Detective (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

The trio of films that followed Jean-Luc Godard's return to cinema mirrored, in some cases, his early work. Sauve qui peut (la vie), Passion and First Name: Carmen matched up in thematic and (vague) stylistic terms with Breathless, Contempt and Pierrot le fou. But it is Detective, Godard's lightest since Made in U.S.A., that truly recaptures the spirit of his New Wave material. Filled with cinematic and literary references, populated by existential refinements of various generic types (detectives, mob bosses, black-clad hoods playing billiards with a cigarette dangling from their mouths, disintegrating couples, paid-off boxers), Detective returns the director to his reflexive roots for a lovely throwback tempered only by the slight melancholy of the New Wave performers who now look older.

Confining the action to the Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare, Detective moves between three groups of people whose paths overlaps as they move about the hotel. Godard films static takes that emphasize the boundaries of his setting, rarely able to move his camera far back enough inside a room to go further than a medium long shot. On the occasions that Godard does manage to put some distance between the camera and his actors, it comes in the form of dazzlingly placed high- and low-angle shots of hallways and the expansive ground floor, taking an uncharacteristic pleasure in the shining commercial retreat that lacks the director's typical, ironic assessment of the gold-plated chandeliers and plush carpet. Yet even these big, beautiful shots segment the hotel's layout into a series of locations unto themselves, suites and bars in a void that suggest proximity to each other only because all the characters keep running into each other.

Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

[This is my May post for Blind Spots.]

Irma Vep is the third Olivier Assayas film I've seen, the other two being Summer Hours and Carlos. This 1996 feature contains the roots of both, the former's elegant respect for French art history and the latter's deconstructive, post-New Wave wit. A film about a film production starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Irma Vep instantly recalls Day for Night, but as Assayas voices and visualizes a sense of dissatisfaction with French cinema, the film becomes something else. Eric Gautier's gritty, 16mm cinematography and sophisticated camera movements combine New Wave spontaneity (the film was shot in three weeks) with formal know-how to be both behind-the-scenes docudrama and rich cinematic fantasy.

That the  production in question is an adaptation of Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires only complicates Assayas' thematic intent. The characters working on this French film set all talk of American films, some disapprovingly, others with an eagerness to see their own national cinema reflect Hollywood's crowd-pleasing scale. Assayas "remakes" Feuillade's film to remind everyone that France invented the action epic, and that they didn't need insane budgets and special effects to do so. Yet the fact that someone would remake it speaks to a lack of original ideas for contemporary French directors, and that's leaving out how little of France seems to make its way into this production.

Film Club: Day For Night

Before Halloween, one of my very best Internet friends, Allison, proposed we watch a horror film we'd never seen and chat about it on our sites. We settled on Les diaboliques, but some snafus led to those plans falling through. But we refined things a bit and regrouped to talk about Day for Night, a film I've been meaning to watch for years (I think I even rented it at one point but ended up sending the disc back unwatched). I'm glad to say Truffaut's film more than lived up to its reputation, and I had a great time chatting with Allison about it, and I think we covered most of the film's terrific charm.

To read our back-and-forth, head over to Allison's site, Nerd Vampire, and check out her post.

What Time is It There?

When someone describes a film as minimalistic, he usually refers to the aesthetic quality, a sparsity of construction and mise-en-scène that leaves a chill in the air. What so many, including myself, fail to adequately convey is that minimalist film, when done well, tends to be richer, more painterly and more evocative than more complicated work. Perhaps it's because the removal of classical elements of mise-en-scène take away the intellectualism of the cinema. Rather than give us symbols to toil over, directors pull back and leave emotions to fill the gap. Thus, it's harder to talk about these movies, because even when shots are deliberately arranged and edited and you see what the director is saying, you cannot fully discuss the picture without investing in it emotionally. For those who believe criticism should strive for objective verisimilitude, meaningful criticism of such works is impossible. It's easy to talk about someone's creative and emotional vision when it comes caged in unlockable elements. It's much harder when you have to expose yourself to talk about someone else's bared chest.

From a conceptual standpoint, Tsai Ming-liang's films suggest minimalism taken to an extreme. Not only is he a master of the long, static take, he reuses the same actors in essentially the same roles. Lee Kang-sheng plays the protagonist in all of Tsai's films, and he even carries the same character name, Hsiao-kang, across more than one feature. Lu Yi-ching tends to play the mother figure, Miao Tien the father. Chen Shiang-chyi plays the young woman, be she a love interest or something else. Tsai even reuses the fish from The River. Plenty of directors work with actors multiple times, but by assigning the same cast to roughly the same parts each time, Tsai expands upon his ideas of dissociation and conformity before a film even starts: though he leaves open the possibility that the feelings of disconnect and ennui in his characters are rooted in the same people, the recycling of casts allows him to make the case that we're all becoming the same. Modern thinking coined the term "nuclear family," and it also made that unit into its own prison. No longer about community, now all we have is our immediate relatives, and we cannot even communicate with them.

The first shot of What Time is It There? hangs outside the kitchen of a humble Taiwanese home as an old man finishes preparing dinner. He walks into the room where the camera rests and sets down his plate on a table, but he doesn't eat, restlessly reaching for a cigarette and fidgeting. Though he sets a plate for no one else, he gets out of his chair and calls for Hsiao-kang, then he steps outside on the back porch and rearranges a plant. His disquiet, though calm, introduces an anxious mood, and the look of emptiness in Miao's face when he sits closer to the camera is haunting but understated. The only dialogue of the entire scene is the father shouting "Hsiao-kang!" The rest unfolds in near silence, only the rustling of the rearranged plant and the creak of the wooden chair putting something in the audio track.

In the next shot, Tsai relocates to a car with the young Hsiao-kang, now cradling a container with his father's ashes. He and his mother head to an interment, located in what almost looks like a reference library, filled with shelves of fine oak cabinets in which to store remains. Instead of the unique and differentiated headstones in Western cemeteries (one of which Tsai later shows), this place literalizes the idea that we are all equal in death, and it also suggests that we are equal and unoriginal in life. As I watched this scene, I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that horrific obsidian wall that reduces the meaningless sacrifice of so many thousands to simply their names, at once an admission of our shame and a final attempt by the powers that be to minimize the disgust by removing all humanity from the equation. We know as little about Hsiao-kang's father in death as we did in the brief amount of life we saw.

Tsai complicates the shot further by introducing the first of many tragicomic elements in the film. As the camera sits in the narrow corridor of this modernized, efficient form of interment, a Buddhist priest performs a funeral ritual, clanging chimes and chanting centuries-old prayers in the middle of this clinical room. The sight of the priest, in his bright orange robe, standing among the polished, nondescript, dark wood paneling is inherently funny, but the sorrow it communicates, of committed Buddhists trying to ensure their beloved will return, is rending. At the same time, the way that the rows of ashes resemble a kind of reference section, a place of storage, also implies that these wee cupboards might actually aid the Buddhist idea of reincarnation: they might merely be places where one's former body is stored while the spirit seeks a new host.

