Onathanrosenbaum

Godard in the Age of Video [SOFT AND HARD]

From the Chicago Reader (November 17, 1995). — J.R. Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard With Godard and Miéville. A 48-minute video that’s premiering in Chicago ten years after it was made, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) is so far in advance of most films and videos made today about the essential properties of both media that it makes not so much Chicago but contemporary Western culture feel like an intellectual backwater. It was commissioned by and originally broadcast on England’s Channel Four, and although most of Godard and Miéville’s talk is in French and subtitled, the funding source is acknowledged in several ways: by the video’s English title, by English intertitles throughout, by many stills from Hollywood pictures (including Frankenstein, Scarface, Rear Window, and the 1948 Joan of Arc) employed as punctuation, by an early sequence of Godard speaking in English on the phone about business arrangements for his film King Lear, and by a brief but moving exchange in English between Godard and Miéville that concludes the work. Read more

Jun 8, 2025 - 07:15

Godard in the Age of Video [SOFT AND HARD]

From the Chicago Reader (November 17, 1995). — J.R.

Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject)

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard

With Godard and Miéville.

A 48-minute video that’s premiering in Chicago ten years after it was made, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) is so far in advance of most films and videos made today about the essential properties of both media that it makes not so much Chicago but contemporary Western culture feel like an intellectual backwater. It was commissioned by and originally broadcast on England’s Channel Four, and although most of Godard and Miéville’s talk is in French and subtitled, the funding source is acknowledged in several ways: by the video’s English title, by English intertitles throughout, by many stills from Hollywood pictures (including Frankenstein, Scarface, Rear Window, and the 1948 Joan of Arc) employed as punctuation, by an early sequence of Godard speaking in English on the phone about business arrangements for his film King Lear, and by a brief but moving exchange in English between Godard and Miéville that concludes the work. Read more