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

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

What is postmodernism anyway?

In his chapter Smiling with Regret, Douglas Morrey confronts the classification of Godard as a postmodern filmmaker. As we have increasingly seen after his film "Weekend", Godard style undergoes a drastic transformation. As he because more enamored of video we see techniques such as freeze frame slowly leak into his cinematic form. Morrey also identifies the significant increase and change in Godard's citational style. This movement away from a traditional narrative, combined with experimental elements of montage, and quotation support the claim that Godard is a postmodern filmmaker.

Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as the crisis of narrative, particularly in reference to the narratives inherited from the pervious generation of storytellers. Godard works hard to confront the traditions of narrative, even from his early works. Remember the appearance of title cards in Vivre sa Vie. He is interested early on in the organization of stories and the conventions of organization found in cinema at the time. As Godard career progresses we can see his evolution of narrative exploration. I agree with Lyotard that this period does confer a crisis in narrative, but the crisis is not destruction. His approach to his later films still employs narrative through experimental political, cultural, and social critique.

Morrey acknowledges that some commentators paint postmodernists as surrenders of political questions by citing the realization of a perfect political system in liberal democracy. It is true that Godard's more overtly political films like La Choinoise stand is stark contrast to more experimental films like King Lear, but to suggest as Robert Stam does that Godard's later work is only radical "in an aesthetic nature" completely misses the deep philosophical questions Godard raises about the nature of post industrial capitalism. Though Godard is not the only filmmaker to address concerns about the rapidly rising consumer culture, few filmmakers address this problem with such zeal.

Stam's critique accuses Godard of technical and aesthetic tricks, while challenging the narrative as something banal. I couldn't disagree more. It is through his expanded use of montage, citation and juxtaposition in his later work that becomes this political component. I think that we have seen that Godard is a filmmaker who consistently challenges assumptions of political organization and the culture industry throughout his entire career. But there is a danger of, as Terry Eagleton says of allowing postmodernism to become a "catch all term for board cultural phenomena". Here we can see that Lyotard's definition is too broad. Without specific criteria, we find that the term "postmodernism" loses all meaning. Lyotars definition is too broad and does not adequately address our concerns here. Morrey then suggests Frederic Jameson as an alternative to Lyotard with his definition of postmodern culture as a critique of multinational capitalism and one that is overtly political.

In this sense, we can see that Godard clearly fits this definition. His use of citation and montage are explicitly directed to counter what he sees as the capitalist invasion of the daily life of people. One of my favorite examples of this is in the film where Godard juxtaposes clippings from magazines onto of dialogue of girls talking about sexual intercourse. What can be read as a innocent scene between two friends sharing their fears and questions about the intimate details of their sex lives, takes on a darker meaning when rapidly cut with images of products aimed at women to feel more beautiful.

Morrey suggests that the borrowing of forms without regard to their content is a characteristic of postmodernism. We can see this in Godard's use of quotation. Sometimes the quotations are used out of context, or as Morrey suggests " isolating a single thought, image, or observation that pleases him or that fits into the associative schema of the film". Some quotations can be seen as more significant than others. But, like his use of montage, this use of quotation is not postmodern in and of itself. Many filmmakers refer to other works, but do not fit within the confines of postmodern. But it is Gordard's use of quotation that is significant. It is his skill in juxtaposition both of references and montage that gives Godard this postmodernist label.

I argue that it is his use of quotation in combination with his use of montage creates a unique narrative progression where Godard attempts to incorporate ideas, motifs and symbols that exist outside of the narrative structure of his films. But this incorporation attempts to enhance rather than to distract or deconstruct the narrative. Those looking to reconcile Godard's narrative approach with that of a traditional 3 or 5 act structure will be disappointed. His approach delivers a story that the viewer must actively engages with to construct. It is this shifting of responsibility from the filmmaker to the viewer that gives these later films their style, and counts them among postmodern cinema.

-Oz

On "The Negotiation"

It was a pleasure viewing Azin Feizabadi's work in class last night. 

A few thoughts came to mind on my commute home regarding The Negotiation. 

I would have liked to ask what degree of influence did Lars von Trier's Dogville {2003} have on the formal development, both in terms of Brechtian mise en scene,

and the use of V.O. which I thought mirrored {rather effectively} von Trier's approach.

The detached omniscience of the V.O. narrator in this case, most concerned with form and the arc of classical story construction, implies a future position looking back; the pendulum of humankind, the rise and fall inherent to the histoire{s} of social movements {or attitudes} as seen through Neo-Platonic macrocosm. 

The V.O. is the most closed element of Feizabadi's piece as it introduces a position rooted in an acceptance of the overarching inevitability of political flux,  its actors interchangeable, the reorganization of social hierarchy ever so slight. 
In other words, the narrator's knowledge {abeit didactic} of humankind's {Sisyphean?} tendency to initiate upheaval, yet favor stability {the core tenet of classical narrative structure}. 


Through the use of video diptych, we as audience/active spectator find ourselves placed in-between the conversation among archetypal choreographers of radical conflict. This I feel is the essential component of the work {especially in its original installation form} as we can then tangibly participate in the fertile, intertwined dialectic between peace and bloodshed, love and war,  aspiration and futility.

For once possibility trumps political statement.

Leif Huron
{5 of 5}