This documentary looks at the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound.
Making sense of the career of Jean-Luc Godard is both impossible and contrary to the spirit of his art. More than any other filmmaker, Godard, over six decades of features, sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound. He long ago left behind intelligibility, at least in the conventional sense.
But if an overview were your goal, Cyril Leuthy’s documentary “Godard Cinema” — which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, just eight days before Godard’s death at 91 — acquits itself reasonably well. It refuses to reduce Godard’s output to the relatively accessible French New Wave period and tries to deal with him in all his thorniness.
There is Godard the film lover turned film director, who had made a decisive break with his childhood and who, beginning with “Breathless” in 1960, rewrote the rules of cinematic storytelling. His work continued to defy precepts of commercialism, language and politics. Interviewed in the documentary, Marina Vlady, the star of Godard’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” (1967), recalls the difficulty of acting the complicated texts that the director would read into her earpiece.
Leuthy’s survey doesn’t ignore Godard’s bizarre flirtation with Maoism or the abrasive, often-neglected films he made with the politicized Dziga Vertov Group, in a period that forced him to acknowledge the contradiction of making art collectively in an auteurist medium. (The filmmaker Romain Goupil recalls that holding majority votes during the editing process wasn’t really suited to Godard the poet.)
Rebirth came, oddly, in part because of Godard’s interest in video. The 1975 unveiling of “Numéro Deux,” which harnessed and interrogated the technology, was “really a moment when Godard allows himself for the first time in a long time to say ‘I,’” the film historian Antoine de Baecque says. And from there, Godard never stopped.
For many, the attraction at Film Forum, where “Godard Cinema” opens this week, is not the documentary but the short that precedes it, a final work from Godard screening under the title “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.” It is essentially storyboards in motion: The cinematographer Fabrice Aragno has described it as an offshoot of Godard’s preparations to adapt a 1937 novel, “False Passports,” that won its author, Charles Plisnier, the Goncourt Prize.
The short is filled with cryptic witticisms (“It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there”), abstract artwork, photographs, film clips (from Godard’s own “Notre Musique”) and even Godard himself in voice-over explaining his ideas about Plisnier (“He was more like a painter than a writer”). That’s after the sound kicks in, which takes a while.
Godard Cinema
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
