The hour-long film looks at his life, through his work, in a way that any Godard fan would want to see.
One of the great paradoxes of Jean-Luc Godard is that he was a radical, a maverick, a director who kept his purity and always looked askance at “the system”, but because the essence of making films requires a lot of money, and is associated with fame and creates images that can be circulated with iconic power, Godard was an outsider who was also an insider; cinema poet-turned-celebrity; an artist who overcame the larger-than-life ethos of the old school of movies with the prohibitive imperatives of the avant-garde.
This whole contradiction is laid out fully, with a sweet kind of resonance, in Godard par Godard, an hour-long documentary written by Frédéric Bono and directed by Florence Platharets, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival today as a tribute to Godard, eight months after his death on September 13, 2022. The documentary was screened alongside Godard’s latest film, the 20-minute “Trailer for the Movie That Will Never Exist: Filthy Wars.” It all sounds like one of those Cannes specials. , but the opposite: this is a program that should have been seen by the world at large, and with any luck it will be distributed in this way. It is a tribute that invites us to look back, with tender fascination, at all the cinema that Godard gave us and at who he really was.
In 1960, when he released Breathless, the nimble, rebellious postmodern gangster film that Francois Truffaut, in one of the documentary’s many clips, hailed as the greatest first film ever made (along with Citizen Kane), Godard was catapulted into the brightly lit pop-culture marquee of the new film revolution. And he himself will become as much a part of it as his films.
Godard, who flirted with acting early on, knows how to play himself. For years, he gave hundreds of interviews, sitting in front of the camera like the beautiful frowning art star that he was. “Godard par Godard” brings together an incredible array of archival footage that even most Godard fans have probably never seen: glimpses from the set of Godard filming his 1960s classics, a director who is both casual and meticulous, or scenes of him wandering the streets and cafés of Paris with a cigarette in hand, plus a cornucopia of television interviews in which he presents himself in that earnest, austere way—the dark glasses he never took off, the delicate beauty, punctuated by that cleft chin, the unmistakable voice (so calm but with a hint of trepidation in it, a haunting rumble of passion), the smart jackets and the wicked smile that began to disappear around 1966 as he became more extreme in his ardent conceptual Marxist self-must-destroy-the-cinema-to-save-it absolutism, and he began to look dark and a little desperate, like a bandit on the run.
There is great footage from the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, when Truffaut and Godard, shouting at reporters as they both commanded the spotlight, insisted that the festival itself should be closed in solidarity with French workers and students who were had combined to create a mythic moment known—and romanticized by bourgeois followers everywhere—as May ’68. May 1968 was a workers’ uprising, but it was also a social pantomime of an uprising that was only for itself. It transformed – and, in some ways, damaged – Godard, convincing him that he was at the forefront of a far more radical shake-up of cinema and society than himself.
Godard for Godard is structured around a chronological presentation of Godard’s films. There are no talking-head interviews, except for what we see in the old black-and-white clips — or, decades later, Godard on “The Dick Cavett Show.” But in every movie, from Breathless to A Woman Is a Woman, from Contempt to La Chinoise, from Tout va Bien to Numéro Deux to First Name: Carmen to JLG/ JLG — Self-Portrait in December’, the film creates a vivid image of where Godard was when he made each film. Florence Platarec’s achievement is that she elevates the filmography of a snapshot into a spiritual biography.
The film overflows with fresh details. We all know about “Breathless” and the jump, but “Godard par Godard” gives you an idea of how the film was improvised and how Godard used every technique – wide-angle close-ups, handheld tracking shots – that you didn’t have to. Overnight, he replaced the restrictions of the cinema with something free.
But Godard had his own limitations. There’s an interview with Anna Karina when they were married partners in art and life, in which she talks about how she couldn’t change a word of Jean-Luc’s scripts, even though she says he worked so closely with his actors , that they become life partners. There’s an amazing sequence where we see the dance scene from The Outsider Gang as it was being filmed… in a cafe full of civilians! Godard talks about how Brigitte Bardot’s nude scenes in Contempt were done to please the film’s American distributor (but Godard turned exploitation into art) and describes how his whole impulse was to fuse documentary with fiction. We see him being interviewed on the beach in Cannes, talking about how much he hates enlarged photos.
There was a moment in the 1960s when Godard began to do what Dylan did: he used the press’s silly questions to turn his answers into performance art. He was saying, “You are all part of the system. I’m not.” And he wasn’t; he had abandoned the system. But the system abandoned him too. As he grows into middle age, you can see him go through the five stages of alienation until he comes out the other side. Appearing on the Cavett Show , to promote his comeback, with the 1980 film titled Slow Motion (released in the United States as Every Man for Himself), he’s actually pretty hot. He dismisses the idea that he’s ever gone, but says he’s done with grief and also that the new film, his “second first film,” is the first in which he expresses who he really is.
I think he’s kidding himself (his 60s movies were just as personal), but his new life is infectious and fuels the rest of his career. “Godard par Godard” follows the director in the 2000s, when he’s holed up in his Swiss bunker and his work becomes more complicated than ever. Yet he seemed content to live outside the net of movie fame, smoking his cigars and preaching to a diminished choir.
Speaking of which, Trailer for the Movie That Will Never Exist: Filthy Wars would be a minor curiosity if it weren’t positioned as Jean-Luc Godard’s final testament. It’s unlike anything he’s done before: a series of collaged photos, many with printed aphorisms, each collage mounted on a piece of white Canon cardboard. You could call the film a clever version of The Complete Godard. Here is “our war”, here is May 68, here are thoughts like “But the most important thing is that there are no adults”, here is his plan for a film about the revolution, built around the writings of Leon Trotsky’s heretic-turned-assistant. And here Godard ends the film by describing something that is “rented to what is not yet the Jewish Agency.” Yes, these are the last words in the career of Jean-Luc Godard. Make of them what you will.
Personally, I never knew what to make of Godard. To me he is a mystery, a muse, a symbol of what made me want to merge with the movies, an artist so confusing that he often left me infuriated, and an artist so powerful that he forged the very soul of modern cinema. What did it all mean? Only Godard knows.