Issue 3: Spring 2009
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT: High Mimetics in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema
Tony McKibbin
How to set to work exploring Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98)? Three possible approaches come to mind. The first concerns the section where Daney and Godard talk about the history of cinema, and as Daney tries to elaborate an argument, Godard constantly interrupts, as though the pleasures of distraction have a greater hold than the evolution of a thought. The second concerns Godard's insistence that the image is more important than the narrative, that what we remember of Hitchcock is not the story behind why Marion is at the Bates motel in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), or the details surrounding the glass of milk in Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941), but the motel and the glass of milk themselves. The third regards how Godard has become a genuinely poetic filmmaker.
Histoire(s) du cinema
Now there is potential frustration in Godard's inattentiveness towards Daney's argument, and yet this is the inattentiveness present in much of Godard's work as he looks less for the development of a thought process than a clustering of thoughts. When Godard insisted that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order, the same could be said of a thought process. Does he find Daney's laying out of a thought too laboriously intelligent, and wants to splinter it with interruption? Godard, who of course would so often argue with André Bazin and others at Les Cahiers du cinéma on the importance of montage over the long take, no matter his own occasional and deliberate fascination with it in for example Weekend (1967) and Tout va bien (1972), seems even to demand the interruption of the flow in conversation. As Daney starts to say that Godard and his generation were perfectly placed to sum up the history of cinema, where Daney's generation came too late to do so, Godard seems to want to take from Daney's argument the odd line that interests him and ignore or correct those that don't.
What Godard offers up here is the idea of montage as arrogance, a notion no filmmaker has developed more completely than Godard, and that was also, of course, at the heart of his very first feature. It wasn't only that Godard ‘arrogantly' broke the cinematic rules in A Bout de souffle (1959) with the jump cut. It was also that in the process he offered an equal insouciance to his central character Michel. Michel wasn't just the law breaker diegetically. Godard created a lawlessness in technique that captured the lawlessness of emotion - how well behaved, technically, were all those other criminals we had seen in cinema history next to the jump-cutting antics of Michel?
Central to Bazin's ideas in relation to the long take were also of course certain notions of modesty. If Bazin remains the most loveable of critics, this quality doesn't only lie in his personality: in David Thomson's words, "Bazin would be exceptional if only because he is the only important writer on film for whom no one had an angry or pained word". This modesty of personality is matched by a certain modesty of vision he expected from both himself as a critic and from the filmmakers themselves. This was the modesty of capturing reality in all its "ontological ambiguity", and at the same time the "desire to preserve", to accept the way that cinema can capture time past and fix it in a given moment. We might also add a certain type of discreet behaviour, evident when Bazin says a little disapprovingly of Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) "that we know everything about the past and future of these characters whom we have merely glimpsed. Nothing is kept in the dark, not even what might be ambiguous due to missing information." Is this Hitchcock's immodesty, as Bazin equates ambiguity with discretion?
This is to propose that Godard's approach is in many ways the antithesis of Bazin's, without at all suggesting Godard's position is remotely insignificant. It is equally important but radically different. With Godard we have montage, immodesty and even disgracefulness (his constant interruptions); with Bazin we have the long take, modesty and gracefulness. In the scene where Godard and Daney talk not only does Godard interrupt, he also looks like he barely listens: we see him scratching his face, drinking his tea and looking not at Daney but into space. We also have the camera position, which has Godard partially framed in close-up, with Daney in medium shot, so that Godard's fidgety body-language is all the more apparent: when Godard takes a sip of tea his arm blocks the body of Daney as he talks.
