Criterion Sunday 512: Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux (aka My Life to Live, 1962)

I have of course seen this Godard film many times before (and written about it far more eloquently in the past than I can muster now) but it may be my favourite of Godard’s oeuvre. It limns the concerns of the contemporary 1960s world to something self-consciously archaic in cinema, using intertitles (the chapter headings for this most structural of films, composed as the subtitle says, in 12 tableaux), gorgeous black-and-white close-ups of Anna Karina’s face (not to mention the back of her head), and of course those images of Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. But beyond that, it’s a film that deals with his eternal theme of capitalism, using the figure of Karina’s Nana as a way into a morally murky world. Nobody really ends up in a good place — shades of Breathless at the end — but the story of Nana’s falling into prostitution as a line of work and then into love (not a line of work) is almost sidelined by an aesthetic interest in the image. Indeed it’s very easy to miss the film’s ostensible plot, but also very easy (and equally pleasurable) just to look at the film as a series of tableaux vivants.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard; Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Anna Karina; Length 83 minutes.

Seen at university library (VHS), Wellington, October 1998 and June 2000 (later on DVD at home, London, Wednesday 14 August 2013, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Monday 7 February 2022).

Criterion Sunday 482: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, 1967)

I think the way you feel about this film probably has a lot to do with how you feel about Godard overall. His can be a very frustrating body of work to follow, and even at his most accessible, back in the 1960s, by the end of the decade he was starting to get abstruse and political in ways that weren’t always friendly to audiences watching. However, for my money this is the film where he balances those two opposing tensions best, being both pretentious in the way his whispered narration hints at various topics around capitalism, alienation of labour and the modern city, while also presenting an identifiable character whose life we can be pulled along by. It’s pretty abstract at times, but there’s beauty as well as b0llocks in that abstractness and if it seems like an impressionistic grab bag of ideas, it’s still for me pretty compelling, a film that doesn’t divulge all its mystery but holds back something for repeat viewings.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard (based on an article by Catherine Vimenet); Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Marina Vlady; Length 87 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 27 November 2021 (and earlier on VHS at the university library, Wellington, March 1999).

Criterion Sunday 481: Made in USA (1966)

Godard always had a way of making films really quickly, especially in his mid-60s career pomp, and most seemed to be either stark black-and-white films about a woman (often Anna Karina), or widescreen saturated-colour genre riffs (often with Anna Karina). Made in USA, as its title implies, is very much one of the latter, and the genre it’s playing off is the detective film, via a novel by the creator of the Parker character (very much unofficially at that, hence the film’s relative unavailability in the US until this release, due to threats of legal action). The plot itself makes very little sense at a casual acquaintance, and this is surely the point: it’s more about using the tropes and the visual language of detectives, spies, gangsters and the like to create some nifty juxtaposition of colour, sound and image that throws up a critique of the capitalist West and its innate corruption. Anna Karina is fetching as ever in the lead role of Paula Nelson, while everyone else sports character names based on Godard’s favoured directors (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller and Nick Ray, after all). His resulting movie has energy to spare, with all the little tics Godard was known for, layering multiple texts with jarring sound effects, only further obscuring the machinations of the plot. It feels like a heady formal exercise, and it rather paved the way for later films like Week End (1967) that Le Gai savoir (1968) that lead towards abandoning such bourgeois affectations altogether.

(Written on 8 January 2016.)

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard (based on the novel The Jugger by Donald E. Westlake [as “Richard Stark”]); Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Léaud, László Szabó; Length 85 minutes.

Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT2), London, Thursday 7 January 2016.

Criterion Sunday 421: Pierrot le Fou (1965)

I’ve always had this film pinned in my head — having seen it a couple of times 20 years ago — as one that’s fun, and rewatching it again, it is, mostly. I feel like I should mention right up-front that there’s a rather hideously racist interlude with Anna Karina in a painted yellow face making some mock-Vietnamese noises, and even if it’s intended to be part of an anti-American satirical rehashing of the conflict in Vietnam, it can’t help but disrupt the film’s tone. Which is otherwise, as mentioned above, pretty playful. It builds on the saturated sun-drenched coastal resort colours of Le Mépris, and sets up some of the apocalyptic imagery that was to come in Godard’s career (in Week End, most notably), as his two criminal-lovers on the run rehearse a sort of Bonnie & Clyde script with a metatextual commentary and little asides to camera, but Godard never repeats the same trick twice, making it feel even a little exhausting at times, as things head towards their colourfully bleak ending. The deeper socio-political dimensions are more evident in some of his other films, but Godard was always most playful about genre and film itself, creating his own playbook of self-referentiality, than about empathy for people’s lives in the world (which may explain the yellowface). Certainly these characters never quite feel like much more than an author’s conceits, but Anna Karina (and Belmondo too, in his way) has an ever-likeable charm that suggests more than the film sometimes does.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard; Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina; Length 110 minutes.

Seen at City Gallery, Wellington, Friday 10 September 1999 (before that on VHS at the university, Wellington, February 1999, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Wednesday 28 April 2021).

