I’m finally getting on this. On November 1, the NYT did a big piece on French film director Jean-Luc Godard, who is up for an honorary Oscar, that credited attacks by him from Jewish establishment orgs saying that he is an anti-Semite, based on a number of glancing statements about Jews in Hollywood, and his strong opposition to Zionism. Richard Cohen has chimed in by saying that it’s an “outrage” that Hollywood means to honor a man of raw “Jew-hatred.”
Now the pushback. Critic David Ehrenstein has since taken on Richard Cohen’s slam: “Godard has become the designated Leni Riefenstahl… He must be defended against this vicious utterly mendacious attack.”
And here is a letter written to the Times by Bill Riordan, a college professor in Colorado. Riordan specifically addresses a film by Godard called “Here and Elsewhere.” He allowed us to publish the letter because the Times doesn’t appear likely to do so.
To the Editor:
Re “Hollywood Production: An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy”
The charge that the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is an anti-Semite—reported in the Michael Cieply article in the November 2nd edition of the Times—is as absurd as it is obscene. Quoting the author of the not-very-good book, “Everything Is Cinema” does not make it any less ridiculous and creepy. The film at the center of the controversy, “Here and There,” was a masterpiece made in the mid-70s and most likely never seen by a single member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the film, Godard submits his own political practice and that of the European left (the film’s intended audience) to a searing self-criticism.
The film’s principal thesis is that the developed world’s left, unable to make a revolution in Europe and in the “first world,” projected its own desires on “third world” revolutionaries and, specifically, the left Palestinian resistance. Inert and wallowing in their political impotence, Godard blames the European left and himself for responsibility in the massacres and repression that the Palestinian resistance suffered at the hands of the Israeli military. The film, which has (like all of Godard’s work) a rich diachronic depth, views the plight of Palestinians at the hands of Zionist nationalism as the historical product of Europe’s own anti-Semitic past. Thus Godard brilliantly represents a history defined by a quasi-Hegelian unity-of-opposites (Golda Meir and Hitler) in which former victims become victimizers and what Jean-Paul Sartre would have called history’s “counter finality” where the ultimate product of Europe’s racist past is an emerging quasi-fascist and racist state constructed as a “Jewish” homeland. Many contemporary Israeli intellectuals and artists are making the same charges against the current State of Israel.
The film, if anything, seems not so much anti-Semitic as prophetic. Our contemporary situation in which a stifling ideological conformity is demanded of us, as well as the continual and ongoing attempts of censorship against any possible narratives that might counter Zionism’s self-representation, demonstrates the prescience and profundity of one of the finest film artists in our world. I (as well as Godard, I imagine) find this suffocating ideological climate chilling. The current charges against Godard continue to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of his work.
Bill Riordan
Denver, Colorado
