THE
MASTERPIECES OF GODARD
Photo: Karina.
One of Godard’s masterpieces, in which Marianne Renoir (Karina, who was divorcing the director at the time), accompanies Belmondo’s Pierrot, who has abandoned his wife and children in Paris, on a doomed escape to the Mediterranean. The movie is important for its themes of alienation and brooding narcissism, especially revealed in a party where mannequin-like capitalists spout American TV ad copy instead of conversation. Sam Fuller makes an appearance, proclaiming that film is like a battleground because it contains "love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotions." The girl, the gun, the sports car, they’re all there. But now they’re emblematic of insurmountable ennui, the knowledge that everything must end. In the final scene, Belmondo wraps dynamite around his head, lights the fuse, then changes his mind. But he can’t stamp out the inevitable.
Karina
is a stripper who wants to have a baby and settle down, in one of Godard's
most buoyant and charming films, A Woman Is a Woman(1961), and a
lonely, pathetic Paris prostitute in My Life to Live (1962). Les
Carabiniers (1963) was an antiwar allegory that provoked violently
hostile reaction from audiences. The wide-screen polished color
cinematography of Contempt (1963) stood in sharp contrast to the
grainy dreariness of Les Carabiniers. With Band of Outsiders (1964),
Godard returned to the world of the gangster for the first time since
Breathless. As in most of his films, the protagonists here are uprooted
people, outsiders who defy the boundary between the real and the imagined.
A Married Woman (1964) was a conventionally structured sociological
study of the alienation of a modern Parisian woman who can relate only on
the physical level to both her husband and her lover. Alphaville
(1965), Godard's excursion into science fiction fantasy was followed by in
the same year by Pierrot le Fou (1965). Gradually, Godard's films
were becoming stripped of structure and conventional dramatic form, with an
increasing emphasis on film as an essay, and cinema as a political and
social instrument. Masculine-Feminine (1966) was a free-form study of
mores of Parisian youth. Made in USA (1966) had a crime story for an
apparent plot. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) told the
story of a Paris housewife who indulges in prostitution for extra income.
La Chinoise (1967) featured in the leading role actress Anne Wiazemsky,
who became Godard's second wife in June of 1967 and later appeared regularly
in the director's films. This marriage, too, ended in divorce.