It is in watching this moment that we can understand better an anecdote Richard Brody details in his book on Godard, Everything is Cinema. Godard wanted Bernard Henri-Levy to play the part of Joseph in what was to become Hail Mary (1985). Levy finally refused the role, saying, "I was afraid...afraid he was going to hijack my image...I was very afraid. Not only of his extraordinary intelligence but also of his perversity. Was I up to avoiding the trap he would eventually set for me?" What this trap consisted of Levy of course would not know, and Godard is well capable of not Bazin's modest ontological ambiguity of reality, but a certain immodest desecration of the personality. When Alain Bergala, in a brilliant article on Godard called ‘The Other Side of the Bouquet', talks of Godard always looking for a position to place the camera that would generate freshness, we can extend it and say on occasion it can create love - as we so often find in the filming of Anna Karina in the sixties work, Nathalie Baye in Slow Motion (1980), Cécile Camp in Eloge de l'amour (2001) - and sometimes ridicule: Depardieu in Helas pour moi (1993), Godard himself in First Name: Carmen (1983), in King Lear (1987). No filmmaker gives the impression of being more inclined to frame on the basis of an emotional disposition that Godard. The ‘other side of the bouquet' can be cruel or benign. Is this the sort of trap Levy was so worried about?
In Histoire(s) du cinéma of course Godard cannot generally frame as he chooses in a film that contains so much footage that belongs to the work of others, but if he lacks the freedom of disposition in the choice of angle in so many of the shots, then he nevertheless takes full advantage of the freedom of montage. Some of these, if you like, ‘desecrating montages' are arresting, though, of course, in the Godardian flux we have no time to arrest them. There is a woman lifting her top up against images of religious iconography, Chaplin lording it up next to footage of immense poverty, and the much commented upon image of Holocaust footage dissolving into an image of Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (1951). In voice over Godard says if George Stevens hadn't used the first 16mm colour film in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck, Elizabeth Taylor would never have found a place in the sun. Libby Saxton, in her essay in Forever Godard, ‘Anamnesis and Bearing Witness: Godard/Lanzmann', talks of "obscene yet fertile" connections, and we might add that partly what makes many of the connections appear acts of desecration is that though the burden of proof to justify these connections would seem to be Godard's, he instead muddies the connections still further. For example, before Godard shows us Holocaust footage followed by Taylor we are shown an image from Goya, as Godard says we should remember one other prisoner: namely the Spanish painter. Is Goya so significant to Godard here because he detailed the atrocities of the Napoleonic invasion in Spain, and that cinema has not done the same in relation to the Holocaust? Yet what about Stevens' footage in the camps, and in relation to Taylor in A Place in the Sun - Taylor may have had amongst the most beautiful blue eyes in cinema, and it would take colour to bring them out, but A Place in the Sun was of course in black and white and 35mm? Was her place in the sun - the colour photography that could make her and her eyes famous, not in other films? Where Bazin would argue a point until it became fully evolved, Godard is more given to scattering seeds of thought; that we must make whatever we can of them.
It is here that the disgracefulness and the desecration come together. How can a filmmaker not only juxtapose images of the Holocaust and Elizabeth Taylor, but at the same time offer no explanation for their juxtaposition except for a brief voice-over that in itself hardly makes the point? This may be a problem if a viewer expects from the film a moral perspective, but what if we assume a position of fertile amorality consistent with Godard's own aesthetic position; and that his purpose is to find in the many images he bombards us with a shock of thought that cannot settle into a coherent meditation? Is it not consistent with the interruptions we mentioned earlier?
Yet this doesn't mean Godard has created a meaningless film simply because he has produced an ‘incoherent' work. Often the words are used interchangeably, but one of the great ideas behind auteur notions is that a work's apparent incoherence gains its coherence not only diegetically, through the particular work, but also extra diegetically - through the body of the work. As Eric Rohmer proposed in a Cahiers article on Renoir in the early fifties, "...I would wish...to propose a form of criticism which would not concern itself with ‘beauties' or ‘faults', but which would uncover the rationale underlying a development whose thread has eluded us..." This links us to our second point that we raised at the beginning of this piece concerning Hitchcock and the image. Godard seems to propose that it is not Hitchcock's mastery of narrative that gives his images meaning, but his mastery of images that give his narratives meaning. This might not necessarily be the case, but it is very much a Godardian formulation, and further, perhaps, a Godardian ambition. There are two comments from Godard that are useful here. One comes from an interview with Cahiers in Godard on Godard where the director says "Criticism should be written primarily for one's own sake rather than for the cinema", and the other, also from early on in his work, when he tried to explain what he wanted to do: that his approach was in some ways closer to that of a painter than a narrative filmmaker, and so consequently people would have to stand around all day while Godard decided what he wanted to shoot.
