WIND FROM THE EAST (Dziga Vertov Group—Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gérard Martin, 1969)

Initially creating leisurely rural scenes, both contemporary and “period,” and playing these off a dense, repetitive aural collage of politically-minded voiceovers, Le vent d’est is Jean-Luc Godard’s heartfelt response to the disarray and demoralization of the French Left in the wake of May ’68. Shot in Italy and made by the filmmaking collective to which Godard at the time belonged, Groupe Dziga Vertov, it is a “what-to-do-now?” rumination—all passionate energy in search of a decisive course of action. It takes the form of a film about the making of a film, which could be the film that we are watching, or at least the one the filmmakers may be dreaming. Godard’s compatriot, Jean-Pierre Gorin, principally edited, with Godard assisting and (Godard has humbly asserted) learning. The segment titles—“The Strike,” “The Delegate,” “The Mobilizing Minority,” “The General Assembly,” “Repression,” “The Active Strike,” “The Police State,” “Theory,” “Self-Management,” “Armed Struggle,” “Civil Violence”—also came from Gorin, who, according to Godard biographer Richard Brody, devised them as a “practical” navigational tool. For me, they are irrelevant, especially as the titles are often slipped in quickly and, sometimes, almost invisibly. They are an attempt to “contain” a far-ranging, fluid dream, and it is the dream that wins out.

The film opens with a boy and a girl—we later discover, both actors in the film-within-the-film—lying together, asleep in the grass, our view of them partially obstructed by their arrangement, sheltering foliage, and the off-kilter camera angle; the purple of the boy’s pants strikes our eye and prepares us for his variously painted face in the internal film: both primitive spectacle and, past and present, terrorist—well, what is it? Self-proclamation? Camouflage? The girl also is in the internal film, but before we learn that the two actors are also playing actors we have before us the intermediate scene of their waking up and making love, during which the foliage shelters them precisely from our invasive view. I take all this as metaphor for Godard’s own desire to be “left alone” as he works through his ambivalence and confusion to reach some point of political decisiveness, for instance, regarding the role of violence that is best in order to advance the progressive cause against the oppression of workers. At different points the film seems to be rejecting or embracing violence, but viewers who assume that the final position taken—including a how-to for the homemaking of bombs—is decisive in the matter are perhaps applying a linear narrative convention to a non-linear, atomic (because, largely, fluidly associative) film. While his search for a resolution to his ambivalence sets up in certain viewers an expectation that Godard will indeed resolve the issue, adding heft to wherever the film “ends up,” this fails to take into account two things: the spirited, unpredictable nature of this film; the possibly intransigent nature of dear Jean-Luc’s ambivalence!

Besides, it is always possible with Godard that he is “being playful,” testing us as well as himself, or deliberately mixing up dream and reality, filmic and non-filmic life. To be specific, Godard may be weighing in his mind the “terrorist” bombing of the café in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), which Le vent d’est directly notes in passing. (It is the poignant style of Le vent d’est that whatever it notes or shows it does so “in passing”—a quality that disputes the charge of “ideological rigidity” routinely lodged against it.) As such, the film circles in Godard’s memory of the Algerian War—and oppressive French colonialism in general: a point of national disgrace, and an instance of Godard and Gorin’s attempt to see the single river of the struggle for justice, whether economic or political, to which each separate struggle, wherever, whenever, contributes. Training terrorists to make bombs? Instead, Godard may be “wearing” this film of his as a kind of makeup or mask. A visual key to this “playfulness” is the Weekend-“blood” of unmistakable red paint that he splashes over period-guerrillas in the film-within-the-film: more makeup; another “mask.”

