Godard, Typographer.
Our take
Alright, let's dive into this. Godard, the typographer? Honestly, the premise alone is enough to make us reach for a magnifying glass and a well-worn copy of *Breathless*. Palacios-Dalens’ article, as she herself admits, is almost irresistible to anyone with a passing interest in cinema and the subtle architecture of language. It’s not just about recognizing a font choice here or a justified margin there; it's about understanding how Godard, a figure synonymous with cinematic disruption, also wielded the tools of layout and typography as another weapon in his arsenal. It’s fascinating to consider how a director known for shattering narrative conventions also meticulously controlled the visual language of his films, a control that extended beyond the frame to the very presentation of text – intertitles, subtitles, even on-screen credits. We’ve explored this kind of granular detail before, like in our piece on Tuscan Letters, where we waded into the obscure corners of typographic history, and the painstaking recreation of letterforms tells a story all its own. And it echoes, in a way, the kind of deep contextualization we attempted in Proto-Elamite in the Iranian Context, where the structure of a language itself reveals insights into a society.
The core of Palacios-Dalens' argument, as I understand it, is that Godard’s typographic choices aren't just aesthetic; they're performative. They’re a direct extension of his filmmaking philosophy – a questioning of authority, a rejection of traditional cinematic grammar, and an embrace of the fragmented, the provisional, the deliberately jarring. Think about the jarring use of Helvetica in *Weekend*, or the often-illegible intertitles in *Histoire(s) du cinéma*. Those aren’t mistakes; they're declarations. They’re refusing to be neatly packaged, to be easily consumed. It reminds me of the debate we had about language acquisition in What if we’re learning speaking in the wrong order?, where a non-native speaker challenged the assumption that a linear, sequential approach to language is always the most effective – Godard, in a visual sense, is doing something similar. He’s disrupting the expected flow, forcing the viewer to actively engage with the text, to decipher its meaning, to confront its inherent ambiguity.
What's truly compelling about this connection is that it expands our understanding of both Godard and typography. We tend to think of typography as a subservient element—a tool for legibility, for clarity, for conveying information. But Godard demonstrates its potential as a disruptive force, a means of subversion. It’s a reminder that even the most seemingly innocuous design choices can carry profound meaning, especially when deployed by a visionary artist. It challenges the notion of “good” typography, forcing us to consider the intent behind the form. Is a typeface “bad” simply because it’s difficult to read, or is it subversive because it resists easy comprehension? It’s a question that resonates with Spoot’s whole ethos, really – digging beneath the surface, finding the sharp, narrow edge of something unexpected.
Ultimately, Palacios-Dalens’ article—and this whole line of inquiry—hints at a broader shift in how we perceive visual language. We're moving beyond a purely functional understanding of typography and layout to one that acknowledges their expressive power, their capacity to convey meaning beyond the literal. And it's not just about film. Think about how typography is used in graphic design, in advertising, in user interfaces. Are we, as consumers, truly aware of the subtle ways in which typography shapes our perceptions and influences our choices? What new forms of visual disruption will emerge as artists and designers continue to experiment with the boundaries of language and form? Perhaps the next great cinematic revolution will be less about camera angles and more about the deliberate, defiant placement of a single, slightly off-kilter letter.
As a fan of both Jean-Luc Godard and typography, how could I resist Paule Palacios-Dalens’ 2019 article Jean-Luc Godard, the Typographer with a Movie Camera (originally Jean-Luc Godard,le typographe à la caméra)? Here’s the introduction:
If Jean-Luc Godard is the cinema itself, he is also heir to the printed page. Layout design, and in particular typography, is for him the privileged means of experiencing at every opportunity the paradoxical relationships of text and image. A particular facet of his graphic work concerns the use he makes of type fonts. Three stages emerge through his filmography, marked by the use of a unique typography, whose subtle choice indicates significant aesthetic and political stakes.
For the first two phases it is about the very French Antique Olive, designed by Roger Excoffon between 1965 and 1967, which was followed by the symbol of Swiss typography, Helvetica, from the 1980s to 2010. The third phase is distinguished by the use of so-called screen fonts (Tahoma or Verdana) designed by Matthew Carter. Godard uses them in his last two works to date, Adieu au langage (“Farewell to Language”, 2014) and Le Livre d’image (“The Picture Book”, 2018). If the primary function of typography is to show the text, Godard’s underlying question, whatever the medium (video, paper or film), is a painter’s preoccupation: How to represent thought and what colour (political and pictorial) to give it. How to print a thought in movement and free oneself from the fixation of the text on the page? How to make a book while making a film? Typography is the privileged visual mediation through which Godard tries to put an end to the competition between text and image in the production of thought.
