Jean-Luc Godard
A rebel artist that has been lauded as the biggest name in cinematic history since Lumiere and Welles. He was the prime figure in the new wave of French cinema that emphasized personal style, and the creation of movies that express the director's personality, style and thoughts rather than external entertainment values and rules. This method of auteur film-making is commonplace today but was taken to an extreme during the height of the new-wave, sometimes creating movies that were purely personal statements and explorations (Philippe Garrel was the most extreme). Godard entered the film-making scene in 1960 with Bout de Souffle using hand-held cameras, wild jump-cut editing, youthful undisciplined energy, whimsical narrative, exploratory cinema with people in the street as subjects, and other unconventional techniques and has since then explored and deconstructed cinema in every way possible. His movies were technically ground-breaking and intensely fascinating to cineasts, and they progressed through various stages, increasing in inscrutability, personal musings and intellectual esoterica while minimizing narrative.
At first, his movies were primarily marked with various self-aware and deconstructive techniques such as using filming, framing, soundtrack and lighting techniques that break conventions, summarizing pieces of the story or genre instead of narrating them, catching key moments of a cliched plot and dissecting them, winking and talking to the audience, showing the same scene more than once in various ways, using plain settings and characters to act out big-movie cliches, etc. All this usually keeps the viewer aware that he is watching a movie and explores or spoofs a genre through its elements instead of telling a story. After a while this became known as Godard's cinematic shorthand. Although all this meta-technique excited jaded movie buffs and caught people's attention, it often gives the impression of being rebelliously showy or merely exploratory (with a few exceptions like 'My Life to Live' or 'Alphaville') and served to alienate most audiences instead of involving them. His other trademarks include (often irrelevant) injections of political, artistic, or social musings, obscure references, anti-American polemics and numerous cryptic visuals or references.
After a prolific decade of cinematic deconstruction, there was a decade (67-78) of political documentaries and didactic Maoist manifestos with endless political preaching masquerading as technical cinematic experiments. This was followed by a final period where his movies became mere backdrops to his personal and often cryptic contemplations, wordplays, mental workouts, rants and political commentaries, and the actors became mouthpieces and delivery devices for his random thoughts and aphorisms, so even the cineasts started ignoring him. After the late 80s, Godard's movies presented purely intellectual explorations of ideas, employing a very French technique of making waves with provocative thoughts and dialectics. These rapid-fire injections and a lack of narrative often gives the impression of a challenging intellectual art film, but these musings are more often than not intellectual hot air, and comparing notes often leads to contradictions and chaos. Many of his observations are easily understandable but logically wrong, and most of the movies fail to weave a compelling connecting thread between these thoughts, opting for whimsical and unrewarding intellectual exercise instead, and prompting thinking audiences to come up with their own observations.
Listed here are only his most impenetrable or strange, excluding most of his monotonous political experiments and challenging philosophical film-essays, although almost all his films feature elements of whimsical playfulness, disjointed deconstruction, and meandering didactic intellectualism.
A humorous satiric blend of film-noir (complete with a serious, trenchcoat-clad detective), and sci-fi. An inter-galactic agent tracking down a professor lands in Alphaville where words like love and conscience have been banned and everyone is slave to machines and logic. Rebels are exterminated and chopped up in a swimming pool by synchronized swimmers, and the dictionary has replaced the bible. The big joke and cinematic stunt is that no special effects were used, Alphaville is Paris, and his space ship is a car. Added to the mix is Godard's usual slew of obscure references and in-jokes. Probably the most entertaining film Godard ever made but that's not saying too much.
Experimental but mostly understandable political essay by Godard on the French so-called revolutionaries and students of Communism and Mao. Political views, aphorisms, quotes, and musings on Socialism vs Capitalism and Imperialism are thrown about didactically while students physically act out and demonstrate abstract ideas using music, scores of red books, patriotic sunglasses, fake blood, gestures, etc. The more interesting and amusing aspect of this film is the attack on armchair revolutionaries, or worked-up students who make declarations and occasionally try to start terrorism but are basically lost, resulting in both scathing verbal attacks by more mature thinkers, and aburdly humorous scenes like a botched assassination due to a mental burp.
One of the better latter-day movies by Godard exploring the dynamics between man and woman and relationships between people as practical business deals. A rich countess heavily involved in business almost runs over a man, picks him up and develops a relationship with him which becomes doomed when he turns out to be useless. After she coldly lets him drown to death, his much more confident and strong twin appears and develops a much stronger relationship with her. The relationship between rich and poor is also explored as a financial and social contract, love and romance are used as contrast, and women are often portrayed as receiving ideas and direction from men. This theme is interesting, but unfortunately not developed enough and most of the movie revolves around the usual Godard intellectual ramblings, quotes from books, and random aphorisms, most of which I strongly disagree with as usual.
