflects on the political functions of the dispositives they use, have not had to grapple with Godard’s image politics at one point. Godard’s axiom of not only making political films, but also to make films politically, targets exactly this: how do the productions technologies of images condition work relations, power structures and gender relations?
Godard’s transgressions of dispositives also includes a venture into the exhibition format in Centre Pompidou in 2006. A typically difficult project, which got its curator Dominique Païni fired in the process, is also a kind of history of cinema, and consequently of the 20th Century. Three sections of the exhibition were structured historically (‘avant-hier’, ‘hier’ and ‘aujourd’hui’) but not chronologically to revisit several themes of the Histoire(s) project. A documentation of the exhibition together with a group of presentations and testimonies from collaborators upon his death can be found here: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/videos/video/demain-a-partir-de-18h30-hommage-a-jean-luc-godard-en-direct During the last years there have also been installations made of his Livre d’image film, where sequences are presented on screens in an exhibition space.
In spite of his advanced age, Godard was still active when he died. As it is revealed in an interview in April 2020, just after Covid-19 struck, he was working on a project together with his collaborator during the last years, Fabrice Aragno. This film has not been released, so we may yet have a new Godard film in store for us.
Godard’s take on the Covid virus was one of communications theory, as a kind of germ producing noise in technical media. Godard elaborates further on Covid as viral communication in one of his last interviews, on the occasion of his reception of a lifetime award by the International Film Festival in Kerala (India) in 2021.
Godard’s staging of himself as an old man of cinema, chain-smoking his cigars, in these interviews, is moving and generous. Godard has often included himself in many of his own films, especially from the 1980s on, but he also announces his own demise in the closing comments of Livre d’image, producing an ominous caughing fit both in the French and German commentary versions. But Godard’s final self-fashioning came in a film not directed by himself. In See You Friday, Robinson (2022), Iranian filmmaker Mitra Farahani sets up an exchange between Godard and 99-year old Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan through video files sent between their homes in England and Rolle. Godard sends a short video every Friday, and we see him folding his laundry, struggling mounting the stairs in his house, or just looking into the camera drinking his watered-down wine. That is the farewell of M. Cinema.
Trond Lundemo is a Professor in Film Studies at Stockholm University. He is co-editor of the book series "Film Theory in Media History” at Amsterdam University Press, and contributor to numerous conferences and volumes on the work of Jean-Luc Godard.
