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

Praise for Everything Is Cinema
    “Meticulously detailed… A story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey.”
    — The New York Times Book Review
    “Godard changed the movies as much as the American masters he grew up on: Welles, Hawks, Hitchcock, and the rest. He is as original as Picasso—but unlike Picasso, he has been denied the biography he has always deserved. This is it. Just at the moment when the New Wave turns fifty, Richard Brody has given us Everything Is Cinema , a remarkable book, which describes with sharp intelligence a great and elusive artist’s times, intellect, passions, and work.”
    —Wes Anderson
    “Geniuses all have their flaws, and Brody goes to great lengths to contextualize these without excusing them, the better to unmask and explain this famously inscrutable artist and his work. All in all, Brody has given us the most satisfying—and epic—movie biography of the year so far.”
    — DGA Quarterly
    “ Everything Is Cinema is better than a biography, it is a novel. And a great novel, in which one discovers the story of a man who almost picked the wrong art form, a struggling writer who became an immense filmmaker.”
    —B ERNARD -H ENRI L ÉVY
    “Enthralling, exhaustive, and, above all, unwilling to swallow the mass opiate that says Godard’s post-1960s work is somehow less than what came before.”
    — The Village Voice
    “Full of lucid analysis and human context, Richard Brody’s book performs a heroic act in rescuing Godard and his growing shelf of works from the prison of myth and theory, from the cult of youth and the cult of the’ 60s, restoring him to his place as an engaged, hard-working artist.”
    —J ONATHAN L ETHEM
    “The book’s principal virtue, underlying its trenchantly judged account, is Brody’s determination to grapple with Godard’s public image while insisting on its inextricability from his personal crises. This multifaceted portrait provides something far more valuable and complex than a myth-busting corrective.”
    —Film Comment
    “Richard Brody’s biography of Godard—arguably the most important, enigmatic, and exciting filmmaker of the second half of the 20th century—effortlessly weaves intellectual history, a personal saga, and an authoritative reading of the films themselves into a seamless web. It virtually crackles with intelligence, and is a must-read for anyone interested in cinema.”
    —P ETER B ISKIND

EVERYTHING
IS CINEMA

EVERYTHING
IS CINEMA
    THE WORKING LIFE OF
    JEAN-LUC GODARD
RICHARD BRODY
    A HOLT PAPERBACK
METROPOLITAN BOOKS / HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY New York

Holt Paperbacks
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trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
    Copyright © 2008 by Richard Brody
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Brody, Richard, 1958—
    Everything is cinema: the working life of Jean-Luc Godard/Richard Brody.—1st ed.
p. cm.
    ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8015-5
    ISBN-10: 0-8050-8015-5
    1. Godard, Jean Luc, 1930–—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
    PN1998.3.G63B76 2006
    791.43023’3092—dc22
    [B]
    2006047347
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    Originally published in hardcover in 2008 by Metropolitan Books
First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2009
    Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
    Printed in the United States of America
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Maja, for my very being

PREFACE
    I N THE SPRING OF 2000 , J EAN -L UC G ODARD RECEIVED ME in his office in Rolle, a town on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he has been living and working for the past thirty years. Rolle is set on a sharply rising slope between the lake and the highlands. It is a sedate town. The main street has one traffic light. Mont Blanc