POLITICS

​Godard's commitment to a political cinema was signalled in one of his very earliest articles, ‘Towards a Political Cinema’ (Godard on Godard, pp.16-17). Of all the early enigmatic articles it is this one which has proved the most opaque; the English translator commented ‘while most of Godard's early article; are fairly cryptic, this one is almost impenetrably so' (Godard on Godard, p.24). In fact, however, certain clear terms emerge from Godard’s discussion. Talking of a shot from Gerasimov's The Young Guard which he claims sums up the whole o Soviet cinema, he writes: 

. . . a young girl in from of her door, in Interminable silence, tries to suppress the tears which finally burst violently forth, a sudden apparition of life. Here the idea of a shot (doubtless not unconnected with the Soviet economic plans) lakes on its real function of a sign, indicating something in whose place it appears. 

​Godard's insistence that politics in the cinema is a question of signification, the affirmation that the aesthetics the political are intimately linked, an affirmation aided by the linguistic coincidence, lost in translation, that French has the same word for shot and plan, the emphasis on a moment of emotion as the articulation of the political and the personal — all these can be understood as providing some of the crucial terms for Godard’s film-making.

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​It is not usual to consider A bout de souffle a political movie; the conventional wisdom is that Godard does  not reflect on politics until le Petit Soldat, and yet the terms of the problems of politics are already assembled in the first film. While Michel and Patricia talk and play in Patricia's room, the radio brings them news of the visit that Eisenhower is paying to Paris and to the recently installed Général de Gaulle. The lovers' international affair thus finds a political analogue. And yet the analogy is formal and empty; the distance from the personal to the political is understood as infinite. Later in the film, Michel and Patricia separately descend the Champs Elysees, Michel reading yet another edition of France Soir and Patricia trying to evade the policemen who are following her. Their descent is impeded by crowds of people and the policemen controlling them and as the camera pans across from the pavement to the road we see that the politicians' motorcade is ascending the Champs Elysèes. In fact, we never see the politicians' faces: ​the motorcade and the police are enough to signal their presence. In the movement of the pan Godard demonstrates the distance between the personal and the political, which is also the distance between the form of the thriller and the form of the documentary. The form of the thriller reduces politics to a momentary lure in the narrative: our only interest in the motorcade is that it explains the presence of so many policemen in terms other than the hunt for Michel. In parallel fashion, any newsreel in which the motorcade figures as a central meaning would see Michel and Patricia only as part of the public gathered to observe the two national leaders.

Throughout Godard early films the search for a form of politics is also the search for a form of cinema which could discuss politics: the thriller again in Alphaville, the war movie in Les Carabiniers. But as Ihc political pressure of the 1900s grew more intense, and particularly the pressures of the war in Vietnam, Godard's search for a form adequate to the demands of politics which would also constitute a politics adequate to the demands of form became increasingly desperate. N o film poses the dilemma more clearly than Masculin/Féminin. The protagonist, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, occupies the position of the oblique stroke in the title caught between the masculine world of party politics in which his Communist friend, played by Michel Debord, moves so comfortably and the feminine world of teenage magazines and pop music inhabited by his pop singer girlfriend (Chantal Goya). His own desire somehow to unite and transform these two disparate elements of his experience with the aid of fragments of the traditional discourses of Western culture leaves him without listeners in a solitude emphasised when his only audience is provided by a record-your-own-voice booth. The popular forms of art, despite their appeal, are increasingly shown as incredibly ruined by their relation between producer and consumer, epitomised in the cinema audience's indifference to the quality of the projection and the idiotic formula questions that Chantal Goya is asked on behalf of her audience by the interviewer for a pop magazine. At the same time, there is a liberating novelty in the pop music world completely missing from the habitual politics of the French Communist party, frozen in a repressive stereotype which ran not Admit the demands of art or sexuality into the language of politics. For Godard, it is not a question of posing the problem of politics in terms of popular art, nor of posing the problem of popular art in terms of politics. In Masculin/Féminin and the two films lie made concurrently immediately afterwards, Deux ou Trois choses and Made in USA, the problems of politics and art are articulated in the same terms: the terms provided by the forms of cinema.

​Godard has never simply accepted the form of the political. So used are we to the daily diet of political information at the international, national or local level that we rarely question the form of politics, the way in which communal decisions are taken and social transformation consciously pursued. It is, of course, the fundamental heritage of the revolutionary tradition that the question of ​the form of politics is itself political. However, if Leninism was an attempt to hold together this revolutionary truth and the necessity to intervene h» the given form of the political, the party being the new form of organisation which allowed of such a double engagement, the historical subjection of Communist parties to the most narrow definition of the political is a testament to the bankruptcy of the Leninist tradition in the developed world. For us in the advanced capitalist countries there it perhaps no instance so evident of the failure to theorise or practically act on the form of the political as the lack of engagement with the new information media that have developed throughout the century. The effects of this media on the form of the political remains, still, largely unchallenged in theory or in practice. One way in which it is possible to view the whole of Godard’s work is as such a challenge and a challenge that operates at the level of both theory and practice.

GODARD: IMAGES, SOUNDS, POLITICS.

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