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5 Godard, Spielberg, the Muselmann, and the Concentration Camps
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67 5 5 Godard, Spielberg, the Muselmann, and the Concentration Camps Junji Hori GODARD AND SPIELBERG in a 1997 television interview with the popular French journalist Paul Amar, Godard is shown a demo of a filmmaking simulation computer game released under the title Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair. When asked whether Spielberg is still a filmmaker or if he has now become a businessman , Godard responds by reciting from memory a short poem by Bertolt Brecht entitled “Hollywood,” which he also quoted through Fritz Lang’s character in the film Le Mépris (1963). Then, unperturbed by a provocative question about whether a collaborative filmmaking project between himself and Spielberg would be possible, Godard evokes his favorite dichotomy between culture as rule and art as exception, and considers the fellows of Hollywood, who gleefully join the ranks of people selling their wares in “the market where lies are bought” (Brecht), as a typical form of culture—an accumulation of products that circulate in a capitalistic sense. It is as if Godard himself approved the simplistic schematic that serves the purpose of dividing the two filmmakers according to the dichotomy between high-class and low-class culture, art and entertainment , or modernism and kitsch.1 Although Godard and Spielberg certainly differ on a number of points, it is easy to see from a brief glimpse at their respective filmographies that the two, in fact, share a common interest in film history and twentiethcentury history. When Godard first clearly depicted his interest in World War II in his short film Le Dernier mot (1988), Spielberg was filming his Empire of the Sun (1987). Furthermore, Hanns Zischler, an actor who plays a dual role in Le Dernier mot as a German officer and his son, also cooperated closely with Godard’s Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991) and played the role of a document forger named Hans in Spielberg’s Munich (2005). In addition, Godard’s preparation and production periods for Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), which features the death and resurrection of cinema Godardian Politics of Representation: Memory/History 68 during World War II, particularly the Holocaust, overlap with those of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), all of which also focus on World War II. For that matter, it is almost as if Spielberg’s filmography was moving upstream against Godard’s filmography . For instance, the Black September Organization links Spielberg’s Munich (2005), whose story begins from the terrorist incident caused by this group, and Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s project Jusqu’à la victoire, which was left unfinished because of the Black September incident of September 1970. It is also true that the 1968 Chicago Conspiracy Trial, the subject matter for one of Spielberg’s new projects, is a theme also handled by Godard and Gorin’s film Vladimir et Rosa (1971). If we keep in mind this affinity between the two directors, Godard’s repeated criticisms of Spielberg come to resemble a type of defence mechanism . For instance, take the 1998 interview conducted by the magazine Les Inrockuptibles.2 From the very outset, Godard tossed around remarks such as “I can’t say that I’m envious of Spielberg” and “There’s no need for me to get on my knees for him.” And, aside from the opening scene depicting the invasion of Normandy, he levelled a negative evaluation toward the then just-released Saving Private Ryan in the name of Anthony Mann’s Men in War (1957). Psychoanalytically speaking, it is not difficult to note a sort of denial on Godard’s part when he abruptly mentions a famous commercial director’s name without being asked about it, and avoids the confrontation with the recent film by taking refuge in the cinephilic past. We focus here on the fact that this kind of rash and even envious renouncement of Spielberg by Godard was rather pronounced in the 1990s, when his critical rhetoric against the United States was also prominent. For example, the question of why people would prefer to go watch a bad American movie rather than a bad Bulgarian movie—a clever quip that only Godard would make regarding the overwhelming supremacy that Hollywood enjoys in the global market—frequently came up during interviews at that time.3 In fact, Godard’s criticisms of Spielberg were also connected with this context. In other words, Spielberg was singled out by Godard as the...