It's impossible to feel optimistic about that line of thought, though, when you follow the reactions of the son and wife left behind. The mother continues to hold Buddhist rituals in the hopes of bringing her husband back, constantly setting his plate for dinner and interpreting anything remotely suspicious as her husband's ghost floating around. Hsiao-kang, who does not seem as if he was ever that sociable, retreats into his room, not even leaving to urinate. Instead, he pees in plastic containers -- bags, bottles -- like Howard Hughes. During the day, he leaves the room only to go sell watches on the street, where a woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) approaches him looking for a watch that can keep two times as she is leaving for Paris soon. Unimpressed by any of the watches he's flogging, Shiang-ciyi asks if she can buy the one Hsiao-kang is wearing. Having received the watch from his father, Hsiao-kang feels not only an emotional connection to the timepiece but a superstitious one, fearing that he would give away a piece of his dad. But he relents, and the woman goes on her way.

After this brief encounter, Hsiao-kang's behavior begins to shift. On a whim, he begins to set the watches in his case to Parisian time, then any clock he can find. He visits a bootleg stand and asks for French films, taking home François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Tsai's favorite movie). At night, he sits awake, watching this scratchy, panned and scanned version of the movie that lops off 2/3 of the original frame. Later in the film, Tsai shows the woman in Paris sitting on a bench when the star of Truffaut's masterpiece, Jean-Pierre Léaud, sits beside her and attempts to make small talk.

These tendrils snake and wave, directionless as the tentacles of a sea anemone, but they never converge or brush against each other. The vague connection that tugs at Hsiao-kang is perhaps not romantically motivated so much as the outgrowth of his increasing hollowness. No one else who stops to buy the boy's watches makes any impression, as they do the usual: they scan over Hsiao-kang's wares, maybe haggle a bit and move on. Shiang-ciyi stood out, and whether he feels any attraction to her is secondary to the mere fact that she broke the routine.

When Tsai takes his camera to Paris to follow the woman, though, he does not resort to portraying her as some free spirit to extend her unorthodox actions with Hsiao-kang. Rather, she seems as lost and without purpose as the man whose watch she purchased, if not more so. In Paris, she is naturally alienated from the domestic population, and she does not make clear why she even came. She nurses a piece of paper with a phone number but never calls the mysterious person, leaving her isolated in France. Listlessly, she wanders Paris, not even taking in the sights as she uncomfortably sits coffee in cafés as if she heard that's what Parisians do and just repeats the action over and over in an attempt to fit in. A sense of displacement pervades the film, but Shiang-chyi literalizes it, having traveled to another part of the world to find somewhere she might belong, only to be even more lost.

Compared to the ragged howl of pain in Wong Kar-wai's films, loneliness and loss in Tsai Ming-liang's movies are more contained, held behind a dam that holds back the flood until cracks appear. He denies us the catharsis of full release, achieving a pain even greater than that of Wong. Where his previous film, The River, was more explicitly about modernity and the threat of interpersonal loss in a world that now functioned on a global scale, What Time is It There? approaches the same general subject in a way that complicates and deepens it.

The problem Tsai finds in the modern world here is not that we lose all sense of connection but that there are so many possibilities opened up to us that we experience sensory overload and shut down. The mise-en-scène in Tsai's shots is always static and angled, not in mathematical precision but to ensure that no one faces horizontally, where they might make eye contact with someone to their side, nor directly at the camera, where they might at least feel us watching and caring about them. They have options, but in their confusion they wind up stuck in the middle, facing diagonally to nothing.

Numerous moments of the film speak to this disconnect. At a subway station in Paris, Shiang-chyi sees an Asian man, perhaps Taiwanese, across the gap, but when he board the train that fills the space between them, she does not move to make conversation despite the longing for communication that's plain on her face. Hsiao-kang and his mother cannot relate to each other, but if they could just sit down and talk about their emotions over the patriarch's death, they might move forward. Instead, the mother is reduced to sobbing and begging for answers from the family fish as she grips the tank desperately. Later, Hsiao-kang listens to a frothy, lightweight radio show that recounts silly news stories as a chirpy but disengaged female voice bounces through titillating nuggets. One of the stories concerns a dog running around a highway, and the woman on the radio goes through a series of awful jokes about it trying to get a suntan, only for someone to call in and say the poor thing got run over. After the slightest pause and downturn in the host's voice, she returns to business as usual, masking a sense of pain with the same hollow façade Hsiao-kang and the others use, even if they're not as bubbly.

In the film's most tragicomic moment, Hsiao-kang sits in a theater after leaving a store where he rearranged the time on the clocks. The other customer who watched him do it comes in, sits next to Hsiao-kang in a nearly empty theater, takes the kid's giant clock and walks off. Hsiao-kang follows him, ending up in a bathroom where the man opens a stall to reveal dropped pants with the clock covering his penis. It's quietly absurd, but it suggests that the man was snapped out of his own ennui and disconnect by watching Hsiao-kang. Just as the boy felt an imperceptible tug toward the woman, so too does this man to Hsiao-kang, and while it's funny when he casually knocks the stall door closed on the man and walks out with a sigh, it's also sad because Hsiao-kang cannot see his own pain in others.

There are casualties in Tsai's view of the modern world, however. The director sees the irony of his fears of cultural loss in a homogenized world when his own cinephilia sprang from European cinema, and he rather reluctantly places the New Wave on the chopping block. The hissing, snowy bootleg of The 400 Blows casts the young Jean-Pierre Léaud as a ghost, and when Shiang-chyi meets the aged Léaud, they sit in a cemetery (itself contrasting classical Western interment, ornate and influenced by Christian social values, with the crematory policy of Taiwan). Shiang-chyi has no clue who he is, both a result of generational gap and cultural separation, and Tsai clear mourns the New Wave even as he makes clear that if the final nail had not been put in the movement's coffin, he is going to be the one to do it.

The title of the film is What Time is It There?, but 'where' is a relative term dependent on 'here.' Nothing makes time more disjunctive than the cinema, which can cross space and time in a single cut. For a film that uses clocks as a central symbol, the movie wryly has a non-linear progression even though it does not seem to ever double back. The structure of the film becomes as displaced as its characters, always moving forward but never really going anywhere, never recognizing what's happening.

The climax of the film is among the most haunting I've ever seen, similar in its culminating expression of directionless ennui and existentialist doubt to the ending of Tokyo Sonata. Each of the three primary characters engages in a sexual activity that only separates them further from others. In Paris, Shiang-chyi meets a woman in a restaurant and comes back to her hotel room. They sleep together, in a literal sense, but Shiang-chyi leans over and kisses the woman as if repaying the favor of talking to someone. The woman is unresponsive. Back in Taiwan, Hsiao-kang has sex with a prostitute, while the mother vents her sorrow and her fantasies of her husband returning by masturbating with the container of her husband's ashes. The awkwardness of this and Shiang-chyi's moments might be funny, but they are intensely affecting. The mother in particular seems to think that this perverse act with bring her closer once more with her husband, that his ghost might return and pleasure her. In the end, she seals herself off, reduced to isolated self-love she envisions as reconnection instead of finding someone else. (And what Western actress would sob noiselessly, avoiding histrionics and awards-baiting monologues, while still letting snot run down her face?)

