The Politics of Pre-Political Godard: Alphaville, Made in USA

“Because more than any other art form it is involved in the real world […], the cinema is totally implicated with the society, both its expression and its means of exerting pressure, its witness but its judge; in other words, both its accomplice and its betrayer.”¹ To say at this point that Jean-Luc Godard is a political filmmaker is somewhat of a truism in film studies. Since the events of May 1968, Godard renounced all of his previous films, embracing a stark Brechtian approach of deconstruction, and refused to play into the capitalist model of mainstream cinema. Prior to this work, though, Godard extolled his political and philosophical beliefs in a number of his pre-’68 films. Though many consider Le Petit Soldat (1963) to be the most political film of his early era, there are numerous political undertones and subtexts to be found in two of his most politically vocal films of the era: Alphaville (1965) and Made in U.S.A (1966). Alphaville speaks specifically to the idea of a government suppressing the identities of its people through technology and modernity. Made in U.S.A., which begins as a noir about a woman who investigates the death of her lover, becomes a cacophony of political references about the Gaullist regime and leftist politics, marking the uncertainty of the coming years. My goal with this paper is to explore these two films, discern the political and economic subtexts within them and determine whether Godard was able to anticipate to some degree the events of May ’68. In examining these films, it’s possible to chart not only the coming of the radical, politicized Godard, but also the artistic awareness of social responsibility and the coming of French political film criticism in the late 60s. While his truly radical period would come in the 1970s with films like Tout va Bien (1970), Godard’s early films demonstrate that his ideological stances were stalwart from the start. As the world of cinema evolved into something more weighty and prescient, Godard helped to incite the movement that would change the critical realm for years to come. He was not the only filmmaker to recognize the connections between politics and filmmaking, but he was one of the most radicalized, as I explore later in this paper.

After a failed foray into politics in the years immediately after World War II, Charles de Gaulle emerged from citizenry in the wake of the country’s war with Algeria, which grew out of France’s humiliation after WWII and their subsequent failures in Vietnam. Richard Neupert describes the world’s conflicting views of France after the war: “a helpless victim, a lazy and ineffective military force, a valued ally, a crippled industrial power.”²  Facing the loss of their colonial empire and battered by the years of the Vichy regime, the French sought certainty and security, and many of them found it in de Gaulle.  De Gaulle was re-elected as president on Dec. 21, 1958 and, with the signing of a new constitution a few months prior, he fostered the Fifth Republic—a powerful and authoritative system that Mark Kurlansky describes as the only way to “prevent a military coup attempt.”³ This new government ensured de Gaulle’s power over the country, which “had turned to him to end the Algerian crisis, not to reform the French state.”⁴ De Gaulle diminished the parliamentary system that had come to define the Fourth Republic, a system that de Gaulle had openly criticized for years for its lack of a strong, centralized leader.  Though he did not abolish it fully, he was able to set “the agenda for the legislature, [and decide] what bills are to be discussed and what version of them [as well].”⁵

After a few tense years of negotiation and dissention with rogue French military leaders (under the title of the Secret Army Organization), de Gaulle ended the conflict with Algeria and turned his efforts to re-shaping France’s economic and political constructs, controversially pulling the country from NATO in 1966. He amounted levels of power that had not been awarded since the times of the monarchs, and de Gaulle fashioned himself to be a leader of great mythology, encouraging the idea “that he had singlehandedly saved France from the fascists.”⁶

In asserting France’s power outside of Europe and in more international affairs, de Gaulle was trying to ensure the future of the country both militaristically and politically, but as Richard Brody points out in his book Everything is Cinema: the Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, he “was received by most French intellectuals and by the left as an instrument of the military insurrection and thus as an agent of a soft fascism.”⁷  Students and youth became radicalized after the Algerian war, protesting his constitution and utilizing “the civil rights movement, the American war in Vietnam, and protests against the war” as tools in their leftist ideologies.⁸

