American academics (see #8, below). Many of these academics clearly found it easier to quote the theoretical discourses and slogans of Le Gai Savoir, Vent d'est, and Tout va bien — all of which were eminently teachable precisely because they were more easily reducible to their verbal texts –- thanto analyze the complex audiovisual and verbal interplay in Numéro deux and Ici et ailleurs, which were far more resistant to verbal paraphrase, or to situate the two TV series as particular political interventions conceived in relation to France and its state-run television in that period, a specialized context that was equally hard to grasp. This latter period in Godard's work seems marked by two tendencies that are closely connected: the first is a grappling with TV as both subject and metaphor (in Ici et ailleurs,Numéro deux, and Comment ça va), On the one hand, and as a medium to work in and through (in the two TV series), on the other. The second tendency is to grapple more directly with political and social engagement, an approach that is quite distinct from the grappling with theoretical positions found in the previous films. Thanks to this loss of continuity every subsequent Godard feature appears to come, as Baumbach puts it, "from a vanished time."

8. Hermeticism and declining interest in intellectual cinema. In Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag expressed a growing disaffection with the "diffident logorrhea of Godard's late films," compared with Syberberg's "supreme confidence in language, in discourse, in eloquence itself." (8) Significantly, in the same volume (though in an essay written seven years earlier than "Syberberg's Hitler"), she also alluded in passing to "the irresistible ascension of Woody Allen." (9) In fact, it would not be unduly fanciful to argue that the principal American model for "intellectual art cinema," once Godard's films, became, about ten years ago, those of Allen – films whose complete trust in narrative, disinterest in formal abstraction, and more modest intellectual aims place them in a different universe of discourse. This is certainly plausible if one compares Vincent Canby's remarks about both directors in the New York Times over the same period – beginning, say, with his rapturous review of Manhattan in 1979, continuing with his stern advice to Antonioni in 1982 to study the films of Allen, and concluding in 1990 with his dismissal of Nouvelle Vague as "featherweight," in a review that ends: "Only people who despise the great Godard films, everything from Breathless (1959) to Every Man for Himself (1979), could be anything but saddened by this one. The party's over." Setting aside the question of whether the self-pity, defeatism, and nearly suicidal impulses of Every Man for Himself ever constituted much of a party to begin with, Canby's pronouncement resembles Baumbach's in that it describes a break in Godard's work rather than either a continuity or a development. And surely an implicit element in Canby's dismissal is Godard's abandonment of a relatively lucid narrative: from this point of view, it might be argued that the more legible, 'realistic' narratives of films like Breathless and Every Man for Himself constitute, for some of his viewers, promises that Godard has not always kept.

Canby, one should note, is a relatively late defector from the Godard camp; Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, by contrast, who were two of Godard's biggest defenders in the mid-sixties, ceased to show much sustained interest in his work from the late sixties on, and most other mainstream critics have tended to follow suit. (Sarris expressed a grudging support for Nouvelle Vague"as an essayistic meditation on a dying world," but added that Godard is "caught in a losing wager" because "the cinema did not end with Breathless" and "the world did not end with Weekend.") (10)

On the other hand, American academics became increasingly interested in Godard around the same time (the early seventies) that mainstream reviewers were backing away –a period that corresponded roughly to the beginnings of academic film study, when Godard himself was, ironically, converted by certain academics into a kind of Aristotelian model of a theoretically informed counter-cinema. I'm thinking in particular of Peter Wollen's essays "The Two Avant-Gardes" and "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'est" (11), although a similar tendency can be found in the writing of Robin Wood about Tout va bienover roughly the same period. Thanks to the efforts of these and other critics, films like Le Gai Savoir, Vent d'est, and Tout va bien became valued classroom texts that were resented as virtually offering recipes for the establishment of a politically progressive "alternate" cinema.

But by the time that Godard moved to Switzerland, even this interest seemed to diminish; Fassbinder began to supplant Godard as the exemplary contemporary European director among academics, much as Allen replaced Godard in the mainstream, and, apart from Camera Obscura's special Godard issue in 1982 (12), the rest has mainly been silence. Nevertheless, one can't deny that a certain loss of evangelical urgency has made Godard's recent work somewhat less accessible, to Americans and non-Americans alike.

"I think I'm not a very good screenwriter who can be a good director," Godard once said to me in an interview." (13) Certainly, a discrepancy between his mastery of and confidence in mise en scène and his uncertainty in furnishing a story and dialogue accounts for many aspects of his films, particularly his more recent ones: the inability of the director-hero in Passion to come up with a story; the appropriation of "classic" stories in First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary, and King Lear; the use of a story line furnished by others (Alain Sarde and Philippe Setbon) in Détective; the scattered serial narrative of Soigne ta droiteinterrupted by rehearsals of pop music (recalling the form of 1+1/Sympathy for the Devil); dialogue consisting exclusively of literary quotations in Nouvelle Vague. This problematic search for story and dialogue ultimately points to a unifying belief or system that could impose continuity. Over the years, Godard has sharpened

his ability to film nature, to light shots, and simply to fill certain moments with sound, color, shape, and movement. What he seems to have less of –in the absence of his former cinephilia and Marxism — is a pretext for getting from one of these moments to the next.

Sometimes, as in Passion and King Lear, this pretext becomes simply spite and anger – emotions undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present, just as they were perhaps overvalued twenty years ago. Godard has been honest enough to reveal the envy that underlies, in part, his spite and anger, and obviously these emotions may seem less than heroic. But as a source of energy and invention all three can still have heroic consequences, epitomized in a line spoken by a character in William Gass's story "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country": "I want to rise so high that when I shit I won't miss anybody." Rising as high as Godard may entail some measure of self-protection in this respect, as well as elitist alienation, but this has never been the inclination of American intellectuals, who are likelier to reject the very terms of such an aspiration. Significantly, my editor at Soho News changed the title of my 1980 Godard interview from "Catching Up with Godard" to "Bringing Godard Back Home" -– home in this context apparently being located somewhere in the vicinity of Vincent Canby's party. But until we address ourselves to catching up with Godard, the point of The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective, we haven't any home to bring him back to.

End Notes

1. Roger Greenspun, "Film Notes," Cahiers du Cinéma in English, no. 6 (December 1966), p. 5.

2. Molly Haskell, 'Auteur! Auteur! Cahiers du Cinéma Takes a Bow,"New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, Sunday, March 1, 1992.

3. Richard Roud, Godard (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1970).

4. John Simon, "Godard and the Godardians: A Study in the New Sensibility," reprinted in his collection Private Screenings (New York: Macmillan, 1967). The quotes cited here are from pages 306-32.

5. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965).

6 . _______________, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969).

7. Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You've Never Seen, National Society of Film Critics Members Staff, ed. Michael Sragow (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1990), p. 166.

8. The quotes cited here are from "Syberberg's Hitler," in Susan Sontag,Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 137-65.

9. Ibid. p. 4.

10. New York Observer, December 3, 1990.

11. Peter Wollen, "The Two Avant-Gardes," and, idem, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'est," both reprinted in in his collectionReadings and Writings (London: Verso, 1982).

12. Three essays from this issue, Camera Obscura, no. 8-9-10 (Fall 1982), are reprinted together in this volume, under the title "Sexual Difference and Sauve qui peut (la vie)," pp. 42-55.

13. Soho News, September 24-30, 1980.

Jonathan ROSENBAUM
first published in:
www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/03/eight-obstacles-to-the-appreciation-of-godard-in-the-united-states/