Essay Five: The Dead End — Godard and the Price of Absolute Commitment
This essay is part of Chameleons or Charlatans: The Art of Reinvention — a series examining artistic reinvention across the twentieth century through six figures, the cultural theory that illuminates them, and the question of whether what they did is still possible. Each essay stands alone. The series opens with The Invitation.
Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930 to a French-Swiss doctor and a mother from a wealthy Huguenot banking family. He grew up, by all accounts, pampered and secure — shuttling between Paris and Switzerland, lodging with members of the cultural elite through family connections, failing his baccalauréat and returning to Switzerland, then back to Paris and the Sorbonne, nominally to study ethnology, actually to haunt the Cinémathèque Française and argue about films with a group of young men who would between them change the history of cinema. When his family cut off his allowance in 1951 — exasperated, finally, by his refusal to do anything conventionally useful — he supported himself by stealing. From friends. From relatives. From the Cahiers du Cinéma office where he was beginning to publish criticism. François Truffaut, who knew him as well as anyone and loved him for years before the love curdled into something else entirely, would later say in a letter of spectacular fury: you pretend to be poor when in reality you were the wealthiest of our circle.
This is the man who would become the most uncompromising political filmmaker of the twentieth century. The class origin is not incidental. It is the engine.
Part One: The New Wave and What It Was
The French New Wave is one of those cultural movements that retrospectively acquires a coherence it never quite had at the time. The group of young critics clustered around Cahiers du Cinéma in the early 1950s — Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol — shared a contempt for what they called the cinema of quality, the respectable, literary, well-crafted French films of the postwar period that they found aesthetically dead and politically evasive. They wanted a cinema that moved like life moved — handheld, immediate, location-shot, improvised, formally restless. And they wanted a cinema that belonged to the director rather than the scriptwriter or the studio — hence the politique des auteurs, the idea that the director is the film’s true author, whose sensibility is visible in every shot regardless of the material.
Godard’s contribution to this manifesto was Breathless in 1960. Shot in four weeks on a tiny budget with a handheld camera, it achieved something that almost no debut feature achieves — it didn’t just announce a new director but a new way of making films. The jump cut, the direct address to camera, the refusal of conventional continuity editing, the mixture of genre thriller and philosophical digression — all of it arriving with such confidence and such energy that its commercial success was almost beside the point. It made over two million admissions in France. Godard had not just made a film. He had written a grammar.
The fourteen features that followed between 1961 and 1967 — often two or three a year, at a velocity that is almost incomprehensible — constitute what critics have called simply the most astonishing run in cinema history. Contempt. Alphaville. Pierrot le Fou. Two or Three Things I Know About Her. And at the end of the run, Weekend — the film that declared the end of cinema as Godard had practised it, a bourgeois apocalypse on a French motorway that ends with a title card reading FIN DE CINÉMA, and which Godard later described as the last film he made before the revolution. He was not speaking metaphorically.
What is essential to understand about this period — and what the standard account of the New Wave as aesthetic revolution tends to underplay — is that it was also always a political project, even when the politics were subterranean. The auteur theory is not a neutral aesthetic position. The claim that the director’s vision is sovereign — that the film belongs to the person behind the camera — is an argument about authority and its location. Godard would spend the second half of his career systematically dismantling exactly that authority — recognising, eventually, that what he had helped construct was a form of power that reproduced the structures he claimed to oppose. The man who invented the auteur’s power then spent thirty years arguing it was a form of oppression.
Part Two: May 1968 and the Rupture
The events of May 1968 in France — the student uprising, the general strike, the ten million workers who stopped work simultaneously — affected different people differently. Truffaut was moved but returned to making the kind of humanist films he had always made. Godard was detonated.
He later said that everything he had made before 1968 was bourgeois cinema — technically inventive, formally interesting, and politically complicit with the system it appeared to critique. Breathless was not a revolutionary film. It was a fashionable film that the culture industry had absorbed and celebrated and sold as a poster. The jump cut had become a technique. The auteur had become a brand.
Marcuse would recognise this immediately. The culture industry doesn’t suppress the avant-garde. It digests it.
Godard’s response was the most extreme available. He would stop making films in the conventional sense entirely. He would dissolve his own authorship into a collective. He would make films that could not be recuperated because they could not be consumed. The result was the Dziga Vertov Group, formed in 1969 with the young Maoist filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, named after the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker who had theorised a cinema of pure fact against the manipulations of conventional narrative.
