One of the consequences of the September 11 air attacks against the US has been a decrease in transatlantic filmmakers to European film festivals. It started at the San Sebastian Film Festival (September 20-29) and has taken its toll at the Stockholm International Film Festival. Exit the Coen brothers, Lea Pool, John Cameron Mitchell, Todd Solonz and a host of others. But the most devastating absence at this festival is that of Jean-Luc Godard who due to illness was unable to attend to receive the Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award.

Several of Godard's vintage films and his latest work Éloge d'Amour were shown in anticipation of his visit, to acquaint and re-acquaint festival-goers with the vastness and magnificence of his filmography. It was mentioned in the festival news that the Danish 'Dogme' films are nothing new and that it all started with Godard, a film critic turned filmmaker who was sick of lousy, pretentious filmmaking. Although his films are saturated with anti-Hollywood comments, you never get away from his homages to the world of film within his films such as Chaplin and Griffith and Fritz Lang himself in Contempt (1962).

Another habit is capturing movie posters and marquees in background shots --Howard Hawk's Hatari(1962) and his own Vivre sa Vie (1962) to name a few from Contempt . Breathless pays respect to Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1959) as well as Alain Resnais Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) when Godard obviously wanted to lift up French film. And in Éloge d'amour Bresson's 'Notes on the Cinematographe' are read up.

The most outstanding aspect of Godard's work on the whole is the absence of character-led dialogue and the assemblage required of the spectator to make the pieces fit. His films are giant jigsaw puzzles with superbly crafted segments. In an interview reprinted by Stockholm Film Festival, Godard says that his latest film Éloge d'amour is about young people and old people, and the more problematic "in-betweens"--adults. Godard at 71 is starting to reflect and ponder about whether things weren't easier before.

For example, globalization used to just be called "'the universal stage." Common to all his films is his love/hate relationship to the USA and to "Americans" for trying to buy their loss of history with artifacts from other "older" cultures, and for hogging the name American from other "Americans" in Central and Latin America.

Godard laments how audiences have been formed by television in a negative sense with a dependency on simplistic narrative conventions and he attempted to change that in his work. He also invented the formula for film that still is pretty much with us today: "All you need is a girl and a gun."

Many festival entries at Stockholm for the past decade in fact involve a "femme fatale," and gangsters sporting sunglasses and guns-- ranging from the mildly gothic to super violent. It began with Breathless and went on to influence Scorsese and Tarantino and scores of directors. The men lining up to be shot in a swimming pool in a futuristic city in Alphaville (1965) are prototypes for Roy Anderson's patiently waiting characters in his dystopias such as Songs From the Second Floor. Godard also made cops look bad and glamorized prostitutes such as his wife Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie.

He gave them a respectability and that has contributed alas to the myth of the happy prostitute. Jane Fonda starred in Godard's Tout Va Bien at the time when she earned the nickname "Hanoi Jane"' for flirting with the North Vietnamese. Later Godard addressed her dubious politics in Letter to Jane (1972). She later went on to win an Oscar for a not so happy prostitute in Klute sporting the same haircut from Tout Va Bien and all was well again. Weekend (1967) makes you think twice about getting out of town and going bumper to bumper. The film shot almost exclusively without close-ups forces you to confront how these shots are used ideologically to create the star-system, subjecting you to cold-turkey close-up withdrawal.

Godard's "tableaux style," of episodic lessons is demanding. Vivre Sa Vie had actually 12 sections. Later when he tried to present the tenets of Marxist-Leninism to workers, his lessons assumed enormous lengths and were considered utterly and formally boring. All in all, he has been able to pull together many of his outstanding characteristics, rapid editing, jump cuts, disorientation, fragmentation, temporality, and other "in your face" stylistic devices, making him one of the greatest filmmakers of cinema history. At one time he didn't want his film to be given publicity. He felt it was an insult.

In Éloge d'amour Godard digs at Steven Spielberg because Shindler's widow lives in poverty though he made millions from Shindler's List. He adds that he's "a little bit better" than his American filmmaking colleague.

After you see a Godard film it's strange to shift gears back into the endless formulaic narrative films which inundate the market. Everything seems strange for awhile until it becomes normal and familiar again. But Godard is like fresh air in an industry clogged with an overproduction of mediocre films. It has been said that Godard is an acquired taste. As he puts it: he tries to give 100% to 10% as opposed to the 1% that Hollywood gives to the other 90%.

Although Godard could not be at the Stockholm International Film Festival, his presence is here. The Bronze Horse for the Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award is well deserved: "Jean Luc Godard is being honored this year for his tireless research trips into new filmic landscapes, for his youthful desire for revolt which has grown stronger through the years, for his challenging ability to continually widen the boundaries of our vision and thereby our view of our surroundings, our world and film art."

Moira Sullivan