Random Thoughts on Godard

There’s been much discussion as of late about Jean-Luc, mostly due to the publication of a new biography by New Yorker contributor Richard Brody.  I haven’t read the book yet, but have been following the internet noise over the past month or so.  The New York Times got around to reviewing the book this past weekend, which has occasioned some thoughts.

In the review, Stephanie Zacharek writes:

 

As Brody, a film critic and editor at The New Yorker, makes clear in the preface, he still believes in Godard’s relevance, claiming that the resolutely not-retired filmmaker, who has lived in Rolle, Switzerland, for the past 30 years, continues to work “at an extraordinarily high level of artistic achievement.”

That’s a lovely, optimistic sentiment, but one that much of Godard’s post-1967 output doesn’t deserve: Empty shadowboxes like “First Name: Carmen” (1983) or “Notre Musique” (2004) seem designed to alienate viewers rather than draw them closer, which is what happens when any artist begins to live entirely inside his or her own head.

 

I would counter that there’s a difference between offering an “optimistic sentiment” and taking a generous approach.  Brody may be overreaching, and Notre Musique is undoubtedly a seriously flawed film, but to proclaim it an “empty shadowbox” is hyperbolic and shows a lack of generous attenuation to Godard’s political/aesthetic reckonings.  Zacharek continues:

 

The second half of “Everything Is Cinema” covers the films Godard made after 1967, and it’s a very long half. Brody tries to energize us for this interminable home stretch.

So, the last, oh, forty years of an artist’s career have been “an interminable home stretch” to an admittedly dazzling first ten?  Later:

 

Throughout his career, Godard’s political ideology has often amounted to little more than slogans, attention-grabbing sound bites…Although Brody repeatedly challenges Godard’s limited ideology, he does buy a little too readily into the notion that a work of art informed by political ideas is inherently more meaningful or more interesting than one with, say, a great deal of aesthetic inventiveness or emotional depth.

[…]

Godard’s political ideas have never been the strongest elements of his movies. Unfortunately, after 1968, they often became their focal point.

 

So, since Godard’s politics were facile, it was unfortunate that he decided to focus on them.  

I think Zacharek hasn’t bothered to distinguish the medium from the message.  From Gilbert Adair’s review of the book:

 

As for the cinema proper, it was Godard who first conceived of editing as the art of disconti nuity rather than continuity. Godard who paid retrospective homage to the neglected icons of popular culture. Godard who proposed that the filmic image had to be flattened out for the sake of its own autonomy. And Godard who foresaw that that image was ultimately destined to dethrone the word as the irreducible unit of communication. Marshall McLuhan, another major theorist of such a revolutionary semantic displacement, continued to have recourse to words to describe the end of the word, whereas Godard used images and, if words, then words as images.

 

Assume that Godard’s output is intended to be politically revolutionary (a notion that Zacharek implicitly seems to find fault with (as if real change would be as palatable as Breathless)), rather than a personal expression.  If words are less powerful than images, how does one begin to communicate complicated ideas, let alone complicated revolutionary ideas?  Words (sound-bites)-as-images was Godard’s chosen path, and his breakthough was to reconcile and communicate words-as-image/film-as-image into a text.  Word – image – film = text.   

Two problems:  how to get beyond the surface level of the sound-bite (which Zacharek refuses to do), and how to make the sound-bite emotionally appealing.  I’d argue that the near-impossibility of the former grants the latter.  Godard may have thought that editing (a.k.a. the language of film) could be the thrust, but his revolution failed:  techniques and ideas were co-opted and neutered with no punch-back from the revolutionaries.  As such, the bulk of Godard’s post-60’s work has been a lament.  In this light, look at this clip from Notre Musique, which Zacharek called an “empty shadowbox”:

 

 

I think Godard refuses to answer the question at the end because it misses the point.  The question is not whether digital can save cinema, but whether cinema can ever be saved, or rather, if cinema itself can save.  There’s a wealth of sadness in this clip.  One might say it has “emotional depth.”