Reading with Jean-Luc Godard
Godard’s use of books, of quoted text, of written and typographic words on signs, of titles and inter-titles, presents us with quite an extreme case. He deployed text in his films like no other film director, at an intensity that may be unmatched. At the same time he was exceptionally sensitive with images (and with sound – a topic for another book?). These components worked together in these films; it would be wrong to extract the words from the films, and to suggest any dryness in this obsession. Reading with Jean-Luc Godard is a wonderful book that certainly does justice to the matter that he read, and, by considering the texts read out or invoked, it often succeeds in illuminating the films.
Reading with Jean-Luc Godard is organized alphabetically by the names of the writers quoted in the films. So, from Henri Alleg to Virginia Woolf, 50 critics and commentators, drawn from across the world, supply three-page essays (termed ‘entries’ by the editors) – no longer, no shorter – on a book or other kind of printed text that Godard deploys in his films. More than a hundred works by 90 authors are considered. The book has a preface and a coda by the late Fredric Jameson, and is concluded with set of tables, bibliographies, and indexes that are essential ingredients of its functioning.
I will try to convey the flavour of this book by describing one of its entries, Kevin J. Hayes’s discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The oval portrait’.1 Here the Godard film that refers to the story is Vivre sa vie (1962), which centres on Nana (played by Anna Karina), a young Parisian woman in a failing marriage who has to turn to prostitution for money. Hayes starts by noticing that one of the publicity stills for the film (so, not a frame enlargement, but a photograph of the set made while the filming was in progress) differs from what we see on the screen. In this photo, on the table is a copy of Freud’s Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Hayes writes that ‘The comment Freud makes in Three Essays that is most pertinent to the cinema concerns how the act of looking can trigger libidinous excitement.’ And that by lingering at this stage, the artist can redirect the libido towards the creation of art. Hayes speculates that Godard may have recognized that Freud’s book did not need to be invoked here, because he had found another text – Poe’s story – to deliver this idea.
Is this pushing interpretation too far? Hayes could have strengthened his argument by pointing out that this scene with the non-reference to Freud is followed directly by the scene in which Poe is quoted. By this stage, near the end of the film, even the improvisatory Godard would have known what he was going to do next.
So in the final, twelfth ‘tableau’ of Vivre sa vie, Poe’s story is quoted at length, in the translation by Baudelaire (another of Godard’s writers, and the subject of another essay in the book). We see a young man reading the book, but the quoted words are spoken not by him but by the director of the film. Now the meanings in this film thicken. Karina was Godard’s great muse in his films of the 1960s. We hear his own voice delivering Poe’s ‘story of an artist whose wife perishes while she sits as a model for his painting, her death coming as soon as the portrait reaches perfection.’ Hayes picks up a controversial moment here: ‘At one point as he reads, Godard interrupts the written text to speak directly to his wife and star, Anna Karina. He calls Poe’s story “our story . . . a painter portraying his love”.’ Hayes directs us to different critical views about this turn in the film: Susan Sontag felt it made ‘the one false step’ in the film; others have appreciated it as a way of highlighting the idea of the libido being channelled into art, and as a way of pointing to ‘the underlying conditions of the filmmaking process’. Harun Farocki suggested that both Poe and Godard share a ‘masculocentric’ attitude towards art, assuming that ‘a male artist is necessary to recreate female beauty in a work of art’. Hayes goes on to consider Edgar Allan Poe’s work more generally, seeing ways in which it previsioned ‘a central impulse of the cinema: to channel love into the act of capturing the source of its beauty and mystery’.
So here our critic does much more than just tabulate a reference to a writer. This is the case with all the entries: the critics discuss the writers invoked, and their texts, and see how these work as part of the fabric and functioning of the films.
The editorial mechanisms of Reading with Jean-Luc Godard are spelled out at its start by Timothy Barnard in ‘A note on the text’. This runs to eight pages and does explain in scrupulous detail all the conventions used in the presentation of its materials. Here I will point to just some of the most interesting decisions.
Perhaps the most difficult issue is how to give the titles of books and films: in the original language? or in (English) translation; and what to do about works that have been given different titles in different translations? The titles of Godard’s works are given in their original French (so, no Breathless – hurrah!). But in the entries, all the books and essays cited by Godard are referred to by English-language versions of titles. Barnard explains: ‘This title is thus either that under which the work has been published in English (or by which it is generally known by English speakers), or a title assigned to it for the purposes of the present volume (because no translation exists or because the existing translation has not been adopted).’ (p. xii)
This last part of the policy is interesting. One sees it in action in this small instance: Michel Mourlet’s article ‘Sur un art ignoré’ was used by Godard in Le mépris. In the book’s entry, under Mourlet, the header title is ‘On an Unknown Art’. In the footer, details of the first publication are given in their original glory: ‘Sur un art ignoré. Cahiers du Cinema 98 (August 1959), 23–37.’ But in the list of works cited in the entry we find: ‘Michel Mourlet. On a Misunderstood Art, 2022.
