Reply to C.T.

Here are two replies to C.T.'s excellent post on "Word and Image in Vivre Sa Vie." These comments also allow me to nuance some of the arguments I made in class last night.

(1) Having reviewed the position of the philosopher Brice Parain (whom Nana meets in a café in Vivre sa vie), I don't think I made it clear how his views can be squared with existentialism. His arguments can be understood as existential because he both acknowledges the constraint or limitation of language as well as the necessity of making sense, of communicating, of forging relations, through or within language. We cannot simply or passively accept the norms that serve as the basis of language, but neither can we believe it possible to wholly overcome them either; rather, we have to discover a usage of language that allows us to express our limited but necessary freedom. Moreover, Parain's insistence on silence – as a respite from language – can be understood as akin to Godard's examination of the image/word conflict in his film. In this way, Godard's film can be seen as an attempt to put into practice not only these moments of solitude or silence (and the withdrawal of meaning or sense) but also a modified – personalized – use of language or grammar.

(2) Despite the placement of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on the side of image and on the side of silence (it being a silent film), Carl Dreyer's great 1928 work is itself a complex examination of the relation between words and images. Here, I refer specifically to the way the filmmaker places words (logos) on the side of patriarchy or Law, becoming the means whereby the tribunal comes to condemn Joan of Arc and consign her body to the pyre. Dreyer uses historical documents to accurately replicate the actual words used at Joan's trial and he juxtaposes these words, used as intertitles, with a series of revelatory close-ups (but revelatory of what, exactly?). This reminds us that Godard too doesn't simply forego words or language and in the name of a silent image. Rather, he will increasingly foreground their relation, showing us – among other things – how words, in cinema, can become images (and, in the process, lose their fixed sense). 

   

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Oui ou Non?

Godard is correct I think not to respond to this question. There is a pause, a moment of silence, and then a cut. The question, in an important sense, is not for him to answer (and it's a nice touch that the lighting of this shot doesn't allow us to search for an answer in his facial expressions). This is a question for the next generation of filmmakers and artists. Oui ou non? They must decide – or, by not deciding, fail once and for all. 

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Being and Light: Notre Musique

It is common, when discussing the duality between Judith and Olga, to place Judith on the side of "light" and Olga on the side of "dark" (after all, Judith is committed to reconciliation whereas Olga seems to see no solution in this life). This simple opposition though is belied by Olga's first appearance in the film, which is prefaced by these mysterious lines (spoken, I believe, by Juan Goytosolo): "Light is the first visible animal of the invisible." Not only is Olga introduced in relation to light, but she also exudes pure radiant energy here. A being in motion. It is a beautiful image that has stayed with me for the past half dozen years since I first saw the film.

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"Her" and Signs

Among the litany of questions asked in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle is the following: what is an image? What is a sign? In what way can we distinguish, for example, an image of Marina Vlady (as Juliette) from an image taken from a magazine or comic strip or billboard? Is this just one more image – one more sign – put into circulation in our society of the spectacle? Is there a way that this image (or any image) can resist this reduction to just another sign? And what exactly is a resistant-image? How might it work against the spectacle that is modern life? Or can it? And does it matter? Is there any "use-value" to an image (as Marx might say)? Or have they all entered into the system of "exchange value" and abstract equivalence (where value is determined by extrinsic forces and solely in terms of monetary worth)? 

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2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle Trailer

As Douglas Morrey points out in his excellent discussion of 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, the "elle" in the title is not simply a reference to the film's heroine but also to the modern Parisian city ("la région parisenne") that was being constructed in the sixties, as well as – potentially – a whole other series of "elles" (i.e., nouns that, in the French language, begin with the female article "la"). This is made clear in the trailer for the film which proliferates the number of potential "elles" that the film will consider.  

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Being and Singularity

Reading Courtney’s entry led me to this post because it made me realize what an excellent example Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) would be to discuss the particular combination of symbolic, iconic and indexical signs that we find in the cinema. So here goes.

