Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

by Richard Brody

A landmark biography explores the crucial resonances among the life, work, and times of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age

When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images--cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a--if not the--key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable.

In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers.
Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.

Genres: Film, Biography, Nonfiction, Art, History, Media Tie In, France

720 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2007

About the author

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. Since 2005, he has been the movie-listings editor at the magazine; he writes film reviews, a column about DVDs, and a blog about movies, The Front Row. He is the author of the book “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.” He lives in New York.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Godard still had sixteen rows of American films in his library; he had been deceived, but the illusions were beautiful ones, beautiful to believe in, even after their fraud was revealed.


This was a sublime albeit painful experience. Joel bought this for me upon its release nine years ago but I never pursued such as I didn't wish to encounter spoilers per the films depicted within. I'm rather sure Godard would find my explanation bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz0Zd...


This is a biography of an ultimately nebulous presence, hidden behind those dark glasses and the swirl of cigar smoke. The whirr of the projector blends with his raspy voice. This is a warts and all endeavor: misogyny and anti-Semitism percolate. Both were difficult for me to absorb.

What wasn't a challenge was viewing a half dozen of his film per week recently and I'm sure Amazon approves of my obsession. Godard is quoted repeatedly, "At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought. I find the Slavic soul at the core of that. Maybe that is why Solzhenitsyn figures so prominently in Goodbye To Language - but then why all the scenes of people defecating? There is considerably gravity in making Godard an institution. Much like his counterpart Bob Dylan, he doesn't easily conform to such expectations. Whether it was his Maoist phase or when Jack Lang as Minister of Culture assured JLG of funding -- the results were astonishingly singular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx37f...

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. Vivre Sa Vie
2. Pierrot Le Fou
3. Weekend
4. Band of Outsiders
5. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
6. Alphaville
7. A Woman Is a Woman
8. Breathless
9. Contempt
10. Masculin Féminin
11. Une Femme Mariée
12. Passion
13. Notre Musique
14. Prénom Carmen
15. Hail Mary
16. Le Petit Soldat
17. Tout Va Bien
18. Ici et Ailleurs
19. Eloge de L'amour
20. Numero Deux

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Les Carabiniers
Made in U.S.A.
JLG/JLG
La Chinoise
Detective


THE HALL OF SHAME:
King Lear
Soigne Ta Droite
For Ever Mozart
Le Gai Savoir
Comment ça va?

All others unseen.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Brody's very long critical biography on one of the great film artists of the 20th Century is both thoughtful, damning (in a sense) and also provocative. I don't fully buy his theory that all the films he made in the 60's was about Godard's relationship with wife/muse Anna Karina. I think it is partly true, but it's for sure not the whole picture of the man and his work. But a big part...?

i really enjoyed the part of the book that deals with Godard's later years. It seems he consistently bites the hand that feeds him. Yet, he did so in a very brilliant way or technique. He put it in his films. However after reading this book, I feel Godard maybe one of the great memoir writers on film. Which means to me that he writes or films what he's thinking about life at the moment. He sees the medium of cinema as a self-reflective tool as well as how one sees history.

And it's the last part which gets him cranky with respect to the issue of the Concentration camps of World War 2 and how it isn't portrayed in the cinematic form to his understanding or liking. In a sense he feels let down by cinema by not either exposing the condition of the camps or commenting on them. i see Godard's point of view and I think it's an original thought. Ardono says that there can't be poetry after the camps, yet Godard (I think) feels that its an area that needs to be explored. i think one of his fears is something like that happening again - and how will the media/cinema deal with it?

But that is only one issue in many issues that are daily observations on an unique artist who sees the world in a very specific way - and in such a way consistently challenges himself to question such a world and his part in that world as well.

So if you are a Godard fan read it. If not, but care about the nature of cinema and what it means to you - still read it!

