What Has Come to Pass for Cinema in Late Godard

Abstract

It might be useful to consider Godarďs career as if it followed a somewhat disordered, almost reversed chronology than the transition from modernism to postmodernism. By this view, Godard's early films would be the properly postmodernist work, indulging in pure pastiche, working almost exclusively with surface play, chance, the fragmented and decentered subject, as well as reveling in the dedifferentiation of the categories of mass culture and high art. The euphoric celebrations of Westerns and films noir in his articles for Cahiers du anema would fit nicely with such a characterization, and the later remakes of his early work (the Hollywood version of Breathless with Richard Gere) as well as the focus of his contemporary postmodern followers on the films of the early sixties (Quentin Tarantino's obsession with the early Godard, most notably emblematized in the naming of his production company after Bande a part) would seemingly offer support for this periodization as well. Paradoxically, then, Godard's early period would usher in a political moment, an impulse thought to have been vacated in the postmodern. This moment of modernist engagement would be followed by his experiments with video and television, a medium chronologically much newer than cinema that would lead him into the past. For oddly enough, video would spawn the rebirth of cin-