GODARD: Les carabiniers (1963)

Godard has always been a filmmaker who pays as much attention to the politics behind his work as the images in his work. Les carabiniers (The Riflemen), his fifth film, displays this dualism at work, criticizing the act of war and the politics of nationalism and imperialism while at the same time interrogating the aesthetics of the war and anti-war film.

The story of Les carabiniers is fable-like in its simplicity. Ulysses and Michelangelo are two peasants living on a wasteland with a mother and daughter, Cleopatra and Venus. Two riflemen come to their shack and convince Ulysses and Michelangelo to join the army and fight for the King, seducing them with all the riches in the world. They go to war, sending letters home to Cleopatra and Venus. However, when they finally get home, they find that their rewards are not quite how they imagined them.

Les carabiniers did not do well on release, and it isn’t hard to imagine why. It is gritty, nasty, plotless, ugly, the characters are vulgar stereotypes, the events are shocking, the soundtrack is a constant barrage of explosions and gunfire. It is an angry, abrasive little film, but it chooses its targets with intelligence and its critique and the way this critique is made are fascinating.

Ulysses and Michelangelo are promised everything, from money to the monuments of the world to any sadistic little wish they may want to carry out. The criticism is obvious – any horror is permissible in war – but it also alludes to colonialism in its acknowledgement of the gleeful seizure of lands and property regardless of the human toll it may take and to nationalism in the blindness with which Ulysses and Michelangelo gets suckered into signing up for the war. Given these characters’ grotty and aimless existences at the beginning of the film, it is clear that king and country have not done anything for them so far, and is unlikely to do anything in the future. Indeed, the extended punchline of all of this is that the two soldiers return home only with photos of their promised rewards – pointing towards the illusionary nature of all nationalism and, by extension, colonial gains. By the end of the film, the country has erupted into what seems like several distinct civil wars between the republicans, the democrats, the communists, the anarchists, the state and the army. The film ends on a disused, ugly bus shelter in which Ulysses and Michelangelo are shepherded and gunned down.

The film’s critique of war suggests that the men and women who fight are not those who receive the rewards and the acclaim and that it is not in their interests to fight their king’s wars. But the film also holds a critique of the aesthetics of the war film. The film is fractured, loud, uncomfortable viewing and the war scenes are intentionally choppy and confused. Godard opts for short scenes of sadistic war crimes rather than some grand narrative of war. Godard’s point is that war films, like action films, entertain an audience when they should be horrifying them. Compare the battle scenes in Les carabiniers to the same in Saving Private Ryan, in which the violence is certainly horrible but the film does allow the war to have a heroic and redemptive quality. War films tend to validate war even as they criticize it. Les carabiniers then, because it denies the audience a fluid narrative line with which to understand and digest the war on screen (even down to the simple cutting between weapon fired and damaged caused), can be said to be a truly anti-war film.

It even goes so far as to suggest, in the scene inside the cinema in which Michelangelo is fooled by the projection while everyone around him silently imbibes whatever the screen throws at them, the brainwashing nature of cinema and the need to engage intellectually with what is being shown. As such, Les carabiniers is a distancing and confrontational film, a bombardment of ugliness and noise, but all to an extremely moral purpose. There is nothing enjoyable or aesthetically pleasing about this war, nothing cathartic, nothing whatsoever to validate the horrors onscreen – because this film is truly a pacifist one.

With Les carabiniers, Godard unites form and message to create one sustained and powerful critique, which will make one rethink one’s opinions about wars past, present and future as well as rewatch war films looking for the signs that they are as much pro- as anti-war. It is one of Godard’s most difficult sixties films and one of the hardest to like, but it is one of real intellectual rigour - with this film, Godard could not be dismissed as just a stylist. Despite being one of Godard’s least financially successful films, it is one of his most important early films.