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The man who helped change the face of cinema with the french new wave, this book literally leaves no stone unturned in terms of his career. Having first discovered a Godard film by complete chance about fifteen years ago on TV in the early hours of the morning I have been transfixed with his work ever since, the french culture, the women, the style and the cool looks, all bound together with his unique vision of film making. That first film was 'Weekend' which at the time I hated, but this would only eventually lead me to 'A bout de souffle'(Breathless) widely regarded as his most famous and influential work, the film blew me away and the first time my eyes caught the sight of Jean Seberg my heart doubled in size! what a natural beauty. The man was no fool and knew that some of his films may not appeal to everyone, but if there is one thing in common throughout his films it's the women!, I mean what is the reason most guys venture to the cinema?......Yes that's right!, and with Bardot, Seberg and his muse Anna Karina as some of the actresses, he had the pulling power. And of course the french and sex go hand in hand like no other. I hope to God there is 'the next life' and end up somewhere resembling 60's Paris, I will be a very happy man.

[Djll]

I'm so used to reading books on Godard by the post-Marxist Colin MacCabe, I'm having a hard time with this one because it's so far a fairly apolitical review of the director's life. Not that there's anything wrong about that. I'm just surprised, especially after seeing the size of Richard Brody's beard on the inside flap.
(100 pp later)
OK, so there's lots of politics in the book, only because Godard was so intensely engaged with the political issues of his day. I like Brody's way of putting each film in the context of what Godard was attempting, what he had just done, what else was going on then, other directors' works, etc. And then he shows how the points are made. It's very easy to read yet packed with information.
(p252)
Brody's making a big case for most of Godard's 1960s films being about his love affair and breakup with Anna Karina. Really?

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Richard Brody's tour-de-force of film scholarship, he delves deeply into one of the most labyrinthine oeuvres in all of cinema: Jean-Luc Godard.

The book is simply astounding in its scope: detailed background, production history, critical reception and analysis for no less than every film and video Godard has produced in his prolific career since 1959, often producing at a rate of 2 or 3 films per year. No less impressive is Brody's attention to detail in unpacking the insane web of references contained in the films: encompassing everything from (of course) cinema, Western literature, Marxism, classical music, philosophy, painting, political theory, and personal mythology.

What sets "Everything is Cinema" apart from other books on Godard (notably Colin MacCabe's "A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy") is that although it is apparent that Brody considers Godard to be one of the seminal artists of the 20th century, he nevertheless does not shy away from being harshly critical of the films and of Godard as a person when he feels it is justified. In fact, some have argued that Brody is perhaps guilty of the intentional fallacy in his very personal readings of Godard's films. My feeling is that his readings were usually pretty foolproof conceptually, but that doesn't mean they are the only possible readings, which I think Brody addresses in the text.

One of the most valueable aspects of "Everything is Cinema", for me, was that it provided a critical approach towards analyzing Godard's often obtuse work from the 80's and 90's. In fact Brody argues, often convincingly, that the films of this period are actually in some ways superior to his more lauded 60's work. I'm now inspired to revisit those films and think that I'll have the tools to get a lot more out of them when I do.

[Briana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jean-Luc Godard passed away back in September and as a film fan who was introduced to artful cinema through his French New Wave movies, I was inspired to read more about the man behind the lens. Through the years, my interest in the French New Wave has waned, especially in light of the #MeToo movement and my own journey into intellectualism. Godard is still a polarizing figure among contemporary film fans but his influence and skill are undeniable. I’m not really into biographies about people but Richard Brody is a writer that I’ve been following for years because of his film criticism and scholarship at The New Yorker.

Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody is rich with intelligent and sharp writing about the spectacular working life of what many would consider a genius. I’m a firm believer in using the internet to simply research whatever you want about an important figure in pop culture but as I said, I enjoy Brody’s writing. Immediately I was swept away by the way he outlined his subject here. Godard is someone I went from loving to tolerating. While I sought out something more in-depth about Godard’s life, I expected to just sort of get on with this book without much feeling.

This was an enthralling and interesting read. I’m happy that I spent time reading this because it offered insights into his background and what went on with making these beloved films. I cannot say enough how much I enjoyed Richard Brody’s writing, I would probably read anything he releases.