The film's final scene does not bring these people together, because that's not the point. Where so many of the "network narrative" try to link people, the only thing the characters in What Time is It There? have in common with each other, even the relatives, is how alone they are. Tsai moves at last to Paris, unable to bring mother and son together, to close on Shiang-chyi. She sits by a pool, lounging uncomfortably and meditatively in a chair built always to lean back. Behind her is an empty chair. Some children play with her suitcase, throwing it into the pool, only for Hsiao-kang's father to walk by and fish it out. What does this mean? I cannot say on a first watch, but it spoke to me about those tendrils that connect even the loneliest of people, and that perhaps all that we saw was Hsiao-kang's projection of the woman he obsessed over, looking to her to get over the pain of his father's loss. In his mind, maybe she actually did take a piece of his father with her to Paris, where he now lives. It's a magical moment, reminiscent of the end of Being There, but it also has its bleaker side. The woman who made an impression on Hsiao-kang is stuck in Paris, and his father is there too. But he remains in Taiwan, possibly imagining all this but never going there himself. Some part of him knows Paris won't really be like that, and that he will just become as alienated as Shiang-chyi there. It's the final joke in a dryly comic film, the prospect that a third of the story, as depressing as it was, was actually someone's most hopeful fantasy. But like all the other gags, it's rooted in a deep sadness that turns laughter into tears.

Le Gai Savoir

Portions of Godard's Le gai savoir were filmed before he jetted off to London to muck about with the Rolling Stones, but the final product definitely has a post-May '68 feel to it. In context, Godard's minimalist movie serves to flesh out some of the vague ideas behind Sympathy for the Devil, and it takes the unfinished conception behind the splintered rockumentary to an extreme: with this film, the director wanted nothing less than to shatter the make-up of cinema, proof that Week End's final title card was not a declaration of fact but a statement of intent.

Made just before Godard entered into the often-contested (and even-more-often ignored entirely) Dziga Vertov Group, Le gai savoir represents the artist's attempt to "return to zero," to compensate for the lack of home video by making a film that essentially rewinds his other films. Using his two favorite revolutionary actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, Godard roots the film's (in)action in a dark studio, pitch-black but for the gentle stage light that illuminates the two actors. They introduce each other as the descendants of Rousseau (Léaud) and Lumumba (Berto) and immediately launch into polemical discussions that reconstitute politics around art in Godard's usual fashion. Then they splinter off, agreeing to monitor the relationship between sight and sound in three phases for three years, first simply observing, then critiquing and finally acting upon their theories. Only now do the intellectual touches of the director's previous works seem tame: at least they came in the form of aesthetically beautiful and narratively spry movies.

By far his most confounding and layered work to that point, Le gai savoir exists in a fractured state, jumping between the two actors in the studio to jarringly bright still photographs and bustling, candid shots of people on the streets. Sounds overlap. Images are drawn on, recolored, juxtaposed and then folded into the audio. The only prop in the studio with the actors is a clear, plastic umbrella that they intermittently wave about while they speak in a manner that breaks up every sentence between the two of them.

All of this reflects Godard's deconstructionist attitude, even the umbrella, reduced to a basic, transparent outline. A critic, of course, breaks down a film into its various elements and discusses each and how they relate to the film as a whole. As such, there may be no better example in Godard's canon to illustrate his contention that the best way to criticize a film was to make another. Le gai savoir takes this idea past the point of film and into society: early on, he displays still photographs with letters written on them as if teaching the alphabet, albeit one whose examples are relevant and political (i.e. Vietnam for V); he echoes this later when Léaud's Emile rants about the illustrated words in a child's dictionary might display terms like "soap" for 'S' but neither "sex" nor "syndicate." The O's in words scribbled onto the screen are emphasized through underlining or capitalization, stressing how much they look like zeroes. Even the back-and-forth between the actors played over these photos and illustrations takes on a quality similar to those instructional cassettes used in languages classes for reading comprehension.

So, is Le gai savoir a lecture? Well, yes, but compared to the didacticism of Sympathy for the Devil, Godard returns to his playful self. The mood of the film is, despite the headiness of its objective, appropriately childish. Godard even brings in a kid to play a free association word game as Berto and Léaud lob words from off-screen for the boy to respond to. It's unclear whether the actors are actually speaking to the boy, unlikely, even, considering he somehow knows to say the word "October" in connection with "Revolution" despite being no older than 10 (he also links "Chinese" with "Earth," playing into Godard's Maoist fascination by implying that the nation's people are attuned with the planet). Then the director and actors do the same with an old, half-deaf man, and the nature of the game equalizes the old man's experience with the young boy's innocence by limiting the players to simply saying what first comes to mind.

The dominant force behind the film is, naturally, Godard's gift for montage, here reverted to its foundations in Russian political cinema. I cannot hope to have picked up anything but a fraction of the various juxtapositions of images, sounds and writing, but the overall effect of the constant cutting is a surprising cheekiness that showcases the director's wit in the midst of his polemics. A picture of a nude woman in a magazine pops on the screen, with the word "Freud" written by her head and "Marx" written, well, a little further south, inverting the popular perceptions of the aims of the two thinkers and hilariously positioning Marx as the man of "action," as it were. Lyndon Johnson and Charles De Gaulle are routinely paired with Hitler and Stalin through images and dialogue, making them all into false prophets who abused the public trust, the only difference separating them is that the people can actually rise up against Johnson and De Gaulle where the others brutally crushed dissent. The most brilliant moment involves Berto, clad in a period dress, reading nonsense in front of a backdrop of comic book characters as Léaud, wearing contemporary clothes, reads aloud coherently. Seemingly random, this one scene contains numerous dialectics, between classical and pop art, lingual meaning and gibberish, and the old (the dress) versus the new (Léaud's modern garb).

"Theoretically, these two sounds have nothing to do with one another," Berto says of some noises Godard assembles, and Léaud completes the thought by adding "But they could eventually have a connection." That idea propels Le gai savoir, which uses its minimalistic foundation not to completely destroy the cinema (though it ultimately ends in blackness with only a whispered narration to suggest that the film is still playing) but to stage a film of infinite possibilities. Berto and Léaud are often obscured in shadow because they are merely symbolic, Berto of theory, Léaud of revolutionary action. But the people on the street, the comic books, the war photographs? Those are all crisp and beautiful, even when horrific, and the director's editing of them makes the movie come alive even when you're tearing out your hair to pinpoint it.

"This film is not the film that needs to be made," Godard confides in us in his closing whisper, already chastising himself for his shortcomings in trying to capture the world, his political zeal and a buried optimism in a spare 92 minutes. What he wants of Le gai savoir instead is for the film to show him the path back to the beginning, to the vantage point where he can see all the trails cinema forged for itself. Only then, only by following the paths back and studying them along the way, can he make a new one. There it is in a nutshell: Le gai savoir is a half-meta, half-literal visualization of Jean-Luc Godard as the ultimate cinematic trailblazer.

Week End

By 1967, less than eight years after he split the cinematic world open with Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard had completed 14 features and nearly 10 shorts. Contained within were enough masterpieces to float the careers of a handful of directors and an unquenchable thirst for innovation that took his work from the genre films of Breathless to the full-on avant-garde structuralism of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.

Yet growing civil unrest, which had informed many of Godard's films in this period, had fully brought out the political radicalism in the director's revolutionary aesthetic. Having already shifted his style to reflect his politics, Godard at last decided that the time had come for him to abandon the cinema altogether, that even art movies fueled bourgeois self-absorption that distracting from the issues plaguing France. It was a big decision: intellectual as Godard was and remains, he first made his name as a movie buff, someone who would structure a failing relationship in Contempt around the making of a film so he could A) redefine the cinema and reality using each other's terms and B) to see what it might have been like to be on a set with Fritz Lang directing.

