Notes
183 N O T E S NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1 For my discussion in this book,I have had cause to draw on the filmographies in MacCabe’s Portrait of the Artist (compiled by Sally Shafto), Bellour and Bandy’s Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, Michael Witt’s dissertation On Communication, Brenez et al.’s Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, the second volume of Alain Bergala’s Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, and Antoine de Baecque’s Godard: biographie. The “Communication” chapter of this book is organized around the idea that three features were followed by two television series, and the order of these first works that I give here is basically consistent with all of these filmographies except Shafto’s. Shafto specifies that Numéro deux was released on September 24, 1975, that Comment ça va? was “[p]resented at the Venice Film Festival August, 1976, and released 28 April 1978,” and that Ici et ailleurs was “released in September 1976” (358– 59). Six fois deux, she (among others) specifies, was broadcast from July 25 to August 29, 1976. The 1976 Venice Film Festival ran from August 24 to September 7. It is fair to say that for Shafto, Ici et ailleurs, Comment ça va?, and Six fois deux are, for the purposes of release dates, more or less simultaneous. This is at odds with the dates in the filmographies in Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (which all put Ici et ailleurs at 1974), as well as those of Godard: biographie (which puts it at 1973–76) and On Communication (which puts Ici et ailleurs at 1974, although specifies that it was “first released in 1976” [331]). The order that I have here is, essentially, going with the majority view on Ici et ailleurs’ date. 2 Godard’s feature film Je vous salue, Marie (1985) and Miéville’s short film Le livre de Marie (1985) were released together, and so while neither one is a collaborative work in the same way that Soft and Hard or Ici et ailleurs are, they are inseparably linked. I lay out this argument in a more detailed way in Chapter 4. 3 It is, unfortunately, worth noting that the English-language version of Six fois deux distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, in addition to being extremely expensive, is available only as a DVD, whose transfer is so poor as to render the work borderline illegible at the best of times. 4 Sympathy for the Devil concluded with the performance of the Rolling Stones’s song of that title, the rehearsals for which form a sort of backbone of the film. Godard famously and angrily disowned this version, although he also said in a 1971 interview that “there’s not much difference I think, except the ending” (Goodwin et al. 12). 184 Notes 5 Membership of the Groupe Dziga Vertov seems to have been more extensive than just Godard and Gorin. The 1972 interview between Godard, Gorin, and Goodwin et al. has the following exchange: “How many people are in the Dziga Vertov group? GORIN: For the moment, two—but we are not even sure” (10). Discussing the breakup of the group, Antoine de Baecque’s Godard: biographie describes the various post-Groupe careers of Gorin, Armand Marco, Claude Faraldo, and Isabel Pons (517). Sally Shafto’s filmography in Colin MacCabe’s Portrait of the Artist gives extensive credits for all of the films, and some of the names include Claude Nedjar (producer on 1969’s Pravda and, as I discuss in the next chapter, the producer who brought Godard to Quebec) and May 1968 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit (script on 1969’s Vent d’est); see MacCabe 355–56. Tom Luddy was their “American connection”; he told Brad Stevens that “JLG asked me to coordinate tours—involving himself and Jean-Pierre Gorin—with Dziga Vertov films, which I did—I think twice—as a kind of agent or unofficial US member of the Dziga Vertov Group: Yale, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Berkeley, Ann Arbor—big audiences.” See Brad Stevens, “The American Friend: Tom Luddy on Jean-Luc Godard.” 6 An excellent English-language introduction to Rouch’s work can be found in Joram ten Brink, ed., Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Rouch’s own writings on cinema and ethnography have been translated and collected as Jean Rouch...
OR
