You and Me in the Camera-Car

On Jean-Luc Godard's Week-End

Perhaps it isn’t entirely surprising that the nation responsible for some of the kookiest car designs — designs that seem to ask “what even is a car?” so intently they forgot to include some of the most obvious features — also seemed most interested in the car as a brute object. Not as an actor on screen, not as a mode of conveyance, but as an obstacle, a complication. Not as a realization of freedom, but rather as one unending catastrophe. The freedom, perhaps, that we’re condemned to. While Hollywood’s cars, motorbikes, buses fairly reliably brought their passengers to wherever their plot needed them to go, French cinematic cars of the same era are far more treacherous.

This is not really about a positive or negative attitude towards cars. Cars and motorbikes deliver the characters in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) to the logical endpoints of their journeys, and those endpoints in either case are death. But there’s a tidiness to the logic of conveyance even in New Hollywood storytelling, one that French films of the same era often refuse. That is, if Hollywood shows the cars its characters are taking at all. After all, if a drive is uneventful, it is a nullity plot-wise: the detective shows up at the actress’s apartment, the cast gathers for dinner, a new kid in town gets off the bus. French movies of the era show cars because cars in them do not function lubricants of social interaction. In a movie like Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967), they seem to precipitate the breakdown of social interactions, they play witness to the breakdown of social cohesion.

Whether they’re cause or effect, means or opportunity is never entirely clear in Godard’s film. They’re just … around when everything goes to shit, as it inevitably does in Week-End, about every 5 minutes. But part of that is that cars are everywhere: for about its first hour, Week-End is a more car-centric movie than perhaps even Cannonball Run. Even when characters are just interacting, walking, pausing, cars are all around them — and never the sleek, officious objects of use and convenience. They are rather almost exclusively maiming, mangled bumper cars that constantly hit one another, tip over or catch fire.

Rarely has a film staged so many brutal crashes, or rather (almost always) their aftermath. Yet all of it barely seems to register for the people in the movie. At one point, Godard’s main characters wander through a spectacular car wreck, with burning Citroens and Peugeots strewn all about the roadway when a dying man weakly asks them if perchance they know if there’s a mechanic anywhere nearby. There’s a scene of a horrific three-way crash that finds a character wailing hysterically over the loss of her Hermès handbag.

There’s something J.G. Ballard said with regards to his novel Crash (published six years after Godard’s movie came out) that I think Week-End agrees with: “About twenty thousand people a year are killed on the roads in America. Of course, every death is deplored, but collectively it's manslaughter on a gigantic scale; and it's tolerated as part of the price to be paid. Similar tolerances (acceptable casualties) run through the whole of life. There is a sort of built-in deadening of human feeling that is inseparable from the sort of lives we've opted for in the late twentieth century.”

There is a portion of the film (about its middle third) that feels almost like a war movie in its relentless scenes of carnage and devastation. Because of course Godard isn’t the only director in 1967 to put a car crash on screen. But elsewhere in 1967, car crashes appear on screen with some kind of logic: inciting incidents, climactic moments, scenes of suspense or heartbreak. A director who reaches for them twice might seem a little hacky. For a stretch, Godard reaches for them in almost every single scene. Week-End is so unremitting in its car-based mayhem that all the mayhem blurs together. Hollywood was able to metabolize the “collective manslaughter on a gigantic scale” by giving it meaning, which also meant: by making it rare. Week-End makes car violence so ubiquitous as to make it a mark of indistinction rather than distinction.

Cars become the background hum of a society that has become identical with its own violence. They seem to be the carriers of that violence, the occasion for that violence, but also the thing that makes that violence invisible or unremarkable (the “built-in deadening of human feeling” Ballard mentions). One of the first things we hear in Week-End is a man suggesting that it would be convenient if another man (his lover’s husband) died in a car accident, asking whether his brakes will give out. “Seven people got killed at an intersection in Evreux last Sunday,” he observes. He doesn’t explain what that has to do with anything — is the suggestion that Roland’s crash would barely be noticed amidst such carnage? Is the idea that other lovers get so lucky, why can’t he? Whatever the case, he doesn’t get to follow up, because — in a touch that pretty much structures Godard’s entire film — their conversation is interrupted by a car accident below their balcony. The accident quickly leads to a fist fight.

