Godard — Cinema is over
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From the Guardian:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1472494,00.html
‘Cinema is over’
Jean-Luc Godard hardly ever talks to the press, and when he does it’s as likely to be about football as film. In a rare interview, Geoffrey Macnab discovers that the original enfant terrible of the French new wave has lost none of his fire
Friday April 29, 2005
The Guardian
‘Play tennis, see my analyst’: how Godard passes the time
It is a balmy afternoon and Jean-Luc Godard is sitting by a French swimming pool, smoking a cigar and talking football. His new film, Notre Musique, has just received its world premiere. Midway through it, there is a reference to the famous match at Wembley in November 1953 when Hungary (the “Magnificent Magyars”) defeated Billy Wright’s England 6-3. Reflecting on the match, Godard, a devoted football fan as a youngster, begins to tick off the names of the Hungarian players one by one. “Apart from the goalkeeper, I remember them all,” he says. There was Puskas (“the galloping major”), the right-half Bozsik (“the deputy”), Sandor (“the mad winger”), Kocsis (“the golden head”). Stanley Matthews, he adds, is the only English player who sticks in his mind.
Godard describes first watching the Hungarian team, which revolutionised world football, as being “a discovery, like modern painting.” Most of the Hungarian players, he points out, were from Honved, the “club of the army”. The country was under Soviet occupation. None the less, Puskas (an army officer) and his colleagues approached the game in a freewheeling, marvellously uninhibited style that contrasted with the regimentation of day-to-day life behind the Iron Curtain. The only team that has come close to Puskas’s Hungary, Godard adds, was Ajax of Amsterdam during the Cruyff era. “Everybody played in attack and defence – it was like free jazz.”
Godard turned 74 in December. In the twilight of his career, he remains as playful, provocative and perverse as ever. Somehow, it’s no surprise that he is as eager to discuss Puskas and Stanley Matthews as to reflect on his new film. He is nothing if not contrary, and has an unerring ability to wrongfoot critics and audiences alike. At a press conference for Notre Musique, Godard fazed journalists by inviting a spokesperson for the French actors and technicians’ union to take to the platform. He then sat silently as the union’s gripes against the French government were detailed at length.
Humorous, lyrical and baffling by turns, Notre Musique is typical late Godard: part essay, part poetic meditation. The film, divided into three parts, begins with a rapid-fire montage sequence of stock shots from documentaries and Hollywood war movies. Lasting for around seven minutes, this section is called Hell. Godard uses a quote from the 18th-century philosopher Baron de Montesquieu to contextualise the images: “After the great flood, men came out of the earth and started exterminating each other.” Alongside the battle scenes, there are shots of penguins and monkeys. “I found some pictures of American GIs in the river and I thought they made a nice follow-up to the monkeys,” he explains cheerfully.
Next comes Purgatory, in which Godard returns to Sarajevo, a city also featured in an earlier film, Forever Mozart (1996). He wanders through the city, encountering journalists and academics, and discussing politics and history. We hear asides about how history is written by the victors. There are actors playing fictional characters and real people (Godard among them) playing themselves. There are near-identical images of Palestinians and Israelis on the same sea shore, but the context of these pictures is utterly different. One is of victory, the other of defeat. We hear a quote from Malraux: “Humane people don’t start revolutions, they open libraries”. We also see the bridge at Mostar, whose destruction in 1993 marked a low point of the Bosnian war. The bridge has now been reconstructed, amid much talk of hope triumphing over barbarism.
“I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory,” says Godard. The final part portrays heaven, albeit in heavily ironic fashion. Paradise is a leafy place in the woods, guarded by US marines.
Godard may be a famous name, but he seems resigned to the fact that his films are not now widely seen and rarely make much impact at the box-office. His reputation is such that his regular producers, Ruth Waldburger and Alain Sarde, can raise money for his new projects easily enough, but his recent career isn’t exactly a commercial beanfeast. To illustrate the point, he tells a story of how he recently flew from Montréal to New York. When he arrived, the customs officer asked him: “Mr Godard: what are you coming here for? Business or pleasure?” Godard indicated the former. The officer asked what business he was in. “Unsuccessful movies,” Godard replied.