Godard gave himself one last theatrical feature as a send-off, and the result was Week End, the most openly radical proclamation of his career to that point. An attack on, well, damn near everything, Week End touches upon all the usual Godard targets -- gender conflict, Western imperialism, the loss of French identity to capitalist interests -- and then extrapolates some of the criticisms of the revolutionaries in La Chinoise. No one is innocent, and the only France Godard can seem to foresee for the immediate future is one on fire. Son of a bitch always was prescient.

Centering on a married couple, Corrine (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne), each seeing someone on the side and planning the murder of the other. Godard spends the first 10 minutes showing both parties discussing the other, with Corrine even going into graphic detail of one of her crazier trysts to a male friend. Corrine mentions to her lover that she distracted Roland away from changing the old brakes in his car, while Roland tells his mistress that he has put his efforts on hold to avoid raising suspicion and to wait until his wife's rich father dies so that he might get the inheritance after he kills her.

This is a dark setup for a film containing numerous horrors, but many of the reviews I've read of the film don't mention how damn funny this film is. When Roland and Corrine get in their car and pull out of their flat's parking lot, Roland hits another parked car. The child of the vehicle's owner sees this and starts screaming for his mother, who comes despite Roland's attempt to bribe the child into silence. The mother rightly berates the couple for trying to drive off, and Roland and Corrine respond by accosting her until a man comes out of the complex shooting.

The lunacy of the moment sets the stage for the rest of the film, structured as a series of picaresque vignettes of French society crumbling to the point that even fictional and dead historical characters walk around the place. Wrecks and corpses litter the countryside, and at all turns people find a way to argue over politics and philosophy; Juliet Berto plays a radical leftist who gets into a fatal wreck with a tractor driver that leaves her lover dead. Rather than scream at the tractor driver to vent her anguish, she blames the government-subsidized business that owns the tractor for providing the driver with his transport with which they bleed him dry just as the wreck has caused the Berto's lover to bleed out. Roland and Corrine watch this unfold along with a small crowd, yet when the couple peels off in their coupe to avoid the issue, both the radical and the farmer unite to harangue the two for trying to just place the world out of sight. The farmer even brings up Marx as he yells as Roland and Corrine, and mutual hatred for these bourgeois fools appears to calm the argument between farmer and intellectual.

Such intellectual yet absurd comedy allows Godard to illustrate his quibbles with society without resorting to purely didactic soapboxing, in a manner that eclipses the subtle visual irony of La Chinoise. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays a guy dressed in centuries-old formal wear and also a poet out of the 19th century espousing his Romanticism and even preventing Roland and Corrine from calling for help with their car wreck by singing into the pay phone as if calling to a maiden in a tower. Yet when he spots a nearby Porsche that the couple wishes to use, he drops his loftiness and steals the sweet ride for himself. In this capitalist nightmare vision of the world, everyone has been encouraged to assert his individuality, so violence erupts constantly. As we can see with Léaud, even old movements like Romanticism, with its poetic celebration of the individual in relation to one's environment, become perverted and propagandized to exalt the necessity of strength.

On the flip side, the radicals in the film are typically as self-absorbed and blind as the bourgeois couple who move through the surreal backdrop of the warped countryside. Corrine may be most concerned with her Hermes handbag when it goes up in flames with the couple's car, but the leftists who ride around a stretch of road where the two attempt to hitchhike have their own peculiar focuses. Before one man can say whether he will give them a ride, his wife leans forward from the backseat and asks Roland, "Would you rather be screwed by Mao or Johnson?" "Johnson, of course," Roland replies, thinking that he can read the older woman. "Drive on, Jean. He's a fascist," she barks in response, and the man drives off without a second look at Roland. Corrine fares similarly when a lorry driver asks her who struck first, Israel or Egypt and she answers "Egypt." Everyone has become so wrapped up in his or her own ego that anything that does not conform is considered vile, yet no one exhibits any close ties together because people value their sense of independence too much. When Roland ends up setting fire to a young woman acting as a proxy for philosophy, the darker implications of the scene (besides immolating a young woman, that is) suggests that people are abandoning the process of creating and analyzing thoughts because that simply takes too much time and effort.

And in the middle of it all is an unending traffic jam, filmed in several tracking shots that reduce the frame nearly to a two-dimensional strip. In fact, Godard so magnificently draws out the first tracking shot to the point he begins to pass the same type of actions -- people tossing balls between cars, horrific wrecks, unruly livestock bleating and groaning in the backs of trucks -- repeatedly that the shot comes to resemble one of those old strips of background placed on rollers and spun on a loop behind static actors or budgeted animation to have a character move a large distance without having to either animate a massive number or cells or worry about tracking down a long street with one of the older, heavier models of a film camera. Week End has a sickly yellow hue to it, as if all the vehicular congestion has produced enough smog to make the air quality of Los Angeles seem that of a Himalayan hamlet. Chemically suffocating the brains of those already made fighting mad by the worldview placed upon them by corporate interests, the smog becomes both a catalyst and a byproduct of this vicious society, where people are so happy to get out of a traffic jam that they breeze through a puddle of blood coating the road from a nasty wreck just to get back up to speed.

After about 80 minutes, the couple finally reach Corrine's parents' house, only to find her father dead and her mother unwilling to share the inheritance. Without hesitation, Roland kills the mother, something Corrine not only does not object to but openly abets to secure her financial stability. Before they can celebrate, however, the two are captured along with some English tourists by a group of hippy guerrillas who display their contempt for humanity by engaging in cannibalism. After placing the conflict between Roland and Corrine on the back-burner, Godard saves his ultimate display of giddy nihilism for last as Roland finds himself in the hippies' stew pot and Corrine joins the band of cannibals and eats her husband without a second thought.

Week End is an equal opportunity offender, airing Godard's deep, bitter grievances even as he makes light of his targets and even adds some complexity to his caricatures. Before he criticizes the armchair socialists, Godard inserts a scene where Roland talks about a socialist maxim with Corrine and notes that Marx did not come up with it. "Another Communist said it. Jesus said it." Elsewhere, he lets two garbage men rant about society, but even though he makes them far more philosophically inclined than the average sanitation worker, Godard acknowledges that such rhetoric can be tedious and droning.

That cheeky willingness to point out the links that bind supposed opposites is but a small reflection of Godard's attempt to tear down the house as he runs out of it. His trademark use of intertitles take on their greatest import, breaking up the action in a way unique to his films and marking sudden shifts without necessarily creating distinct tableaux. Two early cards identify Week End as "a film adrift in the cosmos" and one "found on a scrap heap," excessively self-deprecating yet largely spot-on summaries of the style.

The greatest indication of Godard's true intent with the film, however, comes when a madman carjacks Roland and Corrine's car. Claiming to be the son of God and Alexandre Dumas, the man not only rails against Christianity as "the refusal of self-knowledge and the death of language" but declares war on tradition and grammar. "I am here to inform these modern times of the grammatical era's end," he crows, "and the beginning of flamboyance, especially in cinema." What Godard visualizes with Week End is his frustration with cinema's limitations, unable to do what he needs it to do at that point, which is nothing less than to save the world. Yet the director's aesthetically radical choices do not simply destroy the cinema in a fit of pique. Instead, he breaks what few rules he had not already shattered to show that, even if it cannot serve his purpose, the cinema still has an extraordinary power to combine reality, fiction and the surreal nebula between them into something that can evoke anger, laughter, wonder and every other emotion.

