Jean-Luc Godard: The master who wowed audiences 24 frames a second

Jean-Luc Godard is the Che Guevara of cinema. The original Che died bringing on a revolution in the jungles of Bolivia, but the cinematic Che lived on to make films, break conventions, innovate constantly and, finally, get bored with the medium.

In fact, as Weekend, his film excoriating the faux charms of the bourgeoisie, spooled towards its end, Godard stunningly announced in the final credits—End of story-End of cinema. For a man who famously said, “Cinema is truth at 24 frames a second”, proclaiming the end of cinema was a truth he did not take too seriously. Godard, who passed away on Tuesday, went off track into Maoism and existentialism and outright sloganeering and then, finally, off the grid, only to send his films off and on to marquee festivals with cryptic messages, that too, potshots at those festivals itself.

When Film Socialisme, part of his always moving wrecking ball against flagrant consumerism and glitz and ostentation of Hollywood, appeared at Cannes, Godard, who played hooky, said: “I cannot oblige you at Cannes. I would go to the death for the festival, but not a step further.”

Also Read: Iconic French director Jean-Luc Godard dies at 91

In 2011, he told Fiachra Gibbons of The Guardian that “film is over. The auteur is dead. The future is cut-and-paste movie mashups”. A statement that circled back to what he had famously announced at the end of Weekend. For a man who said a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order, the 2011 statement took the story, in a jump cut—one of his most fabulous inventions, sadly appropriated by the likes of MTV—back to 1967 when Weekend hit the screens. What would you call that? A flashback? Or a narrative that plays on a Godardian loop, starting in 1967 and ending, or maybe still continuing, in 2011.

Godard’s story did not jerk. It was more or less a straight trajectory. From being a garrulous protege of Andre Bazin, the father of the French New Wave and the writer of the influential book 'What is Cinema' and the co-founder of Cahiers du cinema, the storied film magazine where most of the New Wave legends from Resnais to Rohmer to Truffaut to Godard himself wrote scathing pieces on sentimental French cinema and its stolid conventions,  to spending days and nights at the Cinematheque Francaise under the tutelage of Henri Langlois, a stout Frenchman born in Turkey, who gave the concept of film archives to the world, Godard just burst onto the cinematic stage with Breathless, a film that left everyone who saw it hyperventilating about its freshness and vigour and chutzpah.

Breathless demolished many cobwebby conventions of the cinema and gave, in its running time of 90 minutes, at least a century or perhaps more of new film grammar. The Jean-Paul Belmondo-Jean Seberg classic is still a rage with film students and each frame of Godard’s debut has been dissected and analysed at film schools all over the world.

Despite the dissection and a raft of analyses the film has been subjected to, Breathless still remains a great, almost heartstopping moment in the not very long history of cinema. Godard and his cohorts studied, rather learnt by rote, each and every frame of American middlebrow filmmakers such as Sam Fuller. The New Wave was also singularly responsible for lifting Hitchcock from his low-to-middlebrow status into the pantheon of world’s greatest filmmakers. Truffaut, Godard’s compatriot and a friend with whom he later fell out, wrote a book on Hitchcock, still considered by many to be one of the best theoretical and analytical and practical books ever written in the field of cinema.

Truffaut also wrote the story for Breathless and Godard penned the script as he went along shooting the film with Raoul Coutard, a cinematographer who birthed a bold visual style with a documentary aesthetic that was a mix of handheld jerkiness and natural lighting.

Stickler for Breaking Rules

Godard always played with the narrative like a champion player plays with a football. He dribbled it; he kicked it around; he broke the rules; he experimented and scored. In some cases, self-goals. According to many critics, his films, after Weekend, veered into a Godardian jungle only he could navigate. Many filmmakers and critics tried to hack their way through the deep forest, but reached nowhere. But Godard, who always knew how to carve his own path, was aware of the maze he had laid and got himself through it, always. After some time, everyone stayed clear of the Godardian labyrinths and some even yawned when one of his films made it to the festival circuits. Godard was never a box-office buff and he once released one of his later films, before its official screening, on YouTube.

The quotations from literature and philosophy he liberally used in his films could be termed, depending on what your ideology was, and from which corner of the world you came from, a Warholian or Brechtian tactic.  Faulkner, Rilke, Dylan Thomas, Louis Aragon, Francoise Sagan — the references and quotations came thick and fast, almost jolting the audiences out of their narrative reverie. The middle could be before the beginning and the end in the middle, as he famously said.

But works like Pierrot le Fou, which came out in 1965, satirising the puerility of Hollywood, and Une femme mariee (1964), a modernist film on adultery that showed Godard’s familiarity with the works of French intellectuals like Claude Levi-Struass and Roland Barthes, are still breathtaking to watch for their invention and ingeniousness. After 1967, Godard just went beyond the pale of many film buffs. He descended into Maoism and militarism and had powwows with Sartre, and more or less thumbed his nose at narrative cinema. It was a steep descent, so steep that Godard never came out of it.

Stamp on Indian Cinema

In India, his influence has been immense. All the bubbliness and mechanised jerkiness of modern and shallow Bollywood owes a huge debt to Godard. Godard shaped video art more or less singlehandedly and for that, the likes of Baadshah and Honey Singh, who produce music videos every year, should at least read up on him.

Even Satyajit Ray borrowed the ending of his iconic Charulata—the grim still shots— from the French New Wave. Ray was also an unabashed admirer of Godard’s Breathless and was pained when the French director went off track after 1967. Truffaut, as a critic appraising Pather Panchali at Cannes, had walked out of the theatre in disgust at the sight of Indians eating with their hands.

But Indian directors like Ray easily digested the New Wave menu and fused it with their palate. Intelligent filmmakers like Ray could easily manage the fusion, but most in Bollywood used Godardian techniques and ended up making silly pastiches. Some even bunged in weighty quotations on title cards without deeply studying literature and philosophy.

Godardian title cards were very effectively used by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, an auteur film that came in the late 70s.

There may always be a hodgepodge in Godard’s universe, but we can’t afford a topsy-turvy narrative. So at the end we can only say that Godard, along with Sergei Eisenstein and DW Griffith, will remain one of the fathers of cinema, the most modern of arts.

Cinema, at one point, may die, but Godard and his crucial works will survive. Even in a world of constant jerkiness and chaotic jump cuts and turbulent theatres of politics and war. In a dysfunctional world where fakery and misinformation rule, cinema may not be an undying truth anymore, but Godard will continue to charm and wow us, 24 frames a second.