Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville by Jerry White (review)

Film enthusiasts well know the centrality of the work of Jean-Luc Godard to European cinema. Arguably no other twentieth-century filmmaker has been as vexing, provocative, or influential. A major force behind the loose collective of French iconoclasts known as La Nouvelle Vague and a frequent contributor to the widely read journal Cahiers du cinema, Godard has long been the source of a rich body of scholarly analysis and discussion. The main focus of that discussion has been the work he created in the 1960s, from the iconic À bout de soufflé (1960) to the leftist political critiques of La Chinoise and Weekend (both 1967). After the tumult of Paris 1968, Godard turned to what is often called his experimental period, during which he shifted his practice to video, then a largely undiscovered form, and to a range of film formats, long and short, several incomplete or abandoned.

Jerry White, who holds a Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University, picks up his study of Godard’s work at that turn, preferring to see Godard’s career as a continuum, not as a series of breaks from first principles. But as the title of this work suggests, White is careful to position the contribution of Godard’s partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, as equal to Godard’s. Godard and Miéville have collaborated uniquely since the early 1970s, creating works that increasingly engaged not only the political challenges and deficiencies of capitalism and consumerism but also the more personal and domestic realities of male-female relations. In the early 1970s they left France, first for Grenoble, and then for the Swiss countryside, where they still reside, returning to the land of their respective childhoods and working independently from the centre (Paris). This move matters in a variety of ways. White argues that Miéville’s influence in the 1970s and beyond is reflected in those works that take up the quotidian and mark a shift from women as object to a more nuanced understanding of women’s lives and women’s bodies. The nature of their relationship is best captured in the metaphor of “two bicycles” riding side by side, as opposed to a tandem with front and rear positions.

This thoroughly researched, highly readable work covers a lot of ground in depth. Indeed, White diligently takes on all the key Godardian thinkers, effectively turning somersaults to point out the inadequacies of their commentaries or to underscore significant points of agreement. In this way, he enters the rich ongoing conversation about the value and meaning of Godard’s work, but in stressing Miéville’s stake in the authorship of so much material he also helps to change the game. It would now be difficult to leave her out of future studies of everything from Ici et ailleurs (1974) and Numéro Uno (1975) to Liberté et partrie (2002). Not surprisingly, the habit to date has been to erase her from her rightful authorship.

White accomplishes his mission most elegantly, but he also shows us so much more along the way. He makes a strong case for situating Godard and Miéville’s work in a modernist poetics, illuminating the ways their films rely on filmic conventions to subvert and critique them. This approach is motivated, he argues, by their “obsessive search for a story, for a grand narrative that will explain the late capitalist world of Western Europe.” Those who prefer to read Godard’s films as antinarrative or essentially anarchic might be surprised by the power of White’s argument. And always behind the works looms the figure of the founder of Cahiers du cinema, André Bazin, whose hugely influential Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (published posthumously in 1958) goes so far to explain Godard’s – and Miéville’s – moral-aesthetic practice.

This is a refreshingly thorough and lucid study of one of the most demanding and...