As Jean-Luc Godard moved from one medium to another, from prose to filmmaking, he remained a critic. He brought a linear, argumentative style to his films, many of which are about the process—and sometimes the joy—of learning. But his fragmentary polemics were far more suited to an image’s strange mix of definitiveness, since it sits right in front of you, and ambiguity, for there is a less established way to read it. It’s hard to imagine Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98) would make any sense at all as a book-book rather than an image-book. And if Histoire(s) is something like a definitive (insofar as Godard would allow) tome, then his less dense and developed Sixties films are something like essays. Many of them are studies of genre, deconstructions and recapitulations of the kind of films Godard played a pivotal part in reclaiming during his time writing for Cahiers du Cinéma. Breathless (1960) and Bande à part (1964) did this for the gangster film and Alphaville (1965) and Made in U.S.A (1966) did it for the noir.
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Alphaville, while critical in its ways, blew up the noir, and in that tight close-up, alienated from plot and motivation, made it look like a grand battle between the forces of darkness and light. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), one of Alphaville’s clearest antecedents (both films’ detectives run powerlessly from scene to scene revealing as little to themselves as to us) also felt epic and politic, something that Anna Karina’s re-interpretation of the detective in Made in U.S.A agrees is inherently true of the genre. But her film zooms out to the frame surrounding this epic image, it sees the production of it, as the title implies; it looks not just at noir genre, but at genre itself.
In the film’s pivotal scene, the axis on which it spins, Karina’s journalist-turned-detective, Paula Nelson, has a long conversation with a barman who doesn’t like to be called sir and is a comic-strip approximation of a worker, dressed stockily in overalls and a plaid shirt. Said worker, in a typical Godardian paradox, states that “sentences are pointless and empty words”, suggesting that to organise words, and more importantly ideas, into a form crushes them. He goes on to show that grammar is a particularly meaningless and arbitrary structure by whirring out a long line of technically correct but nonsensical sentences like “the ceiling is hung from the light”, “the tables stand on top of the glasses” and “I am what you are”.
In the mouth of his worker, Godard leaves his thesis on genre: like the humble sentence, it too is a subsuming structure, one that forces everything within it into either conformity or divergence from its centering norms. These ideas and narratives are forced into shape by the violent force of film grammar, mirrored in the transitions where Nelson turns her head and tears one scene to the next by the force of the cut. Once meaning is stripped bare, all that’s left is something like The Big Sleep (1946), which leaves its interpretations and plot obscure to even the people who made it.
But another, perhaps more literal, reading of Godard’s attack on structures and sentences is that he was looking back on his own writing. He would turn against his older work many times in his life and, at the time of Made in U.S.A’s release, was only a few years away from the first major turn. In the film’s final scene, Nelson tells an old friend that she’s going to start writing again, turning her experiences during the events of the film into a book or maybe an article, crushing them into those forms, and he tells her she lacks principles. That’s because, as with genre, writing in general, and criticism in particular, can reduce its content—the film it’s supposed to be about, for example—to fit within its normative style and range of arguments. When a critic only asks how well something works rather than what it works towards, the film is left blank and demystified; explained away.
Maybe this wasn’t the case quite as much for Cahiers du Cinéma in the Fifties and Sixties as it is for Sight & Sound today, but Godard’s alma mater wasn’t free of a house style. There is certainly an archetypal Cahiers director, a slightly vulgar (genre and populist) Hollywood auteur who would be reclaimed as a great artist. And it doesn’t take an awful lot of reading to be able to predict, with decent accuracy, which films and directors the magazine will praise, if not the eccentric mix of academia and artistic looseness that will justify it. At the time of making Made in U.S.A, Godard wrote little more than—to borrow the chapter title from Godard on Godard (1972) that covers 1959 to 1967—marginal notes while filming. Clearly there was a greater reason than mere circumstance that his criticism moved from one medium away from another—there was something he wanted to get away from.
At this point in his career, Godard’s linear march forwards was simultaneously about escaping the limits of conventional filmmaking and figuring out why his slippery instincts wanted to escape them. Underneath its noir trappings, when film production is stripped down to the backrooms, garages and warehouses filled with movie posters that Nelson wanders through during the second act, Godard had to confront what was behind the scenes. So does Nelson, and it breaks her. “Politics, money. I wonder why it doesn’t make me puke to have been involved in all that for so long”, she says quietly, bitterly, defeated. Hollywood, as it existed in the Sixtiess, was an extension of Fordism: a dream factory, but a factory nonetheless. Capital is the broader structure, the sentences that criticism and cinema are sealed within.
Therefore, Godard argues, if criticism wants to be of any use, it must be fragmentary and destructive. Over the next few years his films would tear away more and more of the recognisable formalism of Hollywood pictures until all that was left was two people and a black void in The Joy of Learning (1969). From there, he could start building again. Without following Godard all the way into the void, it’s really only being critical that separates criticism from marketing; the only way you can truly advocate for a medium is to push against it as a product. Otherwise, you can only look uselessly back at what’s already been done, like Karina’s detective who admits “If I speak about a place, it has disappeared. If I speak about a man, he’s about to die.”
And yet, Nelson can’t quite let go of her anachronistic sense of heroism, and neither can I. Even after she realises that there is no mystery and no secret behind all the recognisably noirish obfuscation, Nelson wants to continue fighting in her own way. The final scene, though shot on an overcast day, feels surprisingly sunny as she drives with an old friend to somewhere new. There still seems to be some part of Godard that doesn’t want to let go of the Hollywood cinema that he made his name reclaiming as great art, no matter how compromised it is. But he’d spend the next phase of his career dampening out those last romantic notions; it’s almost as if any remaining sentiment he had for Hollywood drove off with Karina. She and Godard would never work together again.
But even in Godard’s darkest and latest work, at the furthest distance from Made in U.S.A, you can still sense some desire for a Hollywood he could live with, for some small glimmer of idealism to shine back through—even if it never did. But that might just be what I want to believe. My instincts pull me as much towards a pure love of Hollywood as Godard’s pushed him away from it. And, especially in the face of his imposing body of work, it’s sometimes hard to reconcile that romantic view with serious criticism. Even if, as Nelson says, driving away with a quiet assurance, “we’ve years of fighting left, often within ourselves”, I’m not sure I’ll ever reconcile those two sides of myself; I’m not sure that fight will ever stop. Maybe Godard would have appreciated the contradiction, or maybe he would have said I lack principles. Either way, I hold tightly to his film that sits at my own uncomfortable intersection.
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