Rather than the poker-faced instructions on bomb-making, something else in the film might give one pause: despite their criticism of the “Socialist Realism” that Stalin expected Soviet filmmakers to aim at achieving, Godard and Gorin’s surprising ambivalence regarding Comrade Stalin—this, sixteen years after the tyrant’s death, and even less time after the launch of deStalinization, by Nikita Khrushchev, in 1956. Yet this is explained, at least in part, by the film’s optimism and historical sense. One of the fleeting voiceovers lights on the pertinent theme: History advances “masked,” in disguise. Despite Stalin’s mass murder of his people as part of his collectivization policy, the show-trials and CPSU’s purges, his vicious and virulent police state, Stalin may yet have contributed to the advancement of world communism, if only by the corrective reaction that his criminality and “cult of personality” invited. Godard and Gorin are taking, then, “the long view.” But they leave unmentioned the grim, implicit converse to their positive perspective—at least, hope; for if history sometimes benefits humankind when it least appears to do so, it may be equally true that seeming positive advancements could be masking regression. Repression can be the real-world outcome of what sometimes appears to be the advancement of social, economic and political justice. It is nothing short of dazzlingly brilliant how this film plays with the motif of makeup, masks and disguise—sometimes, even when it seems not to.

Seeing Le vent d’est for the first time more than forty years after it first appeared (and was largely dismissed) has been, for me, a heady experience. My grasp of Godard remains wonderfully deficient, whetting my appetite for successive viewings, new insights and delights. This film, even at this late date, is fresh, vibrant, witty, poetic. To get underneath its masks, start by taking off your own.

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FILM SOCIALISME (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)

The Egyptian watch that has passed from wrist to wrist—both wearers that we see are black women—contains the universe in a grain of mechanism. And contains history. In the middle of Film Socialisme, Jean-Luc Godard’s first theatrical film shot exclusively in high-definition video, the gold watch stands—hangs, like a star?—alone, a figure against an illimitable black ground. It has no face; it tells no time but, instead, seems to encapsulate the mystery (or mysteries) of time. So vast, so deep—and yet, when worn, it is “property,” in a film where someone notes, “There must be a redistribution of property.” The shifting ownership perhaps reflects what is also noted: “Money is a public good.” (To the disembodied male voice uttering this against the nighttime sky—Ferdinand’s, in Pierrot le fou?—a disembodied female voice—Marianne’s?—adds, “Like water.”) However, it also reminds us of what it cannot fail to remind Godard: the earrings that pass through different hands in Max Ophüls’s Madame de . . . (1952). Their loss, and the loss of the beloved who gifted her with them, cost the heroine her life; this nourishes the tragic undertow of the watch’s employment by Godard, a symbol conjoining his adoration of cinema and his disdain for the property ownership fueling the expansive inequities generated by the god of globalization.

The initial setting of the tripartite Film Socialisme is a cruise ship proceeding from one port of call to another on the Mediterranean. Post-opening credits, the first shots are of the sea below—in a work in rich color, haunting imagery tending towards black and white. One sublimely mysterious shot penetrates the sea, showing a school of small fish circulating amidst seaweed: a premonition of the watch that will harden it, giving it a mechanized form: timelessness = time = timelessness; the flitting, glittering fish encapsulate our vulnerability, and Godard’s; somehow looking into a kind of mirror, we and Godard are the sole witnesses.

The vulnerability of youth accounts for another incomparably beautiful image: in silence, Ludovic, a young boy, and Alissa, the older girl he has befriended onboard, descending at night in the transparent cruise ship elevator, both facing away from the camera at an angle and toward the dark eternity surrounding them; their bare necks seem especially vulnerable. Eighty-year-old Godard invests this image with his own sense of vulnerability, his sense not only of time’s dwindling for him but also of his and others’ failure to achieve, politically, a more equitable world. We feel his feeling in the grip of history that has failed to deliver on the promise of liberty, equality and fraternity—an issue with which a pair of young siblings confronts their parents later in the film.

The three sections of Film Socialisme are titled “Des choses comme ça” (“Things Like That”), “Quo vadis Europa” (“Where Is Europe Going?”) and “Nos humanités” (“Our Humanities”). A plot element in the first section involves intrigue surrounding pilfered Spanish gold; gold coins drop onto a dark surface, evoking an image from Sergei M. Eisenstein’s never completed ¡Qué viva México! (1932), where a necklace of gold coins is the dowry necessary for a girl to buy her way into what is ultimately exposed as (because of gender inequality) merely the illusion of wedded bliss. (Godard’s pair of affectionate parrots right before his film’s opening credits also alludes to a bit from Eisenstein’s Mexican footage.) The gold necklace that Alissa wears telescopes her end; a curse governs the fate of those who implicate themselves with the stolen gold. Alissa may pay for the sins of her grandfather, a Nazi war criminal who likely gifted her with the necklace from the looted treasure. Will the curse also take away Ludo, who briefly delves into her cleavage to finger the necklace while she is wearing it? Young Europe is shadowed indeed by the sins of Europe’s past.

