JonathanRosenbaum.com

Eight Obstacles to the Appreciation of Godard in the United States

From Jean-Luc Godard: Son-Image 1974-1991 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992). -– J.R.

“Jean-Luc cultists,” complains Judith Crist in the World Journal

Tribune. God bless them! They constitute a line of defense against

every manipulative insult the entertainment business throws out,

there are more of them each year, and they may even be winning.

– Roger Greenspun (1)

Greenspun’s rallying cry of a quarter of a century ago testifies to the passion and debate that

used to be stirred up in the United States when Godard’s name was mentioned. The gradual

phasing out of that debate and the depletion of that passion cannot be explained simply, and

to understand it at all requires some careful thought about how American culture as a whole

has itself changed in the interim. For a director still closely identified with the sixties in

American film criticism, Godard is regarded today with much of the same fear, skepticism,

suspicion, and impatience that greet many other contemporary responses to that decade.

And his status as an intellectual with a taste for abstraction may make him seem even

more out of place in a mass culture that currently has little truck with movie experiences

that can’t be reduced to sound bites. (One might add that he has still fared somewhat

better in this respect than Antonioni, whose American reputation has suffered an almost

total eclipse.)

Roughly speaking, Godard’s career as a critic spans sixteen years, from an auteurist

appreciation of Joseph Mankiewicz, published in the second issue of Gazette du Cinéma

in 1950, to “3000 heures de cinéma,” published in the 184th issue of Cahiers du

Cinéma (November 1966). His career as a director of features has lasted almost twice

as long and reveals a comparable ambivalence toward the U.S., with both a love of

William Faulkner and Robert Aldrich and a mockery of American power and influence

extending all the way from Breathless to Nouvelle Vague. But in contrast to this

sustained love-hatred that, through all its vicissitudes, has never ceased to be both

pursuit and flight, embrace and recoil, the relationship of the U.S. to Godard has,

broadly speaking, been one of increasing fascination (roughly 1961 to 1973),

followed by decreasing interest (roughly 1974 to 1992).

It should be recalled, however, that, even at the height of his popularity as an

arthouse director, Godard was always something of a minority taste among critics

and audiences alike. While the American critics and institutions that were originally

most supportive of his work — Richard Roud, Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, Pauline

Kael, and Vincent Canby, among the former; the New York Film Festival, The Museum

of Modern Art, and New Yorker Films, among the latter — have been highly influential,

mainstream resistance to Godard’s work has remained constant over the past three

decades, becoming increasingly decisive over the second half of this period.

The remarks that follow will attempt to pinpoint some of the sources of that resistance.

Without pretending in any way to be exhaustive, I think that the principal obstacles to the

American appreciation of Godard that have existed — and, in many cases, continue to exist

– point toward a complex of cultural attitudes that ultimately have bearing on much more

than Godard’s work. Nevertheless, insofar as Godard’s name has remained both a symbol

and a rallying point for a certain kind of cinema since the beginning of his career, it seems

useful to delve here, however incompletely, into the question of what that kind of cinema has

meant, and continues to mean, in an American context.

While much of my emphasis will be on the American reception of Godard’s work since I974,

it is important to bear in mind that Godard’s American reputation prior to this period,

beginning in 1961 with the release in the United States of his first feature, Breathless,

affected his subsequent reputation in two largely antithetical ways. That is, part of the

resistance to Godard in this country since I974 can be construed as a backlash to the former

centrality of Godard’s name and work in certain circles, while another part of that resistance

is due to a lack of awareness of his former centrality, especially among younger viewers.

(Two significant instances of this latter situation, both dating from the early eighties, are

worth citing here. By his own account, Jim McBride was able to finance his American

remake of Breathless only because most producers he approached had heard of the film

but had never seen it; and when Godard’s Passion received an uncharacteristically wide

American release a year or so later, it was most often billed — in ads, on marquees,

and even in recorded phone messages at theaters – as “Francis Coppola’s Passion”.)

