Losing Godard: a Smoke Social extra
A brief reflection on art, despair, and the irreplaceable, in the wake of Jean-Luc Godard's death last Tuesday at age 91
There was a spectre hanging over this year’s Cannes Film Festival – it was that of Jean-Paul Belmondo. He was everywhere, material and immaterial. On one hand there was the noticeable absence from the festival’s proceedings of Belmondo’s spirit – by which I mean a certain rebel charm, a kind of mid-century high-low sensibility which he so exquisitely typified. But it was his physical presence which was just as marked. The glittering Belmondo smile was quite literally impossible to miss, a string of enormous banners raised along the Rue d’Antibes in homage to the great actor who died in September last year. Images broadcasting those unforgettable features all of his own – his impish eyes and his heavy lips and his nose sitting somewhat askance – could only provoke you into imagining the great days of yore when, sun beaming down upon the heavenly Riviera, Belmondo’s roguish strut resounded along the Croisette.
Belmondo’s story begins in the suburbs of Paris where, during his schooling and early adolescence, he displayed a natural facility for all things corporeal. Matters of the body seemed to interest him much more than those of the mind. He was a boxer in his youth, and an avid footballer. His grades were low, largely through neglect. Only in his late teens did he discover the stage, which led to a successful application for the Paris Conservatory. Trained to perform the classics, and indeed as the son of a renowned academic sculptor and professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the somewhat low-brow medium of film felt a distant possibility for the young Belmondo. Especially so when he was called away to complete his military service in Algeria, where he was stationed for six months in 1958.
The year before his conscription, however, Belmondo had stumbled into several small-time film roles to compliment the work he was otherwise doing putting on performances of George Bernard Shaw and Jean Anoiulh. One such role saw Belmondo paired with a then-unknown 27-year-old director named Jean-Luc Godard who, in casting for his short film Charlotte et son Jules, couldn’t go past the roguish eyes of the boy from Neuilly. Here, we find an impossibly beautiful and impossibly juvenile Belmondo – he was 25 when the film began shooting – relishing the role of jealous and mealymouthed boyfriend, giving a necessary touch of charisma to a character whose sole task is to rant at his wordless girlfriend for the film’s entire twelve-minute duration. Taking place entirely in one location – the jealous boyfriend’s miniscule bedroom – comparisons with a similar bedroom scene in Godard’s next film, À bout de souffle, are impossible to avoid. But before Belmondo could power Godard’s first feature to the untouchable pantheon status it now holds, he was called away to Algeria. Godard himself had to dub all of Belmondo’s lines in Charlotte et son Jules.
So he returns in 1958, does a couple of short films, and is then cast in À bout de souffle. The rest – the immortalisation of Belmondo and co-star Jean Seberg; the legacy of the film’s technical innovations; the extent to which Raoul Coutard’s defining look would become a kind of brand for the films of la Nouvelle Vague; hell, even la Nouvelle Vague itself – is, as they say, history. Upon his death, Belmondo was given a state memorial service at Les Invalides in Paris, an honour rarely endowed to artists. But then, only the grandest of gestures could ever possibly do justice to what Belmondo et al gave to French cultural history when they began filming on the streets of Paris in the late summer of 1959.
“This film that I took for the start of a new cinema, I now see as the end of cinema,” said of his début feature Jean-Luc Godard, who we lost last week at the age of 91. Godard, struck down with a number of illnesses, chose last Tuesday to end his life by assisted suicide in his home in Switzerland, where the practice is permitted under certain conditions. A choice perhaps unsurprising for a man whose name, if the endless stream of obituaries are to be trusted, is synonymous with iconoclasm. A more ultimate provocation would have been to do it in France, where it is not yet legal. But I’d like to think that Godard, a great ironist if not a great dramatist, could foresee the certain absurd coincidence which his actions would visit upon l’Héxagone. Last Monday, President Emmanuel Macron confirmed that a “citizen’s convention” would be raised in order to discuss the possible legalisation of assisted suicide or euthanasia; the following day, the man who was perhaps France’s most influential 20th century artist, and who epitomised the trademark French irreverence, cultural vanguardism, and high self-regard, decided to end his life by just those means in a neighbouring country. Godard always insisted that, when it came to his French-Swiss nationality, he relished his position of having “one foot in each country.” So it was that in France he became a star and that in Switzerland the star finally extinguished, once and for all.
