Godard and Truffaut

The French New Wave movement highlighted the importance of films as more than just a tool to replicate reality. Despite this, it is easy to see the directors of this time as artists who used the cinema as their medium with which to create expressive masterpieces. They used this art form in an experimental manner, breaking traditional views of the cinema. From their use of natural light to the angles that they shot their content in, these directors developed new methods of filmmaking.

Godard’s use of jump cuts in A Bout de souffle/Breathless was revolutionary, for example. Although it stemmed from pressure to shorten his film, his method influence many movies thereafter. According to “The Story of Film (pg. 269),” there were nine (!) jump cuts alone in the car scene were the voice-over stated, “I love a girl with a lovely neck.” I believe that he used this intentional stylistic editing mainly to distort the audience’s concept of time and space. This discontinuity editing makes us realize that what we are watching is something that is not occurring in real life. It is instead an artwork provided to us so that we can see what Godard wants us to see. It reminds us that this is the result of one man’s vision, an auteur piece were you can undoubtedly feel the director’s presence. The jump cuts in Breathless do not show a transition between one setting to the next, but instead show the exact same action in different lighting. The shots themselves become art that should be studied in all angles and all aspects possible.

It was interesting to learn (through Brody’s article) that people were so stunned by Godard’s experimental style that an audience in Nice heatedly tore up their seats because of what they thought was malfunctioning equipment. Most people at the time, and even now, are not prepared to see such unconventional techniques of editing and filming. I believe that many individuals at the time (despite popularity of Hitchcock’s films) expected to go into a movie theater to be taken for a comfortable, somewhat predictable ride that ends rather enjoyably. I have met a couple of people in my own life who refuse to watch frightening or upsetting films, especially when their own lives are not going exceptionally. Their rationale? They use movies as a pleasurable escape and do not to seek to be put through more angst or torture. Truffaut and Godard’s styles would not have appeased these movie-goers. These directors sought to portray life as it was- a personal, messy account of situations surrounding particular individuals.

Both Godard and Truffaut could be considered founders of the French New Wave. They viewed film not as a portrayal of real life, but as a part of life. It was Godard who famously stated that cinema was, “truth at twenty-four frames a second.” They were both fixated on the idea of the director as the film’s creator and sought to innovatively bend logical features of the cinema. While the two directors shared many similarities, they were also distinct in quite a few ways.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the main difference- put in very simple terms- is that Truffaut created films to tell a personal story while Godard created films to radically disrupt the established methods of cinema. Godard’s style is usually much more complex and sophisticated than his storylines. He challenged that he could create a film about a man, a woman, and a gun and he did. This shows that he wasn’t necessarily aiming to tell a timeless story, but rather wanted to experiment with techniques that shattered the rules of contemporary cinema and distorted the way that the public viewed French films. Godard created personal films, but through a very different approach than Truffaut. He did not do it through the storyline and the characters, but formed it by the way that he filmed the story. It is much more difficult for me to explain his approach, for some reason, than the one that Truffaut’s took.

Truffaut seemed to see his films as diaries or novels. 400 Blows, for instance, was very realistic and focused on the present moment. We were able to see a slice of life from a young boy without really understanding the character’s beginning or end. Truffaut’s films are extremely personal in two ways, the first being that they seem almost autobiographical to him and the second being that it is personal to the viewers. You almost begin to feel the emotions of the characters because of the way the story is told. In 400 Blows, the only people that truly shared the boy’s problems are the audience. This gives the illusion of a private relationship and makes it possible to form a deep connection with the main character. I can completely understand how the squeals to 400 Blows would feel like “seeing an old friend.” Truffaut’s aim was to tell a great, well thought-out story in an avant-garde, unconventional manner.

The pair of sci-fi movies that I watched over the weekend only reaffirmed what I have seen in 400 Blows and Breathless. Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury (there was one reference to his other work in the film), is a well-told story (in English) about an oppressive society that outlaws books for fear that its citizens will act individually and independently. Truffaut casts the role of Linda and Clarisse to the same actress by using a short blond wig, a long red one, and filming the characters with different filters. He saturates the color red throughout the film and shoots excruciating close-ups of books being burned to ashes. The flames in the film captures the audience’s attention in a trance-like manner and the spoken opening credits show television antennas on rooftops which foreshadow the state that the world is in. There was constant zooming in and panning out and sometimes you could even read the book that a character was reading. A few times an action was dramatically shown in slow motion. An example of this is when the firefighters drop the bad of books from the top of the staircase and when the woman begins to burn with her books and she throws her arms up as the flames simultaneously shoot upwards. I also noticed quite a few, quick repeating shots throughout the movie.

