Éloge de l'amour

Veering into my own 60th year, having taken a sharp (and for some it would seem unhappy-making) turn in my own creative work over the past ten years, I have in recent years given thought to the trajectory of the so-called “creative” life – primarily in the work of painters, but also in other branches of the arts, including cinema. The following are some thoughts prompted by recent exhibitions and JL Godard's last work.

Lucian Freud at the Tate Modern (August 2002)

At the Tate Modern (the older Tate museum) there was recently a retrospective of the work of Lucian Freud. I managed an hour during a rather packed Sunday afternoon, also the exhibition's final day, not really comfortable, but all I was able to squeeze into my stay in London. Aside from having to elbow one's way to see the paintings – past people clutching their lecture devices who don't really look but stand three or five feet away listening to what I am sure is an academic facts and figures summary like dates, where he was living, and other not really so important things vis á vis the painting, with ready-made interpretations of the meaning of this or that – it wasn't really enough time, but so life goes.

Freud's earliest work (early 1940s) shows an immediate painterly talent. It is heavily influenced by surrealist qualities and mannerisms - juxtaposing odd things (zebra head coming in through a window), strongly distorted features, and so on. After a brief flirt in this direction he quickly settled in on portraiture, at first while very skilled, using thin washes, built up in layers, these works sometimes come perilously close to illustration - very good illustration but illustration. An early series of portraits limits the exaggeration to large eyes and a slightly bulging top of head (a well-known one from this series is among a group with excessively big eyes that goes dangerously into Walter Keane territory - a really trashy kitsch painter from '60s America). For this period his color palette is if not bright, at least not so limited and muted as it would become. Clearly he is no colorist.

Quickly enough, with some painterly hints from his friendship with Francis Bacon visible, Freud gravitated towards his idea fixee, which he then pursued with obsessive intensity for the next 50 plus years - portraiture, often nudes, in a palette of skin tones, earths, occasional reds, and when other "colors" enter, very muted. Here and there are a few images without people, of foliage. At the outset of this his paint is thin, washes built up to make a dense textural richness. This gave way to a thicker paint, in which in a meticulous manner he harnessed very fine aspects of the brush, with small little ridges of paint showing the traces of the individual hairs of the brush; this was done in a careful manner, heightening the richness of fine details. From a few steps back the images, like Caravaggio, seem somewhat clear and tight; with your nose in the painting, the fluid painterly qualities come to the fore. His balance in this is often perfect.

Such careful and meticulous detailing frequently (whether done in a painterly manner or more photo-realist one) results in a rigid and dead image. For several decades Freud pursued this aesthetic, certainly an obsessive and laborious process. Perhaps the best example is a large canvas of foliage, leached of color, a rich field of tan, slight earths, depicting leaves and the dense bramble of a bush. At a distance the sense of depth is amazing, one layer giving way to that behind it, several fold. Up close the depth vanishes, and what becomes clear are the amazingly small but very painterly details - the edge of a leaf defined by a meticulous fringe of thick paint trails of a stiff brush, applied with an exactitude which for anyone who has painted, seems astounding. It is a very big canvas, and its surface is completely covered. I cannot imagine how many hours it took, but certainly very very many. Unlike most such paintings, in which technique tends to overwhelm the painting itself, here the balance is immaculate, the push-pull tension between the "image" and the "painting" as precise as a tightrope walker's step. This is just the opposite of the numerous examples in Western art of the 'look-at-me' still-life exercises of flowers, peeled fruits and glasses in which the virtuoso act of painterly perfection destroys the image, the tour-de-force sucking out any interest beyond an academic, yep, you sure can make that illusion.

In his portraits, limited in his color range, Freud though engages in discreet but in fact very strong spatial manipulations. The space is normally flattened out, so that, for example, the legs of the sitter in the chair are being looked down on while the torso and perhaps face are seen frontally. Within this unrolled space are often foreshortenings pushed to slight extremes, such that one is not really aware, as one might be in surrealist work, of the spatial warp, but feels it is “natural” while in fact it is highly unnatural. Through this spatial play Freud imparts both a sense of monumentality to the most ordinary (a person in a chair or on a bed), and at the same time secures a rich sense of psychological penetration of the person (always a bit grim and unhappy – Freud must be approached with a buoyant spirit or he will fast take you down).

