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Godard's Sound Montage
Godard and Beethoven
Jean-Luc Godard developed an original and paradoxical approach to musical montage. The focus in the clip below is on Movement 3 of the 3rd “Razumovsky” String Quartet (Opus 59, Number 3, also known as the String Quartet Number 9 in C Major, 1808).
Menuetto (3rd Movement) of Beethoven's 3rd Razumovsky String Quartet
In the clip from First Name Carmen, we watch as this movement is performed in sequence and as if it were recorded as direct sound that is being performed live onscreen. Godard sometimes matches the sound to other images and juxtaposes other types of sound, but the music also resumes where it last stopped when it appears again.
![Jean-Luc Godard (1983) [i]](/assets/general/Exhibition/Film-Music/_filmRelatedPosterTransformWebP/Ludwig-van-Beethoven.webp)
“I didn't choose Beethoven, it's Beethoven, in a way, who chose me. I followed the call. When I Was 20 myself, which is the age of the characters in my film, I had listened to Beethoven at the seashore, in Brittany, the last Quartets, and discovered the Quartets there... I preferred the ocean to the Mediterranean, and what I wanted was to have what I would call 'fundamental' music. I wanted music which had marked the history of music itself, both its practice and theory, and the Beethoven Quartets represents this.”
Jean-Luc Godard (1983) [i]Godard and Beethoven
With characteristic rigor and puckish playfulness, Godard’s soundtrack for First Name Carmen focuses not on Georges Bizet’s eponymous opera, but on the string quartets of Beethoven. Although he sometimes used Mozart, Godard frequently structured his montages around one of the middle-or-late-period Beethoven string quartets, with their sophisticated call-and-response structures, sometimes working this into the fabric of the films by restarting a piece from the moment it had been left off fifteen or twenty minutes before. This created a form of continuing dialogue that Godard extended further by reusing some of the same pieces in subsequent films, connecting them not simply with their own histories as artworks, but also with their use in previous Godard films. When sustained passages of the same quartet (Beethoven’s String Quartet Number 16, opus 135, 1826) heard in pieces throughout Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) are performed live onscreen in First Name Carmen, the impression is of a musical dialogue played out across the entire corpus of the filmmaker.
In the sequences below, Godard develops a “horizontal” montage using severely limited means: restricting himself to natural light sources, strictly chronological progression within the Beethoven pieces being performed (sometimes) onscreen, and contrapuntal juxtapositions across and between only two tracks of sound. Several years earlier, Godard declared that he proceeded in this almost sculptural way because he has “two hands to manipulate [the tracks] … if I had only one arm, maybe I’d have only a single sound track" [i] By using these elements in atypical ways – linking the spatially specific “direct sound” associated with the group in a car with images of other cars on a highway, for example – Godard was able to use montage to generate a new cluster of audiovisual associations, connecting elements and ideas across time and space.
[i] Gideon Bachmann, “The Carrots Are Cooked,” in David Strerritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard Interviews (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 130-134
Romantic Montage in First Name Carmen
In one of the most startlingly beautiful sequences in Godard's cinema, portrait shots, live performance of the Beethoven string quartet (Opus 132, 1825) that has coursed throughout the sequence are brought together with shots of an open door at sunrise, the sea, hands touching, boats passing, and a flying bird. These quintessentially, almost stereotypically, Romantic images are presented both ironically and with bracing conviction and tenderness.
References
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Isabelle Huppert
