Godard on Godard

Translated and edited by Tom Milne

292 pgs. 1968, republished 1986 De Capo Press

foreword by Annette Michelson

Jean Luc Godard, the prolific New Wave director, was a film critic for Cahiers du Cinema (the French film criticism journal) from his pre-filmmaking youth (20 years old) into his adulthood (after international renown.) This book is a selection of his writings (mostly reviews, some interviews he conducted, and a few interviews featuring him,) from 1950 until the end of 1967. There is insightful commentary by editor/translator Tom Milne, which is footnoted and featured as an appendix.

The book is chronologically ordered, beginning with Godard’s first writings for Cahiers and ending with his writings after he made Two or Three Things I Know About Her(1967.)

His feature length movies, from Breathless (A Bout de Souffle, 1959,) on, became more and more disjointed. In this book, his writings and perceptions of cinema follow the same path. It proceeds from the amateurish rambling of his first four years to the very articulate and then to the non sequitur musings of the late 1960’s.

I liked that this book was a window into Godard’s thought processes. It was nice to relate his theory of cinema into his films, and tracking the progression of his film ideology.

I didn’t like the title of the book. It implies that it is a collection of interviews with Godard, which it isn’t. It is mostly his reviews of movies. There are only a few interviews with Godard, and a few interviews Godard conducts with other filmmakers.

The first 69 pages were poorly written reviews, and it was difficult to read on. They reminded me of arrogant high school reviews; rambling, shallow, and uneducated.

The rest of the book is written well and lucid, and Tom Milne provides interesting commentary/trivia to each entry.