Jean-Luc Godard's Week End

To put it in Godard's own words, the only way to really talk about film is to make a film itself. What makes his work interesting is that it is never cinema, but cinema about cinema. And thus, writing about Week End, a film about films, not only seems redundant, but a little foolish as well.

Much as we would like to assume Week End provokes discussion, Godard throws a huge fuck-you in the face of his audience (faux-intellectuals like me) in the opening scenes. "ANAL-YSE," instructs a film title that interrupts a long 'erotic' (is anything truly erotic in Godard's films? Or does he reflect eroticism?) monologue that is shot in a restless one-take that frames and re-frames its characters.

This nihilistic satire is not without its own humor though. The many brawl scenes are played out with an outrageous physicality that borders on slapstick; the (in)famous long tracking shot that shows the couple stuck in a traffic jam from hell with animals, yachts, and picnicking people in line is pure cinematic grandiloquence (Godard supposedly did the scene, which included 300 tracks in total, just to piss off his producer); every character in the film is murderous, and always angry. One scene shows the couple, stranded from a car accident, wandering in the forest and meeting Emily Brontë and an unnamed philosopher, a pair antithetical to the couple, full of graces and gentility. Brontë, the only character in the film that still sees beauty in rhymes and riddles, is burnt alive by the impatient couple, when she wouldn't give them directions out of the forest. 'Isn't it cruel to burn a philosopher?' the husband asks the wife. 'What do we care? She's not real anyway.' 'You know,' replies the husband. 'We are little better than her.' The only advantage that these ugly characters have over her is the fact that Godard has made them the protagonists of the film, and like them or not, they are the ones we have to watch till the end; their superiority comes only by birth (if characters are mankind, and the filmmaker is God), hence theirs is a class struggle similar to reality.

Their consciousness of this relates the underlying class struggle in every movie, film noir, horror or otherwise. The only reason why other characters die in a serial killer movie is purely random coincidence designated by the author. Whether or not the main characters are worthy of survival means nothing but for the fact that they are picked by the hand of the author to carry the story to its conclusion (although certain types of films might conform to a discernible moral code: in slasher movies the sexually promiscuous die first; Hitchcock killed his main character halfway through in Psycho and we see how shocking this effect is, even though by the code, that character deserved to die). This altogether existentialist theme comes through, especially, because the two main characters in Week End are resolutely annoying.

As in many of Godard's 60s period films, these characters know fully well that they are characters in a film, and constantly address the camera or refer to themselves as unreal. But what is 'real' anyway, when our perception of ourselves is only the relationship between how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others perceiving us? Reality - by that term encompassing self and society - as we know it, is nothing but reflections of more reflections, endlessly refracting and changing its quality as it passes through people. Although the nature of film makes it a pseudo construct, it can be also said to be a reflection when the author means it to be. If film is also a reflection of a reflection, isn't it a reality too?

The husband's comment: 'We are little better than them' makes sense when seen in this light - they might be little better than the people that are killed off, but we (the audience) are little better than anyone else in the film too. Framing this in its meta-context, when we have characters that know their innate quality (that they are merely characters), they cease to be inferior to us. In fact, these characters might even be superior to us, because they know themselves, but we - whether as individuals or as a society - including the filmmaker himself, Jean-Luc Godard, do not know ourselves. We look at the film, and the film looks back at us in utter contempt and disgust.

The film does not look at this as an absolute truth though; like many meta-films, there is a deep distrust of itself as a film. A manipulation/exploitation/distortion of image-realities is always suspect in its many (intentional or unintentional) political implications. Being a film 'aware' of itself, being a film that in parts exposes the manipulation of images through images (which, although paradoxical, might be the best means; it reminds me of Haneke's experiment in Funny Games), Week End never allows empathy with actions. In this regard, it can appear surrealistic to some extents. A scene features a frustrated concert pianist playing Mozart on a grand piano in a farmyard - his audience: a few scattered people and a whole lot of heavy farming machinery. In one long take that sweeps across the farm as it travels, people are put on the same plane as the landscape; it seems as if the audience were the steel vehicles rather than the humans.

To Godard, it is not ironic that technology has wrested the power over the world from humanity's hands. One could not easily forget the melancholic image of the wrinkled ex-film noir super spy Lemmy Caution quietly contemplating a gregarious hydraulic machine in Godard's disillusioned, information/technology-saturated Germany Year 90 Nine Zero. The product of the industrial revolution and civilization's need for some form or progress (regardless of what form) has resulted in the dominance of tools (one of which is cinema). These tools are the same weapons wielded by the Western civilization for purposes of imperialist hegemony, out of which capitalism is unleashed. Machinery, war, genocide are all poisonous waste produced by civilization (which, for argumentative purposes, we'll consider as uniquely Western).

Undoubtedly, it is a gross simplification of a complex evolution which can only point to one solution - a naive ideal of socialism (which is how I see Godard's thought to have evolved). But Godard finds a strong metaphor to express this theory, in which J.G. Ballard, and later David Cronenberg found a kinship - the car crash. It is a culmination of Western progress, ambitions, and also every form of entropy that is thrown in the way. And so Week End is littered with terrific crashes and copious amounts of blood - or, as Godard puts it, 'red paint.'


The artificiality of the image does not condone its complicity; there is nothing more political than the image. Godard intercuts a series of politically correct tableaux mixing people of different races and classes with an intertitle that accuses photography of becoming 'FAUX-TOGRAPHIE.' The fact that reality can be arranged, manipulated into a coherent reality - that is able to prolong its temporal existence - makes the image propaganda, whether or not the image itself believes in its politics. If considered on all the implications an image can make in its reality, then one cannot take the image lightly - even the placement of African and Arab characters in the film becomes charged with political meaning. It is more than a little chilling that the call-to-arms uttered by these characters in the film are the exact ones that are still being uttered today, 40 years later. In using these characters as mouthpieces for a diatribe against the West's neglect of the 'Third World', it is inevitable that we reach the other pole of this politics instead. They are reduced to symbols; tools to serve another design (in this case, Godard's design). It is perhaps, then, only socialist enough that Godard treats all his characters and designs as pure symbols.

Perhaps influenced by the situationists at the time, the film acts as one to drive people out of the cinemas; to destroy the shaded environment - the cinema - in which audiences replace spectacle for the real world. In Godard's Le Petit Soldat 7 years ago, a character might have declared that 'photography is truth, hence cinema is truth 24 frames per second,' but that ideology only seems naive now. Cinema - especially the hyperreal form of the musical, as parodied toward the end of the film - becomes a form of idealism that will forever disappoint. Equally unattainable as the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity), the political ideals of the repressed 'Third World,' musical and fantasy scenes - albeit with politics more subtly shaded - are also doomed to be corrupted by the real world. Quoting Georges Perec in Masculin Féminin, a character sighs while watching a film, 'It wasn't the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make... and secretly wanted to live.' If we attempt to replace this spectacle with reality, cinema will forever remain for us a disappointment. Hence, Godard's proclamation of 'FIN DE CINÉMA' at the end of the film is a call to subsume cinema with life, striving together for the ideal, and anticipating his purely political films with the Dziga Vertov Group.