Up next was Le Mepris

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GODARD: Vivre sa vie (1962)

Vivre sa vie is split novelistically into twelve distinct parts, each detailing Nana’s (Anna Karina) descent into prostitution through economic necessity and what happens after. No other Godard film, to my knowledge, is as committed to realism as this one is, both social and emotional and in terms of form. In some ways then, it can be considered the truest of Godard’s films and the saddest.

Nana is a young woman who harbours ambitions to be an actress. These dreams have not come into being and Nana, dissatisfied, leaves her husband Paul (Andre S. Labarthe) and tries to make it on her own. She has no cash and no one she knows can lend her any money – she has to cadge a cinema ticket of Paul and her landlady locks her out of her apartment. Following an unsuccessful attempt at petty crime, Nana is forced to take up prostitution.

Karina gives her best performance for Godard here, playing a woman who is still young but who knows even at this early stage that she has failed to do what she wants to do with her life. Karina brings out this frustration and disappointment and, after she becomes a prostitute, self-loathing brilliantly. In one scene, Nana rambles about her newfound economic independence and her responsibility for herself, pretending that she is happy, only for her face to suddenly dissolve into silent, choking unhappiness in the instant that she runs out of words. Then she silently watches a couple across the café. These two moments together are amongst the most moving that Godard ever achieved. We do not know what Nana is thinking when she looks at this couple – it could be that she is thinking of her own loneliness, it could be that, since the man seems to be a little cold, that she is thinking about her comfort depends on such taciturn men, showing her feelings of independence as a delusion. What is significant in this moment is that Godard holds back on the tricks and delivers a ‘straight’ moment of performance and drama.

Other parts of the film are more experimental, but the experimentation is muted here in favour of a depiction of the state of prostitution in France and the lot for the women who do it. One part of the film belongs squarely to documentary – Anna questions her pimp Raoul (Sady Rebbot) about the laws and practices of prostitution and he replies coldly and scientifically about how the job works and the laws that need to be followed. It is a dehumanising sequence, displaying how stark the options are for those who do this job. Godard frequently films Karina in close-up in profile and in low light, detailing stages of her descent in her face. This culminates in a scene towards the end of the film in which Godard reads in voiceover Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ to Nana, a story and the theme of the film about a man who is an artist and the woman he loves. A brief insight into their marriage (on the rocks at this point) and an examination of how the films have got in the way of their love. It is also another example of a woman subjugated by a man. The film concludes then with a stark and sudden, powerfully undramatic sequence detailing Nana’s betrayal by Raoul and her death at the hands of two uncaring men. The film ends with her body on the street, the camera suddenly tilting down, giving Nana an ascension that nevertheless must remain ruthlessly in the gutter.

The battle between Nana’s emotions and the reality of her existence plays out underneath the main current of the film. We see Nana’s trying to overcome her self-disgust – just as we see attempts to live as if nothing is wrong despite the embarrassment of asking friends for money and trying to hide from her landlady. Her moments of happiness are rare and usually tainted. She dances alone to some music in a pool hall and despite her loneliness and the fact that the three men ignore her. We watch her dance, not caring if it’s sad, happy despite everything – and then Godard cuts to her POV – we see now the bare, ugly room, the unpleasantness of her journey and the faces of the men who ignore her. Like the singing scene in Une Femme est une femme, Godard shows the disconnect between how the character feels and where the character is, though here we are left more with the impression of denial rather than irrepressible joy. In another moment, we see her happy with a young man, a man she incidentally picks up at the pool hall. She talks of ending her life as a prostitute and returning to normality and yet we know she won’t be happy. The young man refuses to leave the apartment and prefers to read ‘The Oval Portrait’ to her from a book he has just happened to find. The only time Nana is happy without consequence is, intriguingly, when she goes to the cinema to see Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and experiences a transcendent moment of (self-)recognition.