There is the idea here of Godard destroying narrative for a painterly subjectivity, just as criticism should ‘destroy' the film and reinterpret it; make it one's own. Is Histoire(s) du cinéma a summation of such a project, as he simultaneously destroys narrative by taking all of the many images he offers both out of their narrative and historical contexts, and practises a criticism that is very much his own? Godard's incoherent accumulation of images contains a coherence within the body of the work, or more especially in the body that is the work.
This leads us to a third point, and this is the body that is the work as a poetic meditation. If, as Raymond Bellour proposes in an essay ‘Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze', Deleuze's two volumes on cinema contain a novelistic dimension: a sort of remembrance of films past; then does Godard's no less ambitious project possess a poetic dimension that helps explain Godard's prioritising Hitchcock's image-making over narration, and even Godard's interruptions over Daney's attempt at developing an argument? But what do we mean by the body of the work? This in fact ties into Daney's observations but from a different place. When Daney reckons Godard and his generation are perfectly placed to sum up the history of cinema (as indeed by this reckoning Deleuze was also), Daney starts to develop a point that is essentially historical. Godard instead, in Histoire(s), goes off in the direction of the personal. This is the history of cinema embodied as a death rattle, with Godard's voice-over musing on cinema's fate through the accumulation of images. Where Deleuze balances the recollection of films past with the future possibilities of the medium, as he explores cinema as a constantly evolving system of signs renewed by new auteurs, Godard is the filmmaker who will not go gently into this good night, and will take with him as many images as he can, like a man whose cinematic life is passing before his dying eyes.
Earlier we mentioned the idea of the director capable of producing relatively incoherent images within the one work that become coherent in the body of the work. But this is perhaps especially true of Godard where the body of work isn't only the body of the oeuvre, but also the body of the artist - as we suggested when mentioning Godard's emotional disposition towards framing images. When we proposed that Godard's comments on Hitchcock and imagery maybe say more about Godard than Hitchcock, we do so because Hitchcock is the master of the contained fear; the narrative the objective correlative of the emotion that he seeks. Hitchcock would not ask, as Godard famously does in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), why this shot rather than another: the accumulation of narrative purpose allows, even demands, that certain images be filmed. We can hardly claim the glass of milk in Suspicion or the Bates Motel in Psycho are arbitrary images.
But what happens if the images aren't in the objective narrative of the film, but almost in the nervous system of the filmmaker? We would not say especially that Godard's early films were the product of first and foremost a poetic sensibility. More defined by the freedom of the body that produces them (indeed Gilles Deleuze regards them not as poetic but as ‘novelesque'), they seemed often pop cultural explorations of the moment, agitative adventures in a sort of body consciousness. Whether it is the way Jean Seberg walks down the Champs Elysees in A bout de souffle, Anna Karina moves round a pool table in Vivre sa vie (1962), or the three leads dance in Bande à part (1964), much of Godard's work in the early to mid-sixties could be an echo of Emmanuèle Riva's comment in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais. 1959) where she talks of how young she once was. Had cinema ever been as young as during the Nouvelle Vague? Not only in terms of the characters in front of the screen, but the energy brought to the films by the directors behind the camera. When Godard said that he felt, in a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone, younger than the youngest American filmmaker because "my cinema is younger just because there are no rules, and he has a lot of rules", this would seem especially true of much of his sixties work, where the combination of freedom from rules, the youthfulness of the actors, and the willingness in this combination to capture the energy of the young, gave his films a freedom where no image needed to carry any weight - everything was potentially light. Even if in films like Le Mépris (1963) and Alphaville (1965), where he wanted a melancholic dimension, this was still closer to love than death. What we're proposing is that much of Godard's late work - including Eloge de l'amour and Notre musique (2004) - contains a sort of poetics of death.
