Two or three things I love about Godard's Weekend

The very mention of Jean-Luc Godard can send shivers down the spine of a middlebrow movie buff – or a highbrow movie buff for that matter. He stirs up some very extreme reactions. Students of cinema (self-taught or institute-taught) learn early on that Godard occupies a hugely important place in film history but that it may not be possible to learn much of practical value from him. In an astute piece written in 1968, Pauline Kael compared the stature of the then 37-year-old director to a stature that James Joyce had reached in literature at a much later age:

He has paralysed other filmmakers by shaking their confidence (as Joyce did to writers), without ever reaching a large public...it’s possible to hate half or two-thirds of what Godard does – or find it incomprehensible – and still be shattered by his brilliance...

...Again, like Joyce, he seems to be a great but terminal figure. The most gifted younger directors and student filmmakers all over the world recognize his liberation of the movies; they know he has opened up a new kind of movie-making, that he has brought a new sensibility into film. But when they try to follow him they can’t beat him at his own game, and they can’t take what he has done into something else...he has already made the best use of his innovations, which come out of his need for them and may be integral only to his own material.

It’s common to find people having strong “opinions” about Godard without having seen much of his work. (“He’s too gimmicky and pretentious,” someone told me once. Later I learnt that this person’s only firsthand knowledge of a Godard film was of the first 20 minutes of Alphaville.) Viewers who believe content should take precedence over form (or that form should be as invisible and functional as possible) don’t have much time for him. And even among those who are more open-minded about cinematic experimentation, there’s a perception that Godard is a director to be admired from a distance rather than to be enjoyed. After all, even the descriptions or short synopses of his films can be intimidating.

I was thinking about all this while watching my DVD of Weekend, Godard’s superb 1967 movie about an unpleasant Parisian couple on an increasingly bizarre road-trip. Certain words or phrases repeatedly crop up in descriptions of this film: “apocalyptic vision”, “the end of civilisation”, “bourgeoisie greed”, “consumerist society” among them. Its reputation as a very political, radical work can scare away potential viewers, which is a pity – because though Weekend IS self-conscious and self-referential (its protagonists remark that they are “just imaginary people” in a movie, and one of its many playful “inter-titles” describes it as “a film discovered in a garbage dump”), it’s also outrageously funny if you have a taste for dark, grisly, absurdist humour. I rate it among the most eye-poppingly entertaining movies I’ve seen.

For one thing, it’s full of surrealist setpieces that are reminiscent of Luis Bunuel’s late films (including a sequence that explicitly pays tribute to The Exterminating Angel). There are great moments involving a herd of sheep and an Alice in Wonderland figure (or is it Emily Bronte?) who cries as she is set afire. As the film progresses, its imagery (highways littered with destroyed cars, cannibalistic hippies who play drum solos and crack open eggs with giant saws) gets more and more outlandish, but on a poetic level it makes perfect sense. Besides, is it really so exaggerated? The scenes where rich people turn savage over the most minor car accidents, attacking each other with tennis balls(!), spray paint and then shotguns, won't seem particularly strange to anyone who's witnessed road rage in Delhi.

I have too many favourite scenes to mention here but one is the extraordinary early sequence where Corinne (Mirielle Darc) talks about a ménage-a-trois she participated in. It’s a long monologue and it has all the trappings of a really erotic scene (an attractive young woman lounging about in her underwear, detailing a sexual tryst in explicit language), but it’s made deliberately sterile, even off-putting, by the flatness of Corinne’s voice, the repugnance of some of the acts she describes, and Godard’s on-again, off-again use of Antoine Duhamel’s ominous music score makes it even more unsettling. It reminded me of a famous sequence in an earlier Godard film, the wonderful Contempt, where a nude Brigitte Bardot sprawled out on a bed effectively deconstructs herself by drawing her husband’s (and the viewer’s) attention to various parts of her body in turn. In both cases, there’s the director taking a scenario that should by rights be stimulating and instead turning it into something that discomfits the viewer.

Weekend is usually described as a “political film”, but I see it as a work of pure nihilism, not a vehicle for any sort of ideology. In one scene, a character flags down a passing car for a ride and a middle-aged woman rolls down the passenger-seat window. “Would you rather be screwed by Mao or [Lyndon] Johnson?” she asks. “Johnson, of course,” the hitch-hiker replies. “Drive on,” she tells her chauffeur, “he’s a fascist.” But the impression one gets is that if he’d answered Mao, she would have said the same thing and driven on anyway. Then there’s the magnificent, hyper-politicised exchange of words between a rich young woman and a tractor-driving peasant after a crash between their vehicles kills the woman’s boyfriend. “You can’t bear us having money while you don’t!” she screams at the lower-class man, “You can’t bear us screwing on the Riviera, screwing at ski-resorts.” If you miss the humour of this scene, you'll think it's wordy and didactic (hence "political") - but the very absurdity of the conversation and the way it's intercut with shots of people looking on vacuously makes it easier to see it as a cosmic joke. Besides, this “class struggle” (as the inter-title calls it) ends with the unlikeliest of reconciliations, which makes nonsense of what has gone before it, and suggests that human actions are determined not by long-lasting principles but purely by the convenience of any given moment.

“The power of text”

My Weekend DVD has a video introduction by director Mike Figgis. Wanted to share this bit – his view on Godard’s unconventional use of inter-titles:

People say of a Bob Dylan song “Well, the lyrics were amazing.” And I go “Oh, I never really thought about the lyrics – but it’s such a lovely song, and the lyrics seem appropriate for this song.” But many people seem to have this idea that you either listen to the music or you listen to the words. And one of the problems some viewers have with Godard is that he uses text in his films in a very deliberate way – he uses provocative statements that sometimes don’t seem to make much sense. But I see it differently: I think it’s almost as if, in the flow of the film, he suddenly thinks it would be a good idea to cut to black, with some red letters flashing on the screen. Then he asks himself “What would the red letters be? Oh, they could be this...” and he thinks of something very quickly that fits in organically with the flow of the film.


And as a viewer I’ve always agreed with his decisions: I’ve never had a problem with why those words are appearing at that particular time. And often the text is accompanied by a sound, which also makes sense. To me, he’s a complete filmmaker who’s thinking with all of his senses. He doesn’t bias himself towards the visual, which is something most filmmakers do. Godard is one of the few artists in cinema who has understood the power of text. Text engages a different part of the brain from sound – if someone says something and you listen to it, intellectually you’ll engage with it in a certain way; but if you repeat those words as written text on the screen, with music underneath it, a different part of the brain will engage in a different way, and you’ll end up with a different result.


So I think it can be a mistake to ask the question “What does that literally mean?” – the question should be “Does that feel correct to you?” Does it make sense that he went into that mode at that particular point in the scene, and for me the answer has always been yes. Godard has forced me to think about the way in which sound and text and camera movement can be used together to make a film.

It think it's interesting that Figgis makes the Dylan analogy, because the question "Does that feel correct to you?" (as opposed to "What does it mean exactly?") is the right one to ask of some of the great abstract Dylan songs from his "electric" phase in 1965-66 - songs like "Visions of Johanna", "Tombstone Blues", "I Want You", "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again".