How to write a letter to a Maoist director, if you must

To what do we owe this new flare-up of interest in Jean-Luc Godard? Surely the publication of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by the New Yorker's Richard Brody, and surely we should thank him for the opportunity to revisit the differences between leftist and not-leftist cinema.

My father kept (keeps?) a copy of the lyrics to "Can't Get Started" in the desk drawer of any office he works in; I keep a photocopy of Truffaut's 1973 letter to Godard that I made on the Yale library's cheap photocopier, even now that I've actually shelled out the Amazon money for his Correspondence: 1945-1983 and don't need the photocopy anymore. Here's a taste:

With every shot of [X] in Weekend, it was as though you were tipping a wink at your pals: this whore wants to make a film with me, take a good look at how I treat her: there are whores and there are poetic young women.

. . . The notion that all men are equal is theoretical with you, it isn't keeply felt, which is why you have never succeeded in loving anyone or in helping anyone, other than by shoving a few banknotes at them. Someone, maybe Cavanna, once wrote, "One should despise money, especially small change," and I've never forgotten how you used to get rid of centimes by slipping them down the backs of chairs in cafes.

. . . After all, those who called you a genius, no matter what you did, all belonged to that famous trendy Left that runs the gamut from Susan Sontag to Bertolucci via Richard Roud, Alain Jouffroy, Bourseiller, and Cournot, and even if you sought to appear impervious to flattery, because of them you began to ape the world's great men, de Gaulle, Malraux, Clouzot, Langlois, you fostered the myth, you accentuated that side of you that was mysterious, inaccessible and temperamental (as Scott would say), all for the slavish admiration of those around you. You need to play a role and the role needs to be a prestigious one; I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job. But you, you're the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery.

He ends the letter with a quote from Diary of a Country Priest: "If I had, like you, failed to keep the promises of my ordination, I would prefer it to have been for a woman's love rather than for what you call your intellectual development."

It's a very literate put-down, and Truffaut is very good at capturing the style of a benevolent man at the end of his rope, but the best thing about the letter is the way he brings a director's eye to Godard's behavior. "The Ursula Andress of militancy?" This must be the man who, in his days as a critic, could tell that Nicholas Ray hated doctors because in Bigger than Life he always blocked them in groups of three, framing them like thugs in a gangster movie.

It is interesting to consider Truffaut as a conservative, or at least as someone pushed in that direction by the soixante-huitard radicalism around him. Even as early as 1960 he was saying that Camus "resembles--with respect--American left-wingers a la Dassin, the type who discover at the age of thirty-five that everyone on this earth should have enough to eat."