I'm finally getting on this. On November 1, the NYT did a big piece on French film director Jean-Luc Godard, who is up for an honorary Oscar, that credited attacks by him from Jewish establishment orgs saying that he is an anti-Semite, based on a number of glancing statements about Jews in Hollywood, and his strong opposition to Zionism. Richard Cohen has chimed in by saying that it's an "outrage" that Hollywood means to honor a man of raw "Jew-hatred."
Now the pushback. Critic David Ehrenstein has since taken on Richard Cohen's slam: "Godard has become the designated Leni Riefenstahl... He must be defended against this vicious utterly mendacious attack."
And here is a letter written to the Times by Bill Riordan, a college professor in Colorado. Riordan specifically addresses a film by Godard called "Here and Elsewhere." He allowed us to publish the letter because the Times doesn't appear likely to do so.
To the Editor:
Re “Hollywood Production: An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy”
The charge that the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is an anti-Semite—reported in the Michael Cieply article in the November 2nd edition of the Times—is as absurd as it is obscene. Quoting the author of the not-very-good book, “Everything Is Cinema” does not make it any less ridiculous and creepy. The film at the center of the controversy, “Here and There,” was a masterpiece made in the mid-70s and most likely never seen by a single member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the film, Godard submits his own political practice and that of the European left (the film’s intended audience) to a searing self-criticism.
The film’s principal thesis is that the developed world’s left, unable to make a revolution in Europe and in the “first world,” projected its own desires on “third world” revolutionaries and, specifically, the left Palestinian resistance. Inert and wallowing in their political impotence, Godard blames the European left and himself for responsibility in the massacres and repression that the Palestinian resistance suffered at the hands of the Israeli military. The film, which has (like all of Godard’s work) a rich diachronic depth, views the plight of Palestinians at the hands of Zionist nationalism as the historical product of Europe’s own anti-Semitic past. Thus Godard brilliantly represents a history defined by a quasi-Hegelian unity-of-opposites (Golda Meir and Hitler) in which former victims become victimizers and what Jean-Paul Sartre would have called history’s “counter finality” where the ultimate product of Europe’s racist past is an emerging quasi-fascist and racist state constructed as a “Jewish” homeland. Many contemporary Israeli intellectuals and artists are making the same charges against the current State of Israel.
The film, if anything, seems not so much anti-Semitic as prophetic. Our contemporary situation in which a stifling ideological conformity is demanded of us, as well as the continual and ongoing attempts of censorship against any possible narratives that might counter Zionism’s self-representation, demonstrates the prescience and profundity of one of the finest film artists in our world. I (as well as Godard, I imagine) find this suffocating ideological climate chilling. The current charges against Godard continue to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of his work.
Bill Riordan
Denver, Colorado
Cannes: Jean-Luc Godard's 'Film Socialisme' has his avant dazzle, but it isn't pretty if you read between the lines
Image Credit: Stephanie Cardinale/People Avenue/Corbis
Years ago at Cannes, I attended a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and ended up walking out after 20 minutes — not because I didn’t like the film, but because it was being shown in French without English subtitles. Since most of what I saw consisted of narration, and I barely speak a word of French (in high school, I seemed to know less of the language each year I studied it), it seemed altogether pointless to stay. I assumed, at the time, and naively, that I’d mistakenly wandered into some special category of screening intended for the foreign press. Actually, the movie had only just been completed, and it was being shown without subtitles because Godard had approved it that way. He can be a stubbornly perverse purist and devoted anti-communicator (especially when it comes to Americans).
With Godard, though, nothing is simple. This year at Cannes, I saw Film Socialisme, his latest tract/poem/experiment/avant meditation, and this time, too, the French in the movie was spoken without a full translation. But at the bottom of the screen, throughout the film, there appear clusters of words, in English only, that aren’t so much subtitles as slogans and pensées, displayed in cutting counterpoint to the images. (This time, you were out of luck if you didn’t speak English.) Film Socialisme has obscure moments, but it’s (literally) easy to read. That may be because Godard, at 79, has something scaldingly urgent to say, even if it isn’t pretty.
The first half of the movie presents scenes on a cruise ship, which Godard treats just like the spaceship in WALL-E — as a giant, floating metaphor for our passivity and corruption. There are striking, abrasive, raggedly degraded video shots of people dancing in the ship’s disco (the music is distorted into scrapes so that it sounds like electronic torture with a beat); these shots suggest that our entertainment escapes have become a form of madness. Godard presents the passengers on the ship as clueless zombies and happy pawns, and his images have some of the primary-color narcotic sharpness one remembers from Pierrot le Fou (1965) and One Plus One (1968). At the same time, the words and phrases at the bottom of the screen offer an ongoing haiku analysis of our current condition: words like “today bastards sincere” or “aids tool for killing blacks.” Then there are the oversize headlines that really spell things out, like this one: “Palestine: Access Denied.” At one point, the screen flashes (untranslated) Arabic letters in white with Hebrew letters in blood-red superimposed on top of them. Richard Brody, in his magisterial 2008 Godard biography, Everything Is Cinema, has acknowledged the filmmaker’s creeping anti-Semitism, and watching Film Socialisme, you don’t need a translation to know what Godard is really saying: that Israel, with regard to the Palestinians, isn’t just in violation — but, rather, that it is a violation.
He’s still cryptic about it, of course, and he lumps Israel in with other “antisocialist” regimes, hectoring the whole world for its litany of injustice. With his leftist-nihilist agitprop laid over an increasingly fractured and depersonalized underground-film vocabulary, Godard is now a strange hybrid — Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky. Late in the movie, he gets some montage going that’s like a deconstructed music video, and you feel the surging pull of his power as a filmmaker. But you also feel one of the key motivations behind his obliqueness, his splintered-cinema techniques: If Jean-Luc Godard actually came right out and said what he was thinking, in all its off-putting extremity and even ugliness, he might knock himself right off his pedestal.
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