Jean Luc-Godard may be unique amongst similarly iconic post-War European filmmakers in that it seems like we rarely go six months without one of his lost or little-known works getting revived or rediscovered, but its rare even for him for two such works to re-enter the spotlight in the same week. BAM’s presentation on Monday night of the little-seen One P.M., a film started by and, finally, starring Godard, was not billed as an event meant to capitalize on today’s street release of the little talked-about Une Femme Mariee, but it does inspire one to look for ways to talk about both in the same breath. There is not much overlap here, but at the very least, both films play on Godard’s interest in and persistent exploration of the tension between reality and its creation. Some notes:

1. One P.M.: Actual vs. Synthesized Anarchy

That One P.M puts Jean Luc-Godard on screen as a central focus should maybe not be the revelation that it is; after all, as we’ve discussed before, his best-known work is so deeply reflective of his personal life, and sometimes vice versa, that traditional distinctions between on-screen and off lose much of their ordinary meaning. But DA Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock’s film — began as a Godard-instigated collaboration called One A.M (or One American Movie), taken over and edited by the direct cinema legends when the French filmmaker abandoned the project and renamed it One P.M. (or One Pennebaker Movie, or One Parallel Movie) — presents a different Godard. Glimpsed here, in what amounts to documentary footage, trying to wring a hybrid of truth and fiction out of subjects both unsuspecting (a twenty-something female Wall Street lawyer) and very suspicious (Eldridge Cleaver), Godard embodies a caricature of the European art filmmaker come to America to con us into giving up our truth.

But Godard-as-actor aside, Pennebaker and Leacock’s footage of Godard directing for anarchy has a charge of true, lawless unpredictability, something that’s not only lacking from much of his didactic late-60s output, but still feels fresh today. In the peak of the piece, Godard and actor Rip Torn go to an all-Black middle school class and Torn, dressed in a Civil War cavalry uniform complete with sword, first adopts a falsetto to parrot the pro-business monologue given earlier in the film by the Wall Street worker. Then, Godard himself stands up and warns the kids to be skeptical of this speech: “Maybe it’s truth, but maybe it’s lies.” Torn then breaks character to have a frank discussion with the kids (as swiftly as Torn drops character, the class seems to transition from nervous and incredulous to bold, chummy and playful) about race and power and the fight against, as one girl puts it, “the White man’s tricks.” Torn then passes out toy guns to various members of the class, walks out of the room, walks back in dressed as a contemporary soldier, and goads the now-militarized youth into shooting him.

The scene has clearly been directed by Godard — and Torn’s performance would have been even if the director wasn’t present giving notes as the action wore on — and yet, when Torn warns the kids that he’s going to come back into the room playing the role of their oppressor and they instinctively, casually shoot him down, there’s something real going on there that transcends preparation or expectation, that could only have been produced by this set of circumstances. Godard’s understanding and mastery of how truth can be milked out of constructed conditions eventually overwhelms his less flattering qualities on display in One P.M. Caught by Leacock and Pennebaker posed with his ever-present cigarettes and sunglasses, whether the camera spies him nervously smirking at the militant musical phrasing of LeRoi Jones, who blocks traffic with an impromptu rally in which he promises torealize “the worst nightmare” of White America, or begrudgingly allowing his lap to serve as a bed for a cat, Godard becomes a character perched somewhere between hateable and attractive — so, not too far off from the ugly/sexy Americana he sought to capture/critique.

2. A Married Woman and Remembered vs. Imagined Pain

A Married Woman, made four years before One P.M. was filmed, does its own dance around the axes of attraction/repulsion, reality and invention. Shot shortly before Godard and Anna Karina announced their divorce (and then went on to work together on Alphaville, Made in USA and Pierrot le Fou), Une Femme Mariee foreshadows the culturally bitter, formally experimental works with which the filmmaker would occupy himself more deeply once the Anna Karina era had fully come to a close, while still directly, unabashedly referencing Karina’s relationships with Godard and her lover at the time, Maurice Ronet.

On one level, Une Femme Mariee can be understood as a kind of a film-length preview of the scene in Pierrot le Fou where Belmondo’s protagonist, in advance of the romantic awakening that will propel him into the grave, smokes in boredom as party guests pitch advertising slogans around the room. In the earlier film, desire as manifested in the language of marketing and desire as manifested in sexual pleasure are reduced to the same dull noise. Godard is quoted in Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema describing the insertion of images and text straight from contemporary fashion magazines into the film’s dramatic interplay: “The models that are proposed to people are becoming identical with the people themselves. Even their sex life is not their own, it’s already displayed on the walls.” The specter of real-life horror does nothing to interrupt the flat hum of desire; the subject of how to discuss the Holocaust years after the fact pops up in winey dinner party conversation, with the adulterous wife brushing it off: “Memory is no fun.” Meanwhile, a matinee of Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog serves as a rendezvous spot for one of her trysts.
If Godard’s main complaint against Macha Meril’s Karina-stand-in heroine is her unwillingness/inability to break free of the language of media and marketing fantasy images, he’s not above the language of mass media to crucify her. There are at least two apparent references on screen to Hitchcock. In the most obvious, Meril sees Hitchcock’s own headshot on a poster outside the movie theater where she goes to meet her boyfriend for what will be their final fling. But long before that and of possibly greater weight, in the first frame of an opening montage devoted to isolated shots of the body parts of two lovers, the woman’s single hand reaches out, and the male hand comes in and, by grasping her wrist, forcibly fixes the female hand in place. It feels like a POV flip on Janet Leigh’s hand reaching out for the shower curtain during her death scene in Psycho.  Is Godard consciously referencing Psycho, a film in which an adultress, in single-minded criminal pursuit of a life with a man who belongs to another woman, is famously stopped in her tracks in unimaginably brutal fashion?
Even if the reference is unintentional, within Godard’s canon of love/hate letters to Karina, Mariee falls somewhere in between My Life to Live’s sadism (he loves her so much he wishes her dead for what she’s done to him) and Pierrot’s masochism (he loves her so much he wishes he was dead for what she’s done to him). The relationship has deteriorated beyond the point where he could casually kill her, but he’s not yet ready to flip the dynamic into an accusation.

Une Femme Mariee is available today on DVD; One P.M. is not, but there is a terrible bootleg of it in ten parts on YouTube.