Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

GODARD: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. By Colin MacCabe. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 432 pp. $25

As a filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, ém­i­nence grise of the European avant-garde, presents stumbling blocks. More essayist than storyteller, he has always made films that subordinate narrative to ideas, or else discard narrative altogether. The ideas unfold unpredictably, through images and techniques that are, by turns, evocative, smart-alecky, and silly. To Godard, contradictory impressions represent not incoherence but fidelity to life’s tumult. For a time, especially in the 1960s, every new Godard film was an event.

Born in 1930 to a prosperous family, Godard left his home in Nyon, Switzerland, at 16 to attend the Lycée Buffon in Paris. A lackadaisical student, he turned to petty thievery, got arrested, and was disowned by his parents. Godard soaked in Paris’s rich cinema culture at Henri Langlois’s revered Cinémathèque and the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, and got to know Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut. This movie-mad bunch became critics for the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma and then filmmakers of the French New Wave.

Along with retelling that story, Colin MacCabe, a professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh, places Godard in another familiar tale: Scion of a cushy background finds Marx and rebels against the bourgeoisie. While films such as Une femme mariée (1964) and Masculin féminin (1966) probe the topic of consumerism with a relatively detached eye, Week-end (1967) depicts France as a decaying nation overrun by greed. As MacCabe notes, Week-end is the work of “someone who has reached a point of total disgust and rejection of his own society.” The film closes with the words “End of Cinema.”

Godard’s next films, including British Sounds (1969) and Vent d’est (1970), sketch a nebulous Maoist ideology that dictates cultural revolution. They are, writes MacCabe, “in some simple sense unwatchable—the premise of each is that the image is unable to provide the knowledge that it claims.” Through a partnership with the filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard has subsequently returned to engaging the audience rather than hectoring it, but his politics haven’t changed.

MacCabe illuminates the historical and theoretical contexts, but he doesn’t deeply analyze the films themselves. It’s a conscious choice, and probably a wise one. There’s no substitute for watching such masterworks as Breathless (1959) and Contempt (1963).

—Christopher Byrd