Happy Birthday Jean-Luc Godard!

It’s been fifty years since Breathless shook things up in the cinema world, and Jean-Luc Godard, who hits seventy-nine today, is still going strong. The most recent of his films to see release in the U.S. were 2001′s In Praise of Love and 2004′s Notre Musique. Surprisingly enough, these two films are among his most elegant, haunting achievements. Godard’s films have become elegiac, meditative essays on everything from revolution, war, death, intellectual property right, love, sex, redemtion (everything they used to be about only less chaotic, and more focused).

This beautiful sequence from Notre Musique features Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet (who died in 2008). In the scene Darwish is interviewed by the film’s French Jewish protagonist. Their conversation circles around the notion/possibility of a “poetry of the oppressed”:  Am I the only one who finds a resonance between Darwish’s position here and that of Godard’s, the aging revolutionary artist looking back on their body of work, and the political spectrum that has hardly changed in light of it? I imagine Godard’s reflection on his former Maoist activism, and all the political potential of ’68 France, could be summed up in the words of Darwish: “I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”

I think Godard is a much wiser filmmaker than he was before, perhaps not as fun, eccentric, or irreverent, but a filmmaker who can construct complex, philosophical questions about life and art through sound and image. For anyone put off by his work in the 80′s (or for those of you who never dug the Breathless – Weekend run) I’d recommend spending some time with his recent output.

In other Godard news, it seems he has a film in the works titled Socialism, starring, among others, punk poetess Patti Smith (!?). Let’s just hope it’s not anything like her epic poem/Kevin Shield’s collaboration.

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