Talking a good movie

Godard's films frequently start out with a good melodramatic idea, something that would support intellectually interesting variants on its themes ("Le Petit Soldat," "A Woman Is a Woman," "Contempt" and "Alphaville" among many others) only to lose their way. They become essayistic or didactic or, occasionally, too personal in ways we cannot fathom. To a degree that Brody seems not quite to understand, their failures derive from Godard's methods. He tended to work from brief outlines, which he would flesh out by writing a page or two of script on the day he was shooting. If inspiration failed him, he would simply send the company home. Sometimes he would intervene in the process, interviewing his actors or having them interview one another on the general topic the sequence was taking up. Very often he would not deliver the film he had promised his backers or talked up in interviews.

He remained capable of more conventional movie- making, and his "Bande a part" in 1964 is a lively, tossed-off, black comedy about a murderous group of slackers that says more about the fecklessness of 1960s youth culture than any other film I know. To me, it's his best film, though Brody rather dismisses it, and Godard soon moved on to his disastrous Maoist phase, then to his passionate embrace of video production, which to this day he pursues in Swiss exile, interrupted occasionally by forays into something like mainstream production. Godard's a cranky hermit; one of his theories is that World War II represented a decisive break in film history. As he sees it, the Nazis and the Americans unconsciously conspired to destroy European culture, the former with the Holocaust, the latter with their imperial economic designs. He appears to equate these two depredations morally, which says a lot about the limits of being an autodidact.

Looking at this career through Brody's lens, one cannot help thinking that Godard is perhaps the victim of attention-deficit disorder. Much of the time whatever pops into his head while he's making a movie -- a book, a public event, a personal crisis -- arrests his attention and gets jammed into the film. Since he does not have a script, that's easy for him to do, and since narrative coherence is not a value for him, these interpolations can be made to seem acts of high daring, even genius, and sold as such to gaga cinephiles who are more interested in cinematic theory than emotional coherence.