[Daniel Tune · Rating 4 out of 5]

Godard emerges as both a more lovable and unsettling figure than I had ever imagined. Brody writes with a measured combination of admiration and clear-eyed critique, resulting in a book that is kind of shockingly hilarious, as Brody skewers JLG's self important bullshit. Like Godard's career it is the most fun in the early going. I found the depiction of the director's very funny and quietly tragic Maoist period to be the most enjoyable section. The image of him and Gorrin cooped up in a makeshift editing room in a bunker in Palestine that is being bombed is like something out of an alternate universe Ishtar. As he gets older Godard seems to either become or reveal himself to be an even sleazier figure than he previously appears, and while the films and the writing don't get less interesting, the book does become a bit more of a bummer. But I still love the creepy bastard, not The Greatest Director, but perhaps The Director, poetically consumed by the contradictions of himself and his age, and for better or worse, fearless in admitting those contradictions in his art (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not). Essential reading for a certain type of cinephile.

[Deniz Rudin]

A remarkable indictment of Godard as both a person and an artist, which, all the more remarkably, seems to see itself as a hagiography, shouting his greatness in a high-pitched monotone. Brody reveals Godard as a solipsistic self-mythologizer—both Brody’s own words!—and yet still seems to take his declarations at face value. Brody claims, hilariously, that Godard invented the idea of lending autobiographical attributes to characters in non-autobiographical stories, a feature of storytelling since, well, people started telling stories; when Brody describes the intent behind one of Godard’s films (King Lear) as to depict himself as “a Christ-like figure who gives his life to redeem the world” and to “raise his claims for the power … of his own films … to the level of divine power”, he takes this not as ridiculous, deserving of mockery, but as evidence of the sublime artistic achievement of the film.

Brody, intentionally or not, paints a damning picture of Godard as a person—self-obsessed, cruel, narcissistic, and shallow; self-pitying and prone to delusions of grandeur, going on screaming tirades at anybody who comes near him, publicly denouncing his friends for disagreeing with him; and, in a turn whose distressingness the book undersells, making a series of films about his pedophilic desire for his lover Anne-Marie Mieville’s prepubescent daughter (who, unsurprisingly, refused to let Godard even meet her own children when she grew up).

But he also makes the movies sound terrible, in spite of his constant droning declarations of their greatness. He assigns their greatness entirely to how directly they express Godard’s thoughts and feelings, but that pins their value entirely on whether Godard’s thoughts and feelings are worth paying attention to, which, see above. Brody’s Godard comes off as a dilettante, somebody whose “literary” ambitions take the form of endless quotations and references, the kind of wannabe who shows off his bookshelves as a substitute for having anything to say of his own. (The book mentions one instance of Godard being successfully sued for copyright infringement for one of the many unattributed quotations—i.e. plagiarisms—that make up the bulk of what is uttered in his films.)

Brody stresses Godard’s desire to see cinema and life as inseparable, to insist on filming what is real. But his Godard is also a reclusive cinema obsessive with nothing to say about real life, and Brody shows, time and again, Godard deciding what “real” things were going to happen in advance, and molding everything in the movies to be the expression of his own thoughts and prejudices, revealing all the talk of the inseparability of life and cinema as what it obviously was: pretentious nonsense, the self-mythologizing of an insufferable narcissist. Brody’s Godard is completely disinterested in other people, and flies into fits of rage when his actors try to do anything but say the lines he has prepared for them. If you already disliked Godard’s work, Brody’s book is nothing but ammunition against it; if you like Godard’s work, Brody’s book must be a frustrating read in providing no reason whatsoever to care about it. Brody announces up front his intention to show that Godard was a singularly important artist for his entire career, not just the much-celebrated 60s period, but instead he simply presupposes that Godard is important, and that all his work is important for the mere fact that it expresses the thoughts and feelings of an important artist. It would be infuriating if it weren’t so laughable.

