Perspective: Godard’s latest film goes largely unseen in L.A.

Jean-Luc Godard, in one of his countless musings on the love of his life, once said: “The cinema is halfway. We go halfway and the audience meets us halfway. But we have to agree that we need a meeting point. … The image is a meeting point.”

The words are from 1981, and since then the two sides have been meeting less and less frequently. Like the late periods of John Coltrane and Miles Davis in jazz, late Godard will never enjoy the appeal of his early classic era. Many devotees of classic Godard view the subsequent films as artistic solipsism. They wonder whether Godard long ago lost interest in meeting his audience halfway, or even, in his famous contrarianism, was willfully fleeing in the other direction.

With the arrival of his latest feature, “Film Socialisme,” this estrangement has reached a new nadir. The film, which debuted at Cannes last year and had its U.S. premiere in New York on June 3, has not opened in Los Angeles. Except for the odd one-off screening (at the 2010 AFI festival and this May at UCLA) it hasn’t shown here. The nonprofit Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre is planning a limited run, though no date has been set.

Considering that the filmmaker is now 80, and reportedly in declining health, possibly the last feature of his extraordinary career will not get a proper airing. Given Godard’s residence these days beyond the outermost reaches of contemporary concerns, this is perhaps not bewildering. But it is dispiriting. Not only because it is the great Godard, but because “Film Socialisme,” for anyone willing to make the effort to meet him halfway — and, to be sure, the thicket is dense to the point of daunting — is rewarding in ways that few movies are.

It is not only a laudable new work from an aging master, it is often gorgeous and moving, and ultimately exhilarating, not least because of its piercing glimmer of optimism — yes, optimism — that shines through the thicket. A three-part meditation on a culture corrupt and adrift, embodied by a bloated vacation cruise ship on the Mediterranean, the film ultimately is buoyed by the wonder in its images, by its humor, and by the tender and stubborn idealism of youth at its heart.

Art-house auteur

It is no secret that so-called art-house films have had a difficult time finding a home in L.A. lately. But this is Godard. Like him or loathe him, it would be difficult to name an active filmmaker who has had more influence on the art or whose work continues to examine the art with more intelligence and vigor.

That should be enough to book the Nuart for a week. “For Ever Mozart” opened in L.A. in 1997 with an exclusive engagement at the Nuart, as did “In Praise of Love” in 2002 and “Notre Musique” in 2004. Despite the contraction of suitable L.A. venues, the Nuart remains true to its mission of offering bold and often essential programming. It plans a fall screening of a new print of 1967’s “Week End.” “But as far as Godard goes,” says longtime film buyer Mark Valen, “that’s where my sights are set right now.”

Valen noted that Godard’s films of the last 15 years or so have not performed well at the box office, nor have they made much of an impression on him. In a recent conversation, he did not recall that Godard’s last two features had premiered locally at the Nuart. As for “Film Socialisme,” Valen said he doubted it could sustain enough business for a one-week run — the Nuart’s usual engagement. “But I always want to be open-minded, so I looked at it. And I really didn’t care for the picture.”

Greg Laemmle of Laemmle Theatres, the only other commercial destination in L.A. for off-off-Hollywood films, said he expressed interest in screening “Film Socialisme,” but could not arrive at a mutually agreeable financial arrangement with the film’s U.S. distributor, Kino Lorber.

The box office numbers thus far have been woeful. For its U.S. premiere week, June 3-9, on a single screen in New York, “Film Socialisme” grossed $9,666, less than 66 other films that week, according to the website Box Office Mojo. To date, its total domestic take is $31,239. In France, its gross last year was only a bit better — $76,890.

For any film deemed to be from the fringes, the only salvation are the nonprofit theaters, such as Cinefamily, which this year rescued the wonderful, off-kilter “Dogtooth” from local blackout. Hadrian Belove, Cinefamily’s head programmer, said he expects to screen “Film Socialisme” at some point, though not for a weeklong run, like last week’s showing in Spokane, Wash. (Spokane?) Most likely, it will screen as a part of a Godard retrospective, he said.

In the meantime, the only way for an Angeleno to see the film is to purchase a European DVD copy, which is viewable only on an all-region DVD player.

