Jean-Luc Godard WEEKEND (1967)

This is among the small number of Godard’s films that received commercial success. But the film is by no definition “popular.” It sets out to be anything but popular, if by popular we mean a film that attracts a wide audience, deals with familiar storylines in familiar ways, and makes a lot of money. WEEKEND does none of these things. It attracts a limited audience, deals with familiar storylines in unfamiliar ways, and made not a lot of money. It fits, perhaps, the Russian formalist idea of “defamiliarization.” This is not precise, but it does twig us to the film’s desire to reconfigure our sense of reality. WEEKEND gives us something we had not expected – even now 40 years after it was made. It tests the limits of what film – narrative film – can do. It combines action with contemplation, movement with stillness, word and image, sound and silence, music and noise, sense and nonsense, realism and fantasy, past and present, and montage and mise en scene.

Godard invokes both Lautreamont and Lewis Carroll, important 19th century precursors of surrealism, and he makes his point even clearer by invoking 20th century surrealists such as Breton, Bunuel, and Bataille. Surrealism challenges reason and progress based on class division. It attacks sentimental bourgeois beliefs that mask a rapacious self-interest. It attacks an art that is driven by realism, and the sense that reality can be known. It challenges common sense. One of the two protagonists in the film (Roland) remarks that he is in a rotten film because he only meets crazy people. These crazy people test the limits of realism and ask us to reconsider what is real. Another layer of the film suggests that as long as we accept enlightenment values of utilitarianism, we are bound to descend into barbarism. The film foregrounds the chaos and carnage and uncaring lack of community in modern life. Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte represent a past that was at least thought-provoking, but our protagonists burn poor Emily. The surrealist edge to WEEKEND is both a sign of its satire of popular art and, paradoxically, its attempt to attract the popular mind. Remember one of the writers invoked is Lewis Carroll, author of the children’s classic ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Surrealism was attracted to Carroll because of his combination of play, nonsense, satire, childhood, and a celebration of the body as both physical and spiritual.

At one point in the film, the protagonists come across a troup of Italian actors. These actors remind us of Grand Guignol, as well as Commedia del arte – forms of art that foreground violence and the carnivalesque. Godard’s film celebrates, while at the same time it castigates, the grotesque lower bodily strata. It finds humour in the grotesque.

And yes, Godard’s film is a popular film. One reason for this is its insistence on populism, pornography, popularity, and pop. I mean by populism that the film is interested in class and the conflict between classes, and although it seems resolutely neutral in its presentation of the classes as corrupt, it also has sympathy, if it has any sympathy, with the populist classes (see especially the scene in which we listen, along with those in the film, to Mozart). I mean by pornography that the film is interested in pornographic displays to a degree that would make Bataille take note. The opening sequence and later when the cook break eggs over the woman’s opened legs and then inserts a fish in the same place are pornographic in the sense that they distance sex from us, place it as a performance that tests the limits of our patience and our imagination. This is pornography that does not set out to arouse in the usual sense, but rather to challenge our jaded sense of morality. Surrealism was interested in pornography as an expression of the futility and decadence of a system we call capitalist. I mean by popularity that the film does seek an audience; it does not simply defy its audience to accept it. It draws us in, especially by its comic moments. It is a funny film, even when the comedy turns abruptly to something horrific. Surrealism employed a dark humour, a comedy of the grotesque. And finally, I mean by pop that the film has a connection with the Pop Art movement we associate with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, and others in the 1960s. It has what today we might call “product placement (e,g, Shell Oil truck, advertisements for Esso, a variety of cars, mention of Gitanes, and a Hermees’ handbag), but Godard uses such brand names and their signs not to ‘sell” them, but rather to undermine them. He empties such signs of meaning by investing them with negative meaning. Surrealism has a tendency to move us to the surface of things. In short, this is a film that debunks popularity of a variety of kinds. Perhaps I should also add popular psychoanalysis. Early in the film, an inter-title sets up the word “analysis” as “ANAL YSE.” Throughout the film, Godard takes an interest in shit, the anus, garbage, waste, detritus, offal – the stuff of decomposition.

But analysis itself is invoked in the opening scene in which the woman tells of her sexual encounter with a man and a woman. What we observe is a bizarre analysis, reminding us of both the psychiatrist’s “talking cure” and of classic painting in which we see fully-clothed males and semi-clad or nude females. This opening allusion to psychoanalysis returns near the end of the film with the words “Totem” and “Tabou” flashed on the screen – a reference to one of Freud’s works.

