The Importance in a Name

I'm going to make this relatively brief, but I just wanted to raise a few perhaps disconnected points about this scene from Eloge De L'Amour:

During the discussion of America’s name, or more rightly put the United State’s name, Godard is drawing on a real grievance voiced by many Latinos and Canadians. My own mother, who is from Puerto Rico, often insisted that I use U.S. to refer to this country as opposed to America for precisely this reason. I always ran into the same dilemma that is raised here: What do we call the people who inhabit this United States of America? United Statesians? U.S. citizens? It was all hopelessly clumsy. The fact that Godard was able to extract such interesting meanings from this childhood problem made the scene fascinatingly poignant to me. Concern with naming and names is not limited to this specific argument. In the United States it had a particular resonance with the black power movement, who sought to remove names that were tied to a history of slavery and rename themselves. One can find similarities between Elle’s deconstruction of America with Malcolm X’s deconstruction of his own name here:

There is also that strain of semiotics present in religions, such as Christianity and, perhaps especially, in Judaism (to name a few) in which the word, or name has the power of its referent. There is a certain reversing of this logic, where some of the substance of the thing named enters its name, in this film where it is a lack or contradiction instead of a power which moves from the named to the name.

For me, this fluid back and forth between a discussion of semiotics and substance is one of the things that set artists such as Chris Marker and Godard apart from other political filmmakers. In their work names and named are constantly leading back into each other, each reflecting insights about the other. The lifting of this argument about a country’s and a continent’s name and placing it in the context of Eloge De L'Amour opens up its possible meanings beyond the binary opposition of politics in general. It is easy when making a film dealing with politics (as well as aesthetic theory) to fall into the trap of lecturing the audience, of being too didactic, and ending up with a movie that would be better written as a theses paragraph at the beginning of a class paper than shown on the screen. Politics in the films of Marker and Godard are not the endpoint but rather a form of movement in and out of the everyday and the unknown, a movement that serves to expand the films’ scopes rather than limit them.

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Godard's Use of Light

In our last class, Sam said something that I had discovered as I was working on my final paper regarding light; it is not about the amount of light but the right light. This is the crux of my final paper. As I was investigating various art movements devoted to light and refining my paper topic, I concluded that this point, the right light, is most pertinent to a discussion of Godard. As we know, even in his black and white films, he utilized natural light and did not rely on the industrial lighting standard for filmmaking. Because my final paper focuses on two specific examples of Godard’s relationship to light, (Alphaville and Passion) in this post I will focus briefly on some of the ways in which Godard uses light to communicate major themes in the films Contempt, Weekend and L’Eloge de L’Amour, namely sexuality, consumerism and memory.

Light in Contempt exists in many forms but what makes it specific to the film is its use to emphasize the sexuality of Brigitte Bardot. From the tinted red and blue to the reflection off the sea or as her backdrop, whether intentional or not, light’s main function is to draw more attention to and accentuate Bardot’s sex appeal.

(But Godard’s use of the natural light of Capri makes the film’s look unforgettably beautiful whether Bardot is in the scene or not.)

Weekend has a different relationship to light. It looks duller or washed out compared to Contempt.

And while so much of it takes place outside or among nature, the dullness remains. It is this dullness which adds to the feelings of alienation or enhances Godard’s critique of consumerism. (Think Marx's alienation theory)The absence of light corresponds to the absence of joy and the ugliness of the main characters. The world that the characters live in, reminiscent of a warzone, feels somehow other than our world when the muted light is taken into account. In this way, his use of light warns the audience of the consequences of consumerism. One lingering question is the role of the fires in Weekend; how can they be understood in relation to light?

Finally, L’Eloge de L’Amour, which uses light so cleverly and skillfully. In this film, Godard often obscures the faces of the main characters.  He again uses light to emphasize a characterization in the film, in this case memory. He actually obscures and manipulates the film through his treatment of light to communicate his points.

Godard maintains a command of light even when the film is in black and white. Nothing is not sharp unless he chooses. The power of Paris as the "city of lights" is not diminished when captured in black and white. (There may be a statement here about Paris for the wealthy vs. the Paris of the worker from the two images below, as one remains crisp and the other is covered in darkness.) Memory is explored and exposed in Godard's use of light.

Godard uses light is such a deliberate way that enhances the overall themes of his films and illuminates the subtelties of his point of view. I continue to investigate his search for the right light…

Godard and the Sea

According to Morrey, Eloge de l’Amour represents, to some extent, a critique of history and memory.[1] If examined alongside Contempt, this insight explains or confirms Godard’s shift from reliance on or reverence for history (if we think about the plot of Contempt) to a questioning of the role or function of history in Eloge de l’Amour. And while this analysis seems reasonable, I wonder how it is expressed filmically. (Apart from the narrative structure or plot.)

Contempt may be understood, as he says in Godard on Godard, as “the story of castaways…survivors of the shipwreck of modernity.”[2] This brings the question to water; if we think about his representations of the sea, in at least three films from his early, middle and late periods, we can see how his ideas about history and memory (and maybe by extension film and filmmaking) changed or developed in filmic terms.

