Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Brody Richard

Author:Brody, Richard [Brody, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780805080155
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2008-05-13T03:00:00+00:00

ALTHOUGH GODARD had reached new prominence in the United States following his tour in the spring of 1970, his recent films were almost impossible to see in France. Pravda was screened, unannounced except through word of mouth, three times in February at the Musée d’Art moderne, where, taking questions from the audience, Godard all but apologized—“The film is 99 percent a failure but I think that it’s going 1 percent in the right direction.” But then, slipping back into character, he added, “For me, this film is a minuscule, tiny turn of the screw in the vise that will crush the bourgeoisie and its culture.”155

He was essentially off the French map, both cinematically and journalistically. Interviews appeared in such small-circulation journals as Cinéthique, an expressly far-left alternative to Cahiers du cinéma (which quickly caught up and politicized to the extreme), and in other radical journals. In the mainstream press, occasional reports detailed Godard’s activities, generally with the sort of ironic yet incredulous admiration inspired by a rich man who joins a religious order and fulfills a vow of poverty. In June 1970, Michel Cournot wrote with pathos in Le Nouvel Observateur about “Jean-Luc ex-Godard,”156 and the next month, Claude Mauriac wrote that Godard’s “body and effects disappeared” into the Dziga Vertov Group.157

While Godard had done a good job of disappearing in France, he was uninterruptedly visible in the United States. Indeed, from an American perspective, he hadn’t really left, in part, as a result of the vagaries of American film distribution, which kept his earlier work in the limelight. Weekend, shown at the New York Film Festival in September 1968, was released immediately thereafter, and the short film Anticipation (part of the compilation The World’s Oldest Profession) came out in November; Pierrot le fou was released to enthusiastic reviews in January 1969, Montparnasse and Levallois (in Paris vu par…, released as Six in Paris) in March; Le Gai Savoir played at the New York Film Festival to great acclaim (particularly from Vincent Canby in the New York Times) in September 1969, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her was hailed when it opened in April 1970, coinciding with Godard’s tour.

Godard’s most recent work (with and without Gorin) also received wide exposure and respectful attention. Indeed, in New York, Godard seemed to be everywhere, with One Plus One opening in April 1970 to praise in the New York Times and Newsweek (though in the Village Voice, David Ehrenstein hedged his admiration by addressing Godard as “you old charlatan, you faker,” and suggested that the film was “a ‘put-on’”). British Sounds and Pravda opened commercially in May, to an extended and enthusiastic study by Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker; in the Village Voice, Jonas Mekas exulted that “Pravda is Godard’s best film to date” and piled it on, saying that it also “may be his most romantic film.” Le Gai savoir opened in June; Wind from the East played at the 1970 New York Film Festival and was received with rapt attention by Canby in the Times.

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