4. Aesthetic conservatism. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing American attack on Godard's work published to date is John Simon's essay "Godard and the Godardians: A Study in the New Sensibility." (4) In the second paragraph of this lengthy broadside, Godard is linked by Simon to currents in the other arts that Simon equally disapproves of, including "aleatory and electronic music," "action painting, Pop and Op art, junk sculpture," "rock 'n' roll and its sundry derivatives in popular music," and "happenings, events, environments, and other 'mixed media.' " Significantly, the only area of film that Simon chooses to relate Godard to in this paragraph is neither "the New Wave" nor any other European film currents, but "'underground movies' or 'New American Cinema,"' a movement whose most vocal figures during this period were not among Godard's strongest defenders. (While Jonas Mekas and a few other writers in Film Culture praised some of the early features, it was generally felt in American avant-garde film circles that Godard's reliance on narrative and on professional actors disqualified him from serious consideration. Significantly, the only "Nouvelle Vague" figure recognized in the permanent collection of the Anthology Film Archives was — and still is — Marcel Hanoun. Mekas wrote in 1970, "With Pravda Godard finally abandons commercial cinema and joins the underground." Mekas declared Pravda Godard's best film to date, but this review proved to be an isolated case.)

The bulk of Simon's essay is devoted to point-by-point refutations of Godard's leading American supporters at the time – Sontag, KaeI, Sarris, and Roud — along with John Russell Taylor and A. Alvarez in England. His principal charge throughout is that Godard is an undisciplined, unstructured filmmaker for whom "anything goes," and it is worth adding that in spite of Simon's many objections to the claims of Godard's defenders, there are some points of agreement about where to situate Godard in relation to currents in the other arts. Indeed, Sontag's evocations of a "new sensibility" in Against Interpretation (5) — which also contains a philosophical analysis of Vivre sa vie attacked by Simon — and her passionate and extended appreciation of Godard in Styles of Radical Will (6) allude to most of the same artistic currents as Simon does, although for her these connections are positive rather than negative factors. On the other hand, faced with Sarris's positioning of Godard alongside "Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot," Simon argues, "About the only place where Godard's position might be comparable to that of the other four is on the toilet seat. But Godard, alas, also expels his work from that position." Rereading Simon's hysterical diatribe today, one is struck by how much of his anger is directed at Godard's respectful (if eclectic) attitude toward popular culture, Hollywood movies in particular. His opening and pivotal example from Godard's work that elicits his deepest scorn is the offscreen recitation of Apollinaire's poem "Cors de chasse" during the screening of a Western. "What business," asks Simon, "have the characters in a vulgar American western reciting one of France's finest 20th-century lyrics at each other — and antiphonally at that, as though it were dialogue that they were improvising?" (Later in the same essay, Simon is equally dismayed by Kael's respectful attitude toward American gangster movies, in her review of Band of Outsiders.) In short, the major issue at stake for Simon was literary high culture versus the encroachments of popular culture, and he regarded Godard (rightly, I think) as a major force in making such encroachments acceptable. (A specialist in theater and European literature, Simon exemplified a certain literary bias in relation to film that was considerably more prevalent among intellectual circles prior to the beginnings of film studies as an academic discipline during the seventies.)

5. Political conservatism. A love-hatred relationship with America has been apparent in Godard's work ever since Breathless, but the increasing political thrust of his work throughout the sixties

As long as this sort of romanticism was reflected in Godard's films, he still had a substantial and vocal constituency in the United States, particularly among students. In early 1968, many of these students at Columbia University went to see La Chinoise again and again only weeks before some of them participated in the takeover of campus buildings, and their campus uprising occurred only a short time before the May Events in France. One could argue today, of course, that La Chinoise may have been more of an effect of that period than a cause; nonetheless, the sort of centrality that Godard's work in the mid-sixties had for some viewers in the U.S. makes the notion of such a chain reaction plausible. And it is even more important to recall that the feeling of spontaneous combustion that ran from Berkeley to Paris and from Rome to Kent State in that period created a cultural climate highly receptive to Godard's impudence, as well as his feeling for the contemporary. One went to see Godard movies in that period with an expectation not unlike that of opening a newspaper.

But after 1968, Godard's violent rejections of cinephilia and other forms of pleasure in his Dziga Vertov Group films — coupled with his willingness to make films in "underground" conditions – led to a gradual disaffection among many of his American fans, including many of the most political. The theoretical concerns of these films seemed remote to most of the student activists (whose resistance to theory has often been remarked upon), and the relative absence of the romanticism and pleasure that had fueled the popularity of films like La Chinoise and Weekend was equally off-putting. The same qualities that led Mekas to praise Pravda were alienating to most arthouse audiences and mainstream critics (with a few notable exceptions, such as Penelope Gilliatt), and it wasn't until Godard made a conscious return to 35 millimeter, narrative, and stars in Tout va bien (1972) that he was to regain part of their interest.

6. The move from Paris. Godard had been viewed in the United States as a French, and specifically Parisian, director. When he moved, first to Grenoble, in the mid-seventies, and then more permanently to Rolle, Switzerland, a few years later, the gradual effacement of his perceived identity led to confusions about how to "place" him that have persisted ever since. Two comparable cases of confusion about national identity in the public mind are those of Michael Snow, a Canadian who has worked on occasion in the United States, and Chantal Akerman, a Belgian who has worked on many occasions in France. The same unconscious form of imperialism that has tended to ignore both the Belgian aspects of Akerman's work and the Canadian aspects of Snow's has resisted regarding the bulk of Godard's work since Every Man for Himself (1979) as Swiss. This has unfortunately obscured the degree to which Godard's Swiss identity might be construed as a significant factor in the meaning of his recent work, carrying specific inflections to the uses of Swiss landscapes, the meaning of borders, the prominence of banks and bankers, and so on – elements that seem especially prominent in Nouvelle Vague, but are also surely relevant to many of the others.

7. Historical amnesia and cultural gaps. The subject of cultural amnesia has been a central preoccupation of Godard's since the mid-eighties –- most evident in King Lear (1987) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989- ), two works that have so far failed conspicuously to receive a comprehensive critical response in the United States. And not so coincidentally, it would appear that cultural amnesia is itself at the root of this failure. Jonathan Baumbach's defense of King Lear, unpublished in 1987 but printed three years later in the collection Produced and Abandoned, epitomizes as well as describes the memory hole that Godard's work since the mid-seventies has fallen into, particularly for American viewers: Between 1919 and 1968, Godard produced virtually all his major work. . . . After that there was a period of agitprop films, in collaboration with Pierre Gorin [sic], where Godard attempted to efface himself as an artist. And though he returned to making commercial films in 1981 with the admirable Every Man for Himself (his second first film, as he called it), he was no longer at the center of our consciousness. He was speaking to us, or such was the perception, from a vanished time.