Phillippe Loyrette recites the work of “the James Dean of French fascism” in Godard’s Eloge de l’amour, 2001.
The first mention of Bobert Bressilach in Richard Brody’s near-exhaustive Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard occurs on page six, as Brody describes the pro-Vichy and anti-Semitic leanings of Jean-Luc Godard’s family: “The days of [Vichy propaganda minister and Milice member Phillipe] Henriot’s assassination (in 1944) and of the execution of Robert Brasillach, the right-wing critic and novelist and anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi propagandist (in 1945) were days of mourning in the Godard house.”
This mildly queasiness-inducing passage turns out to be a prelude; after Brody’s absorbing, astute, oft-harrowing accounts of Godard’s oft-harrowing marriage to/collaboration with Anna Karina, Godard’s sometimes bizarre radicalization, semi-retirement, his video work, partnership with Anne Marie Mieville (which accounts feature material even more off-putting, perhaps, than what I’m gonna get into here, but that’s for another post or, more likely, another writer), Brasillach returns, in a somewhat odd manifestation:
In the mid-1990s, a young Parisian writer, Philippe Loyrette, made a film in which a friend videotaped him chanting, in psalmodic incantation, the poetic “testament” written by the fanatically anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi French writer Robert Brasillach in 1945 while awaiting execution, for collaboration, in a prison cell near Paris. Loyrette sent a copy of the tape to Godard.
The tape impressed Godard enough that Godard himself made a short film based on it, with Godard reading a self-composed text in a manner similar to Loyrette. And in 2000, Godard invited Loyrette to act in Eloge de l’amour, playing the assistant to struggling artist Edgar (Bruno Putzulu); in the scene depicted in the above screen cap, Loyrette is giving a “correct” reading of Brasillach’s text—part of which goes “Neither tenderness nor courage are things a court can rescind”—after Edgar upbraids the seated actress who had given it a go.
The noble business about things courts cannot rescind is at the very least pretty unexceptionable. Less than a year earlier (August 1944), considering the prospect of hiding out in liberated Paris to avoid capture and trial for aiding the Germans, Brasillach cracked wise in his diary: “Jews have lived in cupboards for nearly four years. Why not imitate them?”
After reading Brody’s book and being unnerved by a lot of the same stuff I was having a hard time with, my friend Tom Carson pointed me to Alice Kaplan’s The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. The more one learns about Brasillach, the more peculiarly intricate the web of correspondences between Godard and Brasillach seems. (But that’s not all.)
For instance, as it happens, among the many hats Brasillach donned in his brief career as a littérateur was that of film critic—he was the coauthor, with friend and fellow rightist Maurice Bardeche, of a volume entitled Histoire du Cinema, of all things. It’s one of the few Brasillach works for which Kaplan has unreserved praise; she calls film criticism “the one genre where Brasillach’s strength as a critic and his talent for thick description come together.” (An English translation of the book is still in circulation.) That Godard’s epic work Histoire(s) du Cinema has very nearly the same title as the Brasillach/Bardeche book could be taken as a circumstantial coincidence—were the circumstances different. But Godard’s Histoire(s) begin emerging at the time that, as Brody notes, Godard’s work “entailed the reclamation of writers and artists who led the way to Auschwitz, such as Brasillach.”
Possibly less relevant, but nonetheless kind of resonant, is the fact that, as a literary critic, one of Brasillach’s favorite targets of ridicule was Francois Mauriac…the grandfather of Godard’s second wife, the actress Anna Wiazemsky. Wiazemsky and Godard’s union fell apart after she failed to sufficiently radicalize herself in the late ‘60s, and Brody’s book recounts Godard rather cruelly rebuffing Wiazemsky years after the fact when she remarks on being moved by one of his latter-day films. It’s worth noting that Mauriac actually led the campaign to spare Brasillach from the death penalty after his conviction and sentencing.
Brody does not exaggerate by calling Bresillach a figure who led the way to Auschwitz. Kaplan’s book bristles with examples of Brasillach’s anti-Semitic rhetoric—there’s a particularly pathetic passage where the old, disgusting, Jews-as-monkeys analogy gets a workout. The policy prescriptions he sneakily proposed in his newspaper writings are equally repellent, as was his newspaper’s gossip column—naming names and giving locations of individuals who could be helping out the resistance. Think “Gawker Stalker” for the Nazis’ use and convenience.
Brasillach’s worminess gets worse, in a way, after his capture; from prison, he writes a poem equating himself with the fighters of the Resistance. And in the “Testament” quoted in Eloge, he compares himself to Cervantes. Jean Cocteau nailed the unfailingly narcissistic Bresillach by calling him “absurd and harmful.” Kaplan concludes that Brasillach was guilty of the crimes he was accused of, but that he shouldn’t have been executed. Her objection’s based not just on humanitarian grounds, but on the fact that Bresillach’s death made him a martyr—“the James Dean of French fascism.”
This is the man Eloge’s Edgar speaks of with a quiet reverence, saying “A man was executed at the Liberation 50 years ago. The night before, he wrote this…” (In fact Brasillach wrote the text around January 19, 1945; his execution was on February 5.)
Later in the film, Edgar and Berthe (Cecile Camp), a woman who, based on a meeting several years before, he believes has the key to unlock his artistic project, sit at a bridge in Paris, noting this plaque:
In English, the inscription reads, “Here, Rene Revel, Peace Officer in the 15th District, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, was killed by the Germans, August 19 1944.”
