Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville

Two Bicycles examines all of the films, videos, and television works that Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, two of the most important postwar filmmakers, did together.

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville worked across forms, across media, and across countries. This book, the first to be devoted specifically to the work they did together, examines the way they expanded the possibilities of cinema by using cutting-edge video equipment in a constant search for a new kind of filmmaking.

Two Bicycles moves slowly across France and Switzerland, with detours in Quebec, Mozambique, and Palestine. Their amazingly varied body of work includes a twelve-hour television series, some experimental videos, an acclaimed feature film with Isabelle Huppert, a cigarette commercial, and much else. Overall the book shows the degree to which this work departs radically from the legacy of the French New Wave, and in many ways shows signs of having been formed by the distinct culture of Switzerland, to which Godard and Miéville returned in the 1970s to set up their “atelier,” Sonimage.

Two Bicycles offers a chance to explore a body of work that is as unique and demanding as it is rich and revelatory. Godard and Miéville have worked together for four decades but have never seemed more relevant.

1

Introduction

Sets the stage for the book at the level of theory and film history, with some biographical discussion of both Godard and Miéville.  Special attention is paid to questions of authorship, comparisons with other filmmakers (especially Straub-Huillet), and the institutions that Godard and Miéville have tried to create.

2

Abandonments

Deals with the most important of the projects that Godard and/or Miéville began but never finished, arguing that they offer insights into crucial parts of the evolution of their shared career.  This includes discussion of the American documentary One A.M. / One P.M., Quebec, the video project Moi je, the aborted Francis Ford Coppola production The Story, television work in Mozambique, and the 35-8 camera.

3

Communication

Deals with their work of the 1970s, which existed between film, video and television. We deal here with the feature films Ici et ailleurs, Numéro Deux and Comment ca va?, as well as the television series Six fois deux and France/tour/detour/deux/enfants. We show the ways in which Godard and Miéville were in some ways working outside of conventional cinema altogether, and yet were also creating an avant-garde practice that, based in television as it was, strongly sought to engage with problems of everyday life.

4

Deals with the work of the 1980s, showing how even though it is mostly made up of feature-narrative films, it is still strongly based in the video experiments of the 1970s. Overall we try to show how well-known work like Sauve qui peut (la vie), Prénom: Carmen, Détective and Je vous salue Marie are very much of a piece with the earlier, more experimental work, a connection that is borne out in some ways by the 50-minute video that they made during this period, Soft and Hard.

5

Reconsideration

Deals with the work of the 1990s and 00s, which is in some ways more experimental and thus a return to the 1970s, but which also foreshadows the more essayistic and indeed more pessimistic work that Godard would go on to do on his own. We deal here with 2x50 ans de cinéma français, The Old Place, Dans le noir du temps and Liberté et Patrie, as well as with a number of commissioned pieces (including the all-but-impossible to see Le Rapport Darty).

6

Conclusion

Tries to sum up the work, in no small part by explaining the romanticism/modernism duality that lies at the heart of Godard and Miéville’s shared oeuvre.

Appendix 1

Transcript and translation of a 1973 interview Godard gave to the home-movie-hobbyist magazine Cinéma pratique.

Appendix 2

Transcripts and translations of interviews Miéville has given over the years.