Criterion Sunday 408: À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960)

I’m sure we’ve all seen Breathless a lot of times (I’ve already reviewed it at greater length on this blog). Sometimes it feels like — though it’s not — the first truly modern film, mainly because of its place at the head of the French New Wave, one that may not have even created that template (improvisational, street shooting, up-front love for American genre cinema), but certainly popularised it and had the most cool of those early works (works by Varda, Chabrol and Truffaut have better claims to being earlier). Watching it for the nth time (maybe the fifth, maybe the eighth, I’m not sure), it strikes me that I don’t remember a lot of the shots and the scenes because it’s very much not about plot. It’s about attitude and style, about the jump cuts, and the posing that Belmondo does at the shrine of Bogart and the other tough guys of cinema (also, er, Debbie Reynolds it seems, with those exaggerated facial gestures she does in Singin’ in the Rain), echoing this bravado with hollow quips about women’s fecklessness — even though he’s the one that can’t stay still or keep any money on him. So all these guys with European names who drift through, details about a crime (he’s on the run for killing a cop), just become background to a rehearsal of celebrity by Belmondo and Seberg, looking glamorous and catching the camera’s light as they try to out-run the plot’s machinations.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a series of five contemporary interviews from French TV, a couple with Godard, and one each with Belmondo, Seberg and Jean-Pierre Melville. It’s striking how much more confrontational the one with Seberg is, as the interviewer constantly harps on at her career ups and downs, at a period in rehab, and just keeps on having a go at her, which seems unfair. Belmondo weirdly does his surrounded by sculptures, while Godard dons his customary sunglasses.
• A more recent interview from 2007 with assistant director Pierre Rissient, and the DoP Raoul Coutard, as well as another with Donn Pennebaker, who talks about working with Godard himself later in the 60s, as well as the impact of Breathless. All add a little to an understanding of quite how Godard’s working processes were, and how they were so different from what was accepted as usual at the time.
• Mark Rappaport contributes a 20-minute piece about Jean Seberg. He made his own feature-length biopic, From the Journals of Jean Seberg, so he has plenty of research to draw on. She had a fascinating life, truly, which accounts for the several films that exist about her, but it seems like her early experiences with Otto Preminger weren’t the most positive, and may have been a bad way to start out.
• One of the many extras is a 10 minute visual essay written (but not spoken) by Jonathan Rosenbaum which picks up on just a few of the visual cues and links this work in with his earlier writing as a critic. For some reason the voiceover guy insists on saying “Irish shots” instead of “iris shots” or maybe I’m just mishearing him? Anyway, that’s what I took from it.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Jean-Luc Godard; Writers Godard and François Truffaut; Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg; Length 90 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 19 March 2021 (and several times before, first on VHS at home, Wellington, August 1997 and at university, Wellington, May 1998, and later on Blu-ray at home, London, Tuesday 27 August 2013).

Criterion Sunday 308: Masculin féminin (1966)

It’s interesting to watch this film (technically I’ve seen it before, but it was so very long ago I didn’t recall it at all) and reflect on its continuity with Godard’s later films. Already he’s starting to move away from the zingy genre-inflected works of his earlier period into something altogether more intangible. His leads still have the beauty of 60s French pop culture (whether Léaud now starting to get back into films after his boyhood turn in The 400 Blows, or pop starlets like Chantal Goya), but the characters seem to hover at the surface. The film is constructed as a series of interminable dialogues, back and forth questioning that doesn’t seem to reveal very much of anything (certainly not an inner life), and scenes enacted amongst the group of women Léaud is hanging out with (Goya’s Madeleine and her two flatmates), tracing the feelings bouncing back and forth amongst them all. The idea, presumably, is about the shallowness of youth — the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” as one of the intertitles has it — but beneath the luminous monochrome cinematography and the pretty faces, there doesn’t seem to lurk much in these lives and the characters all ultimately seem a little irritating.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard; Cinematographer Willy Kurant; Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert; Length 103 minutes.

Seen at home (Mubi via Amazon streaming), London, Saturday 11 April 2020 (and originally on VHS at the university library, Wellington, March 1999).

Criterion Sunday 275: Tout va bien (1972)

I’ve now seen this Godard/Gorin film a few times in my life (and have already written about it once on my blog), and it manages to be more accessible than much of Godard’s work in the 1970s, but also still very much concerned with theoretical ideas. It’s the film of a public intellectual, primarily, so when voice is given to revolutionary ideas, it feels less like the directors giving voice to those who have been rendered voiceless, and more a critique of mainstream media in occluding such voices, and in denying power to those exploited under capitalism. The film nimbly flits between these moments of confrontation — usually presented frontally, with bodies crowded into the frame — and satirical digs at management and media, such as our factory manager being subjected to his own factory’s rules leading to him breaking a window to take a leak. Voices at the start and end lead us through the expectations of the narrative for a commercial film, as cheques to all the actors and crew are being signed, and throughout there’s this tension between what Godard and Gorin want to say about power and representation, and what capitalist practices demand, yet it’s never quite as boring as that all sounds. There are sequences as visually arresting as anything in Godard’s filmography, there’s as much humour as anger, and there’s Jane Fonda.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• The main extra is Godard and Gorin’s 52-minute follow-up Letter to Jane: An Investigation about a Still (1972). Following the release of the feature, the two regrouped to talk about that film but chose instead a photo of “Hanoi Jane” listening to the North Vietnamese as a way of talking about their film. It at once seems to sum up Godard’s idea of making films as a means of film criticism, of synthesising arguments about images and where the power lies, while also being rather excoriating about the actress in his own film, whose agency is removed from her by these two guys talking over the image and asking who it benefits and what it all means.
• There’s a brief interview with Godard from the same year, clad in a bathrobe and unshaven, trying to put across what the two were trying to achieve with Tout va bien, which is a pretty thoroughgoing critique of capitalism and power.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin; Cinematographer Armand Marco; Starring Jane Fonda, Yves Montand; Length 95 minutes.

