I touch fits in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, from an homage to B movies to an almost musical thriller. There are also multiple reflective and existentialist discourses of some characters who are mostly antagonists, always tired in addition and who do not care, it seems, what is around them. Although in the end it is the image that goes further than a thousand words, especially when identities and actions are forged in that plane that the camera never manages to frame and in which Godard often pays attention, especially in his first movies.
Before delving further into the cinema of the late French filmmaker, we must dwell on the evidence of the aura with which his filmography has gone down in history as ‘an art only available to a few’, an entertainment for intellectuals or a novelty to dive into if you study any discipline related to audiovisual communication.
Logically, from the 1960s to the century of streaming, the distance between the average viewer and classic cinema has grown, despite having the hallmark of the avant-garde for its time. However, accustomed by now to conventional shots, to sitting down and watching a Gordard film on a streaming platform —part of the filmmaker’s filmography can be found at filmin— one can be found before a ‘thriller’ that engages as much as, for example, those of the commercial billboard.
It is true that in their dialogues Godard’s characters, nihilistic in part, constantly play at pretending that they understand the mysteries of life as if they were spies of the gods, as the plot of ‘El contempto’ suggests, for example, but in good measure the newcomer who premiered with ‘At the end of the getaway’ also offers an entertainment from anarchy with his image and under the consciousness of who knows that he has spectators in front of him, which is why it is noted that there is a camera and there is talk of cinema and more cinema. The metafictional metafiction of fiction.
What makes plots of films such as ‘Vivir su vida’, ‘Banda parte’, ‘El desprecio’ or the already mentioned film debut of the director, among others, so special in front of the camera? Here are some of the stylistic reasons for its charm, which are not so common in today’s cinema:
Evening presentation of the characters: the offscreen
Especially in his first films —although this same resource can also be seen in, for example, the 2014 film-collage ‘Goodbye to language’, in which Godard recalls that he worked in the audiovisual industry to break all the conventional canons of movement camera and which earned him the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival— there are main characters that are introduced in a scene where they are facing away from the camera in a medium shot or close-up or others who arrive to question those leading the action when the camera angle seems not to want to show what they are like, creating an atmosphere of some tension and intrigue for the viewer, who can try to figure out why the character of the film is not being shown. normative form.
This is how the public knows in the first instance, for example, Nana and Paul in ‘Living Your Life’, 1962 production which stands out for being one of the first feature films signed by the Frenchman and for earning Godard the Godard Special Award at Cannes. You don’t always have to give answers in the audiovisual and leave space for off-screen, that plane of reality that also exists in the fictional universe and that can remain hidden (or not) from the viewer, is one more character in these films.
The look of the character, as well as his thinking in subsequent films, guides everything. And it achieves that, in those cases in which the protagonists go beyond the understanding of the public or show a more than reprehensible social behavior – part of the relationships between men and women that are shown in Godard’s cinema have remained anchored in another time under the current contemporary look, as well as those phrases of the dialogue that also refer to women—, are capable of reaching and staying with the viewer, as will happen practically forever with the couple played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in ‘At the End of the Escape’.
Most of the characters in these early films are thugs or lost people, but they also have the power to function as protagonists in the heart of the public despite being rather antagonistic. After all, they are ‘outsiders’ characters who play their own characters within their timeline and who are capable, with all their duality, of filling the ‘thrillers’ they inhabit.
All camera movements fit and also the fourth wall
It is very clear that the public plays an important role in Godard’s cinema, a mantra that is currently more diluted. The camera is not only at the service of the artistic pretensions of the director, but also of the spectators.
There are many shots, snapshots full of air and that more than meet the rule of thirds, which would undoubtedly end up being shared today in a multitude of stories and Instagram profiles. Part of the charm of his filmography also derives from the fact that in conversations between characters the technical action does not remain only in one shot and reverse shot every time one speaks. Rather, it seems to give the idea that anything can happen, with many changes of perspective and pans or circular movements included in the conversation.
As part of the game also enters the breaking of the fourth wall: it is not uncommon to see the characters make the ‘others’ participate by looking directly at the camera to seek accomplices or support for their thoughts, theories or complaints. And, in the same way, at other times the audience becomes the character itself when the camera takes the perspective of the protagonist and ceases to be that narrator implicit in the story.
In ‘El contempto’, however, they are mental monologues those that reach the viewer as a direct voice of the character; while in the case of ‘Banda Aside’, a narrator is the one who questions those who watch the film, recording at the moment the feelings that the skull trio of this fiction is experiencing. Anything can happen in a Godard film, that much is clear.
Cinema as the main plot
In the image that Godard builds, space is also left for the images of that environment in which art and critical thinking flood everything. The seventh art is truth and aspiration in the universes composed by the filmmaker, as if it were almost a simulation of what the characters experience at certain times.
One would say that these people see the camera, just as the audience knows in turn that he is playing a role. As happens in a scene in ‘Band apart’ in which a minute of silence is included almost as a game: for the characters the room has remained dark despite the ambient sound, something that is illustrated with a complete blackout of the band of sound in the film.
The consciousness that surrounds the speeches of Jean-Luc Godard on the screen mixes the grandiloquence of certain characters with the absurd and with conversations that have not changed much today. What is different about the dynamic that Arthur and Frank have with Odile when she is and is not present, trying to charm her on the one hand and shine the ego on the other?
Along the way, the footage also makes a hodgepodge of elements that ultimately responds to experimenting and having fun, although the route is not understood until the end of the journey. “God knows where he is taking us”, is heard in ‘Living his life’ when the protagonist, Nana, is watching a movie about Joan of Arc at the cinema. Godard seems to have known it too.