Berthe, who later, in the film’s video-shot flashback, will try to do battle with the forces of Steven Spielberg (a Jew! imagine!), says of the plaque: “They shouldn’t phrase it like that. Neither ‘Officer,’ neither ‘peace,’ neither ‘Germans’.”
That Eloge de l’amour, roundly heralded as a contemporary Godard masterpiece, fetishizes Robert Brasillach while turning up its nose at the Liberation is certainly…um, provocative?
UPDATE: In the comments section, which now extends beyond a single page (so be sure to look for that “next” button) Craig Keller and Miguel Marias have been doing some commendable spadework in Godard’s defense. Keller portrays some of Brody’s arguments as spurious and comes close to accusing Brody of acting in bad faith. Marias traces the line from Phillipe Loyrette’s short piece containing his recitation to Brasillach’s text to the Godard short Adieu aux TNS (which was inspired stylistically by Loyrettes recitational style but does not contain any of Brasillach’s words) to Godard’s invitation to Loyrette to recreate his Brasillach recitation in Eloge de L’amour and concludes “perhaps Loyrette’s way of reading Brasillach’s text (which I don’t know, and could well be a sort of moving farewell of someone about to die) impressed Godard, but there is not the slightest evidence hinting that Godard was even remotely interested in Brasillach’s words (much less that he solidarized with them).” This ignores the way that Bruno Putzulu’s Edgar leads into Loyrette’s recitation in Eloge: “A man was executed at the Liberation 50 years ago. The night before, he wrote this…”
Yeah sure, that reflects pretty much an absolute disinterest in the words that follow.
I allow that it’s entirely possible that in evoking Brasillach that Godard was merely doing some distasteful baiting of those who would get the reference. But to insist that in this case he either didn’t know or didn’t care what he was doing with respect to a source text strikes me as a little disingenuous.
Did you just Godwin Godard? 🙂
Not QUITE what I’m going for, Dan…
I’m floored by these revelations.
Sadly, many of film’s giants have clay feet. France in particular has some very notable racists. I’m thinking of Brigitte Bardot’s recent conviction for provoking discrimination and racial hatred against Muslims.
It’s her fifth such conviction in 11 years.
I know, Glenn, I know. And I don’t think the man’s a Nazi. But I have a weakness for puns, and the worse the pun, the weaker my resolve is.
Fascinating piece, for the record.
“he was the coauthor… of a volume entitled Histoire du Cinema, of all things…That Godard’s epic work Histoire(s) du Cinema has very nearly the same title as the Brasillach/Bardeche book could be taken as a circumstantial coincidence—were the circumstances different. ”
Huh? How many books have been titled “the history of cinema”? One hundred? Is that supposed to imply something about Godard’s own Histoire(s) du cinéma?
There is a lot of reaching here.
Your paragraph on the relation between Loyrette and Godard says nothing about the _meaning_ of what they did. Do you mean to say they are endorsing Brasillach? Have you seen the Loyrette video or are you relying on a description of it provided by the book?
Éloge de l’amour is clearly, almost too clearly, about Hollywood’s sensationalizing the Holocaust. The wronged party of in the film are the grandparents from the French resistance! If anything it’s one of the more respectful films about the era.
Godard has gone on the record many times about why he thought Schindler’s List was crap and his opinions have nothing, repeat nothing, to do with denying the holocaust or being antisemitic.
I am a bit miffed at how Eloge de l’amour thumbed its nose at the Liberation, though I am admittedly in the masterpiece camp for this film. I tend to agree with John’s assessment, which is that the film, if anything, seems completely dismayed at the interpretation of the Holocaust through fiction.
In addition, I’m not so sure that such a close literary reading of the film really captures the spirit or tone of where Godard was going. He cross-references so many writers that he, at least to this viewer, seems impossible to nail down.
I agree, however, that the illuminations of Godard’s right-wing past in Brody’s book made me queasy.
As the head of the post says, these are observations; while they’re obviously colored by my own perceptions, I don’t believe they amount to conclusions.
I haven’t seen the Loyrette video but I have watched “Eloge” plenty of times, and his recitation of Brasillach is not parodic or ironic; it aims to elevate and dignify the text. The passage in “Eloge” in which Berthe criticizes the plaque was off-putting enough before I had any inklings about Brasillach; now that I’ve learned more about the man, it irks me more.
We can disagree about “Schindler’s List”—my own view is that it does, finally, fail, but that it is not pernicious—but I think the critique of Spielberg offered in “Eloge” has more would-be gudge-settling one-upsmanship to it than actual argument.
I wonder if I shouldn’t try to solicit some kind of online symposium about these issues. Brody has quite a bit more to say about them, particularly as they relate to Godard’s “Histoire(s)” and “Notre Musique.” And I know there are many other critics out there thinking about them.
Godard’s invocations of Brasillach have always struck me to be in line with precisely that leitmotif (which word alone is not enough to-the-point – seems almost to want to be a byword; let’s say “set of observations” instead) of Godard’s which Richard Brody seems incapable of getting his head around through the bulk-course of his nice-in-places, putrid-in-much effort to king himself The American Godard Authority (and Moral Arbiter, while he’s at it): that at the core of human existence, and human history, there exist astonishing paradoxes and dialectics which must remain unresolvable, unreconcilable, and which are indicative of the enigma of who and what we are as a species – the (pre-)eminent one “sur la terre”, at that. Godard’s recitations of and musings upon Brasillach – or Céline if one wants to choose another example – take their formation off of the same branch of inquiry that muses (in paraphrase) – “How is it that I can detest the ethos and politics of this man who made ‘The Green Berets,’ but break into tears when I watch him lift up Natalie Wood to hold her aloft against the sky?”
