Released a year after Jean-Luc Godard’s death at age 91 in September 2022, writer-director Cyril Leuthy’s 2022 documentary Godard Cinema (Kino, $29.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD) is an informative and engrossing endeavor to unravel the mysteries and contradictions behind the movies’ most disruptive trailblazer.
Leuthy interviewed subjects from in and outside of Godard’s circle, from actors like Marina Vlady, Macha Méril and Julie Delpy to academics and film scholars, in an attempt to capture the filmmaker’s “aura.” Godard would have hated so mystical a term, but for Leuthy’s movie, it’s as usefully nebulous as “auteur,” the word Godard and his New Wave colleagues embraced for themselves.
Indeed, Godard would have turned his nose up at a movie this conventional in its structure. Leuthy inserts a jump cut here and there, and shoots one of his subjects from behind a bar in a manner similar to a sequence in Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, but these are cheeky surface homages — Easter eggs for the Godard heads. Godard Cinema’s director is no radical; his previous features have included TV docs on Maurice Chevalier and Jean-Pierre Melville. And his narration is occasionally cringe in its middle school book-report directness: “Behind the legend, there can only be a man.”
All of that said, Leuthy is just as likely to drop a phrase that’s elegant and thoughtful, describing Godard’s body of work as defined by “shifts, ruptures, utopia and loneliness.” There’s something to be said for a movie that tries to reckon with an artist this slippery, and I frankly learned a lot about a filmmaker I deeply admired.
For his part, Leuthy’s initial admiration for Godard is tempered by the honest assessments of his interviewees and the takeaways he uncovers. Godard was a kleptomaniac, for one, and he stole from his uncle to fund an early Jacques Rivette film in which he appeared. In a manner suggestive of Alfred Hitchcock, he reportedly treated his actors like parrots, if not cattle — eschewing written dialogue in script form, but delivering obtuse sentences into their earpieces during the shoots for them to speak verbatim. If you believe Leuthy’s sources, Godard was a misogynist who was coolly detached from women, and was vindictive to those who didn’t respond favorably to his advances — another echo of Hitchcock. What at first feels like a hagiography by an awed fan turns into a postmortem that is, to borrow a phrase, fair and balanced.
Leuthy spends a lot of time on Godard’s creative abyss during his Maoist period (1968 to 1979), which is fair enough. But instead of haranguing on Godard’s blinkered politics during this time, I would have wanted as much a focus on Godard’s brilliant twilight in the 21st century, including his revolutionary 3D experiment Goodbye to Language (2014), but none of this beguiling output is mentioned. Godard Cinema is divided into five chapters, but it seems to be missing a sixth, or at least a coda. I wanted the movie to be longer, but then again, when you’re in the grip of Godard, even secondhand, you tend to not want to let go.
The most notable bonus feature in the Kino Blu-ray is the inclusion of Godard’s final film, a 20-minute short called Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars,” released posthumously at Cannes in 2023. It’s as gnomic as you’d expect, and follows where 2018’s The Image Book left off. A slow-cinema essay film full of disjunctions between picture, voice and music, it contains stills of abstract art, manipulated postcards, cerebral koans, ephemera from Godard’s archive and even, briefly, an actual moving image.
There are references to some of Godard’s old saws, like Communism and the May 1968 uprisings, and to Palestine and to Sarajevo and to Nazi Germany. As far as shorts go, it feels long, and you walk away with the impression that, perhaps more than anything Godard directed since the ’70s, Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist was made for himself, not an audience. Having the opportunity to experience it is a privilege, if not exactly a pleasure. And then, like Godard himself, it abruptly ends.