Sellout Watch: Jean-luc Godard?!?!
From Stephanie Zacharek’s review of a Godard biography in the Times Book Review from Sunday:
[Author Richard] Brody is hardly blind to his subject’s foibles: he calls Godard on his flimsier political ideas, particularly his devotion to Maoism (a trend among French intellectuals in the late ’60s that Brody identifies, rightly, as thinly veiled fascism) and, later, the anti-Semitism that repeatedly surfaced in his work. It’s also worth noting that Godard, the committed Maoist and spewer of anti-capitalist, anti-American rhetoric, made two commercials for Nike in the early 1990s. They were never broadcast, though presumably Godard cashed the checks.
Emphasis added. I was delighted to work with both Zacharek and her husband, Charles Taylor, at Salon, back in the day. The first graf of Zacharek’s book review reminded me why:
Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers—the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless”—became an intolerable gasbag.
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Nike Commercials?
That’s like Warren Ellis doing X-Men.
Coyle’s First Law: EVERYONE sells out. EVERYONE.
So this is why I’ve been getting tons of searches at my blog from people looking for these Godard-Nike ads (a detail I mentioned like 3-4 years ago, in passing). Brody’s biography sounds interesting.
Actually, Zacharek’s review seems quite blinkered. She spectacularly misses the point on Godard’s late films. She criticizes him for being too much inside his own head, as if that’s a slur — as if this kind of personal expression isn’t what critics should expect of our finest artists. To say that his late films subvert emotional engagement only means that he’s achieved his goal. He’s continually looking for new ways to express abstract thought in cinema, to explore the political questions that he has been obsessively re-visiting throughout his career, and all Zacharek wants is more Breathless? That’s fine and all, but if she’s that disinterested in the frankly avant-garde and original places that Godard’s films have gone, she should just admit it instead of trying to come up with elaborate aesthetic justifications for her knee-jerk reactions. She repeats Brody’s questionable assertions about Godard’s anti-Semitism (and fascism?!) without qualification, choosing instead to question the author’s enthusiasm for Godard’s late films. And she does so in the vaguest terms, dismissing in one fell swoop Godard’s entire “post-1967 output,” as though the last 40 years have been a monolithic period of decline for the once-great filmmaker. It’s an idea that middlebrow critics and audiences are all too willing to accept rather than have to deal with the complications and intricacies of Godard’s varied output in the last 40 years.
As for the commercial question, I imagine there’s a reason Godard’s Nike commercial was never shown — probably because it was as uncompromising and unique as the jeans commercials he made for a French company, which were like Godard essays in miniature. Even if the Nike ads, which I haven’t seen, are more bland, Godard certainly wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to cash a corporate check in order to finance his radical agenda. He’s always been very open about the fact that he’s willing to do just about anything to be able to continue making the films he wants to — including stealing film and cameras to make his first films. It’s very easy to criticize the guy, but the fact remains that he has never compromised his films; he’s continued making exactly the movies he wants to. Zacharek’s smug accusation of “sellout” completely dodges the content of the films themselves to take cheap shots at the man behind the camera.
I completely agree with Mr. Howard. Godard started accepting commissions very early on in his career, and as Brody’s book amply explains, not once has the finished work remotely resembled what was initially agreed on. And regardless, I don’t see this as selling out, it’s tragic, but not worthy of derision, that one of the greatest living artists has to look to outside sources of income to continue to produce masterpieces. Another director that had to do this for most of his career? Orson Welles.
As for Brody’s accusations of anti-semitism, I’ve read the entire book, and found them outrageous. So many of his claims required such monstrous leaps of imagination that the last two chapters were almost entirely ruined for me.