In Praise of Godard's in Praise of Love (Critical Essay‪)‬

Jean-Luc Godard's latest film, In Praise of Love, 2001, is yet another departure for the prolific director. Ever since the audacious breakthrough of his first feature film, A bout de souffle (1960), Godard has been moving away from the commercial mainstream into territory that is distinctly his own. A bout de souffle remains Godard's biggest commercial success, and his most conventional film. But Godard demonstrated his disdain for catering to the mass audience with his subsequent film, Le Petit Soldat (1960), which was roundly denounced by critics and public alike, and banned by the censors. Whereas A bout de souffle was a more or less conventional policier, adorned with jump cuts, handheld cinematography, and unofficially sanctioned location shooting, Le Petit Soldat was an examination of the French role in the Algerian conflict, replete with realistic scenes of torture, betrayal, and government misconduct. Even Godard's subsequent films of the 1960s expressed a desire to break away from the traditional narrative format of the mainstream feature film. Une femme est une femme is an "anti-glamorous" musical in which the protagonists wore their own clothes, shot in flat, garish color and Techniscope on a variety of rundown locations; Vivre sa Vie (1962) documents the life of a Parisian prostitute in a series of near-documentary tableaux. Les Carabiniers (1963) tackles the issue of meaningless wars and critiques the soldiers of fortune who fight in them; Le Mepris (1963) chronicles the downward spiral of a film scenarist working for a power-mad producer on an epic shot at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. Alphaville (1965) is a cautionary tale of a future civilization ruled by a passionless, ruthlessly logical computer. Masculin/Feminin (1966) explores the world of French youth and pop music in the 1960s, exposing the essential emptiness of popular culture. By the time Godard created Week End (1967), perhaps the ultimate vision of a violence-obsessed society in collapse, featuring the world's longest traffic jam as one of its most memorable sequences, Godard was eager to leave the commercial cinema behind, to embark on more adventurous projects. One Plus One (1968), a hastily shot political diatribe featuring the Rolling Stones, offered a clue to Godard's new, heavily politicized style of filmmaking, and by 1969, he had dropped out of conventional cinema altogether, to create, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, the Dziga Vertov Group. Over the next 5 years, Godard and Gorin collaborated on a series of intensely vigorous clue-tracts, such as British Sounds (1969), Pravda (1969), Le Vent D'Est (1969), Lotte in Italia (1969), and Vladimir et Rosa (1971), all shot in 16mm on shoestring budgets. However, these films never received mass distribution and were screened mostly by cine clubs, museums, and political activist groups.