Just as, in my opinion at least, one should read the novels of Ernest Hemingway in the context of his life, one should watch the films of Goddard with one eye on the context of the new wave. This was a very interesting period in the short history of film making: it was an effort to break away from Hollywood’s firm grip on the industry. Both financially and aesthetically, mainstream Hollywood film-makers ruled the roost, so in the early sixties European film-makers like Godard and Trufaut set about making a new type of film, just as Llars von Trier did much later with Dogme.

One need only to go to the local cinema to see that both thesse projects failed – the Hollywood high-concept movie, with it’s emphasis on visual spectacle, is virtually the only thing on our screens. No doubt this was in large part due to finance, but I am also beginning to suspect that aesthetics played a part in the downfall of the new wave too.

This morning I watched pierrot le fou by Godard. It was the first new-wave film which I managed to watch properly, and it seemed very alien and disjointed. Having said that, it went some way to confirming the ideas of Christian Metz in that, dispite its disjointedness, it remained readable, suggesting that film cannot be a language. However, the ‘grammar’ Godard employs (and I use the term loosely, as filmic grammar is a highly complex subject; it is a very ethereal entity) is rather odd. He seems to play with ideas of character and time, so that the viewer never quite knows what is going on, or which part of the story he is watching. Indeed, the film is about two people fleeing through France, but I personally was never quite sure what they had supposedly done. It was clear that they had done this deed at a party at the beginning of the film, but this party was being filmed in such aa way – with the film suddenly being shot through red or blue lenses at random intervals, that it was virtually impossible to tell what was happening.

Moreover, Godard seems to like cutting to seemingly random events, like men telling stories of how they woo their girlfriends. He also played with the soundtrack, so music would cut off suddenly. For one raised on the seemless editing of the Hollywood mainstream, this was all very disconcerting.

The effect of all this, I think it fair to say, is comic. It put me in mind of the Monty Python films, and there is no doubt that Godard intended to be funny. While I see no problem with this, it begs the question of why Gilliam is not ranked along side Godard. The answer, of course, is one of legacy: through being comic, Godard experimented with editing. To him, we owe much of the grammar of film – for example, the jump cut is largely attributed to him. Things that Godard created and experimented with were later taken up by the mainstream. Things as trivial today as location shooting were then unheard of in Hollywood.

To our eyes, French New Wave films seem alien; they aren’t part of our regular viewing diets. Yet, without them – without the techniques their directors pioneered the modern cinema would barely exist as we know it.