Painter and model    (Lucien Freud, 1986/87)

Gerhardt Richter at the San Francisco MOMA (November, 2002)

A retrospective of 40 years of painting. I went a bit eager, perhaps over-eager, having admired the isolated picture seen in museums, and reproductions. The thought of seeing a large collection, spanning the career, seemed enticing. At first it was – the first rooms, in chronological order, having the eclectic mixture which I had known to expect: the soft-focus “realist” images, the raw and brutal scraped abstracts. In both cases these seemed to have the weight of seriousness. The images taken from newspapers, rendered in grays and black, their outlines softened with whiskered strokes, the facile rendering of mundane “reality” made mysterious with the reduction to monochrome and the distanced effect of the soft-focus. Juxtaposed against the harsh and large scraped panels, they played off each other nicely, as did the experiments in swirling paints done with a large and sometimes serrated blade. The early work harkened with its newspaper typography and imagery belonging to the American Pop art of the same time, but seemed invested with a German sense of gravity, and a more attentive painterly quality (a small gray roll of toilet paper casts a subtle shadow). Likewise the color panel experiments seemed a more severe case of Op art. Richter seemed ready to shamelessly touch all the bases, including nods to Abstract Expressionist Action Painting, and did so with such graceful ease that it seems almost a critique of these movements. Richter seems a born painter, able to hop from one mode to the next like a child. And yet…

And yet, as room followed room of essentially the same tactics, the radical shift from the hard abstracts to the gray and painterly city-scapes, Baeder Meinhof images, the gentle color land and sea-scapes, the saccharine portraits of his wife and child, the intermixing of soft-focusing and scraped smearing (his unpainting), the effect dulled, and slowly emerging from this accumulation came a powerful sense of obvious kitsch: what had seemed serious decayed into a shallow game, a kind of nose-thumbing “look how I can paint” sucked dry of any more meaningful content. The end result for me was a collapse into disappointment, all this obvious talent thrown away in a sequence of empty gestures. On quite another frequency, it is the same sense evoked by a Warhol, or Ed Ruscha retrospective: like Richter these are equally gifted with graphic talents, able to conjure the catchy image, to exploit a certain range of painterly or graphic quality and to hang it upon contemporary realities; and like these painters the more one sees, the thinner the content seems, until finally the enterprise folds in on itself, reduced to parody or self-caricature. Richter's later images of his child and wife, unbearably kitsch in form and content, are not enhanced by the scraping then applied, rather the effect is as if Richter were assaulting himself, attempting to eradicate the facile manner in which he makes his images, as if scraping away the image would somehow rescue it from its fall into emptiness. It does not, but rather underlines the essential void which no amount of painterly talent can hide, and into which Richter's entire career falls. The appearance of “significance” is a masquerade in this case, an accidental addendum to a lifetime of flight from such significance.

GODARD at End Game

Which then leads to Godard's latest, Éloge de l'amour. On the day of its release, I read the reviews in the Village Voice and New York Times (worthy of a look). I saw the film on DVD at a friend's in London, certainly not an ideal manner in which to see richly visual work such as Godard's. Éloge de l'amour certainly has an elegiac feel to it, the front 2/3rds in often lovely, if rather conservative, B&W imagery, much of it Parisian street scenes, a kind of documentary, but with a Huttonesque quality of being instantly old: lingering in the mind is that one has seen these images decades ago and draws to question the remaking of them – why? The camera is static, the compositions gelid, and lacking any originality. Rather they reprise a kind of history of photography of Paris, echoing rather directly a long sequence of photographers of the last 70 years. The “story” is one of the ones JLG has been telling for 40 years, starting perhaps with Le mépris (1963), and then repeatedly since: the story of making a movie that isn't quite made.

Éloge de l'amour

The end result is a kind of decadence, in Godard's case the inversion of the norm, where usually things get more florid and exaggerated. Éloge instead swerves to a severe Bressonian austerity until it suddenly breaks into a garish and somewhat schizoid and awful “video” which seems contrived to give digital video a bad name. Cranking the colors into not so bizarre extremes Godard actually does little but the most obvious with this medium, a severe disappointment in light of his past experiments in video and film. Juxtaposed to the careful black and white which precedes it, it seems a calculated (and misguided) jab, a backward lament for something about to be lost. One has no sense that he experimented with the new media for its own qualities, but rather attempted to impose filmic ones on it, and failing (as proper) then forced some dubious aesthetic pressure on it if only to laugh. Given his long ago work in video, long before it was in any manner fashionable, this is a bit of a surprise. On the other hand he is 71, and life takes its toll. One senses in the cumulative piece a tiredness of the work, of the failed (and illogical) fight, and of life. Godard was lost in Plato's cave from the outset, so he should not be surprised when this illusory ersatz world of film proves unsatisfactory – as a replacement for life, it is indeed a very unsatisfactory substitute. One should not need 71 years to fathom that. In Godard's case, the self-parody is, as perhaps it should be despite the Gallic setting, in Swiss Calvinist terms. You can't go home again? Or you must?

