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bent over his notebooks, the lamplight glowing softly
 

...As Jim Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice, “a goodly portion of JLG/JLG is charged with death, absence, silence. . . . [H]oled up in his tidy house in Rolle, Switzerland, Godard himself is his own elder, puttering with tapes, bent over his notebooks” (“His Life to Live,” 58); Godard’s home has become a fortress of books and videotapes, “a prison in which the caged artist feels at liberty” (Krauss, 160).

ex Wheeler W. Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (1997) : 200 : link

the first quote — actually two, cobbled together — is not from Hoberman but rather Georgia Brown, “His Life to Live” in The Village Voice (May 10. 1994) : 58
accessible at the PFA CineFiles : link (free, but need to sign up)
where the passage (untruncated) is :
“Now in JLG, holed up in his tidy house in Rolle, Switzerland, Godard himself is his own elder, puttering with tapes, bent over his notebooks, the lamplight glowing as softly as any diva could desire.”

The Krauss passage is from
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986) : 160 : link
the chapter originally appeared as “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” A Postmodernist Repetition,” in October 18 (Autumn 1981) : 47-66 (56) : link (jstor)
 

on “cobbling together” — essentially what my putterings (and other) derivations are —
a difference being, here not knowing what is to be said (or hummed), until it is uttered, whereas scholarship is intentional, has an outline/plan... takes pains to communicate... rationality...
 

13 June 2023