Any casual viewer of Godard’s golden age 60s films will notice their oppressive, overt misogyny; Brody explains that these films were expressions of Godard’s Contempt for his young wife Anna Karina, who starred in many of them. During Godard’s long period of torturing Karina, first making her play a succession of prostitutes because of his scornful view of her desire to become an actress (cool attitude for a director to have!), and then making her play a succession of prostitutes for cheating on him, we get the following piece of analysis of Godard’s artistic intention behind Alphaville from Brody: “…the inability to be true to the dictates of one’s conscience in love is a moral failing at the level of collaboration with a Nazi-like power. The private failure of love—Anna Karina’s failure to love Godard—is both the result of a plot almost cosmic in its malevolent dimensions, and the sign of complicity, albeit unwilling and unwitting, with an evil force.” Brody says that Godard is a great artist because of his creation of a philosophico-intellectual cinema that achieves the fusion of art and life in order to serve as direct expression of its creators’ thoughts and feelings. And the exalted thoughts and feelings that this unparalleled genius used the cinema to express? “My wife cheating on me is as bad as collaborating with the Nazis.” Cool! Brody also quotes Godard describing the lead in Contempt, a character plainly based on Karina, like so: “But as opposed to her husband, who always acts as a result of a series of complicated reasonings, Camille acts non-psychologically, so to speak, by instinct, a sort of vital instinct like a plant which needs water to continue to live. … she exists on a purely vegetal level, whereas he lives on an animal level.” I think that my wife is as dumbly instinctual as a plant, incapable of comprehending my sophisticated thoughts. Also, her not loving somebody who thinks things like that about her shows that she has been perverted against her own nature (love for me) by the pernicious influence of popular culture! (I really, really wish I was kidding—Brody sets this all out in discussion of The Married Woman.) When, under torrents of Godard’s abuse, Karina attempts suicide, Brody’s only comment is to coldly note that this delayed production by several weeks. Godard’s dissection of the facts of his own life, and the forces that shape them—the personal expression that is supposed to make him such a great artist—is hateful, delusional, and reveals remarkably little insight or self-awareness.

By Godard’s 80s period, parts of the book feel like a catalogue of ways in which every young actress who worked with Godard felt exploited and traumatized by his brutal sexualization of them. For instance, this is from discussion of For Ever Mozart: “Allaux was thus introduced to the cinema limp and naked, a subject of violence and an object of desire. She understood that the moment was, for Godard, an unconcealed form of personal gratification and emotional compensation. ‘He shows in his films what he doesn’t have in his life,’ she later said. ‘He likes vulnerable young girls.’ As they worked, Godard told her, ‘I have gotten you to enter into the house of the cinema,’ and he made sure that she knew it to resemble a whorehouse.”

Brody discusses Truffaut’s famous breakup letter to Godard, but doesn’t report its most important contents: the accusation that Godard didn’t actually give a shit about anything but himself and his own public image; that he was more interested in being seen as an intellectual and a radical than in being an intellectual and a radical. Truffaut accuses him of being flagrantly cruel to his crew while preaching Maoist nonsense about “workers”; being flagrantly cruel to Anna Karina, winkingly abusing her in public by making her a whore in film after film. Brody’s book systematically substantiates these claims, so it’s odd that it elides the fact that Godard’s closest friends noticed them and condemned him. Brody himself is sometimes weasely about Godard’s openly abusive behavior toward his crew. For instance, here’s a line from the book: “Witnesses observed that Godard exceeded his prior excesses in trying to elicit responses through provocative thrusts of anger.” Bit of a cowardly way to describe a director who screams at his crew for either suggesting something he doesn’t like, or failing to suggest anything. What a sophisticatedly provocative “strategy”!

