Godard, Truth, & The Poetry Between the Lines

As part of the research for this unit I found myself watching many of Godards films. The Nouville Vague heavily infuenced my approach to my fmp and how i would like to film it. In this short research paper I want to break down the search for truth that is the underlying reason for Godards work, and the deaper behind The French New Wave's reinvention of the entire film medium.

When it came to the infamous quote in the small soldier "Photography is truth and cinema is truth 24 times a second" I was confused. Offcourse the whole movement was started out from the Young turks critiques of contemporary cinema at the time lacking sincerity and truth and not portraying real life accurately because cinema had developed a formula, but this quote is contradictory because then why are Godards films are so artificial? Maybe this contradiction of truth stemmed from directors in western cinema, how all films in general deceive an audience into believing an alternate reality, transporting audiences into a microcosm of a films entire world and story. Metaphorically we can compare this to how when actors deliver a performance as a character, they are still that person behind the character, an actor cannot disappear, we as an audience always know we are watching a film in the back of our minds. Godard would acknowledge this and use takes of actors messing up their lines and moments before he called action, his films were very self aware. This was him communicating his truth, by showing the relationship between actor and director, by infamously breaking the fourth wall to make the audience aware that they are watching a film. We have contradictory impulses and emotions when watching a film and need a suspension of disbelief to be absorbed into a stories narrative, we give ourselves over to what we are watching to be absorbed into the activities going on around us. By using rough jump cuts and discontinuous editing he makes his viewers active and critical, constantly thinking by manipulating you within the medium. In my opinion this links to how he expressed his freedom in film, experimenting with the conventions of cinema, the handheld cameras the mismatched styles to create a contrasting dynamic to evoke emotion in the same way that art is meant too. He used red paint instead of fake blood which highlights the artistic composition within a film. The french saw directors as auteurs, their paintbrush was a camera, Godard is an auteur and we were watching his art 24 frames a second.

A review for 'Band of Outsiders' by noted critic Pauline Kael, notibaly became more important to director Quentin Terantino than the film itself. In the reveiw she said that the film is best described as if a bunch of crazy french men took an American crime novel and directed it not based on the novel but on 'The poetry between the lines'. I always found this statement very ambiguous and struggled to pinpoint its meaning. Perhaps Godard's truth is in 'The poetry between the lines' the 'lines' being what we see on screen and the 'poetry' being the metaphor and connotations behind it, the bigger meaning we take from what we see. I mentioned earlier films being microcosms, they are 'miniature representations that capture the essence of a larger whole'. I am referencing the introduction to the book 'Screen Language' by Cherry Potter, where she says that the sequences in a film are in themselves 'small stories within the whole film, which inspire a sense of profound insight into nature and life itself'.Godard's films are very experimental and philosophical in dialogue, he wouldn't even follow his own scripts, getting actors to improvise and only filming for a few hours a day. In the same way that cinema lacked innovation and the truth to how people actually lived their lives, people 'think of film in terms of entertaining linear stories that hold our attention because we know what will happen next' our question gets answered, there is nothing more to think about the film and we move on. Cherry Potter writes that to overcome passive conformity in the viewer we have to re examine film language and 'consider the medium as if we never experienced it before'. Isn't that what Godard did? isn't that how the Neuville Vaugue was born? The Young Turks broke the conformes of outdated filmmaking by creating an alternative way to tell stories, breaking the rules of the already existing methods by substituting them with a new style of filmaking and to create active viewers that engaged with the film medium in thought. Poetry is very metophorical and considering auteur theory, all we see in a film is metophorical for a directors philiosphies and experinces. auteurs project their philosphies, feelings and experiences in art, so do directors in film. To the French a Orson Wells film was his creation, a Hitchcock film was a Hitchcock film. My conclusion is that 'the poetry between the lines' echoes that a film is a projection of a larger meaning. Art is subjective to a viewer, and film is art.