Jean-Luc Godard's Charlotte et son jules (1959)

This early, thirteen-minute short 'about' Charlotte and her 'jules' (or boyfriend) Jean is in effect almost entirely a monologue by Jean-Paul Belmondo* in his bedsit where Charlotte (Anne Colette) has returned after leaving him for another. He talks all the time, insults her lover, tells her she loves him, won't let her say a word while she makes faces at him behind his back and a guy (in fact Gérard Blain) waits for her in his car outside. Belmondo says she must love him or why has she returned? She opens her mouth to say 'To pick up my toothbrush', which she does and walks out the door.

*The voice we hear isn't in fact Belmondo's but Godard's, although there's some bad lip-syncing.

Jean-Luc Godard's Nouvelle Vague (1990)

Directed long after the 'Nouvelle Vague' period – if it really existed – and almost equally long after Godard's Dziga Vertov films, the film Nouvelle Vague is an oddity that many people would prefer to forget. With a dialogue full of literary and cinematographic quotations usually without mention of where they're from, this insane film has the gardener Jules speaking poetry as if it were ordinary speech, among many other unexpected oddities.

The very rich woman Elena Torlato-Favrini (Domiziana Giordano) hits Roger Lennox – a surname which evokes a character in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye – in her car as he's walking on the road, takes him back to her home, takes care of him and keeps him in her home in Switzerland by Lac Léman. He's the quiet, thinking type and when she invites him to join her for a swim in the lake he refuses because he can't swim. Nevertheless she drags him in and he drowns, which doesn't seem to concern her at all.

Shortly after an identical man, physically, appears and says he's Roger's brother Richard. He's aware of the murder and becomes a director of one on Elena's companies in return for his silence. They become lovers and he's the dominant one. Again they go on Lac Léman but this time she's drowning and he saves her. But the odd thing is that he appears to be the same person as his 'brother'.

Various: Paris vu par (1965)

 

It was Barbet Schroeder's idea to give a bit of pep to the Nouvelle Vague by having a number of players – we can hardly call them 'members' as this was never a movement – make a movie. And the result was six shorts by noted directors, each taking a part of Paris in which Paris vu par was made: Saint-Germain des Prés (Jean Douchet); Gare du Nord (Jean Rouch); Rue Saint-Denis (Jean-Daniel Pollet); Place de l'Etoile (Eric Rohmer); Montparnasse and Levallois (Jean-Luc Godard); and Pharmacie la Muette (Claude Chabrol). In all, the six films last 95 minutes and are an excellent display of the cinematic talent of the time.

Two of the shorts end in death, two in broken relationships, two prominently show street scenes, and two essentially men at work. Douchet shows a one-night-stand in which the man says he's going to Mexico, although he's in fact a model in a life class; Rouch has a woman arguing with her partner about changing their lives, although when she's presented with the opportunity she turns it down: oddly, this seems very Rohmerian, concerning an essentially philosophical issue; Pollet again turns to Claude Malki as a shy person reluctant to enjoy the pleasures of the prostitute he's paid; Rohmer, with his paranoid shirt salesman, seems to be suggesting a man-to-man confrontation is to be avoided, whereas man-to-woman handle accidents in a very civil fashion; in Godard's short, as in Montparnasse where the metal sculptor throws his fickle girlfriend out, in Levallois her car bodywork lover does the same; and finally Chabrol's film has the son of an endlessly arguing couple (Chabrol himself and his own wife (and actrice fétiche) Stéphane Audran) wearing ear plugs to silence the rowing and so not hear his mother's cries when she falls down the stairs and cracks her skull – when the son leaves the house, ironically he stands by Pharmacie la Muette – La Muette is an area of Paris, the silence ear plugs give, and the permanent state of his mother.

Brilliant stuff, but was it impossible to find a female director, such as Agnès Varda?

