Godard as we had never seen him

BarcelonaThe challenge was a big one: to put together an exhibition about the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), "one of the most relevant visual artists and thinkers about the image of the last hundred years". This is how Manuel Asín describes it, the curator of the exhibition Jean-Luc Godard. The fraternity of images, which can be visited at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge from March 28 to October 4. One of the challenges was to explain Godard in such a way that the exhibition "served as an introduction" to the director of films such as Breathless and Contempt, that it was not just a tour for specialists, that it avoided banal fetishism, and that it allowed for an understanding of the life and work of a mutant and often contradictory thinker. Another challenge has to do with Barcelona, a city where not long ago the CCCB successfully programmed, with public and critical acclaim, an exemplary exhibition about Agnès Varda, another pioneer of the Nouvelle Vague.

Well, Manuel Asín, who was the artistic director of the Punto de Vista Festival in Pamplona, has taken on the challenge with discernment and ambition, true to his own well-documented point of view. In total, nearly 400 pieces in different formats (films, photographs, audios, work collages, books), gathered with the collaboration of the Jean-Luc Godard Foundation. The result, Godard as we had never seen him before, is very interesting, very much so as an author's exhibition that unfolds a whole visual, political and philosophical universe in fifteen rooms, practically the entire first floor of the Palau de la Virreina. There is a chronological path, and a lot of audiovisual material to dedicate all the time in the world to, but the exhibition is not a slave to dates and facts. It is not so much an exhibition about Godard's films as an exhibition about how Godard thought and worked, and about how the great political and moral conflicts of the 20th century permeate his work: the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the extermination camps, the colonial/liberation wars in Algeria, Indochina and Palestine, the war in the Balkans...

"War is a very relevant angle in Jean-Luc Godard," says the curator. This angle explains that the images from the filming of Breathless that appear in one room were not chosen to talk about the film, but to emphasize that the author of the photographs is Raymond Cauchetier, a war reporter in Indochina, like Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer of Godard's first short film, Operation 'Béton' (1954-1955), about the construction of a dam in Switzerland. The same happens in the next room, dedicated to the feature film The Little Soldier (1963): the focus is on Godard's decision to address the Algerian War by showing the tortures practiced by the Algerian Liberation Front, which led to him being criticized from the left by Jacques Rivette, another Nouvelle Vague colleague. It should be said that the film, shot in 1960, also bothered Jean-Marie Le Pen, then a deputy and later leader of the French far-right, and its release was postponed for a couple of years, once the war was over. "French colonial wars mark Godard's first films, and they lead him to open up to broader thematic reflections," recalls Asín.

In this room about The Little Soldier there is also a postcard that Godard wrote to François Truffaut and an audio by Roberto Rossellini in which the Italian director explains the play that served as inspiration for the film The Carabineers (1963). However, the exhibition establishes few explicit connections with other contemporary filmmakers, except for collaborators like Anne-Marie Miéville; indeed, it recalls Godard's interest in constructing a cinematic genealogy (with names like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, for example). Also left out of focus is the relationship with actresses like Anna Karina, who was the protagonist of The Little Soldier and many other films, or Brigitte Bardot, the star of the masterpiece Contempt (1963), and with actors like Jean-Paul Belmondo, the iconic hero of Breathless and Pierrot le Fou (1965).

In no case is it an overwhelming off-screen (and it can be consulted in the book Thinking Between Images which has just been published by Contra), because the exhibition has many points of interest, such as the room titled Fighting on Two Fronts, "the aesthetic and the political." It is one of the best spaces in the exhibition. On opposite walls, the tracking shots from Week-end (1967) and Everything's Fine (1972) are projected, the same technique applied with different political purposes, and in the middle there is all kinds of material "disorderly ordered" about the impact of May '68, a turning point in Godard's career, both for the immediate radicalization and for the doors to self-criticism it subsequently opened. It is inevitable to think of the Maoist Godard who despised the Prague Spring and avoided criticism of Soviet ossification.

"Godard is far from perfect, but he valued criticism a lot," says Asín, who to verify the importance of Godardian self-criticism urges us to visit the room on Palestine, where Godard himself questioned the way of "filming war head-on" and, in general, the way of looking at the world. War, again, as in the section titled Bolero fatal, where the short film Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) can be seen. The Balkan wars of the nineties also affected Godard, and, as Asín points out, they are present in Histoire(s) du cinéma, one of the great projects of a filmmaker who believed with conviction in cinema's capacity to explain history. The exhibition speaks of this in the central rooms, with a very well-designed exhibition device for looking and thinking.

In the tour through La Virreina, there is also the Godard "journalist and photoreporter" for far-left publications like J'accuse (again with an off-screen element: his work as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma), and the one who, together with Anne Marie Miéville, "advised the government of the People's Republic of Mozambique", in the late seventies, when the country faced decolonization immersed in a civil war. The Godard who thinks through image collages is not missing, the montage artist who relates images and concepts and who plunders the digital archive to dissect history.

When you reach the end, the installation on the film The Image Book (2018), it is not strange to want to return to the beginning, to the room that opens the way to the exhibition, where the Barcelona fragment of Film Socialism (2010) is projected and images from Espoir, Sierra de Teruel, the film by André Malraux and Boris Peskine about the Spanish Civil War, can be seen; it is here that the key lies that explains the title of the exhibition: The Fraternity of Metaphors. It is a phrase that the critic André Bazin wrote in his review of Espoir, and which, as Manuel Asín says, "explains the connection between Malraux's images and those of France's colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina". Here, the curator pinpoints the core of Jean-Luc Godard's work and thought.