My Love/Hate Relationship with Jean-Luc Godard

Looking back at the Jean-Luc Godard series at the PFA, "Movie Love in the Sixties," I feel partially guilty for not having attended all the films. It is a rare opportunity to see films, especially "classics" on the big screen, in gorgeous and preserved form. Who doesn't love going to a movie theater and sitting in those comfortable purple seats? Yet at the same time it is a major relief not having attended most of the series. I went to Contempt and Breathless and that is probably all I could have handled before losing my mind. As the title of this entry explicitly states, this series has reinforced my love/hate relationship with Godard. Part of me loves his style, how it simultaneously violates narrative codes and creates a captivating energy. We can feel the fresh and innovative nature of his work even today, despite how jaded we have all become with the excessive amount of films readily available.

As a film studies major, I am supposed to appreciate Godard as an "auteur," a cinematic artist who invested a great deal of thought and intellect into his work. He helped changed film, this cannot be denied. However, at the same time, I find his work tiring and tedious, at times reaching a level of extreme pretentiousness. Godard gets so caught up in making references to everything intellectual, from classic films to poetry to philosophy. Very quickly my head starts to hurt. References are great, but how much is too much? I can only take so much such intellectualism. His films deconstruct our traditional relationship with cinema, but he pushes it to a point where it just becomes too exhaustive and monotonous. He moves so far away from narrative conventions, from the orthodox and traditional, that many of his works become almost unwatchable.


I would argue that Contempt is his greatest work and Breathless is an undeniable classic. Band of Outsiders is fascinating to an extent, dealing with characters and scenario, which create an energy, perhaps similar to that of Breathless, but it just never ends up succeeding. In the end, it just falls flat and leaves you wanting so much more. And then there are the rest. They bring up necessary and interesting topics for discussion on the level of content and form, but who can actually stand them? Alphaville was interesting, but enough was enough. Film noir that meets sci-fi is irresistible and a clever play with genre, but yet again Godard’s intellectualized style makes the film intelligible. Masculine Feminine became more painful the further you entered into it. There was nothing to truly captivating with everything existing in such fragmented and detached terms. I know it is meant to be art, but whatever happened to accessibility? Do I need to be French to be able to adore everything he has ever made? Godard asks a lot of his audience, leading me to the final question: can a film be too intellectual?

Peter Bayuk