Meanwhile, in the titanic struggle which Godard has foolishly assigned to himself, it is Spielberg who is winning and laughing all the way to the bank (if himself intermittently showing signs of his own unhappiness with his periodic and pathetic attempts at "artistic seriousness"): the contest between art and Mammon is ever a losing proposition, and Jean-Luc's perpetual battle has taken on the character of Don Quixote. Jean-Luc's bitterness is palpable, though had he “won” – had Hollywood been vanquished from his constant jabs – there is no doubt in my mind he would be equally unhappy and bitter: shadows are a very poor substitute for life, and Godard has been shadow-boxing for his entire life. It is far too late for him to recall the original entry into Plato's cave wherein he lost himself.

Endgame (Amsterdam, January 15, 2003)

I'm here, to give, tomorrow at a conference, a talk on digital media and its preservation (which, ever against the grain, I will suggest is a fruitless and unnecessary and even undesirable endeavor). I am in the Hotel de Filosoof, at a window looking out over Vondelpark, and perhaps by chance it is an appropriate place for these final musings. About ten days ago, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the last of a long sequence of screenings across the USA, a man, more or less my age, opened the post-screening discussion with a five minute long near eulogy, an embarrassing prelude of compliments on my past work, my seeming moral and ethical rectitude, all of which was difficult to accept – I am far more amenable to nasty criticism than cheerful slaps on the back. At the conclusion of his long list of positives he then landed what seemed in the context a sucker-punch, announcing that all his anticipations of, in his words, “enlightenment” had been dashed by the work I had shown, my last completed long piece, Oui Non (2002) being in his view an apparent complete failure, lacking the honesty of previous work, et al. I offered no response, aside from my apologies for having failed to live up to whatever expectations he had brought to the room, for which, frankly, I did not feel responsible. I chose not to note that I have never perceived myself as a giver of enlightenment, and have always been averse to either hero-worship or fandom, and decline to place others on pedestals or accept being put on one myself: the laws of gravity and the nature of human avarice both assure that there is only one exit route off a pedestal.

But, along with many other comments taken in during a 14 city, eight week tour of the USA – my first return at all to my native land in nearly ten years – it served to underline a recurrent theme: the wish of those of the audience familiar with past work to be served up, in effect, more of the same. Where, it was asked again and again, was the narrative, the political directness, the this and the that which was liked of past work, and would I be doing another film like All the Vermeers (1990), or The Bed You Sleep In (1993), or whichever was the speaker's favorite. The frequent sense of disappointment in some for the new work – work which I willfully and happily and willingly did in a manner utterly unlike my previous – was vivid and palpable, almost a sense that I had betrayed the viewer, and hence myself and my own supposed talents. When I responded that I had grown bored with my own work – the process and the end result – even if perhaps it had been good, and that I had no interest in repeating myself as I saw other artists repeat themselves, this was met usually by those persons with dismay. When they insisted their desire for further narratives and on my seeming moral responsibility to provide it, I said that while I imagined I might in the future do something akin to my past narrative work, but that it would not look or be done in anything like the forms I had used before, and that I was not interested in making something I or they had ever seen the likes of before, this was met with a dubious air. In defense, not of the virtues or wonderfulness of my past years of DV work, I noted that in my own mind I had been, since commencing in DV, “playing” and that I thought, after 35 years of filmmaking, that I had earned the right to do so, as well as to shift gears and in a sense start anew, all over again. And that the “play” was fun, but also serious – an investigation and experimentation in a new realm, something I felt reinvigorated my interest in work, and through which I had learned a great deal. I did suggest, by way of pacifying my doubting Thomas', and also telling the truth about my own thoughts, that I was – after six years of such experimentation – feeling just about ready to commence on a “serious” work which would embrace all that I had learned, but that this was not easy, since in effect I had no precursors to take as a guide or if I did, it was more in the realm of music, painting, poetry, than in the cinema.

Of course, such discussion provoked for me a curiousness about the flow of the creative fluid, and a greater awareness of its volatile, living nature. Some artists commence almost full-blown, and tail-spin immediately; some slowly grow, maturing over time; some last, some don't. I am self-aware enough, and a harsh critic of myself, such that I consider these things, and ponder my own nature, wondering where – attempting not to be vain and fat-headed – just where in this spectrum I might fit. And I ponder, as I have counseled in the critiques above, metaphorically, hanging up my own brushes when the due time comes rather than plowing ahead, whether encouraged or discouraged by others, as a matter of habit or pride or arrogance. In the din of the present world, especially in the shrieking media-saturated world of America and its copy-cat cultures East and West, it would seem perhaps the proper and wisest stance would be withdrawal and silence.

