Reinventing the everyday in the age of spectacle: Jean-Luc Godard’s artistic and political response to modernity in his early works

Abstract

Godard’s films prior to 1968 are usually received as pure experimentations of style, as if these films were little more than art-historical examples of a certain kind of avant-garde cinema. The author argues instead that Godard’s often frenzied cinematic experimentations in his early movies may be understood as reflections on the political, cultural and historical issues of France in the 1950s and 60s. In his early films, Godard engages the political and aesthetic strategy of much of French philosophy and avant-garde: the playful and often self-contradictory project of resisting the spectacles of modernity, while transforming the everyday. The author contends that this project constitutes what Jameson calls the political unconscious of Godard’s early work. To sketch this unconscious, the author refers to the larger context in which philosophers, cultural critics and filmmakers take issue with notions of the everyday, spectacle, style, resistance, festivity, consumerism, as well as with the signs of postwar modernity such as cars, modern households, traffic, polls and movies.