Whither does the cruise ship go? Five ancient ports are on its itinerary on its return trip to Barcelona: Cairo, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas and Naples. Although three Palestinians are among the passengers onboard ship, “ACCESS DENIED” flashes across the screen to indicate arrival at—where? There is no sovereign Palestine to correlate to ancient Palestine, and Israel has no interest in admitting sightseers onto what it regards as its own beleaguered territory. Apparently, therefore, Odessa has been hastily added to the ship’s scheduled dockings (a passenger voices surprise that the ship is stopping there), perhaps compensatorily for legal reasons. After all, bought and paid for, the cruise must “deliver” to passengers at least the number of places it advertised! It, too, is “market property.”

Among the mysteries punctuating the ship’s voyage are shots of animals, although at this point I cannot recall which is where. My favorite is the spooky shot at night of a European barn owl which seems as intrigued by the camera as we are with it (the owl). (Its round face, again, visually plays off the faceless watch; so, it also seems to encapsulate the cosmos.) The “curious” owl seems surprised by “us,” if we take the camera to be our representative, and if we aren’t anthropomorphizing what is the owl’s perpetual appearance. Surprising us, though, are another pair of animals, two YouTube LOLcats (possibly a transmutation of the paired parrots at the beginning of the film) that require a pull-back of the camera for their consignment to a screen-within-the-screen, certifying them as a fabrication.

There is, in fact, a pattern of surprises that the film delivers to us as a protest against history, specifically, European history, where past too often has proven prologue and created a pall and a hangman’s noose of predictability. And what is Godard without his playfulness? Thus we come to hear and observe the ship’s banner whipped by the wind, only to be surprised when the same furious sound accompanies the wind’s work on the necktie a man is wearing. The color of the tie—red—suggests, in context, spilt European blood; the color red is a recurrent tinge that highlights the film’s otherwise largely muted and neutral color scheme. In the final, documentary section of the film, which provides mini-essays of each of the stops along the ship’s route, voiceover notes in Hellas that the union of ancient democracy and ancient tragedy produced, for Europe, a single offspring: civil war.

Barcelona is introduced twice with the same image: a snippet of a matador in the bullring. Needless to say, memory of the Spanish Civil War hangs heavily over the Barcelona material, and what initially seems a banal touristy bullfight image becomes upon its repetition, in the context that the film provides, a reminder of the nationalists’ conversion of “the bullring” into scenes of mass executions of republicans. Spain, alas, was the scene of fascist victory, and the outcome of the Spanish Civil War is one of the two signature tragedies of the twentieth century. In present day Barcelona, Godard’s most haunting image in Film Socialisme takes center screen, achieving a depth and power of poetry unsurpassed in his staggering œuvre. A woman reporter stands against a wall (courtesy of Sartre, itself an evocation of the Spanish Civil War and of Franco’s mass executions), interviewing, and jotting notes. To us, she appears at the radial center of the slowly turning, grayly out-of-focus fan of the shadow of such a windmill as Don Quixote once tilted a lance at. (Incidentally, Godard elsewhere in this film includes a bit of Orson Welles’s film of Don Quixote.) There are other famous windmills in cinema, for instance, in Vsevolod I. Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927), “towards the camera in closeup, the scythe-like rotation of a windmill’s stark fan on the farm: persistent, sharp motions that unsettle the frames, within the implied symbolism of life’s tragic round”—“an image that conveys both the harsh entrapment of poverty and signals the future growth of the peasant[-protagonist]’s political consciousness.” In Ingmar Bergman’s comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), the “radial vanes [of windmills] in motion suffuse life’s sexual fortunes with a clock’s mortal indication.” (I am quoting myself.) But what strikes us in the Godard is the reporter’s obliviousness to, or ignorance of, the shadow she is in. If we interpret this shadow as the dogging shadow of European politics and history, we may say that this ignorance or obliviousness of hers undercuts her effectiveness as a reporter of either the moment or the context to which it belongs, no matter the diligence of her note-taking, making her the mere shadow of a reporter, no matter the clarity of her image to the eye. In failing to appreciate “the whole picture,” she is spiritual kin to the reporter that Jack Nicholson plays in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). We may also say she is outgunned by Ludo, the boy onboard the cruise ship, who when he is shadow-boxing on deck at least knows he is shadow-boxing.

