flâneur

Our Godard | Online Only | n+1 | Blair McClendon

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“Art today is Jean-Luc Godard,” the French poet Louis Aragon wrote in 1965. “Godard is not satisfied with the world as it is, he remakes it in his own manner . . . in Pierrot le fou red sings like an obsession.” It would again, decades later, in The Image Book. Godard has long been one of the few who believe that color is not a given, that it is a craft like any other. If his movies—the ones with Belmondo, with Gorin, with Miéville—have staying power, it is because he never completed his own search, for color or anything else. It is customary for any legendary artist to lapse into an academicism of the self. They have figured out how to do what they do and do so indefinitely. Godard wasn’t like that.

Anyone who has done a decent amount of research on Jean-Luc Godard knows that it was not terribly hard to find him, despite his reputation as a recluse. You could look up his address online, and he appeared on Google Street View walking down the street. I never have much to say to giants. It was enough to know he was out there — smoking a cigar, whining, planning — while I was elsewhere doing those same things, only much worse. “He wasn’t sick, he was simply exhausted,” someone close to the family told the French newspaper Libération of his death. A condemnation of this world. Certain people…

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