Een van mijn favoriete stukken over een van mijn favoriete filmmakers heet simpelweg Jean-Luc Godard. De Amerikaanse schilder, filmcriticus en auteur Manny Farber schreef het in 1968. Ik las het ongeveer dertig jaar na datum in Negative Space, de bundeling van zijn beste stukken uit die periode. Sindsdien schiet me bij het bekijken van een film van JLG geregeld de slotzin van het artikel te binnen: “In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.” (...) In bevlogen proza laat Farber zich schamper uit over Godards productieve sixties-output, die hij met stijgende ergernis merkbaar op de voet heeft gevolgd en maar wat graag haat. De spreekwoordelijke druppel die aanleiding geeft tot balansopmaak: La chinoise.

Godard doesn’t even consider turning Bardot into a character shattering the stereotypical image the mass media make of her. He presents Bardot as ‘Bardot’. He cites the phenomenon Bardot, uses it as a kind of ready-made, without irony. And because the mass media associate the name Bardot with ‘nudity,’ he promptly presents her naked. It is as if Godard is saying to the audience: “You came to watch a film with Bardot? Here she is in her entirety, totalement, naked like Urbino’s Venus.”

For the cinema, as Godard once said, is “transitory, ephemeral”, written on the wind; inscribed only in fleeting traces, some disconnected images and sounds, and sentimentally overloaded, scrambled memories. Cinema is hard evidence, but only fitfully can it serve as a testament; death is too much at work there. It is the form of this remembered, necessarily scrappy, haunted, sad history of the twentieth century that Godard evokes in all the prodigious techniques of his Histoire(s) du cinéma. 

L’image van de Franse surrealistische schrijver Pierre Reverdy verscheen origineel in Nord-Sud, het literaire tijdschrift dat hij in 1917 met Guillaume Apollinaire en Max Jacob had opgericht. Als een referentieloos refrein duikt de tekst geciteerd en herschikt op in verschillende films van Jean-Luc Godard. De crux van Reverdy’s stuk is dat hét beeld, als een monolithische en isoleerbare entiteit, niet bestaat. “Ik heb altijd gezegd”, zei Godard, “dat er geen beelden bestaan in cinema. Er is steeds een beeld voor en een beeld achter.”

Wilfried Reichart shaped the WDR-Filmredaktion in various capacities, leading it from 1980 until 2004. Over the years, Reichart had several conversations with Jean-Luc Godard and grappled with his work in reviews, articles and essays again and again. Reichart: “Honestly, I have always been fascinated by this person. I like the constant rebeginning, the permanent calling into question, in order to then take another step. I find that incredibly exciting about him. This fundamental attitude. The principle of his thinking is always to say no. [...] That’s the difference between him and all the others. Rivette has always made the same films, Truffaut as well, and Rohmer very extremely so. They have all found their style and followed it through until the end of their lives. Godard is the only one who hasn’t done this.”

“I only started out in cinema when I was about thirty, and for me, my life or my thoughts have always been lagging behind cinema. Like, if it were a train, cinema would be the locomotive and politics and all that would be the last carriage. It is from For Ever Mozart and mostly Film socialisme onward that it started to be both at the same time. In my personal life as well, how my personal life has joined my cinematographic life.”

The underdeveloped country that does not have a strong or madly national art is to be pitied, because, without its art, it’s all the weaker (its brain can be colonized), and it’s here that the most dangerous extension of economic colonization can be found. In the specific case of cinema, I want to let my colleagues know that they should endure the criticism, the slander and the contempt without wavering, because I am absolutely convinced that Brazilian Cinema Novo is currently producing images and sounds that are what we can call modern cinema.