This particular Brody-brand can of worms is, of course, only one can among a whole shelf whose contents run fairly botulistic by my reading. (Langlois once asserted that he was there to provide the food, but that it was up to the public to do the eating, or not; an ethos to which Godard has been consistently sympathetic.) It culminates in the shit-explosion that is RB’s ‘Notre musique’ chapter, before of course the final, embarrassing genuflection of the last paragraph, and the signet-ring-kiss stand-in of the Acknowledgements section.
We could talk about this book for months – so maybe there ‑should- be a symposium? – but I wonder whether it won’t lead to acute depression on my or any of our part(s), much like that suffered by Stanley Kubrick when he was even only moderately deep still into writing ‘Aryan Papers.’ I’ve considered engaging in a long analysis of this “Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” on my blog, in a possibly-forthcoming post about JLG’s recent ‘Prayer for Refuzniks (2),’ – but is this energy sustainable, or will I end up gagging on its fumes?
craig.
Well said, Craig—the gagging on the fumes possibility is a very real one. Even in pondering the juxtaposition in your comment of Brasillach and Celine, not just fumes but practical matters start coming up. Celine’s body of work is far more accessible, at least in a form, than Brasillach’s is; for those non-fluent in French and/or unable to getto Brasillach’s work, we have to, say, take Alice Kaplan’s word on its value. After which conclusion we might say, well, is that even really the point? Add to that, say, W.H. Auden’s theory as to why history will forgive Paul Claudel (for “writing well,” nice rhyme), and you’ve really got a mess. That’s not even taking into consideration Brody’s suppositions, presumptions, and whatnot. As Tone-Loc would call it, “a big old mess.” But one which fascinates and compels.
I ashamedly hadn’t heard of Brasillach until I read passages in Brody’s book, but this discussion has certainly piqued my interest in revisiting Eloge de l’amour, at the very least.
I don’t doubt your interpretation, Glenn, nor did I take your argument as a conclusion. I haven’t made it to the chapters beyond Nouvelle Vague in Everything Is Cinema, so perhaps I am not properly addressing the issues to begin with.
One question I had for you, though, was how these developments figure in to your opinion of these films. Not to mention that Godard, as noted above by yourself and by countless others, constantly quotes texts in his work, so I wonder what else can be said in other films.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Of course Auden expunged this stanza from the poem later…
Thanks for the full citation, PWC. I didn’t have a volume at hand when recalling the Auden lines.
A proper film (fiction division – there are plenty of documentaries that do it justice) about the Holocaust has yet to be made. I am a Jew, went to Stephen S. Wise Temple Day school, and my grandmother lost the entire side of her mother’s family to Auschwitz, and I, for one, think Schindler’s List is a joke. Speilberg’s decision to tell that particular story in a supremely banal Hollywood narrative-type way was a fatal mistake in my eyes, because the Holocaust is immune to narrative. One day someone will have the courage to make a film about the Holocaust using non-narrative strategies, much like Alan Clarke did with Elephant, the best movie made so far about the Troubles in Ireland. Just following around some Nazis as they do their daily duties (eat, kill, talk, kill, dinner, kill) would be more than enough. Actually, the HBO movie Conspiracy with Branagh and Tucci was a pretty good Holocaust movie; just twenty men sitting around a table discussing the best way to remove the Jews from the face of the earth. I found it to be a far superior film to Schindler’s List, cutting to the heart of the matter in a much more economical and succinct way, but I’m assuming that I would have a hard time convincing anyone of that, seeing as how Speilberg can do no wrong with American filmgoers and amateur critics. But that’s neither her nor there. Trying to point out how massively overrated Spielberg is about as tiresome as the constant elevation of him to the top of the Pantheon based on the fact that he has made more money for more people than any director in the history of cinema. As far as 70s American filmmakers go, I’ll take Scorsese over Spielberg any day, and I don’t even think they are in the same league. I’ve just finished reading Lesley Stern’s The Scorsese Connection, and I never realized what a complex, layered director he is, something I had always suspected but could not really articluate due to the sheer giddiness his films instilled in me. I find Spielberg (with the exception of Duel) to be a very shallow filmmaker, his only concern being how many times he can make you emotionally orgasm. I would dare say that Spielberg’s oeuvre is devoid of one single idea worth contemplating. The last ten minutes of After Hours has ten times the density, thematically, than anything Speilberg has ever done, or ever will do.
Pardon my typos. The proper way to spell his name is Spielberg, not Speilberg. My mistake.
Evan,
What about Lanzmann’s Shoah? Resnais’ Night and Fog?
Yah, yah, the docs, I already said there are plenty of docs that do the subject justice. I’m talking drama, Mike.
Point taken, Evan. Though “Shoah” is nonfiction, it exhibits the kind of expressive storytelling reserved for some of the most supreme narrative filmmakers. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been a bit troubled by it, but considering it to be THE definitive work on the subject.
This was a fascinating piece and I plan to show it to Mr. C, to get his opinion on it as well. I am not really qualified to comment on the substance until I have seen Eloge at least. But this was very well done, restrained but thought-provoking (to say the least).
I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a Spielberg apologist, but what exactly are the criteria for a ‘great Holocaust feature’? Historical accurateness? Political acuteness? Emotional/technical intensity?
I would argue that it would be difficult for any contemporary American filmmaker to muster more than one of these qualities in the same film, for some of the same reasons Spielberg is blamed for above.