Although Godard has had similar troubles before, the current situation signals an ominous turning point in moviemaking’s age-old warfare between commerce and expression — a subject Godard has confronted in films from “Contempt” to “In Praise of Love.” The bottom line has long exerted a form of censorship in Western cinema, tailoring a filmmaker’s finished work to better suit the public taste — generally for the worse.

In recent decades, the reins have tautened on directorial opportunity as well as liberty, resulting in a flattening of the flavor and quality of the movies. There was surely a Golden Age of cinema, and if our time is not the Dark Ages, it is defined by an overabundance of mediocrity. And now, even the few shining lights emanating from beyond the beaten path, as well as many interesting curios, are increasingly lost to those who would seek them out.

In such a forbidding milieu, the matter of Godard’s estrangement from audience becomes fatal. It surely appears that way for “Film Socialisme,” which a general audience will find less fathomable than “In Praise of Love” or “Notre Musique.” Like many of Godard’s works, it interweaves its narrative with a dizzying multitude of images, sounds, intertitles and quotations, but in this case they are wound so thickly as to frequently suffocate its plot and ideas.

The filmmaker makes this even more challenging for English-speaking audiences by rendering the mostly French dialogue in a clipped-phrase subtitling that he refers to (hilariously) as “Navajo English,” as in the way “Injuns” tended to speak in American westerns. A sample, transcribing a character’s monologue: “people ignore other / wars everywhere / ourselves mirror / love yourselves silly / no harm other / law or treason / donot love us.”

On this count, Cinefamily’s Belove expressed an understandable exasperation: “This is not someone who is going out of his way to attract an English-speaking audience.”

Or as one wiseacre on the Internet described his experience watching the film: “Many people leave. We stay end. Notsure why.”

Explorations in film

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Godard’s classic period of the 1960s, which covers a furious succession of films from “Breathless” to “Week End,” has few equals in the canon, and its audience appeal has only grown. Classic Godard yielded to modern Godard with the collective experiments under the name the Dziga Vertov Group, followed in the 1970s by more experiments, this time with the new technology of video. By the 1980s Godard had returned to film, and he has assiduously explored the art of the motion picture in various media ever since.

Along the way, he lost his audience. For those who would argue he lost it by his own intransigence, it must be answered that the vast majority of today’s audience is disinclined to approach any film that is the least bit challenging.

“Film Socialisme” does not eschew a meeting point. Quite the opposite. It places Godard’s conviction of the image as meeting point front and center: Not all of the plot, nor all the ideas, nor all of the dialogue, will be conveyed. They will not be inscrutable, but neither will they be clearly delineated. This is cinema, after all, and in the beginning was the image. Godard returns to cinema’s origins, while employing the latest equipment — an array of video formats, from glorious HD to noxious low-fi — and offers a dream for a way forward: For cinema, and for Western culture.

The title suggests an invitation for the viewer to participate in the experience of the image. The “Navajo” subtitles are not an affront to that stance, but an encouragement. They convey the idea expressed in monologue or dialogue, yet the viewer is liberated from the intractable foreign-film problem of reading the lines on the screen at the expense of absorbing the image. Plenty is lost — details of plot, specificity of ideas, nuance of language — but plenty is gained in return for the viewer willing to participate.

Modern Godard is populated with movies that are part novel and part essay, with the novel often giving way to essay. This time, both ultimately give way to poetry. Many of the images are like brilliantly painted landscapes and still lifes, but, thanks to the technology used to paint them, images of a kind we’ve never seen before, like Fauvism for the electronic age. But there’s more than beauty. The lo-fi video and lower-fi sound are employed with ferocity to depict scenes from a contemporary vacation at sea as unbearably garish. The effect is startling and familiar.

The film title also suggests a dream for Western democracy, not reviving an old one, but dreaming it anew. This is achieved by making children the moral center of the film. While their parents offer grim assessments of the way things are, the (admittedly precocious) children’s questions demand answers about forging a democracy that embodies its professed ideals of liberty, egalitarianism, humanity, dignity.

The film rightly offers no clear prescription for transforming the dire state of Western democracy into something worthy of the children’s queries. But it dares to look for a way out, for us, and for cinema. This is not to say that the way out for cinema is to reject storytelling. But if cinema is to rekindle the kind of storytelling capable of making one fall in love alone in the dark, it must rediscover the image. It must dream again.

john.penner@latimes.com