Read Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard for Free Online Page B

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    In his statement of purpose for the exhibit, he brought up what he called “a question” by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “in the ‘I think, therefore I am,’ is the ‘I’ of ‘I am’ no longer the same as the ‘I’ of ‘I think,’ and why?” He then suggested, “The project Collages de France will seek to respond to this kind of question, more profoundly than the philosopher, in a sort of proof by nine courses.” The intellectual ambition and philosophical scope of the enterprise by which Godard intended “to show and to demonstrate several aspects that have made and unmade ‘la cinématographie’” was grand. Once again, what Godard conceived as the cinema’s privileged relation to both reality and the imaginary made it the subject of subjects, the means by which all things and all ideas could be considered in their entirety.
    However, practical issues intervened, notably with the administration of the museum and the conventions of its installations. After conflict with curators, particularly with Dominique Païni, Godard refused to work with the museum’s officials and put the exhibit together on his own, with the help of staff. The exhibit, retitled Voyage(s) en utopie (Voyage(s) in Utopia), Godard, 1946–2006 , was reconceived: no longer would it feature Godard’s frequent appearance, but rather three rooms filled with images and documents, as well as a new video, Vrai Faux Passeport (Real Fake Passport), that would play on a screen. Yet even in its truncated version, the exhibit provided proof, as if more were needed, of Godard’s claims for the cinema and its inseparability from his own identity. According to Godard, the cinema was, is, more than itself; it is both a supreme aspiration and an impossibility, a repository of history and intimate memory in an age of celebrity and forgetting, a lost golden age of self-transcendence, self-discovery, and a noble, doomed mission of folly for those who would attempt, as Godard himself continues to do, to recover it and restore it.
    A complete retrospective of Godard’s work, shown at Beaubourg concurrently with the exhibit, was a great success, with a full house at most of its screenings. As had long seemed clear to those who followed Godard’s career, and to Godard himself, the oeuvre transcended the confines of the movie industry; now, it officially took its place in the house of art—precisely the claim with which the New Wave had demanded its place in the sun.

EPILOGUE
    R OLLE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS ARE A NATURAL PARA dise. The fifteenth-century castle perches on the shore of the dark blue waters of Lake Geneva. A hundred yards out into the lake, a rounded islet with arcs of dense foliage pierced by a proud, solemn obelisk resembles a Fragonard come to life. The setting is so timeless, it is as if Godard has found shelter in a most un-Swiss form of paradise, one in which the clocks seem to have stopped.
    Godard dines here often with Anne-Marie Miéville in the shadow of the medieval castle at the Hostellerie du château (where he filmed Michel Piccoli in 2 × 3 Years of French Cinema ), as he did during my visit to the town in June 2000. In the busy restaurant, even the nearest voices melt into the reverberant din of table talk and kitchen sounds, yet one could discern the high, flutelike voice of Anne-Marie Miéville: “Brigitte Bardot…Cannes…to drop off his screenplay…he’s waiting… budget… doing the color timing before the editing…” Occasionally, when Miéville paused, Godard murmured haltingly before she resumed the steady flow of energized observations. One of the restaurant’s waitresses described the evening as typical: “He hardly ever speaks. She speaks, not him.” 1 Godard seemed to be enjoying a kind of cinematic serenade, an intimate update from the realm of movies, pronounced by the one trustworthy messenger who was not of that fallen world.
    Earlier, Godard had spoken to me of filmmakers whose work