This is how the car functions throughout Week-End: cars normalize violence, and thanks to cars, every social interaction seems to descend into violence. The film’s absurd tone and its interest in automobility seem not just to be linked; they seem to be identical. Godard seems very interested in the way in which film mediates driving and cars; and the things that mediation makes invisible. Think of the way films cut away from cars that get crushed during car chases, the way they take any excuse to cut away from the aftermath of a collision. How much less fun would a car chase be, if you cut away from The Bandit, to one of his pursuers desperately trying to free his pinned leg from under his overturned vehicle? In Week-End, there’s a scene where the central couple (Roland and Corinne Durand, played by Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) are sitting in their car having another fight about how he didn’t go fast enough on the highway. Godard frames them through the windshield, the same way a classic Hollywood director might shoot a rear-projection scene.

At the very beginning of their discussion, we’ve heard smashing and shattering glass. But then again, there’s smashing and shattering glass all the time in Week-End. So as they bicker endlessly, you sort of forget it happened. At the end of their discussion we cut away to one of Week-End’s many car crash tableaux. The poppy primary colors and the very red stage blood make it look like a Giallo cinema murder scene. A money shot from a horror film (sorry, this screen-shot doesn’t do it justice — do yourself a favor and watch this one on the Criterion Channel!).

Only gradually do we come to understand how these two shots are even connected. The camera shows us the mangled car, an upset hipster girl covered in blood. Then it shows us a tractor that we’ve seen before, when the Durands cut it off. All of this we come to understand, has been unfolding not thirty feet away from the bickering couple. Godard seems interested in three forms of emotional dissociation, and he seems to think they’re related. One that he associates with a kind of bourgeois entitlement and ennui; one that he associates with the alienation involved in driving a car; and one that he associates with the brutal logic of cinema, with the repressive capabilities of framing, cross-cutting, sound-editing.

The plot of Week-End, such as it is, kicks into gear when our married couple (still planning to kill each other) take a drive into the country to visit her dying father … and murder him. Almost immediately they nick someone else’s car and get into yet another car-based altercation, culminating in the amazing image of a bourgeois family chasing after them, the wife furiously lobbing tennis balls at their car, their son firing rubber arrows from a toy bow, and her husband firing from his hunting rifle. People in Week-End can’t stop punching each other whenever cars are around; the car structures gives their interactions a veneer of structure and logic, only to then also immediately shred that veneer to unleash the madness underneath.

That sequence is immediately followed by perhaps the most interesting and famous car sequence of the film: a nearly seven minute shot (interrupted only by those trademark Godard intertitles) of Roland and Corinne stuck in one of cinema’s most vividly rendered traffic jams. We’re on a two-lane country road, fields and a village in the background. The scene is one long tracking shot, with the camera traveling on a dolly parallel to the road — which is to say, in a manner that isn’t available to the travelers on the road. We thus see what the people in the traffic jam can’t: everything, the totality of the slowdown.

The Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) famously described the camera-eye as something distinct from any human form of viewing: “I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. I am in constant motion.” This seems to be, on a literal level, what Godard is after here. The camera is unfettered and mobile where the humans in the scene are immobilized. Which is also to say: the camera is realizing the motion that the many, many cars in the scene want and should be capable of, but — in the scene itself — aren’t.

And yet, there’s little “emancipation” to be gotten from this car-eye camera. “The world as only I see it” seems, if anything, more frightening than what Roland and Corinne see in-scene. From the beginning, the traffic jam piles up absurdities: people are tossing balls from car to car, are sitting outside of their cars, get into shouting matches, all the while also honking endlessly. An entire school class seems to be involved somehow, zoo animals appear to be on the loose. There’s a man towing a boat, rigging it up as though in order to set to sea.

