Issue 8: Winter 2011
Part 2 of 'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction'
David Brancaleone
Part One of this essay can be read here.
Davide Ferrario stresses the importance of the local dimension of culture when filming and rejecting any international style. But Dopo Mezzanotte omits any reference to the local tradition of Italian film-making and the significance and practice of documentary within it. Yet, if you look back to the 1940s and 1950s, even Michelangelo Antonioni, so valued for his fiction, made documentaries early on in his career and Roberto Rossellini also combined drama with documentary film-making, and ultimately switched entirely to documentary towards the end of his life. Leaving aside Antonioni's famous trilogy: L'Avventura (1959), La Notte (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), there is Antonioni's Neorealist Gente del Po (1948), Nettezza Urbana (1948) about street sweepers in Rome, and a documentary about Italian fotoromanzi (photo-stories), a kind of illustrated pulp fiction which was very popular in Italy after the war, L'Amorosa Menzogna (1949). The point is that documentary becomes subsumed into a film language that shows even in Antonioni's fiction, when, for example, the scene is ended in his films and the camera stays to film its aftermath, the pauses of real life, so inimical to Hollywood, but, to him, just as important as dialogue (Chatman, 1985). In Antonioni's Trilogy, there is the plot, the storyline, but it is accompanied by another plot alongside it which still incorporates documentary. This is the space between the actions, the time after the actions; the down-time of the real? At any rate, it is filmed and avoided the cutting room floor.
Cesare Zavattini
In 1953, Cesare Zavattini produced a film made of short films by different directors, called Amore in Città (Love in the City). It combined documentary and fiction characteristics. One of the episodes is in fact a documentary, revealing for how intrusive it is towards the subject - beautiful women in the city - (achieved through what Zavattini called pedinamento, following the person who was objectified as a prey for the camera, as if the film crew were on a hunting expedition, in the same logic of Cartier-Bresson type documentary photography which ‘captures', ‘takes', and ‘shoots', all words that still belong to the language of film) and never acknowledging the subject position. In that episode, the camera follows a host of young women, harassing them on and off the bus, down the street; filmed crowds of men looking at them. Social mores towards women in Italy in 1953 were different and the film documents male voyeurism. But critically? Apparently not. However, male viewers of the period would not have read the pressure on women on the street as harassment. What was being objectively documented was the state of Italian voyeurism in 1953. Wedged between Amore in Città and The Gleaners and I is cinéma verité, the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Agnès Varda herself. For film-makers such as Godard, Antonioni and Pasolini, literature, philosophy and politics complement image-making and contribute to set up a tension, a clash that provokes thought, regardless of whether the film in question is a documentary or not. Thought can be communicated by images as well as by words, or by the combination of the two.Documentary is often equated with what is categorised as the film-essay genre, ever since André Bazin coined the phrase, referring specifically to Chris Marker's work as a political and historical type of writing mediated by poetry (Bazin, 1985, 179-181). But what exactly is meant by essay-film? In recent times, Phillip Lopate has written about the film-essay, calling it a: 'cinematic genre that barely exists' in 'Can Movies Think? In Search of The Centaur: The Essay-Film' (Lopate, 1998, 280). It must have words, whether spoken, subtitled, or intertitled. These must represent a single voice and exclude any collage of quoted texts that do not reflect a 'unified perspective'. The film must be an argument, an attempt at working out a problem; it must put across a personal view, and be well-written (Lopate, 1998, 283). So, in theory, the documentary is not the same as the essay-film and Lopate's classification is quite prescriptive: no interviews are allowed and no documentaries (Lopate, 1998, 305). However, his choice of examples, if we take them as models, include Resnais's documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955).
The origin of the essay film formula was André Bazin's 'Lettre de Sibérie', in which Bazin, following Jean Vigo's description of his own documentary film, A propos de Nice (1929) as 'an essay documented by film', defined Marker's cinema as an ‘essay film' (Bazin, 1985, 179-181). Bazin stressed the importance of the word essay, 'understood in the same way as in literature: both an historical and political essay, though written by a poet' (Bazin, ibidem). So we can blame Bazin for this classificatory impulse, not just to define, but also to segregate the essay (and thus the documentary) from cinema - an impulse which is reflected in classifications such as Lopate's.
Chris Marker's Sunless (Sans soleil, 1982) is an alternative model of documentary. Marker had worked closely with Bazin just after the Liberation. Bazin valued Neorealism's refusal to submit to "a priori aesthetic standards", and its 'exceptionally documentary quality' (Bazin, 1972, 20). Not that he thought that the camera could be entirely objective: 'documentary reality plus something else... the plastic beauty of the images, the social sense, or the poetry, the comedy' (Bazin, 1972, 100 and Bazin, 2005 [1967], 108). Sunless was filmed in Japan and is about more than Japan. It is centred on Marker and his life experience, but twice removed, once, through a fictional filter of a commentary read by a woman and twice, because she in turn is referring the viewer to a fictional character, a photographer (Marker's alter ego), looking back on his life. The voiceover is reflective, documentary yet personal, anecdotal, delighting in detail, but digressive to a disconcerting degree, so that you almost lose the thread. In Marker's work, what has been called essay, for want of a better description, compounds the personal dimension as well as the public, but breaks down barriers between writing and imaging, be it still photography becoming moving image, cinema or video.
