{"id":15995,"date":"2023-12-21T10:22:47","date_gmt":"2023-12-21T10:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/a-taste-for-paradox-and-contradiction-a-review-of-godard-cinema-by-cyril-leuthy\/"},"modified":"2023-12-21T10:22:47","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T10:22:47","slug":"a-taste-for-paradox-and-contradiction-a-review-of-godard-cinema-by-cyril-leuthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/a-taste-for-paradox-and-contradiction-a-review-of-godard-cinema-by-cyril-leuthy\/","title":{"rendered":"A taste for paradox and contradiction: a review of &#8216;Godard Cinema&#8217; by Cyril Leuthy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-15991\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5.jpg\" alt=\"CC image by wilkee\" width=\"828\" height=\"517\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5.jpg 828w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5-600x375.jpg 600w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5-441x275.jpg 441w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5-768x480.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/23a22a764147aefde0d237ca4e6385c5-10x6.jpg 10w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 828px) 100vw, 828px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_X7SgZ8eeu8?si=MpNktK1OPWfXXprb\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Cyril Leuthy composes his posthumous portrait of one of cinema\u2019s great enigmas by entwining, with painstaking precision, original and archived interviews, film clips, newsreels, epistolary recitations and scripted voiceovers. The resulting narrative is totally and memorably Godard, running at 24 frames per second with a clear beginning, middle and end, in that order.<\/p>\n<p>The narrator reminds us that the late Jean-Luc Godard produced over 140 feature films, documentaries and shorts in his lifetime as a part of his absolute quest for cinema, to capture its purity, its humanity, its incredulity, and that he sacrificed his psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing at the altar of the seventh art as a consequence.<\/p>\n<p>As Godard himself comments \u2018As a boy I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion\u2019 and, later in life, \u2018Does the fact that I make images instead of having children prevent me from being a human being?\u2019<\/p>\n<p>He was born into privilege in Paris in 1930, his father, Paul, was a doctor and his mother, Odile, worked for a bank. The family was \u2018fairly intellectual\u2019 but, as his father observes, Jean-Luc \u2018always wanted to be apart. He wanted to follow his thought, only his thought\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>In 1946 he went to study at the Lyc\u00e9e Buffon in Paris and, through his family\u2019s connections, mixed with members of the cultural elite. He failed his baccalaureate exam first time around in 1948, but then passed in 1949. He subsequently registered to study anthropology at the prestigious Sorbonne University but, unsurprisingly, never attended.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018When I was at the Sorbonne,\u2019 Godard explains in Leuthy\u2019s film, \u2018little by little I became interested in cinema. I discovered film clubs and the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise, and I met guys like Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n<p>By 1952 he was writing criticism for <em>Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, the famous French film journal which fathered the now infamous auteur theory. Here he praised the gloomy romanticism of North American directors such as Nicolas Ray and Howard Hawks as opposed to the formalistic artfulness of Orson Welles and William Wyler.<\/p>\n<p>His mother then died in an accident in 1954 but his family didn\u2019t wish for him to attend her funeral. As his sister, Veronique, explains, \u2018Making films was not considered in the family line, where you study, you become this or that. But he was considered as a so-called artist \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-15992\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Breathless_Godard_1960.jpg\" alt=\"Breathless Godard 1960\" width=\"220\" height=\"308\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Breathless_Godard_1960.jpg 220w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Breathless_Godard_1960-214x300.jpg 214w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Breathless_Godard_1960-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Breathless_Godard_1960-7x10.jpg 7w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 220px) 100vw, 220px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Godard\u2019s creative response to such an opprobrious body blow was to knock the wind out of everybody else in sight with his debut feature film, \u2018Breathless\u2019, in 1960. A cool and casual iconoclastic collage of pop culture, jump cuts and discontinuity, the French New Wave film starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and introduced the subject of Godard\u2019s cinema as cinema itself and, naturally, cinema adored him in return.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Will Godard soon be more popular than the Pope,\u2019 opined Francois Truffaut, his friend and fellow director, \u2018that is to say just a little less than The Beatles?\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Fame and adoration were simply not enough for the impish Godard, however. \u2018I have a taste for paradox and a spirit of contradiction,\u2019 he wrote. \u2018The new wave is criticised for only showing people in bed, so I\u2019m going to show people who are in politics and don\u2019t have time to go to bed.