According to my 1967 edition of Godard by Richard Roud, the director’s “latest” films — Made in USA and Two or Three Things I Know About Her — represent a summing up of his career thus far. Filmed more-or-less simultaneously, the films make an informal diptych, says Roud, who notes the director’s hope that they might be screened together as a double-bill, or by alternating a reel from each as a single mélange. Since the first film never had a real theatrical release in the USA, and only this week became available on DVD, these two screening options are finally possible. I tried both this week — a double-feature of the Rialto prints at the Siskel Film Center, followed by that mod switcheroo (for a few reels at least) using the Criterion disks at home.
If only those big screen prints looked as good as the film transfers on the DVDs! — especially Made in USA, which is, visually and otherwise, a knock-out. I was glad to view the films with an appreciative theater audience: even if the man himself seems a bit humorless, his films can be laughfests of Samuel Beckett-like absurdity. For me, the absurdity overflowed the screen to make the whole world Godardian — before the films (in the jump-cut car commercials) and afterward (when everything was charged with wry significance: that woman in the cat-eye glasses, the guy reading the paper, the line of people obediently following an usher, the mental patient walking down the street who said in passing, “You get married. You have kids. You buy a dog. Where does it end?“)
A heightened sensitivity to juxtaposed weirdness may be one possible consequence of spending time with Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, JLG’s collider-smashed particles of culture often lend a strange coherence to an already-fragmented world. Of course, any single viewing is liable just to mystify; you may still be lost after rinsing and repeating. The fact is, the viewer must become nearly as committed as the director to his obsessions, at least temporarily. The payoff may not mean catching everything that comes gushing down the slipstream. But that very torrent of images and ideas, if they don’t pull you under, may carry you to a point of view you might not otherwise have ever been able to reach.
Made in USA (1966) is a Hollywoodish, gangsterish, noirish mind-frak — hastily constructed in part as a favor to a producer friend who needed money. The film presumes to follow a woman’s investigation into the death of one “Paul P…” Yet by this time, JLG had made good his escape from conventional genres/plots, and could snatch up the flimsiest excuse to lead viewers romping through vibrant landscapes of color and ideas, connected only by the onrush of his cryptic commentary — political, aesthetic, semiotic. Even more than the films that came before and after, this one’s an existential and political Looney Tune.
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) leans toward the documentary side of the director’s double-faced vision — toward that “cinematic essay” he so dramatically smashed through conventional cinema to lay hold of. The “Her” of the title, he tells us, is Paris and environs. Thus does Godard turn an “It” into a “Thou” in a film that provokes a showdown with the subject-object opposition, in desperate quest of some kind of synthesis. There’s a frantic, even demoniac edge in this urge toward unity — not least in Godard’s furtive, whispering narration, which sounds like a condemned man running out of time, or an informer trying not to get caught. The director opens with two or three things he knows about the leading lady, describing her twice: first as actress Marina Vlady, then as her character, “Juliette Jeanson.” The aim is discerning the oppositions and holding them together in tension. This wholeness-haunted fixation pops up in Made in USA, where a child recounts his dream of two people meeting to form a single individual. The child’s mother (played by Anna Karina) grasps after her own fleeting epiphany, when “I was the world and the world was me.”
Karina seems to be one more “Her” the director informs on, or confesses about, as his personal obsessions dissolve into more political and philosophical ones. Indeed, Godard manages to make his autobiography our own (“I was the world and the world was me”) as his ex- lover/star now evokes a past more universally pined for. In both films, the perspective is that of a jilted lover — on multiple levels. Yet another “Her” about whom JLG knows two or three things is Hollywood; American movies are Godard’s first cinematic love. Hollywood is rejected here with a spurned-lover’s bitterness, exposed as the Trojan Horse of a culture of violence and oppression. The loving homages and gentle genre spoofs of the early films gives way now to angry denunciation of pop culture as the new opiate of the masses. “If you can’t afford LSD, buy a TV,” scoffs the narrator over an image of a blinking neon “DRUGS” sign. Even so, the artifacts of consumer society remain primal elements for JLG, serving for this director what natural materials like fire and wind and water might be to certain other filmmakers.
