Long Days, Long Months: 5 August

Brody's book on Godard... so boring! The type font, the narrative approach. A biography of a great artist that reads like the biography of, say, Jackie Kennedy is, I repeat, a bore! How dare one make Godard boring? I want more analysis, less dull recounting of what happens in his movies, and especially less gossip.

Brody sets you up for the later charge of anti-Semitism by making note of Godard's (and other New Wave filmmakers') rightist tendencies in the 1950's. Fair enough, but he ignores the farcical, confrontational nature of these professed beliefs. Brody even mentions a Situationist of similar persuasions [Michel Mourre, he of the famous "God is dead" speech interrupting the Easter mass at Notre-Dame in 1950] and still doesn't get it.

Even when he considers Godard's politics more seriously, as in the director's erratic Maoist period of 1968-1972, Brody sticks to his strict chronological approach. Besides, those years did bring Godard's first foray into the Middle East, disclosing those awful anti-Israeli opinions that leave a nice New Yorker like Brody aghast (you mean he suggested that the Israelis have conceived of Muslims in the same manner Germans thought of Jews? the horror).

In those final two chapters I noted earlier, Brody descends at times to sheer idiocy. Regarding Notre Musique, he says the scenes featuring First Americans "suggest [Godard's] an endorsement of the idea that Israel and the United States, alone among nations, developed by conquest and forced displacements, and were thus fundamentally illegitimate and tainted," certainly an inappropriate conclusion to reach. Since when do films endorse such intricate sociopolitical positions? Certainly, characters might espouse them; the directors might even want viewers to walk away thinking such things. But films themselves do not; they are not politicians, they're not individuals; they do what we want them to do. Brody's taking an purposely-elliptical web of allusions and direct references and delineating what he wants to see - not so such to critique Godard, as he's quite gentle toward the aged filmmaker considering what he accuses him of, but to state clearly certain opinions he finds untenable.

He goes on to say, "This rhetorical trick - of [Elias] Sanbar, who wrote it [in Le Bien des Absents], and of Godard, who filmed it - lent intellectual responsibility and a progressive profile to the conjunction of the ancient right-wing bugbears of the European right: the United States and Jews." First, perhaps Brody's copy editor will let us know what left-wing bugbears the European right has.... But seriously, is Brody suggesting that any sort of comparison between the U S A and Israel, two nations who have by their own choice conjoined fates, is principally a right-wing phenomenon? Now we see more clearly why those youthful rightist indiscretions of Godard and his friends figured so importantly in the narrative. Brody wants to ignore a fundamental fact about Godard's career: despite the Maoist rhetoric dissipating after '72, Godard's politics had been forever altered by his radical period.

If anything, it is Brody, in desperately looking for others who share his obsession with Israel and anti-Semitism, who has confined himself too much to right-wing thought, while still thinking of himself as a liberal or progressive. Believe it or not, this curious intellectual position is quite common in the U S. The only right-wing bugbears at work here are those of the American Israel P A C, or the Anti-Defamation League - groups that, by distorting or ignoring the actual progressive opinions of a substantial majority of Jewish Americans, have helped make North American Jewry a right-wing force in global affairs.