Seen at National Library, Wellington, Wednesday 16 May 2001 (and on DVD at home, London, on Monday 26 August 2013 and Sunday 10 November 2019).

Criterion Sunday 238: Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961)

This very early film, Godard’s third feature I believe, gets wildly disparate reviews, and I sort of land somewhere in the middle. It’s a thin undertaking, like so much of JLG’s work, a few recycled ideas stolen from books and film, made feature-length, and largely predicated on the on-screen allure of his leading lady Anna Karina. Of course, there have been less substantial reasons for making a film, and if it’s going to be Karina mugging for the camera or doing little musical interludes (though this is not really a musical), then there are plenty of pleasures along the way. The fourth-wall breaking, the self-aware nods to cinema history, and the constant inventive staging and cutting mark out this period of Godard’s work, and just on a formal level it’s a pleasant undertaking. That said, Karina’s character feels like little more than a cipher for her (fairly bland) male co-stars’ sexual competition, as Brialy and Belmondo try to woo her, and so it ends up feeling overlong even at its shortish running length. Likeable, colourful, and playful, with an excellent Karina only hinting at her much greater work in Vivre sa vie (still my favourite of Godard’s films)… but little more than that.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard; Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo; Length 85 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), London, Tuesday 5 February 2019 (and originally on VHS in the university library, Wellington, October 1998).

Criterion Sunday 174: Bande à part (The Outsiders aka Band of Outsiders, 1964)

I’ve seen this film a bunch of times (and written about in on here before), and each successive time I watch it, I think I become a little less enamoured with it — not unlike the Tarantino films, whose production company is inspired by the title of this film. You remember the dance, the verve, Anna Karina’s face framed in class, almost solarised like a Man Ray print, with her big eyes. You remember Sami Frey’s nonchalance, you remember the beautiful monochrome photography, those Paris street scenes shot from a moving car, the run through the Louvre, the feeling of young lives, of being young. But there’s also this nasty little plot about them staging a heist, and they’re all really dull unlikable people at heart, and I just wonder if it’s a film about people or a film about people in films, and if it’s the latter why really should I care, at least on the third or fourth watch? Maybe some films work better when you see them once and then try to remember what you loved about them.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard (based on Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens); Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey; Length 97 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 1 October 2017 (and originally on VHS at home, Wellington, June 2002, and since then on DVD).

Criterion Sunday 171: Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963)

I’ve seen this film of Godard’s several times over the decades (and have written about it here before) and I feel both compelled and distanced from it, though that may be by design. It’s about filmmaking at a certain level, it’s about the clash of cultures, it’s about a relationship being torn apart (mirroring Godard and Anna Karina, one presumes, at least to a point) and it’s about a lot in between, but mainly it’s about contempt. Not least, one might extrapolate, that includes the director’s difficulty with women, suggesting a certain unknowability. It’s beautiful and hard, and contains a lot, and for all that I don’t necessarily enjoy its characters, I think the filmmaking is about as good as Godard managed.

Criterion Extras: There are plenty of extras on a 2 DVD set, including Encounter with Fritz Lang (1964), a short film in which the director speaks a little on the set of Contempt, but is mostly clips illustrating his architectural style in his early German work. There’s also two Jacques Rozier short films. Le Parti des choses: Bardot et Godard (1964) is a slight little piece about Godard filming Bardot, which takes a sort of philosophical path. However, the better is Paparazzi (1964). Brigitte Bardot, it turns out, was very famous in the 60s, and this film deals with obsessive photographers using a fairly recently-coined term. Those guys are still with us because they’ve become embedded into a system that reinforces and commodifies fame, and that is hinted at with the context of magazine sales, but this short film is mostly about how they were annoying when she was filming Contempt. It’s quite strikingly put together, and has a zingy energy to it. Other extras include an interview with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, an audio commentary, and an hour-long discussion between Fritz Lang and Godard called The Dinosaur and the Baby (1967).

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Jean-Luc Godard (based on Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia); Cinematographer Raoul Coutard; Starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll; Length 101 minutes.

Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), Sunday 20 August 2017 (and originally on VHS at home, Wellington, April 1998, and later on DVD at home, London, Wednesday 14 August 2013).