Three iconic films by Jean-Luc Godard that conjure the turbulent, intoxicating 60s

A South African filmmaker I knew once told a story of how in the 2000s, while attending a film festival in Europe, he had obtained the address of a cinematic hero of his, who lived in relative anonymity in a small town in Switzerland. Determined to try to meet his hero, the filmmaker set off and arrived at the address. But finding himself so close to being in the presence of a man whom he had revered for so long and whose cinematic legend was so great, he decided not to ring his bell and instead snuck a copy of his latest film into the hermit’s mailbox.

As far as I know, Godard never responded or acknowledged that he’d watched the film that the South African had slipped into his mailbox, but it’s a story that reminds me — after the death of the French New Wave pioneer and all-round cinematic genius last week at the age of 91 — that for so long after his initial success in the 1960s, Godard remained nominally in plain-sight even if his still prodigious film output was criminally underseen in the decades from the 1980s to his death and he’d mostly retreated from the world of arthouse cinema and film festivals, in which he’d once been such a pivotal and provocative presence.

Born in Paris in 1930, Godard was, by the time he reached his thirties during the tumultuous political and social decade of the 1960s, one of the most influential, groundbreaking and innovative filmmakers in cinema history. His filmography spans over six decades and encompasses over thirty feature films and dozens of short films and video projects, which remain ample evidence of his lifelong dedication to creating work. As the critic Richard Brody wrote in his seminal book on the director, Everything is Cinema, Godard’s belief was that “[t]he cinema [was] always inseparable from his personal experience — and his own identity has been inseparable from cinema … As a filmmaker, he invented ingenious and ever-more-elaborate means by which to relate both the substance and the form of his work to his own inner and outer life ... Moreover, no other director has striven so relentlessly to reflect in his work the great philosophical and political debates of the era.”    

It’s unfortunate then that there is a shameful lack of Godard’s work available for South African viewers to choose from when it comes to legally obtainable platforms, but here are three that, while not necessarily offering the best examples of the many incarnations and preoccupations of the director, certainly provide a taste of his distinctive and hugely influential style and thematic concerns.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

Masculin Féminin — Mubi.com

A fine example of Godard’s early black-and-white, movie-obsessive cinema that creates a uniquely energetic and jazz-inspired homage to movie style and pop culture without delving too deeply into the radical political areas that would soon come to characterise his work in the wake of the May 1968 protests in Paris.

Made in 1966 and starring French New Wave favourite Jean-Pierre Léaud, it’s a series of vignettes that reflect on the seemingly carefree lives of young people in Paris as they go about the frustrating business of pursuing love and their maddening obsession for all things American. Who Godard referred to as the “children of Marx and Coca Cola” are inevitably ripe material for a freewheelingly celebratory hodgepodge of ideas that offer a presciently pessimistic view of the future of youth that would be borne out a few years later.

It’s also a sly tribute to the shadows of Godard’s own movie-besotted youth and a nostalgia for his days as a teenage film critic that already seemed so long ago, even though they were in reality just a decade before.

Some of its attitudes and ideas towards the battle of the sexes may seem terribly outdated now but there remains plenty of verve and intellectually engaging conversations that would set a pattern for future films on the subject.

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THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

Two or Three Things I Know About Her — Mubi.com

Veering into bright colour and sometimes quieter but still energetic reflection, this film was also released in 1966 and offers a very different look at the “her” of the title — Godard’s beloved city of Paris — through the eyes of its main character: a house wife/prostitute who we observe over the course of 24 hours going about her business.

It’s one of several films that Godard made over the course of his career that use prostitution as a metaphor for life under modern capitalism and the ways in which everything, even sex and pleasure, become commodities. Part documentary, part essay and part treatise on the increasingly unavoidable political events of the Vietnam War and its reverberations throughout liberal society at the time, it’s still an intellectually playful and formally inventive film that shows Godard grappling with big themes while not yet quite throwing his hat into the revolutionary Maoist political ring that he would soon come to embrace.  

It’s an intriguing hint at the new direction that much of Godard’s work would take over the course of the rest of the decade and it still has some prescient things to say about urban life under the pressures of modern capitalism that depressingly ring true almost 60 years later.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil)

In 1968, now a committed Maoist cultural revolutionary, Godard was invited to London by The Rolling Stones to come and document the band at work in the studio as they recorded the song that would become Sympathy for the Devil.

The resulting film is a fascinating document of The Stones at work while also being a confoundingly disjointed, politically angry and ambitious project that frustrated Godard so much that he finally determined that it was up to the audience to make total sense of it.

Combining documentary footage of The Stones with a loose narrative about a young white revolutionary who commits suicide when her boyfriend deserts and joins the Black Panthers, it’s all ultimately a vivid testament to one of the most politically turbulent years in 20th-century history when everything reached a point at which it seemed as if the future would be indelibly changed forever. It also signaled Godard’s determination to completely change his creative strategy by starting again at “ground zero,” and attempting to find a new language that would enable him to marry his politics with his craft.

It became the stuff of legends when at its first screening at the 1968 London Film Festival, producer Ian Quarrie, explicitly against Godard’s wishes and instructions, decided that the full song should play over the end-credits, leading the enraged director to punch him in the face on stage. 

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