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution | Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965)

Alphaville  is the only science fiction film that Jean-Luc Godard made, and yet it's both more and less than a sci-fi movie. It is also something of a noirish detective story filmed in 1960s Paris, although there are hints of German silent cinema with bits of Brian Aldiss's sci-fi novel Non-Stop and Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend; the subtitle refers to Peter Cheyney's Lemmy Caution books, whose film adaptations Eddy Constantine had previously starred in. Here though, Caution calls himself Ivan Johnson who writes for Figaro-Pravda (one of Godard's jokes) when he enters the dystopian world of Alphaville, which is run by a dictatorial computer called Alpha 60, whose purpose is to create a place where emotion doesn't exist, and is constantly changing Alphaville's dictionary, reducing it to exclude any words which express emotion: obvious shades of Orwell's Newspeak.

Caution is a detective who aims to kill Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), the creator of the computer and who used to be Leonard Nosferatu (another of Godard's jokes), and also to destroy the computer itself. In a world where sex is reduced to a natural function with no emotional feelings involved, and where any members of Alphaville who register emotions are interrogated and killed if found to be 'illogical', Caution meets Braun's daughter Natacha (Anna Karina) and falls in love with her, although she doesn't understand the meaning of the word.

As in all conventional films (although this is of course far removed from conventional), Caution achieves his aims and retreats from the wrecked Alphaville with Natacha, whose last hesitant words are 'Je vous aime'. Yes, it's a love story too.

Jean-Luc Godard's Week-end (1967)

Godard's Week-end is often regarded, and advertised, as a film to shock, containing as it does scenes of murder, rape and cannibalism, but this is nonsense because these violent scenes take place off-scene. Godard is certainly film director who has a great ability to shock, but not in the content of his films as such, more in the extremely original way he makes them. The plot of Week-end isn't really important, which is just as well because there isn't really one there, and the motivation behind the action is in effect a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin. A married couple, Roland Durand (Jean Yann) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are on their way to Corinne's parents and after their inheritance, even if it means murder. They get held up by a big traffic accident, crash their car, and on their return journey are kidnapped by the Front de Liberation de la Seine-et-Oise. Roland is killed trying to escape and Corinne becomes a member of the group.

It's what happens on the way that is the focus of interest, as well as what Godard is saying. This was Godard's last commercial film before he moved on to another stage of film-making. It is apocalyptic, an extreme beyond which it is difficult to imagine going beyond, and although it is now viewed as a great film, at the time of release it baffled many people. It is, as might be expected, a continuation of Godard's criticism of consumer capitalism, but Godard pushes the boundaries as never before.

The main point of attention is the car, that hugely important extension of the human being, and here Godard goes out of his way to illustrate how it has become a symbol not only of wealth but also worth, how it distorts reality to the point of madness. In fact, to the point that the car – far from being an advance in civilisation – actually not only enslaves us but turns us into savages. This is seen near the beginning of the film when the Durands set out on their journey of greed and a child dressed in redskin gear yells at Roland for bumping into his father's parked car. Despite Roland's attempt to bribe the child into silence, the mother comes out and throws tennis balls at him, and her husband fires a shotgun. (Many people in the film have guns.)

And then comes the famous eight-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam due to an accident with several fatalities. Although the viewer is blasted out by car horns, the individualism that the car symbolises has been transgressed and the road is now a stationary public space with men playing ball with children in other cars, people picnicking, playing chess on the tarmac, and card games on car bonnets. As the Durands eventually pass the dead bodies they do so casually, as if what they see is an everyday occurrence. And scenes such as this as repeated, with multiple burning car pile-ups and bodies strewn across the countryside being passed very casually. In fact – perhaps a more disturbing thing – the wrecks seem positioned in such a way as to appear almost as works of art.

On their way, the Durands also meet 'Emily Brontë', Tom Thumb, and 'Saint-Just': Godard, as usual, is throwing in various cultural references, and a Mozart is played on a piano in a farmyard, Jean-Pierre Léaud sings Guy Béart's 'Allô...tu m'entends ?' in a phone box, the terrorist's drummer quotes from Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror, there is an allusion to Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, etc. In this last mentioned scene there is perhaps one of the most extreme distancing devices in the film: Corrine is speaking to a man friend about sex, and although she's in her underwear there is an absence of titillation because the lighting is too dark to see much at all, and the background music frequently drowns out the language spoken.

Week-end is nevertheless a dazzling tour de force, to some extent a prediction of May 1968, although the most shocking scenes are the murder of a pig and a fowl.

Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1962)

Pierrot le fou (adapted from Lionel White's novel Obsession  (1962)) marks a transitional phase in Godard's work, starting what Douglas Morrey (Jean-Luc Godard, 2004) describes as a move from the 'domestic space' of À bout de souffle and Le Mépris to more rapid changes that were to come in French society, notably of course the événements of 1968 and its sweeping changes, which I would suggest were more social, psychological, artistic and generally intellectual than political.

Considered incomprehensible by many, Pierrot le fou as 'story' is easy is sum up: Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) leaves his family and bourgeois home for Marianne (Anna Karina), his baby-sitter and five years previously his lover. Staying at her place for the night (and ignoring the minor matter of the blood-soaked body on a bed), he vaguely discovers Marianne's implications in an arms smuggling racket). They escape to the south-east of France, where the racketeers come after them. There are several murders, until Marianne eventually secretly leaves Ferdinard, although he follows and kills her, and then blows himself up by tying sticks of dynamite around his head.

Within the bones of this story are a number of other details making for a highly complex – and at the same time brilliantly innovative and highly influential – film. This is to some extent a road movie in which cars are stolen as in À bout de souffle, but it's also a gangster film, a film noir, a weird musical, and other genres: it's as if Godard is incorporating as many of them into this movie as he can.

Pierrot le fou also has many cultural references, and it is easy to pick out the mention of Céline's Guignol's Band (as well as a line saying 'voyage au bout de la nuit'), Balzac (as part of a telephone number), the cartoon Les Pieds nickelés, Picasso, and the copies of various paintings on walls. Morrey pinpoints several references to Rimbaud, and the vowels at first displayed in the title of the film are an obvious allusion to Rimbaud's famous poem 'Voyelles'. There are also many obvious or semi-obscure references to Godard's previous films.

Many of the literary references are from Ferdinand, who in the beginning even reads to his young son a passage from a book on the history of art: he is fond of making quotations, and often jots his thoughts down in a notebook. His bookishness is not shared with Marianne, who prefers to share her world through her feelings rather than words. Here we find one of Godard's themes in his films: the inability of words to convey thoughts.

I haven't touched on the criticisms of consumer society (most seen at the party at the beginning where the guests talk in terms of commercial products), the postmodernism, or the criticisms of war, but Pierrot le fou is a remarkably complex film, certainly one of the best French films ever made.

Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie | My Life to Live (1962)

Vivre sa vie is of course an early Godard, and extends the theme of prostitution in his second (ten-minute) short, La Coquette (1955). Its main characters are Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina), Raoul (Sady Rebbot), Paul (André S. Labarthe) and Yvette (Guylaine Schlumberger). Brecht's influence with its distancing effects has often been noted, although Douglas Morrey in his book Jean-Luc Godard in the 'French Film Directors' series believes that he is just as much influenced by Bresson: perhaps the twelve tableaux relate more to the stations of the cross; there's Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, and Bresson released Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc just before Vivre as vie; Godard wanted to adapt Bernanos's novel Mouchette to film, which Bresson did later, etc.

The film begins with a Brechtian distancing device though as we see, in one of the many café scenes, Nana (the reference to Zola is too obvious) talking to Paul just after leaving him, only both of them are turned towards the bar and we only see their backs. In the second tableau, which is set in the record store where Nana works part-time, the camera tracks, as Morrey says, along the shelves of vinyl albums as it will later do along a wall lined with prostitutes: everything is consumer capitalism, including human bodies. Nana tries without success to borrow some money and in the end loses her accommodation through not paying the rent. 

Death is frequently present, and Nana is moved to tears as she watches the silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, where Jeanne learns that she is to be burned at the stake. After this, she talks to a photographer in a bar who wants to take partly unclothed shots of her, suggesting that it could be the start of her career as an actress, which she aspires to. She agrees.

In the fourth tableau Nana is in a police station being cross-examined because a woman has complained about her: the woman dropped a 1000 franc note, but Nana gave it back to her and the woman probably only made the complaint because she thought Nana was a prostitute. Nana admits that she has no fixed address and mainly stays with men friends. In tableau five Nana does in fact take her first customer to a hotel, although the encounter is obviously painfully and amateurishly done on the part of Nana.