Raised during the height of WWII, Godard found himself a supporter of the German occupation, inadvertently supporting fascism as a result of his parents’ ideals. As he grew into his teenage years, he began to align himself with the teachings of Sartre, who encouraged artists to take sides and to embrace the actions of the far left.⁹ At the same time, Godard found himself becoming more and more enamored with the cinema, joining Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque and rubbing elbows with filmmakers and critics such as Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette. His early writings hailed the beauty and power of the cinema, sharing his love for American films with readers of the Cahiers du Cinéma. In “The Politics of the French New Wave,” Amber McNett notes that as de Gaulle’s government came under more scrutinous attack, the Cahiers writers began to align their politics with the rising left, ousting Rohmer as the magazine’s editor-in-chief and electing Rivette in 1963. Rivette “shifted its focus slightly and the writing began to take into account developments in European cinema, moving away from aesthetically based Bazinian criticism [of Rohmer’s era] towards a more politically centered Brechtian model.”¹⁰ This new model would serve to deconstruct the cinema, and Brecht himself was considered a Marxist, a political attribute that surely attracted Godard.¹¹ This aesthetic deconstruction would influence Godard in his filmic endeavors, as he began to adapt more radical modes of expression, communicating his discontent with de Gaulle’s leadership and his endless influence over all constructs of society. The Republic’s eventual actions against the film world would seal his vitriolic views of de Gaulle’s regime.

Along with the political developments of the time, Godard became disenfranchised with the economies of American cinema and its monopolization of the industry, which had come to fruition after the Marshall Plan in 1951, which bombarded European nations with an influx of American films.  Godard witnessed the negative impact on French cinema and culture. It was cultural imperialism, as America was intent on shaping European art by its model. While at first he revered the constructs of these traditional narratives and the methods in which they were produced, Godard became “very clear about the death of American cinema and the rottenness of the whole commercial system, a system worth working in only to change or destroy it from within, as about the need to make a different kind of cinema with a different kind of function.”¹² Godard’s fixation with the cinema’s political potential can be seen in his examinations of “the semantic implications of the film as a form: how and why is it that a series of images accompanied by sound can mean; how to they relate to and act upon an audience’s perception of its own situation?”¹³ Godard has always employed the use of montage-style editing techniques in merging visuals and sound to the purpose of evoking certain messages, but also in deconstructing the cinema and its techniques and tropes.

If the montage movement was about the collision of images, then Godard’s Marxist ideologies fed into these techniques fully, as he believed that “conflict [is] fundamental to human existence.”¹⁴ Godard often spoke of the lower classes and their struggle with government and bureaucracy, and his arguments became far more defined in the latter years of the 1960’s. With Alphaville and Made in U.S.A., Godard was honing his revolutionary stance against the Gaullist government by exploring themes of consumerism, government control, the loss of free will and determinism, all through the lens of montage-style filmmaking.

Alphaville: Technocracy, Structuralism and the Modern Consumerism

Alphaville is considered by many to be an anomaly of Godard’s early career. In his guide to the film, Chris Darke notes that it is Godard’s “sole feature-length foray into science fiction and one of his few encounters with a star with major box-office appeal.”¹⁵ The film follows Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantin), his journey to Alphaville and his efforts to destroy the super-computer known as Alpha 60, which has deemed it illegal and irrational for its citizens to show emotion. The film is “set in a transparently contemporary future that drew most of its traits from the alienating aspects of ordinary life,” and was shot on-location in Paris “to represent the dystopian future reflected [in] Godard’s tendentious view of the modern world,” a not-too-subtle reaction to the Republic’s shift to modernization and de Gaulle’s overriding power in the government.¹⁶

