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 anuuncharacteristically 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-