In tableau six Nana is out on the street again and meets her friend Yvette, who is a prostitute. They go to a bar and Yvette introduces her to Raoul, a pimp. But Raoul leaves and doesn't return, there are gunshots outside and a man is shot: another reminder of death. In tableau seven Nana is in a bar ostensibly overlooking a boulevard, although the people and the traffic are stationary: it looks like a huge mural, and is probably meant to be another distancing effect. Here Nana writes (very slowly and with a few minor errors) to a brothel keeper but is interrupted by Raoul who proposes that he become her pimp.

Godard was inspired to write Vivre sa vie by Marcel Sacotte's book La Prostitution, and in Raoul's car with Nana we hear Godard himself (voice off) quoting from the text about medical controls, hygiene, finding customers, prices, the risk of pregnancy, etc. And so Nana learns her trade.

Death appears again in a philosophical scene Nana has in a bar with Brice Parain (Godard's former philosophy teacher), when the philosopher speaks to her about the painful death of Porthos in Vingt ans après. And in the final tableau we again have Godard's voice off reading a passage from Poe's short story 'The Oval Portrait', which ends in the death of a woman. And of course the film ends when Nana wants to leave Raoul's web of prostitution, but is caught between two pimps and shot dead. An very powerful film with not a hint of sentimentality.

Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle | Breathless (1960)

Is 'Breathless' the best translation of 'À bout de souffle'? I prefer 'Out of Breath', but there we have it. Whatever the title, this is Jean-Luc Godard's first film, and quite rightly seen as immensely important as an innovation not only in the history of French cinema but the history of cinema tout court. But why?

OK, jump shots, hand-held cameras, lack of studio, often lack of polish or editing, experimentation, etc, but there's more than that here: there's also a question of content. 

This is 1960 and the USA is still living in puritanism. Now, the nouvelle vague directors were influenced by American cinema: a relatively new country culturally versus an old continent: but that new (half-)continent was in part hidebound by minorities who had escaped from persecutions by the old world, so conflict was inevitable. However new and exciting it was, wasn't Hollywood and all that came from it restrained in so many ways? European (especially French) cinema had learned so much from American cinema, but French cinema was opening up a new world to America. He looks in the mirror and sees himself as a kind of Humphrey Bogart, but the film gave birth not just to the obvious Bonnie and Clyde, but to many other American actors such as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson, etc. Thelma and Louise?

 À bout de souffle was, contrary to what title anyone chooses for translation, a breath of life into cinema. Here we have the main character Michel Poiccard (a young Jean-Paul Belmondo), an amoral gangster, almost a psychopath, someone only out for his own end (financially or sexually), a twenty-something who is on the run from something (maybe himself), who casually steals a car (as he casually steals more cars and money too), dreams of escaping to Italy but must first leave Marseilles and get money that Antonio owes him (although we don't know why: who cares?) 

So he takes off for Paris, driving dangerously and is chased by the police, kills one of them, makes it to Paris, robs one of his girlfriends and hides out in the cramped flat another one's living in: Patricia (Jean Seberg), who may be pregnant by him and isn't sure she's in love with him. But it's evident that she's fascinated by him, thrilled by his gangster reality, and she's in effect just as amoral as him. The sketch of Michel meeting her again on the Champs-Élysées, where she's selling the New York Herald Tribune while waiting to go to the Sorbonne, is one of the classic moments of movie history.

But as he waits for the money he's owed to come in, they hide from the police as they move in closer and closer, until Patricia denounces him because she's decided she doesn't love him, or does she? In the street scene as she hears his dying words, with the faux-naïf voice she's used several times previously, she (rather unconvincingly) asks the cops standing over the body what dégueulasse means.

À bout de souffle celebrates its 60th anniversary next year, and apart from the clothing and the cars still look as fresh as when it was first made. It features Jean-Luc Godard himself as the grass, Truffaut was co-scriptwriter, Chabrol was on the technical team, and Jean-Pierre Melville appears in a cameo. Unforgettable, and this film can be watched endlessly.