The Savage Eye

I came across this movie earlier in the semester and thought that some of the techniques used in the film were interesting.  Often referred to as a dramatized documentary, the film is largely documentary footage that the screenwriters later created a story around.  The main character is a women Judith who seems content to live off of her alimony while trying to figure out her life.  The movie was released the same year as Breathless but I think the more interesting parallels  (the use of documentary footage and the roles of women) are with 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.


The Savage Eye





Chris

Working on Pierrot

I have always been interested in Godard’s process in the production of a film.  In Godard on Godard he says, “Ever since my first film, I have always said I’m going to prepare the script more carefully, and each time I see another chance to improvise, to do it all in shooting, without applying the cinema to something.” (217)

In searching online further about his process, I found a page that shows the shooting schedule, notes and scene breakdowns by Suzanne Schiffman for Pierrot Le Fou.  I find it interesting to compare the documents to the final work to see the spaces that he found most appropriate for improvisation.  I’m still translating it as my French is poor but thought I would share some images and the link with everybody.

There are many more scans on the actual page.  Here is the link.  

Chris

Godard, Levinas & Violence

It’s not a question of re-establishing tourism…between the banks of the Neretva.  We must at once restore the past…and make the future possible.  Combine the pain and the guilt. Two faces and one truth: the bridge.

Its seems difficult.

"If the face symbolizes ‘Thou shalt not kill’ how can we make a face with stones?” 

The relationship between me and the Other isn’t symmetrical.  At first, the Other matters little with respect to me.  That’s his business.  For me, he is the one I’m responsible for.  Here, a Muslim and a Croatian. 

We are all guilty for everything and for everyone.  And myself more than others.

I wanted to take a moment and consider Godard’s approach to relationships of/and violence in Notre Musique.  He quotes Entre Nous by Emmanuel Levinas, a writer whose philosophy rejects the tendency of Totality to try to efface the radical alterity of the Other into its model of sameness.  For Levinas, this tendency is violence and it exists equally in war and in the history of Western Philosophy.

One of Levinas’s central ideas is that the history of western metaphysics carries on a tradition that puts the notion of rationality, which he defines as the move to totalize the Other into a pre-existing category, above any real concern for the Other.  In short, to rationalize is to attempt to make the Other into the same.  Of this tradition and particularly Heidegger he writes, “To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing)” (Totality and Infinity, 45).

For Levinas, the encounter with the Other is, by its very definition, not something that can be understood as a sameness. The experience of the Other in life is the face-to-face experience of the infinite. Any movement to try to understand the Other as something that is “the same” ultimately fails because the being of the Other is infinity. The Other is not a negative other-than me, it is completely Other-wise.  Infinity is the always beyond its own definition, it overflows its definition, and so any idea or notion that seeks to contain it cannot succeed. In his book Totality and Infinity he writes "The absolutely other is the Other.  He and I do not form a number.  The collectivity in which I say “you” or “we” is not a plural of the “I.”  I, you - these are not individuals of a common concept.  Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger, the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [ le chez soi ].  But Stranger also means the free one.  Over him I have no power.  He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal.  He is not wholly in my site.  But I, who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am, like him, without genus.  We are the same and the other.” (39)

Levinas argues that any attempt to identify the Other is an act of metaphysical violence.  The Other is always already there before I experience it so I am always existing already there for-the-Other.  It is in the face-to-face experience of the Other that I am called to it.  I do not define the Other, its infinite being calls to me for a response to it.  I can only ever respond to this face, I cannot define it.  My ability to respond to the Other is, in a way, my response-ability.  This responsibility for the Other and toward the Other is what Levinas calls ethics.

It is this idea of ethical responsibility that I believe Godard is considering in Notre Musique.  In his first act, Hell is violence.  In Purgatory we are shown the attempt to rebuild a bridge destroyed by war.   The bridge represents the in-between that exists between these opposing sides and the lasting imprint of violence.  A female character says, "I wanted to see a place where reconciliation is possible."  In considering the history of violence and one’s responsibility for the Other, perhaps Godard is saying the same thing.

Chris

Tout Va Bien/Letter to Jane

Letter to Jane is the last collaboration between Godard and Gorin. It's content consists of the two analyzing a  single image of Fonda in Vietnam.

J Hoberman says of the film, "Narrated by the filmmakers and condescendingly addressed to "you, Jane," Letter poses the same question as Tout Va Bien, namely the role of the movie star in the revolutionary struggle.  Alternately brilliant and obtuse, the film's disingenuous analysis assumes Fonda as author of the photograph - responsible for everything from the camera angle to the caption that erroneously describes her as asking a question." (Criterion)

While one could pose a Levinasian argument that to experience the radical alterity of the Other is to automatically be in a stance of asking a question (or at the very least waiting for an answer), what I think is truly interesting in this film is G & G's singular focus on one image and how they slowly inscribe upon it a meaning.  It is a unique experience to watch Godard derive meaning from a single image versus a series of them.

Video of Letter to Jane


Chris

2 or 3 things on Consumerism

Commenting on the film, Morrey notes that the one inspiration for Godard was a Le Nouvel Observateur report entitled “The Shooting Stars” about young women whom turn to prostitution in order to maintain their newfound consumerism.  He goes on to offer that prostitution in the film can be seen as a metaphor for the condition of the consumer under an advanced system of capitalism.

Here is a letter (from the DVD booklet)  in response to the article that I think crystallizes the point of view that Morrey is referring to.  I also uploaded a few short clips from the film that speak to this as well.  

Chris