There is something paradoxical about his attitude toward cinema. He now seems despairing of the medium’s ability to reinvent itself or to have any kind of social impact. “It’s over,” he sighs. “There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.”
Yet he continues to study film and experiment as energetically as ever. He is brutally dismissive of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and of the spate of other recent films attacking globalisation, warmongering and US cultural imperialism. “They say they are attacking Bush, but they are not doing it in movie terms, but in words.” He calls Moore (in his idiosyncratic English) “just a Hollywood reporter man”, and compares him unfavourably with the great cinéma vérité documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman. He even suggests that Moore’s work may actually have helped Bush. “It’s not enough to be against Adolf Hitler. If you make a disastrous movie, you’re not against Adolf Hitler.” (Whether he has actually seen Fahrenheit 9/11 is not in any way apparent.)
Nor is Godard especially flattering about the legions of admirers who make reference to him in their own movies or even name their companies after him. Quentin Tarantino, for example, calls his production company A Band Apart, in deference to Godard’s 1964 classic, Bande à Part. “He says he admires me, but that’s not true,” Godard muses, then makes a cryptic remark about the torture and humiliation of prisoners by US guards in Iraq. “What is never said about Tarantino is that those prisons we are shown pictures of, where the torture is taking place, are called “reservoir dogs”. I think the name is very appropriate.”
Back in the 1950s, when he was writing for Cahiers du Cinéma magazine, Godard was among the most provocative critics of his day. “The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray,” he wrote. Another of his gems: “You can describe Hiroshima Mon Amour as Faulkner plus Stravinsky.” Every film student knows quotes such as “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” and “The cinema is truth 24 times a second.”
He remains adept at coining polished one-liners, but now they tend to have a melancholic undertone. Ask him whether he still takes pleasure in Nicholas Ray’s films and he admits he doesn’t watch them any more. “It’s not possible to see the films. You can only see them on DVD, which I don’t like very much, because the screen is too small.”
He sounds equally disenchanted with film festivals. “In the beginning I believed in Cannes, but now it’s just for publicity. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.”
Living in Switzerland, he rarely sees movies, unless he is preparing a documentary like Histoire du Cinéma. He claims he spends his spare time watching sport and reading old Jack London novels. He doesn’t keep in touch with many of the old colleagues with whom he worked in the Nouvelle Vague era. “It’s like with any family. You see your relatives and then you don’t. All of a sudden, they disappear and you don’t know what has become of them. Ten years ago, I felt nostalgic about that period, but not any more.”
No, he hasn’t seen Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which re-creates the heady days in Paris in 1968 and features its own homage to his film, Band à Part. Isn’t he curious about a film so close to his own experiences? “It’s a past life,” is all he says. He likewise parries questions about future projects, joking that all he now has in mind is “to try to play some tennis and see my analyst”.
Despite Godard’s reputation as an aloof, Prospero-like figure, he is a surprisingly gracious interviewee. Not that Godard relishes journalists or authors poring over his private life. Even Colin McCabe’s enthusiastic biography, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70, meets with his disapproval. “I was not glad he did it. I asked him not to, but I can’t prevent someone from writing,” Godard says. “He knows nothing about me. Maybe he knows some of my movies … I was grateful to him for a time because he helped me do a few things, but that’s all. It’s not because you are friends at the time that you have the moral authorisation of entering the private life of another person.”
Godard’s treatment of his own collaborators hasn’t always been chivalrous. One thinks of Truffaut’s famous letter in which he suggested that if Godard ever made an autobiographical film, the appropriate title might be Once a Shit, Always a Shit. Then, there was Letter to Jane, the 1972 documentary he and Jean-Pierre Gorin made about Jane Fonda. A 52-minute deconstruction of a photo of Fonda in Hanoi, this was a cruel and mocking piece of agit-prop. “It was not a very good movie,” Godard acknowledges, but adds that it was “an attempt to analyse the political work of Jane Fonda”, not an attack on Fonda personally.
