Against the Common Enemy: Godard’s Anti-Imperialist Cinema
Let me begin this remembrance of Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away last week at the age of 91, by charting my own initial encounter with his work. Unintentionally, I moved through Godard’s oeuvre somewhat backwards, beginning with what was, in 2002 or so, his newest release: Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love). I had little background knowledge of the films for which he became famous, his exuberant 1960s run that canonically began with À bout de souffle (Breathless) and ended with Weekend, those convention-shattering showcases of noir stylings, ebullient musical numbers, and newsreel-like political interludes. Instead, I had incidentally begun with “late Godard,” and, at least for the first half of the film, I hated it. I hated him. I hated the critics who praised him.
I had, after all, picked up Éloge de l’amour for his name and reputation alone. And what I got for that first half was a film drenched in dreary, muddy black-and-white, conveying a plodding pseudo-story about a man working on some kind of art project about a series of vaguely defined themes: passion, forgiveness, aging, and so on. It seemed not much was happening. The man intermittently conversed with a rich art dealer. He developed an infatuation with a woman whose participation he sought to enlist in his mysterious project. But what perplexed me most of all, what infuriated me, was not so much the plotlessness, but the incessant interruptions of scenes, both visually, with title cards of disparate words and obscure phrases popping up over and over, and aurally, with unpredictable bursts of symphonic music sometimes cutting conversations off mid-word.
But then, somewhere around the midway point of the film, something happened, a dramatic shift of tone and pacing. The city setting transformed into countryside as murky black-and-white gave way to gorgeous colour, a tableau of achingly oversaturated greens and crepuscular blues, reds, and pinks. The music grew louder, and the film let loose with a repertoire of historical allusions and beautiful literary quotations. I remember the words of St. Augustine rendered in voiceover: “The measure of love is to love without measure.” And while I do not exactly remember the specific plot points of the latter half of Éloge de l’amour, I do recall the polemics very well. Characters’ monologues launched into broadsides against US cinema, embodied in the figure of Steven Spielberg, whose production company was fictionally portrayed visiting an elderly couple to purchase the rights to their memories in the French Resistance. (As one character disdainfully mentioned, Oscar Schindler’s wife was then living in poverty in Argentina.) By the close of the film, I felt exhilarated, because for the first time in my still-young film education, I had been shown that the medium could be anything and everything: it could encompass just about every other art form, and it could say something about the present times. Cinema could be angrily political one moment and swellingly elegiac the next. I am not sure the film would have drawn that revelation from me had it not first dared to anger me, to test my patience and expectations.
And so that is where I want to begin, with a sampling from Godard’s less renowned “late period.” A few of the big-name critics pilloried Éloge de l’amour, condemning it to marginality. Roger Ebert gave it but a single star, raging at it for its anti-Americanism and, perhaps even more unforgivably, its anti-Spielbergism. I have not seen the film in years – it is not available for streaming at the moment – but to my memory, it was unabashedly (and I would not necessarily say “crudely”) anti-American when it counted the most, in the window of what Mahdi al-Manjra called US “mega-imperialism”: when the likes of Bush and Cheney were descending on the world with relentless firepower, busily erecting torture mills and buzzsawing the US Bill of Rights and the UN Charter alike. Godard addressed the issue where it hit him personally, in the degradation and misuse of cinema. For him, US colonization of cinema was a crucial aspect of US imperialism as a whole, and it coincided with, and perhaps even caused, the death of cinema – or, if death is too definite a word, at least the great 20th century betrayal of cinema, its failure to meet its own potential. Shady, often US-based, businessmen populate the films of late Godard time and again. The lurking figures of “Steven Spielberg Associates” in Éloge de l’amour were presaged by the American gangster “Don Learo” in King Lear, Godard’s loose (to put it generously) adaptation of the Shakespeare play.
These harsh observations about US cinema came out of a politicization that had long ago set Godard apart from his more genteel colleagues.
