Killing Me Softly?: An Examination of the Depiction of Violence in the Early Films of Jean-Luc Godard (1960-1967)

By Andrew K Lawston

Now including a bonus essay on themes of sentimentality and globalisation in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 film, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. 

Jean-Luc Godard's early films - up to the pivotal Weekend (1967) were determined to prove the adage that all you need to make a movie is "a girl and a gun". Whether in crime thrillers like the era-defining A Bout de Souffle (1960) or philosophical science-fiction masterworks like Alphaville (1965), the Nouvelle Vague auteur alternated between romance, philosophy, and action. 

The violent acts that appear in Godard's early films seem 'muted' in some way, however, prompting this exhaustive study of the director's techniques for depicting violence. Gunshots and car crashes happen off-screen, bottles are smashed silently on victims' skulls, and fistfights are played for comic effect. 

This book explores three possible explanations for Godard's singular approach to the depiction of violence. 

Working with close reference to classic films including A Bout de Souffle, Vivre Sa Vie, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Weekend and Le Mépris, Killing me Softly is a challenging academic study of the early work of one of the world's greatest living directors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew K Lawston
• Release date: Nov 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781519945853

Book preview

To Melanie, the Marianne to my Ferdinand

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I am very grateful to my supervisor, Dr Kate Ince, for her advice and patience throughout the course.

Thanks must also go to Catherine Fiegehen for providing me with secluded accommodation over the summer months to write up this work, as well as to Matthew Marshall for occasional provision of computing facilities.

Finally, I am indebted to Sean Lawston for his constant moral support and his willingness to endure countless viewings of Godard’s films.

INTRODUCTION

When Jean-Luc Godard's first full-length film, A Bout de Souffle, was released in 1960, some critics were unnerved by the casual way in which its hero, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), murdered and robbed his way through the film. Even Poiccard's death at the hands of the law, the traditional end for screen gangsters at the time, repulsed Henry Hart of Films in Review who, in the March 1961 edition complained that:

'The hoodlum is shot by the police and stumbles down a street clutching his belly, in much too much footage, before he falls down.'[1]

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Not appearing too concerned by squeamish reactions from critics, Godard continued to make films in which violence formed a large part of the visual style: the killings that punctuate Vivre sa Vie and Masculin/Féminin, for example, or the politically motivated torturers of Le Petit Soldat or Pierrot le Fou.

Although many writers have noted the level of violence in Godard's films, with Colin MacCabe highlighting it as a major barrier to his appreciation of the works ('There's a certain glorification of violence and terrorism which runs through your [Godard's] movies which I find very repellent'[2]), none has truly addressed violence as a theme. This gap is perplexing, given the highly idiosyncratic way in which violent acts are filmed in Godard's earlier films.

Frequently, characters receive fatal wounds off screen, only to be revealed dead or dying. On other occasions, the camera reveals brutal beatings, which have been muted. And on top of these techniques, action sequences often have a heavy dose of humour added. At all times, Godard is trying to understate or to subvert violent action. The results of this understatement, as well as the possible reasons why Godard should choose to employ it, are the subject of this dissertation. I shall attempt to identify the position which Godard's approach to violent material occupies in the evolution of film violence, and the extent to which his techniques are employed through artistic choice, or because of external factors.

The major films I shall discuss are A Bout de Souffle (1960), Le Petit Soldat (1960), Les Carabiniers (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Weekend (1967). Vivre sa Vie (1962), Le Mépris (1963), Bande à Part (1964) and Masculin/Féminin (1966) will also be considered to a lesser extent.

Weekend is a useful point in Godard's career to end a study of his early cinema for two reasons. First, it virtually marks the end of Godard's interest in narrative cinema for some time, as the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the director embarking on what has been called his 'Maoist' phase, making 'political films politically' as part of the Dziga-Vertov group. This included a political shift from the fairly bourgeois intellectual anarchism of the heroes in the films being studied to an interest in violence as a political force.

This shift can be seen clearly in Weekend. Corinne and Roland behave in a similar fashion to Pierrot le Fou's Ferdinand and Marianne throughout the film, prepared to fight in order to steal a car and killing in the hope of receiving enough money to start a new life. However, Corinne and Roland are consistently portrayed as unpleasant and decadent characters, despite their pronounced similarities to Pierrot le Fou's more sympathetic lead characters. It appears that Godard now considers violence committed in the hope of personal gain to be vulgar and rather sordid, a sign of the bourgeois decadence that he would attempt to renounce through his next films.

This ideological distance between Godard's radical phase and his earlier films would make it almost impossible to assemble a coherent interpretation of his approach to depicting violence, beyond 1967. A further reason for considering 1967 a watershed is that it was the same year many critics believe that screen violence truly began in the way that we know it today.

'In the cinema, if not elsewhere, violence started getting violent in 1966. The films that marked the escalation, in my memory, were Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).'[3]

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With the release of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch shaping the way that violent scenes would generally be filmed from that time on, full of showers of blood in close-up slow-motion, 1967 seems an ideal point to halt an examination of Godard's understated approach.

When examining Godard's understatement of violent acts, it is important to remember that I am not necessarily analysing scenes merely by the amount of gore and blood on display, but by the impact that a scene is likely to have on an audience. Many of the most notorious scenes of screen violence leave more than is generally acknowledged to the viewer's imagination. For example, during the infamous ear-amputation scene from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), the camera tilts gracefully towards the ceiling as Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) closes in on the captured policeman. The details of what is happening are conveyed by the victim's muted grunts of pain, which are gradually submerged by the Stealer's Wheel song, Stuck in the Middle with You. When the violence is over, Tarantino cuts to a long shot showing Mr Blonde taunting his victim with the severed lump, before tossing it aside. It is the casual sadism rather than explicit physical violence that, juxtaposed with the cop's utter helplessness, creates revulsion in the audience to the point where many spectators had to leave cinemas during the scene.[4]

In spite of the squeamishness experienced by some viewers in the face of Reservoir Dogs, I believe that audiences approach violent cinema with essentially fetishistic intentions. With films marketed according to their genre to a large extent, it follows that one of the reasons why an audience chooses to watch a violent crime or action film is that they want to see violence committed. My argument will be that by understating violent acts, Godard is consciously thwarting the fetishistic expectations of his audience.

A more useful example for this study is Psycho's shower scene. With its use