Jean-Luc Godard

[Oedipax]

Brody's Godard bio is certainly worth reading, but Craig Keller's criticisms of the book (posted above) are quite valid. The last few chapters of the book are seriously marred by Brody's interpretation of Godard's criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism; the Notre musique chapter is the biggest offender, but he starts laying the groundwork much earlier in the book.

What I enjoyed most about the book were the many new anecdotes about Godard's life and various details about the production of the films - Brody is more forthcoming than Colin MacCabe when it comes to discussing the technical aspects. I also appreciate how Brody takes his time with the so-called late-period films. MacCabe largely skips over them in his otherwise worthwhile biography, dismissing them as placeholder films for Godard as he worked on the Histoire(s). Of course Brody does more or less the same thing with the 'radical' period and the 70s films.

[King Prendergast]

yes, Brody's book is surprisingly late-film-centric, and his post-70s chapters may be the most useful in that regard. However if you are looking for a very scholarly tract on Godard this is not it. Most sources are popular journals and newspapers and the book as a whole is extremely readable, but I would be a little sheepish to cite it in a high-level academic setting.

[Magic Hate Ball]

For those in Seattle, the SIFF is running a 60's Godard series, August 8-18.

Link

Starts with the new print of Contempt, from the 8th to the 14th.

[dannyf]

I bet you did not know this:

Moments later, the motorcycle slid under the wheels of a bus. Aya was thrown clear, but Godard suffered a skull fracture, a broken pelvis, and numerous internal injuries. Godard was in a coma for almost a month. As Gorin recalled, Godard "lost so much skin from his buttocks that you could touch the bone." He also lost a testicle.

With a footnote citing two independent sources no less!

[King Prendergast]

are those ray ban wayfarers that JLG wore in the 60s?

[LQ]

I appreciate what Godard has tried to do by constantly challenging us as viewers, but every so often you just want him just once to make a film that might actually entertain a few people.

I've yet to find one person who didn't find Band a Part to be even superficially entertaining. And I've shown it to a -lot- of people.

[mfunk9786]

I appreciate what Godard has tried to do by constantly challenging us as viewers, but every so often you just want him just once to make a film that might actually entertain a few people.

I've yet to find one person who didn't find Band a Part to be even superficially entertaining. And I've shown it to a -lot- of people.

I was just going to say the same thing about Pierrot le Fou.

[sevenarts]

Even my father, who doesn't like any artsy films or anything the least bit challenging in cinema, loves Bande a parte and Bout de souffle.

I have to say, I've also never seen a Godard film, no matter how challenging, that hasn't also entertained me very much -- this includes even his latest films, which frequently have moments that are funny or whimsical.

[domino harvey]

I saw Some Came Running this weekend and it became obvious that the film had a stronger effect on Godard than just being namechecked in Contempt-- MacLaine's line "Just because I don't understand something doesn't mean I don't like it" really became Godard's mantra with regards to other films and his own work.

[wpqx]

My comments were in reference to Godard's more recent work, I certainly found his earlier films entertaining and maybe I'm nostalgic but I miss that filmmaker. Weekend is still in my top twenty of all time and probably my favorite French film ever, so I'm hardly putting down his entire filmography.

[LQ]

okay, I could get behind what you're saying then. I too miss the Godard from 1960-1968[/quote]

[Perkins Cobb]

Richard Schickel lets Godard in on what he's been doing wrong all these years. What a condescending windbag.

[domino harvey]

I like how Schickel parrots the same misappropriated and false notion of what "Tradition of Quality" cinema meant to the Cahiers critics, along with several other Godard myths. Brilliant job doing your homework on Wikipedia.

[klee13]

Anyone who could praise the melodramatic ideas behind A Woman Is A Woman, Contempt, and Alphaville; condescend people interested in what cinema could be, and dismiss almost all of the ideas about cinema produced by Godard in one swift stroke is obviously a nincompoop.

That pot shot at King Lear near the end was only inevitable.

[Murdoch]

So Schickel is basically saying all directors should be complacent and make films that function merely as escapism without providing any social commentary whatsoever.

Unlike Godard, they show almost no interest in advancing the cause of cinema in general

Umm, how is that a good thing?

[Antoine Doinel]

Brilliant job doing your homework on Wikipedia.

...it looks like stumbled across a few Armond White reviews online as well.

Another reviewer of Everything Is Cinema laboriously furrows their brow over Godard.

[tavernier]

Another reviewer of Everything Is Cinema laboriously furrows their brow over Godard.

She loves Breathless, though!

[domino harvey]

Wow. So because Brody devotes time to films the reviewer doesn't like, the book is fatally flawed. Yet another "intellectual" reviewer who remains incapable of moving away from the tired party line about how Godard's late period films are in some way inferior to his 60s period, yawn.

[Binker]

Richard Schickel lets Godard in on what he's been doing wrong all these years. What a condescending windbag.

Either Schickel's unsure of his own position or he's afraid of articulating it. His argument against Godard can essentially be paired down to

"...everything is not cinema, that there are matters better suited to other forms -- essays, painting, music, even pulp fiction."

