Soft and Hard: Intimations Insinuations Implications

Abstract

SOFT AND HARD: INTIMATIONS INSINUATIONS IMPLICATIONS At a time when television was extending its bravery and its boundaries, when it offered creative space for the world's film-makers, when a cinema of ideas was still possible... In 1985, working as Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video department of Channel 4, I took on both the programming of a Godard season and the production of a new piece of specially commissioned work from Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville originally entitled A Gentle Conversation on Rough Subjects, which became A Soft Conversation between Two Friends on a Hard Subject (1985) or Soft and Hard for short. Channel 4 was an extraordinary and exciting laboratory at this time, "rebuilding the ship at sea" as a new and radical version of public service television; a publisher broadcaster with a remit to "innovate and experiment in the form and content...