Looking Forward to Godard

At a time when Hollywood is as formulaic as ever, when the representatives of French cinema we receive in the U.S. seem to be attacking critical thought (Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element [1997] could by itself constitute a Ministry of Anti-Education), it is refreshing to read a book that considers with seriousness and a highly contemporary disposition the work of this enigmatic and brilliant director. Jean-Luc Godard took French and international cinema by surprise in the sixties, yet today may easily be relegated to the status of a quaint intellectual from a bygone era. Wheeler Winston Dixon opens his book with quiet applause for Godard’s relentless pursuit of the social and political implications of cinema aesthetics, convincing this reader that even Godard’s early work is far from exhausted and still poses major challenges to both criticism and cinematic practice. Paradoxically, Dixon also faces with full rigor the French director’s pronouncements, beginning with Le Week-end in 1967, of the death of cinema.

This “death” is what makes the cinema impossible as a critical experience, and yet it is precisely such experience that Dixon demonstrates is at the heart of Godard’s filmmaking from first to last. The studios offer “blockbuster films” (1) that aim for the “lowest common denominator”; (2) while at the same time, visual entertainment is given over to the relentlessly expanding worlds of cybernetics, multimedia, and cable TV. Nothing that risks the disturbing, insistent involvement with the image that Godard has continually worked at may make an entrance for more than a moment or two. In this book that very adeptly combines biography, history, description and summary of films, theoretical analysis, and a vast knowledge of the film industry, Dixon situates Godard’s films as both objects and projects in the present situation, through the perspective of how this situation has taken shape over the last forty years. He offers an explanation of capital as it manifests itself in the film industry—a favorite target of Godardian critique—to show how it was in the fluctuations of capital itself that Godard was first able to present his images to the public.

The exigencies of 1960s theatrical film distribution constituted a series of paradoxically liberating strictures; for a film to make a profit at all, it had to appear in a theater.... Thus distributors were forced to seek the widest possible theatrical release pattern for even the most marginal of films, and it is this way that Godard achieved and consolidated his initial reputation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such a project would be impossible today.

(3)

In the well-wrought historical narrative Dixon provides, it becomes apparent that Godard’s work, though perhaps more widely viewed, better funded, and more appreciated by critics in the sixties, is of greater importance today. This would be true of both Godard’s early work—which tends to be better known because of its place in film studies curricula—and his more recent efforts, which bear directly on the contemporary state of cinema and television. Dixon characterizes Godard as an electronic-age prophet who saw the destiny of cinema in a global culture where the visual image dominates, and who, along with his collaborators, “seek[s] to hasten its demise” (xvi)—precisely for the purpose of educating the public as to the role of the image in their culture and its manipulating force in consumer society. “Godard is a moralist—perhaps the last moralist that the medium of cinema will ever possess” (5).

Dixon lays out the major themes he wishes to illuminate—the social, political, moral, aesthetic, and pedagogical aspects of Godard’s work—in the first chapter, “The Theory of Production.” The subsequent chapters, “The Exhaustion of Narrative,” “Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group,” “Anne-Marie Miéville and the Sonimage Workshop,” and “Fin de Cinéma,” each elaborate these themes by addressing a period in Godard’s work in which they become prominent. Dixon submits in the first chapter that the challenge to today’s situation may be...