Darke suggests that during this period, France made “a leap straight from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century,” not only in technological advances but in consumerism as well.¹⁷ Darke writes that “Paris was where the ‘new men’ and ‘new women’ of post-war modernity were emerging to live new lives in new buildings surrounded by the new objects of consumer society.”¹⁸ This new consumer society resulted in part from the aforementioned Marshall Plan, which sought to imbue Europe with American culture after WWII. With the coming of the 50s, the rise of consumerism in America translated overseas by way of appliances, automobiles and other commodities. France may not have caught on to the television until the late-50s, but the suburbanization linked to these new technologies took a definite toll on movie-going in the country. Neupert explains that due to the automobile, “the potential film audience was able to go on more frequent and longer vacations, attend more sports events, or spend more evenings in restaurants and nightclubs.”¹⁹ He notes that television “affected family disposable income for leisure activities more dramatically than did automobiles, which tended to be owned by upper middle class, urban families.”²⁰ As it had in the United States, the cinema of France would be replaced by these pleasures and as these machines began to dictate the daily lives of its consumers, many felt that artistic and humanistic sovereignty would be replaced by the cold hard mechanics of technology. This examination would be the building blocks for Alphaville’s message.

In preparing the film, Godard was influenced by Georges Bernano’s book France Against the Robots, which denounces the English, American and Soviet “democracies” and asserts that “French civilization […] has […] striven to form free men, that is, men fully responsible for their actions.”  Godard, like Bernanos, “considered both the capitalist and communist worlds to be equally inimical to the values of life, love and, crucially, art,” placing emphasis on commodity and technology over free will and, ultimately, humanity.²¹ This “robotization” of the French people can first be attributed to the coming of “technocrats,” whose sole occupation is to place “a government in power […] by calculating demand.”²² In her book, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Kristen Ross attributes the birth of the term “technocracy” to the U.S. in an effort to “designate a system of organizing economic life inspired by the rational structures of the physical sciences” after WWII, a so-called “reign of the experts” as she would put it.²³ The technocrats’ main position was to “cushion the State from some of the failings of the political parties,” and it was a practice that started with the German occupation of Vichy. In France, technocrats played a large part in de Gaulle’s government, for he populated his staff with “an elite and overt entourage of ministres-techniciens” that helped him guide both the government and the country—a technological fascism, as Godard would have likely seen it.²⁴

In this sense, Alphaville’s Alpha 60 and its prohibition of culture through technology is a direct reference to the Gaullist government and its forced “modernization” of French culture.  Darke points out that if “technocracy” was the term used to describe man in the time of modernity, then “the other, which proved highly influential at the level of intellectual enquiry, was ‘structuralism.’”²⁵ In the film, structuralism can be seen in the “particular aesthetics of obsessive geometry and standardizing design” of the city, and with it came “judgments concerning alienation, isolation and automation.”²⁶ Susan Hayward notes that the coming of structuralism in France coincided with de Gaulle’s call for “national unity in the face of the Algerian crisis.”   “The desire for total structure,” she writes, “as exemplified by structuralism, can be read as an endeavor to counter the real political instability of the 1960s.”²⁷ In further examining structuralism’s impact on the country and on Godard, Henri Lefebvre reflects that “structuralism was nothing more than the infusion of technocratic thought into the intellectual field”:  “The structuralist crisis of “man” and “humanism” was above all a practical and historical crisis brought on by a capitalist society where unchecked bureaucratic growth meant that institutions—medicine, teaching, research—no longer put humans first. In a society where objects were more important than people, where cars determine the way people live, why wouldn’t the status of ‘man’ be undermined? But instead of analyzing […] that society, structuralism served as an underlying ideology justifying the devaluation of humans under capitalist modernization.”²⁸  In Alphaville, the value of humans has indeed been diminished, so much so that technocracy and modernity have stripped the city’s inhabitants of language, with “characters start[ing] to talk in the language of advertising,” a common trope in many of Godard’s films.²⁹  To speak of “love” is a crime punishable by death, and scientists of the time agreed with Godard’s vision, noting that “the impoverishment of language and the simplification of syntax are real.”³⁰

To Godard, the modernization of Paris through the Fifth Republic’s efforts to unify the country under an ideology of seemingly false pretenses (namely the absolute control which de Gaulle sought with his new constitution) is what stands out most specifically in the film. His “emphasis on the values of love, culture and individual liberty over the dehumanizing modern world” forms the crux of the film and defines Godard’s fight against de Gaulle’s reign over culture.³¹  Godard’s dissent would be exemplified in later years as the government turned to censorship for many New Wave films (most notably Jacques Rivette’s The Nun) and in the expulsion of Langlois from the Cinémathèque. Many of the issues regarding modernity and culture would come to light in later years, but his criticism of the government and consumerism in the light of de Gaulle’s Republic would be further examined in his later film Made in U.S.A.

