If you can't afford LSD, try Godard's new Criterions

Luke and I certainly have a lot more to say about Godard than this (ask us, ask us!), but alas, word limits. Here is a 'conversation' about Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, both released by Criterion on Tuesday. This was published in this week's SEE Magazine:

Luke: We both adore Jean-Luc Godard, French New Wave star and one of the most important directors of the ‘60s. But before getting too excited about Criterion releasing Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a warning to the Godard-uninitiated is in order: do not start with these films.

Clara: I agree. Two or Three Things, particularly, is a stylistic mash-up of Godard’s earlier films, such as Masculin Féminin, Vivre Sa Vie, and Breathless. In Breathless, Godard, ever the film historian, had Jean-Paul Belmondo dangle a cigarette from his lips, emulating Humphrey Bogart; in 2 or 3 Things, Godard has become his own point of reference, so having a grasp of his style and his place in film history will be pretty helpful.

Luke: Even having seen those films, Made in U.S.A. was hard for me to make sense of at times. I get that Anna Karina solves her ex-lover’s murder to the sound of (I think?) missiles. Jean-Pierre Léaud makes a delightfully bizarre appearance doing ... something. And it’s communist, or whatever. But as usual, the madness is a stylistic joy to watch.

Clara: 2 or 3 Things certainly shares its politics with Made in U.S.A., and it can be equally incomprehensible. It cuts between a Parisian woman working part-time as a prostitute, and abstract elements that depict the changing world around her. Godard uses shots of cranes, sounds of machinery, “interviews,” advertisements, comic strip panels, and the whole Godardian kitchen sink, to express the saturation of information that the modern person faces. That’s one of the most daunting things about Godard’s work in this period: he was really striving to make films about everything in the world at that moment.

Luke: It’s a daunting but important period. As paradoxically both a historian and an iconoclast, consuming the world around him yet critiquing it relentlessly, Godard’s development during the ’60s feels like a Marxist dialectic; these films are approaching synthesis. In the following year came the May ’68 general strike, and Godard’s decision to become an obscure pinko propagandist after divorcing Karina and making a movie about yuppie cannibals. Though not always good (or even bearable), Godard’s transformations were in his very nature as a filmmaker.

Clara: I love how 2 or 3 Things sits on the peak of that major transformation and shows all of Godard’s various sensibilities, from high to low to pinko. It features both banalities of everyday life, and the cosmos being recreated in a cup of coffee, and has a lot to say about both. The dialogue ranges from things like “Style is the man; therefore art is the humanizing of forms” to “My sweater is blue.” Though what really sets this film apart for me is that it feels like one of Godard’s most personal. He narrates it himself, often talking about the limitations of language and the impossibility of communication, but he whispers as if confessing secrets straight into the viewer’s ear. Godard is not warm and fuzzy, but I get strangely choked up by lines like “I can’t tear myself away from the objectivity that crushes me, nor from the subjectivity that isolates me.” You get a glimpse of some emotional core, I think — he’s just really French about showing it.

Luke: For all this talk of cosmos and emotion, the best reasons to love Godard are superficial, which is why of his many changes, these films represent the most tragic. Made in U.S.A. is the last of his films to feature Anna Karina — my pick for cinema’s most beautiful woman — and 2 or 3 Things is the beginning of his career without her. And really, for all his lofty credentials, is there anything Godard does quite so well as film a pretty girl?

Clara: No, and that’s the real reason I’m excited for these Criterion editions: pretty people in high-definition digital transfers!