Understanding the French New Wave: Godard's Breathless and Filmmaking

The Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015 exhibition, held at the ICA for the sixth year running, represents the 16th year of Bloomberg's sponsorship of this annual exhibition. Selected by artists Hervin Anderson, Jesse Flood, Paddock, and Simon Styling, the exhibition features works by multiple artists including James Williams Collins, Pandora Lavender, Sophie Giller, Tomomi Kasai, Francisco Susur Lobos, Scott Mason, Katie Schwab, Oliver Makani, Jen Hanley, Lydia Brock, Andrea Zucchini, Kevin Boyd, Connor Rogers, and You Can Add Chakrabarti. The exhibition explores themes of 20th century abstraction legacy, process-based art, gender and identity, distribution and consumption, labor, and materiality. It also incorporates mathematical concepts like Clifford's Taurus and integrates textual elements from literary figures. The exhibition runs from November 25th to January 24th, with events available through the ICA and New Contemporaries websites.

Vanguard compared favorably against Axis battleships: Bismarck/Tirpitz had similar 15-inch guns but inferior protection; Littorio class offered nine 15-inch guns with longer 42.2 km range but thinner armor; Yamato/Musashi's nine 18-inch guns could penetrate Vanguard's armor but were 40% larger at 70,000 tons. Against Allied ships, the Iowa class offered superior 16-inch guns, faster 32-knot speed, and better fire control. Vanguard's advantages lay in protection, speed, and fire control, though its WWI-era 15-inch guns were less advanced than Iowa's 1939-designed 16-inchers.

The New Wave achieved lasting conquests that persist in contemporary cinema despite the disappearance of original practitioners. Modern cinema shows improved directorial morale with nobler attitudes toward characters, avoiding ridiculous figures. The commercial-artistic balance has reversed—eight of ten modern films have artistic pretensions while only two are purely commercial. This creates a gap where intentions often exceed execution quality. The contemporary landscape offers unprecedented choices, making selection processes more challenging. American cinema continues absorbing foreign directors, with contemporary successes including Roman Polanski, Miloš Forman, and Ivan Passer who have become Americanized while maintaining artistic integrity.

Diana Price compared Shakespeare's biography to 24 literary contemporaries using 10 criteria relating to writing corroborative evidence. Ben Johnson scored 10/10, Thomas Nash 9/10, while the median score was 6. John Webster scored below 4, having written only about a dozen plays and a few poems. Shakespeare scored zero on all criteria. Despite being very active as a writer for 20 years with greater literary output than most contemporaries, and despite more effort spent researching his biography, he failed all verification standards. This comparison suggests that if the Stratford man were truly the author, he would have left more substantial evidence of his literary life.

The Z.1007 didn't enjoy a glorious career not because it was catastrophically flawed—it flew well, handled predictably, and didn't try to kill its crews—but because it simply couldn't deliver on its promises. Its low production numbers, vulnerability to fighters, and demanding maintenance requirements meant it never reached the impact its designers hoped for. Compared to contemporaries: the Luftwaffe's Heinkel He 111 was sturdier, carried more bombs (up to 2,000 kg), and had better survivability thanks to all-metal construction; the British Vickers Wellington used Barnes Wallis's geodetic construction making it incredibly resilient to battle damage, carrying up to 2,000 kg of bombs with longer operational lifespan. The Italian SM.79 Sparviero, with similar tri-motor layout, was far more reliable and became a legendary torpedo bomber, faster in dive, simpler to maintain, and preferred by air crews.

Godard is described as being of the generation of Pinter in Britain, being highly politically committed while also being incredibly skilled in craft and committed to the act of storytelling. The discussion suggests that Godard's work involves a superpower ambivalence between the political and the artistic, with a sense of compulsion to communicate the contradictions of political life through the tool of cinema. Godard's films from Notre Musique through to Image Book show a preoccupation with the imagery of war and the imagery of romance and power, creating cinematic images of history and images created with actors, including gestural shots of hands and objects and sculptures.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1970 essay 'What to Do' established two fundamental theses: filmmakers must make political films, and filmmakers must be politically engaged. His third thesis reveals these are antagonistic—making political films means remaining bourgeois, describing the world's evil within conventional narrative structures. Being politically engaged means advocating radical revolution. Political films that merely describe themes remain trapped in capitalist production logic, designed for profit maximization. True political cinema requires adopting a proletarian class standpoint, attacking existing norms, and transforming power relations between production and distribution. According to Gotha, production must dictate to distribution, and politics must dictate to economics.

Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss filmmaker and pioneer of the French New Wave who broke traditional cinematic aesthetics. In 1968, he created the '30 ver toffee' group dedicated to political cinema, coinciding with the May 1968 protests in France where students demanded educational reforms, spreading to working-class struggles. This period included the Vietnam War, MLK's assassination, and Latin American dictatorships. Godard's films addressed global conflicts including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Chinese revolution, and Palestinian guerrillas, with Maoism as a defining characteristic. His short film 'J'vous salue Sarajevo' employs a three-layer structure: literal image, historical context (Bosnian War 1992-1995), and artistic discourse. The film pays homage to vanguard artists across music (Gershwin), cinema, literature (psychoanalytic approaches), and painting (post-impressionism). Godard engages with the Frankfurt School's critique that mass media creates alienation, challenging this perspective by arguing that both classical and new artistic expressions have value, and that the cultural industry does not eliminate the possibility of meaningful art.

Godard's mid-career work transformed cinema into essayistic form. 'Masculine Feminine' (1966) analyzed the 1960s generation as 'children of Marx and Coca-Cola,' referencing de Gaulle and anticipating the 1968 uprising. 'Weekend' (1967) broke from traditional storytelling, functioning as an essay with constant commentary critiquing bourgeois overconsumption through elliptical images. 'Letter to Jane' (1967) critiqued liberal imperialism through Jane Fonda's Vietnam visit, demonstrating how even liberal media contains entrenched biases that obscure local perspectives. After the 1968 student uprising that nearly toppled de Gaulle, Godard formed the Ziga VTO Collective with other radicals. Their films including 'Everything Is All Right' (1968) depicting class struggle in factories and 'Wind from the East' (1970) attempting to make an Eastern Western from revolutionary perspective. Godard's commitment to Marxist-Leninist-Mao thought led him to understand Mao's theory of contradiction and the shift of revolutionary axis from West to East.

Jean-Luc Godard's film 'China Girl' (1967) served as a key cultural artifact that helped prepare French youth for revolutionary consciousness. Godard, who shifted from mainstream cinema to radical leftist positions, became the primary translator of orthodox Marxist discourse into popular culture, making complex political ideas accessible and attractive to young audiences.

Alvin Gouldner calls himself a 'renegade Marxist' and applies Marxist critical apparatus to intellectuals themselves. This theme of reflexivity—turning intellectual guns back on one's own lines—is central to post-modern tradition. Baudrillard demythologizes everything until he demythologizes demythologizing itself, revealing meta-myth and mega-myth as what remains after all deconstruction.

Finnegans Wake is uniquely suited to accommodate unique reading acts and preoccupations of readers, making it a precursor to postmodern theory. Key interests include self-reflexivity, discursivity, historicity, ground and truth, and the nature of sound and speech. The novel explores how speech emblematizes and lionizes the nature of speech and performance of unique speech acts. Unique voices interject into each other, signaled by punctuation conventions and mixtures of flowy connection with articulated interruptions. The text represents what Steven said in Ulysses—the nightmare of history made manifest. Joyce questions belief, writing 'For what we are gifts if we are about to believe' instead of asking for supplication, splitting off to question whether we are even about to believe.

Self-reflexivity in film is a technique that makes audiences aware they are watching a constructed cinematic work rather than reality, achieved through four analytical angles: production (showing filmmaking processes), distribution (commenting on media formats), consumption/reception (audiences' engagement), and the product itself (films that reveal their own artificial nature). This approach reinforces that film is socially and culturally constructed art, not objective reality, requiring viewers to activate dormant meanings through interpretation.

The original Star Wars films and Indiana Jones series represented the first clearly post-modernist cinema, popularizing counter-cultural filmmaking techniques. Lucas deliberately defied expectations by composing films at a level requiring viewers to recognize implicit meanings beneath conscious awareness. This approach, influenced by Hitchcock's provocation of contradictory emotional responses, distinguished these works from straightforward entertainment. The films' success demonstrated how self-reflexive techniques could achieve mass appeal while maintaining artistic integrity.

Postmodernism faces a fundamental logical challenge: if no single theory can claim to be the final explanation of everything, then postmodernism itself cannot claim such a status. This creates a paradox where postmodernism must acknowledge its own relativity and limitations to avoid contradicting its own principles. By recognizing that even postmodernism is not absolute truth but one perspective among many, postmodernism paradoxically clears space for other theoretical approaches, including metamodernism or future philosophical developments. This self-reflexive quality distinguishes postmodernism from earlier philosophical movements that claimed comprehensive explanatory power, positioning it as a philosophy that is aware of its own limitations and open to revision.