Making cinema politically not political cinema, Godard

Politics involves both past and present. When you read Churchill's memoirs, you understand very clearly what is happening today. You think, so that is what he was thinking when he took part in such and such conference; but you only learn this twenty years later. It is more difficult in cinema: you have no time since you are dealing with the present. (Godard on Godard, p.225)

Godard has a particular approach to the way he does cinema and thinking about film the way he constructs it as a political construction is a version that rethinks the way we can talk about politics and society with different perspective. His recurrent questioning becomes the content and the form of his films. In his interview with Cashier (Godard on Godard, p.215-234) about the film Pierrot le fou he gives a description of how the questioning the things in between events (history) and daily life that lead to one another. Within this construction Godard explains that he the Vietnam references are linked to "the world of violence, and it is violence that controls the way things evolve [...] my reference to Vietnam was pure logic: it was to show Belmondo that they were playing a game, but that nevertheless the matter of their game pre-existed. 

I repeat making a film is an adventure  comparable to that of  an army advancing through a country and living off the inhabitants. So one is led to talk about those inhabitants. That is what actuality is: it is both what one calls actuality in the cinematographic and journalistic sense, and casual encounters, what one reads, conversations, the business of living in other words. (Godard on Godard, p. 224)

This is basically what Godard means when he says he makes films politically and not political cinema. Although some critics might catalog his inclusion of political themes in his films as a superficial approximation of the subject. Godard's films are essays on a subject and take form in a film that draws from the construction of characters, to the use of citation and text, and the inclusion of actuality in his films in relation to the story and the subjects. Everything that lies between the event and daily life. 

By Natalia Guerrero

Silence, the space between Éloge de l'amour - Jean-Luc Godard

When composer John Cage came up with his piece 4'33'', perceive as four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence, he was actually proposing that any sound could become music. This piece is performed in 3 movements, or sections. For the first version the audience, in front of a stage, saw the a performer reach and sit in front of the piano, open the lid and then close it to mark the end of the duration of that segment. He repeated it 2 more times. The audience sat in "silence" listening to the noises surrounding them. It was controversial to the preconceived notion of music. However, Cage when trying to explain his experiment he reflected on the duration as the essential building block of all music, where  duration is the only element shared by both silence and sound. Therefore, why not fill this with either sounds, silence or noise? The third point is that the work of music is defined not only by its content but also by the behavior it elicits from the audience, they can either be satisfied or contribute to the piece. Basically there is not such thing as silence.

In Éloge de l'amour by Jean-Luc Godard there is a recursive use of a black screen, absence of image or a sum of images that yield too much light or exposure (over exposed images). This silence in between images play a similar role as John Cages experiment. This a sequences of moving images that begin with a non visual image and lead to another image, that leads to a non-visual image, in repeat. The relation to the timing in music and the timing in cinema can be related in similar terms as John Cage did when talking about silence and the new forms of authorship when it comes to composing an art piece. 

Humberto Eco, in The Poetics of the Open Work, talks about the open-ended and aleatory nature of modern music, literature and art "pointing to the wider implications of this new mode of aesthetic reception for sociology and pedagogy, and for new forms of communication."(p.20) When talking about open text in writing, like in music, Eco explains that "blank space surrounding a word, typographical adjustments, and spatial composition in the page setting of a poetic text- all contribute a halo of indefiniteness and to make the text pregnant with infinite possibilities." (p.27) This opens to the free response of the one who reads it. 

This is why Éloge de l'amour is one of my favorite Godard movies, when it comes to talk about the construction of memory its infinite relation to images that evoke other images. In this case the use of a non-visual image (black screen) becomes one of the sources for this being an continuous open text on the understanding of memory. The timing of non-image in between images is a silence open for the emotional and imaginative process the spectator indulges in while adapt our personal world into this images, either by association or by superimposition or juxtaposition; "a network of limitless interrelations". (p.24) Many of the images in this film are stripped from the referent, and the text (voice over) becomes part of the image, but at the same time the spectator sees himself confronted with a narration (that is a continuous questioning on memory process and thought) place over an image of nothingness, of images that are just images in movement through a space, the portrait of a fleeting space or landscape. A Time and Space that is not definite neither by the story nor by the narration, so it becomes the image of something we don't know but that we get to know by relating it to something already known. Where the initial referent of the image can become another image, a continuous process of reconstructing memory, a reconstruction that takes place in that silence, in that black screen with the sound atmosphere of the previous image, that leads to a new image. 