But my point is too easy. The notion of pop works another way. Take, for instance, the mention of such popular films as JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS. The revolutionary group in the woods uses these titles for their two-way radio names. Mention of these two Hollywood westerns reminds us of Hollywood and commercialism, non-canonical works, popular film genre, and film’s ability to reach a wider audience than most art forms. Both JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS are films that offer the viewer formal beauty, a formal beauty that we might compare to the formal beauties of painting or music. The co-opting of these titles by the revolutionaries suggests the inadequacies of the films to civilize. If art is supposed to make those who admire it urbane, then something has gone wrong here. The revolutionaries also use BATTLESHIP POTEMPKIN and THE ATONEMENT OF GOSTA BERLING (a 1923 film by Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo’s first important film) in conjunction with JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS to suggest the way film brings together both highbrow and lowbrow. Film is perhaps the second democratic art. And yet here film titles serve the purposes of a cannibalistic group of barbarians who live in the woods and eat their enemies. What good is art in a world like this?

Finally, we have Godard’s insistence that the popular is political. Whatever this film may have to say about art and modernity, it clearly has much to say about the state of modern life. It takes familiar plot lines from popular cinema – the road movie, the murder movie, the musical, the historical movie, the movie about revolution – and uses these to plot the decline of western civilization. WEEKEND begins with the modern capitalist state, then moves back through a sort of military democracy, until it arrives at a revolutionary state in which barbarism seems the fate of humanity. We move from scenes of human brutality that are funny (the first scenes of road rage), to scenes of carnage that we pass over in a desensitized manner (our protagonists do not appear to see the carnage and later they take things from the dead without a shred of hesitation), to scenes difficult to watch because they show the slaughter of animals (a chicken and a pig). While Godard is showing the decline of humanity and civilization, he is also manipulating the viewer into a position from which he or she can only be shocked. Why are we not as horrified by the deaths of people in car crashes as we are in the slaughter of animals for food? The movement of the plot is retrograde, backwards, towards decline and degeneration. And yet the movement to cannibalism merely makes clear the condition of the human condition under capitalism – under capitalism, the oppressor devours the oppressed. The captains of industry are vampires sucking the life-blood of the workers.

Another aspect of the popular is the car. The car is perhaps the ultimate image of modernity and capitalism. It has a long history in the cinema as a kenotype (a “new form,’ in contrast to the archetype, which is an old form). Its connection in this film with money, with escape or the impossibility of escape, with sex and death, with gridlock, with class, with industrialism and the machine, with brutalism, with rage and anxiety, with all the symptoms of modern malaise, and with apocalypse is clear. The car is a petit objet a; that is, it represents the thing that organizes desire, and yet it is illusory. The car is a fantasy, a symptom of our desire for fulfillment, and an indication that fulfillment is always receding, just like the road ahead that quickly becomes the road behind. It represents a futile attempt to fill in for the emptiness of life, in the way that money too does the same thing. What price do we have to pay to go through all these things twice? The wrecked cars and the cars ablaze remind us of the Real that threatens to destroy the delicate and vulnerable reality we try to create around ourselves.
One final note here: the inter-titles in the film (“Film found on a dump heap;” “End of Film – End of World,” and so on) are reminiscent of Situationist pronouncements. “Beginning is Flamboyance, especially in film” is another statement that reminds us of the Situationist’s interest in spectacle. Spectacle, according to the Situationists, replaces reality. We are surrounded by spectacles that only pretend to be real; real life has retreated. Only an art that decries modernity’s interest in and creation of spectacle can be revolutionary. Only an art that abolishes the notion of art as a separate and rarified activity, can be real art. In other words, art is a people’s art (i.e. popular). I think we can argue that WEEKEND both presents a spectacle and is critical of spectacle. For example, all the scenes of crashed and burning cars remind us of a staple of the spectacular in Hollywood films from very early on – the car crash. WEEKEND, however, does not show us the crash, only the aftermath. The point is to debunk the spectacle and to point out the unfeeling horror of what we see. I know that Guy Debord did not champion Godard’s A bout de soufflé (1959; trans. Breathless), but Godard obviously knew about Debord and by 1967 he (Godard) had assimilated the whole tradition from Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism.

A moment in the film reminds me of the world in a grain of sand, a Romantic vision of nature as art. This is when Emily Bronte holds a pebble and the camera moves close to it while she speaks of the pebble’s age and significance. What we look at is a natural form that has affinity with a Henry Moore sculpture. The rock reminds us of the beauty we overlook, ignore and step on every day.