Throughout the scene, Roland Durand seems to attempt the world’s most epic “jerk merge” (the name the SF Chronicle gave to the maneuver whereby you illegally overtake stalled traffic only to then merge back into the lane at the very last possible moment). But at the same time, Roland, seems never happy when he does find a place to merge. The tracking shot has to move on, and so, unfortunately, so must Roland. All motion in the scene seems subtly off — we can see the dictates of the film form in the scene itself, and it takes us out of the scene. What feels real is the substrate of frustration and aggressiveness that suffuses the scene, and that — thanks to the incessant honking on the soundtrack — quickly become the viewer’s.

The camera’s position is ambivalent: yes, it (and we) see more than the people in their Peugeots, Simcas and Mini Coopers. But the more we see the less sense the scene really makes. The ostensible reason for the tracking shot is that Roland and Corinne are overtaking all these cars in an attempt to reach the end of the traffic jam. Why this doesn’t occur to any of the other motorists is unclear. Roland and Corinne seem to be moving because the camera needs them to. It gives the whole scene something theatrical: they’re passing an endless procession of car-based absurdity. And because they are, we are too. Or perhaps better: our characters get to drive by the traffic jam because this is a movie, and movies need two things: they need something to happen; and they need their presence in the scene, their way of taking in a scene to be naturalized.

Godard was pretty interested in reflecting on film as a medium. It’s hard to look at the endless procession of one car, then another (given the fact that Godard has at most three cars in the shot at any given moment), and not think of the frames in a film. Roland and Corinne’s car does something that would make no sense in a real-life traffic jam. Either the other lane would have oncoming traffic, or it would be choked with other cars trying what the Durands are doing. The reason they get to do it is because they are in a movie. Because the camera wants to make plausible a move that it can do but a stopped car can’t. It wants to slide in its impossible lane through the fields of France, to take in what every person stuck in a traffic jam ever has wanted to take in but constitutively — as a person stuck in a traffic jam — couldn’t.

Cinema is rich in scenes that show off self-consciously what this medium can do. But I don’t think the traffic jam sequence is one of those scenes. In the end, it feels like the camera’s impossible movement, its relative omniscience, leaves us viewers more rather than less confused. Sure, the people in the traffic jam are stuck, but their world makes sense. Seeing what we see, we’re not so sure. Godard’s camera keeps arriving at visual markers that make you think “ah, now we have reached the bottleneck, the reason for the traffic jam.” The first overturned car appears about 30 seconds in. There are six more minutes of this to go. Another minute later there’s a white car wrapped around a tree. But the traffic jam keeps on keeping on. Another five cars down, there’s a white car facing a Shell oil tanker. Could that be what did it? But no, the sequence, and with it the jam, goes on. Because this is 1967, the car models repeat endlessly, and you begin to wonder at some point whether the camera has somehow looped back to the beginning of the slowdown.

When we finally get the thing the scene has been building towards, the object of all the suspense, it does, in a manner of speaking, not disappoint. A group of spectacularly mangled cars, with — especially by mid-60s standards — grotesquely shredded bodies littered all around them. The movie will have more drastic traffic fatalities later on, lots of them in fact. But up to this moment, it’s all been tennis balls and the occasional baseball bat. Here we get a first glimpse of the fire, gore and dismemberment that will become a throughline for the rest of the movie. It’s a vicious visual punchline: I built suspense for you, the movie seems to say. What did you expect at the end of a suspense sequence? Were you not waiting for a dead child and a lady sheared in half?

When I showed the movie to my students, one of them said — and I realized that had been true for me on my first viewing too — that she felt she’d been primed for a visual deflation at the end of that interminable tracking shot. That all that congestion was about something truly absurd and disproportionate. But instead the film gives us a scene of drastic violence suitable for a J.G. Ballard novel — and appropriate, in a deeply upsetting way, to all that build-up. You feel a little judged, I think: there’s relief in the sheer visual tedium of the endless dolly shot, the enervating bleating of the car horns, the “we really do get it, Jean-Luc” energy of the endless visual gags finally, finally, finally coming to an end. And so you find yourself breathing a sigh of relief at the sight of maimed bodies and pools of blood on the street. We have become implicated in the moral bankruptcy the film depicts, depicts — this time — by putting us in a car. A camera-car, but a car nonetheless.