Vivre sa vie was an experimental film – its direct sound, long takes and lateral, arbitrary but direct camerawork were rarely seen – but here the technique and the form of the film work towards and heighten the film’s tragedy, rather than commenting ironically on it. Vivre sa vie is one of Godard’s most moving and soberest films, one in which it seems that Godard’s primary focus was on his wife’s performance and the plight of the prostitute. It would be foolish to read the film as feminist necessarily, but it does recognise the difficulties of an economically deprived woman who wants to be independent in a man’s world. In one moment, Nana is paid by a client who then wants another woman. Nana gets the woman for him and when she asks what she is to do, she is told to do nothing and just remain seated. Nana sits, immobilised, in low lighting and in profile and when the film’s theme plays, it is a quietly heart-breaking image of a woman in invisible chains.

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GODARD: Un Femme est une femme (1961)

Having improvised a feature debut with unprecedented artistic freedom and making a hit of it, and having made a follow-up which nearly ruined his filmmaking career in France, Godard moved straight on to Une Femme est une femme (released here as A Woman is a Woman), which may be seen as an uneasy synthesis of his previous two films as well as marking a further innovation in Godard’s cinema.

Une Femme est une femme was sold as an extravagant musical comedy in the Lubitsch mode, but it was a film that arguably challenged its audience much more than À bout de soufflé and Le Petit Soldat. Angela (Anna Karina) works in a strip club and is married to Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy). She decides that she wants a baby, but Emile is not interested, and insists that they get married first. In the ensuing argument, Angela announced that she will find someone else to give her a baby if her husband won’t. This declaration threatens to ruin their marriage, which is further complicated by the appearance of Emile’s best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is more than happy to help Angela out.

A synopsis of the film may sound like the plot of a risqué musical comedy – indeed something that Lubitsch, named during the opening credits, might have made. However, Godard’s intentions seem to be more serious than that, even if the loud Hollywood musical score suggests different. The film begins with a challenging confusion of sound. Angela walks into a café, goes to the jukebox and puts on a record. As she leaves, she winks slyly at the camera. However, when she steps out of the café and onto the busy street, there is near total silence – no score and not even the sound of traffic and pedestrians, only the sound of Angela’s footsteps. The next shot has direct sound – engines, horns, shouting. We cut to a high angle shot and there is silence again and then the shrill opening bars of a sentimental score. These sudden juxtapositions in sound are jarring, bewildering, even irritating, and they will continue throughout the film, but they can be seen to serve a purpose.

Angela states early in the film that she wants to be in a musical – to move from talk and drama suddenly into an exuberant musical number and vice versa – and the film does play as a film that wants to be a musical, but has real life to contend with. The soundtrack then may represent a battle between the drudgery of the real and the emotions of the Hollywood film. Indeed, the first instance, when Angela leaves the music of the café for the silence of the street, feels foreboding and sad – something is lost. However, after this shot and the following shot with raw city sounds, we return to hope (and possibly inside the character’s mind) – the sound elevating the raw footage to something magical. These shots, right at the front of the film, makes it clear that the film is about the opposition between fiction and reality, music and silence, our dreams and our lives.

The seediness of real life and the innocence of the musical is brought out further inside the strip club. When Angela performs, Godard separates her singing from the other noises in the scene. We hear her sing in close-up, her voice as if in a vacuum, sounding young and vulnerable (despite even the sleazy lyrics). Between verses, Godard cuts in Angela’s point of view – seedy characters and the dingy club floor – and removes the sound, creating a distancing effect that further emphasises Angela’s vulnerability and the disparity between her honest performance and the shady setting. Then, of course, the music suddenly kicks in and it blares her out. When she sings again, the background noise again disappears. Godard was to perfect this disassociated POV shot (where we see a disparity between what the character feels and what they and others see) in much more powerful effect in his next film, but it is nonetheless a powerful moment here.

Much of the rest of the film has a looser, sillier tone than these two sadder, darker early moments. While the film is never entirely comic, it is of a lighter tone and one will eventually get the impression that Godard achieved what he was trying to do much more effectively in miniature (the two scenes discussed above) than in the rest of Une Femme est une femme. The film does revel in Karina’s performance, which got her a prize in the Berlin Film Festival, in a way that recalls Bruno trying to capture a beautiful and real image of Veronica through artifice in Le Petit Soldat. The film ends happily, with Angela and Emile reconciled, though it is hard to be convinced, knowing that Hollywood levity rarely wins out when faced with a much darker reality.

