Godard’s Brackets: Now You See ’Em, Now You Don’t!

 

Jean Luc-Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) is a difficult film. It consists of three parts, each seemingly composed of only loosely related bits, so I turned to the internet for help and discovered annotations by David Phelps on a website called Moving Image Source. There, I ran across a passage that opened up for me the film and Godard’s work as a whole:

“When the actor playing Delmas stammers, the filmmaker decides to keep the take, however doubly 'bad' since he himself is heard, from behind, telling the actor to go on. This is what André S. Labarthe noted around the time of A Woman Is a Woman: Godard keeps the accidents and mistakes, even when the takes are spoiled by technical blunders.”

I realized something similar--but staged, not accidental--occurs at the beginning of Godard’s masterpiece Contempt (1963). The film opens with a woman walking along a row of buildings followed by a movie camera and crew. Meanwhile, the voice of Godard himself tells you he has made a film starring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, with a score by Georges Delerue, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, and so forth. Then the on-screen movie camera turns to look at you the viewer before a scene change leading to a movie that unfolds in a more conventional manner.

What is curious about these scenes is how the director and the craft of film-making intrude into the film.

I’m reminded of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. One of the central questions of philosophy is how we can know that the external world really exists and our experience of it is true. After all, our senses and mind may be deceiving us. Since we cannot resolve the problem by stepping outside our own minds, Husserl suggested we take the world for what it appears but place that belief in brackets, as it were, to designate it an assumption.

This is analogous to watching a film. We know the events it portrays are not real, but we behave as if, for the duration of the film, they are. We identify with characters, gasp, cry, and hope for certain outcomes. This is fiction’s suspension of disbelief at work. Writers, directors and other artists want to bring you into their creation as thoroughly as possible without anything to jar you out.

In Godard’s films, however, the brackets are liable to become visible at any moment. You see a movie camera or hear the director offering cues. The director breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience. The movie clears its throat and says, “Remember? You’re watching a movie!” And there you are, sitting in a chair, gazing at a screen, with popcorn grease on your fingers.

Godard is high cinema, but Mel Brooks employed similar techniques for low-grade humor. A movie camera pulls back or draws in too far and breaks through a window or wall, causing the characters to stop what they’re doing and look around like “What just happened?” As a kid, I thought it was hilarious in Spaceballs (1987) when Lone Starr and Dark Helmet are battling with their Schwartzes and Dark Helmet accidentally strikes down a member of the camera crew.

 

Godard does exactly that, only seriously and in a bewildering variety of ways.

After the uncanny opening credits, Contempt is an uneasy experience. You keep wondering if you will see that camera sliding along its rails again, dissolving the reality of the film, dissolving your current reality. And it doesn’t help that the movie is about people making a movie, so that you often do see movie cameras and cameramen, but they’re the ones inside the story, not the ones taking orders from Godard. For a moment, though, you can’t be sure . . .

Another example of Godard’s playfulness comes as Bardot’s character Camille lies nude in bed talking with her lover Paul. At first, everything has a pinkish hue, but then suddenly, with the change of a filter, the coloration is natural, and then--new filter--everything assumes deep blue tones.

Even the trailer is arty:

Film Socialisme is more subversive, mixing dramatic scenes with meditative landscapes, stock photos, public-domain film and cryptic titles. The images flit from one to the next with a rhythm hard to discern, and some are grainy and jumpy as if recorded on a cell phone in poor light. The sound is no more conventional. Voices speak from off camera, two voices unfold parallel lines of thought in alternate bursts, and sometimes the recording device is overwhelmed by sound so the result is an acoustic mess.

In Godard, the brackets continually reappear and disappear . . .

I noticed all this as I watched the films, but I couldn’t really unlock what was going on until that passage on Moving Image Source told me clearly what I’d only grasped faintly. This is mind-bending cinema on a scale I’ve never encountered before and I can’t wait to see more.