Jean-Luc Godard: Remaking the Movies

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ALONG WITH Francois Truffault and Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard has become synonymous with the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which jettisoned cinematic narrative for a more impressionistic, self-aware, often theoretical flow of images. As confidently as he burst certain conventions, Godard also drew heavily from American popular cinema, especially gangster movies and film noir.

He was, as film critic David Thompson has remarked, "the first filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous cinema and to make cinema itself his subject." The characters in "Breathless" and "Band of Outsiders" model not just their clothing and their language on movie stars, but also their bleak worldviews and nearly nihilistic rebellion.

Twenty years later, cinema was still Godard's primary subject, although he had a much more complex view of the form, as the new "Jean-Luc Godard 3-Disc Collector's Edition" suggests. The set includes four of the director's later films — "Passion," "Prenom Carmen (First Name: Carmen)," "Detective" and "Helas Pour Moi (Oh Woe Is Me)" — along with a sole bonus feature, a new short documentary titled "Jean-Luc Goddard: A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma."

Even as he addresses other issues, Godard cannot escape his self-awareness. "Passion," from 1982, is ostensibly about a Polish director making an art-historical epic in France. Despite his dalliances with two mistresses and a workers' uprising at a local factory, it has only the slimmest notion of a story — just as Godard intends.

In 1983's "Prenom Carmen," based loosely on the Mallarmé story, the director plays a director who has committed himself to a psychiatric hospital. "Detective," from 1985, breezily reshuffles film noir motifs. Even Helas Pour Moi, about a god (or the God) inhabiting a human body, seems to have accrued cinematic weight, if only in the way Godard's camera shifts focus to create a dramatic intimacy.

Bound thematically as well as chronologically, these four films attempt to divine the intersection between sex, God, class, art and French national identity, which to Godard are essentially the same thing — namely, film.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Studio Canal