An Oscar for Godard?

„I’ve noted with dismay a meme burbling up in the press and online in the last few weeks, culminating in Michael Cieply’s piece in today’s Times, in which an extremely selective and narrow use is made of passages from my book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, in which remarks of Godard’s that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic are used as fodder to question whether it’s fitting to award Godard an honorary Oscar.

These writers seem not to have read the book in its entirety. Had they done so, they would, I think, be unlikely to challenge the award. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Godard is also the filmmaker who, more than any other beside Claude Lanzmann, has approached the Holocaust with the greatest moral seriousness; in his films, he has treated it as the central political and even aesthetic crisis of the time and has argued, in films and in interviews, that the failure of the cinema to document the Holocaust in the hope of preventing it can even be described as the medium’s—and its artists’— definitive and irreparable failure. In such films as Hélas pour moi and Eloge de l’amour, Godard creates a cinema that is deeply infused with the spirit of Jewish thought, identity, tradition, and history. They are not unalloyed celebrations of Jews; they are profound artistic meditations on the intellectual and emotional connections between the complex heritage and the people who bear it.

I discuss in the book the distinctive centrality that the cinema plays in Godard’s life and thought, and his deep, burdensome personal identification with its history and its destiny; and I discuss the fact that, in Godard’s vastly philosophical conception of the cinema, he sees it as something of a counter-tradition to the Mosaic one: for Godard, the visual basis of the cinema was thwarted in advance, at the dawn of recorded history, by the fact that Moses delivered written law rather than images. Godard acknowledges the centrality of the Hebrew Bible to modern life, to his own life and work—but it’s a legacy that he struggles with mightily, and that, as a true artistic radical, he challenges. It’s what makes his work so stimulating; it’s what makes his work so dangerous—as all great art is, in its essence.”