Une Femme est une femme was a box office failure, and much of the blame can be placed on Godard’s tinkering with the sound design. While it does offer several fantastic moments, it is overall a challenging and slightly confounding film. It would mark the first time Godard would film a marriage (the long sequence in Angela and Emile’s apartment detailing the ups and downs of a disagreement would be repeated in Le Mepris and La Femme mariée) and it is also possible to read an autobiographical exploration of Godard’s relationship with Karina in this film, given that Emile acts like an intellectual to Karina’s performer. As it is though, it is a slightly dated musical-without-the-musical-numbers but one that is certainly not without interest.

After Godard made Une Femme est une femme, he found himself without an idea, a situation that would be repeated several times in his career. However, what he came up with next would end up being another one of his best films – Vivre sa vie.

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GODARD: Le Petit Soldat (1960)

If À bout de soufflé is the work of a young filmmaker, then Le Petit Soldat is as well. In many ways a surprising choice after À bout de soufflé, Le Petit Soldat is a dark and pessimistic film about the ongoing Algerian War of Independence, which ran from 1954 to 1962. The film was made in 1960 - it was banned for three years and ultimately released as Godard’s fourth film – and it can be considered his first political film and a bold attempt to address the crimes of his own country.

Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is a twenty-six year old secret agent working for a French paramilitary organisation in Geneva during the Algerian War of Independence. He does not seem to have many serious political convictions and seems to have wandered into his role. When he is ordered to kill Professor Palivoda, whose only crime it seems is to have not chosen a side, he refuses. Either from apathy or from the distraction of falling in love with Veronica (Anna Karina), he is unable to get away in time.

With Le Petit Soldat, Godard addresses politics for the first time, but instead of identifying himself with one side or another as he would later on, here he identifies himself with Bruno, a member of the French secret service who nonetheless has sympathies for the other side and talks about uniting Right and Left. He is horrified by the violence done on both sides, as is Godard. He opens the film in the aftermath of a French terrorist atrocity and will show both sides committing torture. Godard’s awareness that the French were guilty of violence and terrorism is the main reason the film was banned and is a brave and provocative statement for a young filmmaker to make against his own country in wartime.

However, Godard also suffers from Bruno’s confusion and apathy. Admitting that both sides have done evil, Bruno is left with nowhere to go and no one to help. The film has a pervasive sense of a murky world full of secret agents and double agents. Godard heightens this with many of the techniques from À bout de soufflé, using some disorientating jump cuts and a discordant score to increase the sense of Bruno’s, and the viewer’s, confusion – both political and moral. In one early scene on a train, Bruno listens in on a man telling a friend a long-winded joke. Godard cuts seemingly key sections of the joke, leaving the rest as mere gibberish. The two men are laughing away, but it means nothing to us and it leaves an odd alienating and eerie impression, furthered by the sound design throughout which isolates separate sounds and favours voices disembodied and layered over silence. The plotting, though fairly simple, is kept fairly discreet. Throughout the film, we are never quite sure what is happening and what is about to happen, Godard having achieved a wonderful (dis)harmony between form and content.

This film contains one of Godard’s most famous aphorisms – ‘Photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times per second’ – though it feels like a statement that has been taken wildly out of context, given the confusing and undecided nature of the rest of the film. Add also the fact that Bruno says this whilst trying to distract Veronica enough to contrive an ‘authentic’ photo of her. Rather than affirming cinema, Godard may instead be trying to interrogate truth. Bruno’s final monologue towards the end of the film is one of the key moments of the film, given that here we see the end result of Bruno’s involvement in this dark world. This diatribe, which moves from a refutation of nationalism to talk of having no convictions to the pointlessness of revolution to the inability to know oneself. After denying anyone’s ability to know what he is thinking, Bruno turns to the camera and tells us what exactly he is thinking, but even he cannot hold onto his thoughts for very long. He has been emptied. His dalliance with this dirty war (compared negatively to the seemingly more virtuous Spanish Civil War – a can of worms there) has left him with nothing, only total apathy and existential confusion. The scene ends with the image of people looking for truth (that word again) by sifting through words, eventually being left with only one – silence.

