One of your characters says that Michel Foucault has confused words and things. Do you share his opinion?
Oh God, the Reverend Doctor Foucault! The first thing I did was read the first chapter in his latest book, the analysis of Velasquez' las Meninas. I skipped through the rest of it; I picked up a little here and there-you know I can't read. Some time later I was at Nanterre, looking for locations. In talking to students and professors there, I began to ap reciate the real inroads the book had been making in the academic establishment. So I went back to it again, with this in mind. It began to look really debatable. The current vogue for the "humanities" in the daily press seems very suspicious. I heard that Gorse had been thinking about making Foucault head of the Radio-Television. I have to admit I preferred Joanovici.
In this connection, how do you view the use of linguistics in the study of film?
As a matter of fact, I was just talking about it with Pasolini, at Venice. I had to talk to him because, as I've told you, I can't read, or at least not the stuff men like him have been writing about film. I just don't see the point. If it interests him, I mean Pasolini, to talk about "prose film" and "poetic film," okay. But if it's somebody else, well . . . If I read the text on film and death Cahiers published in French, I read it because he's a poet and it talks about death; so, it's got to be beautiful. It's beautiful like Foucault's text on Velasquez. But I don't see the necessity. Something else might be just as true. If I'm not so fond of Foucault, it's because he's always saying, "During this period, people thought 'A,B,C'; but, after such and such a precise date, it was thought, rather, that '1,2,3'." Fine but can you really be so sure? That's precisely why we're trying to make movies so that future Foucaults won't be able to make such assertions with quite such assurance. Sartre can't escape this reproach, either.
Struggle on Two Fronts: A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard interviewed by Jacques Bontemps, Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye, and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du Cinema #194 (October 1967) pp. 13-26, 66-70
Oh God, the Reverend Doctor Foucault! The first thing I did was read the first chapter in his latest book, the analysis of Velasquez' las Meninas. I skipped through the rest of it; I picked up a little here and there-you know I can't read. Some time later I was at Nanterre, looking for locations. In talking to students and professors there, I began to ap reciate the real inroads the book had been making in the academic establishment. So I went back to it again, with this in mind. It began to look really debatable. The current vogue for the "humanities" in the daily press seems very suspicious. I heard that Gorse had been thinking about making Foucault head of the Radio-Television. I have to admit I preferred Joanovici.
In this connection, how do you view the use of linguistics in the study of film?
As a matter of fact, I was just talking about it with Pasolini, at Venice. I had to talk to him because, as I've told you, I can't read, or at least not the stuff men like him have been writing about film. I just don't see the point. If it interests him, I mean Pasolini, to talk about "prose film" and "poetic film," okay. But if it's somebody else, well . . . If I read the text on film and death Cahiers published in French, I read it because he's a poet and it talks about death; so, it's got to be beautiful. It's beautiful like Foucault's text on Velasquez. But I don't see the necessity. Something else might be just as true. If I'm not so fond of Foucault, it's because he's always saying, "During this period, people thought 'A,B,C'; but, after such and such a precise date, it was thought, rather, that '1,2,3'." Fine but can you really be so sure? That's precisely why we're trying to make movies so that future Foucaults won't be able to make such assertions with quite such assurance. Sartre can't escape this reproach, either.
Struggle on Two Fronts: A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard interviewed by Jacques Bontemps, Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye, and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du Cinema #194 (October 1967) pp. 13-26, 66-70
