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I understand where Hollywood is “coming from.” I have been there myself. As a young 20 year-old, I was “breathless” about Godard’s film “Breathless” (1960). I have grown older and grown up. The Hollywood “bad boy” wannabes absolutely refuse to do so. They are obsessed with violence and sex and political conspiracy theories, and with an alarming and paranoid hatred of America.
They do not see this as furthering the ends of a second Holocaust, Islamic Jihad style. They really do not.
Yes, I understand where Hollywood is “coming from.” Once, like so many other young Americans, I adored all things European. Thus, I despised America as puritanical, reactionary, unsophisticated–dull. French cafes, baguettes, the Louvre, Monet, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, the British Museum, Stonehenge, Stratford-on-Avon, the Via Veneto, espresso, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Dutch canals, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer, all symbolized “High Culture” and countries ruled by revolutionary concepts of freedom.
We, who were young at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, all preferred the emerging European cinema; we viewed it as a mature and serious art form that was also “sexy,” at least compared to Hollywood’s cowboy and Doris Day movies. How many American filmmakers could compare to Italy’s Vittorio de Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini; Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman; or France’s Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, or Alain Resnais who pioneered what became known as The French New Wave of cinema.
Truffaut, De Sica, and all the rest are dead. All Hollywood now has left is its own adolescent adoration of gangsters, native Indians, terrorist radicals—and Godard.
However, the issue is tricky. I oppose boycotts—I really do. I do not believe that we should judge a movie by the moral standards of its creator. There are plenty of Jew haters who are not great film makers. I believe in free speech and in the First Amendment and am outraged by the politically correct censorship of thought and art. And yet, isn’t it awfully dangerous to honor those who are dangerously unrepentant racists? There are always consequences. How many bodies, mass graves, killing fields, will it take this time before the blood-letting stops?
What can one do when telling the truth is not enough? What, exactly, should we do with our human monsters? Jail them? Hang them? Censor them? Boycott their work, boycott the Oscars—that utterly threadbare event? Then, why not boycott Israel–and America too?
It is heartbreaking that honors are being heaped upon racist Jew-haters (even, perhaps especially, upon those who also make legendary films), while, at the same time, dishonor and shame are being heaped upon those who condemn this.
One very small thing we can all do is to name and expose who the racists and Jew-haters really are. The Zionist Organization of America has just condemned the Academy’s choice of Godard; so far, they stand alone.
*Updated:
This information appeared in today’s Israel National News.
Godard is “notoriously critical of Hollywood” and will therefore not appear in person to accept his award. Thus, the Academy will have his statuette delivered to him in Switzerland. Godard’s non-appearance was confirmed by Academy President Tom Sherak.
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