Talking a good movie

Deeply researched, conscientiously written, careful to contextualize its subject both in his field and in the larger culture that shaped his work, "Everything Is Cinema" is in almost every respect an admirable biography, exactly the sort of scrupulous and passionate work significant movie figures deserve and almost never receive. I am in awe of Richard Brody's accomplishment. Yet I have rarely been so glad to come to the end of an admirable book.

That's because his subject is Jean-Luc Godard, who may be the most chilling and annoying figure in the history of the movies -- a director whose films and theories about the cinema endlessly flirt with revolutionary ideas about the medium only to abandon them to solipsism, flight and contempt -- for his colleagues, his backers and, most significantly, for his audience, which has dwindled to a cult more interested in what movies might be than in what they, perhaps ineluctably, are.

Godard was born in Paris in comfortable bourgeois circumstances, did poorly in school (a defect he compensated for by being a manic autodidact) and after the war went on to make a name for himself in this film-mad city as an abrupt, interesting reviewer with a special interest in American genre films. These imports were, of course, terribly influential on the early work of "la nouvelle vague" (the New Wave); Godard's first feature, the perky little crime drama "Breathless," along with Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," helped to define that cinematic movement, which in the late 1950s set itself in useful opposition to the highly conventionalized French "tradition of quality" as well as the ponderousness and self-importance of the postwar American cinema, which had lost faith in the "naive realism" that had been its glory in the 1930s and 1940s.

There's no question that the movies needed a restorative jump-start (or a jump-cut) and Godard was a useful motormouth, constantly granting interviews to journals large and small, in which he tried to redefine the nature of cinema. A lot of this talk, as Brody recounts it, consists of a bright guy popping off, turning himself into a celebrity at least as well known for his conversations as for his cinema. Take, for instance, the dictum from which this book's title derives. What Godard seems to have meant is that film has significant documentary roots and that some sort of interpenetration between reality and fiction might be achieved in generally released movies, which, indeed, he went on to attempt. In a sense, this position is inarguable. There is perhaps no theoretical reason why movies must, as they forever have, cling to the storytelling conventions of 19th century theatrical melodrama. But note that "perhaps." There is an emotional, kinetic immediacy to this kind of filmmaking that a director trifles with at his peril.