Jean-Luc Godard: a rare interview

The enigmatic French director speaks about the furore over his recent Oscar award.

An interview with Jean-Luc Godard was published last week in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (available in translation here), and is so far strangely unreferenced in any of the passionate Anglophone articles written about the furore over his being awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last Saturday (an event he was conspiciously absent from). In the interview, Jean-Luc Godard seems to allay part of the storm growing over accusations of anti-Semitism, by commenting: “When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn’t stand up for them.”

There is, though, much evidence to suggest otherwise (summarized here by The Guardian or given at length in this article for the American fortnightly, The Forward). The much recycled story of Godard calling the producer Pierre Braunberger a “sale juif” (“dirty Jew”) in 1968 in François Truffaut’s presence (an event which allegedly led to the collapse of the two director’s longstanding friendship) is indeed, if true, shocking. But some of the other accusations leveled at him are more ambiguous. Benjamin Ivry, in his article for The Forward, submits that a line from Godard’s 1964 film Une Femme Mariée (“Today, in Germany, I said to someone, ‘How about if tomorrow, we kill all the Jews and the hairdressers?’ He replied, ‘Why the hairdressers?”) is demonstrative of an underlying anti-Semitism. This seems both unwise and unfair. The film is after all a fictional work of art. Whilst the line is undoubtedly a tasteless joke, it is the character in the film and not Godard who is making it.

The interview with Godard in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is enlightening in other senses though, namely how gratified Godard was to receive the award. When asked what the honorary Oscar would mean for him, Godard replied, “Nothing. If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it. But I think it’s strange. I asked myself: Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually know my films?” He goes on to claim that the Academy must be making their award largely on the basis of his early criticism. When asked why he didn’t attend the awards ceremony, Godard answered simply: “I don’t have a visa for the US and I don’t want to apply for one. And I don’t want to fly for that long.” It’s hard, though, not to partly attribute Godard’s no-show at the awards ceremony to a longstanding rancour towards the Hollywood establishment, who up until now have almost entirely ignored his oeuvre.

Godard’s latest release Film Socialisme won’t be coming out in Britain until April 2011, though when it showed in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last August in was popular with critics, despite deliberately provocative sub-standard subtitles (“L’argent est un bien public” was subtitled in English as “Money public good”) and the fact that Godard didn’t deign to attend the screening. In Jean-Luc Douin’s pensive review of Film Socialisme for Le Monde , he points out that what obsesses Godard, as it has done throughout his cinematic career, is the idea of “rejoining a family after having been excluded from his own, of reuniting with a tribe after having been excluded from the Godard house, after having seen the fraternity of the Nouvelle Vague fray at the edges.” When Godard talks about himself as “the Jew of cinema”, it is this continual search for a tribe, a band, a group, to which he refers. As he says in his most recent interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “I want to be together with everyone else, but stay lonely.”