Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (review)

Protean Figure

Biography is a tricky business; by offering the details of an individual artist's life, it can give the erroneous impression that creative achievement is a matter of personality or circumstance, only loosely connected to the broader issues of time, place, and history. Yet great artists are not just great people performing in front of a cultural backcloth; they are the backcloth themselves. Their dilemmas throw the underlying contradiction of their times into relief, and, sometimes, their work provides resolutions, or at least new possibilities.

For Colin MacCabe, Jean-Luc Godard is one of these protean figures. His films are, he asserts, "amongst the most important European art of the second half of the twentieth century," and he sees the director's career as a walking metaphor for "the paradoxes of modernism at their most acute." This means that his book is more than just a biography. While it places Godard in the foreground, investigating his cosmopolitan French-Swiss upbringing, his friendships with fellow directors like Francois Truffaut, and the nature of his enigmatic personality, its main emphasis is on his life as ideas in action. To mangle Polonius, here is a cultural-social-political study, or a historical-psychological-personal one, a mosaic made up of life, art, and the forces that have shaped both.

The cement that binds these disparate pieces together is nothing less than the crisis of the artist in the twentieth century. MacCabe believes that the problem is rooted in language, irrespective of the medium, and that in Godard's case it was inherent from the very beginning. Like Truffaut and other directors of the French New Wave, the young cineaste started out as a critic in the early 1950s, writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the groundbreaking journal that captured the iconoclastic spirit of the young film fanatics of post-war France. Some of this energy was rooted in the usual youthful desire to tear down the orthodoxies of the previous generation, especially the literary cinema of old stagers like Marcel Carne. Yet, as MacCabe notes, it was also a response to the larger questions of the artist's relationship to mass culture. Earlier in the century, modernist writers like Joyce and Eliot had reacted to the spread of films and the popular press by retreating into an esoteric language that was inaccessible to the majority of the audience; by contrast, the Cahiers critics embraced that audience, specifically as it was represented in the Hollywood factory product of the time. They saw the studio works of Howard Hawks, for example, or Alfred Hitchcock, as a true classic art in which both creator and audience continued to enjoy a kind of prelapsarian common culture and understanding.

The first, glad morning of Godard's filmmaking was based on this faith in commercial films. Starting with A Bout de Souffle, his first feature in 1960, he embraced this new linguistic possibility, staying within the convention of narrative films, although giving it his own particular twist. The sky soon clouded over, however. Despite critical acclaim, the films were not box office bonanzas; worse, the United States' growing involvement in Vietnam, as well as the decline of the beloved studio system itself, tarnished the vision of Hollywood as the shining city on a hill.

Godard then moved into a second, Maoist phase where he breathed the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968 and worked under the banner of a collective, the Dziga Vertov group, which produced more knotted, even obscure work. This proved to be a dead end; MacCabe's descriptions of films like British Sounds (1969, commissioned by London Weekend Television, of all people) make them sound as alluring as being stuck in a lift with a gaggle of structuralists. Creative energy revived, however, when Godard moved to Switzerland with his current partner, Anne-Marie Mieville...