That being said, the more important question, of course, is whether Spielberg’s ’emotional orgasms’ are more or less harmful to the memory of the Holocaust than Godard’s ‘collaborator fetishism’?
Or to put it another way, if we are to dialectically (and simplistically) oppose Spielberg and Godard as forces of commodification and poetics, respectively, which is more dangerous to the memory of the Holocaust – a market manipulated empathy for a past experienced from a historical distance or a reimagining of an icon’s intellectual shortcomings?
They’ll never make a “true” Holocaust feature because to do so you’d have to break a whole bunch of stereotypes and formulas.
Although part of me wonders what’ll happen as the technology gets cheaper. Red has suddenly reduced the costs of owning a cine camera by 75% with one fell stroke. I don’t know if it’ll happen in America, especially considering how hidebound and generally godawful the American indie scene is. But I think changes are coming down the pike.
Bindler, “Jaws”, “Close Encounters of the Third”, “ET”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Munich”? There is no hope for you.
Glenn, this is a provocative and fascinating post, but I don’t quite get this loopy connection you make between Godard, Brasillach, Mauriac and Wiazemsky. Rightest Brasillach used to attack Mauriac and Mauriac was later kind to Brasillach, and then Godard divorced Wiazemsky because she was “insufficiently radicalised” TO THE EXTREME LEFT in his Maorist period, and was cruel to her when she liked one of his later films that (you and Brody imply) have some FAR-RIGHT leanings … that doesn’t add up for me. And you call this loop “possibly less relevant, but nonetheless kind of resonant” ??
And now, of course, I can’t for the life of me find the name of the film Wiazemsky professed to be moved by. Nevertheless—you are probably right. I was reaching—speculating that Godard’s Brasillach fetish could have had an iota or two to do with an old resentment against Wiazemsky. A stretch, absolutely. Still, the lines of continuity that exist between the four figures is, if nothing else, worth noting.
The Guardian reads Some Came Running:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/06/taxi_driver_goes_to_the_movies.html
I don’t know what’s a typepad, so maybe I have no right to comment on these comments. To start with, I haven’t read Mr. Brody’s new book on Godard, and every comment or review I read about it (in spite of being mostly appreciative or complimentary) discourages me from trying to: so far, I see no new information, and instead lots of far-fetched (and rather defamatory) conclusions drawn from insufficient or misinterpreted data. I guess Godard is accused now of anti-Semitism mainly because he defends the Palestinians (or did in the ’70s) and dared to criticize (rightly, in my view) suddenty aware-of-his-Jewisness Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (which I happen to find ambiguous and cheaply sentimentalized, so that makes me anti-Semitic to some fanatics, I guess). Part of the queasiness these insinuations seem to have caused amongst fellow admirers of Godard have no other ground but a naïve faith in what Mr. Brody tells or suggests, or probably under the influence of the rather unsound ways of deduction the book seems to follow. As someone already pointed out judiciously, Godard’s is the only of about a thousand “Histoire du Cinéma” written and published in Europe which is called “Histoire(s)…”, so that hardly can connect him with the notorious Bardèche & Brasillach, whose well-known “H. du C.” many of my age have read (the same as communist Georges Sadoul’s) and found rather bad, old-fashioned, pre-Bazinian if you like. Not that I think ideology (good or bad) prevents anyone from having good taste when watching films or writing about them (that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?), but I disagree with Ms. Kaplan appreciation; in any case, he was not shot because of his film criticism, but his “Histoire” doesn’t deserve a reprint nor would be useful today even for a newcomer to cinephilia. Godard never was a Brasillesquian, their masters were Heri-Georges Auriol, André Bazin and Henri Langlois (rather read this one, by the way). It seems a bit late in history to remind anyone that to quote is not to support, assume, adhere to or identify with the quoted author, book or phrase, in particular when most of the texts in Godard’s films are quotations (often misquoted, or misattributed), sometimes because he does not remember where it comes from, nor how was it exactly phrased. You cannot take Michel Poiccard, Pierrot le fou or the Carabiniers for Godard or his spokesmen, no more than you can equate Julien Sorel with Stendhal or Tolstoí with Pierre Bezhukov despite the many traits the novelists borrowed from themselves to create these characters. I will not to into the connections between Mauriac and Wiazemsky or Godard with either, but there is no way to give any sense to them, much less if you try to bring into it Brasillach. However mistaken Ezra Pound, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline ou Guitry (and I am not making these four equally guilty or equally innocent) may have been about Pétain, Vichy, De Gaulle, Hitler or the Jews, they were very good writers, and the latter a great filmmaker. And I don’t see any mockery of the Libération (although many excesses were commited, and many collaborators became righteous “resistants” in the last days of the German occupation and after) in “Éloge de l’amour”. By the way, what is the name, the date, the lenghth of this Godard movie with the Brasillach text, who has seen it?
Thanks,
Miguel Marías
Fascinating post. I’m not sure I can contribute anything, but just wanted to add a “read it, liked it” note.
Although I do have to echo Miguel Marías in saying that everything I read about Everything is Cinema makes me want to read it less and less…
One thing I do disagree with:
“Brody does not exaggerate by calling Brasillach a figure who led the way to Auschwitz.”
If there was a road to Auschwitz and Brasillach was leading it, it must have been a wide road, and everyone must have been walking hand-in-hand.
I do think this completes the circle of Godard’s political affiliations, though: from Maoist to Nazi. Maybe even a full circle and beyond, if he’s ever been an Anarchist.
And while I’ve never gotten into Godard much, anyone who thumbs his nose at the French resistance gets my respect. Of course, doing it in 2001 is a bit… passé?
