‘Beware of writers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation’, says E. M. Cioran. But how, otherwise to begin? In my notebook, the words, writing as life, and I remember Ferdinand in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (admittedly, I do so through Brody’s book, which is beside me here on my desk …) the fugitive who, having reached the idyll of the seaside, writes dreaming of a great Joycean book that would contain all of life. And Marianne, beautiful Marianne, fellow fugitive beside him in the sea crying up, ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do!’, and Ferdinand says ‘Silence! I’m writing!’
How ludicrous! A man with a notebook on a boulder, with Anna Karina wading beside him. Brody, anyway, tells us a marvellous story about Godard’s impossible love for his actress. Read the chapter on Alphaville, for example:
Most crucially, when Natasha asks Lemmy the fateful question – ‘Love: what is it?’ – Godard answers the question himself, cutting to an extraordinarily intimate close-up of Anna Karina, her face illuminated by velvetly indirect sunlight, almost out of character. It is a brief short of breathtaking beauty that shows what love is: the emotion, on the part of a filmmaker, that gives rise to such an image.
What romance! And Godard had already lost Karina by this time (I think). If I was to review Brody’s book (no time!) love would be the red thread I would follow through its pages, all the way up to Eloge de l’amour, whose love story, says Brody, ‘is Godard’s least inhibited and most ardent’. Is it possible to love a film that was almost impossible to watch (so boring, so difficult to follow, I who can barely tell the characters apart in an ordinary thriller)? Is it that I watched this film because I wanted to have watched it so as to read and write about it? How ludicrous! How stupid!
Brody’s book, anyway, carried me happily through a difficult time. Sometimes books can do that, and they’re worth looking out for, joining up hours and afternoons and days that would otherwise fall apart. Sometimes you need to find a power of narrative that is more powerful than you, and sweeps you up in its own arms. And when you finish it, you’re locked out, and there’s no way in again, except to read back where you’ve annotated it, and perhaps copy our parts of it, the better to remember what happened.
Lars Iyer's Blog 