Once we move to Godard’s late period, where his films became more abstract and philosophical, and less narrative, Brody celebrates his achievement in becoming a philosopher who uses a camera instead of a pen. But the book enters outright cognitive dissonance in this period, because Brody can’t quite restrain his disgust for the thoughts that this great camera-philosopher was using the cinema to express. Brody identifies the “provocative” thesis of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma period as being that there is a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the dominance of American cinema in international popular culture. “Provocative” is more than a little euphemistic; like all of the philosophical themes that Brody identifies in Godard’s work, it is more accurately described as very stupid and deeply offensive. Brody is quite clearheaded about Godard’s right-wing cultural conservatism being the true guiding light of his entire career, even during his Marxist period, and says outright that Godard was an anti-semite and nostalgic for the days of collaborationist France in a way that queasily undermines all his rhetoric about the damning failure of cinema to prevent the Holocaust. “His expressions of sympathy for the Jews killed in the Holocaust were interwoven with expressions of disdain for the Jews not killed in the Holocaust.” … “Godard was obsessively telling a Jewish story from which Jews were kept out.”

We close on Godard the elder statesman, that insightful film genius, oozing an invaluable glop of cinematographic wisdom. Take for instance his take on Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday. The movie, strikingly for its time, depicts a shrewd fast-talking intelligent woman, played by Rosalind Russell, as an equal sparring partner for a shrewd fast-talking intelligent man, played by Cary Grant. The movie avoids soft-focus beauty shots of Russell, instead filming her conversations with Grant in matching shot-reverse shot pairs that place them exactly on a par with each other. Godard says that this choice proves that Hawks was “incapable of seeing the difference between a man and a woman.” As is so often the case when talking about Godard, I really, really wish I was kidding.

Brody himself comes off very poorly irrespective of whether he makes a compelling case for Godard’s greatness. He’s scathing of Pauline Kael for daring to assert that she knows the difference between art and trash before going on to suggest that everybody who doesn’t like Godard, or indeed doesn’t have the right opinions about which of his movies are the best ones, can’t recognize art and prefers trash. Each new Godard release is accompanied by a list of which critics had the correct opinions about it and which ones were morons incapable of recognizing genius when they see it. To Brody, the good critics are those who agree with him, and those who don’t are craven or stupid. He has, after a long career as a film critic, failed to grapple even a little bit with the inherent subjectivity of aesthetic experience. He also suggests a dilletantism to match Godard’s, for instance summarily dismissing the entire catalog of ECM records, which includes hundreds and hundreds of recordings of repertory classical, contemporary classical, traditional jazz, avant-garde jazz, and jazz fusion, as being background music that doesn’t reward serious attention.

Brody recently tweeted:

There are times when criticism seems like professional gaslighting, with the crucial word (whether written or not) being "actually."

This is, ironically, a very precise description of his exegeses of the cryptic works of Godard’s late period, which he insists are actually very explicit and clear about their philosophical theses. Contrast this with David Bordwell, from a very thoughtful breakdown of the visual construction of In Praise of Love:

Nor will I do a detailed narrative account, because I find the characters and their interactions still fairly baffling. I’m always amazed that critics can praise a Godard film without ever getting down to explicating what’s literally happening in a scene. They write as if these films were telling their stories straightforwardly. Without help from the presskits, could journalists discern even the sketchy plots they refer to? A great deal of the fascination of Godard’s late works comes from his refusal of the most elementary forms of exposition—picking out characters, explaining their relations, and the like. There is always a story, but it’s about three-quarters hidden, and this seems to me to require a lot more analysis than people tend to give it.

Or Will Sloan—someone quite sympathetic to Godard—on The Image Book:

As usual, one has a lingering suspicion that the film’s impenetrability is a cover for Godard’s lack of intellectual rigour. I question, for example, how insightful it really is to juxtapose footage of terrorists shooting/dumping bodies into the sea with footage of Jimmy Stewart rescuing Kim Novak from the harbour in Vertigo. I also question the way he seems to draw equivalence between real violence and the "violence" of representation.

Whether you love it or not, to claim that late Godard is clear and easy to recover straightforward philosophical messages from is gaslighting, pure and simple.

