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    Rosenbaum - Eight Obstacles To The Appreciation of Godard in The United States

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    EIGHT OBSTACLES TO THE APPRECIATION OF GODARD IN THE UNITED STATES JONATHAN ROSENBAUM ‘Jean-Luc culiss,~ complains Judich Crist in che Werld Journal Tribe. God bless thera! They constiute a lie of defense against every manipulative insu che enterainmenc busines chrows ou ‘there are more of chem each yet, and they may even be winning. Roget Greenspun! Greenspun’s rallying cry of « quarter of a century ago testifies to the passion and debace that used to be stirred up in che United States when Godard'’s name ‘was mentioned. The gradual phasing our of thac debate and the depletion of that passion cannot be explained simply, and to understand ie ar all requires some care- ful chought about how American culture as a whole has icself changed in the interim. Fora director sill closely identified with the sixties in American film cricicism, Godard is regarded today with much of che same fear, skepticism, suspicion, and impatience that greet many ‘other contemporary responses to that decade. And his status as an intellectual with a taste for abstraction may make him seem even more out of place in a mass cul- cure chac currently has little truck with movie expe: ‘ences that can’t be reduced to sound bites. (One might add chac he has still fared somewhar berter in this respect than Anconioni, whose American reputation has suffered an almose cotal eclipse.) Roughly speaking, Godard’s career as a critic spans sixteen years, from an auteurise appreciation of Joseph Mankiewicz, published in the 2d issue of Gazette du Ciné it. 1950, t0 "3000 heures de cinéma,” published in the 184th issue of Cabiers du Cinéma (November 1966). His career as a director of features has lasted almose ewice as long and reveals a comparable ambiva- lence coward the U.S., with both a love of William Faulkner and Robert Aldrich and a mockery of Ameri= can power and influence extending all the way from Breatbles vo Nowoelle Vague. But in contrast to this sus- tained love-hatred that, through all ics vicissitudes, has never ceased to be both pursuit and flight, embrace and recoil, the relationship of the U.S. co Godard has, broadly speaking, been one of increasing fascination (oughly 196t to 1973), followed by decreasing inter- est (roughly 1974 t0 1992). Ie should be recalled, however, that, even at the height of his populariey as an art-house director, Godard was always something of a minority taste among critics and audiences alike, While the American critics and insticutions that were originally most supportive of his ‘work—Richard Roud, Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, and Vincent Canby, among the former; che New York Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, and New Yorker Films, among the latter—have been highly influencial, mainstream resistance to Godard’s work has remained constant over the past three decades, becoming increasingly decisive over the second half of this period. ‘The remarks that follow will attempt to pinpoint some of the sources of that resistance. Without pretend- ing in any way to be exhaustive, I think chat the princi- pal obstacles co the American appreciation of Godard that have existed—and, in many cases, continue to exist —point toward a complex of cultural attitudes that ultimately have bearing on much more than Godard’s work. Nevertheless, insofar as Godard’s name has remained both a symbol and a rallying point for a cer- ‘ain kind of cinema since che beginning of his career, it seems useful to delve here, however incompletely, into che question of what that kind of cinema has meant, and continues to mean, in an American context. ‘While much of my emphasis will be on the Ameri- can reception of Godard’s work since 1974, ic is impor- tant to bear in mind chat Godard’s American reputation prior co this period, beginning in r961 with the release in the United Staces of his first feature, Breathless, affected his subsequent reputation in two largely antithetical ways. That is, part of the resistance to Godard in this country since 1974 can be conserued as a backlash Co the former centrality of Godard’s name and work in certain circles, while another part of that resistance is due co a lack of awareness of his former centrality, especially among younger viewers. (Two significant instances of this latter situation, both dat- ing from the early eighties, are worth citing hece. By his owa account, Jim McBride was able to finance his ‘American remake of Breathless only because most pro- ducers he approached had heard of che film but had never seen it; and when Godard's Passion received an uuncharacteristically wide American release a year or 50 lacer, i¢ was most often billed—in ads, on marquees, and even in recorded phone messages at cheacers—as “Francis Coppola's Passion Although many of the topics addressed below cep- resent ongoing problems of reception rather than ‘obstacles posed in a particular period, and some of these are overlapping rather than sequential, I have given chese topics in a very rough chronological order, from problems associated with Godard during che six- ties, to the recent present. 1. The Nonvelle Vague context. Cleatly, che fact that Breathless was originally perceived as part of a larger artistic movement helped immeasurably in providing Godard's frst American audiences with a loose context in which to understand his work. Brecibles opened in New York the same year as Claude Chabrol’s The Cousins, after Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Francois Truffaur’s Tbe 400 Blows, and Louis Malle's The Lovers had alveady appeared, and while information about "the Nouvelle Vague” in the American press tended t0 be somewhat vague and confused—charac- teristically, both Resnais and Malle were often assumed 10 be Cabiers du Cinéma critics along with Truffauc, Godaed, and Chabrol—the sense of Godard being pare of a larger movement was already fairly pronounced. ‘While the Nouvelle Vague continued to be regard- ed 2s a viable journalistic hook by American critics throughout most of che sixties, subdivisions and dis-

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