— Sur un art ignoré, 2008.’
Turn to the list of principal sources at the back, and we see what’s going on (p. 356): an English translation as ‘On a Misunderstood Art’ was published in 2022, and the French text was published in a book of Mourlet’s writings in 2008. Barnard dissents from that English version of the title (I agree with him), and prefers to use his own translation within this entry. While I’m not sure about this perhaps high-handed way with published titles, I do applaud the way the original publication is given at the foot of each starting page. Thus Poe’s ‘The oval portrait’ was originally published under another title, which we find in this footer to the entry:
‘Life in Death. Graham’s Magazine 20, no. 4 (April 1842), 200–1.’
This adds interesting and valuable information.
Dating of films can be a complex matter. Barnard explains that only the date of ‘completion and wide release of a final or near-final version is indicated in the entry’. What counts as ‘wide release’? And if a film was released in France in December 1998, in Germany in January 1999, in the USA in February 2000, what year should we take? Films whose release was delayed significantly – by censorship processes, for example – may carry two dates. Godard’s Le petit soldat (1960/63) is an example here.
Barnard makes good use of typographic possibilities to enhance meaning and use. Authors cited by Godard and discussed elsewhere in the book are set in small capitals. Full or ‘block’ capitals are used to translate and quote Godard’s own use of such capital letters in the intertitles that are used in some of his films. The typeface used to set the book offers these options, and it provides non-lining numerals that are used here as a norm.
One sees the typographic coding beautifully at work in the title index (pp. 393–403), which, like all the lists at the back of the book, is set in a single column. The coding used is: titles of essays in upper- and lowercase roman; titles of books in italic; titles of books and essays that are the subject of entries are set in small capitals.
Caboose, the publisher of the book, is run from Montreal by Timothy Barnard, co-editor of this book, and involved as editor or translator in several of the other books on its list. I bought my copy of Reading with Jean-Luc Godard direct from the publisher and received an email from Barnard advising me about its shipping time: this and some other details are sure signs that this is a one-person-with-helpers outfit.
I had to look up the meaning of ‘caboose’. From Wikipedia: ‘A caboose is a crewed North American railroad car coupled at the end of a freight train. Cabooses provide shelter for crew at the end of a train, who were formerly required in switching and shunting; as well as in keeping a lookout for load shifting, damage to equipment and cargo, and overheating axles.’ I might guess that this name here makes a nod to the role of freight trains in films, and perhaps it also suggests what an editor/publisher can do: look after the material being carried, care for it without making a fuss, and all this from a place at the end that you might miss altogether.
The imprint page (p. iv) has the ring of a small publisher on a mission. We read ‘Prepared without financial assistance, public or private.’ (set in small capitals). The copyright line: ‘No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, who holds exclusive publication rights.’ (Does this apply to my photos included in this piece? I would say that these are an essentiual part of my discussion, and are ‘fair dealing’.) And: ‘Designed and typeset in Janson type by Marina Uzunova and Timothy Barnard.’ And – ‘Printed in Sweden by By Wind on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC®) certified paper.’
As to how the book opens physically: it’s not bad. It is sewn in sections of 16, and the glueing of sections is fairly flexible. Even if this isn’t cold glue, a book of this extent (448 pages) made in this way does lie fairly flat when you open out the middle pages (this is for the paperback edition; there is a hardback too).
I have seen – though not yet read – one other Caboose book: Godard’s ‘Introduction to a true history of cinema and television’ (2014), which gives the (or a) text for talks that he gave in 1978 in Montreal. This is another substantial book (560 pages) and evidently the product of a heroic feat of editorial work, in its creation of text from a videotape of the talks, bypassing the ‘faulty and incomplete’ book publication of 1980 in French.
Reading with Jean-Luc Godard is a book done with high intelligence and full-out conviction. With Andrew McPherson’s The life, times, and work of William Gillies, it is joint winner of the prize for the best edited work that I read in 2025.
Timothy Barnard & Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Reading with Jean-Luc Godard, Montreal: Caboose, 2023
Here may be the place to point out that the style of this Substack is to follow a bibliographer’s convention in capitalization of titles (apart from proper names, first letter of the title only). Barnard follows the usual Anglo-American conventions of capitalizing: as well as the first letter of first words, every noun, adjective, adverb, but not most prepositions and articles, are given initial capitals. Similarly – because that is the convention used in this Substack – I have started the publisher’s name with capital letter, despite the publisher setting it all in lowercase.