Godard and the Palestinian Cause
There remains in my view much to love about the French New Wave, but Godard’s association with it does little to clarify the direction his films later took. Other New Wave filmmakers weren’t nearly as wide-ranging in their interests. During a recent screening of Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, I was struck by the hermetism of the film’s characters, their cushioned seclusion in the countryside and the limitation of their field of concern to only themselves and each other. I adore Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, but its references to the Paris upheavals of 1968 serve as little more than atmospheric support for the hapless Antoine Doinel’s stumbling and whimsical misadventures with women. In the years those films were released, 1967 and 1968, Godard was becoming increasingly intoxicated by revolution, until he was eventually compelled to lead a protest against the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the general strike in Paris. “We’re talking solidarity with students and workers,” Godard barked. “You’re talking dolly shots and close-ups; you’re assholes.”
But it was not his position on the May happenings that set Godard’s work so radically apart, aesthetically and politically, from his colleagues. It was, rather, that he dared, through his burgeoning Maoist connections and his founding of the Dziga Vertov Group (taking inspiration from an old Soviet visionary), to seek out “another 1968,” so to speak. The “Western left,” if I could speak in loose and provisional language, has often failed to grasp that Paris 1968 was a rather small stirring compared with the revolutionary storms that were swirling in many parts of the Third World. In Palestine, 1968 was the year of the feda’i, when volunteer soldiers decisively rejected the doctrine of dependence on Arab states and turned instead to themselves, the disinherited peasantry of the Arab region, to dare launch commando operations into Occupied Palestine (“Israel”) for the liberation of the land and the return of its refugees.
By heading to Jordan to document the Palestinian revolution, Godard turned his back on the accolades and adoration of the Western art and film world. I will always cherish him for that. His anti-Zionism, more than merely his predilection for Maoism, added genuine nerve to his painterly talents as a filmmaker. It was a difficult position to take in France, or anywhere in the West. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom Godard organized on behalf of the Maoist organization Gauche prolétarienne, and whose apartment had once been bombed on account of his pro-Algerian activism, ultimately embraced Zionism.
With the Dziga Vertov Group, a film collective founded with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard set out, in his words, to “make films politically,” a task distinguishable from simply making political films. Radical filmmaking did not mean simply addressing radical themes; it meant radical forms of production and, as much as possible, delinking from traditional funding sources. Godard traveled to Jordan to collaborate with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Palestine Film Unit. The young Palestinian filmmakers he met found themselves embarking on a similar mission, experimenting with the medium to see what possibilities it held out for Palestinian liberation. Many of their concerns were practical: to establish a sovereign Palestinian cinema capable of capturing the people’s daily struggles and dreams, as well as their histories and national identity, in light of a mass media apparatus that had paradoxically sought to erase and vilify them.
Godard contributed his impressions to the publications of multiple PLO organizations, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) Al Hadaf and Fateh’s Al Fateh. Asked in the pages of Al Hadaf where he got the idea to travel to Amman, he responded that the Central Committee of the Palestinian Revolution had asked him to make a film on the understanding that the film it would be in essence an Arab one and thus, naturally, Arab-funded. He said that he wanted to address “methods of thinking and working in the Palestinian revolution,” to make a political film, “or rather a political report,” in Arabic and dubbed according to the needs of distribution. As to the politics of the film, Godard clarified to the PFLP that he and his fellow filmmakers were not seeking out sensational images, which was what one might expect of US and French television networks. Rather, they wanted to do an analysis of the Palestinian revolution, work for which they had found themselves still “at the beginning of the road.” Overall, they did not intend to give lessons, but “to take lessons from people who are more advanced than us.”
In an article for Fateh published in the summer of 1970, Godard laid out the logic of his and Gorin’s commitment to Palestine. The filmmaking duo were “French militants,” and so it was only appropriate that they should concern themselves with a region colonized and then divided by French imperialism under the Sykes-Picot agreement. The situation was also “less obvious” than the revolutionary war raging in Southeast Asia. (Godard did not mention in the article that he had attempted to make a film in collaboration with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; the relevant authorities there found his aesthetic approach politically unsound, although his segment in the collaborative Loin du Vietnam helpfully took up the task of offering to Western audiences a clear, chronological timeline of modern imperialist interference in Vietnam.) Godard and Gorin wanted to make films that would help to make revolution. They wanted to make films with which they could “demonstrate the feda’yin’s struggle to their Arab brothers who are being exploited by the bosses in the French factories.”
