Jean-Luc Godard: Five Films For Newcomers
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
In a recent interview, French New Wave legend Jean-Luc Godard implied he was on the road to retirement from cinema for good; he is turning ninety one this year, after all, and has been churning out a consistently thought provoking filmography for over seventy years at this point. He’s currently working on two films, so we still have new Godard projects coming our way, but this is still devastating news. Godard is easily in my top ten favourite directors of all time, and his peak in the ‘60s dominated my best one hundred films list of that decade. Not many auteurs have pushed the boundaries of cinema as well and as often as Godard has. I’d do an even bigger list than five, given the amount of gold he has given us, but I’ll be ranking every single Godard film eventually (maybe even this year), so we’ll get into all of these works by then. I don’t even consider the five films below his best necessarily, but they do give a nice array of what he was really good at. Here are five films for newcomers of the works of Jean-Luc Godard.
5. Goodbye to Language
One of the very few legitimately great 3-D movie experiences I’ve ever had is with Godard’s abstract commentary Goodbye to Language, where the focal point of a “narrative”, a shot, and even a three dimensional illusion all come into play. One unforgettable moment is when the two different images used to create a “3-D” effect diverge from one another, forcing you to accept one image over the other. It’s a bold decision that most filmmakers that choose to make 3-D films wouldn’t even consider, but Godard made it the climax of his experiment.
4. Vivre sa vie
Picking from his ‘60s films is nearly impossible. I don’t have Bande à part, Week-end, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou and a number of other classics here. I opted for Vivre sa vie, because of how devastating the film is; it carries some of the strongest emotional resonance of any Godard film I’ve ever seen. For the amount of rules that Godard broke, it’s great to see him still dominate his field even by adhering to some of the more conventional elements of filmmaking; in this case, it’s to tell the story of a tortured soul who dreams of a better life.
3. Histoire(s) du cinéma
One of the most ambitious film projects I’ve ever known about is Histoire(s) du cinéma, which took Godard around ten years to make. This video essay is part documentary, part multimedia experiment, and completely art in only the kind of way Godard could make. Unrelated images, sounds, and ideas are smushed together to tell (and rewrite) the history of cinema, from the mind of both an academic and an auteur. Histoire(s) du cinéma is an astounding dismantling of the filmic medium, with a reassembly that only a true cinephile could pull off.
2. Contempt
Contempt is one of my favourite Godard works not just because I’m a sucker for films about filmmaking (which, well, I am). It’s an overwhelming experience to see Godard operating with cinematic beauty, and not just jarring juxtapositions and ideas. Contempt is both minimalist and maximalist, with some scenes that carry on in one room between two people preceding moments of a gigantic scope. Not to say that Contempt is his most commercial film or that it will appeal to everyone, but it’s definitely the film — to me — that feels like Godard’s way of playing within the confinements of mainstream cinema, and churning out a melodrama that has more heart than twenty blockbusters put together.
1. Breathless
Regardless of the film’s unorthodox nature or its popularity, there is literally no better place to start with Godard than with his debut Breathless. First off, it’s Godard’s best film, so there’s that. Secondly, Breathless became a FILM 101 staple almost immediately, thanks to its experimental editing, anarchistic nature, and countless broken rules. It’s over sixty years old, and I’d argue no film — even the pale imitators — pulled off what Breathless was able to achieve with its fragmented bastardization of the cinematic experience that breathed new life in what seemed to be a mastered medium; the master was actually just getting started.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.