Godard at 70

Did I really have time to pen such missives? I post this as a reminder of how much time I used to have to send letters to newspapers and magazines. Of course they didn't print it: must have been The Guardian or Time Out. Godard must be 80 in two years. Will he get a better treatment this time. of course he will. The hacks will read the biographies by McCabe and Roud.

The article (November 26) printed to mark Godard’s 70th birthday inadvertently gestures towards its own more pervasive shortcomings by way of several glaring errors. Godard was not the only director associated with the Nouvelle Vague to avoid simply “renewing traditional cinema” - as anyone familiar with the work of Varda and Rivette would attest. The surname of Godard’s second wife is Wiazemsky (not Wiamensky). As to whether she can be said to be “dull”, one can only speculate about the criteria the unnamed author of the article uses to judge humans - but presumably they are of a piece with those which permit him or her to dismiss Godard’s entire output of the 1980s and 1990s as offensive, callow and boring. Myriem Roussel, and not Juliette Binoche, played the lead role in Godard’s Hail Mary. If the author of the piece cared to check the archives he or she would find copious evidence that the condemnation which greeted the film in some quarters was far from universal. Regardless of the opinion one might have of Godard’s work it deserves better treatment than this. After all, according to the anecdote related in the article, even Godard at least did Brody the courtesy of one interview before denying him a second.