As media, cinema could potentially challenge the international corporations whose images and information bulletins had churned out calumnies against Palestinians by effectively representing a peasant struggle for lost land as a nihilistically violent pursuit emerging from a supposedly timeless Arab anti-Semitism. “Fateh… fights against American imperialism,” noted Godard. “But American imperialism is also The New York Times and CBS. There are a lot of journalists who sincerely consider themselves as leftist, and who are not fighting CBS and The New York Times.” He declared his task as “directing these forces [of image and sound] against those of the common enemy: imperialism – that is: Wall Street, the Pentagon, IBM, United Artists (entertainment from Trans-America Corporation), etc.” He tilted his hat towards Palestinian daring: “We are several decades behind Al Asifah’s [Fateh’s military wing] first bullet… Abu Hassan said: ‘Al-Asifah’s first bullet has to be fired close to the ears of the farmers, so that they can hear the sound of the liberation of the land.’”
Godard’s initial intention was to make a PLO propaganda effort titled Jusqu' à la victoire (Until Victory). That film was aborted amid the agony of counterrevolution in Jordan. In the “Black September” of 1970, as Palestinians agitated against the US’s secretive “Rogers Plan” (an attempt to liquidate the revolution by pacifying and drawing on Arab governments), the PFLP and Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) called for the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy and its replacement with a free Palestinian republic, one led by an alliance of workers and peasants. The US activated the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The Pentagon mobilized troops for a potential invasion. The CIA dispatched special advisors to the Jordanian king. What followed was a US- and Israeli-backed onslaught against the refugee camps, the social bases of the revolution. Shells relentlessly smacked the camps. Many people, men, women, and children alike, whom Godard had gotten to know, were massacred.
Four years later, wounded physically by a nasty motorcycle accident as well as psychologically by the slaughter of his comrades, Godard ventured with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville to put his footage from Jordan together into some kind of film. They came up with Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere). That film served, in part, as Godard’s own attempt to deal with his prior naivete, his shock at how his earnest attempt to understand revolutionary propaganda was curtailed by atrocities. The film’s title, referencing dissonance, is multifaceted. Images of France (“here”) mainly include a working class family zoning out in front of the television. Their narcotized stares are interrupted by still photographs of murder and rubble from Black September (“elsewhere”). The screen here has become a great stupefier rather than any kind of liberator; it is not a connector between working class peoples, but an obstacle, a wall severing rather than mediating the relationship between representation and reality. Taking cues from the great Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the film drew attention to the fact that it was a film, which could both help audiences to notice the techniques behind art and propaganda and invite their own participation. Godard had already been playing with these tactics for some time, most famously in Masculin Féminin when Jean-Pierre Léaud’s character, attending a film screening, stops both the film we are watching and the one he is watching to urge the projector to switch to the correct aspect ratio. In Ici et ailleurs, the Brechtian games moved from playful to politically poignant, asking the audience to consider how the filmmakers’ presence affected the images they were receiving of the revolution.
From my 2022 vantage point, the self-criticism of Ice et ailluers – and there is plenty to go around in Godard and Meivelle’s voiceover narration – is a bit masochistic. Part of Godard’s legacy in the making of the film was his support for Palestinian filmmakers, some of whose projects have, thankfully, survived Israel’s cruel attempts to seize and destroy Palestinian cinema. Mustafa Abu Ali’s Laysa lahum wujud (They Do Not Exist) is available online and is an important document of Nabatiya refugee camp, which Israeli air forces bombed in 1974, erasing its existence like so many towns before it across historic Palestine. Abu Ali’s 1977 film Filastin fi al-Ayn (Palestine in the Eye), also available online, was a tribute to cinematographer Hani Jawharieh, who was killed by an enemy bullet while serving in the line of cinematic duty to the revolution. Here was, in the Jordan Valley, a front where filmmaking really was a matter of life and death, where filmmakers dwelled among, and in a way were themselves, guerrilla fighters. And here was another thing, explicitly political yet deeply personal, that cinema could do: commemorate martyrs and preserve the memory of loved ones lost.
