The Other Jean-Luc

I have to admit that Jean-Luc Godard, whose death was announced yesterday, wasn't quite as horrible as the ad-hoc accolades being showered on his name in the hours since. Every periodical and news-gathering service has felt obliged, in purple prose, to eulogize Godard. The tributes might give one some idea of how controversial he was - fifty years ago. In those days, films were thought to be worthy of passionate debate. It was the steep decline of the quality of films in the late '60s that brought an end to it. Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. His death was followed, over the ensuing years, by Chabrol's, Rivette's, and Rohmer's. Godard hung on in Switzerland until his body was so depleted that a doctor was asked to assist him into that glittering movie palace in the sky (it's legal in Switzerland, don't you know). Alas, Godard's influence, the effect he had on film criticism and on cinephilia, will live long after his assisted suicide. His films, however, are so redolent of the Sixties that they will remain a monument to its strident inanities. 

It all started in 1940 with the Fall of France when little Jean-Luc was 9 years old. (François Truffaut was 8, but the two didn't meet until 1948.) What the Nazis did to the French in four years of occupation shouldn't happen to any nation, but it was especially demoralizing for one that had been the mortal enemy of Germany for generations and that had participated, with its Vichy government, in its own occupation. Godard and his family was safe in Switzerland, but as an ethnic-Frenchman he must've been deeply affected by the plight of France. 

Immediately after the liberation in 1944, American film promoters moved into France to reassert Hollywood's hegemony over its film markets. During the Occupation, there had been an embargo on American films, so the reappearance of them on French cinema screens after the war was revelatory to the young men - Godard was 13 and Truffaut 12 - who needed a distraction from postwar conditions, one of which was finding out how best to forget the Occupation. Back in Paris to pursue a university degree in anthropology, Godard joined film clubs where he made the acquaintance of Truffaut and Rohmer. He began to contribute to André Bazin's film journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the early '50s, often locking horns with Bazin's positions. 

Then, in 1954, something terrible happened when Cahiers published an essay by Truffaut called "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Trend of French Cinema"). Just to give you a sampling of Truffaut's critical prowess, he once proclaimed that Jean Renoir never made a bad film. But it's impossible to exaggerate the impact of this single essay and the theory that grew out of it.(1) 

Immediately after its publication, battle lines were drawn. Even Bazin took exception to it. Truffaut and Godard, their heads and dreams filled with Hollywood movies, argued that a director is as much the author, in French auteur, of his work as any novelist or playwright. The problem with their theory was that it was disastrously uncritical. Though the Cahiers critics were especially savage when they considered the French films of the generation of their parents, which they quite transparently labelled cinéma du papa ("daddy's cinema"), they fell over themselves in praise of Hollywood movies. This was a complete inversion of film criticism prior to Cahiers - Hollywood movies weren't taken seriously by critics simply because experience had taught them not to. The works of film art that had appeared intermittently were invariably made somewhere other than Hollywood. 

Another problem with the auteur theory is how indiscriminately it was applied. Not only was Hitchcock an auteur, but so were Howard Hawks (Godard's personal favorite) and Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and Allan Dwan and every other Hollywood director one could name. This was their Achilles Heel. Though it could conceivably be demonstrated that a studio employee like Michael Curtiz was the author of every one of his 181 movies, nobody found it necessary to address the quality of the individual movies or the quality of their author. In other words, Vincente Minnelli became an "author" of equal value to Federico Fellini. Is L. Ron Hubbard an author equal to Saul Bellow? Is Colley Cibber a playwright equal to Shakespeare? 

Godard was a perfect example of the theory - he was the guiding force behind all of his films, their true author. But one more giant flaw in the theory is the notion that every film an auteur makes is worthy of attention. This is one reason why, in the popular imagination, Stanley Kubrick, whose work suffered a falling off in the mid-1960s and kept on falling to the bitter end, made nothing but masterpieces. 

Godard never stopped stirring the shit, but sometime during the Vietnam War audiences stopped noticing. The world has shrunk immeasurably since March 16, 1960, the day a film called Breathless - or Á bout du souffle - opened in Paris. It doesn’t matter any more if the only films of Godard's that are worth bothering about, even conditionally, were made 60 years ago, and I'm thankful for that. But Godard was a kind of art film Tarantino - clever but ultimately half-witted. One of his more coherent quotes sounds just like Tarantino: "I know nothing of life except through the cinema." It wasn't Breathless or Le petit soldat or Bande a part that we remember, but the fact that the stir the individual films created for about a decade was caused by cinema. That doesn't happen any more and will never happen again. 

(1) Auteurists often argue it wasn't a theory.