All the World's a Song

Criterion has a David Lynch playlist currently streaming so last night I watched Mulholland Drive again. Not for the first time, I found myself comparing and contrasting the Club Silencio scene with Jean-Luc Godard. I suspect a lot of people who watch Mulholland Drive take the Club Silencio scene as a commentary on movies and art in general. I'd say it's more of a commentary on a commentary, specifically the kind of postmodernist deconstruction Godard made.

In Mulholland Drive, the two protagonists visit an avante-garde stage performance in which a sinister man maliciously reminds the audience that all of the music they hear is not truly live, that it's just a recording.

This reminds me of the musical number in Godard's Une femme est une femme in which Godard repeatedly removes the music from the soundtrack.

Godard's point, as it was in similar moments in Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le fou, is to show audiences how they're being manipulated by the music. The key difference is that Lynch argues there's something sinister about it, that it clearly disturbs Betty, who experiences a seizure. As I was saying in my recent Vertigo analysis, fantasy seems a necessity for maintaining sanity. One could argue Betty/Diane shares some blame in making her fantasy so precarious as to lead to her own destruction. But the ambiguity of just how much control she has over herself is fundamental to the tragedy.

Jean-Luc Godard

A cornerstone of cinema has died. Jean-Luc Godard was a great filmmaker but his contribution to the artform was greater than the average genius auteur's. He is one of a handful who could be said to have changed the whole shape of the medium. He and Truffaut, with the French New Wave starting in the late 1950s, changed the fundamental language of cinema, creating ripples that would eventually spread all over the world, as far as Japan and the U.S. The advances of 1970s American cinema into realism and complex storytelling couldn't have begun without the influence of the French New Wave, and therefore virtually all cinema to follow owes Godard a debt. He died yesterday at 91.

Human beings are compulsively reactionary. Once someone has thrown mud in your eye, the impulse to throw back something worse can be overwhelming so that the conflict becomes defined purely by conflict. But Godard was a rare critic whose motives were a perfect blend of love and criticism. For as much as Pierrot le Fou or Vivre sa vie deconstructs the tools of the filmmaker, operating as postmodernist manifestos on the manipulative quality of motion pictures, they were also imbued with real human warmth. Godard's maxim that "cinema is the truth 24 times a second and every cut is a lie" led to his tendency to treasure long takes of his actors, lingering on a shot of Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris until a natural smile starts to overtake her performance.

He breaks it all down but then he builds something from the old pieces that turn out to retain their lustre after the assault. He made something new that was really a distillation and accentuation of what was great about the old. He achieved a mixture of nature and artifice that's endlessly magnificent to behold.

Anna Karina

Anna Karina, who passed away two days ago at the age of 79, is widely recognised as one of the most prominent faces of the French New Wave. The muse of one of the 1960s cinematic movement's most prominent directors, Jean-Luc Godard, she played an astonishing variety of characters in only around six years. From the innocent girl fallen in with hooligans in Bande a part (1964) to the mischievous stripper in Une femme est une femme (1960) to the defiant prostitute in Vivre sa vie (1962), her beautiful face expressed complexity in these characters that went well beyond those simple descriptions.

No wonder Godard was so entranced. The film critic turned filmmaker chose to show her weeping face in close-up in a famous scene from Vivre sa vie in which she watches another woman crying in Carl Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc. What a way to draw attention to another film and to make a point about how emotions and experience are communicated through film. Anna Karina had the face and the talent for it.

After her breakup with Godard, he made movies about her and she went on to direct her own films and write novels. She remains primarily celebrated for her work with Godard, though, but that's no dishonour. The combination of mesmerising beauty and sensitive performance is a supreme rarity and no-one could ever duplicate what she did.