Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject)
A 48-minute video that’s premiering in Chicago ten years after it was made, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville’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 Mieville’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 Mieville that concludes the work.
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An intimate home video in most of its details and ambience–taped in and around Godard and Mieville’s home in rural Switzerland and built around their normal daily activities–Soft and Hard gradually turns into a discussion of and meditation on the differences between TV/video (“soft”) and film (“hard”). The transition from domestic documentary to epistemological investigation is accomplished so subtly, on so many different fronts, that one can’t always pinpoint when and where it takes place. But key moments in this process include points at which TV screens and the images they contain impinge on domestic events (including the climactic conversation); a scene punctuated with freeze-frames showing Mieville at an ironing board, during which Godard, after taking several practice swings with a tennis racket, irascibly remarks, “So I’m making pictures instead of making children–does that stop me from being a human being?”; and a passage from Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil read aloud by Godard in the front seat of a car while Mieville goes for a walk (yielding a lyrical passage of superimposed pans across clouds and landscape).
Mieville–initially a still photographer and subsequently a filmmaker–has been an important part of Godard’s life since the early 70s, when she nursed him through two and a half years of intermittent hospital treatment following a serious motorcycle accident. Mieville is now accorded cowriting, codirecting, and/or coediting credits on some Godard projects but not on all. Soft and Hard is probably the collaborative work in which she’s most frequently seen and heard (though she also figures fairly prominently in First Name: Carmen, where significantly she plays Godard’s nurse). And surely it’s the work that gives us the best, most precise depiction of how they collaborate. Among the many possible meanings of the title is that these adjectives apply to Godard and Mieville, though it’s by no means certain that Mieville is the “soft” member of the duo, despite Godard’s prominence in their scenes together. The late Serge Daney once described her highly critical offscreen voice in such films as Ici et ailleurs (1974) and Numero deux (1975) as “cruel mothering.” But to my mind she saves both Godard and this video from the unchecked neo-Goethean excesses of self-regard and melancholia that characterize his more recent JLG by JLG.
Considering how important metaphor, simile, and subjectivity are to Godard’s poetics, it’s small wonder that he would lament the prosaic, antimetaphoric, and “objective” side of TV–a side that, in retrospect, the whole first section of Soft and Hard was devoted to trying to overcome through the expressive, playful use of freeze-frames, slurred motion, and superimpositions.