                       

In iconic terms, we can speak about Falconetti’s resemblance to the historical figure she is playing. (Just as we would discuss resemblance when looking at drawings or paintings of the historical figure, like in the two images above.) We can also speak more broadly about the role the actress is asked to play: a young woman who finds herself brutalized by a series of paternal authority figures. Here too we can speak of iconicity. Falconetti, the actress, can be said both to resemble Joan of Arc and also resemble how a woman might appear under such extreme conditions of duress.

What about the symbolic elements? In symbolic terms, we might speak about Dreyer’s intense use of the close-up and how it is like and unlike the conventions of the close-up of the period. (How it both replicates and modifies the convention of the cinematic close-up, first introduced in the 1910s.) We could also speak about various Western notions/beliefs about the significance of the human face, including the oft-repeated claim that the eyes are the “window to the soul.” More abstractly, we could also speak of the way Dreyer uses the juxtaposition of shots in order to stimulate certain emotions and ideas. (Of course, most of the examples here are also iconic, but this demonstrates the difficulty of separating the iconic from symbolic elements of the cinematographic sign.)

Along with these signs though, we would also need to consider – in the cinema – the status of the image as an index. For what we see when we watch Dreyer’s film, is the thirty-six year old actress Falconetti at a specific moment of her life; a moment which repeats every time we re-watch this film. And this image of Falconetti is not a likeness or a written testimony: it is a document of the actress that she herself has left behind. (We can speak of Dreyer’s greatness as a director and Rudolph Maté’s talents as a cinematographer but without Falconetti there would literally be no image – not this image anyway – because it only exists as such because the actress Falconetti herself existed. She is not a figment of the director or cameraman’s imagination.)

And it is this aspect of the film that Dreyer, in fact, exults in, because his goal is not for us to forget Falconetti in order to see Joan of Arc but to have us perceive both at one and the same time: to see their relation to one another. Falconetti is not made transparent so that we can focus only on the legendary woman and the fictional recreation of a historical event. We are made to attend to the actor’s very materiality, her status as a physical entity. This is what makes Dreyer’s film not only a great retelling of the Joan of Arc story but also “a documentary of the human face.” In order to see Joan of Arc we must attend, at the same time, to the actress Falconetti in all her singularity.

This is what cinema allows us to celebrate: the singularity of every being, who may resemble other beings (or be made to resemble other beings) but who is, finally, absolutely singular. Literature, as an art consisting largely of symbolic signs, and painting, as an art consisting of iconic signs, are excellent mediums to address the general and the universal. Cinema can speak to these dimensions as well but it does so through the specific and the particular. Every filmmaker who can be said to foreground the indexical properties of the medium can be said to ask the viewer to attend to this specificity and particularity: the uniqueness and singularity of this person or thing, the uniqueness and singularity of this moment in time – forever preserved on a strip of film.

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Digital and French Impressionism

The audience gasped last night when this shot – in which Godard links digital photography to the work of the French Impressionist painters – appeared in Film Socialisme. This is not the first time that he has made this link (see the second half of Éloge de l'amour), and it doesn't work as well here when seen in isolation from the shots that came before it, but it's dazzling nevertheless. And the link may be a vital one for those of us working in the new medium, if only we could remember the revolutionary goals of those nineteenth century painters, dedicated to light and sensorial experience. 

