Briefly explain filmmaker Jean Luc Goddard’s narrative style

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. Godard considered himself an “essayist” producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, he filmed those essays.
2. Godard’s cinematic essays are a frontal attack on the dominance of classical cinema. “The Americans are good at storytelling,” he noted, “the French are not. Flaubert and Proust can’t tell stories. They do something else. So does the cinema. I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider on my own ideas.”
3. Instead of scripts, Godard set up dramatic situations, then asked his actors to improvise their dialogue, as in this scene—a technique he derived from the documentary movement called cinéma vérité.
4. He intersperses these scenes with digressions, opinions, and jokes. Above all, he wanted to capture the spontaneity of the moment, which he believed was more authentic when he and his actors had to fend for themselves, without the security of a script.
5. In Godard’s opinion, there is no point to cinema if all it does is trail after literature. For him, knowing everything you are going to do, makes the doing not worth it. If every word and every pause in a film is scripted, then why make the film?
6. When a critic asked the radical innovator Jean-Luc Godard if he believed that a movie should have a beginning, middle, and end, the iconoclastic filmmaker replied: “Yes—but not necessarily in that order.”