Speak On What It Is You Cannot Put Into Words: Erik Luers Final Paper Topic

For my final paper, I decided to focus on Godard's poignant voiceover narration in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and what it says about language, knowledge, and style. I came to this choice after watching the film again fairly recently, feeling that Godard's internalized monologues to the audience were confessional and sincere. Here was a man wrestling with existential ideas and problems of ontology, admitting that he had so far only been able to grasp a small amount of their entire context.


As a starting-off point, I used David Bordwell's chapter on "Godard and Narration." Originally, I wanted to use Bordwell's theory that Godard's films invite interpretation but defy analysis as my thesis but, after wrestling with it and giving it much thought, I realized that I didn't agree with him. Still, Bordwell makes some good points in the chapter that I felt helped me shape my own argument.


I was also amused by the irony of the narration in 2 or 3 Things, by the fact that, for a film that breaks down language and questions its everlasting constrictive abilities, it so expertly employs words to describe situations that may very well be deemed indescribable. If "language is the house man lives in," 2 or 3 Things features Godard coming to terms with and challenging that impenetrable fact. We are bound by words, but we will nonetheless use them to describe our situation thoroughly. Below is an excerpt from my final paper:

There is an irony at work in Godard's choice to employ his narration over 2 or 3 Things, a film which, quite explicitly, makes a case for the oppressive ability of language. A key theme in many of his films, Godard uses the essence of language and its inability to completely describe thought as a mirroring of the human condition, the boundaries put in place by one binding the expressive abilities of the other. When, early in the film, Juliette's son curiously asks his waking mother to define 'language', Juliette responds quite matter-of-factly, “language is the house man lives in.” The film backs up this claim with scenes of her husband's obsession with the transcribing of political audio soundbytes, and the inclusion of two befuddled men, seemingly existing in another movie entirely, aroused by a constant barrage of knowledge through books. Godard appears to be implying that although language is a necessary and infinite tool, it lacks the ability to describe the indescribable, to give meaning and authenticity to the wordless. His films, often filled with what Bordwell deems “transtextuality”, that is, “citations, allusions, borrowings” (312), emphasize the narrative's need for an unobtainable degree of knowledge. By presenting close-ups of book covers sporting didactic titles, he engulfs the viewer in the onslaught. Man's greatest insecurity is that he may never learn quite enough.


This idea is particularly true given 2 or 3 Things' most famously linguistic scene approximately twenty-five minutes into the film. Sitting in a cafe by herself, relaxing with a glass of Coca-Cola, Juliette glances at another woman reading a hip 60s fashion periodical. Godard shows us this woman's enamored face while providing us with shots of the magazine's colorful pages, each featuring women in chic attire and cosmetic overstatements (i.e. the woman with the United Kingdom-inspired lipstick). As Juliette glances over, Godard's questioning narration kicks in, asking how it is possible to accurately describe the scene unfolding before our very eyes. Does the word 'magazine' efficiently describe what it is? How can descriptive language sum up not only mood, but essence? At the aforementioned garage scene later in the film, Godard again prompts us to remain wary of the restricted fundamentals of this man-made communication system. While we observe Juliette at the garage greeting her husband lovingly, there is something that occurs between them, between them and their placement on the Earth, that is beyond language and conceptualization. Godard's voiceover, comically enough, realizes its uselessness even as it continues forward; the director admits that he cannot do much more than relate it to Faulkner. Since the spelling out of that which is instinctively organic is reckoned useless, no one therefore bothers to attempt the task. Language supplies us with the illusion of thought, of the comfort of placing the enormity of the universe into a few common phrases. By doing so, it teaches us less about the world and rather more about man's never-quite-complete definition of it. 

Erik Luers

Kehr mentions Histoire(s)

For those interested, the main topic of discussion in Dave Kehr's Sunday DVD column for The New York Times is Godard's recently released "Histoire(s) du Cinema" on Region 1 DVD. You can check out the article here.



Erik

Critical of America and American Critical Hate

Godard's In Praise of Love made its mark stateside at perhaps an inopportune time. Shown as the closing night film of the New York Film Festival one month removed from September 11th, 2001 (the film was shown at the Toronto Film Festival at an even worse date: September 12th, 2001), Godard's partly critical assessment of Americanism left many critics angry and confused. They attacked the director for his "snide" jabs at American culture, for the country's lack of a historical past and for its frequenting "pain in the ass," obnoxious citizens. They felt that comments made about Hollywood and about Steven Spielberg and his 1993 award-winning hit, Schindler's List, were unjust and below the belt. They hated Godard's bantering word play when it came to the frequent "Which United States? The United States of North America? Are other States in America not united?" back-and-forth arguments between multiple characters in the film. They didn't favor the belief that Washington, D.C. controlled the American motion picture industry and that without film there would be no trade. They weren't fans of saying Julia Roberts' name in vain. They didn't like the scene where The Matrix's movie poster was so prominently displayed next to Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, as if it made a harsh statement on high versus low culture —  James Cameron's Titanic gets a mention in the film, but it's less about its content (the characters have yet to see it) than about the onslaught of media hype surrounding it. The critics didn't like being attacked at a time where patriotism and universalism (a concept referenced in the film) was being highly thought upon. They felt attacked for loving a film culture that Godard apparently had wanted nothing to do with.

