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.
Godards 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 directors
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 Godards 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 Godards 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 Godards
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 Godards 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 Godards
"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 films
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 Godards 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 Godards experiments with
the montage of sound and vision throughout
his whole career (see the article by Adrian
Martin).