To Godard, 1960s Paris was a political stage, a confused space utilizing a montage technique societal fragmentation, contrast and contradiction on the one hand, while being a reservoir for American cultural invasion on the other.
When one initiates a discussion about prominent resounding cinematic movements as the French New Wave, an automatic calculation promotes itself to a level of political analysis of such movement. The French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague, was not just a mere movement of several filmmakers who reshaped storytelling techniques and cinematographic approaches, rather it was about the logic and reason behind a certain film - an opportunity for the viewer to reach what lied beyond the cinematic scope into his/her own realistic experiences and emotions of the surrounding world. Its utmost crux was, on one hand, rejecting mainstream Hollywood approaches to narration which was based on emotional progression in-between scenes, but rather emphasizing the belief of the auteur. While on the other hand, carrying a certain message and escalating it to a level of societal communication instead of mere entertainment was yet another important aspect of the movement, at a time when culture-starved post-war France encompassed dry and inexpressive films.
The inception of the May 1968 student demonstrations witnessed a strong French New Wave solidarity among its members, including: Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc-Godard, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette. This was the point where youth ideologies were equally leveled with the Nouvelle Vague, creating a new form of French mythology.
Unlike some of the members of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard was a completely different case who was more of a Brechtian-model follower. Godard got tangled inside a web of contemporary French trends that prioritized aesthetics over content. His political interpretations of the Gaullist government and the American intervention in Vietnam was enmeshed with the newly-born 'reform vs. revolution' debate that caused division among opposition parties, e.g. Maoists, Marxists and Trotskyists versus the French Communist Party. By then, emerged a new policy to storytelling that dealt more with political-economic themes shifting away from the notion of the 'camera-stylo'. There was an eager need to look beyond the surface of realism.
Godard....& Paris
During an interview conducted with Godard in 1966 for Le Nouvel Observateur, he mentioned the difficulty of living in Paris during the contemporary era claiming that one must force himself/herself to prostitution and to accept it as the daily norm - a satisfactory modern-society living condition. To Godard, modern Paris was never a newborn - as Geography Professor David Harvey claims: the real core of the spectacle has always been fundamental to urban life, and its political aspects have played an important role in the constitution of legitimacy and social control.
Godard's interpretation of Paris within the context of Gaullist's economic reform placed emphasis on perplexing images of the built environment - an unfinished bridge, a rising tower, or a cement truck in his 1967 picture 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her' - a film that encompassed notions of increasing encroachment of capitalism into people's daily lives. In his 1965 film 'Alphaville', it was robotic sexuality that merged with hard rough surfaced buildings to create the futuristic norm. One scene showed the protagonist's disinterested feeling in the woman accompanying him to his room - this is more of a sarcastic metaphor of a man from the electricity company who asks the woman where the meter is, completely disinterested in the fact she is actually bathing.
ART IS NOT A REFLECTION OF REALITY, IT IS THE REALITY OF REFLECTION - JEAN-LUC GODARD
Being a follower of Jean-Paul Sartre's insights, who opposed the influx of American films into Parisian theaters, Godard believed strongly in the engagement of cinema within the political sphere, which he found possible during the 1968 uprising - it was his opportunity to prove his alliance with the French youth activists. His lens of montage-style film-making attempted to map themes of consumerism, government control, bureaucracy, loss of free will, and lack of any sort of human expressive potentials. His first impressions of reality was an increased sense of image mediation - the things being represented and expressed mean more to human lives than the essence of representation and expression - commodities took over human values, hence camera lens represented reality.
To Godard, 1960s Paris was a political stage, a confused space utilizing a montage technique of societal fragmentation, contrast and contradiction on the one hand, while being a reservoir for American cultural invasion on the other.
Do you share the same insight about Paris as Godard? Do you think Paris has changed over the years? Do you think Godard's ideas apply to the current world, and not just the 1960s phase? Please share your comments, ideas, thoughts, criticism, and/or any sort of information and/or interesting facts.
This article is an extract from a paper I wrote for the International Journal of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies. You can access the full paper here.