Miguel: “It seems a bit late in history to remind anyone that to quote is not to support, assume, adhere to or identify with the quoted author, book or phrase, in particular when most of the texts in Godard’s films are quotations (often misquoted, or misattributed), sometimes because he does not remember where it comes from, nor how was it exactly phrased.” True and fair enough. Excepting the fact that, per Brody, Godard’s introduction to Loyrette was in the form of a videotape in which Loyrette is shown giving the incantory reading of Brasillach’s “Testament,” and that Godard subsequently hired Loyrette to reproduce that valorizing reading in “Eloge d’ Amour.” (It occurs about a half-hour into the picture and I believe my description of the scene in the above post is accurate.) So the idea that Godard didn’t know who he was quoting or what he was doing in this instance does not wash.
Yes, I know Celine and Ezra Pound are great writers, just as Godard is a great filmmaker. in laying out these observations—some of which I believe to be kind of overstated or overly speculative—I was not calling for a condemnation or renunciation of Godard. I’m saying that I’m unsettled by some of my findings, and I’m wondering if anyone else is similarly unsettled.
Excuse me a post-script, although you must read french: either at http://ftp.fortunaty.net/com/textz/textz/godard_jean-luc_je reviens en arriere or at the blog L’innommable dated 29 October 2002, where you can find the Godard interview by Richard Dumas about “Éloge de l’amour” in “Télérama” magazine. A more rational account of the René Revel episode in that film can be found (this time in English) at jessicamartino.com (search “René Revel” on your Google).
Miguel Marías
Miguel –
Sharp observations as always. The Brasillach-chant-evocative Godard work in question is ‘Adieu au TNS,’ from ’97.
craig.
Thanks a lot, Craig. But if the “Brasillach fetishizing” film Godard made is “Adieu au TNS” (1996), then I certainly won’t buy anything Brody’s book is trying to imply (I begin to suspect that because JLG was not willing to co-operate with him), because I happen to have watched several times that very short (7 minutes) film, and once again just now, after I read your answer. And not only is there no mention, quotation of or allusion to Brasillach, the Resistance or the Libération, but the only conclusion I can reach is that Godard was posssibly impressed by Loyrette’s performance on that tape and perhaps was inspired by his way of declamating Brasillach’s text to give his own best performance before the camera in this, one of his most impressive short films, which simply shows Godard standing, with hat and smoking all the time, and swaying slightly on his feet from side to side, as he almost chants (a bit in the style of some melancholy French “chansonniers”) his own moving, beautiful text, which deals mainly with the theatre, from Shakespeare to Artaud, as fits the reason that prompted him to do this short film, the closing of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. So perhaps Loyrette’s way of reading Brasillach’s text (which I don’t know, and could well be a sort of moving farewell of someone about to die) impressed Godard, but there is not the slightest evidence hinting that Godard was even remotely interested in Brasillach’s words(much less that he solidarized with them).
Best,
Miguel Marías
And there you hit upon the essence of the problem with Richard Brody, Miguel, and in two cogent areas:
(1) “(I begin to suspect that because JLG was not willing to co-operate with him)”
(2) “there is not the slightest evidence hinting that Godard was even remotely interested in Brasillach’s words (much less that he solidarized with them)”
Regarding (1), there is an entire backstory here regarding Brody’s unceremonious snubbing by JLG on what was scheduled to be the second day of their conversations in Rolle in 2000. B. Kite delves into this a little bit in his review on the Moving Image Source site – some of the details of which Brody provided himself in his original piece in The New Yorker (the springboard for the book), in 2000 or early 2001. Yet either through his own, or his editor’s, design, no mention is made of this in ‘Everything Is Cinema’ at all – we only note from the footnotes that his discussion with Godard lasted one day. After Brody burns him in effigy in the monumentally deranged closing chapter on ‘Notre musique’ – which, by the way, doesn’t even get in the vicinity of providing the kind of production details that he was able or willing to furnish in the chapters of all the works leading up to that film – he seizures into an abrupt, 180-degree turnaround of tone, ending his book with a ripe-for-the-psychoanalysis-of-it “Epilogue.” Here he shifts into an attempt at ‘literary atmosphere’ (“Rolle and its surroundings are a natural paradise. The fifteenth-century castle perches on the shore of the dark blue waters of Lake Geneva. A hundred yards out into the lake, a rounded islet with arcs of dense foliage pierced by a proud, solemn obelisk resembles a Fragonard come to life. The setting is so timeless, it is as if Godard has found shelter in a most un-Swiss form of paradise, one in which the clocks seem to have stopped.”), before closing with a sentiment that would seem noble, had the Fragonardian obelisk not already set the scene for the saccharine:
“The cinema will live on for as long as Godard’s films are seen, or Godard himself is remembered.”
Yes, after he slays his Troubling Father, the “spiritual paramour” (to use the words of a friend on Brody’s projected relationship to JLG) who jilted him, we’re overheard the murmur of a little piece of phone-booth confessional.
And this doesn’t even scratch the surface.