[Pablo Rendón · Rating 3 out of 5]

La primera mitad del libro es maravillosa: un extenso estudio de todas y cada una de las películas que hicieron de Jean-Luc Godard un referente obligado en la historia de la cinematografía. Luego, Richard Brody parece darse cuenta de la titánica labor que tiene enfrente (¡de seguir el ritmo con el que comienza esto sería una Enciclopedia!) y empieza a despachar la obra de Godard más bien en bloques. El libro es también un testimonio de la figura del cineasta como la de un revolucionario conservador —o bello pero abominable, como decía el crítico Andrew Sarris—, y que entre más se le conoce más se le detesta. Hay, sin embargo, una aseveración del autor que juega en contra: Jean-Luc Godard como cineasta antisemita; Richard Brody parece incapaz de reconocer al responsabilidad en los crímenes de odio perpetrados en contra del pueblo palestino, sin percatarse de que los dardos afilados del realizador francés apuntan más bien al sionismo, ¿o bien sólo me lo ha parecido a mí? Es, de cualquier forma, una fantástica guía de estudio para acercarse al trabajo de uno de los cineastas más fascinantes de los últimos tiempos.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited to pick this up since I've gone through a Godard obsession lately. I poured over it and read it diligently for a few weeks.

The thing is...I had a lukewarm experience.

Brody does an amazing job of scholarship. Godard has made a huge amount of work and Brody really has seen ALL of it. No mean feat- particularly when the work is as dense and elliptical and challenging as Godard's.

While reading I thought that as I got frustratingly little on some the films I was most curious about and way too much on ones I'll probably never need to see, that too much of a good thing spoiled the broth, so to speak.

I can't fault Brody for the kind of book he ended up writing, since being comprehensive must have been a goal from the start. But I think the result was sort of a forest for the trees dilemma where everything- biographical detail, analysis, philosophical reflections, personal and creative evolution- just sort of piled up over and over again until it became kind of a deluge of information which lost its interest after awhile.

It also didn't help that Godard came off like a complete dickwad towards the latter half of his career. I am always very tolerant and forgiving of the asshole-as-artist, by rule and inclination, but eventually he just kind of disgusted me. Again, not Brody's fault but still, either not enough was given for context or too much context gave me a certain nausea.

I appreciate Brody's massive and well-documented work of scholarship but I was looking for more in-depth film analysis and a more prosaic biographical approach and I think many readers will be drawn to the book for similar reasons.

Worthwhile, certainly, but make sure you know what you're getting into-

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great, dense, in depth look at all of Godard's work. Brody does an excellent job at weaving together, biography, the conditions surrounding the development and filming of a project, and insightful analysis of the work itself. Brody doesn't shy away from painting Godard in a negative light when the situation calls for it (and it often does). He perhaps spends a little more time on Godard's major output in the 60s, which is as it should be, but the great thing is that he doesn't slight the later work, even films that are so obscure and hard to find that most of his readers won't have seen them, and may never have the opportunity to see them. The best way to read this is would be to spread it out over time, and watch Godard's filmography (as much as is available) alongside the reading. Watch the movie, read the chapter, watch the movie again. That's a lot of time, but with the kind of level of detail that Brody goes to, I'm sure any fan of Godard or of film would get a great deal out of going through the book as a companion to the films.

[Joshua Gonsalves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only a comprehensive, honest, and compulsively readable guide to the life and films of Godard, but at times reads like one of the most breathtaking books about history I’ve read because its subject was engulfed in history and surrounded by it and used the cinema to illumine the complexities of history, of himself, of movies, of communication in an advanced, irritating, terrifying way.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal, unflinching work covering the life and films of the artist.

