The history of contemporary film began in a bathtub. Not with the grainy short films of D.W. Griffith, the stark black-and-white epics of Sergei Eisenstein, or the choppy comedies of Chaplin, though there is historical merit to prizing these technological achievements as the worn celluloid heralds of a new art form. But from the perspective of a different sort of history, one which traces the history of film as the emergence of a new way of creating and participating in culture, we need look no further than the visionary hobbies of the first film buffs. Here is where film as we know it today really began—in the Parisian bathtub of Henri Langlois.
In 1936, Langlois established the Cinémateque, a theater designed simply to be a place where people could experience important moments in the history of film. The introduction of sound on film in 1929 had posed a major setback for the acceptance of film as an art. While the mass audience quickly welcomed the “talkies,” most of the intellectuals and aesthetes who had begun to rally around this new visual art regarded the advent of sound film as a commercial corruption that fundamentally perverted the medium.
And what happened to all those reels from the golden age of silent film? Theaters had no use for them. Many were recycled for their silver content. But Langlois managed to lovingly salvage a goodly number. They ended up in his bathtub, the only space he had to store them. Out of this storehouse of treasures was born the Cinémateque and a new generation of film appreciation that influences us to this very day.
One of the ways in which this generation influences us is in the importance Langlois placed on the preservation and screening of classic film. (Preservation is not merely an issue for the early days of film history—it applies to the work of filmmakers like Antonioni and Tarkovsky.) Another, fortuitously related, is in the wave of directors and theorists it inspired to make and talk about films, electrified by the scratched and dusty images from the pop culture of a passing age. This sort of film history is the subject of Colin MacCabe’s new look at the director Jean-Luc Godard. It is a history that is as much about biography as it is about technology. In Godard’s life we see the convergence of film as a technology with the intense suspicion that marked post-World World II European philosophy, exploding in social movements leaping from the screen to real life and back again in a new sort of cultural dialogue.
MacCabe often eschews the theoretical and critical for the anecdotal. It is hard to understand Godard without establishing the cultural climate that informed his thinking, beginning with Langlois and extending through a myriad of journals and theaters that persist to this day. This is not just because the culture of film appreciation began to produce a new sort of artist and thinker, but because Godard himself has probably done more than anyone else to draw attention to this culture, to explore the confines of its rules, and to champion it as a higher order of artistic reflection. While he is the godfather of all video-store clerks turned directors, he is also the patron saint of theorists who explore film as the medium of the modern age, the herald of a new democracy in social criticism. “The way to criticize a film,” Godard famously announced, “is to make another film.”
In legend, everyone from James Joyce to André Breton attended screenings at Langlois’ cinema clubs. One of these who would become famous much later was the young Jean-Luc Godard. And around this resurgence in appreciation of the cinema arose a number of journals that began to revive interest in film. The first of these, La Gazette du cinema, was the brainchild of schoolteacher turned filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who would go on to become a great director in his own right. Throw in a little of the disillusionment of Sartre, the increasing influence of the revolutionary anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, and the profoundly innovative film theory of André Bazin and you have Rohmer’s next editorial venture, Cahiers du cinema.
While many still turn monthly to the pages of Cahiers du cinema, few are familiar with its patriarch, André Bazin. He found in works like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane an ontology of film that would inspire the film writing of Cahiers du cinema and the work of a legion of young filmmakers. Through deep-focus shots, non-traditional camera angles, and innovative storytelling, Welles was able to produce a new sort of film. Citizen Kane forces us to make our own way through the visual and psychological details of each scene. For Bazin, this is one of the first films that really seem to understand the nature of film as an art—films freed from the conventions of painting or literature.1
In films like these, Bazin caught a vision for the cinema, one which existed in a primordial form in Langlois’ collection. He caught a fleeting glimpse of what his protégé Francois Truffaut called “the privileged moment” and Rohmer called “flashes of beauty”—or, as given currency by a delicate scene in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), what Bazin himself, steeped in Christian thought, came to call “holy moments.” These are instances in which the viewer enters so fully into what is transpiring on the screen that a moment of meaning occurs which is entirely distinctive to cinema. It is this presence of a transcendent version of the “real” in film, Bazin believed, that is the ultimate justification of its existence as an art form. In this strange new medium, Bazin further argued, such moments take their shape through the distinctive personal vision of the director, who should “author” his film independent of the clichéd corporate expectations of studio executives. (Hence the “auteur theory” that generated fierce debate in film criticism of the Fifties and Sixties.)
From this passionate new conception of the nature of film the movement that became known as the French New Wave was born. Young men like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, hitting the streets with little more than cheap cameras, wheelchairs for tracking shots, and half-written scripts fleshed out by unprofessional actors, began producing films that found instant critical acclaim. Bazin died in 1958 before he was able to see Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, but the New Wave was already well launched, gaining steam with Godard’s astounding debut, Breathless, in 1959.
