Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

Abstract

Colin MacCabe. Godard: A Portrait of Artist at Seventy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 20O4. 432 pages; $25.OO. Protean Figure Biography is a tricky business; by offering details of an individual artist's life, it can give erroneous impression that creative achievement is a matter of personality or circumstance, only loosely connected to broader issues of time, place, and history. Yet great artists are not just great people performing in front of a cultural backcloth; they are backcloth themselves. Their dilemmas throw underlying contradiction of their times into relief, and, sometimes, their work provides resolutions, or at least new possibilities. For Colin MacCabe, Jean-Luc Godard is one of these protean figures. His films are, he asserts, amongst most important European art of second half of twentieth and he sees director's career as a walking metaphor for the paradoxes of modernism at their most acute. This means that his book is more than just a biography. While it places Godard in foreground, investigating his cosmopolitan French-Swiss upbringing, his friendships with fellow directors like Francois Truffaut, and nature of his enigmatic personality, its main emphasis is on his life as ideas in action. To mangle Polonius, here is a cultural-social-political study, or a historical-psychological-personal one, a mosaic made up of life, art, and forces that have shaped both. The cement that binds these disparate pieces together is nothing less than crisis of artist in twentieth century. MacCabe believes that problem is rooted in language, irrespective of medium, and that in Godard's case it was inherent from very beginning. Like Truffaut and other directors of French New Wave, young cineaste started out as a critic in early 1950s, writing for Cahiers du Cinema, groundbreaking journal that captured iconoclastic spirit of young film fanatics of post-war France. Some of this energy was rooted in usual youthful desire to tear down orthodoxies of previous generation, especially literary cinema of old stagers like Marcel Carne. Yet, as MacCabe notes, it was also a response to larger questions of artist's relationship to mass culture. Earlier in century, modernist writers like Joyce and Eliot had reacted to spread of films and popular press by retreating into an esoteric language that was inaccessible to majority of audience; by contrast, Cahiers critics embraced that audience, specifically as it was represented in Hollywood factory product of time. They saw studio works of Howard Hawks, for example, or Alfred Hitchcock, as a true classic art in which both creator and audience continued to enjoy a kind of prelapsarian common culture and understanding. The first, glad morning of Godard's filmmaking was based on this faith in commercial films. Starting with A Bout de Souffle, his first feature in 1960, he embraced this new linguistic possibility, staying within convention of narrative films, although giving it his own particular twist. The sky soon clouded over, however. …

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