Well, welcome to Michael and us. I'm Will Sloane. Here is always with Luke Savage. Welcome back, folks. And if you hear the pattern of tiny feet throughout this episode, we do have a small furry guest in studio with us today. So that's what's going on. What's your name? Tell us about our third mic.

Our third mic is Rosie, although, you know, we've brought her in as producer and I'm hoping in. She mostly just kind of be in the background.

Well, I've been reading Jean-Luc Godard's collected film criticism again. It's in a book called Godard on Godard, an essential part of any cinephiles library. This was the film criticism he wrote, mostly in the 1950s and 60s, before and in the early period of him being a filmmaker at Kaia de Cinema in Paris.

And, you know, this is a book that I dependably pick off the shelf every six months at least and look through and I feel like I've made a breakthrough with it because he's not what you would call a rigorous critic. And so reading it can often be a frustrating experience.

Even if you look at some of the like footnotes that the editor or the translator will sometimes say, yeah, we don't know what he meant here.

But my feeling about Jean-Luc Godard's film criticism has always been that he threw a lot of stuff at the wall and there are at least 20 sentences in there that have permanently taken residents in my brain and have changed the way I view art or at least become part of the tapestry of how I view art.

Not more so than when he said of Jerry Lewis on the Dick Cabot show, he's more a painter than a filmmaker. You hear that and it's like insane.

But then after a while, it sits there forever and you start thinking, well, what does he mean by that? You know, he compares him to Chaplin, he compares him to Keaton, and you realize how much of, you know, what a director comedian does is compose the frame.

And how do you tell a joke in the cinematic frame? You know, I'd like to read two short passages from his film criticism about the work of Nicholas Ray, the director of such films as...

Rubble without a cause.

Bigger than life, many other great films. In his review of Hot Blood, one of his lesser films, Godard writes, if the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it and what is more of wanting to.

While it is easy to imagine John Ford as an admiral, Robert Aldrich on Wall Street, Anthony Mann on the trail of the Bayou La Fume, or Raoul Walsh as a latter-day Henry Morgan under Caribbean skies, it is difficult to see the director of Run for Cover, doing anything but make films.

A Logan or a Tashlin, for instance, might make good in the theater or musical. Preminger as a novelist, Brooks as a school teacher, Fuller as a politician, Cucor a press agent, but not Nicholas Ray.

With a cinema suddenly to cease to exist, most directors would be in no way at a loss. Nicholas Ray would.

After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rubble without a cause, one cannot but feel that here is something which exists only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anywhere else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen.

Nicholas Ray is morally a director, first and foremost. This explains the fact that in spite of his innate talent and obvious sincerity, a script which he does not take seriously will remain superficial.

So he goes on, he gives a rather ambivalent review to that one particular movie, but reading that review, you have to remember the context that when he wrote it, the Kaia critics were making this very conscious attempt to establish cinema as an art form that was not merely a poorer little brother to theater or literature.

They were rebelling against what was called the French tradition of quality. You know, in France, I couldn't really tell you the directors off the top of my head, but people who are doing, you know, high toned literary or theatrical adaptations.

In American cinema, the equivalent would have been someone like George Stevens or William Wiler. I mean, I think Stevens and Wiler made good films, but like they gravitated more towards Alfred Hitchcock.

Somebody dismissed as a mere entertainer by much of the intelligentsia, but in him they saw somebody who had qualities that were indigenous to cinema itself. It was in his gaze that was the cinematic gaze, and that was an incredibly powerful gesture at the time.

And so, you know, you read that paragraph, and here's the second paragraph I read, which is also a Nicholas Ray film, bitter victory. He writes, and it's a variation on themes established in that article. There was theater, Griffith, poetry, Murnau, painting, Rosalini, dance, Eisenstein, music, Renoir, henceforth there is cinema, and the cinema is Nicholas Ray.

I mean, you can't help but laugh at it. It's so provocative, so ridiculous in some ways, and yet it's flimsy, and yet at the same time grandiose.

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