Following Week End, Godard would devote himself to making movies on video for the next decade, first with the radical collective, the Dziga Vertov Group, and then with more autonomy with his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville. He would eventually return to making movies for the silver screen, but nothing can dilute the power of that final title card reading, "Fin de Cinéma." What amazed me as I watched the film, however, is the underlying spirit of the film that does not match the ominous declaration of this statement when divorced of context. Seen at the end of the rest of Week End, the last card only makes clear the idea that Godard decided that, since he was going to be leaving the medium soon, he might as well throw himself a wake. And what a raucous send-off it is.

La Chinoise

Made in 1967, La Chinoise, with its focus on radical students mounting their case against De Gaulle's capitalist government, may be the most prescient of Godard's features up to that point. Initially dismissed as a fanciful look at leftist youth in France, in less than a year its discussions of disgruntled workers and disenfranchised students would become a stunning reality as the entire country ground to a halt from mass protests and strikes. That it projected only a year into the future, though, may actually mark the film as Godard's least forward-thinking, given how ahead-of-its-time even his earliest films are.

Adapted from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, La Chinoise, if you couldn't figure out from the title, displays the influence of Maoism in Godard's politics. As with the novel, La Chinoise follows five leftist revolutionaries, yet the director's sympathies clearly lie more with his group of students than Dostoevsky's did with his characters, whose ideas he thought demonic.* That does not mean, however, that Godard wholly supports the rhetoric spouted by his young Marxist-Leninists, and if La Chinoise stands as the most identifiable precursor to the director's politically radical films, then their scornful reputation may be overstated, even undeserved.

Appropriately, red is the dominant color of the film, infusing practically everything in the apartment shared by Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the most vocal of the kids; his girlfriend Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky); Yvonne (Juliet Berto), a sometimes-prostitute (of course) who does most of the chores in the flat; Henri (Michel Semeniako), a somewhat timid intellectual who never argues with Guillaume's passion; and Kirlov, the only character named for his counterpart in The Possessed. Each day, they hold meetings in their apartment to argue specific tenets of Maoism and to harangue the French government. So radical are these youths that they invite a black student to speak, a striking break from the sea of bourgeois white faces that adorn the work of the French New Wave. (Godard even acknowledges this by taking the camera outside the apartment and filming the black student, Omar a.k.a. "Comrade X," isolated in the left window as the camera pans over the outside wall until pausing at the right window where the main characters sit, showing the vast difference between these privileged white kids and those of other backgrounds and races on whose behalf they're always speaking.)

The title card calls La Chinoise "a film in the making," and we see the movie unspool as a mockumentary, with the character directly addressing the camera, which Godard shows at one point, revealing Raoul Coutard filming Léaud. Hilariously, the film now plays within the context of the reality TV era, and the radical proclamations of the students seem less a call to action than the talking heads of a pretentious version of Big Brother, replacing C-list celebrities and dim-witted frat rejects with fiery intellectuals. They want revolution -- Comrade X points out that they need revolution to advance socialism -- so they compare and contrast the various ideologies to find the perfect plan of attack. "Liberalism," says one, "deprives the revolution of solid organization and strict discipline," and later Guillaume even reads aloud a piece supporting dictatorship in the suppression of undesirable elements that compromise the integrity of the whole.

That snippet sounds like Stalinism, which Guillaume otherwise rejects. He, and Godard, acknowledge the grave crimes committed by the Soviet dictator under the guise of Communism and seek to move away from them. Godard even cuts to a black-and-white photo of Stalin with eyes colored red, as if the only red in his body was the rage and oppression with which he viewed the world. Godard uses that line about liberalism weakening the cause with a heavy amount of irony, yet we see how these kids have not yet fully crossed into leftism and are liberal enough not to have solid footing with their beliefs. While they are certainly outspoken, they also take into account the negative aspects of their chosen ideologies and look for a better way.

Not for long, mind you. Guillaume insists that the issue with Communism stems from there being two different forms from which to choose. Russian Communism, he says, does not truly incur the wrath of imperialist America: Johnson does not bomb Russia, he allows Soviet musicians to tour the United States, and he even meets diplomatically with Soviet leaders. Chinese Communism, on the other hand, warrants the shelling and classified bombing of Southeast Asia and the escalation of fighting in Vietnam. The United States would not open relations with China until Nixon took office, so Guillaume's '67 rantings carry a bit of weight. Why does one country's revolution inspire saber rattling and the other actual force? Neither, of course, is true Communism, but does the reaction to China reflect how much closer it came to a true class consciousness and proletariat revolt than the small but effective Bolshevik revolution? And is one of the two dangerous over the other, and which one? Guillaume does not answer these questions, likely because Godard himself hasn't worked it out yet, the dialectic split even within socialism reveals the different shades of red. Guillaume can only conclude that, because America attacks Chinese Communism, that must surely be the one that poses the biggest threat to the status quo.

The narrative, such as it is, is itself infused with Maoist principles. Véronique confides in Guillaume that, "I've decided I don't love you anymore," which of course references Contempt (as does Coutard's on-screen appearance and the amount of time Godard spends in this Pop Art-tinged apartment). The breakup serves to teach Guillaume about Mao's discourse on the "struggle on two fronts," made further obvious by the fact that Véronique constantly wears blue clothes that clash with the red apartment, as Guillaume stands in between in his white T-shirt. La Chinoise is itself a study in this maxim, always countering its diatribes against capitalism with a mention of the negative effects of the faux-populist revolutions and regimes that spawned their red pamphlets. If anything, Godard uses the film not to promote a wholly Marxist or Maoist philosophy but to demonstrate how a serious examination of any political ideology reveals contradictions and instances of horrendous misuse.

Consider the spellbinding conversation Véronique, incensed by Guillaume's rhetoric into assassinating the visiting Soviet Minister of Culture, has with an older philosopher on a train. It's the least interesting scene aesthetically, replacing the stunning primary colors with the earthen tones of the French country passing by outside the window, yet no other moment is as striking or captivating. The man is Francis Jeanson, formerly a pro-FLN radical in the late '50s until his arrest and high-profile trial in 1960. Jeanson, actually Wiazemsky's philosophy professor, now stresses nonviolence, seeing himself and his past actions as responsible for the next iteration of revolutionaries. Véronique, deluded in her haze, insists that, as a student, she's more attuned to the zeitgeist and has more understanding of the tenets that Jeanson abandoned. The older man smiles sadly and agrees that he's been out of the loop for a few years, and his voice contains no patronizing tones, only a resigned sigh. He thought he could change it all too, and now he attempts to talk his progeny out of their own naïve bloodlust.

Indeed, the "Aden Arabie Cell" fails miserably. Véronique accidentally misreads the room number where the minister stays and kills an innocent man. Kirlov, always the most withdrawn of the five, kills himself off-screen and the group disbands. Emphasizing this failure of naïve planning is a shot of Véronique returning to the apartment complex as the gate of the community closes behind her. These kids couldn't be any more sheltered. When the interviewers ask Henri about the collective's failure, he's too busy stuffing his face with bread slathered with butter and jam. He "would rather eat thank talk," as Andrew Sarris said, and we see in his literal consumption the sneaky consumerism that drives even the anti-capitalist movement.

Godard jovially satirizes this contradiction, opening the film's "second movement" with a jaunty pop song titled "Mao Mao" that runs through Marxist rhetoric even as it blares on popular radio and likely sells a few singles. In one humorous scene, Guillaume reads from the Little Red Book wearing various pairs of sunglasses with the flags of various countries, as if playing with toys as he engages in skits and impersonations of each nation's faults and merits. As much as the director embraces a number of Marxist ideals, he cannot help but wonder if its rise in France can be attributed to its hipness. The students themselves play into this, what with their massive stockpile of Little Red Books, as if owning as many as possible somehow makes them "more" socialist.