Made in U.S.A.: a Scrapbook of Political Manifestos

Unlike Alphaville, whose political allegories are shrouded in subtext, Made in U.S.A. (made the following year) acts as an overt scrapbook of sorts, culling numerous artistic, cultural and political references and impressing them upon the viewer in rigorous fashion. The film follows Paula Nelson (Anna Karina), a journalist for the true-crime magazine Radar, who searches for her missing lover in true film-noir style and becomes embroiled in a political conspiracy of sorts. The film, as J. Hoberman notes in his essay “The Long Good-Bye,” is “anticapitalist and anticonsumerist, decrying miniskirts and rock and roll as forms of fascist mind control, yet more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-twentieth-century pop culture than any movie Godard made before or would make after.”³² There is a clear conflict present in the film, as Godard simultaneously pays tribute to the Hollywood types that inspired him (the film is dedicated to Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller) while damning them for their capitalist gains and imperialist reach. Godard chose to style the film after American noirs because he felt that “the structure of the American film noir is itself political” and his cartoonish yet ideologically charged intrigue suggests that all of the conflicts referenced in the film “were products of the Cold War, were ‘made in USA.’”³³

The film came to fruition after the elections of 1965, in which de Gaulle was re-elected by total suffrage, and after Rivette’s The Nun had been banned by the government and religious groups. As a result, “Godard likened de Gaulle’s government to the Vichy regime,” and the banning, “as de Gaulle himself recognized, held the French authorities up to ridicule and made them appear hopelessly out of touch with modern life.”³⁴ Along with The Nun’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, Godard “immediately orchestrated a formidable outcry in the press, issuing a ‘Manifesto of the 1,789’ (a reference, of course, to the year of the French Revolution) in defense of the film.”³⁵ Soon after, the government lifted the ban laid by Malraux, but in its wake, “the New Wave’s aesthetic resistance to mainstream French culture redefined the terms of French politics, and Godard found himself in its vanguard.”³⁶

Made in U.S.A., which Godard produced with Beauregard, was also influenced by the controversy surrounding the disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka, a case Godard found endlessly intriguing and indicative of the devastating lengths the government would go to capture its enemies. Ben Barka was “the exiled leader of the left-wing Moroccan opposition and a major figure in international Marxist and anticolonialist politics.”³⁷  He was allegedly convinced to work on a film about decolonization with journalist Philippe Bernier and filmmaker Georges Franju, all organized by a mutual acquaintance, Georges Figon. Ben Barka was subsequently apprehended by authorities and tortured to death for information.

Godard came upon the story and was struck by Figon’s role in the conspiracy. A revolutionary who had illusions of becoming a filmmaker, Figon declared himself to be “a son of the bourgeoisie who had straightened himself out.”³⁸  When found to be a factor in Ben Barka’s disappearance, he was sought out by authorities and found dead in January 1966 by apparent suicide. Left behind was a recording that featured his “accounts of film scripts” and various other musings. Godard centered on his tale as “an outsider and frustrated filmmaker whose situation [he] assimilated to his own”, and used these tapes as the inspiration for the series of tapes left behind in the film by Paula’s slain lover, Politzer (a reference to a Marxist philosopher who was assassinated by the Gestapo in 1942).³⁹  On this tape, “she hears Politzer’s voice intoning a series of elaborately doctrinaire Marxist incantations,” and the voice “is that of Godard, who thus effected a direct identification of the Figon character.”⁴⁰

