For Ever Godard

by Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated to the British Film Institute. His book, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist, appeared from McFarland in 2000. He is currently writing Understanding Realism for the Bfi's Understanding the Moving Image series and Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism, a blend of reception aesthetics and personal memoir. He is a regular contributor to the websites Audience, Bright Lights Film Journal, Senses of Cinema and Talking Pictures, and contributes book reviews to the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

On Britain’s Channel 4 recently a commercial ran in which a young man perplexes the popcorn vendor in a fleapit by buying popcorn and soda, then walking out of the cinema, sitting on the sidewalk, and catching a movie on his Motorola mobile. It dawns on you that the “death of cinema” discourse must have achieved critical mass. For Ever Godard is one of the most important, and impassioned, interventions in this debate to appear so far. The book is a coffee table collection of essays inspired by the For EverGodard conference at London’s Tate Modern in June 2001. It consists of a selection of the original papers and specially written pieces by scholars including James Quandt, Colin McCabe, Adrian Martin and Nicole Brenez, along with newer voices such as Libby Saxton, Vinzenz Hediger and Trond Lundemo. Your first impression is of a sumptuously illustrated but intellectually daunting book that responds best to sampling. The critical response has been mixed. For those prepared to engage with its weighty, sometimes difficult, issues, For Ever Godard bears out Hilary Radner’s perception of the conference, published at Sensesofcinema.com: “This event will set the terms of the debate around Godard’s films and videos for the next decade.” For others, such as the London Observer’s Peter Conrad, it is windy bunkum. For Radner, the conference revolved around key questions in contemporary film culture. As more and more filmmakers prefer videotape to celluloid, what can it mean to make films? In an era when interpretation and taste have been called into question, how do we evaluate individual films? What is the role of the filmmaker, critic and scholar amid such a climate? Jean-Luc Godard has not only been a seminal figure in world cinema but central to the “death of cinema” discussion, and a key purpose of conference and book has been to celebrate his contribution to the evolution of the moving image. What you think of For Ever Godard depends very much on your perception of the point – impasse or revolution – cinema reached at the close of the 20 th century. It will also depend on your opinion of late Godard, since this book assumes that hitherto peripheral work on television and video importantly shaped the Godard corpus, and invites us to reconsider relations among moving image media. The problem then becomes one of availability. Late Godard has tended to be difficult to see since he dropped out of the official arthouse distribution and exhibition channels in the seventies. Ten years in the making, his eight-part video collage Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) ideally needs to be seen for this book, like the 2002 interview collection The Future(s) of Cinema, to make proper sense. Adrian Martin’s eloquent piece on pastiche in À Bout de Souffle, Bande à part and Alphaville pays attention to specifically cinematic rhythms, textures and compositions in such a way as to recall the SeulCinéma (Cinema Alone) portion of the Histoire(s). Vicki Callahan emphasizes the formal play of figure and trope in an intriguing essay on the “Sacred” in Godard post-Passion (1982). In it Callahan invokes Chapter 4A of Histoire(s) in which Hitchcock talks about montage as the essence of cinema, an idea central to understanding Godard. The manipulation of the soundtrack in Histoire(s) is investigated in Laurent Jullier’s piece on ECM’s CD accompanying the sequence. Montage, continuity, succession, synchrony permeate this book’s consideration of the specific nature of film, as well as the relationship between film and history. Keith Reader’s interesting piece on asynchrony considers disjunctions of sound and image in various Godards. For example, he examines the relationship between Godard’s films and historical events in the sixties, in particular how LaChinoise and Weekend (both 1967) foresaw the events of May 1968.

Godard is nostalgic about what cinema once was, and as if in sympathy this book is steeped in an air of simultaneous celebration and regret. The events in Paris in May ’68 were famously triggered by Henri Langlois’ deposal as head of the Cinémathèque Française. The ethos and image of the museum runs through this book as it runs through Godard’s oeuvre. Ever since his three protagonists dashed through the Louvre in Bande à part (1964), the museum as exhibition, as theft and as imaginary editing has fascinated Godard. What are the implications of the alliance between the “century’s tool-box” and the classical idea of the museum, asks Antoine de Baecque. The idea of the 20 th century as a cinematic imaginary on which artists, advertising men and propagandists have drawn is as central to À Bout de souffle (1960) as to Éloge de l’amour (2001). Haunting conference and book is the sight of Godard as a troubled visionary, stranded somewhere between the treasure trove of the cinematic century and the fractured future of the moving image. In her conference summary Radner compares Godard with French critic Serge Daney who, until his death in 1992, articulated a more upbeat, less essentialist prospect for film in the age of domestic delivery systems. She writes: “The Godardian act of preservation is a gesture that attempts to catalogue and index the gestures of cinema as a means of arresting and capturing what cinema once was, of possessing it if only as a memory.” As Sight and Sound critic Chris Darke observed, Godard’s nostalgia comes to a head in Histoire(s), calling it a “mourning-work” for the End of Cinema.

Whether you welcome the evolution of celluloid into videotape, or rue the corruption of cinéma pur, whether you see the questioning of critical taste as the ongoing refinement of criteria, or the end of criticism, For EverGodard is a challenging book. Torn between formalist and philosophical concerns, some pieces require recent immersion in Deleuze and Benjamin, while Brenez evokes Socrates in her discussion of the centrality of the question in Godard. As Ginette Vincendeau observed in her February Sight and Sound review, many of these essays participate in an aesthetico-philosophical strain of auteurism more redolent of fifties Cahiers du cinéma than subsequent Anglo-Saxon auteurism. As in the original auteurism of Godard’s young day, the historical and political contexts that characterize transatlantic writing seem prominent by their absence. By contrast, Colin McCabe’s engaging reminiscence of setting up the financing for Je voussalue, Marie in 1985 is mired in the concrete and the contextual. As is James Quandt’s energetic search for useable prints for his 2001-2002 Godard retrospective at the Ontario Cinémathèque. You also welcome a thorough and thoughtfully illustrated filmography, an assiduous bibliography, and a glossy overall production that makes this beautiful book difficult to put down.

For Ever Godard

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