by Scott Macaulay

"Where’s the debate?" the anti-war opposition asks about our American media. The organized debate may be a lost art form, but it’s been replaced in our popular culture, for better or worse, by the interview. Indeed, scores of Q&A’s litter our media landscape, from fawning celebrity handjobs to pseudo-serious "expert commentaries."

In American television, the interview as product is defined by the interviewer. Charlie Rose, Barbara Walters, Bill O’Reilly, Jimmy Glick – all create rhetorical frames that shade the words that fill them. Reading The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/2001, though, one is reminded that there are still interview subjects capable of regaining control over the interview process. This small, spiffy, and very orange book, distributed in the U.S. by Distributed Art Publishers, contains three long interviews with Jean-Luc Godard recorded during the time he worked on his In Praise of Love and History/Histories of the Cinema. As the publisher notes in his introduction, "Any interview is more or less a game of tennis, and this is especially true of Jean-Luc Godard. The filmmaker starts off strong, acing us with a winning serve…"

Film lovers interested in the Leighton Hewitt of the directed dialogue can pick up this book at artist bookstores and sample these and other prime Godardisms.

On digital video: "Everyone says that digital video allows you to do this or that, without ever saying what was actually done. Digital video allows you to be free, but free to do what? At what moment? Actually, few things change. Celebration is a thoroughly standard, even academic film."

On whether he owns a DVD player: "Yes, but I haven’t managed to go beyond the control panel… You need to use a remote that is too complicated. I’ll learn, or I’ll pay a maid who can handle DVD… "

On the death of celluloid: "The day when celluloid film no longer exists, the world will have changed. A certain way of storing, of recording, that partakes of both cinema and literature, will have disappeared. The cinema provides us with a metaphor of this system. The positive is given to us; it’s up to us to make the negative, as Kafka said. French cinema today, I get the impression that it is given the positive but it is not making the negative."