WEEKEND invokes Marx, Engels, and Mao. But does so, not in any coherent or programmatic manner. Godard clearly dislikes American imperialism, and a capitalism that he equates with Fascism, but this does not mean that he champions what we might perceive to be Fascism’s opposite: Communism. The Maoists in the film are cannibals. The film is more apocalyptic, than straight ahead political. When the two garbage men speak of the evils of imperialism and the oppression of multinational exploitation of Africa, they speak in front of a huge pile of garbage. Irony is the mode here. Is what they say a bunch of garbage or are they speaking about the garbage created by the injustices of the imperial powers, especially America? Like 'Les Chants de Maldoror' by Lautreament, WEEKEND contemplates human cruelty and brutality in a world seemingly without transcendental truth. The film refuses to offer a vision of revolutionary hope in its diegesis; however, it does offer a revolutionary hope in its form. This is art as action; this is art as analysis in every sense of the word. It analyses capitalist society, and it analyses contemporary hysteria.

And so this film is both popular and anti-popular at the same time.

Mise en scene
Literally “putting in the scene.” Mise en scene has to do with space (where does the action take place?), as opposed to montage, which has to do with time (how many shots make up a scene and how much time do they occupy both within the diegesis and without the diegesis?). Film, like just about any of the arts, has to take account of both time and space. WEEKEND is careful to set the space of the action – in a country road, in a forest, in, on, and around a garbage truck, in a farmer’s yard, and so on. I’ll look at one instance, the initial scene in which the woman tells her story about a sexual encounter to her lover. This scene is insistently placed in one space in a room by a bright window, and the camera moves in and out from the characters slowly as the woman tells her story. The two characters do not move about; they remain in their positions vis a vis the camera, he in the background and she slightly above him in the foreground. As she recounts her story, the effect is almost that of voice-over because despite the camera’s unwavering focus on the two people (the scene has no cuts or pans away from the two characters), we cannot see either of them clearly. The reason for this has to do with lighting. Godard uses back lighting in this scene; that is, the light for the scene comes from behind the two characters rather than from in front of them or even above them. The effect of back lighting (also used in CITIZEN KANE) is to cast the characters in shadow. We see them not quite, but almost, as silhouettes. These people live shadow lives, not quite real. They inhabit the Platonic cave, not seeing the light behind them.

But the back lighting has another, even more important effect. In front of us occupying much of the screen space is a woman wearing only a bra and panties. The viewer will (naturally?) want to see this woman, and see her clearly. But we cannot see her clearly. And so perhaps we strain trying to make out her figure as best we can. If we assume that the viewer tries to penetrate the shadow to see the characters, and we recall just what the woman is saying, then we can hardly avoid the uncomfortable fact that we are positioned as voyeurs trying to spy on this scene of sexual confession. We are, in effect, made complicit with the perversions (sado-masochistic activities) of the characters we hear about in the woman’s story. Godard has complicated the usual filmic gaze. By usual filmic gaze, I mean the usual position for the viewer of a film is as the owner of the gaze, that look that owns what it sees because it is not looked back upon. We see the beautiful woman on the screen; she is there displayed for our appreciation and pleasure. She does not look back knowingly; she does not know she (or he, at times) is the object of someone’s gaze. And yet we know that she (or he) is aware of the gaze, and in this awareness there is, in effect, a returned gaze. But because of the unease with which we must look at this scene straining to see the characters clearly, we are thrust back on ourselves, made to contemplate just what is going on. We are placed within the mise en scene, we are that camera with its roving eye trying to get a closer look at these two people to savour both the woman’s semi-clad body and to probe the man’s reactions.

I take this scene to be a particularly effective example of what Slavoj Zizek describes as the effect of pornography:
[pornography’s] perverse character lies not in the obvious fact that it “goes all the way and shows us all the dirty details”; its perversity is, rather, to be conceived in a strictly formal way. In pornography, the spectator is forced a priori to occupy a perverse position. Instead of being on the side of the viewed object, the gaze falls into ourselves, the spectators, which is why the image we see on the screen contains no spot, no sublime-mysterious point from which it gazes at us. It is only we who gaze stupidly at the image that “reveals all.” (Looking Awry 110)

In the case of the scene in WEEKEND, however, nothing is revealed except the viewer’s stupidity, as he or she strains to see what is not revealed. As she or he strains, she also listens (perhaps lasciviously) to what the woman says. Her account “tells all.” But of course in telling all, it tells nothing. What is missing in all of this is emotion. We have motion, but no emotion. Pleasure without emotion – is this the pornographic experience?

Sound works in a similar way in this scene. When I say the viewer “listens” to what the woman says, I am not precise. Her words are constantly in danger of being drowned out by the ominous and loud music of the soundtrack in this scene. Without the subtitles, we would have difficulty hearing what she is saying, and we would have to strain to hear her, just as we have to strain to see her. Both sound and lighting force the viewer to become conscious of the filmic quality of this scene, of the voyeuristic nature of viewing and overhearing.

