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By Andrew Lapin
(SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 / JTA) In 2010, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced plans to award French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard an honorary Oscar. Many in the Jewish community revolted.
Calling on the Academy to rescind the Oscar, the right-wing Zionist Organization of America called Godard a “virulent antisemite,” arguing that Godard had a record of making antisemitic comments and putting antisemitic language into his films. Jewish press outlets reported accusations that the filmmaker was an antisemite.
Such claims of antisemitism were a constant throughout the long and idiosyncratic career of the pioneering French New Wave filmmaker, who died Tuesday at age 91 from assisted suicide. But for Godard, life was just an extension of cinema — all a public performance, as his Jewish biographer Richard Brody chronicled in the book “Everything Is Cinema.” So while Godard the filmmaker continually made his movies into an expression of radical, sometimes contradictory politics, commentators and even close friends could never be certain if Godard the person truly held those views.
Even as his films included jokes about slaughtering Jews (in 1964’s “A Married Woman”) and a line about Jews inventing Hollywood (in 2010’s “Film Socialisme”), he also expressed sympathy for the Jewish people, befriended Europe’s leading Jewish intellectuals and engaged in rigorous, thoughtful debates about the ethics of how and when to depict the Holocaust on film.
Godard’s Pro-Palestinian Activism
All this came amid Godard’s outspoken pro-Palestinian activism. His 1976 essay film “Here and Elsewhere,” which he co-directed with his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville, includes positive depictions of Palestinian resistance fighters and juxtaposed former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir with Hitler. The film was born out of the remnants of the duo’s failed attempt to make a movie about Palestinian liberation, to be funded by the Arab League.
According to reporting at the time by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a militant Zionist group calling itself “An Eye For An Eye” released stink bombs and mice into a Paris theater showing the film, much to the anger of the theater’s Jewish director, who called the attack “Nazi-like.”
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