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Jean-Luc Godard to Adapt Best-Selling Holocaust Book

by Christopher Campbell
June 5, 2009

Master filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is still hard at work even at 78 years old. The French filmmaker is planning to adapt Daniel Mendelsohn's best-selling Holocaust book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, according to Hollywood Reporter. Not quite a memoir so much as a first-person investigatory work, The Lost involves Mendelsohn's present-day search for information on what happened to his relatives who remained in Poland during World War II. The adaptation would likely be the French auteur's next picture, once he completes the political film Le socialisme, which had been rumored to be his last film.

Could Godard be aiming for an Oscar after all these years? It's doubtful, but these days it's impossible not to think of the Academy when news arises that some director is working on a Holocaust film. Godard is different, though, and the Holocaust has been a theme in many of his films throughout the years, ignoring the words of a character in his own film Une Femme Mariee on the topic, "memory is no fun."

Richard Brody at The New Yorker sums up the filmmaker's way of addressing the Holocaust in his work: "Godard’s approach to the subject (indeed to history altogether) has been to recover traces—cinematic, archival, political, emotional, personal—of the Holocaust in the contemporary world." Right, so this won't be the next Schindler's List or The Piano. But given the familiar source material, it will probably make more noise in the States than the rest of Godard's recent films. We'll be sure to keep you updated on the status of The Lost adaptation and if it indeed does move into production sometime in the next year or two.

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