The director describes his new film as an optimistic one, with an underlying message that “reconciliation is possible” – but there is no disguising the his dismay about the state of his chosen profession. In one of the most poignant scenes in Notre Musique, we hear a voice asking him if small digital cameras can save cinema. There is a close-up of Godard’s face: he scowls and says nothing at all. The inference is clear: the battle is already lost. As our meeting ends, I put the question to him again. There is still no answer.
· Notre Musique is released on May 20.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/Feature_Story/interview/0,5365,135383,00.html
Jean-Luc Godard
Praise be to Godard
The eternally radical director tells Jonathan Romney about his latest film – and problems with the ironing
Friday February 11, 2000
The Guardian
In a recent film by French Romany director Tony Gatlif, the hero, bored with handing out political pamphlets on the Champs-Elysées, starts hailing passers-by with a mocking cry of “New York Herald Trib-u-u-ne!” The fond reference is to a turning point of modern cinema – Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 debut feature A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), in which crop-haired Jean Seberg brought an ambivalent blast of US culture to the boulevards. The rest of Gatlif’s film is equally Godard-fixated – in one scene, a film critic rubber-stamps a programme of the director’s work with the single word “God”.
Such homages show that Godard’s influence in France is still inescapable. As one of the key figures – many would say, the key figure – of the nouvelle vague, Godard was the cultural polymath who practically invented French screen modernism, using a vast repertoire of cinematic, literary, artistic and historical references to forge an ideal of a demanding, militant, hyper-serious yet hyper-playful cinema. On French TV, comedians still get a laugh imitating his rasping, doom-laden voice-overs; young populist auteurs still routinely disparage him as the pope of “nombriliste” (navel-gazing) art cinema.
Yet Godard has long been a phantom presence. Once at the centre of world film culture, he has been through several forms of quasi-exile since the mid-60s. First he abandoned the commercial cinema world for revolutionary avant-gardism with the Dziga Vertov group, founded with Jean-Pierre Gorin, in the late 60s and early 70s. Then he returned to Switzerland, where he grew up, retreating to Rolle on Lake Geneva with his personal and professional partner, film-maker Anne-Marie Miéville. After a brief semi-commercial comeback in the 80s, he has now retreated to the margins, pushing the structural complexities of his work so far that even an averagely committed art-cinema audience declines to follow him.
Godard may no longer fill cinemas, but for many admirers he’s more godlike than ever. Some recent work for film and TV may demand a leap of faith – for example, is Hélas Pour Moi, made in 1993, radical experimentation or just plain incoherent? But for the most part, Godard’s enigmas continue to fascinate: his films, more essayistic, less narrative than ever before, have become a continuous free-form commentary on art, society, memory and, above all, cinema. Much of it is autumnal, melancholic, and at the very least, suggestive of profundity. If his series Histoire(s) du Cinéma – (Hi)stories of Cinema – is, as some feel, cinema’s answer to Finnegans Wake, then the 1995 “autoportrait” JLG/JLG is surely its Krapp’s Last Videotape.
British audiences may not know it – he hasn’t had a film released here since the mid-80s – but Godard at 70 is still going strong. But there’s always some mystery surrounding his current activity. That’s why I’m surprised to get the call to interview him in his producer’s office in Paris: the deal is that he’ll talk only for half an hour, and specifically about his new film, Eloge de l’Amour (In Praise of Love), which will premiere in Venice this autumn. That makes Godardian sense – an interview about a film that no one’s seen, and that, most likely, will only vaguely resemble the sketchy script-cum-treatment that I get to read. What the hell. It has to be worth the trip.
The audience turns out to be with a man exactly like the “Jean-Luc Godard” character he often plays in his and Miéville’s films – mad Uncle Jean in Prénom: Carmen, or the slogan-muttering narrator of Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Godard is as much a self-created cartoon as Woody Allen: unshaven jaw, unkempt brush of wiry hair, TV-screen glasses, and the huge cigar, his perennial tribute to the old Hollywood mandarins. He’s friendly, but to the point: a handshake, a cough, and we begin. I ask whether his new film will resemble its script much: he once claimed film scripts were invented by Mafia accountants to keep the books regular. “That’s just a historical hypothesis,” he says, the baleful gravelly voice emerging from way back in his throat.
