King Lear

Jean-Luc Godard’s “adaptation” (emphasis on the quotation marks there) of William Shakespeare’s King Lear is more avant-garde and experimental than his other more notable films, possibly because King Lear belongs to Godard’s second wave of cinema where he was less concerned with social and political trends. I warn you that it can be extremely demanding of the viewer and for someone less familiar with his work, advisably, this may not be the best film to begin with. I would skip this for now and mosey on over to something like Bande a Part or Alphaville, which would introduce you a little more smoothly into the mind of this marvelous madman.

Okay, now to try and decrypt this film so as to try and give you a slight insight into what this film is trying to communicate. King Lear is supposed to be set in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster which unfortunately for our young protagonist, William Shaksper Junior the Fifth (Peter Sellars not Sellers as I was disappointed to discover), has obliterated every last shred of art (including literature, films and paintings) entrusting him with the responsibility of rediscovering and rewriting that which has been lost. Whether his specific task is to recreate Shakespeare is unclear, but after hearing mafia kingpin Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his daughter Cordelia (Molly Ringwald) quote straight from the original text, he is inspired and tries then to articulate some poetry of his own. Even though Godard has used names straight from the play this is not an adaptation of Shakespeare’s vision but is a study (as the end inter-title says), an interpretation, and I would say a defamation (which I will explain later on) of it. The film makes little attempt at following conventional filmic techniques (even those conventional by Godard’s standard) that would be used by other directors, for example, Akira Kurosawa and his faithful adaptation of Hamlet in Throne of Blood, when adapting Shakespeare. The plot of the film is very thin as there is little in the shape of things that occur. Narrative is confused for there is no real chain of events or cause and effect of any kind. There is absolutely no character development, or construction for that matter because most of the dialogue that would usually set up the character is used to ask philosophical questions about the evolution of art and nature. As far as drama of which we would expect elements of romance and tragedy, there are deep touches of it, though it is not the kind of romance between two people but more Shaksper Junior’s affair with ideas. His burgeoning fascination of how art is created when there is no art to refer to leads him to fall in love with nature. The tragedy lies in the realization that words are needed to make things exist for without them we would be ‘nameless’.
Ultimately it is an aesthetic film for it doesn’t really consistently keep the viewer engaged but provokes him/her with disparate montages of Godard’s heroes and inspirations; abstract sounds of seagulls, crows and pigs which are used almost like a weapon, as an aural onslaught expected from directors like William Burroughs; and a cinematography that seems muddy, dusky, and earth-tone, frequently having the effect of causing the characters to blend into the image. At times I felt the dialogue was superfluous and just used to antagonize the viewer for it offered little understanding of anything and was sometimes muffled to the extent that it was inaudible. Whilst I appreciate the inter-cutting and simultaneous use of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds and dialogue to create conflict, here it just sought to confuse the viewer even further, as some of the voice-over musings were hard enough to decipher on there own, without the extra brain candy coming from the Don and Cordy. However there are moments when some of the philosophical spiel is crystal clear and worth the wait. An example being the mechanism of cinema and how, ironically, it is used to ‘direct’ people; telling them where to look etc. ground the film as one that is trying to instruct people rather than distract. Another idea that is suggested in this scene is that art is not about the image or sound but the emotion that that image or sound evokes in the viewer. Given this, it could be concluded that Godard’s own interpretation of Shakespeare is a representation of the emotions he felt when he read the original play. All I can say is that he must have been tripping on paint thinner when he read the damn thing for I would describe King Lear as an arbitrarily acidic mutation of Shakespeare’s work.

Another scene which stands out is that which Godard himself is acting in as the eccentric, spaced out, philosophy professor who Shaksper Junior talks with in trying to acquire help in how to reconstruct his ancestors work. The scene’s audio is interrupted with the crowing of crows, and the crackling of a fire they have built. They discuss the birth of words that have been destroyed by fire and which as though from the fire of Prometheus will be reborn. The dialogue seemed almost randomly dadaesque as though maybe Godard had thrown darts at his copy of King Lear to choose the lines. However this seems inconsequential to him, as his objective is to confront the sounds that speech makes rather than the meaning of the actual words. It is our ability to hear that reassures us that life is real. We talk, not to say anything important but just to let people know that we are alive. The sounds of the seagulls, crows and fire etc. reiterate this notion; even the silence of Cordelia represents a different kind of sound; a “No Thing” sound.

The fact that no art exists any longer suggests that in order to create it from the beginning, Shakesper Junior will have to think like pioneering artists thought. Art that is derived from other art doesn’t require this primordial approach but as there is no art left for him to draw inspiration from, he must go back to deconstructing the basic elements of life and interact with the natural world. That is why he can be seen strolling through the woods, sitting on the rocks that line the ocean and letting the waves crash over him

The words “show not tell” are spoken later in the film and I would say pretty much encapsulate Godard’s philosophy, where, as in other films of his, he celebrates silence, encouraging ‘the cessation (not abolition) of images’ for truth. When he says “show not tell” he does not mean that sound itself is useless. To Godard sound is something that can be shown also. If you close your eyes whilst listening to a sound you can conjure your own visualization of what you think the sound is rather than having it explained. This is why shortly after saying those words he dubs the squawking seagulls over responses made by Don Learo and Cordelia. He is trying to illustrate that the composition of sound and image doesn’t have to be coherent and that we create our own associations between the two. He is saying that the grass isn’t necessarily green and the sky doesn’t have to be blue. This returns to his original point whereby just as a piece of art cannot exist objectively but is dependent on our reaction to it, neither can nature, which as Godard “teaches” us is the basis for the former.

I said earlier that King Lear was an attack on Shakespeare rather than a tribute to him and hopefully you don’t think I am saying that haphazardly. Shakespeare was a man of words, someone who used poetry as a lingua franca between nature and man so that man could look more honestly within himself. Godard on the other hand was a man of images who if I may say so, had a distrust… a disdain… a downright homicidal contempt for how reckless words can be. What better way could he have chosen to make this point than by butchering like a heretic, one of the most respected plays by the most immortal legend of words.

Oh yeah, and Woody Allen is in the last ten minutes.