Montage
Different effects derive from montage. Godard uses montage in the scene of the mother’s death near the end of the film. Just as the mother is killed, the film cuts to a shot of a skinned rabbit and we see blood spilled over this gruesome carcass. The combination of shots informs us what happens to the mother without showing us what happens to the mother. What we do see intensifies the ugliness of the act. We see an act played out in time, foreshortened and rendered metonymic. Perhaps a more telling use of montage is in the scene in which the two garbage collectors eat their sandwiches, and one speaks for the other in sequence. As we watch each one in turn eat his sandwich, we hear the other one speaking in voice-over as the film gives us a series of montage shots. What we get is a collapsing of time in these shots, both the time within the film and the time of imperial activity over the past century or so. History comes in a series of interconnected shots connected by the voice we hear over the scenes. Whereas the mise en scene keeps us in the space of the protagonists as they make their journey, the montage allows for a rearranging of time. Montage can layer time, show more than one action taking place simultaneously, but not at the same time.

Tracking Godard’s film or finding the Godardian chronotope
But things are not that simple in a Godard film. Take for example the mise en scene. More than once in the film, we have scenes in which our protagonists encounter people from the past (e.g. St. Juste, and Emily Bronte). In other words, the film does not simply invoke characters from the past (Lewis Carroll, Andre Breton, etc.), but it also gives us the past in the present. In other words, the mise en scene is implicated in time as well as space. What Godard does is fuse mise en scene and montage. He does this most obviously and most brilliantly in his use of tracking shots.
WEEKEND contains one of the most famous tracking shots in cinema (others are in Welles’s A TOUCH OF EVIL and Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER, and perhaps Hitchock’s FRENZY); certainly it contains the longest or most likely the longest tracking shot. Godard’s camera tracks along a country road for ten minutes (a long time in filmic terms), and as it does so it manages to fuse mise en scene and montage. Obviously, the placing of the scene is clear. The camera follows the film’s protagonists as they make their way through a long traffic jam, past cars, trucks, and even a sailboat. We see many small vignettes, people playing ball, playing chess, reading, arguing, eating, and so on. These vignettes are often framed by the poplar trees that line the road, and such framing works as a montage slicing what we see into pieces of time as people occupy themselves while waiting for the traffic to begin moving again. Crossing all these vignettes are our protagonists who refuse to wait for the traffic to move and just drive on rudely. They effectively take control of both space and time (fusing montage and mise en scene). We have the chronotope of the road, a picaresque plot with ironic twist. Our protagonists are their own antagonists. They take to the road as if it was their own, and find trouble along the way.
We have another instance of the flamboyant tracking shot in the Mozart scene. Here the camera tracks one way in a circle and then the other way in a reverse circle. This tracking shot contrasts with the insistently linear tracking shot of the traffic jam. In the latter instance, the linearity leads nowhere, except perhaps to death. In the circular tracking shot we have the camera remaining centered on the music of Mozart. It moves around the yard passing a variety of people, most of whom we would call members of the proletariat. Our bourgeois protagonists lounge against a post yawning and looking bored, but the working people are rapt. The music speaks to these people. And whatever it says, it keeps a circumference. The true art is for everyone; it does not separate.

The tracking shot suggests fluidity of experience, connectedness. It sees things as part of a continuum. In a film that consists of fragmented scenes and fragments of words and phrases and disconnected people, the tracking shot works to oppose fragmentation and separation.

What WEEKEND “tracks” is humanity’s decline, its slide into barbarism. The scene when we hear Mozart on the piano contrasts the slide with momentary hope for the embrace (the circular tracking) of art and humanity. As a film, it uses just about everything a film can use: camera positions, the range of shots from close-up to distance shots, perspective, montage, mise en scene, inter-titles, music, sounds, dialogue, voice-over, back lighting, tracking, framing, monologues, costumes, references to literature, and so on. The film aspires to the condition of pure cinema by assimilating the other arts. It challenges the viewer to take part in the dialogue the film begins. This is dialogic art. And one of its many ironies is the fact that the protagonists know they are in a film (This is a rotten film; all the characters are crazy), and yet act as if they were not in a film. They do not, in short, take part in the dialogue the film initiates. They are not interested in communicating or in pursuing ideas. They are the capitalist subjects, subject only to their desire for money.

Revolutionary Cinema
One of the most insistent themes in WEEKEND is revolution. We have the many references to the French Revolution (Liberty, Fraternity, Equality), references to Marx, Engels, and Mao, and of course the revolutionary group at the end of the film. We are told that the worker needs to be as brutal as the bourgeoisie to get results. We learn that freedom is violence. And yet, we see that violence is hardly freedom in any attractive sense. Maybe we see that revolutions only perpetuate the cycle of violence and brutality that the history of civilization chronicles. A revolutionary cinema is a cinema that promotes detachment from the cycle of violence. The only cycle worth pursuing is the cycle the camera performs while we listen to Mozart. The only true revolution is art itself.