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Le Mépris and Authorship

Le Mépris is a good work to use as a test case for auteur theory (la politique des auteurs) and Astruc’s la caméra-stylo. Although it is not the only film directed by Godard with a literary source, it is the one that stays closest to its source material, a novel by Alberto Moravia (Il Disprezzo). Yet, it is hard for me to imagine anyone who has read the book, as I have, and seen the film to claim that the “author” of Le Mépris is Moravia. Il Disprezzo is a work by Moravia, and Le Mépris is a work by Godard. Here I would repeat the comment made by the ex-Surrealist poet Louis Aragon about the film at the time of its release: “I’ve seen [the] novel of today. At the cinema … It’s called Contempt, the novelist is someone named Godard” (qt. in Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema, p. 172). At the same time, what is fascinating is that while the author of the film is undoubtedly Godard, Godard himself acknowledges and explores his works relation to a whole series of other texts, including, of course, the novel upon which it is based. Is this because – as a postmodernist might say – there is no originality, everything has already been said, everything has already been done, et al.? I would say "no", and precisely because Le Mépris, for all its intertextual references, is original – and retains this originality nearly fifty years after its initial release. (The film's exploration of quotation and translation – of quotation as translation – is uniquely Godardian. This doesn't mean it can't be imitated, but the imitation remains precisely that: Godard without Godard.) Godard’s use of citation and allusion is not an acknowledgment that the expressive potential of art has been exhausted; instead, his citations and allusions affirm the enduring power of art, always waiting another chance to provoke, to excite, to disturb. As Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit observe, “Godard quotes inordinately in his films – through passages projected onto the screen, or through characters who recite bits of literary texts, or directly from books.” And this citational practice works to liberate the texts that he quotes, allowing them to remain in process or in movement. “By citationally picking at literature, he de-monumentalizes it, therefore resurrecting it from the death of finished being, and allows it to circulate – unfinished, always being made – within the open time of film” (Forms of Being, p. 65). Unfinished, always being made, open: all keys to Godard’s particular form of art. All characteristics that we can attribute to the author referred to as "Godard" – a figure who doesn't precede or transcend his art works but who emerges, comes into being, alongside them. (And, if any reminder is necessary, all characteristics described by Eco in "Poetics of the Open Work.")

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The Practice of Reading

Surely the most unfortunate line that Roland Barthes ever wrote is the one that concludes his essay "Death of an Author": “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Endlessly quoted, yet so poorly understood. I don’t know how many readers have read this as a slogan that what is important is not the literary work itself (and by extension the work of art) but what the intrepid reader does with the text. Thus, while the “author” is cast aside as a useless or outmoded concept, the reader affirms himself or herself as the true creative locus of textual production. (One consequence of this: a shift from “difficult” modernist texts to an emphasis on the artifacts of popular culture, to be pillaged at will. Why does this occur? Precisely because it is believed that creativity is now the art of the beholder. The text is secondary to its usage.) Let’s not forget that the “death of the author” was meant to signal, for Barthes, the death of the sovereign subject, i.e., the belief in the individual as the punctual source for a text’s meaning. It was meant to question the fallacy of the intentional subject – whether this subject is understood as an author, a critic or a reader.  

Barthes statement, it seems to me, should always be accompanied by another, this one by Maurice Blanchot: “What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s ability, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads – a man who knows in general how to read” (emphasis added). What Blanchot valorizes here is not the reader but the act of reading, and what this act means for both the author and the reader, each destabilized by the same experience or event. This, I would argue, is fundamentally Barthes’ point as well, but his inability to resist a stylistic flourish led him, and several generations of students, down the wrong path. Reading is an encounter between oneself and another. What is affirmed is neither the author nor the reader, but the act that binds one to the other. Blanchot: “To read is thus not to obtain communication from the work, but to ‘make’ the work communicate itself. And if we may employ an inadequate image, to read is to be one of the two poles between which, through mutual attraction and repulsion, the illuminating violence of communication erupts – one of the two poles between which the event comes to pass and which it constitutes by its very passage.” These two poles are the author and the reader, and the event occurs in the (anonymous) passage between them.