While I do not have any idea if my scribblings (kept largely private) constitute “poetry” the following was written a handful of years ago, a musing prompted by consideration of the career of Emil Nolde, a favorite painter in my eyes, never mind his erratic output and ultimate decline:

medium film sudah mencapai batas puncak pencapaiannya dan medium video mulai menyerang sinema dengan berbagai sensasinya.. itulah prediksi Godard tentang kelanjutan sinema. :)  menarik memang..

Before and After:
Origins and Death in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard

The desire to work on a film text can stem from a variety of sources. In the process of this work, nonetheless, the writer is often quartered between the time of the first impression and a time of research that distances one from the first breach that catalysed the motion of the enquiry. Finding and working around this first impression is part of the fidelity we must display in order to remain close to the work we analyse.

The present remarks and reflections are rooted in and illuminated by one of these first impressions, an impression left by a striking image that appears near the beginning of episode 4a of Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). This image is what led me to investigate and reflect upon the motifs of origins and death in Histoire(s) and other Godard works.

Impression of Origin

The opening segment and the entirety of episode 4a is carried by Giya Kancheli's Abii ne viderem ("I turn away so as not to see"), a piece for violin and orchestra, where discordant staccati are contrasted with long suspended legati. After the title LE CONTROLE DE L'UNIVERS, Godard presents us with an odd image, emerging as from a shadowy and intimate dark room. A heavy-grained, black and white strip of celluloid, torn by streaks, slowed down to the point of abstraction, runs through the video machine. We can see, on the left side of the screen, the hip and leg of a woman, and a man's face and hand in the centre of the image. The scene is lit by a fragile strip of light, engulfed by grey grain. The man's gesture is made hesitant by the strobes of light. His hand appears and disappears in the darkness, between the immobile legs of the woman. This image has no name. Anonymous, impersonal, almost invisible, saved from a past it recalls and annuls at the same time, this image was obviously destined for a totally different usage - probably an early 20^th century stag film.

No matter the precise origins of this image, what is central here is that it produces an image of origins: origin of the world, via Gustave Courbet's scandalous painting that it obliquely recalls; origins of a tentative Controle of the Universe; origins of a mystery, suspended on the verge of its own disappearance, a point of obscurity and of pure nudity. This hand, working in the very centre of the "origin of the world", seems to evoke an essential creative tension: the limit of its own possibility, its birth and conception. In this image one finds en condensé a pictorial reference, a reference to the gesture of the gynaecologist that helps give birth, but also to the artist who must "work with his hands", and the spirit that "manifests his presence" - these two phrases recurrent motifs throughout Histoire(s) du cinéma. Between the origin of the world and the control of the universe, it is the programme and the drama of all Art that is expressed.

Variations

As is often the case in Godard, this motif is not isolated. One can find a number of variations and reworkings of this image (and the issues it raises) in works such as Je Vous salue, Marie (1985), Hélas pour moi (1993) and L'origine du XXIe siècle (2000).

For instance, the opening scene of L'origine du XXIe siècle superimposes - as the title L'OR - L'ORIGINE - DE L'ORIGINE is being formed - a golden lake and the pubic hair of a woman shot in extreme close-up, taken from Hélas pour moi. As the intertitle DU XXIe SIECLE appears, the soundtrack breaks into sounds of rifle shots and bombs exploding, in sharp contrast with the violin melody that accompanied the opening images. Twelve rapid shots are then seen on screen in a 3 second time span (blazing sun, sexual penetration, black image, etc.) War and pornography stand here - as elsewhere - in opposition with Eden (the Garden of Delights) and the Light and Mystery of the Origins (1).

Such a télescopage between the End of the World and the Origins of the world is also central to an important segment of episode 2a of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Near the end of the episode, Godard mixes a still image from Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu (1959) and Courbet's Origin of the World, and opposes it with footage of concentration camp prisoners during WWII and a black and white pornographic sequence. In this cross-cutting of The World of Apu and death camps, Courbet's Origin and pornographic material, one grasps what is at stake: all that could represent, in art, the possibility of beauty (art's infancy) has been troubled, raped by the horrors of the war and the camps in particular. The state of original infancy has been irrevocably perverted (2).

