Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here.  First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman and The Riflemen. Then Ben returned, and we took a look at Pierrot le Fou,  Masculin Feminin and the last Godard-Karina collaboration, Made in USA. We followed this up with our review of what we consider the best of all Godard films from this period, Two or Things I Know About Her, and the followup to his masterpiece, a little scene but essential Godard called The Chinese. Rounding out the syllabus, is the final of the fifteen films Godard made in this, the most fertile period of his impressive career, a film that boldly proclaims that it is the End of Cinema. Godard 101 bids you adieu with the arrival of...


Week End (France, 1967, Godard)


Ben Begins:

Well, I suppose there are blacker black comedies.  But when you throw in the weirdness factor, the comedy in Week End is very black indeed.  If I may craft a tag line from sources both anterior and posterior, it's Mad Max or Death Race 2000 as chanelled by Hieronymus Bosch.

That is, Bosch with a near pathological hatred for the middle class myth of freedom in the automobile.  Week End is a full frontal attack on the French bourgeois take about getting your kicks on Route 66.  There are test-drive harbingers of this in Crazy Pete, about which I could not refrain from calling slightly surreal and even Felliniesque.  But Week End is sort of Satyricon.  Satyricon not eight days a week, only on the week end, but a descent into hell nonetheless.

It's hell not below ground, on the surface, street level, the pavement.  And in full daylight too.  All the better to watch as the world goes from merely anti-social scrappiness to full-on anarcho-barbaric cannibalism.  By the end of the film, The Lord of the Flies is looking like peace, order and good government.  Of course, the most famous scene is earlier on when we're still being subjected to merely anti-social scrappiness, albeit with an already perverse degeneration of basic human decency.  I have in mind the nearly 10 minute long continuing shot of the traffic jam on the rural road.  Very cool.  But this time out I was up to speed on the literary source material, "The Southern Thruway," one of the best short stories I have ever read.

As for the full-on anarcho-barbarism that ultimately arrives, go figure, but this is when the comedy really refuses to be misunderstood.  It is so horrifically over the top yet cheesy in the extreme, the joke is made to measure for the critique of the lifestyle sold in every car commercial; and by association, the whole get-away-to-the-good-time-party culture of greed.  If I found it necessary to speak of surrealism when reviewing Crazy Pete, about Week End I have to say that it is most comprehensible to me as a work of dadaism.

I won't go so far as to say the Week End is a weak end to the first phase of his career, but after being so knocked out by both Two or Three Things I Know About Her and The Chinese, in my estimation it is lesser Godard.   I will give it the back-handed compliment of an elitist, though.  It is certainly the more popular picture.  I say this even without knowing how the films fared at the box office upon release or how the critics judged them then or judge them now.  Week End is much less intellectually verbose and features a fair amount of action-packed excitement.  Plus it includes what is by far and away the most sexually titilating scene in a Godard movie so far.  And even though the film is grim to the nth degree, alas, nihilism sells.

In regard to this, it cannot be overlooked that Week End is a very mean-spirited film.  We can see in retrospect that compared to the authentically uncertain and complex self-examination of his previous two outings, Godard finished 1967 by picking what for him was an easy target.  Having travelled so far from the apolitical, purely aesthetic shape-shifting of Breathless in 1959, eight tumultuous years later he not only believes he knows who his political enemies are - he's out to get them. 

In Week End, violence is no longer a topic for theoretical discussion.  The film is a kind of revenge fantasy.  For every bomb dropped on the Vietnamese, there is in Week End a burning luxury vehicle built by the same military-industrial complex (including it's European satellites) that builds the bomber planes and tanks.  If what's good for General Motors is good for America,Week End yells loud and clear that it's NOT good for General Motors.  The crazy hippies-gone-ghoul out in the woods skinning everything alive are nothing more than the New Left self-destructing; torching this Cadillac owner and that Citroen owner in stupid sectarian Robin Hood bands of outsiders, when they should be getting together and burning down the system.

And Dan:

"You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world[...] You say you've got a real solution. Well, we'd all love to see the plan."

Remember that train ride in The Chinese? Veronique is confronted by her philosopher professor, who wants to know what she has planned after committing the murderous acts that will shut down the country's universities, and she confesses that she has no idea what would happen next, but that it was necessary to start from scratch, regardless. And remember that Godard was feeding these lines to the actress through a hidden ear piece? 
--"What's the point of killing people if you don't know what to do next?" 
--"What we do next is not my work." 
--"You don't care." 
--"No, I don't [...] I'm only a worker producing a revolution." 

Well, Week End is Godard's answer to this revolutionary myopia. Godard has made a film for those who are completely unconcerned with the consequences, and just want to tear this mother down. Be careful what you wish for, he seems to be arguing, because if you want a revolution, but are ill-prepared for the outcome, don't you know that you can count me out. Whereas I sometimes felt like I was trapped in a closet in The Chinese, Godard kicks the door in with Week End. While we spend most of Godard's last two movies (along with Two or Three Things I Know About Her)  in the abstract realm of philosophical rumination, with Week End, Godard takes us out of the musty world of ideas, and into the vigorous universe of action. You know all those things these characters have been talking about? Let's see what happens when they turn them into deeds. 

