Godard's involvement with the revolutionary forces of both France and America is well documented. At the end of filming One Plus One on the Stones, he punched producer Quarrier for releasing the alternate cut Sympathy for the Devil.
Work with Pennebaker (of Monterey) on One American Movie involved interviewing a Black Panther, Rip Torn as an American Indian and footage of Jefferson Airplane on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel in New York (where Balin was arrested and Slick danced nude.) He found himself unable to complete editing, and it was later released by Pennebaker as One Parallel Movie.
A fatal side-issue was Jean Seberg's (Breathless) involvement with the Black Panthers, which led to her being followed by CIA agents and apparent suicide.
These signs of artistic involvement are what are conspicuously absent in today's demoralised social-media-political nemesis. Grace Slick once pointed a gun at a cop who had intruded into her home, musically commemorated in
Both Slick and Linda Perry (of Deep Dark Robot) are well outside of the clubbishness of the social trends of now (Knock me Out being their sole duet on Perry's solo debut In Flight.)
Perry's video for 'Speck' has a dark finesse of the psyche that has New Wave traits (shooting her face then reverse-shooting her feet; shooting into the sun..) The psyches of people who appear to act contrary to the norms of modernity have things in common.
'It hurts far too much to be dead' has a Byronic quality that comes from a dark psyche of the underworld (bestial decadence a la Noto.) If Perry seems a miserable dike, this quote from Godard is a like one, referring to a sombre image as a young boy.
I was already in mourning for myself, my sole companion, and I suspected my soul had stumbled on the body and that it had left again without offering its hand.
For Jean-Luc, the mourning seems to for a scary future. Again, this has a Byronic sound, as for example this from Manfred (set in the Swiss Alps, natch.)
And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften'd down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill'd up,
As 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old, -
The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns. 'Twas such a night!
(Act 3, scene 4)
The soaring crags and pitliess chasms echo Manfred's unspoken sorrow (related to Byron's physical love for his half-sister Augusta Leigh.) The future has become insufferable emptiness.
The Gothic sensibility you could say is pessimistic, but honestly so in that the human psyche has insufferable needs that are not part of an ordered universe.
A Cartesian world of mechanistic perspective coordinates leads inevitably to inconsistencies, in that a purely ordered universe has zero content (expression or physical applied to psyche.)
The strewn stars; the myths of Man; the spontaneous element without which all will be lost. Lost to the hyper-real illusion of Relativity space we are currently inside, bizarrely variable in time, unlike a spinning-top (Earth).
The physical greatness - the Swiss Alps, the Black Hills of Dakota - reflect on human yearnings and expressions of anguish in a meaningful universe. Manfred is a climber; he meets a chamois hunter; the Indians were hunters in their day.
The physicality that relates to human psyche is another strong connection to JLG. During filming of Prénom Carmen (1983), he made it clear to the performers he wanted the physical motion of natural behaviour rather than psychological interplay. One of the actors recalls,
If we tried to understand, to analyze the character's psychology, Godard got angry, he stopped us at once. He said that destroyed expression, which should remain intuitive and free.
Similarly for Hail Mary, with Myriem Roussel.
'He picked me up every day by car, and would talk to me, to put me in the state of mind for the scene we were going to shoot. It might be gentle, it might be violent. He wanted to put me in the state of acting for the first time.'
In the end he got what he wanted. By avoiding traditional actor direction and wearing her down through numerous retakes, Godard removed any trace of theatrical expression from Roussel's performance and returned her to the completely naturalist presence she had when he first saw her.
The truth of such a performance - somewhat like Raducanu or Bruce Lee - is in the physical spontaneity that reveals a state of mind.
So, essentially he is trying to integrate the physical and the psyche. Where the head becomes separated from the body, the invidious ego becomes dominant.
The head is inevitably attracted to logical areas that are essentially illusory. We live in a world of words that promote this sad state of affairs.
To take a prime example, 'Darwin' is not so much a theory as an iconic word. This point was made inadvertently by the animated X-Men episode 'Descent', featuring Mr Sinister in the days of the Iconic naturalist
During a lecture, Darwin denied Sinister's obsessions, but the impression one gets is that the affable Darwin represents the reason denying the warped ego of Sinister (his alter ego.)
The ego homes-in on experimental logic, while it's obvious that evolution can only take place in a jungle-like environment of predator-prey relationships. In this scenario, muscles guide the bones, and the psyche is attached to the world (in fear, rage, caution, loyalty, need.) Power and balance are the orders of the day.
The Darwin/Sinister dichotomy is much like Jekyll and Hyde; one is hidden but begins to dominate the rational one. A warped descent is the conclusion.
Sitting on the Western sofa, the head is dissociated, ego-lust predominates,news saturates. Future-optimism denies the physical degredations that are invaluable for the psyche and inspire a state of revival.
