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

hovers weightlessly in the distance.
    When I arrived, Godard was seated at a broad, uncluttered trestle desk in a spacious office on the main floor of one of Rolle’s few modern buildings. He has one wall of compact discs, another of books and pictures, and from his chair, he faces out onto a roomful of video equipment that would do a small TV station proud: sturdy industrial metal racks holding tape decks, switchers, meters, monitors, a bulky sound console squat on the floor, dozens of cables and wires and plugs strung from one board to another, and a computer. A television monitor was on: Godard was keeping an eye on the men’s semifinal matches at the French Open.
    He welcomed me with the description of a cartoon he recalled from the pages of The New Yorker , the magazine for which I had come to interview him. The drawing shows a unicorn wearing a suit, seated at a desk, and talking on the phone. The caption reads, “These rumors of my non-existence are making it very difficult for me to obtain financing.” To Godard the cartoon seemed exemplary of his own situation. Happily, though, he continues to exist—and also to work—at an extraordinarily high level of artistic achievement. Somehow, this fact is disturbingly unknown, except among a small coterie of film lovers. His work continues to be the subject of academic conferences and journal articles, and the intermittent DVD releases of his films aregreeted by flurries of eager Internet postings among the tight circle of his devotees. But Godard’s name is no longer common currency in the film industry, or for that matter on the cultural radar. While enormous attention is given to filmmakers of more modest ability, Godard has become almost forgotten. But unlike Orson Welles, who struggled to make anything of value in his later years, or D. W. Griffith, whose career was stopped cold by changing fashions, Godard continues to develop. His obscurity is not hard to fathom—his work is demanding, but acceptance of its demands yields singular rewards, and, as the later chapters of this book will argue, his more recent films are indeed works of art fully equal—and in some respects, superior—to the early pictures that made his reputation and established his celebrity.
    Godard is undoubtedly best known for his first feature film, Breathless , which he made in 1959. A highly personal yet exuberant refraction of the American film noir, Breathless was gaudily emblazoned with its technical audacity as well as with Godard’s own artistic, literary, and cinematic enthusiasms. Even now, Breathless feels like a high-energy fusion of jazz and philosophy. After Breathless , most other new films seemed instantly old-fashioned. The triumph of Godard’s longtime friend François Truffaut at the 1959 Cannes festival with The 400 Blows , had announced to the world the cinematic sea change effected by a group of critics-turned-filmmakers already known in France by the journalistic label of la nouvelle vague , the New Wave. But The 400 Blows was only the setup. Breathless was the knockout blow. If The 400 Blows was the February revolution, Breathless was October.
    After Breathless , anything artistic appeared possible in the cinema. The film moved at the speed of the mind and seemed, unlike anything that preceded it, a live recording of one person thinking in real time. It was also a great success, a watershed phenomenon. More than any other event of its time, Breathless inspired other directors to make films in a new way and sparked young people’s desire to make films. It instantly launched cinema as the primary art form of a new generation.
    In the 1960s, Godard’s films were eagerly anticipated events—in France, in the United States, and around the world—and each new release seemed to leave the last far behind. Writing in February 1968, Susan Sontag called Godard “one of the great culture heroes of our time” 1 and compared the aesthetic impact of his work to that of Picasso