Who is the greatest filmmaker of all time? It is a question without an answer, at least not one that avoids endless debate. But one perfectly reasonable solution to the puzzle to is Jean-Luc Godard. Per IMDb, the French auteur made more than 130 films, of which about 60 are major, feature-length works. While these dozens of efforts spanned a range of genres and schools of artistic thought, each demonstrated intellectual rigor, technical mastery and an inevitable urge to provoke. Even past his 80th birthday, Godard’s films remained loaded with often obscure cultural and philosophical references, avant-garde elements and defiance.
Cyril Leuthy’s documentary, Godard Cinema is a chronological portrait of the director. Beginning with Godard’s college years, the film proceeds in rote fashion, from his awakening to cinema to Breathless and his outpouring of immense works—12 in just six years—until his Maoist turn in 1967 with La Chinoise. Leuthy’s tale then shifts to Godard’s relative disappearance into radical politics and collective filmmaking, taking up his biography again with his re-emergence into the mainstream in 1977. Finally, the film concludes with a survey of Godard’s cinema since 1977 —oddly stopping around 2010.
Godard Cinema is engaging, mostly due to the subject matter: Any film that gets to use scores of clips from Godard’s immense oeuvre has a lot to offer! But while there are a few visual flourishes, the documentary is far too straightforward to portray the life of film’s greatest iconoclast.
For instance, very little is made of Godard’s philosophical allusions or frequent cinematic experimentation. The highlights of Godard’s life covered are the obvious ones: Breathless, Anna Karina, Weekend, 1968, going underground, Every Man for Himself and Histoire(s) du cinema. When Leuthy does zero in a film, the coverage is superficial. When it comes to Godard’s infamous Maoism, Leuthy is uncritically dismissive, and otherwise has little to say.
More damning than that reticence—for all his prolific output, Godard was notoriously private and even deceptive about his life—is that Godard Cinema comes across as quite incurious about its subject. Aside from a brief discussion of Vietnam, the film is strongly averse to engaging Godard’s political allegiances and causes. There is no detailed look at his innovations, nor his relationship to his filmmaking contemporaries. Beyond a one-sentence mention, Leuthy ignores Godard’s vital film criticism. There is no thesis in Godard Cinema, and it is challenging to figure out why the film was made at all: Why would someone apparently uninterested in really getting deep into Godard’s work make a film about Godard? It’s a biography of Godard that Godard himself would loathe for its conventionality.
While Leuthy does not have much to say about his subject, any cinephile or Godard fan will find much to enjoy in the interviews with the auteur’s collaborators (mostly his regular actresses) and the numerous film clips. If nothing else, it will drive the viewer to re-watch some of Godard’s best-known work.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
The post Godard Cinema appeared first on Spectrum Culture.