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-15993\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Little_Soldier_Godard_1963.jpg\" alt=\"The Little Soldier Godard 1963\" width=\"267\" height=\"372\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Little_Soldier_Godard_1963.jpg 267w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Little_Soldier_Godard_1963-215x300.jpg 215w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Little_Soldier_Godard_1963-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Little_Soldier_Godard_1963-7x10.jpg 7w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 267px) 100vw, 267px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Thus he shot and released \u2018The Little Soldier\u2019, also in 1960. Starring his new wife and onscreen icon of the French New Wave, Anna Karina, the film explored the use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence and, consequently, it was banned in France until 1963.<\/p>\n<p>Although his commercial successes continued with, for instance, \u2018Contempt\u2019, starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, a large bright aperture had opened itself up within Godard and through it he could see that his immediate future lay not simply in the aesthetics of moviemaking, but also in its politics: that is to say, in Marxist critiques of the middle class, capitalism, consumerism and, following the invasion of Vietnam in 1965, North American cultural imperialism.<\/p>\n<p>As the actor and historian, Christophe Bourseiller, recalls \u2018[Godard] arrived one day with a crate of [Mao Zedong\u2019s] \u2018Little Red Book\u2019 which he had picked up from the Chinese Embassy in Paris.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>David Faroult, author of \u2018Godard: Inventions of Political Cinema\u2019, continues that the director wished to document the political climate in contemporary France by focusing on the radical \u2018Union of Communist, Marxist and Leninist Youth, a new pro-Maoist group very much influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-15994\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Chinese_Godard_1967.jpg\" alt=\"The Chinese Godard 1967\" width=\"220\" height=\"296\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Chinese_Godard_1967.jpg 220w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Chinese_Godard_1967-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/The_Chinese_Godard_1967-7x10.jpg 7w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 220px) 100vw, 220px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The resultant feature film, \u2018The Chinese\u2019, loosely based on Dostoyevsky\u2019s novel, \u2018Demons\u2019, was released in 1967, wherein an isolated group of politicised students are portrayed as \u2018[The Swiss Family Robinson] of Marxism-Leninism\u2019 in Godard\u2019s attempt to \u2018confront vague ideas with clear images\u2019 as one social class sets about overthrowing another.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese Embassy detested the film however, describing it as the work of \u2018a reactionary moron\u2019. In turn, they said if they had the power then they would forbid it from even being called \u2018The Chinese\u2019. Godard was disappointed of course, but he wasn\u2019t dissuaded.<\/p>\n<p>At the outset of the now legendary student protests and industrial strikes across de Gualle\u2019s France in May 1968, Godard, Truffaut and others famously travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to demand the event be delayed \u2018for the film industry to show solidarity \u2026 I\u2019m talking about solidarity with the students and workers, and you\u2019re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!\u2019<\/p>\n<p>From 1970 to 1971 Godard marched alongside the Dziga Vertov Group, a political filmmaking collective which, ironically, sought to erase the notion and influence of the auteur by way of Marxist content and Brechtian forms.<\/p>\n<p>Godard was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in Paris in June 1971 however and spent a week in a coma. Leuthy\u2019s narrator comments that, not only did this serve as a metaphor for the director\u2019s political failings, but also for his rebirth: he met the famed multimedia artist, Anne-Marie Mi\u00e9ville, in 1973 and they were married in 1978.<\/p>\n<p>The middle-aged director then entered into a period of exile and experimentation, building the <em>Sonimage<\/em> studio in his house in Grenoble where he explored and invented new filmic approaches with the latest videography equipment to \u2018satisfy his fantasy of making movies all by himself.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>As Henri Langlois, one of the original founders of the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise in 1936, aptly observes: \u2018The last person who made cinema language evolve was Godard \u2026 With access to video technology, he would become the new Griffith of cinema.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there is much more for audiences to uncover, experience and learn for themselves from Cyril Leuthy\u2019s thoughtful and disciplined documentary about one of the key figures in the history of the moving image.<\/p>\n<p>The documentary\u2019s US premiere is at the non-profit Film Forum Cinema in New York on December 15<sup>th<\/sup> 2023, and this will be preceded by Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s final film project, \u2018Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>In turn, while the digital release of \u2018Godard Cinema\u2019 across the US won\u2019t be until February 2024, UK cinephiles can enjoy the documentary now on the BFI Player online. It is highly recommended.<\/p>\n<p><em>This review first appeared on Arts Express for WBAI 99.5 FM radio in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cyril Leuthy composes his posthumous portrait of one of cinema\u2019s great enigmas by entwining, with painstaking precision, original and archived interviews, film clips, newsreels, epistolary recitations and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":651,"featured_media":15991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1664],"tags":[2928,2930,2929],"class_list":["post-15995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films-2","tag-breathless","tag-the-chinese","tag-the-little-soldier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/651"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}