She goes into detail about the history and nature of the typefaces and the use Godard made of them; here’s a bit from her discussion of Antique Olive:
When it was released between 1958 and 1960, the Antique Olive was a radical novelty, which Dutch type designer Gerard Unger comments in retrospect as follows: “An Excoffon’s response to the style dominated by Swiss pragmatism and objectivity.” As a sign of the filmmaker’s keen attention to typography, this sanserif commonly used in advertising is identified by Godard for its originality, and unexpectedly used in numerous screenplays that punctuate his films, among them Pierrot le fou (Pierrot the Madman, 1965); La Chinoise (1967) and Week-end (1967), which are also distinguished by the use of the colors of the flag. In its chromatic and typographic alliance, this ensemble constitutes a condensed version, here referred to as “French taste”, an expression modelled on “Dutch taste”, in reference to the classification established in Pierre-Simon Fournier’s Manuel typographique (1764-1766). […]
Not only was the filmmaker able to grasp the salt and singularity of the Antique Olive, but also, through its exclusive and repeated use, to experience the first radicality of this character whose ambition was to constitute a French counterweight to the regulatory and normalising influence of the international Swiss style, then in strong expansion during the sixties. The typographer and historian Roger Chatelain analyses the resistance that this current engendered in France during this period. “During the inter-war period and from the 1940s and 1950s onwards – when the new Swiss typography took off – French opposition and reticence (…) manifested itself violently. (…). The said typography, advocated and disseminated by Swiss Germans, was directly derived from the work of the Bauhaus and the theories of its followers (…). How could one have, before and very quickly after the war, praised and recommended in France graphic forms which had originated in Weimar, Dessau, Berlin… Paris was not going to find its way in the ruins left by Hitlerism!”
Here’s some of what she says about Helvetica:
In principle, Helvetica, abandoning the logic of handwriting in favour of modernist aesthetics, was designed to erase all forms of expressiveness or affects and to constitute a typeface particularly suited to corporate communication or advertising messages. Its associated attributes of rationality, whiteness, sobriety, purity of form do not exempt the typeface of ideological colour.
The German type designer Erik Spiekermann, for example, loathed Helvetica for its design and its extreme regulating principle. […] The font infiltrates every level of communication and insidiously acquires a status of passive omnipotence that is all the more relentlessly diffuse and everywhere present. […]
As with all political and aesthetic issues, Godard, in his typographic choices — French versus Swiss typography — places himself at the core of a most acute debate which, beyond typefaces, questions the ways in which thought is represented. […]
In his article “La Suisse: le cinéma comme interprétation”, Alain Badiou is particularly enlightening on two points: His historical vision of Switzerland on the one hand, and his definition of Swiss art, in which he places Godard, who “hunts down on the smooth surface of the overwhelming Swiss consensus (…) the stigma of History” […]
With regard to this specific period of Godard’s film production, Badiou’s observations support my analysis in interpreting the filmmaker’s exclusive recourse to a typography praised for its extreme neutrality: “Switzerland”, he says, “is that middle point from which Godard observes the world, and where nothing excessively disturbs his problem.” Similarly, using Helvetica as a symbol of the “overwhelming consensus” is equivalent to adopting a middle point of typographical writing, where the filmmaker abandons all forms of graphic expressiveness for minimal and rational compositions. The inserts of Film socialisme are exemplary in this respect: black background, centred or flag composition, capital letters of the same size, colours used with measure. Where we notice that Godard abandons the blue-white-red palette. […]
If the first period with Antique Olive directly questions the issue of heritage – be it French, family, cultural; in an ostensibly graphic and provocative way through the use of blue-white-red, staged puns and expressive typography, the Helvetica phase looks more soberly at what it is possible to transmit as Switzerland, as Badiou points out, but also as a filmmaker who is more reflexive about history.
And on his final phase:
From the question of heritage to transmission issues, the typographical evolution follows the chronology of a lifetime of questioning and challenges to the different media (video, film, print). Both periods place at their centre the question of the hegemony of the text, considered by Godard as his “royal enemy”. If video marks a decisive step in Godard’s way of freeing himself from text, typography, in its application, is a subtle facet of it. The last period I entitled “pasteurized”, based on a term borrowed from Massin about the disappearance of lead types, corresponds to the use of so-called screen fonts, in this case Verdana or its equivalent Tahoma. The ordinary and transparent character of these fonts evokes what Massin describes in the loss of relief – which involves touch but also more symbolically the way of shaping thought; following the abandonment of letterpress printing in the sixties and seventies: “a pasteurisation, a levelling, the mark of lead is no longer inlaid on the paper”. These characters are no less complex in their function of ensuring optimal legibility on the screen. […]
This third period is distinguished by the abandonment of the specifically typographical fact by Godard, delegated to other hands, those of Fabrice Aragno in particular. The latter, in the continuity of Adieu au langage, continued his “mission of making, treating and assembling all materials according to Godard’s models”. The typographical composition becomes here one element among others made during assembly without any noticeable attention to the letter. If one examines Godard’s filmography, this detachment is a new phenomenon, which contrasts with the two main periods identified.
In these typographic choices, the filmmaker uses typefaces that are emblematic of an era, designed to respond to technological changes in printing but also to new modes of communication. Each typeface (Antique Olive, Helvetica or Verdana/Tahoma) has been tested in terms of legibility and chosen by virtue of its invisibility, its ordinary dimension, unnoticeable in its daily omnipresence.
I’ll never be able to watch a Godard film again without noticing the typefaces.
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