On Before and After, Origin and Death

The origin, in this context, comes to represent a state of Before: before the fall of the world. The Origin is, for this reason, inseparable from what comes After (after Auschwitz, after Chernobyl, after the invasion of CNN and its groupies, etc.) We can say, anticipating my propos, that Godard's recent work (from the '80s onward) is situated in a time-space of loss and repossession, between the Lost World and Time regained. A sense of what has been lost must first be recognised before imagining new possibilities. But this possibility is Janus-Faced, forked between a stare drawn towards the Before, and a look at the catastrophe of the After where he stands and towards which he is pushed. The search for this Before means acting upon the loss, plunging deep in the heart of the abyss that chained history to its distress, and that orchestrated cinema's loss.

We must note that this Before and After cannot be seized strictly as historical markers. They manifest themselves through a variety of forms: philosophical, historical, geophysical, lyrical, biographical, etc. They are questions, before being dates or historical events. In Prénom: Carmen (1983) the question asked is: "What is there before the Name?" In Je vous salue, Marie Godard tries to capture: "What did they say to each other, Joseph and Marie, before the Legend?" Puissance de la Parole (1988) ends on a vertiginous evocation of the original chaos, where all four elements blend via video mixing, an acoustic and visual polyphony. Lettre à Freddy Buache (1981), JLG/JLG autopotrait en décembre (1994) and For Ever Mozart (1996) show a series of personal landscapes, places where Godard grew up, streets of Lausanne and Geneva, the house of his mother, the shores of Lac Leman. Hélas pour moi and Allemagne année 9 0 neuf zéro (1991) both have narratives revolving around investigations into what happened before. In King Lear (1987), William Shakespeare Jr. the 5th tries to rewrite the disappeared works of his famous ancestor. In Histoire(s) du cinéma and other works Auschwitz, the invention of sound film, the television empires, the Fall of the Wall, Chernobyl and Sarajevo all mark the end of something. These different events are 'second degree' in the sense that they all are valued as symptoms of this After. And there are as many variations to signify the Before. Godard, thus, is following the traces of the fleeing gods while picking up the traces of what made them disappear.

So how should we conceive all these 'befores' and 'afters'? It is not evident that Before be anterior to the After, and that what existed before cannot reappear, that the "murmur we once perceived, a long time ago, oh!, so long ago, the murmur begins again" (Histoire(s) du cinéma). Before and After are points that permit Godard to draw lines; they are treated as events that deploy a cartography of history and memory. They are without beginning or end since they are both beginning and end, origin and death, resurrection and regression. Each point of origin replays from within a death that displaces all coordinates; each End is an invitation to begin anew. Hence, the possibility of still making films, for Godard, seems caught between a strive towards origins and an imaginary of the end. Origin and Death are constantly played one against the other, incessantly displaced, deterritorialised. The task of the filmmaker then resonates like the verse from Baudelaire's "The Voyage":

This passage, in turn, appeared in a 1965 Cahiers essay by Godard entitled "Pierrot My Friend":

When we put these two quotations from Baudelaire and Claudel next to each other, we see that they both respond, in Godard's re-appropriation, to the same task: a search for Cinema. And so we would have, on the one hand, all that can figure the origins of cinema and the origin through the cinema that Godard practices, and, on the other, all that can signify cinema's death, a death that he was already anticipating with ironic optimism in 1965. (5) Splendour and misery, grandeur and decadence: these two movements seem to have set in motion Godard's films from the very beginning. Let us look now at the manifestations of this double bind in the evolution of his cinema.

À la recherche du cinéma perdu

À bout de soufflé

Godard has often stated that all the essential inventions of cinema were found in the first twenty or thirty years after its conception. Returning to the beginnings of cinema is a way of giving it a new breath of life, a breath that one feels very tangibly in his earlier films even those (like Le Petit soldat [1960]) where a gloomy sense of death lurks over the work. All the technical processes Godard has integrated throughout his career - slow motion, acceleration, intertitles, still images, iris, lap dissolves, Vertovian montage, silent sequences - recapture, in the present of their reinvention, something of cinema, giving the impression that it had just been invented. But could we not also say that this return to sources - which is also a constant invocation of cinema's history - is the most obvious trace of Godard's and the New Wave's cinephilia? Isn't Henri Langlois the usher who opened the doors of cinema to them?

We can say, punningly, that Godard has two birthplaces: Geneva 1930, and Paris on the Avenue de Messine in the late '40s early '50s, where Langlois introduced the not-yet-exactly-young-turks to cinema. Light was then revealed: "Let there be light" (episode 3b).

Langlois is often presented in Histoire(s) du cinema, via Fra Angelico, as the Angel of the Annunciation (as in 3b). Godard's debt to Langlois is revealing of his debt to cinema history as a whole, without which he himself would have no history. Langlois showed them the "brotherhood of metaphors". Because of this critical cinephilia, what became very clear to Godard was that, to make a film, he had to align himself in a fraternity with the past - whether its name be Vigo, Stroheim, Lang or Malraux - a past metamorphosed in the present (this is the theme of episode 3b).