Those books become one the great sight gags in Godard's oeuvre: they litter the apartment, stacked so high that the students can use them as furniture, lounging about on Saturdays like a hipster Breakfast Club. If these radicals are trying to spread the word of Mao, then we can clearly see that Marxism isn't catching on among the population quite so widely as the more hysterical commentators of both sides would have the French believe. For the students, though, the books become a literal barricade against figurative ideas, built up to protect them from the ills of capitalist society. Naturally, they believe words will save them.

Godard does not entirely dismiss the five radicals' failed ideology as the product of naïveté and entrenchment in bourgeois norms, but his willingness to posit this as a possibility shows how well he tempers his own radicalism with a more holistic view of politics. "The revolution is not like a gala dinner," says more than one character, and Véronique goes so far as to call for the destruction of France's artistic institutions to ensure firmer commitment to the cause. Yet Godard, as ever, believes that the only true constant in life, the only invariably rewarding belief, is faith in the arts. Politics are messy, but art is pure. That underlying theme makes La Chinoise so surprisingly enchanting and viscerally entertaining in addition to its thoughtful ruminations, and the most radical element of the film is the director's willingness to examine both sides of the coin when so many revolutionaries are scarcely better than propagandists.


*Modern translations of the original Russian title often come out as The Devils or Demons

Made in U.S.A.

Starting with a dedication to Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller worded as if they'd actually reared Jean-Luc Godard through childhood, Made in U.S.A. marks the final kiss-off from the genre pictures that Godard loved and loved to make. Its title works as both a sign of the fondness he still at least partly felt for the old films he championed so enthusiastically and the sarcasm with which he views the usage of the phrase as an advertising tool. The film is, in true Godard fashion, as much a satire of itself as it is a earnest attempt to make a political thriller. The mere sight of Anna Karina (in her final full-length collaboration with Godard) walking through "Atlantic City," which simply must be placed between quotation marks, in her garishly bright mod outfits immediately situations the film in opposition to the dreary trench coats and dull fedoras that made up the unofficial uniform of the private detective.

Karina's Paula Nelson is indeed a detective, fashioned, save for the fashion, after Humphrey Bogart. Yet she wades through a world of such vibrant hues that even she compares her caper to wading through a Disney film. Paula heads to "Atlantic City" to meet with her former lover, Richard P...well, P-something, as a noise always drowns out his surname when someone speaks it -- I wonder if Tarantino based his equally arbitrary and cheeky decision to omit The Bride's name from the soundtrack of Kill Bill from this film. Upon arrival, however, she finds him dead, or at least officially so, with naught but a tape recording of his leftist rhetoric to give the character presence.

Naturally, the disembodied voice belongs to Godard, who stands in for his own stand-in as the radical and the jilted lover. With its numerous, striking closeups of Anna Karina, whose faced was simply made for closeups, Made in U.S.A. is as much a kiss-off to Godard's ex-wife as it was the genre films that informed his early efforts. The plot quickly spirals out of control, the masking of Richard's surname indicative of Godard's wry overemphasis of political thriller tropes. Like The Big Sleep, every piece of acquired information only raises more questions, questions typically directed at the increasing jumble of half-baked ideas, cast-off lines and confusing characters.

Rapidly, the importance of the narrative falls away, leaving behind fascinating aesthetic and thematic choices that far outweigh the interest of the entangled plot. As filled with pop culture references as it is aligned against the growing Americanization of French culture, Made in U.S.A. is the hippest film Godard made since Band of Outsiders. Aesthetically, it not only looks incredible -- more striking even than Contempt and Pierrot le fou -- but displays the director's constant wit in his arrangement of image and sound. Apart from the masking of Richard's name, Made also returns to the comic book imagery of Pierrot, cutting from a hand snaking out of a corner to yank in Paula to a graphic reading "Bing!" before returning to find our heroine stirring from unconsciousness.

Jonathan Rosenbaum likened the film to "a Rauschenberg painting in motion," which may have been Godard's intent. Robert Rauschenberg was one of the artists who aided the transition from Abstract Expressionism into Pop Art, Pop Art of course being the grounding aesthetic of all of Godard's '60s features in color. A 2006 article in the Village Voice called him the American Picasso, and Godard references Picasso directly in the film. Certainly, Made in U.S.A. shares some of Rauschenberg's principles of collage and artistic appropriation and, more simply, they really do look similar, brightly colored puzzles that can be worked out, or not, and retain their charm. The imagery in Made in U.S.A. can be every bit as stupefying as its narrative, and it's important to note a character at one point saying "mise-en-scène" as the subtitles translate it to "mirage."

Made in U.S.A. also builds upon Godard's radicalism. His recorded diatribes harangue the Right, castigating their "sublime parry" which "gives the masses the facile emotion of courage without risk and pride without sacrifice." Yet Godard does not put forward merely a liberal rant. By setting the film a few years into the future, he can create a fake news bulletin that all politicians will received armed protection on election day. Even as he criticizes, through the visuals and the speech, the commercialization of French culture and the country's increasingly uncomfortable synergy with the American government, Godard does not ask for a break. In one of those tapes, he dismisses the idea that France can only retain its identity through a break from the U.S. Such a solution is reactionary and isolationist, and Godard wishes to keep it out of leftist rhetoric. The final few minutes of the film make for one of Godard's more memorable finales, as Paula discusses politics with Philippe Labro, a journalist playing himself. They get down to the obsolescence of the current political dialogue -- "right and left, it’s a completely outdated question. That’s not at all the way to pose the problem” -- but when the time comes to provide a new solution, the film ends, leaving that answer for another time.

Make no mistake: Made in U.S.A. is far from a classic. Jean-Pierre Léaud looks downright bored working through his few lines, and at times the narrative sags so badly that it challenges the benefit of doubt one might afford to Godard given his penchant for telling the story between the narrative he sets up, as opposed to following through on it. Yet a key scene in the film, one that takes place in a diner, provides a perspective for the film. One of the patrons engages in a philosophical dialogue with the barkeep (and, eventually, Paula) which leads to him arguing the nature of a sentence and how it is defined. In response to the bartender and Paula's answers, he declares, "A sentence can't be meaningless and have a fuller meaning." Godard does not seem to know whether he can make both a flighty genre exercise and something relevant and innovative, and, for a time, I don't either. Made in U.S.A. is one of the few of Godard's films that did not wow me during this retrospective, yet it's also one of the most interesting and thought-provoking. Besides, its scattershot chic provides one half of a larger framework for the film's question of the dual nature of Godard's films when contrasted with his next film, shot simultaneously during the production of this film. But that's a matter for the next Godard article.

Masculin, féminin

The subtitle for Masculin, féminin, 15 faits précis, translates to "15 precise facts," and even a neophyte like myself knew that the ideas propounded in Jean-Luc Godard's 11th feature would likely not be facts and certainly wouldn't be precise. After watching it, I'm not even sure gives us 15 of 'em. As one might expect of the director's growing fondness for Brechtian tricks and structuralist philosophy, these facts announce themselves through intertitles, supplying us with numbers that cannot be trusted and text scrolls that read as stream-of-consciousness thoughts.