Hence when we mention the poetic in relation to the body this isn't the freedom of the body that helped give birth to the jump cut, but the free association of the mind as it remembers fragmentarily a cinematic past not as literature but as poetry. From this perspective it makes sense that Godard would insist on the images in Hitchcock as laws unto themselves rather than narrative units of information. But rather than seeing this as Godard's avant-gardism at work, as Jacques Rancière intriguingly believes, we're more inclined to see it in some way as a sort of rear guard action. In his book Film Fables, Rancière quotes Jean Epstein saying "there are no stories. There never have been stories. There are only situations that have neither head nor tail; without beginning, middle or end, no right side or wrong side...". Rancière adds "but the avant-gardist tradition seems to be taken up again here as a swan song, a testimony to what cinema truly was or would have been if it had not been defeated by its enemy, the power of the text and narration which embody the deadly power of Commerce and Industry." This is a fair comment, but we feel that Histoire(s) du cinéma's power comes equally from elsewhere: from the poetics of death that allows images to gain their power from the aging body, a body that when young was more interested in the ‘novelesque'. Daney is in many ways absolutely right that it would take someone from Godard's generation to embark on such a project, but at the same time it requires someone from Godard's generation who is summing up cinema as one sums up a life.
Yet we wouldn't want to push this too far for at least three reasons. One is that Godard was not especially old when he embarked on the project: he was still in his fifties. Secondly, the images of Godard himself are often of a man not at the end of his life but in the middle of it: as he sits at his typewriter, bare-chested, and smoking a cigar, he seems robust enough to have at least another couple of decades in him. Thirdly, some of most elegiac moments are voice-overed by Alain Cuny and not Godard in the final episodes. But nevertheless there is the sense that the cinema can no longer support a life. Will other generations have the cinematic inner resources Godard has to draw upon, the sort of inner resources that are not those of coherently thought through arguments, but the accumulation of images that can sit deeply inside is? Paul Willemen, in an interview in Looks and Frictions, talks of the various forms cinephilia takes, and the religious aspect central to it. Cinephilia here is "principally...a discourse of revelation...the revelation of the soul. Whether it was the soul of the actress being revealed in Rossellini's Stromboli (1949), or the soul of Hitchcock being revealed in I Confess (1952), there was always a discourse of revelation under it all in different modalities."
Whatever Willemen's reservations about such a position, this undeniably helps explain Godard's project. Histoire(s) is a sort of semiotics of the soul, an idea perhaps consistent with a notion of poetry that doesn't want to ‘utilise' language, with its prosaic connotations, but closer to a ‘high mimetic', taking into account Northrop Frye's idea of the low mimetic dealing with everyday realism. In this sense Godard also wants not to utilise film images but to poeticise them, to seek from them revelations of the soul as Willemen proposes is central to cinephilia. This returns us, in conclusion, to why Godard would insist that we do not remember the plots surrounding Hitchcock's key images: Godard wants to turn such images into revelatory moments, removing them from the low mimetic of narrative convention, and elevating them to cinephilic consciousness.
What we've proposed then is a threefold aspect to the work. First the ‘interruptive' dimension that privileges editing over mise-en-scene and that leads to the second: a radical insistence that images are more important than the narrative containing them, which in turn leads to the third, and that is the poetic dimension such images possess, a poetics of cinephilia at its most abstruse and yet emotionally precise. All three elements are contained within a mourning for cinema, a sense that if it is not quite Godard who will go gently into the night, it is cinema in its death throes. This needn't be true but it can provide, ironically enough, a strong super-structural narrative to hold Godard's poetic meditation together. As Nicole Brenez astutely noted in her contribution to a piece called ‘Movie Mutations', printed in Film Quarterly and elsewhere, "the death of cinema merely represented a grand melancholy theme that certain filmmakers needed in order to make their films". Perhaps this is true of no film more than Histoire(s) du cinéma. But does its death not give birth to poetry, perhaps rather like a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly?
Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journals worldwide.