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Satyajit Ray on Jean-Luc Godard:
"'I DON'T LIKE Godard' is a statement one frequently hears at Film festivals. Now, I don't like Godard too. But then, 'like' is a word I seldom use to describe my feeling about truly modern artists. Do we really like Pablo Picasso, or Claude-Michel Schönberg, or Eugène Ionesco, or Alain Robbe-Grillet? We are variously provoked and stimulated by them, and our appreciation of them is wholly on an intellectual level. Liking suggests an easy involvement of the senses, a spontaneous 'taking to', which I doubt if the modern artist even claims from his public. Godard has been both dismissed summarily, and praised to the skies, and the same films have provoked opposite reactions. This is inevitable when a director consistently demolishes sacred conventions, while at the same time packing his films with obviously striking things. Godard's main unconventionality lies in completely doing away with development in terms of plot. Some make this claim.
for Antonioni too. But this is false. Beneath an exterior of apparent arbitrariness, Antonioni's films conceal an almost classical formal pattern. With Godard there is no such concealment.
Sometimes there is a theme. 'Une Femme Mariée' (1964) may be said to be about a woman vacillating between her husband and her lover, and when you've said that, you've said everything – or nothing. The theme only serves as a springboard for a series of dissertations, some related to it, and some as wide off the mark as one can imagine.
Up till now, a director's hallmark was supposed to reside in his personal approach to his theme. One looked for the special signature of an artist. If Godard has a hallmark, it is in repeated references to other directors, other films (both good and bad), other forms of art, and to a myriad phenomena of contemporary life. These references do not congeal into a single significant attitude, but merely reflect the alertness of Godard's mind, and the range and variety of his interests.
The upshot of all this is that a Godard film assumes for me the aspect of a collage, and I for one am convinced that that is how his works ought to be judged, and that is where lies their aesthetic validity. We know that in painting a collage is a form of abstraction in which seemingly unrelated elements are brought together to create a pattern of contrasts. Some of these elements – such as a guitar or a wine bottle in a collage by Braque or Picasso – have 'meaning'. But since the guitar and the wine bottle are taken out of their context and placed in juxtaposition with elements wholly unrelated to the idea of music or drinking, they assume a quality of abstraction. What symbolic value still clings to them adds a subtle overtone to the collage – a touch of humanism in a mélange of tones and textures.
Likewise, Godard has scenes in his films which begin to suggest a human involvement. But they are inevitably cut short or developed with deliberate illogicality, as otherwise they would be 'conventional' and, therefore, out of key with the rest. In more than one Godard film, key characters have been killed off by gunmen at the end, and there have been no logical reason for such obliteration.
Now, to a mind attuned to the conventional unfolding of plot and character, such things may well seem upsetting. But one can never blame Godard for thwarting expectations, for he is careful to establish his credo from the very opening shots. In Une Femme Est Une Femme, there is a prologue in which some of the main sources of the film's style are actually named in screen-filling letters. 'Vivre Sa Vie' (1962) states clearly in the credits that it is 'A Study in Twelve Scenes' and 'Masculin Feminin' (1966) calls itself a film in fourteen fragments.
The trouble, really, is not with Godard, but with his critics or, at least, a good many of them – who are constantly trying to fit a square peg into a round whole. With any other art, I would have said with confidence that Godard would win in the end. But in the ruthless and unserious world of commercial cinema that he has to operate, I have my doubts."
('A word about Godard', Link, Ray, 1966)
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