Although many of the topics addressed below represent ongoing problems of reception

rather than obstacles posed in a particular period, and some of these are overlapping

rather than sequential, I have given these topics in a very rough chronological order,

from problems associated with Godard during the sixties, to the recent present.

1. The Nouvelle Vague context. Clearly, the fact that Breathless was originally perceived

as part of a larger artistic movement helped immeasurably in providing Godard’s first

American audiences with a loose context in which to understand his work. Breathless

opened in New York the same year as Claude Chabrol’s The Cousins, after Alain

Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and Louis Malle’s

The Lovers already appeared, and while information about “the Nouvelle Vague” in the

American press tended to be somewhat vague and confused — characteristically, both

Resnais and Malle were often assumed to be Cahiers du Cinéma critics along with Truffaut,

Godard, and Chabrol — the sense of Godard being part of a larger movement was already

fairly pronounced.

While the Nouvelle Vague continued to be regarded as a viable journalistic hook by

American critics throughout most of the sixties, subdivisions and discriminations

became more apparent as more films and information became available. It was

eventually understood that directors who had started out as critics on Cahiers du

Cinéma — Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer –represented

a particular core group in the Nouvelle Vague, identifiable by their eccentric taste for

American genre films, their low-budget methods of shooting, and their relatively

freewheeling styles. (Regarding the latter, it was widely believed that most or all of

these directors depended a great deal on improvisation. The appearance of John

Cassavetes’ Shadows around the same time as Breathless led some reviewers to make

certain connections between the two, without discriminating between the actor’s [alleged]

improvisations in Shadows and Godard’s practice on Breathless of working without a

complete shooting script; some time passed before it was understood that Jean-Paul

Belmondo’s asides and rambling monologues at the beginning of Breathless weren’t

the actor’s own inventions.) Many other popular French films of this period, such as

Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Malle’s Zazie, and

the early films of Jacques Demy and Philippe de Broca, were often labeled “Nouvelle

Vague” as well, and it was a while before the efforts of the better-informed critics made

it apparent that some of these films, like those of Resnais and Demy, were more related

to the tastes and methods of the core group than certain others, like those of Camus

and de Broca.

The eventual dissolution of the original concept of “Nouvelle Vague” – with reference

both to the core group and to its wider applications — was gradual, and largely came

about when the ideological, temperamental, and stylistic differences between members

of the core group became too glaring to overlook. Godard’s increasing move toward

Leftist politics articulated one of the most striking of these differences (see #5, below),

and if one draws certain approximate parallels between the dissolution of the Cahiers core

group and the breakup of the Beatles (which occurred during the following decade), it is

clear that Godard was the John Lennon of the group. (Following the same rough parallel,

Truffaut was the Paul McCartney and Rivette was the George Harrison, although one clearly

couldn’t postulate either Chabrol or Rohmer as an equivalent to Ringo Starr.) By the time that

“Nouvelle Vague” became appropriated as “New Wave” to refer to a kind of rock music, the

original meaning of the term had passed out of the working vocabulary of the American

mainstream — so much so that contemporary American academics who teach Nouvelle

Vague films generally feel obliged to speak of the “French New Wave” in order to avoid

confusion.

One final comment regarding the original Cahiers core group is worth stressing.

As many of the eccentric film tastes of these critic-directors gradually passed into the

American mainstream — so that it eventually became less shocking to regard Alfred

Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as serious and important directors — the polemical force

of Cahiers du Cinéma’s position regarding American cinema was largely dissipated,

thanks in large measure to the early critical efforts of Andrew Sarris, terms like “auteur”

and “mise en scène” (the latter with hyphens added) entered the language, and the

notion of treating popular American mainstream and genre directors as serious

artists became not only acceptable but firmly entrenched, eventually lent even more

credence by the expanded role played by promotion (and the promotion of certain

directors) in the reception of big-studio Hollywood features. Broadly speaking, the

attention once accorded to figures like Godard and Truffaut (and other foreign

directors like Bergman and Fellini) as “artists” is lavished today on directors such

as Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Meanwhile, current American interest in