As for your point in (2), Brody lays out the case that the way the ‘Adieu au TNS’ film came about was because Bérangère Allaux – an object of near-amour-fou for Godard in the mid-’90s, and an obsession that dates back to his preparation for the shoot of ‘For Ever Mozart’ – had joined the curriculum at the TNS (the Théâtre National de Strasbourg). When the film was finished, he held a pre-release première (following the true première in Sarajevo) in Strasbourg – a night that ends with, as related by Brody, an upsetting close no more atypical than any stage in any extended unrequiting, but which Brody describes as “a pathetic conclusion” before giving it another lame literary gussying. (p. 573)
When Godard finally accepted that the relationship with Allaux was impossible, he made ‘Adieu au TNS.’ We note, however, in Brody’s outlining of the antipathy felt toward Godard by Allaux, and by her classmates (who regarded her, as the object of Godard’s affections while he was there ostensibly making a film about their studies, as “first among equals”), that the good author is tying a bow on a rather bizarre motif, initiated in the ‘France tour détour deux enfants’ chapter, in which Brody sits down with Camille Virolleaud and proceeds to tease out of her a “case study” on the trauma she experienced while being – Brody beats around the bush, but let’s just come out and say it – “psychically raped” by Godard during the shoot of the work. The motif in question emerges on p. 401 of The Camille V. Case Study, in which Brody pens the following jaw-dropping observation (my jaw literally dropped, and I don’t think it was as a result of the reasons he’d intended for conveying the effect) –
“He pulled her aside in the school’s courtyard during recess and interviewed her when in fact she wanted to play with her friends. After the filming ended, she endured the taunts of classmates who wondered why she had been chosen and not they. In fact Camille did not at all feel chosen, she felt singled out, and would gladly have resumed her former unremarkable life.”
Yesterday a fascinating review was passed on to me by a friend – which review I was not aware of, which subject of the review I was not aware of. I think it’s worth putting out there in the context of this conversation, and in the context of the conclusions that one may (or hey, may not!) already be drawing from not just some of the ‘throughlines’ highlighted above, but those that course throughout the whole of Brody’s book.
Maybe all of this stuff should be highlighted in a new or “updated”-flagged post, Glenn? Once more than 20 comments accumulate around a post, the rest spill over onto a second page, the existence of which is only denoted by a small “Next” link at the bottom… a few people who’ve been checking the conversation out weren’t even aware that the discussion was continuing after the 20th post, which was by Miguel, onto a second page…
Perhaps this will be, in essence, the ipso facto symposium..!
craig.
Here is the review I alluded to at the end of my last comment. It’s taken from the “DVD Verdict” site, and written by one Bill Gibron (Google for a direct link – I’d paste, but the URL might get flagged). This is the text:
iability Crisis (1995)
Copyline: The things we do for love are beyond good and evil.
Paul is a New Yorker in his mid-20s, bouncing between jobs as a temp and a documentary production assistant. He wants to get a job in advertising, if only to escape the daily grind of uncertain employment and avoid the Holocaust horror stories he has to witness as part of the filmmaking process. His girlfriend, Dunja, is a Yugoslavian student who has just returned from China where she was studying the language. A jealous and protective woman, Dunja fears Paul is straying from their relationship. Indeed, Paul is fascinated with all the other women around him—a strange, seductive singer named Wendy from downstairs; an overtly friendly co-worker at his new job.
As the distant couple fight and fall in and out of love, one element remains constant between them: Paul’s religion. As a Jew, Paul is conflicted. On one hand, he understands that his parents expect him to embrace his faith and marry within it. But on the other, Paul has been bombarded with feelings of anger and dismay. He hates the victimization mentality of the Jewish community, and he holds some strange beliefs about the Nazis’ complicity in the Holocaust. For Paul, life has always been about following orders and listening to your superiors. But he is sick of being held to a legacy that he had no direct part in. In a world full of people looking to exploit their persecution and history, Paul rejects such labels, and in so doing, is destroying his relationships. Just like his sister’s pending lawsuit over an accident involving her ex-husband, Paul is in a Liability Crisis: he knows whom to blame, but confrontation and conclusion may be painful and unpredictable.
Lumbering between a philosophical diatribe and a drama of mismatched lovers, Liability Crisis is a movie that dares you to like it, on many roguish levels. First, there is the near-incoherent nature of its narrative—an amalgamation of speeches, propaganda pitches, half-overheard heartfelt conversations, and out-and-out callous confrontations that seem to add up to one miserable confusion of emotions. But the layers of illogic continue to mount and amass, as the message becomes the medium and vice versa. The acting is also a study in stasis. While perfectly appropriate for the tone and tenor of this film, the majority of the performances barely register (even our lead actor whispers most of the time). Feelings are kept in check to make room for gentler grandstanding.
But perhaps the most confrontational aspect of the movie is its subject matter, which can best be described as a self-hating Jew’s gradual acceptance of the Nazi notion of Hebrew horribleness. From the belittling statements about the Holocaust to the tendency to constantly apologize for the actions of the Third Reich, Liability Crisis is a tainted tone poem to an affinity for reconfiguring history to make it more suitable to one’s self-image. The title, a twisted take on the notion of blame and responsibility (and referencing an ongoing legal battle between Paul’s sister Susie and her ex-husband), is the setup for the difficult proposition made within the movie. Who is really at fault here? The German people? An extremist subset of same? The modern Jews who want to remove themselves from such painful memories? Or is it the survivors of the concentration camps? Is their mantra-like repetition of “Never Forget” allowing progress for their people, or leaving them mired in a tired testament to man’s insane evil against man?
