Jean Luc Godard's purported anti-semitism

Brody’s most incriminating charge is that of anti-Semitism, not only in connection with Godard’s longtime support of the Palestinian cause but as a matter of generalized prejudice rooted in everything from his childhood absorption of ambient French bigotry to his feud with Claude Lanzmann over the latter’s refusal to use archival footage in the Holocaust documentary Shoah. Brody musters a fair amount of evidence, such as a 1985 remark that invokes the stereotyped slur of Jewish usury: in the history of cinema, Godard said, the ”real producer” is “the image of the Central European Jew” because “[m]aking a film [involves] visibly producing debts.” Brody locates the heart of Godard’s anti-Jewish bias in his conviction—aired most expansively in Histoire(s) du cinéma, his 1998 video series—that true cinema died in the middle Forties as a result of its failure to document the Holocaust, a failure that Godard attributes to money-minded Jewish studio heads. More broadly, Brody paints Godard as an obsessive artist who regards “all of human history as a precursor to or tributary of the history of cinema,” and who blames the Jewish people—starting with Moses, who returned from the Burning Bush with tablets of law rather than icons of revelation—for “the fundamental cultural flaw of society, its preference for text over images, its anti-cinematic prejudice.” Brody finds the apex of Godard’s bigotry in the 2004 collage-drama Notre Musique, which Brody calls “a film of prewar prejudices adorned with postwar resentments—and, like much else in the history of anti-Semitism, with personal frustrations.” As powerful as much of Brody’s argument is, he weakens it by overinterpreting the evidence and (as with the women-and-films motif) pushing it too far—writing about Notre Musique, for example, as if anti-Semitism overwhelmed every other element in its intricate network of images and ideas. But dubious devices mar only a few portions of Everything Is Cinema, and my other complaints are relatively minor, relating to interpretations more than methodologies.

http://www.cineaste.com/articles/everything-is-cinema-the-working-life-of-jeanluc-godard