Langlois's seances also showed the soon-to-be critics a novel way of thinking about the history of cinema grounded in films:

From the outset, the status of cinema history in Godard's films is intimately linked - through quotations, references, techniques and so on - to the role this history played in his own life as cinephile, critic and cineaste. With the passing years, what was initially a gift, then a horizon of artistic invention, became debt, responsibility and an urgency to save cinema from its disappearance from memories. His cinema has, in many ways, become a cinema of resistance.

Godard and History: Quoting and Reinventing

Godard has always proclaimed himself in texts and interviews the child of the museum and the cinémathèque. "We were born in the museum, it's our homeland, and we're the only ones". (8) It's for this reason that Godard's history project, according to Serge Daney, could only be done by someone of his generation. (9) The Cahiers critics found themselves both witnesses and preservers of a cinematic historical heritage, whilst following the tormented path of cinema's many deaths. This consciousness was to be expressed with a mixture of resignation, cynicism and sadness by the different auteurs of the period: Resnais, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut, Varda. But none has given as much attention to the process of cinema's dereliction and possible resurrection as Godard.

By what secret election does Godard feels responsible to fill this task? "Why ask me to shoot this twisted fairy-tale?" asks the protagonist from King Lear. Is it because, as Daney suggests, Godard is, of all the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, the most "fundamentally a historian? If this is so, how is this historian's sensibility manifested in the works? Godard has not been interested in the genre of historical films; nor is he interested in representing history (unlike people such as Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Berri, Milos Forman and Steven Spielberg). (10) If Godard is to be seen as an historian, it's first and foremost through his art of quotation.

This art of participates in history in two ways: by feeding on the history of expressive forms; and by integrating quotations that, via the intelligence of his montage, propose little 'history lessons'. In both cases, the use value of these quotations is to re-present the history of artistic representation and philosophical interrogation. This reflexivity of an artistic form on itself (cinematic quotation) or on another (painting, novelistic, poetic, philosophical) is a way of reminding us that all expressive forms are grounded on prior experiences of art (seen, heard, read). We are then witnessing a re-appropriation and a re-invention of something that impressed the cineaste and, on another hand, the mise en scène of this art itself within the history of other art forms.

Quotations in Godard are not merely an artistic tic. They have become over time an essential question of his work, engaging a historical consciousness and a way of dealing with cinematic creation. As Jacques Aumont states: "The cinematic signifier is, essentially and contingently, a citational signifier". (11) Godard is only enlarging and radicalising this proposal. By exaggerating cinema's essentially citational signifier, he indicates to us everything that has traversed its histor(ies), singular and multiple.

That is why it is often inappropriate to reduce Godard's understanding and practice of quotation by imposing upon it the post-modern lexicon of pastiche, collage, patchwork, etc. Godard's quotations are (his) invention and creation, they are both critical and poetic. In Aumont's words: "The science of the critic, his intuition and his poetry, is to leave unaltered what is quoted, even if he's deforming it, meanwhile showing it as if it was new". (12) Reinventing while preserving, or, better still, preserving while reinventing the object: here resides the intelligence of Godard's quotations. And he has shown how, by preserving cinema in such a way, he could incessantly reinvent it.

Whether he's quoting a scene from Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) or a phrase by Elie Faure (in Pierrot le fou), a short story by Poe (Vivre sa vie), reflections by Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty, the paintings of Renoir, Goya, Picasso, camera movements or technical devices by Murnau, Meliès, Epstein or Eisenstein - Godard is, in every case, telling us something about cinema (the cinema he practices, and that has been practiced) while reinstating the very historicity of cinema. He's reminding us of its place in a History. All that is quoted in Godard is edited (monté) and through his montage bears new meaning, produces something new. The art of quotation refers to something and produces something else in the very same process, born out of montage, téléscopage, displacement, condensation, recontextualisation - in a word: reinvention.

Cinema Itself

So Godard's search for cinema reveals itself, primarily, in the use of quotations that allow the assumption of cinema's historicity while inventing, each time, a new expressive form that re-produces while preserving the quoted element. But quotation is not the final word of this quest; it represents but one dimension. Could we say that Godard's work has never had any subject but cinema itself? "I believe that my first films didn't really have a subject [.] I only tackled a subject at the time of France Tour Detour [197x] and Sauve qui peut (la vie) [1980]. Before then, the subject was cinema". (13) If his other films do have a subject, it seems that this subject matter was, each time, subjected to questions of cinema, its way of treating things, its possibilities of expression and the limits of its representation. From Une Histoire d'eau (1958) to Histoire(s) du cinéma, À bout de souffle to Sauve qui peut (la vie), One+One (1970) to Numéro deux (1975), Les Carabiniers (1963) to For Ever Mozart, Godard has constantly been looking for cinema, finding and losing it, rethinking its foundations, invoking and convoking it, trying to see it - and make us see it - as if for the first time.