In Contempt, the sea is filmed as a fact. If a person chose the crew’s exact shooting location, the sea itself would probably look the same now as it did then. The quality that he captured was unaffected by anything else, purposely. (Not true of the outdoor stone steps painted blue/yellow and therefore a deliberate decision.) The sea’s relation to history was similarly evident. It was for Godard the same sea that Homer described in The Odyssey.  And as the viewer sees it, it is unending and unaltered.

When Godard made Passion almost 20 years later, he had a different method for representing the sea. In fact the idea of representation was even used differently in these middle stage films. He was not hiding from representation nor alluding to it. He confronted what he was trying to represent (the film the viewer sees) with the mechanisms and machinations of filmmaking (the world of the film within the film) until they were united. The sea in Passion is a pool of water inspired by either (or a mix of both) Ingres’ Small Bather and/or Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. (Note the unavoidable historical relevance in representing the paintings.) This image of the sea is not the sea but it is not trying to be the sea either. It is an acknowledged and embraced reproduction of the sea. And while the sea of Contempt is no more than a representation of the sea as well, it is not aware or does not force the viewer to be aware of its representative nature.

Finally, Eloge de l’Amour, coming 20 years after Passion, shows the viewer the sea once more. But this sea is different from both before it. This sea is both altered and a fact, albeit of memory. It is not the sea that anyone would see realistically if standing in front of it. It is a blatant representation of the sea but also includes one’s memory of the sea. It is not afraid to exist apart from the facts of water reflecting light because that it not all the Godard is showing; there is also the presence of the memory in this sea. History and memory and their relationships are being explored in this sea. This is not my sea, maybe not your sea but it is how someone remembered the sea sometime. It is a wholly different approach to representation, to filmmaking, than Godard has used before. Somehow this sea is both a reproduction and a representation; it includes elements from Contempt and Passion while adding something altogether new.

This view is a view unburdened by history since it is not aligned with history; it is changeable to whoever might remember. Or is it burdened by history since history informs the memory? I am not sure what exactly these analyses yield. But I can see now that Godard’s explorations of history and memory are filmically reflected in his life’s work and the changes that are evident over the course of his career seem to be more like developments of the same themes. Now the gap seems more narrow between his early, mid and late stage films; development is expected but these thoughtful experiments are clearly characteristic of Godard.

Sienna

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[1] Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard, 231.

[2] Godard, Godard on Godard, 201.

First Turning Thoughts on Éloge de l’amour

Éloge de l’amour opens with a filmic return to the city of Paris, and Alphaville, with bright headlight circles beaming through rain, and this circle is part of a film of circles, finished, unfinished, followed. The film opens with the question, “Do you remember their names?” A recounting follows. This question is the beginning, and yet, it is a beginning that foregrounds what came before this moment that is the future of the previous moment as well as our present in the film. This present calls forth a recollection of past. We start in a cycle of remembrance, we follow the circle. Edgar is on a quest, striving to create a project of defining adulthood, for him the blurry and missing present in the cycle of life that moves from childhood to old age. The long in-between eludes him. Throughout the film, we hear the beginnings and ends of conversations, the middle often subsumed by music, wind, or the characters’ backs facing us--reinforcing the slippery slope of present, heart, center. The project remains incomplete. 

And then, the two years earlier to which the film’s characters constantly allude returns, for our first time: the image switches from black and white film to saturated video. As Douglas Morrey notes in Jean-Luc Godard, the past is more rich and live than the uncapturable, less vivid present (229). It vibrates, resonates with color. And then we make the turnaround--events and conversations we have already heard of, phrases uttered when phrases were still possible, make their way back to us in the form of their seeds. We realize how they have changed, what it was like when someone else spoke them, and what their reception inscribed on them after their release into the world. Superimpositions act like layered memories, images of the ocean evoke the unending cycles of tides larger than human activity and history.

Throughout, we get the sense that we don’t know where we are going, but we are held, suspended, cradled in the strange comfort of the circle that can contain an unfinished project, which is also its end. On viewing the film, I felt unmoored, like those boats bobbing on the orange-blue sea, but never lost because I was coming back around, just like those boats can never fall off of the planet.

In his interview with Jean-Luc Godard in Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century, Yousef Ishaghpour says, “history is unachievable because it would take an eternity to compile a history of the shortest time.” We all know how this feels. I tried to write about an experience in my journal recently and never got to it because I started writing about the pen I was using and how it got to me and where I took it and what people said about it, and by the time I was done writing about the pen I was writing with, I was tired. Like Edgar says, “no one ever tells the other story” and perhaps that is because each point and thought is connected to others, also connected to others, and we can’t tell the story that way. Even if we get back to it, around to it, things have changed with the weight of history and time. The story you tell is another story anyway. The present and future change the past, and Éloge de l’amour somehow manages to show us this in the transition from black and white to supercolor, through repeated words foretold, as Edgar, Berthe, and the other characters struggle to complete a cycle while inside of many others. There is something in this that says, take heart. In praise of love. 

Tomorrow I leave for Paris and it is the beginning of a journey, led up to forever, and already receding. This film makes me hope it rains while I am there.

-Ruchi