Weekend: Godard's eternal flaming car wreck

Title cards flash across the screen in the opening minutes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967); they inform us that what we’re watching and listening to is both “a film adrift in the cosmos” and “a film found atop a scrap heap.” Very different settings in which to discover a masterpiece of radical post-classical cinema, but either suggests that this is an artifact from a lost time and place, cine-notes from the end of the world. The film’s key images and sounds support this: protracted lines of stalled traffic, the drivers relentlessly, futilely honking their horns, as though the sustaining of this cacophony will do anything to quell their sociopathic road rage; rural landscapes in which the flaming ruins of crack-ups litter the freeways, corpses hanging from shattered windows or scattered across the shoulders like abandoned refuse. A three-car pile-up is overseen by a woman screaming bloody fucking murder, crying out in soul-agony, not for a loved one trapped or maimed or impaled in the wreckage, but for her Hermès handbag. In this only slightly exaggerated version of our world rape and murder is just a shot away, but the loss of designer accessories prompts a level of suffering too painful to bear in silence.

Describing such scenes risks rendering Weekend a very broad anti-consumerist satire, but the film, Godard’s fifteenth feature from his insanely prolific first decade, which begins as something of a neo-noir (a couple conspires to collect a substantial inheritance while each secretly plots the other’s demise) before descending into car-centric social breakdown and casual cannibalism, is dense with nuance, allusion and calculated misdirection. This is an audaciously blunt, bitingly politicized work in so many ways (most notably in its depiction of widespread affectless avarice as a result of high capitalism), yet its overt didacticism, delivered though rampant branding, on-screen text, militant monologues, literary quotations, and absurdist scenes of violent conflict over the most incidental damage to private property, is counterbalanced by formal strategies and narrative twists that, while firmly grounded in the era’s dominant Leftist ideology, always assures us that there's nothing noble about either side of the film’s battle between its haut bourgeoisie and forest-dwelling, Sgt. Peppery anarchist revolutionaries. Godard doesn’t need us to identify with any individual or group in Weekend; his interest seems to lie in the formation of a vast canvas, à la Bruegel, of social turmoil, drawing our attention to horrors that would feel unnervingly true-to-life as the West became increasingly embroiled in Vietnam and France would erupt into strikes and protest the following spring.

Yet Weekend’s prescience expands beyond the special chaos of the 1960s. Its use of the car as the quintessential object of consumerist idolatry is only more resonant in our age of rising oil prices, status anxiety and gaping class divides. Its formalist strategies have inspired countless subsequent satires, even if precious few strike Godard’s uncanny balance of wit, intelligence, craft and provocation. Weekend makes a brilliant double feature with Crash (1996), David Cronenberg’s inspired adaptation of the novel by J.G. Ballard, whose entire body of work could be seen as aligning itself to Godard’s vision of civilization’s auto-destruction (even if in Ballard’s version the cars are fetishized instead of demonized). So what we’ve got here is an apocalypse movie that speaks both to its moment and to the ages, a durable, colorful, endlessly fascinating, surprisingly entertaining ode to catastrophic collapse from an artist who to this day has yet to be outdone in terms of bridging the commercial cinema with the avant-garde. Vive la fin du monde! Vive Weekend!

Death of a Cyclist: screening the delicate balance between pure polemic and pure pleasure

It opens on a stretch of country road so gray, stark and forsaken as to feel pulled from a dream—even the two or three trees look cold and lonely. The image of this landscape stays fixed as the cyclist passes us by, exiting the frame not long before the car enters it, the collision between the two happening off-screen in the eerie, phantasmagoric interim. The car stops and the couple within exits to survey the damage. The man, Juan (Alberto Closas), surmises that he cyclist is dying—all we can see in the framing is the still-spinning wheel. The woman, Maria (Lucia Bosé), urges the man to leave. They drive away, abandoning the cyclist, and the titular event of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released by the Criterion Collection, has transpired with bracing efficiency.

Accompanied by a score of Herrmannesque portent, a tone of an unmistakably noir melodrama has been set. Yet right there within this brooding atmosphere lies the first of numerous overt, pointed allusions to a troubling class disparity: a humble-looking man on a bike is knocked down by a well-dressed couple in a sleek automobile; the couple, we learn immediately after, are having an affair, and are more concerned with maintaining their secrecy—and with it their comfortable bourgeois existence—than with the welfare of the victim of their negligence.

With each subsequent scene come further layers of social critique: the insularity and nepotism that allows Juan to hold an enviable position at a university; the appearance of a nefarious art critic, a self-described “good for nothing” who lurks in elevated social circles sniffing out opportunities for blackmail with an ingratiating smile (there is the sense that the art critic’s vocation is itself deemed a product of bourgeois decadence); the fact that Juan looks conspicuously similar to Miguel, Maria’s wealthy husband, implying that her extramarital activities are so automated that she doesn’t even require a lover that embodies a genuine variation of her husband. The accumulative effect, made complete by the sudden development of Juan’s class-consciousness, spurred by guilt over the accident, is a depiction of a Spain well-settled into Franco’s triumph, sinking into its own turgid morass of Fascist reactionism.

If Death of Cyclist reads as schematic, that’s because it is, and the supplementary texts in Criterion’s package, including one from Bardem himself, emphasize the director’s schema all the more. Bardem had publicly declared the Spanish cinema as “politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, industrially crippled,” and Marsha Kinder’s essay ‘Creating a Modern Spanish Cinema’ shows in great detail how Death of a Cyclist was designed as the antidote, a work that would subversively exploit the trappings of Hollywood thrillers as a way to synthesize and heighten Bardem’s polemical call to arms, its true stylistic genre being that of neorealism.

The problem with this sort of reading is that is renders the movie as an airless manifesto in which the artist only reluctantly lowers himself to entertaining us. It also does a great discredit to Hollywood—American film noir, for all its compromises, was already a great source of social criticism, frequently pulling back the curtain of American prosperity to reveal the corruption at the heart of the capitalist impulse, and the typical noir already possessed many of the same innovations as neorealism, such as its use of location shooting. Death of a Cyclist arrived right at the climax of the original noir cycle, the same year of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Maria, its femme fatale, even attempts to secure her social standing using the same shocking method as Margo in the superb poverty row noir Decoy (46).

Regardless of Bardem’s personal aspirations, focusing all one’s attention on its political promptings can make Death of a Cyclist feel somewhat academic, while the best compliment one can give it is to in fact call it a very elegant, highly effective, often fascinating noir. The film moves superbly, the brisk pacing enhanced by the consistent use of shock cuts, those transitions where one image weirdly matches another in an entirely different scene, as though the storytelling itself infuses disparate events with some creepy synchronicity; exposition is handled with tremendous economy; and there’s a bizarre, fascinating morbidity to the way the accident influences the love affair, which reaches its natural erotic climax in a spray of blood and mechanical impact, acting as a subtle precursor to the bizarre equations of David Cronenberg’s Crash (96).

Death of a Cyclist in the end did not signal much of a revolution in Spanish cinema—not even Luis Buñuel’s return to Spain to make the deliriously perverse Viridiana (60) could manage that. Sweeping changes wouldn’t arrive until the 70s while Franco was either in decline, dying or dead. But Bardem’s film can be admired greatly for the way it gives us a portrait of his country in a period of deep repression and stagnancy, and delivering this portrait in the shape of a thriller sculpted from desire, coincidence, small dreams and the never quite squashed undercurrent of social unrest.