Cahiers du Cinéma is so slight that a respected writer for the New York Times

could recently state that the magazine “is no longer fascinated by Hollywood” — a

remark nearly fifteen years out of date. (2)

2. Release patterns. According to the filmography in Richard Roud’s Godard (3),

the first book about Godard in English, Godard’s early features opened

commercially in the United States in the following order and years: Breathless

(1961), Vivre sa vie (1963), Contempt (1964), A Woman is a Woman (1964),

The Married Woman (1965), Alphaville (1965), Band of Outsiders (1966),

Masculine Feminine (1966), La Chinoise (1968), Les Carabiniers (1968),

Weekend (1968). During the same period, his other early features made their

first U.S. appearances at the New York Film Festival: Le Petit Soldat (1965),

Pierrot le fou (1966), Made in U.S.A. (1967), 2 or 3 Things I Know About

Her (1968), Le Gai Savoir (1969); the rarely shown May 1968 documentary

Un Film comme les autres had its first screening in the United States on the

premises shared by the New York Film Festival, Philharmonic Hall, early in 1969.

Putting these lists together and noting specific dates, one can say that Godard’s

first features appeared in the U.S. in the following sequence: 1, 4, 6, 3, 8, 2, 9,

7, 10, 11, 12, 5, 14, 13, 15, 17, 16. This almost continuous disruption of what

might be regarded as the logical development of Godard’s work from one

feature to the next was bound to lead to certain confusions. (In France, by

contrast, the sequence was broken only by the initial banning of Le Petit Soldat,

Godard’s second feature, which opened in Paris the year after Vivre sa vie,

his fourth.) Haphazard programming patterns also tended to obscure certain

linkages that enhanced and clarified many of the films in question; for example,

Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, made concurrently in

1965, premiered at the New York FiIm Festival a year apart, in 1967 and 1968,

respectively. The latter film was eventually released in 1970; the former, due to

legal problems involving the Richard Stark novel that was the film’s putative

source, has never been released in the United States at all.

3. The price of innovation. As far back as the mid-sixties, it was already a

commonplace that many of Godard’s most “innovative” practices — such

as his jump cuts, employment of direct sound and interview formats,

fractured story lines, references to other films, freewheeling uses of

pop culture, and essayistic digressions — were no longer as startling

as they had initially been, because of their widespread influence on

other filmmakers. But even though a considerable residue from his

eclectic strategies was finding its way into other films, including

those of the mainstream, Godard had the talent to remain ahead

of his imitators by continuing to develop in unforeseeable ways

– a talent significantly shared, and always to his commercial

detriment, by Orson Welles.

Unlike such relatively “bankable” European filmmakers as Bergman

and Fellini, Godard could never be trusted either by producers

or by spectators to “deliver the goods,” in the sense of repeating

the formula (or at least the surface appearance) of a previous

success –- the means by which most well-known contemporary

American directors make themselves known. As recognizable as

Godard’s style may be to aficionados, it has never adopted such

obvious signatures as the white-on-black credits of Woody Allen

films or “Spielberg lighting”. Today, when the dominance of

advertising has had an increasing effect on criticism, any film or

filmmaker that can’t be marketed as an immediately identifiable

quantity runs the risk of disappearing quickly from sight.

4. Aesthetic conservatism. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing

American attack on Godard’s work published to date is John

Simon’s essay “Godard and the Godardians: A Study in the New

Sensibility.” (4) In the second paragraph of this lengthy broadside,

Godard is linked by Simon to currents in the other arts that Simon

equally disapproves of, including “aleatory and electronic music,”

“action painting, Pop and Op art, junk sculpture,” “rock ‘n’ roll and

its sundry derivatives in popular music,” and “happenings, events,

environments, and other ‘mixed media.’ “ Significantly, the only

area of film that Simon chooses to relate Godard to in this paragraph

is neither “the New Wave” nor any other European film currents, but

“‘underground movies’ or ‘New American Cinema,”‘ a movement

whose most vocal figures during this period were not among

Godard’s strongest defenders. (While Jonas Mekas and a few other

writers in Film Culture praised some of the early features, it was

generally felt in American avant-garde film circles that Godard’s

reliance on narrative and on professional actors disqualified him

from serious consideration. Significantly, the only “Nouvelle Vague”

figure recognized in the permanent collection of the Anthology Film

Archives was — and still is — Marcel Hanoun. Mekas wrote in 1970,

“With Pravda Godard finally abandons commercial cinema and joins

the underground.” Mekas declared Pravda Godard’s best film to date,

but this review proved to be an isolated case.)

The bulk of Simon’s essay is devoted to point-by-point refutations of

Godard’s leading American supporters at the time – Sontag, KaeI,

Sarris, and Roud — along with John Russell Taylor and A. Alvarez in

England. His principal charge throughout is that Godard is an

undisciplined, unstructured filmmaker for whom “anything goes,”

and it is worth adding that in spite of Simon’s many objections to the

claims of Godard’s defenders, there are some points of agreement

about where to situate Godard in relation to currents in the other arts.

Indeed, Sontag’s evocations of a “new sensibility” in Against

Interpretation (5) — which also contains a philosophical analysis

of Vivre sa vie attacked by Simon — and her passionate and extended

appreciation of Godard in Styles of Radical Will (6) allude to most of the

same artistic currents as Simon does, although for her these connections

are positive rather than negative factors. On the other hand, faced with

Sarris’s positioning of Godard alongside “Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot,”

Simon argues, “About the only place where Godard’s position might be

comparable to that of the other four is on the toilet seat. But Godard, alas,

also expels his work from that position.”

Rereading Simon’s hysterical diatribe today, one is struck by how much of his

anger is directed at Godard’s respectful (if eclectic) attitude toward popular

culture, Hollywood movies in particular. His opening and pivotal example

from Godard’s work that elicits his deepest scorn is the offscreen recitation

of Apollinaire’s poem “Cors de chasse” during the screening of a Western.

“What business,” asks Simon, “have the characters in a vulgar American western

reciting one of France’s finest 20th-century lyrics at each other — and antiphonally

at that, as though it were dialogue that they were improvising?” (Later in the same

essay, Simon is equally dismayed by Kael’s respectful attitude toward American

gangster movies, in her review of Band of Outsiders.) In short, the major issue

at stake for Simon was literary high culture versus the encroachments of popular

culture, and he regarded Godard (rightly, I think) as a major force in making

such encroachments acceptable. (A specialist in theater and European literature,

Simon exemplified a certain literary bias in relation to film that was considerably

more prevalent among intellectual circles prior to the beginnings of film studies

as an academic discipline during the seventies.)

5. Political conservatism. A love-hatred relationship with America has been apparent in

Godard’s work ever since Breathless, but the increasing political thrust of his work

throughout the sixties — given especial focus by his determination to attack the U.S.

role in Vietnam in every one of his films in the mid-sixties -– made this relationship

particularly acute. The vehemence of Godard’s anti-Americanism by the late sixties

may have drawn some politically oriented viewers to his work, but it also clearly

alienated many others, and in many respects it continues to do so. It might be said

that, in the sixties, Godard’s love for American cinema and his hatred for

American imperialism echoed a kind of ambivalence that was felt in certain sectors

of the United States as well. One of his last texts written for Cahiers du Cinéma’s

in the sixties, “3000 heures de cinéma,” expresses this ambivalence succinctly:

