Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
Like most of Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) and JLG by JLG (subtitled December Self-Portrait, 1994) are annexes to his Histoire(s) du cinema, a work on video in multiple parts scheduled to premiere in its finished form at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland in early August. (Four portions of this video have already shown at the Film Center.) Like the various parts of Histoire(s) du cinema, these films (each about an hour long and being shown together at Facets Multimedia) are above all collections of carefully arranged quotations–interwoven anthologies of extracts from prose, poetry, philosophy, films, musical works, paintings. They differ from Godard’s magnum opus in that they’re films rather than videos and in their juxtaposition of quotations and exquisitely framed landscapes, German in Germany and Swiss in JLG. But like the videos they’re more hermetic personal essays about the modern world than narratives in any ordinary sense. These rich tapestries of rumination essentially invite us to listen to Godard talking to himself, and they resemble each other in that they’re probably the two most Germanic and melancholy films he’s produced since the 60s.
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Germany Year 90 Nine Zero in particular harks back to Godard’s Alphaville (1965)–the most Germanic by far of his 60s movies–by focusing on that movie’s lead character, Lemmy Caution, played by the same actor, Eddie Constantine. Paradoxically Constantine is American by origin and French by association: born in Los Angeles, he was a protege of Edith Piaf and became a nightclub singer in Paris. In 1953 he began appearing in French action thrillers as Lemmy Caution, the hard-living American private-eye hero of Peter Cheyney mysteries. By the time Godard appropriated Constantine and his character for Alphaville–a SF pastiche shot in contemporary Paris but set in a distant galaxy–Caution was something of a camp cliche, but Godard used his weary machismo to suggest tragedy as well as parody. Shot in very-high-contrast black and white, Alphaville took shape as a complex meditation on the German expressionist cinema of the 20s: it’s densely packed with references to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films and Metropolis, and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, and Faust, as well as subsequent expressionist works like Cocteau’s Orpheus, Orson Welles’s The Trial, and various American comic strips. In Alphaville Caution is a spy from the “outer lands” of contemporary culture, posing as a reporter for “Figaro-Pravda” (the “Times-Pravda” in the English-dubbed version), moving through the nightmarishly depersonalized, computerized labyrinth of Paris/Alphaville like a skeptical primitive, embodying nostalgic reactions and stances from popular culture. (A discarded subtitle for the movie was “Tarzan vs. IBM.”)
The references to German expressionist films also remind us of Alphaville, of course. As Lemmy Caution passes a bridge, the narrator says, “Once I was across the frontier, the shadows came to greet me”–a direct allusion to a famous intertitle in Murnau’s Nosferatu (“When he reached the other side of the bridge, the phantoms came to greet him”) that was praised by the father of surrealism, Andre Breton. At the end of Germany, Caution finally arrives at a Berlin hotel in a sequence that pointedly echoes the opening of Alphaville, when Caution arrives at a Paris hotel. The narrator says, “And yet the last man still went about his task,” a reference to Murnau’s The Last Laugh, which is titled “The Last Man” in German and French. In Alphaville a camera movement through the hotel’s revolving door alludes to the Murnau film, but here Godard includes a clip of Emil Jannings as the doorman in The Last Laugh helping people out of a cab, making the reference even more explicit.
A home movie in the most literal sense, and one that Godard explicitly calls “self-portrait–not autobiography,” JLG by JLG has the drawback of suggesting Goethe contemplating his own bust. (A powerful figure like Constantine breaks a movie out of Godard’s mind and into the larger world.) The ideas are every bit as rich and provocative as one would expect in a Godard film, and the sounds and images are every bit as beautiful (lonely snowscapes and choppy waves on Lake Geneva predominate), but the sadness and self-absorption have a cumulative oppressive effect. Even when the movie makes jokes, and good ones at that–“Europe has memories, America has T-shirts”–they aren’t very lighthearted. And when Godard cites the title I Am Legend, taken from a pulp novel by Richard Matheson, to comment on his sense of his own celebrity, the gesture seems arch and strained, neither clearly ironic nor clearly self-congratulatory.
