Godard: genius or gasbag?
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Maybe the problem is the length: Richard Brody’s biography of Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Everything Is Cinema,’ thumps down at 702 pages. To spend that much time with a single subject requires something of the reader: enthusiasm, affection. Without a sufficient level of goodwill, the result can easily be enmity.
‘Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers — the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, ‘Breathless’ — became an intolerable gasbag. That probably wasn’t Brody’s aim in writing this exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, critical biography.’
That was Stephanie Zacharek writing for the New York Times. Our own reviewer Richard Schickel fared little better, admitting, ‘I have rarely been so glad to come to the end of an admirable book.’ Both reviewers find Godard’s personality difficult (also ‘annoying,’ ‘stubbornly confounding’ and ‘perhaps the victim of attention-deficit disorder’). But all these qualities, which might make reading a long biography not much fun, don’t make Godard any less of a filmmaker.
In 1959, Godard’s film ‘Breathless’ launched the French New Wave into American movie theaters and the dialogue of American filmmaking. Godard had also been a critic — for Cahiers du Cinéma — and he was, as Schickel notes, ‘a useful motormouth.’ But while many critics are dismissive of his later work, the Telegraph praises Godard’s film legacy, explaining:
‘This is an artist who has reinvented himself as often as Madonna, and to rather more invigorating effect. You can accuse him of pretentiousness and incomprehensibility, but you could never accuse him of (to use a 1960s term) selling out, and in this era of the two-minute attention-span we must treasure those few remaining artists whose work forces us to use our brains.’
In its review, Time Out New York turns back to the movies and recommends watching Godard’s early films. It also suggests reading a collection of Godard’s essays and interviews: And ‘Godard on Godard’ is only 300 pages.
Carolyn Kellogg