Every film appears through the opacity of its mediations. Filming the present in the present means filming a present embedded in a certain historicity, or at least a temporal depth. "The past isn't dead, it's not even past", the Faulknerian formulae that circulates throughout Histoire(s), could be seen as a general principle for his entire ouvre. Not that we should turn our eyes away from the present; on the contrary, it means that we must try to find ways to make coincide the three modalities of temporality. If cinema is an art of the present, it's certainly because it can be the witness of a convergence of the three Augustinian modalities of time: a present of the past (memory), a present of the present (intuition), a present of the future (expectation). The cinema that Godard conceives is traversed by these three dimensions, and at the same time - and for this very reason - we can say that all notions of linear progression collapse. There is a becoming, but this becoming is not subsumed by the rules of chronology. To go forward, one must, at times, look back.

Concerning Cocteau's Orpheus (1949), Godard wrote: "[I]n order to create cinema we must rediscover Meliès, and that quite a few light years are still necessary for this". (14) It is not surprising, then, that Paul, the protagonist of Le Mépris (1963) formulates the wish of returning to the silent art of Griffith, Chaplin and Meliès. Fritz Lang is also, in the same film, an incorporated quotation of this cinema of mise en scène that Godard seeks, with which he feels cinema has lost touch. In each of theses cases, to rediscover means not to emulate, but to regain, for oneself.

To finish, one must begin again. Between loss and regain, the only way of making cinema is to use the object of this loss as a subject of analysis, the subject of a tale, a land to be conquered. To find this land also means to deserve a Name next to others.

"Why me? Why ask me to shoot this twisted fairy-tale?" asks the protagonist from King Lear, while leafing through a photo album containing images of directors including Cocteau, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles. "Where do I fit in this Pantheon?", Godard seems to ask. Can 'Jeannot' take his place along side Fritz, Boris, Nicholas? Can he be worthy of the name he has been given? The long litany of JLG/JLG autoportrait poses precisely this question.

The Rescapé

Resistance is memory and fidelity. By marking such filiations and paternities Godard, particularly in the last twenty years or so, has been pursuing the true tradition of the 'cinematograph', the first essential intuitions of silent films - those of Jean Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein - and the idea that it is cinema as it is practiced today that has derailed. As Michael Witt has argued, "it is not Godard's work but the rest of cinema that has somehow lost its way and been sidelined to the margins". (16) In the seminars he gave in Montreal in the late '70s, Godard stated similarly that he wished "to rediscover silent films in order to find his own talking pictures". He has also often said that he has never left cinema, and that it is others who have accused him of abandoning it: hence the irony and pain of those Idiot characters that appear here and there in his filmography of the '80s.

Le Mépris

The First Film: Making the First Picture

Regaining cinema is another way of replaying the first film. It is not surprising that images of trains arriving and factory exits have circulated throughout his films. We remember Michel Ange's naïve reactions in Les Carabiniers, but we should also recall the numerous train arrivals in Sauve qui peut (la vie), Hélas pour moi and For Ever Mozart. We also know the importance the factory has had in his films from the late '60s onward, particularly in Tout va bien (1972) and Passion (1982), where it comes to represent cinema's 'ordinary'. Parallels have often been made between Etienne-Jules Marey's early experiments and the slow-motion sequences of France Tour détour. "There is a moment where you need to start from the beginning". (18)

To start from the beginning entails a return to the 'first' film. It can also mean giving himself the right to do and redo his own first film, to constantly displace the moment of this first picture. As a critic, Godard was already making his first film. If À bout de souffle is his first feature, Une femme est une femme is his 'real first film'. Bande à part (1964), after Le Mépris, felt like a return to his first films. Numéro deux (initially announced as À bout de soufflé 2) indicated a new state of facts, a program, a direction. Sauve qui peut (la vie) the famous 'second first film' is seen as his 'third life' in cinema. Nouvelle Vague, if only by its title, is a kind of 'return'. And isn't it that, redoing, albeit differently, all the cinema that has been done? Michel Poiccard's death oddly resembles the death of Paul Godard in Sauve qui peut. Aphorisms by Bresson appear in five or six films, but are inflected differently in each case. Quotations from Summer with Monika (1952), Mr. Arkadin (1955), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1958), While the City Sleeps (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) stream through his films, but each time carry a different meaning. The locus of Godard's creative output lies somewhere between this 'redoing' and this 'differently'.

