In January, I rented Made In U.S.A., a Jean-Luc Godard film I had never seen. I watched it and loved it. I moved on to the special features and loved the insights, both personal and aesthetic, offered by Richard Brody, a New Yorker writer and editor who penned a biography of Godard, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. I bought the book later that month and began.
April is now half-over and I’ve finally completed the book. I could have read it faster for a number of reasons, but mostly I didn’t want it to end. Closing the book this morning was like ending a chapter of my life, like pulling away in the moving van. The last few weeks, I commuted with it through New York, like a sign, practically begging for someone to comment and join me in this world. I got nothing.
Nothing but an education. I have long admired Godard’s revolutionary cinema—his reckless abandon and theoretical challenges to standard filmmaking rules, his disregard for narrative construction and his inability to separate life from the cinema, as the title of the book suggests. Yet, I had much to learn. The seminal works–Breathless, Masculine Feminine and the entire 1960s—are covered brilliantly, but Brody applies the same detailed, thoughtful study of later Godard, demonstrating value and Godard’s growth as an artist, a concept generally refuted. Brody doesn’t buy into Godard being dispensable post-1968 because he understands the work. He nails that film critics—long thought to be the sector of the world who prop Godard up—are generally just as in the dark about his work as the uninitiated. And while the book is not a journey of the writer’s personal opinions about the artist’s work, Brody finds himself in the position of defending Godard’s work against disinterested dismissal and lack of critical comprehension (King Lear, In Praise of Love), and does so the way a scientist might prove a theory.
Understand cinema. Read the book. Watch the films. Everything you can find. Or the ones you’ve never seen. Or the ones you think you’ve seen, but are different to you now.
As Brody states in its final paragraph, the cinema will live on as long as Godard does, as long as his films do. And so it is that the cinema lives on at Cannes in a few weeks, where the latest film from one of the cinema’s true masters will premiere. The trailer for Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard; 2010):