Godard quickly became famous for the personality he stamped upon his films. They swaggered with the nightclub nihilism of cool jazz and winked along with the audience in rollicking send-ups of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Much like the other pioneers of the New Wave, he was unschooled in the finished professionalism of the Hollywood studios. “All you need for a movie,” he explained, “is a girl and a gun.” His films leapt in ungainly edits and makeshift transitions that discomforted and dazzled audiences in equal measure.
Through his radical criticism in Cahiers du cinema and his early films with their homages to B-grade Hollywood flicks, Godard became one of the first to brilliantly unpack Bazin’s reconfiguration of the cinema. Rejecting the Christian profundity of Bazin’s thought, Godard appeared to be replacing the experience of Bazin’s “holy moments” with acutely secular ones. His innovative storytelling reproduced the restlessness of the twentysomething culture that would explode in the Sixties and probed at the moorings of modern European society with an alert eye for ironies and injustices. Godard had begun to turn Bazin’s lens upon the very culture that film itself was shaping and reforming.
In Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo channels Humphrey Bogart so effectively that he creates a film within a film, even to the point of being gunned down by cops right on cue. This gleeful deconstruction of Hollywood pervaded Godard’s work for the next few years, hopping from genre to genre and finding his profane versions of Bazin’s “holy moments” in the strangest of places. A Woman is a Woman (1961) flirts with
musical comedy, subverting the genre through the savvy cinematography of longtime collaborator Raoul Coutard. In My Life to Live (1962), Godard catches his first wife, Anna Karina, weeping along with Dreyer’s Joan of Arc and weaving her way through a tapestry of other cinematic allusions. In Contempt (1963), he dismantles Brigitte Bardot, literally laying bare the illusion, the intriguing fantasy that is contemporary cinema.
But Godard was always a moving target. In 1960, he had made a darkly enigmatic film about the Algerian War, Le Petit Soldat. Initially banned in France because it showed the use of torture by both sides in the conflict, the film wasn’t released until 1963. Films such as Masculin-Feminin (1966) and Weekend (1967) continued in this vein, becoming more self-consciously political. In 1964, Godard had credited himself as Jean-Luc “Cinema” Godard in Band of Outsiders. In 1967, in the postscript to Weekend, he was ready to declare the “End of Cinema.” For Godard, the cinema was no longer the arena for privileged encounters with the real, as Bazin saw it, but rather a place to re-imagine the world through the lens of its social and political alignments. Though he insisted he wasn’t making “political films” but rather “making films politically,” Godard’s work became too distracted by political activism to generate the lighthearted humanity of his earlier ventures. He spent the next decade producing a pile of largely unwatched titles that variously chronicle the Maoist student movements of the Sixties and Seventies, explore the ideas of obscure Russian theorists, and outrageously deconstruct gender codes with Jane Fonda.
In this string of poorly received projects, Godard’s passion was strictly in the present tense. In the 1980s, however, he returned to the history of film and the filmmaking process for inspiration. This return to his origins culminated in the decade-long project he cheekily titled
Histoire(s) du cinema, a massive series of videos in which Langlois’ bathtub treasure-trove achieves its apotheosis. In the title Godard puns on the French word “histoire,” which can mean both history and story, as a starting point for a reflection on the history of film. Through a visual dialogue about classic and contemporary film, he uncovers a metaphysic that is specific to film. For while film is an art, it is also a history.
And just as Histoire(s) du cinema is impossible to describe in print, this new sort of historiography is impossible to describe in any medium but film. Using the material of 20th-century cultural and political history, Godard is able to uncover the storied nature of this secular histoire. Throughout the series, scenes from movies are spliced together under a rich network of music, spoken commentary, and written words. What is his and what is others’ blends together into the biography of a cultural institution. And what could be unpacked as an advanced reading of the history of film plays as a symphony of images, seemingly the montage that Godard had been trying to create his whole life. Film as a history is by now so wired into the history of cultural self-reflection that to improve our understanding of one is to guarantee our role in the other.
Godard’s presence looms insurmountably over contemporary film. Quentin Tarantino’s genre ode, Kill Bill, was produced by Band of Outsiders, Tarantino’s production company named after Godard’s film, and Tarantino’s entire career is inconceivable without Godard’s example. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is Godard democratized—or dumbed down, depending on your perspective. (“Moore doesn’t distingush between text and image,” Godard commented when the film was screened at Cannes. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”)
The 1963 classic Contempt opens with a shot of Godard’s cinematographer tracking with the camera down a stretch of road. As he gets closer, he begins to tilt the camera toward the audience. It is a startling experience, lens facing lens, and this awareness follows us through the rest of the film. Through this provocative self-awareness Godard still holds sway over the way many have come to see what film really is. Only he could get away with saying both “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world,” and “The cinema is something between art and life.” Somehow his life and films harness this tension as if it were the most important one in the history of art.
Michael Leary is studying for a Ph.D. in New Testament at New College, Edinburgh.
1. In December, the University of California Press will reissue What Is Cinema?, the essential two-volume collection of Bazin’s essays, with new forewords by film scholar Dudley Andrew.
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