Liability Crisis doesn’t have any straight answers, and that’s not usual for this film. Director Richard Brody has truncated a two-hours-plus meandering tale down to 70 some minutes of assertions and anger, leaving subtlety and story by the wayside. The best sequences in the film deal directly with Paul’s family and their inability to accept Dunja, his Yugoslavian girlfriend, because she is not Jewish. In conversations about religion and bias not usually heard in modern movies, the strange ideological racism of a religion-based upbringing is thoughtfully addressed. Dunja holds her own throughout, challenging Paul’s mother to defend her position while providing common sense examples of why such small-mindedness is so very wrong. This matriarch claims the Holocaust and the treatment of Jews by the Nazis was the ultimate act of intolerance, then turns and treats this foreign “gentile” with somewhat similar (if not necessarily as bilious) sentiments. For the ten or so minutes this debate plays out over coffee and cigarettes, Liability Crisis is alive with potential and passion. But no sooner are we engaged than Brody throws the tantrum switch and we are back to Paul’s pedantic pontificating, mixing Kafka with Mein Kampf to obliterate the bias he feels he was born with. Indeed, most of this young man’s struggle seems to be about disengaging himself from indoctrination at the hand of his parents. He merely wants to relate to the world without the burden of Jewishness and all that insinuates (for both good and bad). Had the movie stayed in the interpersonal and not moved on to the internationally political, it could have worked as a solid, stern statement about intolerance. But it’s too interested in the party line to tow anything else.
Liability Crisis is not really concerned about this personal journey. It doesn’t want to dwell in the relationship turmoil between Paul and Dunja. It is more interesting in quotes and argumentative support. It is fascinated with its own theoretical viewpoint and can’t get enough of its own preaching. It’s hard to feel sympathy for or develop an association with people who are constantly beating you over the head with their idealism and insensitivity. Dunja fears Paul since he comes across as so amorally committed to his dogma. And we as an audience feel the same way about both him and the film. We watch the vacant eyes as the redolent rants come pouring out of his mouth, and we wonder in amazement about how someone supposedly well educated can sound so hateful. Then we realize that we are not watching a documentary and that these sentiments were scripted. And then it’s time to wonder about the man behind the masquerade, so to speak.
Brody bandies about many misfortunate ideas in this film, using Hitler and his henchmen (perhaps the single most recognizable symbol of evil ever) to underline relationships in decline, family dynamics in flux, and a whole lot of social commentary and conflict. But the advocacy never adds up to a coherent message. All we get are buzzwords and well-researched tirades. Plot elements wither and die from lack of cultivation, but then the director wants us to buy into (and maybe even laugh at) his deus ex machina ending. Sure, Brody may have been meant it to be satirical and karmic, but without any friendly foundation in the parties involved, giggling at the grim reaper comes across as crass and cruel. As does most of Liability Crisis. There is nothing wrong with channeling challenging material for a mainstream story. But when all your narrative is concerned about is lecturing the historically illiterate or zealously Zionistic, there is not much entertainment-wise to cling to.
It must have been difficult for Pathfinder to manage a means of making this movie saleable. The subject matter alone is worth a thousand marketing worries. Liability Crisis is hardly a feel-good romance or searing, serious drama. Instead, it is agenda as art, notebooks and journals of jingoism reduced to screenplay form. And it’s hardly a visual feast. Shot mostly in close-up, and presented here in a dirty, dull 1.33:1 full screen flub of a transfer, the movie meanders between too dark and horribly haloed. Sonically, the aural elements move from a literal whisper to a scream (or in this case, the banging out of Beethoven’s classic riffs on an overloud piano) as silences are abruptly broken for shocking sounds. This does not mean, however, that the Dolby Digital Stereo provides a speaker-shifting soundscape. Indeed, you can usually hear the camera whirring in the background.
As for bonuses, Pathfinder again has a difficult time, but for a clearly usual reason. Brody’s broadsword is bandied about and is evident everywhere in the extras. First, we get a 20-plus-minute interview with the strange cinematic artist. Sitting on a park bench in New York and hardly ever addressing the camera directly, he waxes on about Godard and the lack of an American equivalent to the French New Wave movement. With Brody occasionally sounding intelligent but almost always acting above the questioning, this is intriguing, but ultimately uninvolving, material. A Filmmaker’s Statement is also included on the disc, and this Unabomber-style treatise is enough to give several FBI profilers a run for their routine. Brody has a lot to say and is not afraid to spill it out over several page-through screens.
The biographies of Brody and his two leads are interesting, providing some background and insight into the performers involved. But then we get nearly an hour of missing footage, material excised from the original film to make it more “commercial” or better yet “less confrontational.” It is easy to see why this footage was removed. Paul’s principles and how they came into being are explored in more detail, as is his relationship with Wendy. But for a film that is already incredibly talky, the deleted material ups the verbal ante. With this bonus footage included, the movie would have been unbearable. With it gone, it’s more enigmatic, but still stifling.
Many people involved in moviemaking would argue that politics and entertainment should never mix. Richard Brody would disagree. For him, social opinions are the very skeleton of a cinematic story. But art is in the eye of the beholder, and after witnessing Liability Crisis, you’ll be incredibly confused. It’s a film that will either make you cringe in disbelief, or nod your head in ideological agreement. Either way, it’s a tough time at the movies.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/05/godard_the_embodiment_of_the_s.html
This case begins to fascinate me. Maybe I’ll end up buying and reading that book, although not to learn about Godard. One, I was unaware of that backstory about Godard and his self-appointed biographer, I merely suspected JLG would not have been willing and eager, since he was not even too co-operative with Colin McCabe. Two, I had no idea that Richard Brody aspired to be a filmmaker. And, according to the rather detailed and seemingly very balnced review you have posted, I am inclined to think that maybe he wanted to become the American? British? Godard, for which he certainly would have liked a lot to be somewhat “adopted” by The Old Master. Even the edge of his “charges” against Godard seems quite in tune with the subject matter of “Liability Crisis”. That his family was rather pro-Vichy and (like a lot of the bourgeoisie in Europe in the ’30s) did not feel sympathy for the Jews is a well-known fact. But some of the things Godard said, wrote or repeated in his supposedly Revolutionary period, let’s say between 1967 and 1976, would worry me much more – if I felt he would stand by those slogans and utterly unoriginal lines… Fortunately, I don’t think I need to agree with everything a filmmaker says, implies or does. Much as I admire Godard, I don’t “love” every minute in every film he has made. In fact, I enjoy having a hard (interior) debate with him thru his movies.
