everything is cinema (richard brody)

Richard Brody’s biography of Godard is monumental. It’s an epic journey through the life of a filmmaker via his films. One feels as though Godard ought to be grateful to the gods for granting him such a dedicated, comprehensive biographer, although one also feels that he, Godard, probably doesn’t give a shit. The tension between Godard’s professional and working life is constantly in play, and Brody delineates this tension forensically. From his relationships with his leading actresses to his squabbles with contemporaries (most notably Truffaut) to the fraught working conditions on set. For Godard, film-making would appear to become, increasingly, a calvary, an inexhaustible source of both suffering and joy. Brody traces the evolution of this process film by film, both reawakening the reader’s fascination with the films themselves but also the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the process.

One of Brody’s theories is that Godard’s later films, far less well known than those which established him back in the day, are in many ways more profound and deserving of praise than those earlier gobstoppers. (He’s particularly harsh on Bande Á Part). Of course, these films, as the book acknowledges never reached the audiences of Breathless, La Chinoise, Weekend, Contempt, etcetera. Most readers won’t have seen the later films, and I belong to that most readers category. It feels, as we enter this zone when Godard struggled more and more to get films made, and struggled more and more in the making of them, as though the second half of the book occupies a darker, sadder process, albeit one which Brody assures us, in our ignorance (or at least mine) is one whose artistic richness has been neglected.

From a filmmaker’s point of view, the book is inspirational. It highlights how Godard’s quest for innovation meant he was always at the forefront of new cinematic possibilities, sometimes as a result of his own investment (in the development of hand-held cameras, for example), and sometimes as a result of good old fashioned ingenuity. Making cinema is a technological process but the gurus of technology so frequently blind with science that it can start to feel like an exclusive process, one that belongs to those with access to vast funds and equipment. Godard made films like this, but he also concocted films out of the bits and pieces lying around in his Swiss back yard. There are dozens of ways of creating cinema, and Godard’s enthusiasm for trying all of them shines through, and inspires. Similarly, if anything comes across in Brody’s book, it is that Godard was a filmmaker in the sense that he couldn’t not make film. He was/ is constantly in the process of creation. Some of the ideas come to fruition, some don’t, many are recycled to emerge years even decades later. Scraps of footage for one project appear in another. We have now reached the iPhone epoch of filmmaking and as ever, Godard was there decades earlier, working out how to transform the stuff of daily life into the stuff of art or cinema.