Jean-Luc Godard is one of those figures who has become preeminent by contributing to the creation of a whole new stereotype, that of pretentiously abstruse French films. Yet his fame is puzzling even to himself: “I’ll always wonder why I’m known, because nobody sees my movies. Well, almost nobody.” He and other directors such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol formed what is known as the Nouvelle Vague, a cinematographic movement lauded by some for its boldness and innovation and derided by others for its self-indulgence and esoterism. Yet, as more often than not, the paradigm case hardly fits the stereotype. Godard’s oeuvre is not simply an array of masterfully crafted but impenetrable films with odd narratives and odder characters; on the contrary, his films have a lot to teach us about cinema.
Godard is renowned for being a maverick who would do things exactly the way he wanted them, with little consideration for practical or even legal concerns. He would often film for only two hours a day, sometimes cancelling the whole shoot on the morning because he wasn’t feeling inspired. To evade the Kafkaesque grasp of the French bureaucracy, he decided to record the sound during post-production, which meant that he didn’t have to comply with regulations concerning sound technicians. He even went as far as scrapping the entire script of À bout de souffle (1960) after he started to film and rewrote the dialogue on set.
This idiosyncratic approach extended to his style of directing, where Godard rejected all the narrative and cinematographic conventions of the time. His use of the jump cut in À bout de souffle is still cited as one of the most daring moves in the history of modern cinema. In a famous car scene, the two main protagonists, Michel Poiccard and Patricia Franchini (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg respectively) are arguing whilst driving around Paris. The camera never leaves Seberg, and Godard occasionally leaves out bits of the footage in order to cut to the same shot later in time, a technique which is called jump cutting. (Type “Godard breathless car scene” into YouTube to see the scene.)
Consider how the directing of this scene differs from standard conventions. In Hollywood at the time, and to a large extent still today, if you wanted to show a conversation you would just film it with no pauses, alternating between both characters, i.e. using the shot/countershot technique. Alternatively, perhaps if you wanted to show tension between the characters, you would add some silence in between their lines. No need for jump cuts.
Both methods of directing and writing have their uses, but what Godard does show us that others fail to is a new perspective on cinema. By presenting us with a different way of putting a story to screen, he opens our eyes to how surprisingly formatted by convention mainstream films are. Watching a Godard film may at first seem odd, unnatural even, but once you realize what makes it so, you suddenly grasp precisely what other directors do to prevent that sensation.
So watching Godard – on top of being a pleasure in itself – is an education in the conventions of cinema. The most interesting part is that fifty years after the release of À bout de souffle and eighty years after Godard’s birth, you might think that these conventions would have changed. But the forms Godard was conscientiously going against have hardly altered. Some changes have been made to accommodate advances in technology, but the director’s basic tools, such as shot/countershot, persist.
