His Life to Live

When it comes to Jean-Luc Godard, there's only one significant question to ponder: Is this enigmatic, narrative-discarding hermit the greatest living cinematic artist? The wisest, most transformative, most original agent provocateur at work in the fields of cinema?

The short answer: sans doute. Godard is to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot, and Picasso were to theirs: rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same. Quentin Tarantino may be the most famous public genuflecter before Godard's legacy, but Martin Scorsese, Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant, Spike Lee, Lars Von Trier, Leos Carax, Jim Jarmusch, Raul Ruiz, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Richard Linklater, Catherine Breillat, and Wong Kar-wai, among innumerable others, all owe him a debt they could never pay out. Wrestling in any capacity with movies as art means facing his body of work and taking a deep breath. Godard is a one-man aesthetic revolution that hasn't calmed its cultural mutiny in over four decades. His new, lovely essay-elegy In Praise of Love, opening September 4, may be simultaneously the most relaxed, rueful, and defiant happening our screens have seen in years.

All the same, American culture has had little truck with this prickliest of geniuses since the retardation of the international film market in the '70s. Despite an unassailable rep as one of the globe's few movie masters, less than 15 percent of his last 15 years' worth of work has been released in this country. It's been seven years since a Godard film received any kind of distribution here (Hélas Pour Moi was force-fed to a few major cities in 1995; the Public's defunct art-film program gambled on it here). Not since 1985's Hail Mary has a Godard film made a substantial splash in American art houses.

Workaday reviewers shake in dread at the prospect of having to elucidate the complicated reality of a Godard film to their readers. Sure, he's not breezily accessible, nor predictable, nor profitable (his 1960 debut, Breathless, remains his only worldwide hit). Still, the public eclipse of Godard has persisted for too long. With the release of his new movie, the time is now for any filmgoers worthy of the title to come to terms with the man's rebellious voice.

That Godard himself is a recalcitrant, press-shy eccentric has only contributed to his mystique—holed up in his Swiss village, shunning world film culture at large (he has no personal agent or manager per se, just "commissions"), dissing Hollywood and America, acknowledging no obligation to man, beast, or business beyond himself. A notorious publicity no-show, Godard is famous for getting to the airport with ticket in hand, and then going home again. When the New York Film Critics Circle awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, he simply did not appear, faxing instead a wry note slamming, among others, Steven Spielberg, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and Stanley Kubrick. Last year, he did emerge at Cannes—his old stomping ground—for a rambling press conference, but allowed only one reportedly riotous critics' screening of In Praise of Love and quixotically submitted to only two interviews, with a Russian and an Argentine. Last week's stateside press junket for the new film was scotched after national journalists caught their planes, but for reasons unknown Godard missed his. It seems that however the machine of popular media wishes to use, glorify, or portray Godard, he will not go with the flow.

Such stubborn iconoclasm in the face of worldwide fame is rare enough, but it is also part and parcel of Godard's fundamental life project—the investigation of how movies register on the viewer and in the culture, visually, temporally, aurally, emotionally, philosophically, and how that impact ambiguously reflects history and memory. How to submit to an image-processing industry without losing sight of reality, identity, significance, context? Even at 71, Godard won't allow himself an autumnal fete or a respite from inquiry—for him, movies are life, but show business is death. That's the deal behind Godard's relentless lancing of Steven Spielberg's intercontinental, suffering-as-feel-good-mega-entertainment boil; the climactic dramatic crisis of In Praise of Love is the attempt by Spielberg associates to buy up an elderly couple's Resistance life-story. The trivialization of history's horrors by way of the modern age's most powerful history-making medium is a disaster to which profit and sensation—two factors of modern life Godard places no value on—have blinded us. At the movie's North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on September 12, 2001, In Praise was in fact regarded by shell-shocked critics as a trivialization itself—its mockery of Hollywood presumption and American ethnocentrism could not be swallowed easily. An eye-opening year later, the film's jabs seem almost gentle.