In addition to the Ben Barka affair, Godard names various characters after political leaders (such as Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara) and makes overt references to Gaullist military campaigns. One such reference, “I just did a report on Chateauroux,” speaks to “the evacuation of one of the 11 major U.S. bases in France after de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw France from NATO.”⁴¹ Another quote speaks directly to Dakar and Mers el-Kebir, campaigns that took place in 1940 during de Gaulle’s “newly-formed Free French Movement” and failed to “capture the strategic port of Dakar in French West Africa […], then under the control of Vichy France.”⁴² Some quotes speak to specific leaders, such as “What kind of progress can there be with Lecanuet, Pinay, Plevin,” which notes three major right-wing politicians of the Fourth Republic that “advocated modernity and European integration.”⁴³ In referencing these leaders and campaigns, Godard is finding ways to criticize de Gaulle and his Republic’s politics in an open and unabashed manner, a move that would foreshadow his post-’68 work.

Godard’s most strikingly political message comes in the film’s final moments. After Paula has solved the mystery behind Politzer’s death, she engages in a “rhetorical, quasi-literal dialogue about politics” with a fellow journalist (played by Philippe Labro) for well over two minutes.⁴⁴ In this single take, Paula laments the “failures of the left and successes of the right,” and Lázsló responds by asserting, “The left and the right are the same. One cannot change them. The right, because it is idiotic and brimming with nastiness; and the left because it is sentimental. Besides, right and left, it’s a completely outdated question. That’s not at all the way to pose the problem.”  Paula “responds with an open question, which ends the film: ‘Then how?’ […] a question that Godard would seek to answer practically, in film and in life.”⁴⁵

While many felt the film betrayed politics, (especially Bernardo Bertolucci, who wrote in Cahiers that the film “is paralyzed in its great liberty by ideological conformism”) Godard responded by asserting “that the film embodied his progressive politics in a progressive form,” noting a shot that portrays the cover of a book (Left, Year Zero), and states that “unless one is blind or deaf, it is impossible not to understand that this shot, that is, the mixture of an image and a sound, represents a movement of hope.”⁴⁶ For Godard, Made in U.S.A. was a swan song for the mode of filmmaking he’d come to herald in his early era. As the uprising of May ’68 inched closer, Godard decried the Americanization of French life, most notably in the cinema—the  modernization and commercialization that sought to destroy what was pure in the world of filmmaking. The film’s cartoonish antics are not meant to express the joy of filmmaking, but rather to express the death of the cinema. This convoluted style had come to define his work in earlier years. In mixing the shallowness of American cinema with the political radicalism that would come to define his later work, Godard notes through Paula that Made in U.S.A. was indeed “a political movie . . . Walt Disney with blood.”⁴⁷

The Turning of the Tide: The Shift to Politicized Criticism

As explored in these two films, Godard’s politics were clearly leftist and radical in nature, especially in regard to de Gaulle’s regime.  While the New Wave had effectively changed the face of French filmmaking, the Cahiers critics that had come to define the movement were at a crossroads. Due to their persistence in the nouvelle vague, “general attitudes to the cinema, and particularly American cinema, had changed, and that triumph had then perhaps pushed Cahiers critical positions into dangerous areas.”⁴⁸ Turning to ideological critique and expounding upon Brechtian techniques, the shift to critical theory was one of the biggest results of nouvelle vague criticism, a move that was fostered by Godard and other early Cahiers critics. But as the shift from “modern” to “new” cinemas emerged, “positions [that were] usually associated with Cahiers in the post-1968 period were in fact already well developed long before 1968.”⁴⁹

Godard lets it be known in these two films that capitalist and consumerist tendencies will aid in destroying artistic and humanistic independence, for both the audience and the artist.  Jean-Louis Comolli’s “A Morality of Economics” speaks to the consumerist relation of film to its audiences, a Marxist ideal that Godard notes especially within Made in U.S.A. Comolli notes that the producers and distributors should no longer aim “on one side to get through the biggest sums possible and on the other to channel them towards profits for themselves.” He further states that, “The introduction of the notion of responsibility in the face of an industry characterized by immaturity and the absence of professional conscience as much as of professional expertise immediately implies—and this changes a great deal– a certain honesty: financial, moral and artistic.”⁵⁰  This view of economics lies in “the example of Godard” and is most likely a response to the American mode of filmmaking. Comolli goes on to comment that in the wake of these revolutionary ideas, “the cinema is today the instrument of social reform at both the production and consumption stage […] It is the shattering of the mirror itself, revealing the reflection for what it is and rejecting reassuring likenesses and resemblances.”⁵¹ Godard effectively “shatters the mirror” in his films, and Comolli states that “in relation to the ‘new cinema’ it is appropriate to talk about politics and not art.”⁵²  One year after Comolli produced this piece, the world of politics and film would combust in a fight to preserve the cinema, not only for its artistic form, but for the people of France.