Which of course begs the question, like what? Reading the article, it's glaringly obvious he wants to scream "POLITICS!" but doesn't have the balls. Or maybe he never says it because his problem is not with political cinema but with Godard's political cinema. At other points, he comes close to answering that question with something along the lines of "untraditional storytelling/disjointed narrative/abstraction in general." But he goes back on himself here too, again, either because he's too scared to admit the insanely narrow scope of his appreciation for cinema or because his aversion is not to those principles in general but rather Godard's utilization of them.

He hates Godard, doesn't understand why, so he invents positions he himself doesn't agree with in order to intellectually justify his opinion.

[Perkins Cobb]

I'm delighted to see the Schickel pile-on pick up some momentum after I posted that link, given the overall virulence of his douchebaggery.

Binker's mention of politics is astute. I hadn't considered it in this case, but Schickel's apparent need to refight the Cold War (I guess we didn't win it soundly enough for him the first time) is the most odious lapse of objectivity in his recent work. It's the organizing structure of his Kazan book and an underlying eccentricity in a lot of other pieces, like his review of Stuart Galbraith's Kurosawa/Mifune bio. It is indeed likely that Schickel's distaste for Godard's Maoist period is the real agenda at work here, although if so he expresses it more covertly than he has elsewhere.

Or, it could be he just has a low threshold for challenging movies. He is Eastwood's biggest champion these days, after all.

[Tom Hagen]

Another reviewer of Everything Is Cinema laboriously furrows their brow over Godard.

The New York Times reviewsEverything is Cinema again.

[Antoine Doinel]

The NY Times seems to adopting this horrible habit lately of running two reviews of the same book, often with contrary views. It's almost like they want to cover their bases instead of taking a stand. A couple of months ago, they ran (one of the few) rave reviews of James Frey's latest novel and then a couple of weeks ago, ran another review panning the book.

[Anonymous]

Before I begin, domino harvey - in what way do you think Schickel's notion of what "Tradition of Quality" means is misappropriated and false? It seems to me that his take is simplistic and does not go into detail, but gets the perameters right (though of course it doesn't touch on Truffaut's fairly right-wing scorn of said Tradition's blasphemy - is this what you meant?)

Poor Brody. Even the critics who like his book are bypassing his work to spend their entire review talking about its subject. But let's take on Schickel quote by quote.

"a director whose films and theories about the cinema endlessly flirt with revolutionary ideas about the medium only to abandon them to solipsism, flight and contempt"

"Godard's films frequently start out with a good melodramatic idea, something that would support intellectually interesting variants on its themes ("Le Petit Soldat," "A Woman Is a Woman," "Contempt" and "Alphaville" among many others) only to lose their way."

So in Schickel's view, Godard goes astray, but is it revolutionary ideas or melodramatic solidity that he's abandoning? If the former, how and where does Schickel think Godard is abandoning them? If the latter, how does Godard's work NOT support "intellectually interesting variants on its themes"? Schickel is making questionable assertions without providing any evidence. I'd like to see some.

"To a degree that Brody seems not quite to understand, their failures derive from Godard's methods. He tended to work from brief outlines, which he would flesh out by writing a page or two of script on the day he was shooting. If inspiration failed him, he would simply send the company home. Sometimes he would intervene in the process, interviewing his actors or having them interview one another on the general topic the sequence was taking up."

Though I take issue with Schickel's characterization of Godard's "failures", I appreciate this passage for shining a light on Godard's methods, something many commentators on Godard - pro and con - fail to do. Godard fans whose ideas of an auteur tend more towards Shickel's - "They are aesthetic conservatives, people who find their ground and work it until it is overgrazed" - try to refashion him as their kind of filmmaker, often out of a basic ignorance of his working methods. They don't realize or appreciate the extent to which Godard incorporated improvisation, instinct, and documentary into his work. And this tends to lead them into overly intellectualized readings of Godard's work, in which the element of play, emotion, and risk-taking is ignored, or else taken to be explored in an entirely pre-conceived way. And in return, we get people turned off from Godard because he's been presented to them in this completely cold, theoretical way, when in fact he was one of the hottest and most impulsive of directors. So, whatever his intention in doing so, I'm glad Shickel for pointing out that it's not just Godard's finished films that were revolutionary, but his methods.

"The current bankruptcy of the medium -- the American craze for special effects, the rest of the world's reversion to, yes, "the tradition of quality" -- is a direct result of caution and uninteresting calculation"

Adamently agreed. Which is what makes Schickel's disregard for Godard all the more confusing. Anyway, isn't Godard also "an obsessive" even if his methods don't suit Shickel's idealization of the Tsar sitting on his throne, calmly issuing edicts on the minutea of technique well in advance?

[sevenarts]

Stephanie Zacharek's uncritical review of Brody's Godard book prompts my response.

[Michael Kerpan]

Stephanie Zacharek's uncritical review of Brody's Godard book prompts my response.

Good work. Didn't SZ used to write for "Salon" online. My recollection was that she was pretty worthless on that gig -- at least most of the time.