Giorgio Agamben makes a similar point in a recent article "The Author as Gesture", which revisits Foucault's essay on authorship. At one point, Agamben considers a poem by César Vallejo. He asks, where does the thought or sentiment expressed in the poem come from? It would be a mistake, he says, to assume that the thought or sentiment first existed "in" César Vallejo, who then diligently transcribed this pre-existent idea or emotion. Rather, "this thought and this sentiment became real for him, and their details and nuances become inextricably his own, only after – or while – writing the poem." This thought or sentiment cannot therefore be said to originate within the poet, but it is equally inaccurate to suggest that it in any way belongs to, or should be attributed to, the poem's reader. The thought or sentiment emanates from neither; it comes from elsewhere. And yet it only exists because, once upon a time, there was a writer who sat down to write a poem, and then, some time later, a reader who sat down to read it. "The place of the poem – or, rather its taking place – is therefore neither in the text nor in the author (nor in the reader): it is in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infinitely withdrawn from it."

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Découpage in Vivre Sa Vie

More than his other films, there are several striking examples in Vivre sa vie of découpage or shot breakdown. (We might recall, in this context, Godard's defense of shot/reverse shots and point of view shots in several of his early pieces of film criticism. These articles could be productively studied in relation to this work.) His use of découpage is probably closer in the end to Bresson than to Hitchcock, which is to say it is more modern than classical, but perhaps we are splitting hairs here. In the end, it's still découpage – it's still breaking a scene down into a series of fragments – and it's still richly evocative. Below is a ten shot sequence from Vivre sa vie, with shot one broken into two parts. It is a segment of the fifth tableaux. (It lasts 2 minutes and 39 seconds. The ASL is 15.9 seconds per shot.) The last shot – when Nana attempts to keep her client from kissing her on the mouth – is emotionally devastating (it is also the shot that, at 37 seconds, is held the longest), but there is something about shot six (the folded towel and bar of soap; 3 seconds) and shot nine (the astray, the hand emerging from a pocket; 8 seconds) that are compelling and memorable in their own way (shot six is particularly interesting because these objects appear at no other moment during the scene; they have a distilled presence and communicate their force in isolation). This is equally true when looking at the still images and when watching the scene in the film. They have an intrinsic power that might otherwise be overlooked if they were not given to us as individualized and autonomous images. 

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Shot 1a

Shot 1b

Shot 2

Shot 3

Shot 4

Shot 5

Shot 6

Shot 7

Shot 8

Shot 9

Shot 10

Godard Snubs the Oscars

"Thanks, but No Thanks"

Here is a funny, recent article about how the Academy of Motion Pictures has decided to award Godard an honorary statue at the next Oscars but now fear that the director will snub them:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/the-director-who-ignored-hollywood-2063267.html [Thanks to Heather R. for the link to the article]

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Godard's Ad for Vivre Sa Vie

UN

FILM

SUR

LA

PROSTITUTION

QUI

RACONTE

COMMENT

UNE

JEUNE

ET

JOLIE

VENDEUSE

PARISIENNE

DONNE

SON

CORPS

MAIS

GARDE

SON

AME

ALORS

QU'ELLE

TRAVERSE

COMME

DES

APPEARANCES

UNE

SERIE

D'AVENTURES

QUI

LUI

FONT

CONNAITRE

TOUS

LES

SENTIMENTS

HUMAINS

PROFONDS

POSSIBLES

ET

QUI

ONT

ETE

FILMES

PAR

JEAN-LUC

GODARD

ET

JOUES

PAR

ANNA KARINA

VIVRE SA

VIE

Translation, as found in the Criterion Collection booklet: "A film on prostitution about a pretty Paris shopgirl who sells her body but keeps her soul while going though a series of adventures that allow her to experience all possible deep human emotion, and that were filmed by Jean-Luc Godard and portrayed by Anna Karina. My life to live." Of course, the translation is inaccurate or misleading to the extent that it doesn't include the line breaks found in the advertisement (e.g. A / film / about / prostitution / about / a / pretty / Paris / shopgirl…), because it should be clear that what Godard is providing here is not simply a description of his film but also an attempt at modern poetry. (But let's be clear. It's not that Godard wishes to transform poetry into modern-day advertisements. No; he wishes to transform modern-day advertisements into poems. To make them more-than simple tools for commercial profit.) Godard believes in the necessity of poetry. Now and forever.

