EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD, Richard Brody

An abusive, stalkery, anti-Semitic kleptomaniac. Not quite what I expected when I started this book. But then, when I started that book on Kubrick I did not expect to run out of energy for it when he fucked someone over for the two hundredth time for apparently no other reason that it saved him a dollar and he quite liked it. The difference, perhaps, is that Godard, in his later isolation, seemed to have some self-awareness about it.

But the key view of himself that the film features is a black-and-white photograph of Godard as a child. Contemplating his own childhood image, Godard wonders why that unsmiling face has such a somber aspect: “I was already in mourning for myself, my sole companion, and I suspected that the soul had stumbled on the body and that it had left again without offering its hand.”

This book is admirably unsparing of Godard’s personal failings, but also meets its intent of focusing on the man’s work and method. Even during Godard’s fairly empty and pointless engagé/Maoist phase. What emerges for me is how much of a “record collection band” Godard was for a chunk of his career. He was a remixer, and his later essay films very much affirm that. He was a visual plunderphonics guy, and got away without paying sample fees because he was Jean-Luc Godard. The guy commuted on Concorde but nobody wanted to hit him for fees because he was a cinematic international treasure.

“For a long time I said that I was on the margin, but that the margin is what holds the pages together. Today I have fallen from that margin, I feel that I’m between the pages.”

The author is very very good at unwinding and presenting process and theory with clarity and intelligence. The book is chronological but all the threads of thought and production are well maintained throughout. There is, I think, a lot of value here for anyone in the creative arts. I found all kinds of stuff I can adapt and use and think about, which Godard, the great adapter and re-user, would probably approve of.

Godard was arguing that the aesthetics of cinema were inherently political, that movies passed along to their viewers a secret ideological code that viewers then, in their own communications, also passed along; he was refashioning his ideological advocacy as a theory of communication. This analysis was a radically dialectical version of Godard’s early insight that “at the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.”

EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD, Richard Brody (UK) (US+)