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

Diegetic Philosophy: Dostoyevsky and Godard

When watching this week’s screening of Vivre sa Vie I was struck by the relationship between two sequences. First, we had the beautiful scene in the café when Nana has a drink with Yvette. Here Nana extols a philosophy of personal responsibility and freedom of action—“if I am raise my hand it is my responsibility, if I am sad it is my responsibility.” (I quote from memory, not being able to find an English translation online.) She articulates (at least at this moment in the film) a pleasure in her freedom of movement, her ability to interact with a complicated and fascinating world at her own discretion. What follows this speech is a joyful demonstration of this fact as Godard uses shot-counter-shot to give us Nana’s wandering gaze, over the song "Ma Môme."





This sequence perfectly brings together Nana’s declaration of independence and the pleasures of cinematic scopophilia, specifically in a cinema that does not obey the demands of a rigorous narrative. What unlimited joys there can be in viewing that which does not demand anything of you! The sequence aptly finishes with the sight of Yvette and Raoul, ending both Nana’s reverie and the audience’s respite from the story.


Alternatively, we have the montage sequence when Nana is initiated into the life of a prostitute. Here Nana asks a series of questions about her new position and is answered by the authoritative voice of Raoul. Along with Nana we learn of recent legislation, economic incentives, statistical factoids, and daily routines relating to the lives of prostitutes in France at this time. Here we have a counterpoint to Nana’s vision of personal freedom. It is interesting to note the use of montage here, as opposed to classical narrative techniques in the previously discussed sequence, where the potential for rigidity in Eisenstein’s dialectical montage becomes nightmarishly apparent. Nana is a member of a group who, like all groups, can be assembled as a set of functions rather than a collection of individual members. The freedom of bodily movement, of new and entrepreneurial interactions with the world, here seems crushed by the human’s integration into the reigning dispositif (to use Foucault’s terminology). Can our choices truly be described as free when they are so constrained by and funneled through the interests of power? How can one reconcile these positions? 





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I won’t try to answer this question here. Instead I would like to address this technique of raising two opposing positions within the trajectory of a narrative. Godard is certainly not the first to deploy this technique. I would argue that what Godard does with film has its roots, at least partially, in what Dostoyevsky does with the novel.


As is clear to anyone who reads him, Dostoyevsky uses his narratives, their characters and events, to grapple with issues larger than their plot-points. In his five major novels, as well as many short stories, Dostoyevsky lays out rigorous treatises on such issues as justice, political action, spirituality, and the individual in relation to society. Each piece can be considered an essay in novel form. But, unlike the run of the mill position piece, Dostoyevsky’s narratives are flexible enough to allow for multiple conflicting perspectives to emerge. (For a greater expounding on this position listen to Hubert Dreyfus’ meticulous breakdown of The Brothers Karamazov over the span of 11 classes here). As his stories progress a complex web of arguments and counterarguments is created producing a nuance in argument rarely allowed under the demanding rubric of academic writing. By intertwining character development and philosophical reflection Dostoyevsky crafts a marvelous tone, where the positions argued are wrapped up in the lives of the personalities who argue them.


All of which brings us back to Vivre sa Vie. If we watch Nana’s final demise with horror, it certainly is related to the horror we feel when we read of the revolutionaries' spiral towards destruction in Dostoyevsky’s The Demons. It is a horror that is not only driven by our empathy for the characters involved, or the dreadful violence that these events depict, but also by what these events say about the prospects of the human race as a whole. Both Godard and Dostoyevsky’s works drive home their climaxes with the drama of a great tragedy along with the gravity of a well-argued conclusion. 

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa