Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

By Richard Brody

Faber, 720pp, £30

IT PROBABLY WASN'T RICHARD Brody's purpose, when he started this exhaustive biography, to show how one of the world's greatest film-makers became an intolerable gasbag. But that is the result, and unless you think Jean-Luc Godard has made a decent film in the last 39 years, you might find yourself struggling to empathise with him.

At the start though, it was so different. Before Godard started living entirely within his own head, he produced films of true genius. For eight years from 1959,

he produced an astonishing 15 full-length features, starting with À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and including Pierrot le Fou and Weekend.

Everything is Cinema works its way methodically through Godard's career, beginning with his days as a young cinephile in the early 1950s, writing for Parisian film journals like La Gazette du Cinema and, later, the newly founded Cahiers du Cinema. Godard's entree into the French film industry, via writing criticism, was "revolutionary and didactic": Godard and his contemporaries educated themselves by making pilgrimages to screenings at the Cinematheque and the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where they watched three or four films a day. Godard, who came from an affluent family, had more money than his contemporaries and found creative, if not especially ethical, ways to get more. In 1950, he helped finance a film, partly by stealing and selling rare first editions from his grandfather's library.

Godard's glory years ended with La Chinoise, his tone poem about radical idealism among the young, and Weekend, the movie that, Brody tells us, Godard himself said was " 'closer to a cry'". (Its final title cards read "end of story" and "end of cinema".) Both of these pictures appeared in France just before 1968, and they precipitated in Godard a "political and aesthetic breakdown".

The second half of Everything is Cinema covers the films Godard made after 1967, and it's a very long half. Brody tries to energise us for this interminable home stretch. He acknowledges that post-1967, Godard – who at the time considered himself a Maoist – was trapped in an ideological straitjacket but adds that this "provided the foundation for a new, co-operative form of film-making" that would inform the rest of Godard's career.

Nice try. If only the movies were better. Brody himself dislikes some of them (Notre Musique) and greatly admires others (Nouvelle Vague). But his enthusiasm for late Godard feels scholarly and tempered rather than passionate, and his extended clinical explications of these films (and the television work Godard did at the time) weigh the book down. Godard's "co-operative form of film-making", when not working with either his friends or partners, looks more like a dictatorship than a co-operative: Brody's narrative is peppered with quotations from actors, cinematographers and others (among them Norman Mailer, who worked briefly with Godard on the 1987 King Lear) attesting to the director's rudeness and willful refusal to communicate what he wanted from them.

Brody is hardly blind to his subject's foibles: he calls Godard on his flimsier political ideas, particularly his devotion to Maoism (a trend among French intellectuals in the late 1960s that Brody identifies, rightly, as thinly-veiled fascism) and, later, the anti-Semitism that repeatedly surfaced in his work. It's also worth noting that Godard, the committed Maoist and spewer of anti-capitalist, anti-American rhetoric, made two commercials for Nike in the early 1990s. They were never broadcast, though presumably Godard cashed the cheques.

Throughout his career, Godard's political ideology has often amounted to little more than slogans, attention-grabbing sound bites. In 1969, he told a London journalist that opera houses should be burned as a means of remaking the culture. Then he amended the notion: "No, not burn them, just forget about them a bit. As Mao said, if we burn books we would not know how to criticise them." Although Brody repeatedly challenges Godard's limited ideology, he does buy a little too readily into the notion that a work of art informed by political ideas is inherently more meaningful or more interesting than one with, say, a great deal of aesthetic inventiveness or emotional depth.

Godard's political ideas have never been the strongest elements of his movies. Unfortunately, after 1968, they often became their focal point. Brody is at his best when he's describing how Godard's technique intensifies the charge of the stories he's telling, opening us up to new ways of seeing. "Even now," Brody writes, "Breathless feels like a high-energy fusion of jazz and philosophy. After Breathless, most other new films seemed instantly old-fashioned." He's got that right. Breathless is Godard's most readily comprehensible film, the access point for many future devotees. And its freshness never abates: to watch it, even today, is to feel present at the birth of something new. Beginning of story. Beginning of cinema. If Godard had given us nothing more, that would be enough.