Au hasard, Godard

It was with some sadness that I finished reading Richard Brody’s newish Jean Luc Godard biography, Everything is Cinema, last night. Sadness because I was enjoying it so much, because it was a reminder of his advanced age and the probably limited number of films he can feasibly complete from here on, and sad for another reason I’ll get to shortly.

It’s one of the more fitting titles for a book I’ve ever come across; more than anyone else, as Brody makes clear, Godard drew little distinction between his life and cinema, and the last few decades of his life have been spent ruminating on this. His six part series Histoire(s) du cinema is in effect an elaborate illustration of this.

Brody himself illustrates this point by dividing and titling the chapters by the films Godard made. So a chapter entitled Pierrot Le Fou will be both about the film and his life during the period of the film’s development, shoot and reception. It’s an effective presentation that highlights how his inability to seperate film from life resulted in a fairly lonely, frequently frustrated and contentious existence.

I read Colin McCabe’s Godard bio a couple of years ago, and this one is both more in depth and offers more astute critical analysis. Any Godard fan has to acknowledge his weak points — they are just too many and too obvious. Brody does acknowledge them, but he occasionally goes too far in attempting to justify and explain the director’s repeadetly shabby treatment of lovers, friends, producers and collaborators, and his eventual morphing into a dirty old man.

Which brings me to the other sad part of this bio. It really isn’t so obvious in (most of) the films, but Brody quotes several interviews in which Godard’s increasing Anti-Semitism gives vent to some shocking statements. I won’t go into detail about his complicated relationship with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoa, or his somewhat convaluted theroy of the cinema’s failure to document the concentration camps resulting in film culture’s demise, but these and other things have led him to dwell on  Jews and the Holocaust quite a bit over the last few decades, resulting in a muddled, contradictory philosophy. Brody doesn’t give him a pass on any of this, but he does go out of his way to explain from where this thinking might have come. (Which is actually helpful and instructive, but originates from an obviously too-respectful source.)

Godard’s philosophy, such as it is, has been muddled or outright dangerously naive since his embracing of Maoism in the late ’60s (and some would say before that), but it’s his ideas about film that have kept us returning to him. I saw In Praise of Love multiple times when it played in Knoxville, and I have to say any Anti-Semitism present went right by me. For Ever Mozart was a bit more pronounced about it, but even then it was the style of the film (which I found kind of boring) I was paying attention to. I’ll also admit that as much as I love many of Godard’s films, I find  many incomprehensible or just dull, and I’ve never looked to any of them for political advice. (Though he does have interesting points to make about prostitution and capitalism, consumerism and art.)

I knew the guy could be a cranky asshole, bordered on misogyny and had suspect political belief, but his blatant Anti-Semetic statements are an unfortunate discovery. He seems to flip-flop in his thoughts about Jews, and Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Levy seem to think he’s an anti-Semite who longs to be cured. I’m sure Godard doesn’t mind his controversial statements being dispersed more widely through Brody’s book, and if he’s upset about anything it’s that he wasn’t wholly able to get his point across through the cinema.