In the 1980's Channel 4 commissioned Soft and Hard from Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mièville. Rode Stoneman explains the background, and locates the film within Godard's oeuvre.

At a time when television was extending its bravery and its boundaries, when it offered creative space for the world's filmmakers, 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, it 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 of programmes'. The Independent Film and Video department had contributed significantly to these aims through commissioning and buying a range of political and personal documentary; experimental, access, and community programmes; low budget fiction and third world cinema. After Soft and Hard, I visited Godard and Miéville on several further occasions in Rolle, buying for the channel Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma (1986), the first two chapters of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989), and Miéville's Mon cher sujet (1989).

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 110.