Beyond Godard's Shadow: In Search Of The Evasive Anne-Marie Miéville

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) The Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville is perhaps best-known as Jean-Luc Godard's partner in life and art. At the time of his death in 2022, Miéville, now 79, had long withdrawn from filmmaking and she has always avoided the public eye. But far from disappearing, her films are now gaining new attention at festivals.

Since the great French-Swiss filmmaker's death at the age of 92 in 2022, the cinema and art world has been experiencing a“Godard moment”, to borrow the title of a recent screening and exhibition program at the Musée de l'OrangerieExternal link in Paris.

There has been a steady stream of books, articles, conferences, screenings and exhibitions-in Nyon, Paris, Berlin, Porto and most recently in London. With the imminent creation of the Jean-Luc Godard Foundation, a long-term project of documentation, archiving, and restoration is also on the horizon.

This foundation was already credited as curators in the exhibition at the Serralves Foundation in Porto as Collectif Ô Contraire, a collective composed of Godard's collaborators over two decades: Fabrice Aragno, Nicole Brenez, Jean-Paul Battaggia, and Paul Grivas.

But one name missing from these initiatives is Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard's partner in life, and, very often, in art. Given the intertwined nature of their professional and personal lives, it seems odd that she is not named among the contributors to this Godard moment. Miéville was Godard's third and final wife.

SWI swissinfo's efforts to reach Miéville through her acquaintances and festival contacts were unsuccessful. The last published interview she gave dates back to 2000, following the release of her fourth and last feature film, Après la réconciliation.

The couple lived quietly and discreetly in the small Swiss municipality of Rolle, near Lake Geneva, their home since 1978. But Godard never stayed completely out of the public eye and even cultivated an online presence in his later years, occasionally indulging fans with Instagram Lives, or enigmatic self-portraits.

In contrast, Miéville was said to be wary of those more interested in her as a person than a filmmaker. Her guardedness was often alluded to jokingly by interlocutors in the few radio and TV interviews she gave. She would respond with bemusement and frustration.

“I never had any problems when it came to getting recognition, I never suffered from being in the shadow,” Miéville once said in an interview in Le Monde. Now it seems that she chose to remain there.

>> The collaboration between Miéville and Godard also includes this ironic ad for the Swiss cigarette brand Parisiennes (1992):

At the opening party for Godard's exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie, attended by renowned figures like Dominique Païni, a curator, programmer and the former director of the Cinémathèque française, and Alain Bergala, a film critic and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinema, this writer's questions met discouraging responses.

A shared unease about speaking on behalf of someone who had chosen not to speak publicly, vague comments on grief and loss, and a definitive statement from Jean-Paul Battaggia:“Anne-Marie Miéville left the world of cinema; all of this doesn't interest her anymore.”

Fabrice Aragno, who recently spoke to swissinfo about Jean-Luc Godard, seemed to share this sense of finality regarding Miéville's work. In a brief phone call, Aragno said:“Jean-Luc used to say that she was much faster than him,” because in just 10 films“she managed to traverse the entire range of cinema. It took him much longer. He wasn't done yet.”

Jean-Michel Frodon, the former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, interviewed Miéville during his time at Le Monde. A great admirer of her films, Frodon explained that he had lost contact with her long ago. Having only second-hand information about the evolution of her relationship with Godard as well as the health challenges and other difficulties she faced over the past 15 years, he said he couldn't give a reliable update.

“The idolatrous forms of worship surrounding Godard-execrable during his lifetime but, alas for him and for us, partly indispensable to the continuation of his work-can only worsen after his death,” Frodon said.

“And they worsen the way she has (despite Godard's efforts) been rendered invisible as the co-author of many of his works. Her four feature films remain very dear to me, and I can only rejoice at any gesture that helps to preserve or restore some of the attention they deserve.”

Recently, there have been several such gestures. Miéville's work was honored in two film festivals this fall-in late October at the Ji International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, then in Madrid in November, at the Márgenes Festival and the Filmoteca Español de Madrid. Before this year, her films had seldom been screened internationally and even less so in Switzerland, her home country, where no festival or art institution has yet offered a comprehensive program dedicated to her work.

Ji Film Festival's programme manager, Adriana Belešová, said the retrospective dedicated to Miéville's work was expected to resonate more with cinephiles, film studies specialists and filmmakers than with the general Czech audience. Belešová said that although the collaboration between Godard and Miéville was far from the conventional dynamic of a female artist overshadowed by her male counterpart, critics and journalists often depicted it that way.

“We wanted to highlight just how multi-creative Miéville was,” Belešová said.“That's why we selected films that illustrate the various roles she held-doing the sound, the editing, and writing the voice-overs.”

>> For the Swiss Expo 02 , Miéville and Godard made this short film,“Liberté et Patrie” (Freedom and Fatherland), about Aimé Pache, a little known painter from their same Swiss canton, Vaud. With english subtitles :

Following the programs organized at Ji and Márgenes, the non-profit association Filmkollektiv Frankfurt is also hosting a retrospective in December focused on Miéville's solo work. Aragno told swissinfo that they are currently seeking funding to digitise the negatives and copies, many of which are only available in video formats from the 1990s:“35mm prints are hard to circulate,” he said.“We're trying to ensure the films can be properly seen in theaters, with subtitled versions available worldwide.”

Aragno said he is glad of the renewed interest in Miéville's work.“Even Jean-Luc was really annoyed when people were sometimes only interested in her because of him. It's important for her cinema to exist for its own sake.”

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