“There comes a time when things have to be made regular – you can see it in films today. Accountancy has a huge influence. It’s the same in war – one soldier, 10 accountants behind him.” In Praise of Love will be in two parts, half 35mm, half digital video. Half of it involves a man working on a vague project (a film? an opera? who knows) called In Praise of Love; half is about two Resistance veterans whose story Steven Spielberg wants to make into a movie. Juliette Binoche will appear, but only as a voice on the phone: “But just for two minutes. Not even that – 30 seconds. All I want is for us to hear her voice, rather than pretend that it’s Julia Roberts or whoever.”
Whatever the film becomes between now and Venice, it won’t be exactly what Godard first envisioned. “I wanted to do a picture of love, between young people, between adults, and between the old, but with the adults it didn’t really work. You can film a first kiss between the young, or even the old, but adults – not really. I just kept that as a framework, so it’s the story of someone who has that project in mind but can’t carry it out.”
The dominant subject may turn out to be Godard’s long-running animus against Spielberg, whose crime in this film is to turn a real-life drama into “une histoire de Hollywood.” Godard has complained that Schindler’s List was “du Max Factor” and once challenged Spielberg to a showdown debate at the Locarno film festival. (He declined). In Histoire(s) du Cinéma, he coins the portentous formula, “Power of Hollywood. Power of Babylon.” Does he see Spielberg as being on the side of Babylon? “I don’t know about Babylon. But at any rate it’s a rather tyrannical power.”
Godard has long entertained an ambivalent relationship with American cinema. As a critic on Cahiers du Cinéma in the 50s, along with auteurs-to-be Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette, he helped reinvent Hollywood history as an alternative Great Tradition – although he confesses, “We defended a lot of film-makers, even some who weren’t really that wonderful.” On the business front, there was a flirtation with Hollywood in the late 70s, when he was briefly affiliated with Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope company. And in the 90s, no one would have been terribly surprised if Quentin Tarantino, who raved about Godard to anyone who’d listen, had wangled him a deal with Miramax. Godard shrugs.
“Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He’d have done better to give me some money.” He displays a peppery attitude to his young acolytes. Hal Hartley recently offered him a part playing “a monster.” Will he accept? “It depends how much he’s paying, and if it doesn’t take up too much time. I probably won’t. Unless he pays me a fortune. And he’s not rich, so he probably won’t.” He gives a sly cackle and puffs on his cigar.
Godard’s recent work may have a hardcore audience among a coterie of critics and academics, especially in the US. But in France, his audience is nothing like it once was, and he’s reconciled to his marginal status. “In France there are perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 people more or less like me, who might go and see my films. They’re fewer than they used to be, because it’s too difficult, because the world has changed. They go to the cinema a lot less, and so do I. But if they do go, they’ll give 80% of themselves to the film. If you go and see Titanic, you only give the film 10% of your personality. Good films get smaller audiences, but more of the viewer.”
Who, then, are Godard’s faithful few? “They’re probably people of my age, who are a bit nostalgic, who feel the world’s going wrong. Younger people may sense there’s a struggle going on, maybe it’s not really their film, but they see the struggle and they respect it. They’re glad to see it. It’s like going to the museum. People will queue three hours in the rain to see an exhibition, for the sense of images, of a look – they know that’s something you can’t see every day, and they need that. They know that’s where the treasure is. You can go and see Titanic – but from time to time, you go and see the treasure.”
For 40 years, the word “Godardian” has been in common currency to describe a way of seeing cinema and the world. Was there ever a moment when Godard became aware of his own name taking on the same ring that “Alfred Hitchcock” or “Fritz Lang” had for him?
“Yes, it felt strange, and it was awkward for me in my private life. But it started to change in 1968 – I began to realise it was a label. I’m glad to have made lots of more or less successful films – but especially ones which weren’t successful, because that helps you to see yourself more or less normally.” He never considered himself in the same terms as the auteurs he once wrote about. “John Cassavetes, who was more or less my age – now he was a great director. I can’t imagine myself as his equal in cinema. For me he represents a certain cinema that’s way up above.”