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Hollywood + Modernism = Godard

Godard’s critical writings of the 1950s share a number of similarities with the criticism of the other “Young Turks” at Cahiers du cinéma. These young critics – Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut – were staunch defenders of both Hollywood cinema (at least, a certain kind of Hollywood cinema) and of the idea of the auteur: the filmmaker-as-author or the filmmaker-as-artist. We see both tendencies already in the first article included in Godard on Godard: an essay from 1950 (written when Godard was twenty-years-old) on the American filmmaker Joseph Mankiewicz whom Godard compares to the contemporary Italian novelist Alberto Moravia (whose novel Contempt Godard would make into a film thirteen years later). As the young critic states, “I have no hesitation in placing [Mankiewicz] on the same level of importance as that held by Alberto Moravia in European literature” (Godard on Godard 13). In a similar vein, he evokes such literary masters as Goethe, Kleist and Dostoevsky while reviewing Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1952). (Let's not forget here that it was the "Young Turks" who first took Hitchcock seriously. It was the "Young Turks" who insisted on Hitchcock's status as an auteur. In 1957, the first monograph on the director's work was co-authored by Rohmer and Chabrol. Five years later, Truffaut began conducting a mammoth series of interviews with the filmmaker that would result in Hitchcock Truffaut, which has never been out of print since its original English publication in 1967.)


Our picture of Godard-as-critic would be incomplete though if we were only to focus on cataloging the Hollywood auteurs he most admires, such as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann, and their use of classical découpage. Alongside this group of classical filmmakers we must also consider his enthusiasm for the work of European modernists, such as Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, and Roberto Rossellini. Godard explores this dual interest in his wonderful article "Bergmanorama" (published in Cahiers in 1958). There are, he says, two kinds of filmmakers: those who are primarily concerned with form and those who are primarily concerned with life. On the one hand, he mentions Hitchcock, Lang and Visconti; on the other, Bergman, Rossellini and Welles. Godard states his preference, in the end, for the latter group. “What is difficult,” he writes, “is to advance into unknown lands, to be aware of the danger, to take risks, to be afraid” (Godard on Godard 80). Whilst Hitchcock, Lang and Visconti demonstrate a formal control over their material which Godard greatly admires, he finds that he prefers the willingness of Bergman, Renoir and Welles to give up control for the purposes of exploration; opening themselves up to life in all its messiness and with its myriad of imperfections. As Godard says, in his review of Summer with Monika, “[Ingmar] Bergman is the film-maker of the instant. His camera seeks only one thing: to seize the present moment at its most fugitive, and to delve deep into it so as to give it the quality of eternity” (Godard on Godard 85). It is not eternity, as the universal or general, that is imposed on the present, but the reverse: the singular and transitory is given the weight of eternity. (Here is Godard at his most Nietzschean.)

What is so remarkable about Breathless is the way Godard combines his love of both types of film and filmmakers. For while it is clearly a homage, at one level, to Hollywood b-movies (with their brashness and energy), it is done in a style that would, at the same time, make Bergman, Renoir, and Rossellini proud. 

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Eine Frau ist eine Frau...

Two wittily abstract movie posters for early Godard films (Une femme est une femme, Vivra sa vie) by the wonderful German graphic artist Hans Hillmann. I discovered these whilst perusing the blog of a former student of mine, Sam Smith, who has recently been getting a lot of attention himself for his striking movie posters and cover designs for a number of Criterion Collection DVD releases including this one: http://www.criterion.com/films/27523-house. Visit his blog at http://samsmyth.blogspot.com/

