Godard in Eric Rohmer’s Le Signe du Lion, 1959, when he was about 30.
“The public is neither stupid nor intelligent. No one knows what it is. Sometimes it surprises, usually it disappoints. One can’t count on it. In one way this is a good thing. In any case it is changing. The old average cinema audience has become the television audience. The cinema audience has divided in two: those who go at the week-end, and those who seek film out. When producers talk to me about audiences, I tell them: ‘I know what they’re like because I go to all sorts of cinemas and I pay for my seat; you never go anywhere, you don’t know what’s happening.’ ”—Godard, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, December 1962.
One of the things I learned during the recent Film Society of Lincoln Center Godard retrospective is that condemnations of late Godard running run across lines of “we prefer your earlier cooler films” are, while perhaps tenable on the ultimately utterly banal grounds of individual taste, built on an essential fallacy. There is no divisible Godard. The idea that you can have A bout de soufflé and shrug off Le vent d’est is convenient and comfortable but ultimately impossible. If you are talking about the fashion-industry approved version of Godard you’re not really talking about Godard at all, but of an aspect of Godard that’s been removed from the host organism, so to speak.
Here are a few things I’ve written about Godard that I don’t find entirely embarrasing.
1) An off-the-cuff NYFF-screening based consideration of Film Socialisme.
2) A review of an excellent compilation of Godard/Mieville short films.
3) An official review of the aforementioned Film Socialisme.
4) A reconsideration of some Godard writing that I do find entirely embarassing.
5) A look at the “War on Christmas,” Godard/Chandler style.
Earlier this week, I read The New Republic’s tribute to Stanley Kauffmann, in its November 11th issue, which consisted of reprinting several of his reviews over the decades. I wonder who selected them, perhaps Wieseltier, since praising WAG THE DOG, and being more dismissive LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, LOLA MONTES, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG and TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER does sound like what a professional neoliberal moralist would choose. I think the giveaway is the review of LA CHINOISE, where Kauffmann says “But the impression grows and persists that Godard is congenitally a bootlicker of young boots.” That was never true, and everything after WEEKEND shows someone quite uninterested in compromising his vision for popular acclaim. But it’s the kind of statement that someone (like Wieseltier) who knew little about cinema but disliked left-wing Frenchmen might think was clever.
Kauffmann was an old-school humanist liberal whose connection to the theater was perhaps fatal for his film criticism, making him a little more forgiving of a superficial theatricality in, e.g., Hal Hartley than prepared to engage the aesthetics of provocation that inform every Godard. That said, he deserved a better homage than the meagre reprinting TNR/Lee Weasel permitted. And Film Socialisme is surely the work of the youngest mind in the room and its stature is sure to increase. Said it before, permit me to say it again: ALL subtitles are in “Navajo”! I.e., subtitling is inevitably an act of compression and elision, offering just a little bit of the facts logocentrically as a film sculpts its way across time. Has any other director ever leveraged this fact to such a formal imperative ONLY in the non-French speaking countries in which FS is shown? I suspect cinephiles in Cote d’Ivoire wonder what all the “Navajo” fuss is about, since they understand what the main characters are saying without them.