1968: Jean-Luc Godard was scheduled to appear as the opening speaker at a movie festival organized by British Film Institute in London. Godard was the fashionable director whose movies, radical chic, and Marxist politics matched the turmoil and uncertainty of the times. The “Summer of Love” was over. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Eldridge Cleaver led a group of Black Panthers on an ambush of police in Oakland. Students rioted on the streets of Paris, demonstrated against the war in Vietnam outside the American Embassy in London. Violence and revolution had replaced the hippie mantra of “peace and love.”
Godard seemed an appropriate fit. He was booked to give a talk about his movies, politics, and thoughts on cinema to kick off the BFI’s John Player Lectures at the National Film Theater. He had just completed Week End his infamous anti-bourgeois movie with its eight-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam and closing credits which announced Godard’s rejection of narrative cinema with a caption that read “End of Cinema.” He agreed to appear. His transport and hotel reservations were booked. Tickets for the lecture were selling well. Everything seemed ready to go. Then, a few days before his scheduled appearance, Godard sent a telegram in which he suggested he might not make it and if he didn’t, well, invite someone off the street “the poorest if possible” to give a lecture in his place:
TS 15/113 LN H0073 XF7964
NEUILLYSURSEINEPPAL 4651 60 19 1210
NATIONAL FILM THEATER SOUTH BANK WATERLOO LONDON
IF AM NOT THERE TAKE ANYONE IN THE STREET THE POOREST IF POSSIBLE GIVE HIM MY 100 POUNDS AND TALK WITH HIM OF IMAGES AND SOUDN (sic) AND YOU WILL LEARN FROM HIM MUCH MORE THAN FROM ME BECAUSE IT IS THE POOR PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INVENTING THE LANGUAGE STOP YOUR ANONYMOUS GODARD
The organizers were somewhat surprised—what the fuck does this mean? The event was sold out—what the fuck do we do? Then, on the morning of the lecture, Godard fired off another missive—you gotta be fucking kidding me…! His message read:
WILL NOT COME TOMORROW MOVIES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH CIGARETTES AND REALITY WITH SMOKE YOUR UNKNOWN GODARD
The night of Godard’s “no-show,” the movie theater at the NFT on London’s South Bank was packed. An unlucky manager had to announce to the audience Godard wasn’t going give a lecture after all. A refund was offered. One hundred patrons got their cash back. The rest stayed and watched a screening of Goodard’s movie Vivre sa vie.
In May, Godard quit France and decamped to London to start work on his film with the Rolling Stones One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil).
Below: Jean-Luc Godard talks movies, politics, and TV with Dick Cavett in 1980.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘One American Movie’: Jean Luc Godard’s abandoned Sixties manifesto
Jean-Luc Godard and the catchiest song ever written about a brutal dictator
Radical Schick: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1971 TV commercial for men’s aftershave
‘You’ve been acting like a shit’: The Godard-Truffaut blow-up of 1973
New Wave: Debbie Harry wanted to remake Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ with Robert Fripp