A unique Godard creation from his Maoist years with relatively strong and lucid ideas. Godard attacks the family, the relationship between man and woman, government and worker, strong governments and weaker countries, and the status of woman. Everything is hierarchical, one higher, the other lower, behind and in front, number one and number two, with number two becoming anally raped and constipated. Family vs. workplace, landscape vs. factory, or is it an illusion? Who is the boss of whom and what have we done with intimacy and sex? Godard breaks taboos, mixing pornography and politics, involving children within the family's sex life, what about parent and child? Is the boss happy? What does the unliberated woman do when she is constipated and everything turns to merde? All this is filmed as a video inside a movie, with Godard and us as detached voyeurs seeing life through machines via our mechanic eyes, wrapping it all in a theme of man vs. machine and raising the question of who is running whom. Interesting stuff, despite the fact that I don't agree with most of it.
Pierrot escapes his dull society life with a babysitter who is being chased by hit-men. They live a strange life together while running for their lives. Idiosyncratic dialogue and seemingly whimsical changes in lighting, coloring and pace afflict this movie as if Godard was trying to loosely abstract ideas and cinema with directing and acting ad-libs. An eccentric exercise in story, cinema and cliche deconstruction that some intellectuals claim to have marked the end of cinema. Possibly the last purely entertaining movie by Godard after which he became more focused on politics and didactics.
A diatribe against Capitalism using exaggerations of decadence, violence, apathy, racism, patricide, chaos, greed, lust, cannibalism, and even endless traffic jams! The attack is direct, eschewing sutlety and symbolism, but the atmosphere, characters and direction are all pure Godard with obscure humor, self-aware film-making and the usual slew of aphorisms, this time mostly political.
Completely impenetrable collection of random musings, tangents, dialogue and visuals against the backdrop of actors trying to shoot a film in Bosnia in the middle of a war (causing violent obstacles), somehow connecting war and art and exploring the effect (or lack thereof) of art on the world. I can't even begin to describe this useless chaotic mess. Basically a freeform representation of the flickering synapses in Godard's head.
A montage of film and documentary snippets, quotes, musical clips, literature, historical datums, etc. related to Germany while Lemmy Caution from Alphaville wanders around the country as an ex-undercover spy with nothing to do, searching to cross the non-existing wall to West Germany. This is linked somehow to a theme of solitude, the solitude of the individual and the state, its unique history and culture, now corrupted by the West and the cursed decadence of Capitalism. I got nothing out of this aimless movie from an angry man. A montage in itself is not educational and neither are whimsical rants.
A modern setting for the tale of Mary's immaculate conception which caused a controversy and a ban from the church. But the approach is neither blasphemous nor spiritual, only an intellectual exploration of the concept of the sublime as expressed in the mundane and the physical. Mary is an sportswoman, her boyfriend is a taxi driver, her father works at a gas station, and one day she gets pregnant despite being a virgin. What follows is a lot of arthouse existential navel-gazing and poetic musings on the body vs the soul, copious nudity with attempts to find the sublime in an average human's body and genitalia (bringing to mind a Catherine Breillat movie), tangents on the creation of the universe and mathematics to explore possible spiritual sources of physical existence, and so on. Explorative but unrewarding; Just some half-baked meandering intellectual questioning.
An endlessly rambling movie focusing (sometimes) on the various stages of love and how these affect young, adult and old people. An important theme is that everything needs a context, usually a historical or contrasting one. This, of course, gives Godard another excuse to launch a tirade against the USA and its lack of historical awareness (so much so that they have to buy it from others and change it). Some of the scattered reflections in this essay are thought-provoking but most are either cryptic, nonsensical or even hypocritical and pretentious. The typically jarring visuals and editing techniques are even more confusing than usual. A mess.
Is this what happens when a maverick intellectual film-maker tries his hand at silly slapstick? Made in the same year as the insane King Lear, and continuing the trend since Every Man for Himself to misanthropically depict a chaotic world populated by crazies, perverts and idiots, this bizarre experiment seems to be attacking the process of creating art amidst a crazy world by turning it into a crazy comedy. Like Sympathy for the Devil, this movie splices footage of a techno-pop band creating songs with other random footage that interested Godard at the time. Here we get Godard as a bumbling Idiot Prince carrying shiny reels of a film he put together to please a producer who demands a movie in 24 hours. He bumbles his way into a sports car that seems impossible to get into, through an airport with strange rules, and into a chaotic airplane where the pilot is contemplating suicide and the passengers hop from one seat to another fondling each other while reading literature. In the meantime, we follow the nonsensical adventures of a bizarre 'Individual' who tries to please his boss with strange antics, gardens a car, caddies for a man who uses golf to flirt with women, dances with a naked ghost, and other random oddities. Add to this Godard's typical random quotes or musings on creation, love and death and you have one extremely chaotic and silly movie.
