Letters from Vienna #130
Jean-Luc Godard
Death of a Nonconformist
Protestant
The passing of Jean-Luc Godard on 13th of September 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland, represents the passing of one of the last great individualists and non-conformists of our age. It’s questionable whether such a love of liberty, individualism and non-conformism, in this conformist, heavily censored and brutally oppressive world in which we currently live, is possible today. If it exists at all it’s usually confined to the shadows and is seldom visible in the realm of public life. It’s certainly not to be found on TV, in the press or on social media.
Initially the way Jean-Luc Godard expressed his love of liberty, individualism and non-conformism was by becoming a thief. “For five years, until he finally landed in prison in Zurich in 1952, Jean-Luc was to steal repeatedly, and repeatedly to get caught”[1] Colin MacCabe tells us. Of course, the object of the exercise was just that: to get caught. And, of course, there was a direct causal relationship between the break-up of his parent’s marriage, Jean-Luc’s need for attention and his transgressions. It was never about “need”, “greed” or “becoming rich”. As he put it: “I have a feeling that I’m not asking for power or riches or anything, because I had more than plenty until I was fifteen. More than anyone. It was very different from Truffaut, for example.”[2]
It is also important to note that Godard was a “Protestant moralist” if albeit an unorthodox one: “Godard’s brother Claude feels that Jean-Luc is indeed best understood as another in an ancient line of strict and severe Protestant pastors.”[3]
“In a devout Protestant family, any talk of divorce was all but disallowed, and so it is difficult to give any clear chronology of the breakdown of the marriage until the final divorce in November 1952. The children have different memories of the split. For Claude, it occurs in 1949 when his mother moves to Geneva, for Véronique in 1951 when she returned from a skiing holiday to be told by her sister Rachel that their mother had left. Jean-Luc repeatedly told me that it came when he was fifteen, which would place it in 1945. What is certain is that Odile Godard had never reconciled herself to the move to Switzerland. Paul Godard may have been delighted in the escape from being “dragged around the worldly salons of Paris” (his daughter Véronique’s guess), but Odile Godard missed those same salons dreadfully and made sure that both she and her children spent as much time in Paris as possible.”
“There are records indicating that as late as 1933, when she was pregnant with Claude in Switzerland, she was still trying to continue her studies in Paris. While she seems to have been a devoted and conscientious mother, involving herself and her children in a multitude of social and cultural activities, and while reading was obviously a passion, there is little doubt that the life of a Vaudois matron was not to her taste.”
“For Paul Godard, however, the life of a general practitioner in a small Swiss town seems to have been an ambition fulfilled. He played an active part in the more general medical world, producing occasional research papers with colleagues and entertaining visiting English doctors. But he took his holidays alone and did not normally join the family for the summers in Anthy, contenting himself with the occasional visit across the lake in his small boat with the intriguing name Trait d’union (French for hyphen). What the full back story of the marriage was can only be guessed at, but what is certain is that for Jena-Luc the marriage was finished with the war, and that by that time it was the subject of Nyon gossip.”[4]
“It might be tempting to explain these thefts, in the vacuous terms of psychology, as an act of rebellion or a rejection of his family, but his brother sees them rather as a reaction to Protestant “stinginess”. Godard himself places them within a comprehensive view of the desire to control his own world:”
“I understood very quickly that the important thing in a film is to control the money; money, that is to say that is to have money is to be able to spend money according to your own rhythm and your own pleasure. I will always remember that when I asked my father for money he would say: “Tell me what you want and I’ll pay for it”…That wasn’t any good at all. What I wanted was money and the power to spend it as I liked. And in the cinema, that has been my principal effort in the cinema…that’s true power which I think very few people have enjoyed…except perhaps the very poor; they’re left to their own devices because they’ve got so little money it isn’t dangerous. But once there’s a lot of money, and real power isn’t in the amount but in the time it is spent.”[5]
Montaigne
In order to understand Godard, it is important to know that he was a disciple of Montaigne: “In their endless discussions about cinema and culture when they were working together, Godard told Gorin that he had always thought of himself as an essayist and that the figure he most identified with, the person he most wanted to emulate, was Montaigne…In Montaigne’s famous introduction to the essays, he says, “I myself am the subject of my book”, and his resolve to test everything against his own personal experience, to insist that any argument must come back to the ground of his own being, makes clear why Godard feels so close to him. “To show and to show myself showing”, one of Godard’s most succinct formulations of his fundamental aesthetic, could almost be Montaigne’s.”[6]
The fact that he studied anthropology at university and had a “scientific”, “experimental” approach to film-making isn’t accidental and must be seen within the framework of Montaigne-like “attempts” (“essais”):
“A chemist doesn’t succeed every single time. One day the experiment goes along very nicely, and another day it doesn’t; there are even experiments made in a vacuum…Since I’m an experimenter, without meaning to speak well or ill of myself – it’s just a way to make a living like any other – obviously you can’t go to the bank and say: “Subsidize me.””[7]
“When Coutard had to leave for another film with four days of shooting to go, Bitsch really appreciated how challenging it was to be Godard’s cameraman. Quite apart from questions of lighting, Godard’s desire for framing always broke classical norms. On static shots this was a problem that could be dealt with, but it was extremely difficult to hold the framing required when the camera was tracking or panning.”[8]
In “Breathless” for example (see letter #60) Godard had no problem with “faux raccords” (false matching shots) or jump cuts. “Godard broke all the rules.”[9]
Similarly, Godard’s experiments with text, sound and structure can be seen in this light. Equally important was his attempt to create a collective, the “Dziga Vertov group” because he “disliked the director making all the decisions in a “fascist manner”.”[10]
Film is inherently undemocratic, as Ulrich Seidl recently pointed out in a discussion, but one thing it is (and this was undoubtedly its appeal for Godard) is the fact that it’s an “ersatz” (substitute) for family[11]. Those who don’t understand this simple fact invariably fail.
[1] p. 32 godard a portrait of the artist at 70, Colin MacCabe
[2] p.18 Ibid
[3] p.5 Ibid
[4] pp.30-31 Ibid
[5] p.34 Ibid
[6] p.241 Ibid
[7] p.174 Ibid
[8] p.150 Ibid
[9] p.121 Ibid
[10] p.228 Ibid