Whereas the history of the Spanish Civil War helps transform the scenes in Barcelona into contemporary tragedy, the middle section, centered on a single family, the Martins, finds in its confrontation of the couple by their children the shadow of other failures, including the politicizing motto and myth of the 1789 French Revolution, and the failed revolution of 1968. Although essential for the unity of the whole, this section, for me, is not as compelling as the other two sections. Perhaps the most interesting character here is the silent llama that haunts the grounds of the service station that the Martins run: a symbol, perhaps, of the dislocations that pockmark the “globalized village.”

The final section revisits the ports of call that the cruise visited in the first segment, but without the benefit of narrative or characters. This documentary conclusion is rich in “our humanities”: history, literature, music, painting, sculpture, cinema. Perhaps its most phenomenal passage integrates shots from Eisenstein’s October (1927) and, especially, Battleship Potemkin (1925) into a sweeping, rapid rightward tracking shot—you may recall that the Odessa Steps passage moves screen-left—through an Odessa forest. Past and present, myth and reality, humanity and Nature, formalism and spontaneity, black and white and color, film and video: what an apotheosis of association and integration, ultimately, a fragment of the dream to make whole—I am not so naïve as to add “again”—the broken nature of our world and our lives: as moving as anything anywhere in Godard.

A disorganized soul, I fear I have scarcely been coherent about this wonderful piece of work. Let me hasten to add, therefore, that it is the most relaxed, most assured thing that Godard has done. It is the best “film” of 2010, Godard the best “filmmaker.”

With this work, dear Jean-Luc has set aside his anti-Zionism long enough to have someone ask, “To be or not to be a Jew . . .” and has opened his heart for the first time in cinema to children, bringing to fruition the course that partner Anne-Marie Miéville set him on with France/tour/detour/deux/enfants (1977-78). The world’s greatest living filmmaker has said that Film Socialisme is his last film. For the time being, let us call it instead his latest. Regardless, it is a summary work full of glints and glimmers of past work, and rounding out with a reminder, especially, of his tremendous Histoires du cinéma (1988-89; 1998), as well as a resounding hommage to Chris Marker’s style of documentary filmmaking. His last work? Even so, we have this film and all the others to go back to and go back to as though our lives depended on our doing this—as perhaps they do.

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LE DÉPART (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1967)