Two or Three Things was inspired by news accounts of French housewives forced to sell themselves to maintain a middle-class — “normal” — lifestyle: prostitution has been an indispensable image for Godard in expressing a dominant mode of being in society. While Juliette Jeanson reads from a fashion magazine, her husband and a friend tune in Lyndon Johnson’s justifications for escalating the Vietnam war — which, on one side of their mouths, they denounce, while on the other, they vent consumer lust. In other words, by 1967 Godard was already debunking a reputedly radical generation as did Thomas Frank much later in his assertion that the rebel pose matches perfectly the needs of capitalism with its rejection of the old and eager acquisition of the novel and new. Another bogus reform, the director alleges, is urban development in the Paris region — one more guise for predatory capitalism. Yet, whatever else they represent, the road curves and construction-cranes captured in documentary-style are among the most lively and arresting images in Two or Three Things. That’s the strange thing about “thingishness,” observes JLG: that dead objects can seem alive and human beings, as mindless consumers, are essentially dead. In exploring this “thingification” of human beings, Godard makes reference to both prostitution and pornography, i.e. the director sees exploitative sex as a paradigmatic means to the object-ifying of persons — of turning a “Thou” into an “It”.
Perhaps this is where JLG’s deconstruction gets closest to the core. “What is knowing something?” he asks in Made in USA — a question that rings into Le Gai Savoir (1969), where he hammers onscreen the word savoir –– “to know,” or rather, “to know facts,” from the Latin scire, root of the English science. Godard is not alone in suggesting that a certain kind of knowing involves power over the known, a mode of domination. But I’ve seen another French word contrasted with savoir as a different mode of knowing: connaître, too, is translated “to know” — though this latter term suggests less an abstract knowing “about” than an intimate knowing — “in the Biblical sense.” JLG’s references to prostitution and pornography imply a distinction between exploitative sex and another kind — even if the bad relationships outnumber good ones in Godard’s films. The vision “I was the world and the world was me” seems a powerful expression of connaître. In Made in USA, Godard speaks also of the “humanizing” power of art — that capacity for turning an “It” into a “Thou.” That would certainly account for those glorious, living cranes, dancing their mesmerizing ballet over the Paris region in Two or Three Things.
Jean-Luc Godard’s bitter criticism of the objectification of persons makes it all the more difficult to understand the director’s turn to abstract ideologizing in his next — “Maoist” — phase. Frustrated by the limitations of language to communicate what he wanted to say and by his audience’s limited capacity for receiving on his wavelength, Godard fled to the Marxist wilderness. At the end of the Sixties, JLG became a lightning rod for the radical currents gathering around him and his subsequent discharge has been generally dismissed as producing more heat than light, films of angry, dogmatic sloganeering. To his credit, Godard eventually emerged from the desert and pulled together the pieces of his violent deconstruction into — if not that new kind of language he aspired to — several new waves of his own art in a film career that has had remarkable second and third acts.
It’s certainly easy enough to sympathize with Godard’s frustration with the limitations he felt he was up against and also to admire his tenacity and inventiveness in searching for a breakthrough. In a sign-saturated world, JLG declares both word and image tainted and suspect — and seeks a new way to know and speak. He batters his head against the walls of various language-prisons, reminding me of Bergman’s similar fevered efforts to burst the bounds and communicate in some unmediated and direct way. This longing for unity and immediacy is behind Godard’s seemingly quixotic suggestion that Made in USA and Two or Three Things be screened together, alternating reels from each film. I gave it a shot, but I didn’t last long. For me, any one of Godard’s films already feels like it’s been assembled by stringing together reels from a half-dozen others. It’s difficult enough just to get a single film by JLG into my head at a time — let alone a pair, let alone an entire difficult body of work that seems necessary to master just to contextualize some particular exemplar. The Godardian slipstream remains an overwhelming flood: I feel lucky if I can pluck out anything useful, clinging to a raft of critical annotations, and staying out of the deep end.
The man can be maddening, even insufferable, and has given me frequent cause to wince — not least for admiring the Red Guard or declaiming “Made in USA” violence while hawking Maoism or offering bomb-building instructions (as he did later) for radicals. He cites Che’s claim that revolution is, at bottom, motivated by love. I’m more convinced by Bazin’s assertion that cinema, at best, is motivated by love. There’s something endearing about JLG’s desperation to know — in that deeper sense — to commune, despite the difficulties and dangers, and in his heartfelt (if bitter) laments for lost love. At the risk of going in too deep, I’ll suggest that Two or Three Things I Know About Her dimly echoes another lament for a beloved city, also addressed as a “Thou”: “O Jerusalem… how often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” Admittedly, given his messianic tendencies and martyr complexes, Godard might especially like this part of that speech: “you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you…” Nevertheless, and despite utterances that make solid arguments against granting him too much authority, I place JLG in the prophetic tradition. Amid the slipstream, one finds fragments of real compassion for poor humanity, despite our limitations, and our propensity for self-destructive illusions.