Riding the New Wave: Absolut Godard

To understand the import of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, one should simply read the first three letters of his last name. And this fall, the Brattle Theatre may be the place for reverence with its Forever Godard retrospective.

This fall, the Brattle showcases Godard's visual masterpieces every Thursday night, offering up a feast of his experiments in spastic editing, hand-held shots, and stories about outsiders who pop up in each others' lives like secret figures in video games. The repertoire ranges from gangster spoof to existentialist poem. Breathless, Alphaville, Weekend, Contempt and Pierrot le Fou, among Godard's most famous films, are all featured, in addition to many of his lesser known works.

Godard, the Don Corleone of the French New Wave, speaks a language that is both unfamiliar and seductive. As a university student in Paris in the 1950s, Godard spent his days in dark pockets of Left Bank cinema clubs. He soon began to contribute to Parisian film journals, in which he wrote reviews and articles under the whispery pseudonym Hans Lucas. When his wealthy parents cut off his pocket money, he took to robbery but remained an avid fan of the cinema, even from the depths of a prison cell.

From the late '60s to the '80s Godard was obsessed with the interchangeability of words and images. In his films, Godard abandoned traditional cinematic narrative to explore experimental filmmaking, placing emphasis on words rather than images as tangible visible entities on the screen.

Last week's Thursday night session included Band of Outsiders. A gangster story with a twist, it tells the story of two con-men, Franz and Arthur, and their attempt to work over a young girl, Odile (played by the one and only Anna Karina). One of Godard's lesser known films, it nonetheless embodies the curious mix between word and image, humor and tragic romance, that is so very Godard. Characters are lonely but have no desire to connect to those around them. Awkwardness only occurs within familiar situations. Dialogue is impulsive and witty.

As in all his films, Godard's cinematography is clean and sharply punctuated, fixing on such pop culture images as pinball machines and posters. High and low art are thrown back and forth, and shown to be virtually interchangeable. The Seine is a Corot, and Romeo and Juliet is a tabloid. The three protagonists run madly through the Louvre to try to outdo some sort of world record.

Godard's deep-voiced narrator even instructs us on how to react and read the images and characters of his film by entering into the film periodically, creating cinematic parentheses. The narrative voice enters, for example, when the three main characters are at a dance club. Odile, Franz and Arthur move across the floor in a beautiful synchrony. In this way we are brought into the mental worlds of the three main characters. Odile wonders whether the men who flank her on either side notice her breasts bobbing beneath her schoolgirl sweater. Arthur imagines kissing Odile. And the ever-slick Franz contemplates metaphysics: "Is life a dream, or am I dreaming up a life?"

Later in the film, the three protagonists discuss the meaning of silence while seated in a nightclub cafe. "How long is one minute of silence?" Franz wonders aloud. And in response, the narrator/director cuts the sound off, leaving us to our own thoughts.

The Forever Godard series runs Thursdays at the Brattle Theatre through Oct. 30. Be sure to catch the fabulous Anna Karina in the double bill Pierrot le Fou and A Woman is a Woman on Oct. 9.