Something co-written and directed by Jerzy Skolimowski that won the top prize at Berlin and stars Jean-Pierre Léaud ought to be my cup of whisky; and, indeed, The Departure, from Belgium, is just that. This dazzling, hilarious, and most tender slapstick comedy-adventure-romance reunites Léaud, who is at his most brilliant here, with charming Catherine Duport, his co-star from Jean-Luc Godard’s superlative Masculine-Feminine from the year before. Their new characters extend the previous ones for Godard; likewise about contemporary youth, Skolimowski’s film is something of a companion-piece to Godard’s. Its frenetic air and snappy pace may also remind one of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and The Knack (1965), although it is far superior to either of these British films. (Other stylistic influences may be Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, 1959, and Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, 1966.) Skolimowski, working for the first time outside his native Poland, conjures a breathtaking romp in Brussels—one all the more remarkable in that he did not understand French. What he grasped, though, were the sensitivities of sixties youth.
     Léaud’s Marc is introduced by Skolimowski’s stoking our sacred memories of Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s tremendous The 400 Blows (1959), which launched Léaud’s career and his iconic participation in the spiritual apparatus of the nouvelle vague; Skolimowski has Léaud pull a sweater over his head, as we remember Antoine doing, and, still in a sequence before the opening credits, run like the wind to reach a pay phone to make an emergency call. (Léaud, in his twenties, is fit and slim and runs much faster than his chunky teenage incarnation.) Thereafter, Marc seems to be all about securing a 911-S Porsche for an upcoming race. (His enunciation of the “S” is priceless.) A sort of Walter Mitty, Marc is a hairdresser who dreams of rally racing. However, the film ends with no such race; we last find Marc, bless him, in a hotel room with Michèle (Duport)—the girl of his dreams rather than a dream of superficial road glory. Anyone who isn’t deeply touched, and haunted, by the end of this gracious film needs a tune-up.
     Léaud, here, is not how we’re used to seeing him: this time out he smokes a cigar rather than an endless trail of cigarettes; he invites a bloody nose at work; at a bar, he stabs himself with a giant pin—a parody of Rod Steiger in Sidney Lumet’s god-awful The Pawnbroker (1965); he is in drag—a lovely nod on Skolimowski’s part to Howard Hawks, whose Cary Grant masquerades as a woman in I Was a Male War Bride (1949); and Léaud claims his most agile, athletic and two-fisted/rough ’n’ tumble role here, indoors and out. It’s not easy for a boy to get hold of a Porsche!
     Every bit of this movie is sensational, including Marc’s zipping down highways in “borrowed” vehicles; but one set-piece is truly stupendous: an auto show that Marc and Michèle attend, remaining in the abandoned showroom after closing—if you will, the only two persons left on Earth. Hiding in a car boot, the two deepen their relationship—a lovely exchange of light slaps signals this—while they appear to occupy the limitless expanse of dark space: a more profoundly mysterious shot than anything in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and a fine anticipation of the boy-girl face-offs on an abandoned stage in Godard’s Le gai savoir (1968). The universe expands; Marc and Michèle now occupy the two front seats of another car in the deserted showroom. The car is perched, like a god, on a slowly rotating platform. As the platform turns, we see the couple pulled apart, each in the space of the other half of the car. As the platform turns, the two halves come together, bringing the couple together. This is the moment when boy-girl romance trumps Marc’s infatuation with cars. It is the miraculous moment for which Marc and Michèle were born for.
     Another beautiful sequence, this one in the street, finds Marc and Michèle hand-delivering a large, exquisitely reflective mirror, from Marc’s place of employment, to a second-hand shop. The reflections of either carrier contribute to the subject of identity, much as does the wig that Marc earlier delivered to Michèle, briefly changing her from a blonde to a brunette. In particular, Marc’s mugging antics with the mirror emphasize his being “something else” to try to help determine precisely who or what he is.
     I cannot tell you how dearly I love this film.

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FIRST NAME: CARMEN (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983)

