All of Jean Luc Godard's films - even 1966's Masculin-Feminin, which on the surface appears as a casually put-together television film - unearth a very complex formal substructure under scrutiny. At the same time as priding itself on 'realism' - direct sound and filming on location - Godard was just as concerned in taking these pieces of direct reality and abstracting them. Godard takes a moment of real life, a moment in time and translates it impeccably into art through his editing.
But if there was not such a total break between his films of the Sixties and those of the coming decades, it is true that in the Seventies - or even as early as Un Film Comme les Autres ( A Film Like The Others) - Godard gave up both stories and stars. He deliberately attempts to make unpopular films and flourished.
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| Godard's Weekend didn't go quite the way it was planned. |
Though in doing so, Godard successfully suppressed most of his talents as a filmmaker Although Godard is no storyteller, his earlier canon suggests his affinity for the lyrical full rein and although he often cast his stars against the grain - drawing out extraordinary performances such as Mireille Darc's in Weekend (1967) - they did contribute a great deal to his films.
In his post-1968 period of total asceticism, he masochistically forbid himself to do what he could do best. If proof were necessary, one can compare Tout Va Bien (1972) with his others of the period : there the presence of Jane Fonda and Yves Montand again allowed him to display his talent for directing actors. Although the film was austerely made, his genius for the staggering image and his singular sense of sound and editing were very much in evidence. And he went back to fiction - though only as support - with large injection of documentary material. It was precisely the dialectics between reality and fiction that made Tout Va Bien a bigger success than his other films at that time.