Possibly Godard's most insane, headache-inducing and inscrutable movie. A descendant of Shakespeare is on a quest to restore and understand lost art, King Learo is a mafioso with a daughter Cordelia who has three symbolic fathers rather then the other way around, Godard is a weird rastafarian professor who speaks from the side of his mouth, Mr Alien is the editor Woody Allen, a mysterious girl in a miniskirt occasionally shakes her ass at the camera, a white horse appears, loud seagulls and random sounds plague the soundtrack, people play with sparklers while philosophizing about images and reality, and various other random scenes and dialogue with snippets of Shakespeare's play weave in and out of this mess. The movie sometimes explores the nature of reality and our relationship and connection to it via images and sounds, linking this to Cordelia's virtue of nothingness and Lear's fears, some may extract other meanings from this movie, others don't even try, but I prefer to believe that Godard was playing a joke on his commercial-minded producers.
5 artsy short films very loosely based on the theme of love and anger. The middle one is by Godard who does his typically difficult, didactic deconstruction by having one couple watch and comment on a movie that seems to be about lovers, sex and nudity (representing various governments, policies and reasons for war and revolution) but it 'lies' and manipulates using visual tricks, hiding underlying anger and evil. The other inscrutable avant-garde short is by Bertolucci who has a theatre group perform bizarre rituals while an elder is dying, after which he is dressed in religious garb. The rest are: A juxtaposition of a happy-go-lucky young man with a flower mixed with war footage (Pasolini), violence and indifference in a regular city that seems full of life, and a student debate with Marxists about various authoritarian systems that make use of justified abuse.
A nonsensical political thriller filmed in parallel with the much more straightforward and thought-provoking philosophical essay 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her', with the occasional hijacking of some thoughts from that movie. It's as if Godard had gotten tired of narrative and plot by now and had much more important things on his mind, so he took a political thriller about a merciless writer and killer who seems to be investigating a murder of her friend, and replaced the dialogue with non-sequiturs or improvisational nonsense about secrets, murders, revolution, conspiracy, spycraft, codes, underground journalism, detective work and mystery. In between this Rivette-like improvisational nonsense that toys with the thriller genre, we get revolutionary statements attacking both the right and the left, and visual statements about the emptiness of everything by applying garish colors on top of dilapidated settings, the title of the movie pointing to the USA as a symptom of this deplorable state. Another unrewarding mess by Godard.
A completely impenetrable and abstruse meditative movie by Godard. The first part meditates on the past, heritage, myth and religion and how the past and our spiritual passions deteriorate over the generations. Then there's a mythical exploration of love, godliness and their delinquency in a tale that makes no sense, and which is told in snippets from different time-narratives spliced with insanely confusing tangents and odd scenes that go nowhere: A publisher's investigations leads him to a missing woman, who once had an argument with her husband, who, in turn, was physically possessed by a god (a trenchcoat-wearing stranger with a bizarre gravelly voice) who wanted to make love to and be loved by the man's wife. The result is an extremely confusing piece revolving around a modern-day myth, dealing with themes of divinity, heritage and love, with random scenes of cruel acts on women, impenetrable metaphysical musings, endless abstruse dialogue, a philosophical and pretentious seduction scene, and a meditative atmosphere. What a headache. No wonder Depardieu looks lost here. And of course, yet again, critics are obviously confused and have no specific insight to share on this movie, yet are all in awe of the naked Emperor and his meditative mood.
A sequel of sorts to For Ever Mozart. A film in three parts: The first is Hell, consisting of a colorful symphony of war images and music. The second is Purgatory where Godard and various other characters meet in Bosnia to muse about random subjects (i.e. more Godard mouthpieces), the important themes being war, violence, aggressors vs. victims, revolutionaries vs. idealists, enemies vs. co-sufferers, and the symmetry of opposites that depend on each other. This is linked to film-making techniques. The third part is a silly forest paradise where one of the characters finds herself after having blown herself up for peace. In other words, an anti-war movie that hates war for servicing evil goals instead of good ones. Hypocritical nonsense. Also included are the usual bizarre tangents, musings, incoherent dialogue, anti-Israel and America rants, snippets of thoughts and mental masturbations. Godard only seems impenetrable because he talks nonsense.
More incoherent ramblings, this time on the themes of work, film-making, the passionate search for something to love and how this relates to real life and fake art. A film-maker shoots striking live reproductions of classic paintings that exude breathtaking beauty but that are reproduced dispassionately. They commit some random actions, ramble on about nothing in particular, argue about other irrelevant topics and take their clothes off periodically, all holding potentially passionate content but performed apathetically to make a point. Pretentious, mostly explorative, and aimless.
Extreme idiosyncrasy posing as a comedy. Amongst the numerous whims given free reign in this muddle is the story of a revolutionary girl holding up banks and hotels, using a lunatic Godard as a front, pretending to be filming a documentary in order to help their plans. During one holdup, this girl shoots it out with a policeman until they fall in lust, and lust is soon replaced with rejection and obsession. Intercut with this seemingly simple but playful story is a group of people rehearsing some Beethoven, numerous scenes of the ocean, Godard and others of the crew appearing to comment on the way the story is going, and the usual eccentric jokes, aphorisms and highly idiosyncratic dialogue. A crime movie and the making of a crime movie explored, turned inside out, and deconstructed ad infinitum, ad absurdum and ad nauseum.