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Bonjour Tristesse

Godard once said that he saw the Patricia character in Breathless as a continuation of the role played by Jean Seberg in Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958). Although the film was panned in the US (as was the first Seberg-Preminger collaboration, Saint Joan), Godard ranked it 3rd on his Ten Best List of 1958, in front of, among others, Visconti's White Nights (9th) and Welles' Touch of Evil (7th), but behind Bergman's Journey into Autumn (2nd) and Mankiewicz's The Quiet American (1st). A year or so after this, Godard would find himself directing Seberg in his first feature film. Above is the most wonderful scene from Preminger's film. (Well, there are two great scenes. The other you shall discover for yourself.) Among its various citations, Breathless includes as well an extract of dialogue from another Preminger film, the deliriously great noir thriller Whirlpool (1949), which has to be seen to be believed. It is Whirlpool that is playing when Patricia enters and exists a cinema in an attempt to shake off the police. (The contemporary installation artist Douglas Gordon "deconstructs" Preminger's film in his 1999 dual-screen video projection piece entitled Left is Right and Right is Wrong and Left is Wrong and Right is Right.)

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Breathless in Context

Alongside changing attitudes towards cinema, there are a number of developments in art and culture in the post-WWII period that could be interesting to consider in relation to Godard’s oeuvre, such as the philosophical school known as existentialism; the attempts by the Lettrists (and then the Situationists) to re-activate and re-purpose the strategies and goals of the avant-garde movements of the 1910s and 1920s (Futurism, DADA, Surrealism); John Cage’s incorporation of improvisation and chance into musical composition; the emergence of what came to be known as “free jazz” in the late 1950s, and so on. Peter Wollen, in his essay “JLG,” suggests another. Wollen notes that what he found particularly striking about Breathless when he saw it during its first theatrical run in the UK in 1960, besides the fact that it seemed to be continuation of Godard’s critical writings for Cahiers du cinéma, was its possible relation to developments in the English art scene that would result in the now famous 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow. (It was this exhibition that first led to the coinage of the term Pop Art.) As Wollen notes, there was a fascination in Europe at this time with bourgeoning American consumer culture in all its beauty and superficiality. Many of the European artists involved in the This is Tomorrow exhibition – most famously, Richard Hamilton (see artworks below) – attempted to appropriate elements from American popular culture and give them a different meaning or value. Wollen suggests that Godard is attempting a similar strategy in Breathless as the filmmaker audaciously mixes quotations or citations from both “high” and “low” culture. In Breathless we find a “perverse mixture of modernism with B-movies” (Wollen 2002: 74), nowhere more evident than in the scene when Michel and Patricia attend a screening of Budd Boetticher’s 1959 b-western Westbound in which Godard substitutes for the film’s dialogue excerpts from poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and Louis Aragon (the former a favorite of the surrealists, the latter one of the original members of the surrealist group). (A variation of this will be found in a later Godard film Pierrot le Fou when the American filmmaker Samuel Fuller makes an appearance in a party scene playing himself, speaking lines that sound very Fulleresque, but at the same time claiming to be in Paris to make a film based on – of all things – Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil!) Already in Breathless, Wollen argues, we find Godard experimenting with certain techniques of collage, techniques that he will come to align increasingly with those of cinematic montage. (More on this later.)

This is Tomorrow was organized by a collective known as the Independent Group who were affiliated with the ICA in London. The idea for the exhibition was to bring together artists in diverse fields (painters, architects, designers, musicians, et al.) and have them work in teams to present works that would reflect on modern culture and its eminent transformation. There is a lot of detailed information on the web both about the Independent Group and the This is Tomorrow exhibition if one is interested. I’m simply going to reproduce here three works by its most famous participant, Richard Hamilton. The middle work (Interior II) is particularly interesting, vis-à-vis Breathless, because it combines painting and collage, including – as one of its appropriated images – a photographic reproduction of the Hollywood actress Patricia Knight as she appeared in Douglas Sirk’s film noir Shockproof (1949). This is not unlike the way Godard "appropriates" Jean Seberg (whom he had seen and admired in two Otto Preminger films) and transplants her into a new and strange terrain, one of his own devising. 

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