Although he has been vocal in his praise of such film-makers as Abbas Kiarostami, Godard admits he’s much less of a cinephile these days. “I hate watching films on TV. I have to see them on a big screen, but if a film disappears, then it disappears. Sometimes if you’re really missing a film badly, then OK – the only way to watch a film in prison is on video. TV is a mechanism of transmission, not of creation – but if you need something, then it comes to you like a ray of sunshine through a prison window. From time to time, I’ll dig out a tape and watch it the way I’d listen to a record.”
Godard may sound like a peevish Luddite, yet he was pioneering the use of video in the mid-70s. The Histoire(s) series is a technological tour de force, mixing sound, text and image into a kind of utopian Gesamtkunstwerk. You’d imagine he’d take naturally to new multimedia, like his contemporary and kindred spirit Chris Marker, but he’s a sceptic.
“CD-Rom isn’t that interesting. There’s that Borges labyrinth side to it, but all that’s over and done with. The technicians have taken it all – they create, but they don’t have that much talent.” He shrugs, and launches into a codger’s lament on the condition of the techno-world. “I used to iron my shirts – I can’t do it any more, because the iron’s got too many buttons on it. I live in a little village and the laundry has closed down. We’re going back to the Middle Ages in a different way – everything takes a long time, even if it happens quickly. If you write to me in Switzerland, and you’re in a hurry, don’t do it by courier, it takes too long – use the normal post. In France, Switzerland and Germany, the postal service still works.”
Time’s up. Godard gives a brisk, courteous “OK” and shakes my hand. He puts on his overcoat and scarf, hangs a rolled-up umbrella on his arm and leaves, cigar in mouth. I watch him shuffle off down the road, looking exactly like the testy philosopher uncle of his films. We’re only a minute’s walk from the spot on the Champs-Elysées where Jean Seberg once peddled her papers, but that’s in the other direction, not to mention 40 years ago, and in another history of cinema entirely.
• The soundtrack of Histoire(s) du Cin?ma is available as a CD box set on ECM Records. The National Film Theatre is planning an extensive Godard retrospective in 2001.
Godard: a life in movies
Early Godard
A fiery, polemical critic on the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard made several shorts in the 50s. His first feature A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) in 1959 established Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg as the iconic bohemian screen couple. His early 60s work was a fevered deconstruction of film styles and genres – musical (Une Femme Est Une Femme), sci-fi (Alphaville), war film (Les Carabiniers), and film-about-film (Le Mépris).
Political period
Godard’s first overtly political film was Le Petit Soldat (1960), banned in France for its commentary on Algeria. His 60s films became increasingly concerned with politics and sociology, culminating in the Maoist student cell of La Chinoise (1967), which anticipated events of the following year. In reaction to May ’68, Godard founded the Dziga Vertov group with Jean-Pierre Gorin: the mission was not just to make political films, but to “film politically”. He continued in this direction with his 70s video work with Anne-Marie Miéville.
The comeback
Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (1979) was Godard’s return to the big screen, the first of a series of complex, playful films that reinvented the tradition of the de luxe art movie: Passion, Prénom: Carmen, Détective, and Hail Mary, which sparked a wave of Catholic outrage. But by 1987’s King Lear, Godard had effectively alienated his new mainstream audience.
The 90s
Godard’s major project in the 90s was the eight-part Histoire(s) du Cinéma, but there were also several cinema features hardly or never seen in Britain: the elegantly enigmatic Nouvelle Vague (1990); the entirely mystifying Hélas Pour Moi (1993); and For Ever Mozart (1996), his controversial take on Bosnia.
Godard et les stars
Radical he may be, but Godard has always had box-office appeal. He played Svengali to his own iconic star, his first wife Anna Karina, from Le Petit Soldat through to Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Made in USA (1966). He also uses stars with an ironic eye for their public image: Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance (Le Mépris), Alain Delon, rocker Johnny Hallyday, even the Rolling Stones in his 1968 One Plus One. Jane Fonda starred in his Marxist melodrama Tout va Bien, but he repaid her by deconstructing her militant chic in Letter to Jane. Norman Mailer, Molly Ringwald and Woody Allen were inveigled into his King Lear.