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Godard
Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy by Colin MacCabe Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004 456 pp. $25 |
The history of contemporary film began in a bathtub. Not with the grainy short films of D.W. Griffith, the stark black-and-white epics of Sergei Eisenstein, or the choppy comedies of Chaplin, though there is historical merit to prizing these technological achievements as the worn celluloid heralds of a new art form. But from the perspective of a different sort of history, one which traces the history of film as the emergence of a new way of creating and participating in culture, we need look no further than the visionary hobbies of the first film buffs. Here is where film as we know it today really began—in the Parisian bathtub of Henri Langlois.
In 1936, Langlois established the Cinémateque, a theater designed simply to be a place where people could experience important moments in the history of film. The introduction of sound on film in 1929 had posed a major setback for the acceptance of film as an art. While the mass audience quickly welcomed the "talkies," most of the intellectuals and aesthetes who had begun to rally around this new visual art regarded the advent of sound film as a commercial corruption that fundamentally perverted the medium.
And what happened to all those reels from the golden age of silent film? Theaters had no use for them. Many were recycled for their silver content. But Langlois managed to lovingly salvage a goodly number. They ended up in his bathtub, the only space he had to store them. Out of this storehouse of treasures was born the Cinémateque and a new generation of film appreciation that influences us to this very day.
One of the ways in which this generation influences us is in the importance Langlois placed on the preservation and screening of classic film. (Preservation is not merely an issue for the early days of film history—it applies to the work of filmmakers like Antonioni and Tarkovsky.) Another, fortuitously related, is in the wave of directors and theorists it inspired to make and talk about films, electrified by the scratched and dusty images from the pop culture of a passing age. This sort of film history is the subject of Colin MacCabe's new look at the director Jean-Luc Godard. It is a history that is as much about biography as it is about technology. In Godard's life we see the convergence of film as a technology with the intense suspicion that marked post-World World II European philosophy, exploding in social movements leaping from the screen to real life and back again in a new sort of cultural dialogue.
MacCabe often eschews the theoretical and critical for the anecdotal. It is hard to understand Godard without establishing the cultural climate that informed his thinking, beginning with Langlois and extending through a myriad of journals and theaters that persist to this day. This is not just because the culture of film appreciation began to produce a new sort of artist and thinker, but because Godard himself has probably done more than anyone else to draw attention to this culture, to explore the confines of its rules, and to champion it as a higher order of artistic reflection. While he is the godfather of all video-store clerks turned directors, he is also the patron saint of theorists who explore film as the medium of the modern age, the herald of a new democracy in social criticism. "The way to criticize a film," Godard famously announced, "is to make another film."
In legend, everyone from James Joyce to André Breton attended screenings at Langlois' cinema clubs. One of these who would become famous much later was the young Jean-Luc Godard. And around this resurgence in appreciation of the cinema arose a number of journals that began to revive interest in film. The first of these, La Gazette du cinema, was the brainchild of schoolteacher turned filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who would go on to become a great director in his own right. Throw in a little of the disillusionment of Sartre, the increasing influence of the revolutionary anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, and the profoundly innovative film theory of André Bazin and you have Rohmer's next editorial venture, Cahiers du cinema.
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