The Passion of Jean-Luc Godard

A new DVD set revisits the director’s work from the 1980s

Jean-Luc Godard was one of the seminal figures of the European art house cinema craze of the 1960s. That decade was the peak of popularity for visionary continental directors such as Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni, and Godard’s 1960 debut feature A Bout de Soufflé (Breathless) in many ways helped set the tone and look of the French New Wave zeitgeist. Throughout the early to mid ’60s, Godard produced a handful of films that were original, bold and occasionally entertaining, with works such as Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, Contempt and Masculin-Feminine having become classics. For awhile, he was revered and imitated around the world. Then he kind of became a Maoist.

He was always one of the most formally challenging and intellectually demanding of directors, but sometime around 1967’s La Chinoise, his always present and usually reactionary, half-formed political views took a hard left turn into French Maoism, and his films suffered. For the next eight or so years, he produced a steady stream of little-seen (with the exception of his last classic of the ’60s, Weekend) films that primarily served as agit-prop. In the mid-’70s, he formed the collective Dziga-Vertov Group, experimenting in video to produce television films that confounded and/or bored the small audiences they drew. Rarely had a film director so captivated and influenced popular culture only to disappear so effectively up his own ass. (A popular music analogy might be Bob Dylan’s ideological surrender to Christianity, followed by his confused wilderness years of the 1980s.)

Then came 1980’s Every Man For Himself, a startling film that was not so much a return to form as it was Godard re-inviting himself. It’s a mature, accomplished film that suggests Godard had undergone some serious thinking and woodshedding regarding his craft. For the next decade, he would produce around a dozen films of varying success, culminating in 1990’s Nouvelle Vague, which many critics consider one of his finest efforts. While those two films are unfortunately still unavailable on DVD, Studio Canal and Lionsgate recently released a three-DVD set of four films from what could be considered the beginning of Act Three in the 77-year-old director’s still ongoing career.

The earliest film of the set, 1982’s Passion, is, in many ways, the most satisfying film here, and is one of the best looking in Godard’s entire oeuvre. None of these films have much in the way of plot, and Passion’s is especially bare-bones. A director (Jerzy Radilwilowicz) shoots a film of tableaux vivants based on classic paintings while carrying on affairs with a hotel owner, Hanna Schygulla, and a factory worker, Isabelle Huppert. That’s more or less it. There’s a lot of talking, considerable yelling and little action.

The most intriguing parts of the film are the scenes featuring the tableaux —  magnificently lit, artfully composed long-takes that move in and around the actors trying to remain still. Godard was wise to reunite with cinematographer Raoul Coutard — who unquestionably helped make so many of his ’60s films a success— after 15 years apart, as Coutard’s sensitivity and understanding of photography serves the film’s subject matter well.
With Passion, Godard commenced with two actions that .would become something of a trademark of his work ever since: inserting seemingly random shots of natural settings such as the sky, sea or trees, and aiming the camera toward a light source for long stretches of a scene. The former added a contemplativeness and mystery to his films, while the latter was an obvious but radical move that changed the look of his films drastically, obscuring his actors as he silhouetted them against the light behind them. He especially loved natural lighting, as it created a chiaroscuro look that resembled paintings.

Godard would also experiment with sound almost obsessively during this period, recording and mixing his soundtracks in a jumbled, non-diegetic way. First Name: Carmen (1983) demonstrates some of his most playful use of sound. Music begins and ends abruptly, dialogue overlaps and sound effects are often misplaced. Classical music and car horns have always figured in his work, but with these films, they sometimes seem omnipresent; a Beethoven quartet may be interrupted by a shrill car horn that never seems to stop.