The films they made — Pravda, Wind from the East, Vladimir and Rosa, Letter to Jane — are genuinely extraordinary objects. They are also, by any conventional measure of what films are for, almost completely unwatchable. Didactic voiceovers layered over disconnected images. Brechtian interruptions that prevent any possibility of identification or pleasure. The human drama — the thing that cinema had been built to deliver — systematically refused at every turn.
Not everyone was convinced that this refusal was either necessary or intellectually coherent. Ingmar Bergman — whose own formal rigour and seriousness put him beyond any suspicion of philistinism — described Godard’s films as constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead, made for the critics rather than for cinema. Mind-numbingly boring was his verdict on Masculin Féminin, shot in Sweden in 1966. Orson Welles, who acknowledged Godard’s gifts as a director as enormous and his influence as definitive, nevertheless told Peter Bogdanovich that he simply could not take him seriously as a thinker — and that this was precisely where they differed, since Godard took himself very seriously as a thinker indeed. David Thomson reached the same conclusion from a different direction: the visual intelligence was real and inescapable, the politics childish and pretentious.
Three serious people. Three variations on the same charge. They have a point. Because the possibility that the Dziga Vertov period was less the logical consequence of genuine intellectual commitment and more the director overreaching into territory where the thinker couldn’t follow — that possibility is exactly what the chameleon/charlatan question demands. Godard took himself seriously as a thinker. Welles thought he was wrong to do so. The Truffaut letter suggests Truffaut agreed with Welles. And the films themselves leave the question genuinely open.
Here is the self-contradiction at the centre of the entire Dziga Vertov period, stated plainly rather than implied. Godard argued that cinema was a form of bourgeois ideological violence — that every conventional film, however politically sympathetic its intentions, reproduced the conditions of passivity and false consciousness that capitalism required. The logical conclusion of this argument is that a filmmaker who believed it should stop making films. Godard did not stop making films. He made films about the impossibility of making films that weren’t complicit in the system he was critiquing, while remaining complicit in that system, while making films. Whether this is the record of genuine intellectual commitment working itself out under impossible conditions, or the record of a director who had confused himself with a philosopher — we leave that unresolved. As Godard himself would have insisted we should.
What is not in doubt is the cost. What remains genuinely open is whether the cost produced anything that meets the standard this series has set — not just formal rupture, but rupture that left the field different, that generated a surplus the culture industry had to reckon with rather than simply ignore. The Dziga Vertov films were not recuperated. They were not absorbed and neutralised. They were simply not received. Which is either the purest form of resistance or the most complete form of failure. Probably both. And probably the distinction matters less than it should.
Part Three: The Cost
What the Dziga Vertov period actually cost Godard was everything. Not gradually, as with Stravinsky losing the serialists or Miles losing the jazz establishment. All at once, and by design. His commercial career ended. His marriage to Anne Wiazemsky collapsed. He was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. He grew increasingly isolated. According to his biographer Antoine de Baecque, he grew disillusioned with the unrealistic idealism of Maoism and attempted suicide twice.
Twice. The man who had made Weekend to show what bourgeois society does to people found himself living the wreckage he had filmed.
Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had built the Dziga Vertov collective alongside Godard and described its films as mad films, love films, political films — where the subject matter of the film is being transformed into the flesh and blood of the film — later moved to California, made his own quieter and more personal work, and reflected on the period with a complexity Godard’s own accounts never quite achieved. His recollection of a joint interview during the period gives the flavour of the lived reality underneath the theoretical apparatus. Godard, prevented from taking an afternoon nap by strange voices in an adjoining hotel room, slipped a piece of paper reading Revolution till Victory under the offending door. The revolutionary irritated by noise. The absolute commitment and the ordinary human need for sleep occupying the same afternoon. Gorin tells this story without malice and without quite resolving what it means. Neither can we.
And then there is the Truffaut letter — the stranger-than-fiction scene that makes the cost concrete and personal. In 1973 Godard saw Day for Night, Truffaut’s Oscar-winning film about filmmaking — warm, humanist, celebratory of cinema as collaborative love and craft. He sent Truffaut a four-page letter. It began: yesterday I saw Day for Night. Probably no one else will call you a liar, so I will.
