Pierrot Le Fou

Jean-Luc Godard had a fixation on the iconography of Hollywood and in particular the American gangster movie that was reflected in his first outing Breathless (1960), the movie which made him famous. However, the only difference between Godard’s gangsters and those he pays homage to rests in the aim of their activities. If possession is nine tenths of the law then Godard’s outlaws are interested in dispossession. In Pierrot Le Fou (l965), which was revived recently at Film Forum, his characters Marianne (Anna Karina) and Ferdinand aka Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) embark on a crime spree that's a repudiation of materialism. They’re Bonnie and Clyde conceived of as mini Raskolnikovs, philosophical nihilists who would be at home in the pages of a Dostoevsky novel. The world they flee is one in which Parisians talk to each other in advertising slogans (even Pierrot tells the attendant in a gas station to “put a tiger in my tank"). But Godard employs a dialectics that uses juxtaposition to pull the rug out from under reality. While the opening of the film thrusts us in the center of a bourgeois household, it also begins with a lecture on Velasquez and Pierrot's phone number is a Balzac exchange. Pierrot says, “I feel fragmented” and later “we have come to the age of the double man. We don’t need mirrors to talk to ourselves.” As the couple make their escape to a Crusoe type world, the camera focuses on Marianne even as Pierrot is talking. Godard who owes his filmic style to Brecht, makes no concession to illusion. When Marianne asks Pierrot what he is doing as he looks backwards in another scene, he says “I’m talking to the audience.” The movie posits an esthetic form of Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" to the extent that a utopian reinvention of both language and life is a subtext of Godard's narrative. For instance Belmondo repeatedly bristles when Marianne calls him Pierrot insisting repeatedly and comically, as if he hasn't said it before, that his name is Ferdinand. Pierrot Le Fou, is overly long and employs citations like a brilliant lycee student who knows his Baudelaire. But it’s also brilliant and Karina, whose personal relationship with Godard was in the process of dissolution during the shooting of the film (they'd been married, but got divorced), has the kind of beauty that might lure a filmgoer to his or her death.

Goodbye to Language: Brecht in 3-D

There’s Godard’s much talked about dog Roxy who has more than a cameo in Goodbye to Language and there’s the subversive use of 3-D. In a kind of cinematic guerilla warfare, this highest level of perspectival illusion is usurped throughout the film. But Godard either mistitled his movie or is so caught up in the Babel myth that infuses it (at one point it’s remarked that everyone will need interpreters) that he misses his own point. From the beginning of the film everyone is reading. They’re reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. The skewed 3-D is mirrored by the overlays of constant and wonderful aphorism (particularly relating to Hitler): “Everything Hitler said he accomplished,” “Machiavelli, Richelieu, Bismarck, Hitler did not invent anything.” “society accepts murder to solve unemployment,” “inner experience is now forbidden by society in general,” “the dog is the only creature who loves you more than itself.” Zero and infinity, adieu and dieux. “Kamera," we are informed, is the Russian  for prison. Monet is quoted and Shelley and Byron make cameo appearances at the end of the film. Truffaut Fahrenheit 451 was a futuristic tale based on a Ray Bradbury novel about the burning of books. But Goodbye to Language is no Kristallnacht. And while Godard may romanticize the closeness of Roxy’s relationship with reality, we cannot be assured that the dog shares his master’s continuing and exuberant delight in the female body. Godard has always exuded Courbet’s love for wanton displays of femininity (in specific the mons pubis which has become a near extinct species of beaver in our pedophiliac Brazilian wax culture). A better title for Goodbye to Language would be Goodbye to Reality. The film’s begins by declaring “those lacking in imagination take refuge in reality” and it’s really Brecht in 3-D with Verfremndungseffekt acting as a didactic tool. If Bergman was the great metaphysician of modern art house cinema than Godard is its epistemologist. Le gai savoir was based on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: Or On Education. His subject is, in fact, language, consciousness and history on both an ontogenic and phylogenic basis. In Goodbye to Language the arguing couple of Contempt (played here by Heloise Godet and Kamel Abdeli) return for an encore. Microcosm and macrocosm—his couple’s utterances and nudity have both theological and semiological significance (“nature” and “metaphor” are recurring titles for sequences). At the end, Godard credits his actors along with a list of great thinkers, who he is wont to quote. His screen does go black and his soundtrack silent, but is his movie a swan song for language? Hardly. Andre Malraux wrote his Anti-Memoirs. He couldn’t have made this masterful anti-masterpiece without it.

Paris Journal VII: Jean Cocteau at the Cinematheque Francaise

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

The Cinematheque Francaise was the brain child of Henri Langlois. Along with Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema, it became the home for New Wave directors like Truffaut, Rivette, Resnais Godard, and Chabrol.  Now housed in a Frank Gehry designed structure, the Cinematheque has come a long way from its humble beginnings and is now as auspicious a part of the French cultural landscape as say the Louvre, the Grand Palais or the Paris Opera. It’s hard to believe that the Cinematheque and the directors who supported it were once the new boys on the block, many of whose early efforts were a rebellion against the techniques and methods by which many French films had previously been made. One could look at Les Quatre cent coups as both a film about adolescence as well as a metaphor for rocky development of an art form. One thing that can also be said about the Cinematheque is that it’s a hundred and eighty degree turn from the quadriplexes in which films are now shown around the world. Even American art houses like Film Forum serve popcorn, but while you can eat in the Cinematheque’s café, there are no concession stands. The Cinematheque is like the Vatican for film buffs and you don’t eat popcorn when visiting  the Holy See. October ll was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jean Cocteau the poet, playwright and director and along with an exhibition devoted to his life, the Cinematheque has been showing classics like Le sang d’un poete and La belle et la bete. A newly restored version of the surrealist classic with its statues come to life  recently enchanted a Sunday afternoon audience of children and adults. In the hands of Cocteau the classic fairytale is turned into one of the great essays on sexual initiation and its accompanying landscape of murderous and libidinous wishes. As the current exhibition demonstrates, Cocteau had an enormous impact on both past and present. He and Andre Bazin wrote one of the first books in French on Orson Welles and his poetic vision of cinema was enormously influential on many French directors. Could there have been L’Annee derniere a Marienbad without the surrealist innovations of a film like Beauty and the Beast?