For his bruising Prénom Carmen, Jean-Luc Godard’s most romantic film post-Karina, Bizet’s late nineteenth-century opera, based on Merimee’s novel, is both a springboard and an ultimate point of return, like the sea. This version is contemporary, with the best performance—obscene, hilarious—coming from Godard himself, as Jean Godard, a once successful filmmaker currently deposited in a mental hospital where doctors and nurses want him out and he schemes to remain. Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) hovers over, although it’s a book about Buster Keaton that’s tucked under Jean’s arm, and his Jewish, disheveled appearance makes him a ringer for Groucho Marx. Jean emerges from the asylum, though, to participate in the making of a film.
     It is his niece, Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who has engaged his interest in the project, whose “set” is Uncle Jean’s borrowed seaside apartment in Normandy. In reality (hm), the projected film—I mean, the one that hasn’t been made—is cover for the terrorist activities of Carmen and the gang she is part of. It is during a bank robbery that Carmen meets her José, rechristened Joseph (“Don’t call me Jo!” he insists), a bank guard, and it is instant love except that poor Carmen, with so much on her plate, cannot commit. Her moments with Joseph can be tender (they share a glorious shot in which each lover’s shock of unruly hair erotically touches the other’s), and they can instantly erupt into nastiness, with Carmen’s cold dismissal of the boy who so wants to love and be loved shutting him out. Indeed, clinging Joseph has himself a secret love, one that he is too shy to declare: Claire, one of a string quartet rehearsing Beethoven for the film-within-the-film’s score. (At least twice, though, a passer-by hums a bit of the most famous aria from Bizet’s opera.)
     Nothing seems to come to fruition. Joseph can’t have his Carmen or his Claire, and when he enters Carmen’s hotel room shower to join her, trying hard to conjure an erection to impress her, his manhood just peters out. When he slaps her face to impose some degree of dominance, she slaps him right back.
     Talk about failure and disappointment! Carmen’s gang can’t decide even whom to kidnap for ransom: the industrialist or his daughter!
     Two recurrent images stress a kind of ontological and eternal certainty in contradistinction to all this failure: Carmen’s forest-dense bush (there is a lot of Carmen on display in this film); the rolling sea. There are so many shots of its shore-headed and withdrawing waves, in fact, that one toys with the idea that they aren’t inserts at all; rather, the Carmenial plot provides the “inserts.” Squawking invisible seagulls periodically “bring indoors” the power of the sea.
     The film’s most striking image also involves the sea. Late, in Carmen’s darkened hotel room, Joseph from behind the still-on television set places a hand in front of the screen. The screen is sufficiently small that the hand seems enormous; the TV is transmitting only static, its light making the hand appear very dark, nearly blacked-out. Here again is an attempt by Joseph to appear strong, dominant, as though his hand were the hand of fate, as though his own fate was indeed in his own hand(s). However, once again the show of Joseph’s strength resolves into impotence. He cannot touch the static; regardless of its proximity, the hand finds the visual content of the screen-within-the-screen beyond its grasp. Moreover, the persistent static eventually reminds us of the sea that we have repeatedly watched throughout the film—a force so powerful, despite the hand’s exaggerated appearance, that it exposes the hand, and the humanity it represents, as essentially puny by comparison. There is, also, a Langian aura of determinism to the image. Joseph’s—anyone’s—fate is not in his or her hands.
     Numerous commentators have noted that the shots of the sea in this film are a visual pun for the nouvelle vague.
      Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard’s partner at the time, wrote this extraordinary film which won for Godard the top prize, the Golden Lion of St. Mark, at Venice, in addition to technical prizes for Raoul Coutard’s cinematography and François Musy’s sound.

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KING LEAR (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987)

The radioactivity dispersed by the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant plunged the world into apocalypse, ending civilization and wiping out its hallmark, art, which therefore had to be reinvented, reconstructed. William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (played by stage director Peter Sellars) is thus at work restoring his ancestor’s plays.
     The premise of Jean-Luc Godard’s film of King Lear, in English, befits the peril in which art finds itself, according to Godard. (Godard, Sellars, Tom Luddy, Richard Debuisne and Norman Mailer contributed to the script.) Toying with it himself here, Godard equates commercialism with radioactive danger. One of the film’s secondary titles is “Power vs. Virtue”—although later reference is made to “the power of virtue” in relation to the reinvention of images: visual art, that is, such as painting, sculpture, cinema. Godard’s film juggles Shakespeare’s play, insights into the play (Cordelia’s silence on the matter of her love for him confronts her father with her presence, her “exactitude”), Mailer’s supposed recasting of the play as a gangster saga, the making of this film (including the deal behind it that has made this possible), and a plethora of ruminations on images. Dramatic scenes, voiceovers (including readings from the play) and even a mini-art documentary are all part of Godard’s haunting tapestry. It stuns how much, moreover, comes through of the emotional power of Shakespeare’s most massively moving, and bleakest, tragedy. (This perhaps refutes Sellars’ claim, perhaps proffered as a joke, that Godard had read only a few pages at the front and the back of Shakespeare’s text.)
     Barbaric and melancholy, but also imbued with suggestions of rebirth, the Swiss seaside setting, punctuated by squawking seagulls, suits the theme of an ending spurring a “new” beginning—one attempting to recapture elements of the past.

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