Truffaut’s response — and it exists, published, extraordinary — called Godard a poseur, a shit, the wealthiest of their circle pretending to poverty. The letter also references an incident involving language directed at a Jewish producer — Truffaut’s own framing describes it as political grandstanding rather than genuine hatred, though two biographers have documented the incident as part of a troubling pattern. The question is unresolved and the essay does not resolve it. What it demonstrates is that by 1973 the most important friendship in French cinema had ended in mutual contempt. The revolution had consumed its own.
Part Four: The Return and the Late Work
Godard returned to something recognisable as conventional filmmaking with Sauve qui peut la vie in 1980. Not a return to the New Wave. Not a continuation of the Dziga Vertov project. Something else: a cinema of fragments, of essayistic associations, of images placed in relationships that generated meaning without determining it. Formally experimental but no longer doctrinaire. Politically serious but no longer ideologically servile.
The centrepiece of the late work is Histoire(s) du cinéma — four and a half hours of video essay made through the 1980s and 1990s in his apartment in Rolle, Switzerland, alone with his editing equipment. A journey through cinema’s first century using found footage, personal memory, literary quotation, philosophical digression, and a visual intelligence so dense and so associative that it resists summary the way a dream resists summary. It is either the greatest film essay ever made or an impenetrable act of solipsism. Critics have been arguing about this since its completion. The argument is itself evidence of its importance.
What it represents in the context of this series is the only available answer to the dead end. Godard could not go back to the New Wave. He could not continue the Dziga Vertov project. He found, eventually, a form — the essay film, the video collage, the image in dialogue with other images rather than in service of a narrative — that could contain his contradictions without resolving them. Not a synthesis. A practice. Something you do rather than something you conclude.
Part Five: The Dead End and What It Means
Here is what Godard’s story tells us that none of the others quite do.
The reinvention argument — the costly leap, the refusal of the accumulated self — has a limit. Godard found it. The limit is the point at which the political logic of the artistic position makes the artistic position impossible. A filmmaker who has argued that cinema is a form of bourgeois ideological violence cannot make films without contradiction. He made them anyway, for sixty years, and the contradiction was the engine. But it was also the wound that never healed.
There is something Nietzschean in this — the messianic zeal of absolute commitment, the will to commitment without an object worthy of it, the faith that survives the death of its God. Godard’s Maoism was wrong — about Mao, about China, about the revolutionary subject. But the commitment it produced was genuine. The motive doesn’t invalidate the act. It just requires sincerity about where it comes from. The class guilt, the Swiss banking family background, the stealing from friends — these are the origins of a political commitment that nearly destroyed him. The commitment was real. So was the damage.
The conditions that made his absolute commitment possible have since been dismantled. Not all at once and not by design. The institutional thickness of French state cultural funding that could sustain uncommercial work. The art house cinema circuit within which unwatchable films were at least legible as a serious position. The ideological framework within which Maoist filmmaking made sense as a response to a real historical situation rather than a historical embarrassment. All of it gone. Structurally, incrementally, through the same political economy that Harvey traces across every other cultural institution. The dead end is not only personal. It is historical.
After Godard, the road runs out in a specific and historical sense. Not because nobody has the courage — though the courage required was extraordinary and the cost was everything. But because the argument he followed to its limit required conditions that no longer exist. The dead end is this essay’s contribution to the series: not a cautionary tale but a marker. This is how far the logic went. This is what it cost. This is where the road stopped.
He died on 13 September 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland. Assisted suicide, legal in Switzerland. He had multiple invalidating conditions and had decided, with the deliberateness he brought to every other decision in his life, that this was the appropriate ending. The auteur who spent sixty years arguing that every image is an ethical choice made the final ethical choice with the same seriousness he brought to every frame he ever shot.
The last cut. His own. Nobody else’s.
Key Works
Breathless (1960) — the grammar: the jump cut, the handheld, the new way of making films that became a film school syllabus within a decade.
Contempt (1963) — the commercial peak: Bardot, Palance, Fritz Lang, the last film that played entirely by the rules Godard was about to destroy.
Weekend (1967) — FIN DE CINÉMA: the bourgeois apocalypse, the declaration of war on the cinema he had made, the last film before the revolution.
Wind from the East (1970) — the Dziga Vertov period at its most extreme: unwatchable by design, the self-contradiction made film.
Sauve qui peut la vie (1980) — the return: neither the New Wave nor the Maoist period, something genuinely new made possible only by the destruction that preceded it.
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) — the summation: four and a half hours alone in Rolle with the editing equipment, the only available answer to the dead end.
At Home He Feels Like A Tourist 
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