Mourning and Redemption: A Cinema of Revelation

Quotations, search for cinema, survivors, first films: all these motifs and practices are based on a common statement. Cinema has been lost, and every filmmaker must come to terms with this loss. This position became ever more radical in the late '60s and throughout the '70s, between the Dziga Vertov group and the Sonimage experiments. When Godard returns to cinema in the '80s - as the legend has it - this position seems even sharper. The deaths of Rossellini, Hitchcock and Truffaut gradually confirm his impression that he is perhaps one of the last, alongside (at least in the '80s) Wenders, Akerman and the Straubs, to follow a certain path.

His films of the '80s and '90s show us a new radicalisation, that introducing to his lexicon new preoccupations: the Invisible, the Sacred, the Law, resurrection, History, mourning, etc. From Passion to Hélas pour moi, the issue of return took a specific turn. Godard has maybe turned towards, as Deleuze puts it, a cinema of revelation, i.e. a cinema that tries to recapture its own essence by capturing the genesis of shapes in the frame, the genesis of the visible on the brink of the invisible, in other words, the in-between between thought and non-thought. (19) It is as if he was trying to film a pre-syntactical consistency of things, a cinema 'before the legend', that would catch things purely.

A very modern preoccupation has thus appeared, trying to grasp things before they've been given a name, in a pre-linguistic state, rendering their ontological depth. The question then is to show this impossible, and all the degrees of invisibility of the visible: this is the ghost matter of Hélas pour moi, the Light of Passion, the Mystery of Marie, Rachel or Carmen that joins cinema's own, and threads it. Is this not in conformity with the privileged mystery of Cinema in Epstein's definition?

In asking what comes before the law, we must also work through and confront it: the linguistic order, the law of images, the forbidden objects of representation, to reach the Word, the original Image. These are all multiple versions of Godard's origins, or his search for the Before in the '80s and '90s. At stake in this striving for the Before is a painful desire to start again, anew, through an understanding of the beginning. This beginning can represent an uncorrupted state of images and sounds - hence all the displaced inserts of landscapes, skyscapes, fields, that signal this 'first state' of images. His late '70s project to shoot a film in Mozambique was similarly based on a will to find a primordial state of images. So it is unsurprising that Godard became fascinated with the figure of Marie. In the script of Je vous salue, Marie, we read:

In the same line of thought, when the protagonist of King Lear finds Pluggy's reels near the end of the film, he says: "The first bells of Easter were ringing. The images were there, as new: shy, innocent, strong. Pluggy's sacrifice was not in vain. The image will appear at the time of the resurrection". The images we see, at that moment in the film, are similar to those that flood his work in the '80s: tree, sky, flower, etc. The time of the resurrection is not a messianic return, but rather a parousie, a 'second event' that redeems the real through images, the resurrection of a presence, lyrical and transformative, of cinema's aura.

To redeem and regain cinema, finally, can also mean finding oneself. Since the Lettre à Freddy Buache, Geneva and Lausanne have reappeared at the centre of his visual universe and naturally participate in this return. Even the house of Odile Monod, Godard's mother, appears in For Ever Mozart. Godard's several changes of habitation in the '70s, from Paris to Grenoble to Rolle, coincide with a similar movement in his cinema. Images of Lake Leman, of plains and streams, images of places of his childhood appear here and there in many films, up to JLG/JLG, which opens with a photograph of a young Jean-Luc. Rooms and landscapes in this film are filled with texts, memories, films and paintings that draw the portrait of the man he is, and is still becoming. If Godard is now in the December of his life, we can also recall that he was born in December and that the film is in keeping with the tension between birth and death, beginning and ending, that foregrounds many of his other films.

In JLG/JLG, we hear Godard saying: "Usually death arrives, and we mourn. I don't know why, but I did the contrary. I mourned first, and death did not come, nor in Paris, nor on the shores of the Geneva Lake". Godard, like cinema, wore first the colours of mourning: black and white, and is still awaiting death, the 'last judgement'. And so he now films this death, or, more precisely, each image he films is ripped away from cinema's death and perhaps even his own death. Cinema has never been more fully (as Cocteau described it), specifically because what is at stake is its resurrection and the possibilities of seeing images resurrect life.

Cinema's birth or rebirth is intimately linked to its death and the process of its mourning. The grieving of cinema draws on profound reflections about its origins, and, more generally, on the question of origins as a philosophical problem. To say it more simply, to position cinema's death is to think differently its resurrection. To wear the clothes of mourning is another way of celebrating its vitality, in memory and in history.