Godard Cinema (Plus)

More than anyone else, Jean-Luc Godard advanced the notion that films could indeed be high art. Yet, his final films are almost “anti-cinematic.” Perhaps no other filmmaker was as lauded or as divisive. You should be familiar with some Godard films to have a basic, fundamental understanding of 20^th Century cinema, but a completist must have a strong masochistic streak. Cyril Leuthy survey’s Godard’s life and work in Godard Cinema, which opens today in New York, along with Godard’s final short film Trailer for a Film that Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.

Godard was part of the American film noir loving scene at Cahiers du Cinema, but he was also deeply influenced by post-structuralist and “anti-colonialist” trends in leftist academia. His early willingness to break the staid established rules of filmmaking was exhilarating, as in Breathless. However, it is also important to remember Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg became iconic themselves, for the characters they brought to life under Godard’s direction.

Anna Karina, one of Godard’s most important partners, on and off the screen, gave haunting performances in films like Made in U.S.A., but their ultimate impact is somewhat blunted by Godard’s extreme Maoist didacticism. In fact, Leuthy essentially argues Godard virtually disappeared in 1970s as a member of the Dziga Vertov filmmaking collective, because the agitprop films they cranked out (but nobody watched) were literally made by committee, undermining Godard’s auteurist role as a filmmaker.

For the most part, Leuthy and company do a nice job chronicling Godard up through the early 1980s, but Godard Cinema is somewhat spottier thereafter. Nobody even mentions his unlikely King Lear, produced for B-movie moguls Golan-Globus and starring the unlikely cast of Norman Mailer, Molly Ringwald, and Woody Allen. It is challengingly avant-garde, but it might be Godard’s last true masterwork.

Frustratingly, Godard’s output thereafter became more like performance art provocations that self-contained cinematic statements. Leuthy largely accepts critical defenses of late-period Godard at face value. There is a bit of dissenting commentary in Godard Cinema, but it is still largely one-sided. Yet, a figure as controversial and ideologically-charged as Godard demands a more even-handed or even confrontational approach.

Trailer for a Film that Will Never Exist is another example of how uncinematic Godard’s final films became. Visually, it is about as dynamic as a power-point presentation, basically consisting of a series of slide-like stills. It is somewhat interesting to hear how Godard relates to Belgian author Charles Plisnier’s expulsion from the Communist Party, due to his Trotskyism. (Awkwardly, Godard might have been more apt to have been the one enforcing ideological purity.) Yet, beyond a few of those ironic references, there is little substance to the short.

In addition to Karina, Leuthy incorporates fairly extensive commentary from Godard regulars Nathalie Baye and Julie Delpy, which will certainly interest the filmmaker’s admirers. However, for viewers not intimately familiar with Godard, Emmanuel Laurent’s Two in the Wave is a far more accessible documentary introduction to the controversial auteur. Recommended for hardcore Godardian cineastes, Godard Cinema and Trailer for a Film that Will Never Exist: Phony Wars opens today (12/15) at Film Forum.