 Luis Bunuel's Exterminating Angel (1962) appears to have been a key cinematic influence as well, as a character appears early on who goes by the name of Bunuel's film title, while in both films, the decadent mores of the bourgeoisie are stripped away to reveal the essential savagery of this social class. In Week End, the central characters are Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mirelle Darc), a middle class couple with a plan. It is hard to believe that there is a more despicable cinematic couple than these two, as the movie begins with each planning the other's murder, as well as that of Corinne's ailing father, should he not come through with the inheritance they both covet (and plan to share with their lovers.) So, with these various highly dubious goals in mind, they hit the road for the weekend, and the moral decadence at display in the leads will soon be reflected in the series of disturbing scenes that will confront us on their trip into the French countryside. 

From the looks of things on the motorway, everyone else in France is planning a similar weekend road trip. If there's one thing that Godard hates nearly as much as the petit bourgeoisie, it is the cars they drive. Every other scene is of one sort of vehicular carnage or another. And the film's most famous scene--the eight minute long tracking shot of a traffic jam--rightly sends up the whole matter of our romance with the automobile.  Shocking contrast between the pettiness of the bored and annoyed drivers, who toss balls, play board games, and tootle their horns with vigor, and the dreadful bloodiness of the accident that we finally get to see has caused the delay.

Our bored, amoral, social climbing, avaricious, materialistic protagonists go forth into this disintegrating society, a Gallic apocalypse. A series of increasingly bizarre and disturbing scenes of social breakdown greet them, and they could not care one whit. They fiddle while Rome burns. And while he saves his most cutting critique for the bourgeois characters whose vile actions dominate the film, Godard refuses to spare the rod, as pretty much every aspect of French society is represented here, and all are deeply flawed; French society, Godard implies, is damaged beyond repair. 

The incidents our  "heroes" encounter become increasingly nightmarish, ranging from torture to rape, murder and ultimately cannibalism; so too does their complete indifference to the horror, which adds a distinctive layer of grimness to the comedy. (Or is that vice versa?) This supposedly civilized couple journeys through a barbaric landscape, not only unaltered by the experience, but in their single-minded selfishness, greedily and cruelly contributing to it. Everyone we meet has become so desensitized to the carnage that the film is daring you to feel anything for anybody. And what has caused this alienation from all human emotion? Godard allows some wiggle room for interpretation, but it is hard to escape the implication that our love affair for the automobile, fed by the advertising industry, and reinforced by popular culture that fetishizes it in songs, movies and television, is the primary culprit. 

However, once Roland and Corinne move away from the highways and automobiles, and into the woods, things do not get any better, and it is clearly his conclusion that people are rotten to the core. Not only do they meet deeply flawed representatives of a variety of social classes, they even run into fictional characters like Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte (poor dear!) as well as a travelling piano salesman who delivers a lecture on how all modern music derives from Mozart; things do not end well for any of them.  Now, we may have lost our humanity to a plethora of external causes, but that seems besides to the point to Godard. There is no escaping the fact that the species that produced Mozart and The Beatles is the same one that has created the barbarism on display here, and that the latter will overwhelm the former. And while we may get plenty of laughs out of the bizarre scenarios, particularly early on in the film, when the stakes are considerably lower (fender benders and tennis rackets) cynicism and despair ultimately rule the day. Laugh, Godard suggests, at your own risk. 

Yet, despite the awful, gruesome deeds, we are left on the outside, unattached to the people who suffer. Godard always keeps us at a distance from the characters. Not just by making them so despicable, but also through standard Godardian techniques--shooting in long shot, so characters are literally far away, or when in medium or close shot, under lighting the scene so that characters faces are hard to make out. We are not to get emotionally attached. The purpose of this film is to provoke thought, not feelings. Not only does he want us to wonder why these characters are so cold and inhuman, he wants us to wonder why WE are as well. 

In another scene, Godard uses a similar technique for an entirely different purpose. He films one character, while the other delivers a long political harangue. Why? As always, Godard wants us to pay attention to the words. For one, he wants us to listen to the content of the rant, and not get distracted by the visuals. But while Roland and Corinne are a captive audience, they are not moved to change their lives in any way. Godard's cynicism is profound. This film is an attempt to rile up the complacent, to incite the content, to unsettle and disturb the self-satisfied. Furthermore, while the off screen character rants, the on screen character eats, and the lead characters collect garbage and complain that they're hungry.  Consumerism rears its ugly yet amusing head yet again in another Godard flick. 

Week End is something of a relief for those who found Godard's previous films too heady and claustrophobic, as there is a clearer traditional narrative momentum, as well as a darkly and appealingly perverse humour that runs throughout the film. However, in the end, despite the delight that can be found in the film's wonderful irreverence, Week End has a bleakness and hopelessness that is hard to shake. Godard does not appear to believe that we have it in us to create a better world, that when stripped back to our essence, we are  self-serving and ultimately destructive. Godard begins the film by announcing via his trademark inter-titles that Week End is "a film found on a scrape heap." Cynics and haters will wonder if that's where it should have stayed. While I really dig an awful lot of things about the film, and feel that it's rage is certainly justifiable, Week End is ultimately a bit too bleak for my tastes. Uncompromisingly cynical and completely unforgiving, Week End is a satire so black, you couldn't see hope if it was dancing in front of your eyes carrying sparklers and singing La Marseillaise. 

Indeed

And now I give you the rightly (in)famous traffic jam tracking shot, in all of its uncut 8 minutes of glory: