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Far more politically engaged than Truffaut was Jean-Luc Godard; in fact, the two were known to have

been mutually disaffected with each other. Arguably, Godard, for whatever his inconsistencies, is the one who might ultimately have been the most influential and remembered. His Breathless (A bout de souffle), which was remade weakly in America in 1983, is still probably the most often cited film when the topic shifts to the French New Wave, and for good reason: it's a kinetic joy, full of jump cuts, lavish Paris location shooting, with cool jazz on the soundtrack, a noirish mood, and a lovely, literate romance, all adding up to one for the ages. Interestingly, the film is based on a story by Truffaut, the only time the two would come close to collaborating on anything.

Godard was the most prolific of all the major figures of this movement; he produced roughly two films a year in the 1960s, and amazingly, many of them still hold up today. In Le Petit Soldat and Pierrot le Fou in particular, Godard gave us his protoypical male characters, men who were full of self-doubt; the politics in the former seem a little more naive than what you'd find in Godard's later, more overtly politicized work, while the latter is essentially a mishmosh of every genre the New Wave seemed to have an interest in deconstructing (gangster, romance, musical) while ultimately ending up in tragedy-land. My favorite Godard film is A Band of Outsiders (A band aparte) which has an innate sense of playfulness at work as Godard very loosely adapts a book noir and (his wife at the time) Anna Karina at her most lovely (and naive). It features a memorable pantomime dance with Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey (who played, in Godard's own words, "the little suburban cousins of [Jean-Paul] Belmondo" in Breathless), and an overall sense of joie de vivre not seen in some of Godard's other films. Alphaville, Godard's homage to both science-fiction and American detective stories, is a fascinating, if slightly alienating, production; Godard's frequent collaborator, cameraman Raoul Coutard, shot modern-day Paris as a "dehumanized city of the future." It's one of Godard's more even-keeled and sustained films and an interesting parable about the alienating role technology plays in our lives. In fitting with the upheavals of the era, Godard became more overtly politicized in the late 60s and formed a film collective called the Dziga Vertov Group (named after the great Russian filmmaker). His films then started to become increasingly inaccessible (not that he was ever striving for mainstream success, mind you). In that period, he produced a number of shorts outlining his politics, traveled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. One notable exception is the fascinating, but disturbing Weekend, which contains one of the chillingly great set-pieces in all of cinema, a ten-minute tracking shot of the world's largest traffic jam as well as a cutting portrayal of the bourgeoisie. As Amy Taubin recently wrote in the Village Voice, Weekend is "kinetic and cruel... the film in which Godard really sticks it to narrative. Not only is it devoid of a single character anyone could care about, the fact that I've given away the ending doesn't matter a jot." Godard the experimenting Marxist will still occasionally turn out interesting works, but they give the appearance of someone who seems to have gone off the deep end or lost touch with reality as most of us know it in his attempts to show his own. But this is Godard - simultaneously exasperating and brilliant, self-important and important. "I've always chosen to do what others aren't doing," he said in a 2001 interview with the BBC. "No one does that, so it remains to be done, let's try it. If it's already being done, there's no point in me doing it as well." And so it goes. And on goes his legacy, too.

Sinclair selects Godard's technique of breaking the synchronization of sound and image in Vivre sa vie to illustrate the authority that sound assumes in dictating meaning, especially when freed from its coordination with the visual image. An exemplary moment of Godard's revolutionary use of cinematic sound occurs when Nana hears a series of machine gun shots soon after her introduction to Raoul in the caf. In this scene, Godard uses sound to shape the rhythm of editing by stuttering the camera movement in time to each bullet shot. The effect of such a technique of forcing the image to follow the sound's lead rather than the opposite makes the "experiencer" reflect on whether the sense of sight warrants undue importance over that of hearing. Many scenes in Vivre sa vie defy the conventional rules of sound use, and we may find use in analyzing the moments in which Godard chooses to allow sound to preside over picture. Not only does the power reversal between the two senses forcibly jar the viewer out of complacency, but it also pushes the viewer to critically examine the emphasis Nana's society places on visual appearances. As a prostitute/aspiring movie star, Nana exploits her visual appearance in order to socially advance, yet her decision ultimately leads to a soulless existence and to an abrupt and meaningless death.

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