Miguel Marías
Thank you, Ronald, and thank you—sincerely!—Miguel. I think we can all concur that our arguments here, whatever our individual positions, grant more to Godard than Mr. Richard Schickel’s recent, and frankly appalling, review of Brody’s book in the L.A. Times does:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-brody6-2008jul06,0,144920.story
As we debate, we should not forget that there are forces at work that would deny Godard’s importance altogether…
A lot of surface dedicated not to Mr.Brody’s book, once sold in the first paragraph, but to trying to belittle Godard. So we know Mr. Schickel does dislike JLG. How interesting! And that probably Mr. Brody feeded his previous antagonism with Godard. The problem is I don’t much mind whatever they may think (or say) about Godard, Hitchcock, Bergman, Straub, Rivette, Griffith, Cassavetes, Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman, Desplechin, Weerasethakul (I can imagine!) or Hou Hsiao-hsien. There are others which can make me think about them, take a second look at their films, discover something (bad, good or indifferent) I had overlooked.
Miguel
I’d like to point out my own experience of the Loyrette recitation in Godard’s film. Simply enough, it was beautiful.
I had no idea who Brasillach was, but the words conjured up strong emotion and the music provided me with a very powerful feeling.
Afterward I learned Brasillach’s story, I learned of his guilt and execution, read the entire text of his Testament (of which, not one has written, a remarkable exception, Godard purposefullly cuts short in the film), and came to consider Godard’s own place in the film industry, the prominent historical position of In Praise of Love (Godard’s first twentieth century feature film) and understood clearly enough that it might well have been Godard’s last picture (the film industry is messy and Notre Musique is what we all might call a ‘gift’, as will be Socialisme if it ever shapes up).
To see In Praise of Love in terms of a final bow of sorts clarifies the use of Brasillach and gives us the entire picture. Although you consider something as obvious as book titles Glenn (and terms or ‘titles’ like ‘anti-Semite’ pervade your post), you unfortunately fail to see that both Brasillach and Godard were are and will forever remain French artists. Their outputs are bound into the national history, the myths of France, but that includes the errors they both made which In Praise of Love attempts in part to reconcile through a clear invocation of strong national memory (“Let’s NOT forget this very powerful text in spite of it’s terrible associations and because of it’s terrible associations that we will always remember and aim to reconcile”) and an acknowledgment of mistakes, an effort to heal.
Here, and please excuse my failure to address Brody’s book which, after having read MacCabe’s I figured could do no better and certainly no less, I still haven’t even touched, I’d like to ask a question that perhaps you could’ve (should have?…“of course not”) articulated in your post: How does one make a profoundly national art–American, French, Sudanese or German–and make clear that it isn’t the entire national history that one aims to endorse? The picture, especially if you’re Godard, has to be sharp. Instead of the fuzzy question that addresses holocaust representation more generally, the thing to do when considering Godard is to ask how one takes on the Holocaust in a work of art when one has been a witness to its atrocities in a direct and indirect sort of way.
Mr. Orejuela—Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Your interpretation of the use of the Brasillach text in “Eloge” is fascinating, and brings up a number of issues worth addressing, particularly those on the notion of a “profoundly national art.” You categorize Brasillach as a “French artist” and say both he and Godard made “errors.” But a jury found Brasillach guilty of treason against the nation of France. He was accused, I would say, of more than an error. That said, Godard’s embrace of both the (putative) heroes and villains France produced in WWII does better set up the takedown of the supposedly history-stealing Americans in the film’s second-half flashback.
Great post, great comments. It’s interesting to remember that the Cahiers du cinema, the birth of the auteur theory and the New Wave came out of a right-of-center milieu (though it was NOT pro-Nazi). When Truffaut first denounced a “certain tendency in French cinema” his essay was as much an attack on left-wing, anti-Catholic blasphemy as on the aesthetically conservative “tradition of quality.”
And as far as Godard goes, whether or not he was a crypto-Nazi in adolesence, he was certainly an outright Maoist in middle age! So being an apologist for tyrants would hardly be out of character.
Also, wasn’t Cocteau himself a bit cozy with Vichy?
Great post, great comments. It’s interesting to remember that the Cahiers du cinema, the birth of the auteur theory and the New Wave came out of a right-of-center milieu (though it was NOT pro-Nazi). When Truffaut first denounced a “certain tendency in French cinema” his essay was as much an attack on left-wing, anti-Catholic blasphemy as on the aesthetically conservative “tradition of quality.”
And as far as Godard goes, whether or not he was a crypto-Nazi in adolesence, he was certainly an outright Maoist in middle age! So being an apologist for tyrants would hardly be out of character.
Also, wasn’t Cocteau himself a bit cozy with Vichy?
I’ve written a response to Stephanie Zacharek’s review of the Brody book:
http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2008/08/everything-is-cinema-and-criticism-is.html
My annoyance with her uncritical repetition of consensus ideas about Godard, not to mention her acceptance of Brody’s questionable assertions about the man’s political beliefs, finally reached a boiling point.