The entire movie is perfectly timed withing this spaces blank spaces, the spaces of images of nothing, and spaces of images of the characters of the film within this image. There is a timing or a tempo that is defined also by the division of the film in chapters, a recurrent strategy used by Godard. The spectator, as the film, seem to float in a time and place that is not definite but that is certain that it exists. It is a constant open text and the journey of memory of each spectator is a varied as the possible interpretations or associations of each image. The silence in between is not silence. 

By Natalia Guerrero

Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic construction of History and Memory

There is a common denominator in Godard’s films, the construction of history and memory. Themes of memory and time, how to record history, using archives of images to tell a story, history as storytelling in an attempt to arrange certain memories, the diffused boundaries between fiction and non-fiction (documentary and fiction, the real and the imagined), cinema as archive of time and memory, the image as archives of images of time; the conception of cinema as both history and memory, a way of remembering the past but also the present. This is a search to understand the cinematic construction of history and memory in Godard’s films Notre Musique and Tout Va Bien. 

The first one ending with the reflection of being your own historian and how that movie is a record of history for those who don’t keep one; the second movie is a continuous use of images, sound, music, quotations to evoke a reality that is not there anymore and its reconstruction through the use of images and thoughts evoked by a landscape, an image of something that evokes something else.

Specifically for this post I would like to focus on the construction of space, used as a tool for narration, in both films. In Tout Va Bien there is a Brechtian approach to history and the uprising events going in on in France in 1968. 

In Notre Musique, Sarajevo becomes the stage, in this case a landscape. A landscape of memory and history in an attempt of being reconstructed, curiously done by an Israeli journalist, Judith Lerner (as in Tout Va Bien by Yves Montand) in many ways becomes a documentary portrait of this city that is being rebuilt after war through the questioning of other wars like the Israel and Palestine conflict. The camera becomes a silent witness of this portrait in the documentary scenes where we constantly see the daily life of Sarajevo through its streets and the visiting of the landscapes used for remembering the lost lives, (the markets, the streets with cars and pedestrians, the constant focus on the women and children on the street, the public transportation like trains are constantly making a pause on the film, a transition between documentary and fiction, between the true life characters like Godard and the poet playing themselves and the fictional characters like the journalist and the french young woman Olga).

A Bosnian women with her child. This sequence was followed by a sound mix of falling bombs.

The journalist visits a memorial landscape, where the stones represent the dead from August 1990-June 1997. The translator explains that each stone is attached to a card and this card to a face and the information of the position the body was found.

The interesting use of documenting a landscape within the narration of the story in this film leads to the use of landscape as a stage, also like in Tout Va Bien, but this time it is a physical space that exists and its intervened with objects, books (piles of books brought by different people) and characters that interact with them by siting texts in reference to war, land, the dead, wars in the name of colonization, and the need for poets and writers so time can survive. There is also the landscape of the bridge that is constantly referenced through the narration of the story and the quest of the journalist of a past and present and its relationship to land (the war battles for land). This landscape is a space for imagination. At one point of Notre Musique there is a sequence of the journalist sitting in the middle of the shot by the bridge, when she looks to the right she see 3 Indigenous People in getting out and in a car, when she looks to the left she see them again but this time on horses and wearing the classical Indigenous American outfit, a shot and reverse shot. This sequence followed the visiting of the stones in the pictures above and the reading of a text that reflected on the me and the other, history and memory. The associations personal memory can come into play with contexts that resemble it, two truths that happened in the same time in history. The quest of the journalist as she reads Levinas Entre Nos, Restore the past and make the future possible.

Poet reads in spanish: Hay que hacer que la revolución cree una interminable fuerza de creación que fortalezca los recuerdos, que precise los sueños, que corporice las imagenes. That reserves for the dead a better fate. 

Deleuze wrote on Godard that his film is open and inclusive. He always used the word AND. In this case his films would be and attempt of History and Memory. A place for questioning, for dream and reality, for interior and exterior. History is the search within the memory of others and our own. Notre Musique is a shot and reverse shot of History and Memory, of me and the other, of the individual and society, living and death. Both Tout Va Bien and Notre Musique become Godards attempt of a historian. Sarajevo is a starting point to reconcile with the past by starting a conversation about the land a common land, a common landscape where you can then find forgiveness.
By Natalia Guerrero