Cahiers du Cinéma, for which Godard wrote as a film critic before starting as a filmmaker, was known for its development of the auteur theory, which posited that directors of films were tantamount to authors of books. But Godard’s time with the Dziga Vertov Group and the Palestinian revolution was really a rebuke to that idea. The Palestinian corpus that survives today shows what might have been possible if the power of film fell into the hands of the people. Of those films, I have a special affection for the PFLP’s filmic collaboration with the Japanese Red Army, Declaration of World War, for not only capturing, but stylistically exhibiting, human freedom. Like Godard, the filmmaker Masao Adachi had traveled to West Asia, in his case to Lebanon rather than Jordan, as a gesture of pro-Palestinian solidarity and of internationalism, to prove that it was possible for people in one nation to take up the cause of those faraway. The film is full of precious sequences, from its hypnotic, dream-like chronicles of travel by both air and road, to its forays into the camps themselves, where feda’yin train, chat, read, and listen to “The Internationale.” At one point, the revolutionary and former political prisoner Fusako Shigenobu summarizes the film’s core message: “In a sense, we already saw the world as one single country.” Together, the PFLP and JRA were engaged in an attempt at a great counter-globalization, using imperialism’s own internationalizing tendencies (such as its quickening of long-distance travel) against it. After 9/11, the US’s War on Terror and PATRIOT Act aimed to shut those very avenues down by intensifying the regulation of international movement along more explicitly political lines.
The playwright Jean Genet, a Frenchman who, like Godard, defied his society’s stultifying conventions to join the Palestinian revolution, called the two years he spent living with the feda’yin in Jordan “the most joyful period of my life.” In his book Prisoner of Love, he reflected on the sense of freedom he felt during an argument he had with a young man from Syria, who went by the name Abu Jamal, about the existence of God. Far from offended in Genet’s disbelief, Abu Jamal insisted on debate, and before beginning reflected on his three months in China, where he learned from Mao to share a kiss on both cheeks of the person with whom you are arguing, to “show that you’re friends.” “What mattered to me,” Genet reflected, “was not any particular argument, nor even the discussion itself… but a sort of kindness and strength… We were free – free to say anything we liked.”
This was an entire milieu for which Godard served a purpose not as a lone auteur, though his fame certainly outweighed those of his collaborators, but as one humble contributor among many. The films produced during that period are not stuck in time or inert; they need not be viewed as simply nostalgic trips for a better political time. They could just as easily be treated as they were intended, as calls to arms still-applicable to the present demands of internationalism and the Palestinian cause, or, in the case of Ici et ailleurs, as interrogations of the difficulties of solidarity and propaganda. (For new generations of Palestinians, now and in the future, they can also provide the important function of preserving and teaching the history of the revolution.) It should be understood and appreciated that Godard’s role, which helped to expand the reach of the Palestinian cause, required a conscious turn away from power centres such as Hollywood and towards a real community, in this case a globally oriented one.
Godard the Terrible
Towards the end of his life, Godard’s reputation was slightly revitalized in the mainstream, and he received accolades from high places. But those acknowledgements were generally based on his early output. I do understand why the 1959-1967 stage of his career continues to resonate. I certainly have my favorites from that period, too. There is Pierrot le fou, for its early Samuel Fuller cameo and its madcap search for total anarchic freedom in the countryside, which features a luscious, glittering coastline and a bright blue-and-yellow macaw in a supporting role, and which at the end literally explodes. (I wonder if it could be said that Godard learned from the Palestinian revolutionaries that some form of discipline is also an essential part of substantive freedom.) There is Made in USA, for its pop stylization and its constant teeter-tottering love-hate treatment of US culture, expressed notoriously in its self-description, “Walt Disney, plus blood – therefore a political film.” And there is Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), whose centrepiece sequence – an essayistic dissection of a coffee shop setting, its people and sounds and even its cups of coffee – is, in my estimation, among the greatest scenes of Godard’s career. To see any of these films on the big screen is a gift; I remember seeing Pierrot le fou at the Detroit Film Theatre as a teenager and being totally enraptured, as if the film’s Mediterranean vistas were literally spilling off the screen.
But those early films marked the relative beginning of Godard’s intellectual journey and somewhat preceded his political radicalization. Those who regarded the criticisms of the US in Éloge de l'amour as essentially de Gaullist – lingering resentment over France’s subordination in the world imperialist system following the Second World War – must have overlooked the significance of the Dziga Vertov Group period, when Godard ruthlessly addressed his long-gestating disillusionment with the Hollywood studio system that had inspired his youth. The themes he developed during that run would dominate his films for the rest of his life.
To chart that evolution in Godard’s politicization, it is useful to compare two films, one from his “New Wave” years and the other at the conclusion of the Dziga Vertov Group: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle and Tout va bien, respectively. In the first film, Godard sets out to critique petit bourgeois aspirations by documenting the daily boredom of a suburban housewife (Marina Vlady), and then intercutting it with philosophical voiceover ruminations, documentary-like chronicles of everyday Paris life, and extended monologues from the actors. Whenever the fourth wall is broken, the film launches into excursions into the topics that middle class social reproduction tends to shut out: subjects as elemental as death itself or as globally important as the then-ongoing war in Vietnam.
In Tout va bien, released in 1972, the working class and its problems, rather than suburban alienation, have come to occupy the foreground. Godard and Gorin acknowledge the dilemmas of financing immediately and comically, unrolling the opening credits over images of checks being signed to pay everyone involved in each component of the film. To fund a film, Godard and Gorin acknowledge, big stars are needed, and so Jane Fonda and Yves Montand are introduced, only for moments later the film’s ulterior protagonists – workers taking over a sausage factory – to assert control over the thin narrative. The studio actors have served as a vehicle to draw audiences to the practical discussions and programs of radicalized workers: their objections to the boss expropriating their surplus-value, their contentious relationship with their union, their demand for the right to paid bathroom breaks, and even their anger about the deplorable conditions of the bathrooms themselves. Through the so-called “didacticism” of Dziga Vertov films such as Vent d'est (Wind from the East), Godard gained a degree of militancy that he could subsequently combine to playfulness in Tout va bien.
Even when he was receiving somewhat perfunctory commendations from contemporary tastemakers, Godard maintained his position against the increasingly corrosive influence of US cinema as an adjunctive deployment of US power. During a 1980 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to promote his “comeback” film Every Man for Himself, he took the occasion to decry US cinema as a colonizing force. In his eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma, he called US cinema a form of advertising, and indicted cinema as a whole for failing to “bear witness” to the Holocaust. When the Academy Awards gave him a lifetime achievement award, he refused to show up to receive it, and commented coldly that the award meant “nothing” to him. “If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it,” he said. “But I think it’s strange. I asked myself: Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually know my films?” He added wryly: “The award is called The Governor’s Award. Does this mean that Schwarzenegger gives me the award?”
More than ever before, over these last two years, I have found myself agreeing with Godard’s pessimistic pronouncements about cinema. Through the COVID lockdowns, the imperialist state carried out enclosures on social life, including cultural life. Countless movie theatres were shuttered, and in many cities only the multiplexes survived. When they reopened, the grand occasion to bring audiences back to the cinema was Top Gun: Maverick, a paint-by-numbers Pentagon recruitment device. The problem of filmmaking is one of access to its fundamental technologies, of which class holds power over the cinematic pipeline, from financing and production to distribution and consumption. Alas, the corporate monopoly on image-making seems as ironclad as ever. Nonetheless, Godard’s challenges to convention, made with both love and fury, continue to point toward alternative possibilities, the full realization of which would require more than simply to ask: “Where are tomorrow’s equivalents of Jean-Luc Godard?” We must also ask: “Where are tomorrow’s equivalents of the Palestine Film Unit, towards which the Godards of the future can turn?”