Prior to the cultural and political upheaval of May 1968, the cinema underwent a similar revolution in the wake of the Republic’s removal of Langlois from the Cinémathèque, an institution that was akin to a church for many Cahiers critics and filmmakers. In her book May ’68 and Film Culture, Sylvia Harvey charts the rise of the Estates General of Cinema (EGC) as a result of the government’s meddling in the affairs of the cinema. After Langlois’ removal, “there were violent incidents when a group of some 1,500 people gathered to protest outside the theater at the Palaise de Chaillot.”⁵³ Further protests led to the reinstatement of Langlois, but at the expense of the government funding that had kept the Cinémathèque alive. In the months leading to May and June, the EGC was formed in an effort to “express itself as a unified and historically progressive force,” taking its name from the Estate of the States General of 1789, which “both expressed and organized the massive transformation of class relations within French society.”⁵⁴

The cinema would belong to the people, and initiatives such as Project 16, which aimed to eliminate a system “dominated by the profit motive,” would help ensure that (22). While its actions were not concrete or necessarily effective, its message called for the “struggle against the economic, social and ideological order—that of capital protected by the state apparatus”; the cinema was a voice for the people and the government’s economic and ideological influence would no longer be tolerated.⁵⁵ This sentiment was fully endorsed by Godard, not only in ’68 but in his previous works as well.

In Alison Smith’s French Cinema of the 1970s: Echoes of May, she asserts that “May ’68 became a date dividing recent history into two,” a date that “brought a genuine discovery, or rediscovery, of a collective identity, where individuals could add their voice to the general shout” that spoke against the Partie Communiste Francais (PCF), “which many felt to be stagnating or not to be sufficiently sensitive to changes in perception.”⁵⁶ She adds that, “More than a political phenomenon, May ’68 was a cultural watershed, an explosive rearrangement of the tectonic plates of French society—it was clearly a necessary climax to a decade or more of accumulating maladjustments, but at the time, and for some years afterwards, May ’68 was read unambiguously, as a beginning and not as an end.”⁵⁷  The revolts of 1968 affirmed that “no matter the political angle, cultural issues are considered to be important,” and the cinema is “an art-form with more potential than most,” invaluable to revolutionary filmmakers like Godard.⁵⁸

It was no longer Godard’s goal to entertain by referencing the filmmakers that had come to influence his work, but rather to inform and incite audiences to his political and economic claims against the government. In the end, he was no longer interested in entertaining the consumerist and imperialist modes of the American cinema, but instead adopted a more “direct” mode of filmmaking, one that harkened to third cinema and montage techniques, that would educate the audiences more than anything:  “A living film culture could not grow simply out of the watching of movies, rather it would grow out of the relationship between the act of watching and a critical awareness of the techniques of the cinema. Film education would change the context within which the films were viewed, and make possible a more active role for the spectator: the role of challenging, analyzing and criticizing the spectacle, not simply consuming it.”⁵⁹  With Alphaville and Made in U.S.A., it could be argued that Godard was becoming more radicalized in his filmmaking, but he was already radical. By utilizing the methods of montage filmmaking from the start, Godard was already placing emphasis on the critical function of film and its power to expose and expound upon its subjects for the good of society. He had already practiced formal deconstruction through the tools of Eisenstein and Marx, and he would now place his skills to further use in what were soon to be his “political” years. As evidenced here, Godard was political from the start. He only embraced it wholly when the cinema became his forum.

Posted on May 28, 2012

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