So key to the film’s sound design, this silence is also what prolongs Bruno’s torture at the hands of the FLN. Captured by the Algerians, they torture Bruno for information and he keeps quiet, without thoroughly understanding why. This torture sequence is the most famous sequence in the film and it is unremittingly bleak and disturbing. Moving from burning to near-drowning to waterboarding to electric shock, it is long, uncomfortable, drawn-out. Godard here had in mind Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the ‘banality of evil’ and so this sequence is fairly subdued, near-silent apart from Bruno’s voiceover, almost dull. It is horrible to watch and there is a strong sense that the torture is degrading for both of Bruno and his torturers.

There is one thing that cuts through all of this pessimism and that is love – although, as we have seen already with À bout de soufflé, love is not enough against the pressures of this world. Bruno falls in love with Veronica, despite their political differences and there is a real feeling of optimism in their plans to escape everything and go to Brazil (though even their love is expressed through indirection – Bruno asks her to tell him lies and Veronica replies that she does not love him). However, this love ends up being used by the French as a means to get Bruno to finally kill Palivoda. Here, at the end of the film, Godard may well be at his most pessimistic. Bruno shoots Palivoda in front of a street full of witnesses and runs away. While he flees, we learn in voiceover that Veronica has already been tortured to death and that Bruno is shortly to learn of this. Bruno is left with nothing and will not be able to do anything about it – whether from the range of forces pitted against him or because of his own apathy is left unknown. All he has left to do is learn to not be bitter about it. With these closing lines and a shot of a hunted Bruno disappearing around a corner, the film ends – this sudden, shocking, intentionally dissatisfying ending leaving us with Bruno’s sense of anger and loss. 

Le Petit Soldat is amongst Godard’s best films because it is a challenging, committed, bold and angry work from a young filmmaker who was still finding his voice in cinema and in politics. Ultimately giving way to pessimism and apathy, Godard’s critique may not have the sophistication of hindsight, given that it was made during the Algerian War of Independence, or of his later work but it is nonetheless a brave work. With only his second film, Godard had proven that he would not be a filmmaker who would try endlessly to repeat an earlier success nor one who would remain differential to his country in the face of their crimes at home and abroad, but one who would make films after his own interests and would continue to innovate. Godard would not follow the caprices of the audience, he would ask that the audience follow him. And, next, Godard felt like making a musical comedy.

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GODARD: A bout de souffle (1960)

This review is the first of an intended series that will look at the feature films of Jean-Luc Godard, starting here with À bout de souffle and continuing through to the present, if I can manage to get a hold of some of his more obscure films. It should, I hope, be a reasonably comprehensive and largely chronological look at the work of one of the most important, innovative and challenging filmmakers.

À bout de souffle, then, is a story about Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time car thief who kills a policeman and is forced to hide out in Paris. While there, he tries to make contact with some fellow criminals and reconnect with former lover Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student first seen selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysées.

The first five minutes of À bout de souffle is a great opening and clearly signals this film’s agenda – to break every rule in the book. The film uses a lot of jazz music in its score but the film itself is noticeably jazzy, moving along to its own rhythm, not afraid to throw in some discordance whenever possible. The film begins with a robbery, in which people look and nod and wave at each other but because Godard has not given us an establishing shot, we have no idea who is who and what is going on. Later, Godard will break the 180˚ rule, making a chase sequence look instead like an impending head-on collision. Michel, presumably making an escape having just stolen a car, will complain about cars overtaking him, wax lyrical about scenery and assess every women that he drives past. The music will be exciting when nothing exciting is onscreen and slow when it should be fast-paced. The confrontation with the policeman is so disjointed that the ensuing scene makes little sense (Michel is half inside his car, the policeman is walking down a lane, then Michel is standing on the lane, and the policeman, having been shot, is falling into some trees). We then have one of the many jump-cuts in the film, where we suddenly see Michel running through some fields, late at night, presumably being chased. Godard fades out here, deciding not to show the chase and the result. And all of this, and much more, occurs in the first five minutes.

