July 5, 2008

Books, 7/5.

Everything Is Cinema "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: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard] 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." For Richard Schickel, Godard is "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."

Updated through 7/8.

Earlier reviews: Andrew Hultkrans (Artforum) and B Kite (Moving Image Source). Earlier discussion: Some Came Running.

Back in the Los Angeles Times: Paul Wilner on Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir; and Susan King talks with author David Kaufman about Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door.

"David Gilmour is a father as well as a novelist and former film critic," writes Douglas McGrath in the New York Times Book Review. "He has written a memoir, The Film Club, about his decision to allow his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour's choosing. Because it smacked of a plot gimmick from one of the movies Gilmour used to review, I feared the book would be similarly cute and tidy. But it's a heartfelt portrait of how hard it is to grow up, how hard it is to watch someone grow up and how in the midst of a family's confusion and ire, there is sometimes nothing so welcome as a movie."

For the Guardian, Elizabeth Day reviews The Studs Terkel Interviews: Film and Theater.

Rob Pegoraro reviews David A Price's The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company for the Washington Post.

Update, 7/8: "It could even be argued that Godard, in some respects, is a more important artist than Picasso," suggests Gilbert Adair in the New Statesman. As for Everything Is Cinema, "Brody's is a good, scholarly life, of interest not only to a charmed circle of initiates, and its lapses are fairly minor ones of judgement (he mystifyingly dismisses Bande à part, one of the most puckishly magical films ever made, while praising the almost unwatchable King Lear as being among Godard's finest achievements) and tone (the book is utterly devoid of irony, something that cannot be said about its subject's films)."



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Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2008 1:12 PM

Comments

Richard Schickel is exactly the sort of middle-brow, bourgeois twit to which Brody aspires in his quest to become The American Godard Authority Ripe for Hire by Mainstream Publications to Comment Upon His Godard'ness. (Pronounced with a hard 'D' at the end, as is the wont of people like Brody and Schickel.) To wit:

"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."

-- To quote Ezra Pound (sort of) on 'Bambi': "Filth."

Brody's urinous biography is a love-letter to the Schickel Aesthetic. Smugly content in its 'sensible' moralistic anti-fervor, and then some.

Absolute poison.

Incidentally, I know of four or five REAL critics (which is to say, real writers) who are currently firing up the analytical equivalent of ICBMs trained to The Brody Codex ("The Brodex" TM, Copyright 2008, Craig Keller), for imminent launch. We'll see how much 'buzz' their pieces generate once they go live, or appear in print; of course, to date, all anyone has seemingly been able to express so far in print (and on the mentally moribund "Godard listserv") about The Brodex (with the exceptions of B. Kite and Jonathan Rosenbaum) is: "Oh, isn't it a wonderful book! It is just WONDERFUL, a WONDERFUL book, and it explicates and normalizes these pesky artists whom we KNEW ALL ALONG, and were only awaiting the right, sensible mind to come along and DEFINE for us just how-so, were Wholly Conceivable after all! And my how -flawed-..."

Except the reality is, it's a wonderful piece of -shit- -- and if Susan Sontag were still upright on this earth, SHE'd be standing for none of it.

craig keller.

Posted by: craig keller. at July 5, 2008 10:54 PM

Yes, clearly, there was no American onslaught against (European) culture, no dumbing-down of public discourse by way of money-chasing series of marketing campaigns for useless diversions, no replacement of culture with an apparatus of systemic certainty and faith in abstract principles of a higher order than human life [the State, the Market], no devolution of human concerns toward the pursuit of individualist pleasures over knowledge (to say nothing of agency). Not one bit.

Craig - I can't wait.

Posted by: Dave McDougall at July 6, 2008 3:10 PM

My name is Jean-Luc Godard, and I do not endorse the above message.

Posted by: Jean-Luc Godard at July 6, 2008 8:44 PM

I don't know what Richard Brody has done to deserve vitriol from both Richard Schickel and Craig Keller aside from take on the thankless task of writing a book on a great filmmaker. I have read several books on Godard over the years including Colin Maccabe's bio, but I think Brody's strikes the best balance between solid research, enthusiasm and knowledge of its subject, lucid critical insights and a lively prose style.

If introducing Godard in all his contradictions to a wider audience is something to be sneered, then sneer away. I suppose we should all leave the mainstream of critical discourse to the those who laud Judd Apatow as the new Billy Wilder...please choose your enemies a little more wisely.

Posted by: Lee Hill at July 7, 2008 12:45 AM

I wonder if there are others who found Brody's incessant, obsessive chaptering of Godard's filmography counterproductive? Brody's rather conservative approach divides Godard's filmography by titles and dates, and spends too much time covering the financial woes of JLG. Why? Wasn't this covered on McCabe's book a few years ago?

Perhaps the penultimate book on Godard has yet to be written, as it seems the linear approach to biography, by JLG's birth to the present day, seems counter to his approach to life and cinema. Brody's book reminds me of the documentary on Stan Brakhage from ten or so years ago, the format of which could barely capture the man and the myth. Here we are again.

Posted by: Michael Lieberman at July 7, 2008 11:15 AM

Oh please, a wider audience, nothing! You're putting sawdust on the vomit and calling it tinsel for a hoedown. No matter how feebly accepted the many misconceptions of Brody's book go, we can at least be sure that GODARD ON GODARD will always have a wider audience. Always. And THAT book automatically chooses its enemy carefully: Brody's blind, single-minded, fanatical screed.

Posted by: Aimee Pache at July 8, 2008 7:57 AM