Of Jean-Luc Godard's Times and Legacy

Back when I was just starting to move beyond the lowbrow in my cinematic tastes I discovered the films of Jean-Luc Godard--largely by way of the Bravo channel, back before it became a sewer of reality television. Films like Contempt (1963) and Weekend (1967) were by no means conventional "entertainments," but they often entertained, and managed to interest even when they were not entertaining.

Still, I have not given much thought to Godard for many years--as I was reminded when reading of his passing last month.

Amid the outpouring of commentary one piece that stuck in my mind was David Walsh's lengthy reflection on Godard's career, and in particular how he summed up that career. Specifically he held that Godard's "evolution and final artistic destination," however "idiosyncratic" they may seem, were in the end a "'welding together' of moods and traits common to a generation or more of once left intellectuals" (emphasis added) of the kind that leftists like Walsh see everywhere and denounce everywhere, not least

disappointment with history and society in general . . . a misanthropic blaming of the population for war, ecological damage and other catastrophes . . . a rejection of a class perspective in favor of identity politics . . . skepticism about the possibility of truthfully representing reality in words or images . . . and hostility toward rational, coherent thought.

Considering this reading of Godard and what he ultimately represented I find myself thinking also of the legacy of "the '60s" that looms so large in the memory of the left, and of others' perceptions of the left, which Godard can also seem to symbolize. Those sympathetic to the associated tendencies recall it as youthful, energetic, idealistic in the most positive sense of the term. But the more I look back at it the more I get a sense of its limitations--the counterculture's elements of bleakness and irrationality, which seem to have won out over everything else and made it a dead end for all those who had entertained such hopes, with Godard's trajectory seeming to embody that too. That makes nostalgia for it more ironic and that much sadder, a reminder of just how bleak its situation was in the conservative decades that followed, and the thin gruel on which leftists were content to subsist in these hard times.