Godard has a helpful habit of telegraphing entire films through their title credits, and Masculin, féminin is certainly no exception: its first cards are cluttered with names, a primer for the thick paragraphs of musings seen later, while the actual title of the film appears in a telling manner, displaying the "Masculin" in broken up snippets before showing the "féminin" as a whole. The anti-bourgeois, pretentious Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud, he of The 400 Blows fame) and his equally insufferable friend Robert discuss the difference between men and women at one point. Robert notes that the word "masculin" can be broken into two other words, "masque" (mask) and "cul" (ass). Men wear masks to attract women, and usually they end up making asses of themselves in the process. But they cannot divide "féminin," which they feel gives man a superiority inherent in the structure of language. Their sexist ideas are appropriately regressive, considering such warped logic recalls times long past when people considered names to have a certain power (a time we might be returning to, given the anonymity of the Internet and the power one can wield by knowing someone's true name).

It is easy, then, to view Masculin, féminin the same way one could facilely summate Pierrot le Fou: that it is but another work of self-absorbed pity by Godard concerning Anna Karina. After all, Paul receives the bulk of the lines and spends most of the film philosophizing. The girl he falls for, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), is an airy pop chanteuse, wholly unconcerned with the sociopolitical issues around her, which have turned from the simmer seen in Godard's first political features to a low boil. In one scene, Paul "interviews" his lover (a scene repeated later between Robert and Madeleine's friend Elisabeth), asking her opinions about socialism, America, birth control and other hot topics, and she admits ignorance to each one. She cannot even say if any countries are currently engaged in high-profile conflicts. Ergo, one could write the whole film off as one of Godard's more sexist exercises; I was greatly surprised to see even Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the great Godard supporters and one of the few to devote serious focus to his post-Weekend work, largely dismissed Masculin, féminin as a minor work in hindsight.

I say "surprised" because I found so much to love about Masculin. In a way, it is the perfect Godard film, or at least the perfect Godard '60s film. Where Pierrot le fou collected Godard's cinematic experimentation into his first brazenly avant-garde picture, Masculin, féminin collates that with his developed political sense. None of his previous films captured a more perfect and revealing snapshot of '60s Paris and its turbulent youth. Paul and Madeleine hover around the late teens and early twenties, yet they clearly symbolize younger teens coming into sexual awareness in a conservative system that did its best to segregate the sexes (which of course makes its censorship for teenagers under 18 so ironic yet predictable). That never works, of course, and all it accomplishes is warped sexuality. Paul admits that he's been with hookers, but he quietly notes that the sex is "sad and without passion." Robert, on the other hand, loves his time with prostitutes for all the misogynist reasons you might expect. Madeleine, like all young women in such societies, must acquiesce to the sexual advances of the men yet preserve her "honor" to be considered acceptable by the same men who rigorously pursue her. She can sit in a theater watching a blue film without comment, but she turns coy when someone broaches the subject of the pill, unsure of what to say about this new invention and the power it gives women.

Even the casting speaks to the issues these characters face and embody. Léaud became an icon with The 400 Blows, and in many ways Paul seems like an older update of the Antoine Doinel we saw in that film and its sequel, Antoine et Collette. He just got out of the military -- incidentally, Truffaut's third installment of his Antoine series, 1968's Stolen Kisses, showed Antoine after a dishonorable discharge -- and speaks bitterly of his service, despite the fact that he dodged a bullet by receiving his draft notice after France pulled out of both Indochina and Algeria. Yet those national experiences have influenced his ideology. Goya plays the aspiring singer Madeleine, yet in real life she was a successful yé-yé girl, a member of the female-centric pop movement that took root in Europe and proved popular in Japan (Madeleine mentions the success of France Gail in the East at one point). Her stage name, Goya (she was born Chantal Deguerre, which is itself relevant as "guerre" means war and this film is all about the battle of the sexes), of course brings to mind Francisco Goya, last of the so-called Old Masters and for many the first modern painter. Francisco Goya was a political subversive, using subjective, macabre paintings such as The Disasters of War to comment upon the horrors of his time. Chantal makes herself an indirect descendant by name appropriation -- her real-life stage name recalls Godard's own penchant for naming characters after artists, such as Marianne Renoir from Pierrot -- and we see a devolution from art as a means of subversion and idealism to a fleeting phenom that capitalizes (emphasis on the capitalism) on trends to make a quick buck before the next hot item comes along.

That corruption of pop culture informs much of the film's politics, as, per usual, Godard infuses his cinematic occupations with his philosophical and ideological concerns. After starting with existentialist pictures, Godard dismisses Sartre as an affectation of the bourgeoisie, something for rich kids who need to get out more. Paul paints anti-war messages on walls, even the car of visiting American GIs, but his shouts of "U.S. go home!" perhaps comment as much on America's economic influence on France's social identity as they do the lad's distaste with the situation in Vietnam. Léaud manages to walk this tightrope -- between borderline-nationalistic isolationism and left-wing politics -- as his very appearance and mannerisms allow him to be at once a symbol of rebellious socialist youth and a confused, hopeless romantic.

Yet Godard's anti-American pop culture sentiments are not necessarily anti-American. Paul expresses his support of the youth in America protesting their government's actions, and the only American figure particularly singled out for scorn is Lyndon Johnson -- granted, it's in a song that Paul sings about tyrants including Hitler and Stalin, but still. What Godard chiefly expresses in his condemnation of America's pop culture is its meaningless. Even the growing number of politically relevant entertainment -- the left-wing Bob Dylan and the regressive James Bond are both mentioned -- have no impact on any actual politics. In that sense, Paul/Godard's frustration with America is largely a case of outwardly directed self-disappointment.

Linking this sociopolitical commentary with the film's fundamental conflict between genders is Godard's "cinemarxist" experimentation. He still toys with image and sound, bringing the background noise to the fore of the audio mix, usually to highlight squabbles between other couples. This leads to non-sequiturs that flesh out gender conflict to demonstrate that the issues between Paul and Madeleine are not an exclusive love story but one strand of the tangled web of sexual politics besotting Paris in the 1960s. As Paul and Madeleine chat for the first time in a café at the start of the film, a married couple argues in the background and the man takes their child and leaves. In a rage, the woman pulls a pistol and shoots her husband. Later, a white woman shoots two black men on a train in front of Paul because they harass her. As the couple plays with a toy guillotine, Godard lays audio from a presidential debate over the visuals, with the left-wing Mitterand taking a beating as someone (De Gaulle?) whips up faux-populist fervor. The film's structure even reflects the pacing of romance and heartbreak, as it starts at a leaden pace during Paul's courtship, picks up when he and Madeleine start dating, and jump-cuts all over the place as their relationship splinters and reforms. Even as Godard captures the social situation in Paris with clarity, he cannot help but filter his images through cinema, reflecting upon sexual disappointment via Paul's commentary on a Marilyn Monroe film he saw where all he could notice was how tired and old the sex icon looked. He even references himself; "You're not Pierrot le Fou," Madeleine tells Paul at one point. "He stole cars for his women"

Two scenes in particular summarize Godard's true feelings concerning his sexual politics. The first, a tragic interlude, moves the camera away from the main characters to watch a hooker soliciting a john in a café. She learns that the john is German and mentions that her parents died in a concentration camp. The man can only be exasperated at being linked to his national shame, unable to process that the only reason the two are even talking is likely because this woman lost her parents in Germany and turned to hooking to feed herself (look at how hungrily she attacks her meal at the table). The second moment is the purest (and funniest) distillation of the entire film, if not Godard's sexual musings up to this point, comes in a scene where Paul and the gang go to see one of those old porno-cum-art films that existed back when pornographers had to insert "artistic merit" into their films to avoid prosecution. Just as the film heats up, Paul leaves the auditorium and busts into the projection room to harangue the projectionist on the subject of aspect ratios. Oh, Jean-Luc, you hopeless romantic, you.

