godard: Out of breath, again waiting for Godard

There have been more radical filmmakers before, during and since Jean-Luc Godard made his great body of cinema. But no one has been arguably so revolutionary, in the sense of dramatically changing the language of modern motion pictures. A pivotal member of La Nouvelle Vague, or ‘New Wave’, cinema, which Francois Truffaut aptly described to be not a movement but ‘a quality’, Godard’s first feature film, the 1960 A Bout de Souffle (Out of Breath) – better known in the anglophonic world as Breathless – was itself a manifesto of this ‘quality’, with its jump cuts, elliptical narratives and organic dissolves. In films like the 1963 Le Mepris (Contempt), the 1965 Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot the Fool), the 1968 documentary-cum-feature 1+1, and the 1987 experimental King Lear, Godard, with his scorn for the ‘thick’ plot line, showed the true value of not just moving pictures but moving situations.

In cinema, Godard showed us that an art form can be an arch-rival to life, with controlled distillation of dialogues, meshing and unmeshing of characters, and a sensory collation-collision where beginning, middle and end need not follow the dogma of that order. As he had once said when responding to violence depicted in his films, ‘It is not blood, it is red,’ a nuance that eluded most viewers in his time, and would have certainly eluded even more people today.