Most of their claims are, in my opinion, unwarranted. They're just looking for an accessible way to voice their disdain for the film, and in doing so skip over the more crucial themes of the film, that of memory, language, Catholicism, recorded history captured in images and sound, and the real kicker, love. The negative reviews seem to harp on the second half (the digital, colorized portion) as if it made up more screen time than it actually does (approx. forty minutes, and only about half or so deals with the American execs). Their beefs with the film seem to stem more from Godard's post-Weekend filmography than with his In Praise of Love narrative; it's as if the first half of the film, frequently cited for its rousing cinematography, was a prelude to American-bashing and disdain.

In his review for the Chicago Sun Times, one of the more famous mainstream critics, Roger Ebert wrote on the film, "It is also painful to see [Godard] attack Hollywood as worthless and without history, when (as Charles Taylor points out on Salon.com), Godard was one of those who taught us about our film history; with his fellow New Wavers, he resurrected film noir, named it, celebrated it, even gave its directors bit parts in his films. Now that history (his as well as ours) has disappeared from his mind.

His attacks on Steven Spielberg are painful and unfair. Some of the fragments of his film involve a Spielberg company trying to buy the memories of Holocaust survivors for a Hollywood film (it will star, we learn, Juliette Binoche, who appeared in Hail Mary but has now apparently gone over to the dark side). Elsewhere in the film he accuses Spielberg of having made millions from Schindler's List while Mrs. Schindler lives in Argentina in poverty. One muses: (1) Has Godard, having also used her, sent her any money? (2) Has Godard or any other director living or dead done more than Spielberg, with his Holocaust Project, to honor and preserve the memories of the survivors? (3) Has Godard so lost the ability to go to the movies that, having once loved the works of Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, he cannot view a Spielberg film except through a prism of anger?"

Ebert's review seems be missing the larger picture here. Godard's take on survivors of war selling their rights away to a country without history is not unfounded. And by implying that we are a country without history, Godard is not claiming that events such as the Civil War are fictitious; irony of ironies, for whatever reason, it's one of the less adapted wars for the silver screen. Is America not a country popularized by immigrants? Are our histories less American than (take your pick) French, Italian, German, etc.? And do not many American filmmakers, playwrights, and novelists take advantage of these countries' histories for self-gain? Of course this is a pessimistic view, but it is one not without precedence. What artform would you choose to craft your story? As the film asks,  a novel, a film, an opera? And the artistic license for each goes on.

A.O. Scott in The New York Times remarked in his review of  the film, "Anti-Americanism has long been a staple of French intellectual life, and its history is not entirely ignoble. But rather than address the complexities and contradictions of American cultural hegemony, Mr. Godard falls back into a pose of world-weary, Olympian disdain." Here, the critic does not deny the truth of the matter as much as he faults it for attempting to do something more and equates it to artistic laziness. Its success is beside the point. Godard would be damned if he did and damned if he didn't. Godard's films are always political in one way or another, but it is rarely their sole reason for being.

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly expressed his anger towards the film by noting that "after switching to psychedelically charged video, [Godard] starts to bash the United States, taking particular relish in making Steven Spielberg his whipping boy...The anti-American didacticism can't be separated from the filmmaker's creeping rejection of life itself. The people in Godard's universe have become little more than puppets reciting Quotations From Chairman Jean-Luc." Is there a connection, as Gleiberman believes, between the "anti-American didacticism" and Godard's "creeping rejection of life itself?" Is that creeping rejection even in the movie? The connection seems to be grasping at straws. Or perhaps it's an example of another American critic taking offense to Godard's views of the U.S.A. and mustering up an attack on the man's oeuvre from there.

Note: By using the word "They" in this blog entry in reference to the critics, I do not refer to all American critics (J. Hoberman of The Village Voice was a fan of the film), but merely to those referenced above who appeared to attack Godard out of defense for their country.

Links to reviews:
Ebert's review
Scott's review
Gleiberman's review 
Hoberman's review 

----Erik Luers

Alpha 60: The Grandfather of "Watson"?