[Jeffrey Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting book. Even when he is making films that are the most uninteresting stages for spouting Maoist and other utterly ideologically driven rhetoric, Brody’s telling of the filmmaker’s story is completely engaging. He tracks Godard’s evolution of filmmaking technique and the ideas about film and ideology that he tries to express in his films, so that, confident that his films from 1968 to, what, the early ‘70s? are well-nigh unwatchable, I want to watch them.
Even knowing that Godard abused girl child actors, exposing them inappropriately and blackmailing the girl in one of his films into being filmed undressing; up until his later period bringing very limited stereotyping to his women characters; treating his actors as simply mouthpieces for his own words; I still want to see the films, for his use of what he called deconstruction of human movement that he would later develop into studies and close attention to how people do things and react to things (the problem with his “deconstruction” technique is that it removes the state of the body as captured in a single frame from the context of its movement, and thus makes it appear to be other than the entire movement seen whole reveals it to be). One of the most interesting things in the book is Isabelle Huppert's saying that when he wouldn’t let her act, but forced her to just repeat his words, she felt that that enforced discipline brought her closer to the character.
I’ve left out way too much, but what’s significant is that 1) he was serious, and 2) he was evolving.
My brother-in-law made the point that you have to consider an artist in the context of his time, and Brody validates that in noting that what we regard as sexually inappropriate, abusive use of children (in film, here) was in keeping with a notion of the time that to not relate to children as sexual creatures was to oppress them by barring them from their sexuality. This I regard as an abusive attitude that was shared by a larger, less-marginalized group than was the case before and after, and seems to have been more socially acceptable then than before or after, but it is still worth noting that there was a correspondence between the artist and the time. A mental illness is no less abusive and no more justifiable for having been shared by or acceptable to most members of a society. Clitoridectomies are no more defensible for being a social norm in certain countries; genocide is mass murder, regardless of the fact that it was a carried out by an entire nation.
Godard indicts all of cinema for not having sufficiently documented the Nazi death camps—namely, for not having found footage that he thinks must exist of victims going into the gas chambers and then being taken out dead. That precisely may be true, although Godard himself admits that he has no proof of the existence of such film. However, even taking his indictment on his own terms, he ignores George Stevens’s crew’s filming of the liberation of the camps, and the films of the piles of the victims’ naked bodies being piled and put in mass graves. (They had a horrible fluidity.) Or the still photographs of the victims. Or the still and cinema portrayal of the emaciated survivors. Instead, he exploits the horror of the crime for his own purposes, to make himself the only savior of cinema. If those aren’t specific enough, his charge is a cavil.
Brody analyzes Godard’s anti-semitism.
I’ll probably watch his films simply for the technique. But I am quite unimpressed with Godard as a thinker. He has his unique perspectives, and those have value, but that doesn’t set him apart from anyone else.

[Bob Andelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I studied French New Wave cinema in college. Took it twice, in fact, in Professor Robert Ray’s class at the University of Florida. Little-known fact – my degree is actually in Film Studies.

Anyway, I loved the French New Wave films from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. What I didn’t care for was the over-inflated discussion that followed each screening.

I’d watch the movies, in awe of the storytelling, the jump cuts, the women, the casual sex – you get the idea. But when the lights came up, Professor Ray always insisted on going deep into the meaning and motivation of the filmmaker.

So here I am, Mr. A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep, about to welcome the esteemed film critic of The New Yorker magazine and author of the new book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean Luc-Godard. It’s a fascinating look at the best of the best of French New Wave, the auteur behind Breathless, A Woman is A Woman, La Chinoise, King Lear, and many more. And it made me wish I was more patient back in Professor Ray’s class more than 25 years ago.

Listen to my interview with Richard Brody here: https://mrmedia.com/2008/05/richard-b...

[Peter Schutz]

like all biographies, this is pure indulgence, candy, for the godard-tards among us. pleasure to read, a lot of fun anecdotes and impressive deep diving on the part of Brody. in finally finishing this book—i tried to “watch along” with the book, which increased reading time—i am left feeling jealous at the authors access to all of godards video and print archives. incredible. and of course theres probably so much more out there. but i am also left feeling sad that he only spent 1 day and 1 evening with Godard himself. for some reason i thought it must have been an extended acquaintance and an authorized bio. but that’s not really Godards style.
the later sections are definitely weaker; a lot of synopsis and hurt by lack of historical insight. also condemnatory of godards politics, which seem purposely complex and post-structural, meta-political or trans-political almost. but, i suppose, they are fair criticisms nonetheless.
i love godard and i thoroughly enjoyed this book. packed with insight, such as it is.

