E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wave maker Jean-Luc Godard remains a mystery BY GERALD PEARY

Am I the only one who connects French/Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and Bob Dylan, both stunningly prolific and ever-uncompromising modernist geniuses whose challenging films and songs have been with the world since circa 1960? For more than four decades, their daring artistic twists and spins have alternately exhilarated and frustrated their fans. By temperament, both are moody and aloof and suffer no fools. Both are ladykillers who have often been bad to their ladies. Both talk their own species of private language, even in public, with sphinx-like logic a common denominator. Can you imagine a normal conversation with either? "Jean-Luc, seen any good movies lately?" "Bob, how about those Sox?"

I’ll admit it. This veteran interviewer is afraid to speak with Godard. I’ve passed the French New Wave cinéaste on a New York street and bowed my head. What could I say that would interest him? He takes no pleasure discussing the cinema. He has little patience for flattery, or, the opposite, for being challenged. He’d never turn the tables and ask personal questions of the interviewer. He wouldn’t give a damn. Even Colin MacCabe, a British critic who has known Godard for years and is the author of the new Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (FSG, $25), confesses in the book that, "fond as I was of the old brute, I’d never thought he had found my company irresistible."

MacCabe talks of Godard’s "complete indifference to normal social convention" and imagines him at a party displaying "an asocial silence which could freeze a room instantly." As a child in Switzerland, Jean-Luc was a thief and shoplifter. As a young man in France, he was the morose one of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, the one who had little to say after watching movies. On the dole in the 1950s, he stole first editions from friends and sold them for tickets to the cinema. When he secured a real job, it was an unlikely one: for two years, he was PR head of 20th Century Fox’s Paris office. François Truffaut was among his Cahiers film-critic friends and provided the story that motivated À bout de souffle/Breathless, Godard’s extraordinary 1959 breakthrough film. A few years later, they had a harsh, fatal falling out over politics, as Godard, by then an ultra-leftist, could no longer abide Truffaut’s classic-style middle-class films. When Truffaut died of a brain tumor, in 1984, Godard admitted he felt nothing at all.

Anna Karina was a model from Denmark who after Godard spotted her in a bubble-bath commercial starred in his classic works (Vivre sa vie, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, etc.) and became, for a few years, Mme. Godard. "For Godard, the story is of crippling jealousy," writes MacCabe, "for Karina, of desperate solitude." He stalked her everywhere. Their child was stillborn. He left her for months without explanation. She tries suicide several times. He hit her. They bitterly divorced.

Godard was never the greatest human being, though he’s long settled down, residing since the ’70s in a small Swiss town with filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville. Miéville did not consent to be interviewed for MacCabe’s book, and whatever conversations he had with Godard provided scant personal information. The result is a failure as an intimate biography — the man remains an enigma — but an excellent book for putting Godard’s œuvre into a social/political/theoretical context.

Godardians are divided. Is his career about the crown years of 1959 to 1967, Breathless to Weekend, and afterward incomprehensible self-indulgence? Or has his vision crystallized through passing time, even as his films become so private, esoteric, opaque? MacCabe is among the "later Godardians." He adores Godard’s melancholy and elegiac video essays of the 1990s; he compares the 1998 tome Histoire(s) du cinéma to Finnegans Wake. In the end, that’s what’s needed of a biographer, a partisan like MacCabe who’s convinced that Godard at a cranky 73 remains the most vital filmmaker in the world.

SHARON LOCKHART, whose work shows May 1 at the Harvard Film Archive, makes one-shot movies with a stationary camera, like the ancient Lumière films. "No" (2003) succeeds as both an anthropological and a conceptual work, with a Japanese couple bundling hay becoming a kind of dance. "Teatro Amazonas" (1999) uses the same technique pointlessly; it’s 38 minutes of a Brazilian audience turning restless at a music performance.