There is a shot in the film that I found was particularly interesting. It is when the firefighters are searching the people in the playground for books (I unfortunately no longer have the film and cannot provide the exact time). For a few seconds half the screen is blacked out and most of the people in the playground, including the girl brushing her hair with a ridiculously oversized comb, are omitted. I believe that this was stylistically used so as to forcedly turn the audiences attention to the man on the right side of the screen being searched. There was also another instance that I thought was odd, after the medics pump Linda Montag’s stomach/transfuse her blood, when her profile can be seen in the mirror of their bathroom. In her reflection it looks like she is smirking but in real life it looks like she is pouting (again, I don’t have the exact time, but if I get a hold of the DVD later I will add it). There is a good chance though, that this has nothing to do with the film or Truffaut’s style but that I was completely imagining it and am going crazy.

Speaking of going crazy, Godard’s sci-fi film Alphaville made me feel bewildered and disturbed most of the time (and despite this I still enjoyed it!). His use of jump shots, repeating scenes, and images and directions that randomly inserted resulted in a sense of disorientation. The film is about a society controlled by the computer Alpha 60 where human emotion is illegal and logic is equated to happiness- a world where certain words are prohibited and a man is killed for weeping over his wife’s death. I thought it was interesting that the story was set in a futuristic, distant galaxy, but that the setting seemed to look very much like Paris in the 60’s. Godard’s clever directing makes me think that there must have been a reason to do this… could it be that he wanted his audience to reflect on their own society by mixing an outrageous sci-fi plot into their everyday scenery?

The story sometimes made me feel as if I had overlooked something, and I am afraid that I may not have understood absolutely everything that was happening. Just as one of the words on the list of puns in the movie was “absen e” (with the absent “c”), I felt that the shocking techniques used made me feel like parts of the film were missing. Does that make sense at all? The manner in which Alphaville was filmed made the story seem even more unrealistic than it already was. For one, there is constant a shift between lightness and darkness. Also distinctive was Godard’s irrational, seemingly spontaneous inclusion of the rational equations “E=mc” E=hf.” Another thing that stood out was the use of negatives near the end of the film when you can see Lemmy walking towards the car (again, I need to look for the times later). Did Godard use this because he wanted to show that Alphaville was a place were everything was flipped upside down and where black became white and white became black? Was it to show the senselessness of a city ruled by pure logic? Or did he do this to just disturb the audience and see what reactions he would get? Interestingly enough, I noticed that Fahrenheit 451 also showed one shot that was in negative (I believe it was when he was dreaming, oh how I wish I had the film my disposal to double check!).

I thought that these films reflected the directors in many ways. In Fahrenheit 451, it was a bit more difficult to tell where Truffaut personal experiences showed. Maybe it was in the choice of the books that were burned or in the passages that the book-people recited. Near the end of the film, Montag’s false capture is shown on the television and a character explains the reasoning behind this. He says that the “show” must go on and that they will find some way to end the story because the “audience” wants a climax. He is essentially stating people’s tendency to want to see complete stories in both real life and in television/film. I believe that through this dialogue Truffaut is not only explaining the inevitable mixture of life and film, but is pointing out something else that is essential to his style. In 400 Blows he did not finish the account of the young boy and he went beyond the inclination to tell and see a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He agitates his predictable viewers in the manner that the people in Fahrenheit 451 hate.

In Alphaville, the fascination that the citizens show toward the outsider Lemmy is partially due to his ability to dwell in the past. Alpha 60 tells of the importance of being in the “now” and Godard and Truffaut were able to somehow also capture moments in time as they unfolded.

It is remarkable that, according to Brody, the creative expressions of these two revolutionary directors were accused of alienating the public from cinema. In reality there was a good possibility that it was the television that caused this decrease in theater attendance. At one point, the press blamed New Wave directors such as these to have caused such an uneasy feeling among their viewers that they no longer went to see movies. I personally enjoy being challenged as a viewer. I find the way that Truffaut and Godard filmed movies to be just as fascinating as their twisted relationship. Truffaut’s subtle methods and Godard’s bold techniques were true auteur advancements. They found ways to uniquely graffiti “I was here” throughout their movies by personalizing the experience of the cinema. It causes the audience to look for the director’s footprints in a film, to search for the telltale signs that tell us that the creator is indeed present in the creation. It is easy to see what a strong impact these forward-thinking directors had on films to follow, particularly those from the French New Wave movement. I can’t wait to see Fellini’s films this week to discover the impact that he had on cinema!

PS- I’m sorry that this turned out to be so ridiculously long! :(