More and more, Alphaville is proving to have been ahead of its time. The video below isn't quite Tarzan VS IBM, but it does represent the company's mission to birth a computer program that could understand language (and syntax) to make a mockery of man's ability to retain information and problem solve. Is Watson just the nucleus for an electronic supreme being? Or is it nothing more than a creation of capitalist greed? Godard may not have predicted this while filming, but the future of artificial intelligence may be less involved within a role of politics than with vaudeville entertainment. Then again, we're only in Watson's beginning stages. Whereas Alpha 60 was great as a futuristic lie detector and watch dog, Watson, remarkably similar in appearance to its "cinematic father figure", has verbal expression down pat. Of course, the human element appears to be missing in both. If anyone is wondering, Watson destroyed his mortal competitors during the week-long challenge, and the show proved to be a ratings success and a hell of an advertisement for IBM.

----Erik Luers

Sex and Desire on a Film Set in the Age of Auterism: Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt

Over the years there has been much said, praised, debated, misinterpreted, and altered when discussing what the French critics in Cahiers du Cinema once labeled as the "politique des auteurs". Believing that a film's director was the key voice and visionary behind a particular film, the auteur theory praised artistic distinction and power, thus creating an endless hegemonic structure over all film sets. In theory, a pantheon of greats could do as they wished. Unfortunately, if not given final cut, the director's pull decreased and was left at the mercy of the greedy, know-it-all studio execs with a hunch for what the public wanted. Too many cooks in the kitchen does not a good meal make. In his 1963 film Contempt (original French title: Le Mepris), a story very much about filmmaking, Jean-Luc Godard plays with the idea of power in the movie world in a delightfully sexy and kinetic way. A woman between two men, the lead heroine, married to a meek, humbled screenwriter, begins an affair with a ravishing, big shot American producer who orders her husband around. Has she fallen out of love with her spouse for his lack of power or for the Don Juan producer's position of strength? Godard crafts a film about desire for the new, the foreign, rather than one about respect for the old and familiar.


In the motion picture industry the role of the screenwriter is quite low on the creative totem pole. He writes (or in Contempt's case, adapts) a story for the screen and then sells his work to producers who will do with it as they wish. Throughout the course of filming, the screenwriter may be asked to do specific rewrites. If he refuses, someone else will be brought in to do them instead. The screenwriter is expendable. Paul, our screenwriter lead in Contempt, knows this all too well. Artistically castrated and at the mercy of Jerry, the arrogant American producer, Paul goes through each day yearning for his former "glory" days as a playwright and author of pulp crime novels. He hasn't adjusted well to not being in control (in his previous writing jobs, he had the creative power but less of a financial gain to show for it). Perhaps this is why, having given up and gone through each passing day as a lowly yes man, Paul has his beautiful, twenty-eight year old wife Camille take an intimate ride with Jerry early in the picture. He is giving her over to him as a sign of cowardice; Camille recognizes this moment and immediately changes her demeanor. The mystery of what occurs between her and Jerry throughout this car ride and their brief time spent together afterward haunts a large portion of the film.

It becomes obvious that Paul wants to have the control that Jerry possesses and surrenders his wife to express camaraderie. As Godard would ironically have it, Paul will lose the girl but not gain the power. When Camille eventually goes to this other man, Paul gains enough courage (and becomes more masculine?) to quit the production and go about working on the projects he truly believes in. Unfortunately, to gain this artistic freedom, Camille had to be removed from his life. The fact that he had her taken away unwillingly says much about his lack of knowing what he really wants. He either desires to be with Camille or to be Jerry's doppelganger. By the film's end, he is left with nothing.


Godard cast Brigitte Bardot, at least in part, for her international sex symbol status. His film makes this clear in her various scenes of undress — in some shots, she seems to be portrayed as an unobtainable naked angel from the heavens. Her character's inclusion gives the story a sense of lust and mystery, providing much of the necessary conflict for the film. Camille represents what both men want but neither can have. Paul constantly wants to please her and keep her happy while Jerry simply wants to bed and conquer his cheap screenwriter's wife. The politics of a film's production trickles down to the private lives of its makers. Viewers may be correct in  suspecting that Paul wants to or has had a fling with Jerry's noble translator/assistant, and this furthers the belief that Paul envies the man who signs his checks (one time quite literally on the assistant's bent over back).


The auteur theory was created to give credit where credit was due. In Contempt's film within a film, the director Fritz Lang plays himself as old, tired, and flustered. He is a director that does as Jerry tells him. One glance will pretty much tell you that his days of musical beds has long since passed. Camille's affection then becomes a prize to be wrestled over by a writer and a producer, a man out of his element versus a seasoned pro. The audience may personally feel that she is right for neither man, but one certainly deserves more empathy than the other. In Contempt, Godard presents a screenwriter as the tragic hero, the misguided lover, auteur theory be damned.


----- Erik Luers