“Mystery and fascination of this American cinema. How can I hate Robert McNamara

and adore Take the High Ground, hate the John Wayne who supports Goldwater

and tenderly love him when he abruptly takes Nathalie Wood into his arms in the

next to last reel of The Searchers? [translation mine]“

As long as this sort of romanticism was reflected in Godard’s films, he still had

a substantial and vocal constituency in the United States, particularly among

students. In early 1968, many of these students at Columbia University went

to see La Chinoise again and again only weeks before some of them

participated in the takeover of campus buildings, and their campus uprising

occurred only a short time before the May Events in France. One could argue

today, of course, that La Chinoise may have been more of an effect of that

period than a cause; nonetheless, the sort of centrality that Godard’s work in

the mid-sixties had for some viewers in the U.S. makes the notion of such a

chain reaction plausible. And it is even more important to recall that the feeling

of spontaneous combustion that ran from Berkeley to Paris and from Rome to

Kent State in that period created a cultural climate highly receptive to Godard’s

impudence, as well as his feeling for the contemporary. One went to see Godard

movies in that period with an expectation not unlike that of opening a newspaper.

But after 1968, Godard’s violent rejections of cinephilia

and other forms of pleasure in his Dziga Vertov Group

films — coupled with his willingness to make films in

“underground” conditions – led to a gradual disaffection

among many of his American fans, including many of the

most political. The theoretical concerns of these films seemed

remote to most of the student activists (whose resistance to

theory has often been remarked upon), and the relative absence

of the romanticism and pleasure that had fueled the popularity

of films like La Chinoise and Weekend was equally off-putting.

The same qualities that led Mekas to praise Pravda were alienating

to most arthouse audiences and mainstream critics (with a few

notable exceptions, such as Penelope Gilliatt), and it wasn’t until

Godard made a conscious return to 35 millimeter, narrative, and

stars in Tout va bien (1972) that he was to regain part of their interest.

6. The move from Paris. Godard had been viewed in the United States

as a French, and specifically Parisian, director. When he moved, first

to Grenoble, in the mid-seventies, and then more permanently to Rolle,

Switzerland, a few years later, the gradual effacement of his perceived

identity led to confusions about how to “place” him that have persisted

ever since. Two comparable cases of confusion about national identity

in the public mind are those of Michael Snow, a Canadian who has

worked on occasion in the United States, and Chantal Akerman, a Belgian

who has worked on many occasions in France. The same unconscious

form of imperialism that has tended to ignore both the Belgian aspects

of Akerman’s work and the Canadian aspects of Snow’s has resisted

regarding the bulk of Godard’s work since Every Man for Himself

(1979) as Swiss. This has unfortunately obscured the degree to

which Godard’s Swiss identity might be construed as a significant

factor in the meaning of his recent work, carrying specific inflections

to the uses of Swiss landscapes, the meaning of borders, the

prominence of banks and bankers, and so on – elements that seem

especially prominent in Nouvelle Vague, but are also surely relevant

to many of the others.

7. Historical amnesia and cultural gaps. The subject of cultural amnesia

has been a central preoccupation of Godard’s since the mid-eighties –-

most evident in King Lear (1987) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989- ),

two works that have so far failed conspicuously to receive a comprehensive

critical response in the United States. And not so coincidentally, it would

appear that cultural amnesia is itself at the root of this failure. Jonathan

Baumbach’s defense of King Lear, unpublished in 1987 but printed three

years later in the collection Produced and Abandoned, epitomizes as well

as describes the memory hole that Godard’s work since the mid-seventies

has fallen into, particularly for American viewers:

Between 1919 and 1968, Godard produced virtually all his major

work. . . . After that there was a period of agitprop films, in

collaboration with Pierre Gorin [sic], where Godard attempted

to efface himself as an artist. And though he returned to making

commercial films in 1981 with the admirable Every Man for

Himself (his second first film, as he called it), he was no longer

at the center of our consciousness. He was speaking to us, or

such was the perception, from a vanished time. (7)

Missing from this chronology (along with the “Jean” in Jean-Pierre

Gorin) is any recognition of five major Godard works that followed

his collaboration with Gorin and preceded Every Man for Himself,

all made in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville: Ici et ailleurs

(1974), Numéro deux (1975), Six fois deux/Sur et sous la

communication (1976), Comment ça va (1976), and France/

tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977-78). None of these works

received anything more than minimal exposure in the United States,

frequently without subtitles, although I believe the political and formal

importance of this massive block of work — comprising collectively over

eighteen hours — far exceeds that of the “period of agitprop films” (1969

to 1972, about nine hours) that were fetishized by certain English and

American academics (see #8, below). Many of these academics clearly found

it easier to quote the theoretical discourses and slogans of Le Gai Savoir,

Vent d’est, and Tout va bien — all of which were eminently teachable

precisely because they were more easily reducible to their verbal texts –-

than to analyze the complex audiovisual and verbal interplay in Numéro

deux and Ici et ailleurs, which were far more resistant to verbal paraphrase,

or to situate the two TV series as particular political interventions conceived

in relation to France and its state-run television in that period, a specialized

context that was equally hard to grasp. This latter period in Godard’s work

seems marked by two tendencies that are closely connected: the first is a

grappling with TV as both subject and metaphor (in Ici et ailleurs, Numéro

deux, and Comment ça va), On the one hand, and as a medium to work in

and through (in the two TV series), on the other. The second tendency is to

grapple more directly with political and social engagement, an approach that

is quite distinct from the grappling with theoretical positions found in the

previous films. Thanks to this loss of continuity every subsequent Godard

feature appears to come, as Baumbach puts it, “from a vanished time.”

8. Hermeticism and declining interest in intellectual cinema. In Under the

Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag expressed a growing disaffection with the

“diffident logorrhea of Godard’s late films,” compared with Syberberg’s

“supreme confidence in language, in discourse, in eloquence itself.” (8)

Significantly, in the same volume (though in an essay written seven years

earlier than “Syberberg’s Hitler“), she also alluded in passing to “the

irresistible ascension of Woody Allen.” (9) In fact, it would not be unduly

fanciful to argue that the principal American model for “intellectual art

cinema,” once Godard’s films, became, about ten years ago, those of Allen

– films whose complete trust in narrative, disinterest in formal abstraction,

and more modest intellectual aims place them in a different universe of

discourse. This is certainly plausible if one compares Vincent Canby’s

remarks about both directors in the New York Times over the same period

– beginning, say, with his rapturous review of Manhattan in 1979, continuing

with his stern advice to Antonioni in 1982 to study the films of Allen, and

concluding in 1990 with his dismissal of Nouvelle Vague as “featherweight,” in

a review that ends: “Only people who despise the great Godard films, everything

from Breathless (1959) to Every Man for Himself (1979), could be anything

but saddened by this one. The party’s over.” Setting aside the question of

whether the self-pity, defeatism, and nearly suicidal impulses of Every Man

for Himself ever constituted much of a party to begin with, Canby’s

pronouncement resembles Baumbach’s in that it describes a break in Godard’s

work rather than either a continuity or a development. And surely an implicit

element in Canby’s dismissal is Godard’s abandonment of a relatively lucid

narrative: from this point of view, it might be argued that the more legible,

‘realistic’ narratives of films like Breathless and Every Man for Himself

constitute, for some of his viewers, promises that Godard has not always kept.

Canby, one should note, is a relatively late defector from the Godard camp;

Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, by contrast, who were two of Godard’s biggest

defenders in the mid-sixties, ceased to show much sustained interest in his

work from the late sixties on, and most other mainstream critics have tended

to follow suit. (Sarris expressed a grudging support for Nouvelle Vague “as

an essayistic meditation on a dying world,” but added that Godard is “caught

in a losing wager” because “the cinema did not end with Breathless” and “the

world did not end with Weekend.”) (10)

On the other hand, American academics became increasingly interested in

Godard around the same time (the early seventies) that mainstream reviewers

were backing away – a period that corresponded roughly to the beginnings

of academic film study, when Godard himself was, ironically, converted by

certain academics into a kind of Aristotelian model of a theoretically informed

counter-cinema. I’m thinking in particular of Peter Wollen’s essays “The Two Avant-

