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GOING, GOING GODARD
by Daren Foster

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DAREN FOSTER PODCAST September 1 2009 - PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN

GOING, GOING GODARD
by Daren Foster

***The last post. Although Never Say Never.***

Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

I love quoting that line because it came to me not from the original, but from my favourite film writer, David Thompson. When I drop his name in any column, I feel it elevates me if only in my mind. Thompson used a piece of Fitzgerald’s line as the title of his 2004 book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. It’s a wonderful overview of the movies that I loaned to someone a couple years ago and never got back. So if any of you are reading this column right now and have a copy of the book and no idea where you got it, now you do. It’s mine. Give it back.

I recently crossed paths again with the above Fitzgerald quote in an article I was reading about Jean-Luc Godard. Now, as I have claimed many times previously in this space, I am in no way a cinephile. I consider my movie tastes to be firmly middle brow, a veritable Goldilocks by preference. This one’s too arty. This one’s too blockbuster-y. This one’s just right.

But I am not unaware of Godard. Anyone who’s taken even the most basic of film courses or a date to a rep house trying to make a good impression will have come across him; most likely his 1960 feature debut, Breathless. No, not the one starring Richard Gere. If you’ve heard of the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague if you want to sound really pompous), you’ve heard of Jean-Luc Godard. The descriptor ‘Godardian’ is especially handy when you want to stop a movie conversation dead in its tracks. There’s a very good possibility that those you’re talking to will not know what you’re talking about when you say ‘Godardian’ or they’ll realize you don’t know what you’re talking about. Either way, everyone will happily move on to another subject.

In the aforementioned Godardian article which used a review of a Godardian biography, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody, as a jumping point to a larger Godardian essay, it become clear to even those of us lacking true Godardian credentials that the man swung some serious cinematic pipe during the 60s. We’re talking 15 feature films between 1960 and 1967 including 3 in 67 alone. Even as just an example of prolificacy, it’s a pretty impressive feat, but as Godardian scholars will tell you, it wasn’t the number as much as the nature of the films that were the real marvel.

Critic Pauline Kael compared Godard to James Joyce, saying “It’s possible to hate half or two-thirds of what Godard does -- or find it incomprehensible -- and still be shattered by his brilliance.” Another critic, Andrew Sarris, described Godard as “the most elegant stylist and the most vulgar polemicist, the most remorseful classicist and the most relentless modernist, the man of the moment and the artist for the ages.” There are those Godardians who claim that his film La Chinoise inspired the student revolt at Columbia University 3 weeks after it opened in 1967.

So clearly, Jean-Luc Godard isn’t just some filmmaker who simply made a lot of movies back in the day.

This caught my attention as 2009 winds down, bringing a tumultuous decade to a close and the beginning of countless lists for best movie honours of the past ten years. What? It’s been 10 years already? Weren’t we just cowering under our computer desks with fingers crossed, hoping that some Y2K bug wouldn’t bring the sky down around us? Really? That was 10 years ago? Huh.

Now I’m not going to go off on some tirade about the lists I’ve scrolled through since we all know these kinds of tabulations are highly, highly subjective. One person’s masterpiece is another’s piece of shit. My favourite film of the decade, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, neared the top of many of the lists I’ve come across while my second favourite, I’m Not There, didn’t show up on one. C’est la vie as the Godardians might say. Big deal. Je m’en fiche.

But I cannot let pass, unremarked upon, the heavy presence of titles like Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight and Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 no less. If these are the movies this decade will be remembered for, then we have been dwelling in dark days indeed. Dark, soulless cinematic days. While I don’t pine for the music or television of the past, I certainly do in terms of the movies. Ours is the age where fanboys firmly took control and the adolescent mindset reigned supreme.

The Oughts didn’t seem to be headed that way. 1999 presaged great things to come. That year, American movies appeared poised to enter another golden age. Magnolia, Fight Club, 3 Kings, The Limey, Being John Malkovich, were all released in that final millennial year. New technology held the promise of innovation and novel ways in which movies would be made, delivered and viewed. Filmmakers would arise from the wilderness, transforming and renewing the art form.

Ten years on and I think it safe to say, yeah, not really. Bottom line Hollywood battened down the hatches and fattened itself on the under-developed brains and over-active prurience of teenage boys. Movies became bigger, louder and dumber. The likes of Michael Bay prospered while his medium faltered, embracing irrelevancy toward anything but the making of money.

Nowhere is that as apparent as in the case of Quentin Tarantino. Hailed in some quarters as the new Godard -- in fact Tarantino’s A Band Apart production company is named after Godard’s 1964 film of an almost similar name -- for his ridiculously great 1990s work, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, the 2000s haven’t so much cemented his reputation as exposed him for the pale imitator that he is. The Kill Bill movies, Death Proof and the most recent Inglorious Basterds are but empty husks of films; slick bits of engagement that never survive past the walk out of the theatre. While Godard used his encyclopedic knowledge of movies to examine life (no matter how dystopian or misanthropic), Tarantino uses his to show off nothing more than his encyclopedic knowledge of movies.

The final credit at the close of Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend, states END OF CINEMA. While a tad self-serving and certainly premature since Godard and his European art house brethren helped detonate an explosion that cleared the way for the creative outburst that came alive in Hollywood right throughout the 70s, there is something a little prophetic about it as you look back over the last 40+ years. The moneymen regrouped and slowly reassumed control during the 80s, squeezing out and marginalizing boldness, originality and vision over the next few decades. Instead, they rewarded calculation, derivativeness and blind loyalty to marketing departments. Godard has been proven right. Cinema no longer exists. Movies are just one branch of the massive entertainment conglomerates that drain us of our leisure hours.

If cinema is indeed finished then what place is there for any sort of analysis or critique? How long can you shrug your shoulders with indifference at yet another eminently forgettable movie and try to string together a few words in explanation? What’s the sense? It’s like banging your head against a wall. Very enjoyable at first but it just leads to a nagging headache right there behind the eyeballs. Who needs that?

So into the silence of my own TV room, I am going to retire. Start brushing up on my Godard. Try and figure out what could’ve been and what might yet still be. I mean, season 3 of Mad Men is now over. What else is there left to write about?

END OF COLUMNS