Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

Half of me simply wants to divert your attention to Film Forum’s “Godard’s ’60s” series, currently unspooling until early June. Unfair? Not really. Any time spent with this daring (and, let’s face it, difficult) filmmaker shouldn’t be wasted on half measures. Godard’s transformative art—the early romps that still feel like spring rains, the tortured 1970s political tracts, etc.—represents a curious mind, tossed by wavering confidence, hauteur, even criminality (at a young age).

But here is a dutiful biography, dogged and rigorous, penned by The New Yorker’s film-department second-stringer Richard Brody. Much like Vincent Lobrutto’s oddly uninspiring 1996 life of Stanley Kubrick, Everything Is Cinema collects tons of data but forgets to awaken the filmmaker within. (Note Brody’s subtitle, almost a declaration of war against Vanity Fair types who would deign to desire a little off-set conclusion-drawing.) Brody merely reports. Sometimes he flaunts an unfashionable opinion, placing 2001’s stilted In Praise of Love on the “highest of pinnacles.” But overall, he doesn’t seem suited to chronicling a risk-taker.

What’s missing? To borrow a phrase from the master (try to find a copy of Godard on Godard), a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Perhaps proceeding film by film, chapter by chapter, is a little dull. The material still provides some high points, especially when Godard estranges himself from his New Wave peers in the 1970s. In this section (already excerpted in Brody’s magazine), the book briefly comes to life with hurt feelings. But the potential for radical thought, implicit in all of the director’s work, is somehow lost.