'Jean-Luc Godard: The Permanent Revolutionary'
In Jean-Luc Godard’s long career in cinema, he precipitated one revolution that continues to reverberate, Breathless (1960), and several attempted coups of limited impact. As part of the Cahiers du Cinema crew in the ‘50s, he helped forge new critical thinking about film. Later, he was given to making lofty pronouncements. “If it is no longer possible to be an intellectual filmmaker, then I must stop being an intellectual,” he declared. But his intellectualism never ceased as he continued to seek new rationalizations for films that were often thought experiments via camera.
The newly translated Jean-Luc Godard: The Permanent Revolutionary is a compactly composed, long view of the director’s life and oeuvre. Author Bert Rebhandl, a German journalist, glosses over his subject’s blinkered judgments including support for the Mao cult (how many millions did he kill?) before moving on to other pseudo-utopian schemes. Although verging on hagiography, Rebhandl astutely describes and summarizes Godard’s expansive body of work whose driving force was a restless imagination.
Godard continually declared that cinema was dead. Rebhandl puts it well, mentioning Godard’s “latent apocalyptic inclinations.” Exemplifying the director’s muddled processing of world events, his mercifully seldom-seen film Pravda (1970), condemned the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as well as Czech reformers crushed under Soviet tanks. Neither side measured up to the director’s Maoist ideal. On the other hand, Godard’s thoughts on the implication of combining sound and image in cinema were interesting, as was his idea that—maybe—motion pictures can undermine the unthinking reception of false reality and the invisible ideologies that blind us.
Jean-Luc Godard: The Perpetual Revolutionary is published by University of Wisconsin Press, translated from the German by Edward Maltby.
