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1 C h a p t e r 1 INTRODUCTION The work of Jean-Luc Godard is both voluminous and widely celebrated. This is as it should be; he is a great filmmaker, someone who has spent a career rigorously rethinking the fundamentals of his medium (film) and its neighbouring media (television and video). Anne-Marie Miéville’s work as a filmmaker seems, at first glance, to pale in comparison. She has directed several noteworthy works, and to judge from them, it might seem that she could be filed under the category “interesting Swiss filmmaker,” hardly a classification that would offer a central place in the history of postwar cinema. That would be a mistake. The greater mistake, though, and the more common one, is to conflate “the films of Godard and Miéville” with “the films of Jean-Luc Godard.” The frequency with which that mistake is made is no doubt a result of the considerable international fame that Godard accrued during the 1960s as part of the French nouvelle vague (hereafter, the New Wave). When such fame is attached to a single name, it can become hard to see beyond that name. This sort of myopia is explicit in Andrew Sarris’s 1970 interview with Godard and JeanPierre Gorin, who were at that time making films together and signing them as “Groupe Dziga Vertov”; Sarris writes there how Godard “walked in with his assistant Jean-Pierre something or other” (51). Critics often seem to consider some of Godard’s very best work to be made by him and his girlfriend, AnneMarie something or other. Of course, this is not the case at all, as it was not the case with Gorin; one of my first tasks in this book is to lay out some of the problems that the films of “Godard and Miéville” pose for understandings of authorship in cinema. I do that, in small part, by following scholars such as Michael Witt and Catherine Grant and proposing that the clearest, most illustrative comparison point for Godard and Miéville is the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Godard and Miéville pose similar problems in terms of their status as avant-garde artists; thus, I also lay out some of the ways in which their work is both more and less radical than it may at first appear. It is the French critic 1 2 Chapter 1 Serge Daney who lays out this“Godard paradox”more elegantly than any critic I know of, and his notion of the Godard paradox serves as a segue into a brief discussion of Daney’s work and its usefulness as a “way in” to Godard and Miéville’s films, videos, and television programs. Once through the preliminaries (Chapter 1, “Introduction”), I divide this book into four parts that more or less move forward chronologically, and that seek to integrate some of the work that Godard and Miéville have done individually with the work they have done together. In Chapter 2,“Abandonments,” I give some basic discussion of projects that Godard, or Godard and Miéville, began but abandoned. There are quite a few such projects, and I believe that seven of them are important for understanding the kind of work that Godard and Miéville have done together: the film One P.M. (which Godard began with D. A. Pennebaker in 1968 as One A.M. and Pennebaker finished in 1971), the video project Moi Je (which Godard began work on just before leaving Paris for Grenoble, where he set up shop with Miéville in 1973), aborted projects in Quebec and Mozambique, an abandoned feature film for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios (which was to have been called The Story), a basically unsuccessful attempt to work with Jean-Pierre Beauviala to create a new 35 mm camera, and an abandoned project to commemorate the seven hundredth anniversary of the Swiss confederation. In Chapter 3, I move on to a discussion of the three films and two television series that Godard and Miéville first made together in the 1970s, work that exists in a curious state, between film and video; I call this chapter “Communication,” which is a persistent concern for them during this period. “Communication” begins with three feature films that use video imagery—Ici et ailleurs (1974), Numéro deux (1975), and Comment ça va? (1976)—and concludes with two television series—Six fois deux: Sur et...

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