This is not a paean to the cinematic legacy of this most indubitably avant-garde of filmmakers. What Godard did for cinema (or rather, did to it) cannot be measured in a 1500-word piece, much less so by someone so unqualified as I. Innumerable have been the efforts to do just that – to sum up Godard without qualification – in the wake of his death; some are better, some worse. The best thing I recently read about Godard was, in fact, an excerpt from an essay written by Gilles Deleuze from the November 1976 edition of Cahiers du cinéma. “I can tell you how I think of Godard,” Deleuze begins:
“He’s a man who works very hard, and it follows that he is completely alone. But this loneliness is not the common sort: it’s filled by a huge assortment of things. Not dreams, fantasies or projects, but actions, things and even people. It is a many-faceted, creative loneliness. It’s what lies behind Godard’s ability to operate powerfully on his own, but also as part of a team. He can deal on equal terms with anyone…”
I like this because, after encountering a torrent of hagiographies and pseudo-cinematic appraisals of Godard, it is the only thing I’ve managed to find in the maudlin days after his passing which genuinely reveals something about what made him special. Iconoclasm is a dirty word; it’s only one step above icon, which is not just dirty but also empty through overuse. At least we can say that with Godard the descriptor in some way befits the work. He was a destroyer of boundaries, he was a figurehead, he did create a vanguard. But the greatness of Godard is perhaps most simply in the fact that nobody, at any time, anywhere, could match the power of his vision. Let’s examine, for example, the immediate circle around him, the Cahiers group (for want of a better appellation). Viewed alongside a Truffaut or Rohmer, the passion and force of a Godard picture is incomparable, even if the result is something resembling not so much a piece of storytelling as a speculative, almost expositional inquiry. Of course, Godard only ever used the dramatic predicament as a pretence for an investigation of his real subject, which was the form of cinema itself. In this way, one writer’s description of Godard as “cinema’s James Joyce” is not so far off the mark. This indeed explains why it will take us many, many more years to adequately analyse Godard’s collected works; and why, where many of his peers created undoubtedly excellent films, none of them ever came close to the high-art achievement of Le Mépris, a touchstone of European filmmaking and perhaps cinema’s most engrossing and beautiful love letter to itself.
Now, this titan is lost to us. The sadness is not so much in his passing – if the stories are to be believed, then we can take solace in the relief it would have given Godard to end his suffering. Rather, the sadness is somewhat akin to that of destroying a family heirloom: it’s the despair of the irreplaceable. LeMonde called Godard “the image of la Nouvelle Vague which now, with him, definitively ceases to be.” But we knew that la Nouvelle Vague was long over – Godard himself knew it. Better to ask: what of the iconoclasts, then? Quentin Tarantino is probably the last one left. We can only pray that, by the time his star dims into permanent night, another new wave will have caught hold.
On this point, however, I’m not so optimistic. Not long ago, I saw Woody Allen’s forgettable new film, Rifkin’s Festival. Of course, Woody Allen is nothing like Jean-Luc Godard. Their sensibilities are irreconcilable, and their directorial talents are channelled into differing aspects of the role. We can also judge that where Godard continued to reorient his artistic prism even in his late work, Woody Allen has supplied the inverse case, more or less making the same film since the turn of the century. And yet it’s also true that, although the cultural canon would be left unchanged if Allen had stopped making films twenty years ago, we can find our way to a justification of the new work by revisiting the sheer accomplishment of the old. Here in France, where Woody Allen is still adored, the release of Rifkin’s Festival has brought about a number of retrospective screenings of some of Allen’s masterpieces. I have been fortunate to recently see, on a big screen for the first time, Annie Hall and Manhattan. And I found it impossible to leave those two films – to leave Rifkin’s Festival too, for that matter – with anything other than a feeling of what you might call triumphant melancholy. As in, it’s all still right there, as good as ever, and yet it’s all slipping away. Woody Allen turns 87 in December. It’s been nearly fifty years since he took his first tentative steps on a path which was to deliver what remain some of cinema’s highest achievements. Those films continue to provide such a fresh injection of pleasure that you almost shudder to think of their age, of your own age, of what comes next when the great relics of the past drift away.