When À bout de souffle first appeared in cinemas, these innovations were often taken as mere incompetence, but they are much more important than that. They make us, as an audience, realize how much there is in cinema that has been codified, how many rules there are for filming and editing and how reliant we are on these rules. Most of these rules came from Hollywood, where the traditional style was for invisible direction, lighting and editing. If the audience notices any of these things, then they have been distracted from the story, the characters or their popcorn. But Godard delights in his medium, as does is cinematographer Raoul Coutard and his editor Cécile Decugis, and here he shows how these rules are, effectively, a restraint on the possibilities of filmmaking. It needs hardly be said how influential this film is and how it made Godard the key filmmaker for a whole generation. À bout de souffle, then, is a great young film, every frame revealing a youthful energy and enthusiasm and, very possibly, a contempt for the older way of doing things.

This is true – and there are plenty of further examples that would be unnecessary to write down (just go watch it again if you’ve forgotten) – but it is not entirely what À bout de souffle is about. The term ‘À bout de souffle’ is frequently translated as ‘Breathless’, emphasising again that energy and youthfulness, but a more accurate translation is ‘End of Breath’ which is much more reminiscent of the terminal breath. Both Michel and Patricia are very tired of the world that they are in. Patricia has ambitions to write for a literary magazine and is an avid reader, but after an interview with the deeply obnoxious Parvulesco (played by Jean-Pierre Melville) she is thrown into a funk. Michel’s lifestyle seems exotic and exciting, modelled like the film itself on Hollywood gangster films (if you are wondering why Michel wipes his lips with his thumb so often, take another look at Bogie in The Big Sleep). However, we realize that Michel is even more tired than Patricia. In the end, Patricia glumly decides to return to her career (gained, it is suggested, by sleeping with or promising to sleep with her editor), choosing the path that everyone else has trod before her, while Michel is so fed up, he can’t even be bothered to get away from the police that he knows are coming. Look at the scene where Michel stops at a cinema and stands in silent tribute at a poster of Bogart (a poster for The Harder They Fall, mind, the last film Bogart made before he died), before wandering back into the world, a rare quiet moment in the film that feels leaden and sad. Or the moment during the usually upbeat extended bedroom scene where Michel sitting at the end of the bed and looks out of window and thinks about death, the camera observing him from behind and lingering on the moment. Putting the eye of a realist in the youth film genre, Godard reveals their empty heart, celebrating non-conformity at the same time that it encourages those who follow the rules. Like all Godard, there is a serious if not angry heart underneath all of the fun and games.

Godard had yet to find his style or his politics at the time he made À bout de souffle but the film remains rewarding nonetheless as an expression of a maverick young filmmaker who got the chance to make a film and was not going to waste it. Much darker than it would initially appear, À bout de souffle is not the epitome of cool as many praise it (one wonders how they deal with later Godard, if at all), but it is exuberant and thoroughly enjoyable. Much imitated but never truly repeated, it is a magnificent debut.

Next came Le Petit Soldat.

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Les politiques de Godard

'Les politiques de Godard' is a series of articles that will look at the major films of Jean-Luc Godard. It should, I hope, be a reasonably comprehensive and largely chronological look at the work of one of the most important, innovative and challenging filmmakers that the cinema has produced.

A bout de souffle (1960)
Le Petit Soldat (1960)
Une Femme est une femme (1961)
Vivre sa vie (1962)
Les carabiniers (1963)
...
La Chinoise (1967)