[Chris Landry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very thoroughly researched and Brody's insights into the more difficult later works like Sauve qui peut, King Lear, Hail Mary, and For Ever Mozart are some of the best I have read. The quality of the writing is very high and clearly done by someone with sincere engagement with the work. I learned so much cool stuff reading this book! I was warned that Brody interprets a lot of the 60s work through the prism of Godard's romantic life, a tendency of the book that made me wince a little. Brody also seems reflexively uncomfortable with Godard's post-68 political convictions. While I think he could not be more wrong in his reading of Notre musique, that said, the good far outweighs the bad here so if you're a completest you should check this out. Everything Is Cinema makes a good compliment to Colin McCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, but if you only read one, read the latter.

[James Messer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Behemoth of a book. Richard Brody is such a persnickety dude that it’s only fitting he found his match in Godard. I’m a huge Godard fan. Love some of his work and am unmoved by others. But even his clunkers are well worth watching. Like any Godard fan I’ll love some of his lesser ones and dislike some of his OPUSES in direct contrast to another Godard fan. (Don’t like Pierrot le Fou or King Lear but LOVE For Ever Mozart and Weekend, etc)

So, it was nice to see Brody be critical of some of the movies even if he sometimes editorialized more than I’d like, overall. Also, Godard is more critical of his own works than I would’ve expected. So it’s nice to know that everyone including JLG have faves and clunkers in his oeuvre.

His obsessions, his neuroses, his charm, etc are all displayed here, too. GOD WHAT AN ASSHOLE. 720 pages of dealing with this psycho written by one of my favorite critics whom I agree with, at tops, 30% of the time.

[Jakub Kočenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Broady proves that even 700 pages are not enough to fully examine the grand historical sweep that is Godard's work and life. This critical biography provides detailed information on Godard's youth, early cinephilia, romantic liaisons and personal demons, but sometimes it fails to sufficiently examine the films themselves. This shortcoming is especially strong in the chapters concerning his Nouvelle Vague years, which overplay the importance of Karina and JLG's relationship as the single most important structuring element of said films. However, Broady deserves credit for dedicating much of the book to Godard's post '68 works (Sadly, underseen even by alleged cinephiles), especially his later masterpieces such as Every Man for Himself, Haily Mary, In Praise of Love and the magisterial Histoire(s) du cinema.

[Janice Forbes · Rating 2 out of 5]

A detailed survey of Godard's body of work

The film maker is seen through the rose coloured glasses of a long time admirer and historian of his work. The loving attention to every detail from the first idea, then to development, production and screening of Godard's films, allows Godard, the artist and human being, to be known, including numerous negatives like his anti- semitism and disturbed infatuations with young actresses. While respecting the creativity, experimentation and rebellion against traditional method that were Godard's legacy, the man himself is a person I do not admire. Perhaps his feeling that "everything is cinema" speaks more of boundary issues than of a great mind that will live on through his work and inspire future generations. Godard was a man of his time which is well left where it belongs, in the past.

[John Ledingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this and revisiting/newly discovering several of Godard's works along the way. The 60s chapters are pure cinephile candy. Though I'd seen several of the films covered, the excavations of Godard's prickly works in his Maoist 70s, postmodern 80s and beyond were indispensable bits of context-criticism. Feels like as comprehensive a history of Godard's career as might exist in English. (Save for the last two decades after publication.) At the same time, I found Richard Brody's frequently antagonizing takes on Godard unproductive and obnoxious. No doubt one I'll keep around and revisit for years anyway, in reference to some of the later films.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still not particularly enamored with Godard (especially as a person) or with many of Brody's critical opinions, for that matter. However, where this bio excels is the clarity and detail with which Brody writes about one of the most sprawling and significant careers in film history and its context in the events of the 20th century. One can easily recognize what a monumental task it was.

[Denisse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it and recommend it for writers at all levels.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

godard was one crazy guy

[Tereza Dodoková]

V skutočnosti nedočítaná, neviem ako sa dá napísať tak tučná kniha v kontexte Godarda apoliticky.

[John Bleasdale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brill

[Falso Prusiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Kion You · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a nightmarish, flagellating career…yet Godard is cinema and cinema is Godard

[Scott Leffler · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars