jonathanrosenbaum.

net
Review of Michael Witt’s JEAN-LUC GODARD, CINEMA HISTORIAN
Posted
4-5 minutes

Published, in a slightly shorter version, in the August 2014 Sight and Sound. —
J.R.

JEAN-LUC GODARD, CINEMA HISTORIAN

By Michael Witt. Indiana University Press, 276pp. £20.65.

paperback, ISBN 9780253007285

jeanlucgodardcinemahistorian

Reviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum

histoire(s)5

There has been a slew of important books lately devoted to post-60s Godard,
including Daniel Morgan’s Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema, Jerry
White’s Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, and
Godard’s own Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, translated by
Timothy Barnard — the latter including Michael Witt’s introductory, 55-page
‘Archaeology of Histoire(s) du cinéma’. But none seems quite as durable, both as a
beautiful object and as a user-friendly intellectual guide, as Witt’s superbly
lucid, jargon-free book about Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema
Historian.

histoire(s)6

Copiously illustrated with frame enlargements that complement the text without ever
seeming redundant, this examination of the philosophical, historical, and aesthetic
underpinnings of Godard’s masterwork isn’t only about a four and a half-hour video;
it’s also about the work’s separate reconfigurations as a series of books, a set of
CDs, and a 35-millimeter feature of 84 minutes (Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du
cinéma). And one of Witt’s major achievements is to clarify just what Godard means
— and doesn’t mean — by ‘histoire’, ‘cinéma,’ and even ‘du’ (‘of’ or ‘by’).
Godard’s history (or story) is more a matter of poetry than chronicle, with ties to
Benjamin, Braudel, Foucault, and Michelet; his “cinema” is quite distinct from
“film,” having more to do with a collective leap in national self-awareness (as in
Italian Neorealism) than with any individual achievement. So what Godard means by
the ‘decline’ or ‘death’ of cinema excludes his reverence for such key individual
artists as Chaplin, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, and Welles and revolves around
the failure of film at mid-century to confront the Holocaust.

histoire(s)2

Regarding Histoire(s) as Godard’s magnum opus that brings coherence to and reveals
continuity with the remainder of his work, Witt persuasively plots out many
extensive through-lines. Yet there are times when I wish his conceptual and
referential frames were still wider. The overall orientation of his study is, to
coin a term, francocentric, so you won’t find Eliot, Joyce, Pound, or even Hammett
listed in the index; I also regret the neglect of many of Godard’s key works as a
film critic, including his reviews of Bitter Victory, Hollywood or Bust, Man of the
West, Montparnasse 19, and The Wrong Man. When Witt discusses the importance of
Alain Resnais’ early work to Godard, he overlooks both La chant du styrène (which
inspired some of Godard’s most rapturous critical prose) and Last Year at
Marienbad, much of whose soundtrack is included in the first episode of
Histoire(s), as Witt himself recalls in a subsequent chapter.

la_chant_du_styrene

Considering Witt’s thoroughness as a researcher, my only factual quibbles derive

from specialized information he can readily be excused for not knowing: his claim
that Godard was able to use all the film clips he’d selected for Histoire(s) once
Gaumont agreed to clear all the rights is contradicted by a penultimate, prelease
edit of three of the later episodes that Godard once sent to me, and his subsequent
suggestion that Godard saw Truffaut’s La chamber verte is refuted by my failure to
convince Godard he should see it, if only for its implicit critique of la politique
des auteurs. But this is mere hair-splitting about an essential book.

jonathanrosenbaum.net
Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy
Posted
8-10 minutes

From the Summer 2004 issue of Cineaste. — J.R.

Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

by Colin MacCabe. Filmography and picture research by Sally Shafto. New York, NY:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 432 pp, illus. Hardcover: $25.00.

This isn’t an authorized biography of Jean-Luc Godard. But it appears to have

qualified briefly as a book that might have become one after Colin MacCabe first
embarked on it in the mid-Eighties. “Two years later,” he reports in his Preface,
“he” — meaning Godard — “asked me how the work was progressing and this encouraged
me to bury my own doubts and to prepare a very detailed treatment. By the early
nineties, however, it was clear that Godard no longer had any faith in the
project.”

MacCabe says nothing to explain this change of heart and loss of faith. A look,
however, at one version of his detailed treatment — “Jean-Luc Godard: A Life in
Seven Episodes (to Date),” published in Raymond Bellour’s 1992 Museum of Modern Art
collection Jean-Luc Godard Son + Image, 1974-1991 – provides a plausible reason,
especially if one zeroes in on the following passage in the second episode: “The
South American journey came to an end [in Rio] when Godard’s father once again
refused to support his son any longer. A few nights on the beach at Copacabana and
a pathetic failure to raise money as a homosexual prostitute were the prelude to a
return to Switzerland and Paris, where Godard contributed to the first issues of
Cahiers du Cinéma.”

MacCabe coyly avoids any mention of this detail (or even this essay) in the present
volume, but drops plenty of hints that some of his dealings with Godard over the
years have been (characteristically) troubled. This must have been an extremely
difficult book to research and write, and we all owe the author our gratitude for
having seen it through to the end. Despite the fact that each episode or chapter —
and there are now five rather than seven — seems to redraft the book’s agenda
slightly, becoming progressively more of a critical study and less of a biography
as it proceeds, this is a book that adds considerably to our understanding of
Godard, and no one who wishes to study his career in any depth can afford to be
without it.

Never one to proceed by half measures, MacCabe informs us in the Preface that
“perhaps the most apt” comparison one can come up with for Godard’s Histoire(s) du
cinéma is Dante’s Divine Comedy, “which takes the elements of one life to provide a
perspective on human history. Dante is also apt because it is the writing of the
Divine Comedy in Italian which signals the beginning of a recognizable European
culture; it is not an exaggeration to say that Histoire(s) du cinéma marks its
end.”

I think one can reasonably assert that it is an exaggeration — as is MacCabe’s

claim at the end of his review of Le mépris in the September 1996 Sight and Sound
that “This is the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe,” or his remark
to Philippe Sollers (which he reports in this book) that Godard is “the great
French poet of the twentieth century” (which he then cautiously modified by adding,
“after Valéry”). There’s something endearing about MacCabe’s bent for hyperbole
even if one isn’t always sure whether it derives more from conviction or from an
overall tactical strategy. When he calls Cahiers du cinéma “the most significant
cultural journal of the twentieth century,” and then, six pages later, “the most
successful cultural magazine of the twentieth century,” one wonders how much time
he’s spent pondering possible alternatives in these sweepstakes. Given MacCabe’s
highly variable track record as a producer, which has included everything from
Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (arguably one of the greatest of all
English features) and highly significant TV work by Godard and Scorsese to
meretricious and irresponsible documentaries of would-be film history by Stephen
Frears, Oleg Kovalov, and Nagisa Oshima, one wonders if these effusions can be
ascribed in part to his ambitious entrepreneurial instincts. The same reasoning
that brought us Tim Robbins and Quentin Tarantino as “expert” commentators on
Samuel Fuller (in another TV documentary) may be similarly concerned with the
public accepting Godard without a certain amount of heavy salesmanship.

Towards the end of this fascinating book, MacCabe also compares Histoire(s) du
cinéma to Finnegans Wake, and having pursued the same grand comparison myself, I
can’t really reproach him for riding such a hobbyhorse. Central to all the above
remarks is the firm belief, vociferously shared and elucidated by Godard himself,
that cinema is worth being considered alongside the other arts; and considering
that MacCabe’s background is in literature (with Joyce a particular specialty),
it’s refreshing how often he brings extracinematic reference points to bear on his
subject.

This is a legacy MacCabe shares with many of his fellow former editors at Screen in
the 1970s, and it more than makes up for the fact that, like most other members of
that group, he’s never really been a film scholar. That he can allude to The Tiger
of Eschnapur and Journey to the Lost City as “two of Fritz Lang’s last films” —
apparently mistaking the latter for The Indian Tomb without realizing that it’s a
dubbed travesty combining and condensing Lang’s two “Indian” features — is an
unexceptional gaffe, worth mentioning only because I believe these features are
crucial to understanding Le mépris. Yet most film buffs who know these films
backwards and forward — and who will readily respond to MacCabe’s assertion that
“the level of Godard’s mastery of the production process is without obvious
parallel in the history of cinema” with the obvious parallel of Chaplin — know
little about Joyce, much less Brecht, Sartre, Althusser, Barthes, or Lacan. And
it’s MacCabe’s grasp of all six that suggest what’s valuable about his own
understanding of Godard — a sense of intellectual and cultural history.

One sign of a well-researched biography is a tendency for certain facts to make

meaningful configurations when they appear together regardless of whether or not
the author chooses to comment on them. One striking example of this here are the
many instances in his youth of Godard stealing, often from his relatives, combined
with his frequent employments of unattributed texts by others, which makes his
entire career, according to former collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, “an assault on
the notion of intellectual property.” (Although he frequently got caught for his
early thefts, he has only recently had to face serious repercussions for using
someone else’s text without permission or acknowledgment — a legal action
successfully brought by Viviane Forrester for copyright infringement of a text of
hers in his 1987 film King Lear. Given her success, one wonders how long it will be
before some other authors follow suit.) And if there are some striking gaps in this
book regarding the discussion of Godard’s oeuvre as well as his life — among the
omissions in the former are most of his major short works, including Le nouveau
monde (1963), Anticipation (1967 — the last film he has made to date with Anna
Karina, and a brilliant postscript to Alphaville, just as the preceding film is a
pungent first draft), La contestation (1967), Scenario du film “Passion” (1982),
Puissance de la parole (1988), and L’origine de xxieme siècle (2000), all included
in Sally Shafto’s impeccable and indispensable filmography — one at least feels
that most of the pertinent thematic bases are covered.

The first and in some ways most valuable chapter, “Gods and Demi-Gods: The Monods
and the Godards,” is an exceptionally skillful account of Godard’s imposing family
background and privileged childhood, all the way up until his mother’s death from a
motorbike accident when he was in his mid-twenties. (It’s intriguing to discover
here that Godard’s maternal grandfather was Paul Valéry’s secretary and business
manager.) If the organization of materials tends to become somewhat looser as the
book develops, some of this undoubtedly derives from the complications of writing
about a living and still volatile figure. MacCabe obviously can’t tell us the whole
story — who could? — but he nonetheless adds appreciably to our factual and
intellectual understanding of the man.