For Ever Godard

by Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt, Eds.
Black Dog Publishing, London, 2004
461 pp., ill. 200 b/w, col. Paper, $45.00
ISBN: 1-901033-69-4.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, Leuven, Belgium

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be

Jean-Luc Godard is without any doubt the most important artist-theoretician of film history. Yet his work remains tragically unknown (which does not mean without influence) as well as unseen (at least by the broad public). Much lip service is paid to several of his movies and to certain of his filmed and written essays, but for the Anglo-Saxon (and, to an increasing extent, also for the French) audience, Godard is becoming more and more just a name, instead of being the short-cut for an exceptional career and oeuvre as a film-maker and philosopher of the twentieth-century image.

Godard’s work can be divided, with a rather uncanny precision, in three periods: first, the New Wave features (from his first hit, Breathless (1960), till Weekend (1967)), marked by the creative dialogue with and within the mythical journal Cahiers du cinema; second, the political (Maoist) period of the Dziga Vertov Group, and the reorientation toward video and television; third, the return to the feature film, starting in 1980 with Sauve qui peut (la vie), characterized by the almost metaphysical reflection on the status and the power of the image (these are also the years of the controversy with Lanzmann, whose Bildverbot is violently contested by Godard, and of the major achievement of the eight hours documentary Histoire(s) du cinema (1989). Representing more than five decades of work in the cinema, the some 50 films by Godard are often difficult to see: The whole production of the collaborative Dziga Vertov Group seems to have vanished, whereas the earlier and later works often sleep in various well-hidden and well-locked archives.

The present collection is the indirect result of a four days conference held at Tate Modern in June 2001. It is not just a proceedings volume, since only ten out of twenty-two contributions are derived from this event, the first of its kind in the UK. Yet the book does respect the interdisciplinary scope and depth of the conference, presenting texts coming from a wide range of fields and disciplines, including cultural studies, film theory, anthropology, art history, psychoanalysis, etc. Moreover, For Ever Godard also attempts to give a balanced survey of the director’s complete film-making, first by opening with a very useful "illustrated filmography", second by focusing not exclusively on two or three highlights or on those works that fascinate most from a contemporary viewpoint, but on a very broad selection of works, paying the same attention to all periods and studying both better and lesser known movies. Section One groups six articles that re-examine the "basics" of Godard’s across five decades, such as the for instance the relationship with the present and the actualities and his obsession with asynchronous structures. Section Two brings together another six articles that study the major formal dimensions of Godard’s movies. Section Three entails four chapters on "sound and music", a particularly important but strangely under-theorized and under-analyzed part of his work. Section Four is structured around an interrogation on history and memory in the wake of Histoire(s) du cinema; its six contributions address more philosophical matters.

Most of the chapters are excellent and the overall effect of the book, which is also cleverly illustrated, is breathtaking. It provides the reader with a clear and useful state of the art, while completing it with many innovative views on Godard’s contribution to our ways of thinking and practising cinema. The editors have found the perfect mix of Anglo-American and continental scholarship, on the one hand, and of introvert (close reading) and extroversive (cultural theory) articles. The strong editorial hand makes that each contribution manages to link its own central question to the whole of Godard’s work as well to the current discussions in film theory. Both efforts highly increase the use-value of the book: The thorough reading of as many films as possible compensates for the actual difficulty of seeing them; the theoretical background foregrounds the incredible richness of Godard’s "theoretical practice", whose long-time absence in the Anglo-Saxon field can only be regretted. To quote just some examples: The theory of the database logic in storytelling, too rapidly associated with the sole work by Peter Greenaway or Lev Manovich, will certainly benefit from the articles on Histoire(s) du cinema (see the chapter by Trond Lundemo). The recent considerations on the film’s paratext (i.e. the filmic and verbal "extras" that are now becoming available thanks to the DVD technology) should start with having a close look at Godard’s deconstruction of the very difference between film and trailer (see the article by Vinzenz Hediger). And the inquiry into the film as a hybrid or multimedia construction can still earn a lot from Godard’s experiments with the montage of sound and vision throughout his whole career (see the article by Adrian Martin).