Gardes” and “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est” (11), although a similar

tendency can be found in the writing of Robin Wood about Tout va bien over

roughly the same period. Thanks to the efforts of these and other critics, films

like Le Gai Savoir, Vent d’est, and Tout va bien became valued classroom texts

that were resented as virtually offering recipes for the establishment of a

politically progressive “alternate” cinema. But by the time that Godard moved

to Switzerland, even this interest seemed to diminish; Fassbinder began to

supplant Godard as the exemplary contemporary European director among

academics, much as Allen replaced Godard in the mainstream, and, apart

from Camera Obscura’s special Godard issue in 1982 (12), the rest has

mainly been silence.

Nevertheless, one can’t deny that a certain loss of evangelical urgency has made

Godard’s recent work somewhat less accessible, to Americans and non-Americans

alike. “I think I’m not a very good screenwriter who can be a good director,” Godard

once said to me in an interview.” (13) Certainly, a discrepancy between his

mastery of and confidence in mise en scène and his uncertainty in furnishing a

story and dialogue accounts for many aspects of his films, particularly his more

recent ones: the inability of the director-hero in Passion to come up with a story;

the appropriation of “classic” stories in First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary, and King

Lear; the use of a story line furnished by others (Alain Sarde and Philippe Setbon)

in Détective; the scattered serial narrative of Soigne ta droite interrupted by

rehearsals of pop music (recalling the form of 1+1/Sympathy for the Devil);

dialogue consisting exclusively of literary quotations in Nouvelle Vague. This

problematic search for story and dialogue ultimately points to a unifying belief

or system that could impose continuity. Over the years, Godard has sharpened

his ability to film nature, to light shots, and simply to fill certain moments with

sound, color, shape, and movement. What he seems to have less of –in the

absence of his former cinephilia and Marxism — is a pretext for getting from

one of these moments to the next.

Sometimes, as in Passion and King Lear, this pretext becomes

simply spite and anger – emotions undervalued in more

cowardly periods such as the present, just as they were

perhaps overvalued twenty years ago. Godard has been honest

enough to reveal the envy that underlies, in part, his spite and

anger, and obviously these emotions may seem less than heroic.

But as a source of energy and invention all three can still have

heroic consequences, epitomized in a line spoken by a character

in William Gass’s story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”:

“I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.”

Rising as high as Godard may entail some measure of self-

protection in this respect, as well as elitist alienation, but this

has never been the inclination of American intellectuals, who are

likelier to reject the very terms of such an aspiration. Significantly,

my editor at Soho News changed the title of my 1980 Godard

interview from “Catching Up with Godard” to “Bringing Godard

Back Home” -– home in this context apparently being located

somewhere in the vicinity of Vincent Canby’s party. But until we

address ourselves to catching up with Godard, the point of The

Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective, we haven’t any home

to bring him back to.

End Notes

1. Roger Greenspun, “Film Notes,” Cahiers du Cinéma in English, no. 6 (December 1966), p. 5.

2. Molly Haskell, ‘Auteur! Auteur! Cahiers du Cinéma Takes a Bow,” New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, Sunday, March 1, 1992.

3. Richard Roud, Godard (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1970).

4. John Simon, “Godard and the Godardians: A Study in the New Sensibility,” reprinted in his collection Private Screenings (New York: Macmillan, 1967). The quotes cited here are from pages 306-32.

5. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965).

6 . _______________, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969).

7. Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, National Society of Film Critics Members Staff, ed. Michael Sragow (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1990), p. 166.

8. The quotes cited here are from “Syberberg’s Hitler,” in Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 137-65.

9. Ibid. p. 4.

10. New York Observer, December 3, 1990.

11. Peter Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” and, idem, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est,” both reprinted in in his collection Readings and Writings (London: Verso, 1982).

12. Three essays from this issue, Camera Obscura, no. 8-9-10 (Fall 1982), are reprinted together in this volume, under the title “Sexual Difference and Sauve qui peut (la vie),” pp. 42-55.

13. Soho News, September 24-30, 1980.