"The philosopher and the filmmaker share a way of being," reads one of the titles, "a certain view of the world that embodies a generation." Godard does just that when he sums up the entirely film in an intertitle that throws up the film's most memorable line -- "This film could have been called 'The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.'" The dichotomy between the two is of course the subtextual conflict of the entire picture. Marx, the last truly great philosopher, or at least the last one that Godard still idolizes by this point, rails against everything that Coca-Cola represents: a sugary (syrupy, in America) pick-me-up designed to offer a fleeting distraction posing as true comfort. Coca-Cola is the blood that greases the wheels of the capitalist industry. Paul's voiceovers reveal a free-thinking, outraged socialist, philosophizing about himself and his country. They are but continuations of his usual conversations. Madeleine's voiceovers, however, read differently, as if Godard threw out the character's normal speech and had her think aloud what Godard makes of the character. ""Give us a TV set and a car," she says in a narration, "but deliver us from liberty." The director recognizes that capitalism does not free people from tyranny but merely shifts enslavement from a dictator to material goods.

Yet Godard is not so self-absorbed to deify Paul (and therefore himself) and castigate Madeleine. That line about Marx and Coca-Cola is typically interpreted to mean that Paul and Madeleine, indicative of their generation, are the product of an uneasy coupling between these two forces, when I see each character as the child of the respective fighters: Paul, of course, is the child of Marx, and Madeline the daughter of Coke. Yet Madeleine is ultimately less a slave to her worldview than Paul is, as evidenced by his death at the end of the film, which occurs off-screen with no indication that it would happen to sap any potential romanticism or martyrdom from his demise. That leaves Madeleine to carry on, and in the final scene Godard suggests a freedom for her and other women over the conservative oppression placed upon them by society (both De Gaulle's France and the lingering influence of the Church), even as his quiet sympathy and concern for the character doubles as a scathing final line on the politics of the film. We learn that the whisperings of Madeleine's pregnancy throughout the film were correct, that she carries the child that will form the true union of Marx and Coca-Cola, and it's telling that the end of the film suggests that the best course of action with such a creation involves "a curtain rod." Then, Godard subtly reveals what he thinks of his male lead's ignorance, as he succeeds in dividing "féminin" where Paul failed, blasting away the middle of the word to reveal FIN, because the lady always gets the last word.

The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

This is only the second French New Wave film I've ever seen, but I think it brings with it all you ever need to know about the genre. A few months ago I watched Jean-Luc Godard's debut Breathless, and though I found it to be a technical watershed and could see its influence immediately in numerous movies, I found myself alienated by what I perceived to be an air of great pomposity, of -- as much as I hate the term in the world of cinema -- style over substance. What I saw in that film was the obsessiveness of the New Wave, an anal-retentive need to be in control of everything to the point of myopic self-absorption. I feel like I need to give that film another go, and luckily I'll be watching it in my film class in a few weeks, so perhaps locking myself in a room with no distractions to see it on a big screen will help. Happily, I have absolutely no reservations about the debut of Godard's colleague, François Truffaut.

Also a contributing writer of the groundbreaking French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut took the auteur theory to heart with this debut, pouring his own life story into the tale of the young delinquent Antoine Doinel. To aid him, he found 14-year-old actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who delivers one of the all-time greatest performances from a child actor in this film. So personal was Antoine's story, and so successful were Léaud and the film as a whole that the actor and director would continue Antoine's life over the course of four other films.

Antoine has a hard life, to the say the least. At home, his harpy of a mother screams at him for the smallest things. When she is not outraged with her son, she simply acts as if he isn't there; she's too occupied with lamenting her poverty to her friends and conducting an affair with one of her co-workers. Conversely, Antoine's stepfather seems nice enough, and even enjoys a friendly bond with the boy. However, he never feels truly attached to him as a son; when his wife accuses him later on of not supporting the boy enough (oh, the irony of that statement), he replies angrily, "I gave him my name! I put food on his table!" Amicable as he may be, the stepfather views Antoine as little more than baggage and cares little what happens to the boy.

Because his family neglects him, Antoine must essentially be raised by society. First that responsibility falls upon his teacher, who views Antoine as little more than a rebel (the title of the film itself is a French idiom for "raising hell"). It certainly doesn't help that the boy can't seem to catch a break: a pinup calendar makes the rounds amongst all the lads in the room, and the teacher spots it when it reaches Antoine's hands. As punishment, the boy must remain inside for recess, where he starts to scribble a half-apology/half-apologist statement on the wall, only to be harangued once more. When the teacher assigns him extra homework, Antoine stays home "sick" the next day. He misses another day, and tells the teacher his mother died. The teacher is of course stunned and reaches out to the boy, until the mother shows up at school and he rages once more.

The school dismisses the boy as a liar and a delinquent incapable of learning. Yet we see the real Antoine behind closed doors: he pours over Balzac and even sets up a small shrine to the man's work. When he lights a candle for it and the whole thing (made of cardboard) burns down, he's so devastated that even his parents forgo yelling at him and take him to the movies. The boy even pays tribute to Balzac's style in an assignment, but the teacher simply accuses him of plagiarism.

Finally sick of it, Antoine runs away from all of this with his friend René. Their friendship is the only genuine and touching bond we see in the entire film. As they roam the streets trying to survive, Antoine begins to sneak into the cinema, and we get beautiful shots of Léaud's awed face looking up at the flickering gods. As a boy, Truffaut himself was a delinquent, neglected by a mother who wished him to be neither seen nor heard. As a result, he read and snuck into the theaters through the emergency exits as a kid, and found happiness and meaning in what he saw. When Truffaut stated "Cinema saved my life," he wasn't kidding.

Eventually Antoine gets arrested for yet another misunderstanding, and now society shifts the responsibility for him onto guards and wardens, who send the child to work in a camp near the sea (his mother wanted him to be able to see the ocean). The film ends with that justly famous tracking shot of Antoine escaping, running and running until he reaches the beach and stopping only when he reaches the water. Then he looks into the camera and the film freezes. What do this ending tell us? That no matter how much Antoine tries to escape, he'll never break free, that even if he somehow breaks free of society nature itself will hold him back? Yes, but there's also an uplifting beauty to this last shot, unmarred even by the decades of cheap ripoffs found in everything from comedies to commercials. There's a hint of defiance in Léaud's face: I might not ever win, but damned if that means I'm gonna give up.

Though certainly not a happy film, The 400 Blows overflows with oy, albeit from behind the camera. "I demand a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema," he once wrote, and that unbridled happiness fuels Antoine's journey as much as Léaud's incredible performance. His camera moves throughout the children in the classroom and in the theater as if one of them, pausing to capture their faces, focused and down-turned on their schoolwork and ecstatic as they look up at entertainment. Later, Truffaut jogs the streets of Paris with Antoine and René, and that ending tracking shot contains in it more boundless joy than 99% of all fantasies combined. Breathless may have set a standard, but for my money The 400 Blows is the French New Wave film you simply have to see.