Department of older business

My friend and much-missed former neigh­bor Andrew Grant called my atten­tion today to a post at the blog Kinoslang by Ted Fendt, con­cern­ing a 1998 short by Jean-Luc Godard entitled Adieu au TNS. The piece exam­ines the work and chal­lenges the writ­ings of Richard Brody about it, say­ing that Brody’s descrip­tion of it in his Godard bio­graphy Everything Is Cinema tries to implic­ate the work “in some kind of cryptic, but sym­path­et­ic engage­ment with anti-Semitism and/or Fascism that Brody feels runs through­out Godard’s work.” 

The essay is in large part an effort to refute some of Richard’s con­clu­sions and claims, and con­vin­cingly cites a text from the short work which Fendt trans­lated. This is essen­tial mater­i­al for the Godard enthu­si­ast and schol­ar, but I bring it up here mostly because I am cited in a foot­note, along with a post I put up in 2008 which was vig­or­ously chal­lenged at the time by crit­ics Craig Keller and Miguel Marias. 

Looking at the post now I am struck, albeit sadly not sur­prised, by the self-righteousness and bel­li­ger­ence of it. Having engaged, enthu­si­ast­ic­ally, in some curs­ory research on the sub­ject of Robert Bresillach, I spun out an insist­ent quasi-indictment of Godard as a Suspect, if not out-and-out Bad, Agent with respect to the whole anti-Semitism and/or Fascism thing. 

Not to indulge in back­stairs rhet­or­ic, but I’ve come to believe that I was even more wrong than Keller and Marias took me to task for being. My “eureka” moment came over last sum­mer, when the film I used as my main spring­board text, Godard’s 2001 Eloge de l’amour screened as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s J. Hoberman-honoring installation/movie series based on his recent book Film After Film. Watching the film as a whole, rather than cherry-picking indi­vidu­al scenes and min­ing data that might shed light on the his­tor­ic­al con­text of the fig­ures invoked but in fact do noth­ing to illu­min­ate how those fig­ures are used in the film’s con­text, what I saw was pro­voc­at­ive, indeed, but hardly in any respect pro­gram­mat­ic. Phillppe Loyrette’s recit­a­tion of the “test­a­ment” of the col­lab­or­a­tion­ist writer Robert Bressilach is many things, but it’s also so tetchy and hobbled that it’s almost poignant, but not in a way that could sug­gest that Godard believes either fig­ure is to be fol­lowed, their philo­sophies to be embraced. Similarly, the reflec­tions of Berthe, which I’m so cyn­ic­al about in the post, play not as an attempt to cast a cold eye on the French Resistance but an expres­sion of a striv­ing to paci­fism. It’s worth remem­ber­ing, too, that while it’s appar­ent from the film’s per­spect­ive that Berthe is an admir­able char­ac­ter, she is in fact a char­ac­ter and not neces­sar­ily a mouth­piece for the dir­ect­or. I have been guilty, in examin­ing oth­er Godard works, of tak­ing incid­ents from Godard’s bio­graphy and apply­ing them to his films in order to express skep­ti­cism over what the films are doing, most recently in a rather con­ten­tious con­sid­er­a­tion of his most recent fea­ture Film social­isme. I don’t renounce my writ­ings on that film, but I do think I might have done bet­ter had I made the close read­ing that Andy Rector and oth­ers in that thread rightly accuse me of slough­ing off on. 

I will say I now think I was wholly wrong on Eloge. I don’t think it endorses anti-Semitism or insults the Resistance. Rather, I see it as what the title says it is: an elegy, and a pained, messy one that is, in a seem­ingly con­tra­dict­ory fash­ion, spun out with a stag­ger­ing form­al assur­ance and eleg­ance. The phrase that most often comes to mind when con­sid­er­ing it is Adorno’s sub­title to his Minima Moralia: “Reflections from dam­aged life.”