Sunless (Chris Marker)
Can we call these 'art films' then? When asked back in 1968 whether he was making social commentary or film, Godard chose to reply that he 'could see no difference between the two'. No wonder as we know the social and political context of the time involved him and many others, outside the cinema world too. But in the same interview he also said: 'I believe both in fiction and documentary' (Godard in Sterritt, 1998, 32, 34). Even then, he was seeking to reconcile the two opposites. Godard again: 'Movies were invented to show reality, but they have not been used that way. They have been used to show dancing girls, killers, machine guns, lovers' (Godard in Sterritt, 1998, 177). The underlying thread in many interviews is the documentary: 'I think I am making more or less documentaries, but I don't see much difference between these two categories' (Godard in Sterritt, 1998, 176). He added: 'I'm half a novelist and half an essayist - which is not admitted in the motion-picture world, and is very awkward' (Godard in Sterritt, ibidem). What is revealing is the continuity of such statements. Godard's work is poised between fiction and documentary, but is neither and this, it seems to me, is also the nature of his more recent films.
So what is at stake in this essay and in Lopate's categorization of the European essay-film is not genre at all, but how you frame film as idea, when it escapes your tidy, if contradictory, genre classification. Lopate's framing of film as essay limits the very possibility of thinking an alternative to the mainstream and constrains its experimental fluidity into no more than one genre among others, instead of an entirely different way of doing things, a mode of expression capable of releasing the real potential of the moving image. This is how I interpret Godard when he says in an interview of the 1990s:
'Motion pictures were invented to look, tell, and study things. They were mainly a scientific tool for seeing life in a different way. To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema. All the rest should be documentary study in a broad sense, research and essays' (Godard in Sterritt, 1998, 176).
In this interview, indeed, the recurring theme of Histoire(s) is the idea that cinema should not be primarily entertainment and that cinema had failed to live up to its potential in recording the truth of history. It follows that so-called ‘essay-films' and ‘art houses' cannot exist separately in divisive categories. Such a tendency towards classification is part of contemporary film studies as an academic discipline and shows in Sam Rohdie's Montage where despite precious insights, 'classicism' becomes a recurring justification (Rohdie, 2006), to defend the cinema of the spectacle and entertainment from any Brechtian-inspired interruptions, and to naturalise its cinematic forms into a neutral film language. (Perhaps this accounts for the extraordinary exclusions from Rohdie's book - of Godard, Marker, Varda or even Jean Vigo).
Koppel mentioned Moretti and Varda. I associate both, but even Marker, with Pier Paolo Pasolini's ideas on cinema. I think the rejection of the Neorealist aesthetic, of its naturalism, by Pasolini who was a poet as well as a militant intellectual on the Left, but had rejected social realism, helps to make sense of the documentary today. Leaving aside his stab at structuralism - a critical method he fortunately outgrew after publishing Empirical Hereticism (1972) - the substance of his cinema of poetry is, in the light of several films which frequent the border line between fiction and documentary, if anything, more valid today than it ever was. Pier Paolo Pasolini makes a distinction between cinema of poetry and cinema of prose, highlighting (in theory) and developing (in film practice) the multidimensionality of film, freeing it up from issues of linearity or objectivity and blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, so that his contribution to cinema was to interrupt such rigid frames of reference. Pasolini's models include his own work, Michelangelo Antonioni's and, tellingly, Godard's. Pasolini called their film-making cinema of poetry. Godard also makes such a connection between poetry and film work: 'The cinema should be more poetic - and poetic in a broader sense, while poetry itself should be opened out' (Godard, 1986, 242). The phrase cinema of prose designates Neorealism which Pasolini criticised in 'Officina' (1955-1959), a literary journal he co-founded. Neorealist film-makers worked with non-professional actors, instead of film stars and borrowed narrative techniques from film documentary, especially the elliptical form of story-telling that reduces stories to their defining fragments, or what Bazin called the 'image fact' ('l'image-fait') (Bazin, 1990, 263). I think Pasolini's critique of Neorealism went beyond the practice of film criticism to form an integral part of the films he made, such as, for example, La Ricotta (1963) or Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966) which openly reject Neorealism, not only through a direct reference to Roberto Rossellini, the director of Open City (1945), uttered by Pasolini himself in his voiceover for the character of a talking raven, but also because the film is an allegorical journey. It features a story within the story in which the father and son characters, the comic Totò and Ninetto Davoli, become twelfth-century Franciscan monks preaching to the birds in a parable told by the raven to teach them perseverance. The allegorical framework, established early on, subverts the documentary filming of the signs of the 1960s capitalist boom, seen from the beyond of Rome's hinterland places, the new flyovers crossing the campagna romana, the half-built new apartment blocks and the shantytowns, and the cinéma verité footage of devoted masses at the funeral of party leader Togliatti. How can the two co-exist? Somehow they can and do.
Uccellacci e Uccellini (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
They do, since Pasolini's positioning, between what he was trying to do and what Neorealism stood for, never precluded using key elements of the cinema of prose, for example, making short film documentaries in the same years he was filming feature films: Comizi d'Amore (1964), La Rabbia (1967), and Appunti per un film sull'India (1968). Indeed, starting in 1954, long before he began to direct his own films, Pasolini co-scripted thirteen films. The documentary approach to feature film-making was in the air when Jean Rouch made Chronique d'un eté (1960), which Pasolini had seen (Viano, 1993, 192-197). However, despite obvious analogies, there is a difference between a Neorealist approach of working towards a documentary and Pasolini's documentary, which today seems very contemporary in its rejection of categories. For example, the documentary in Pasolini's Appunti per un film sull'India is turned inside out by Pasolini asking the interviewees about a fiction film he was planning to make about India (Viano, ibidem). The question was: would they sacrifice their lives to a starving lioness and her cubs as did a Maharaj of the past?
Just as Neorealism demystified Fascist myths by attempting to bridge the gap between film and the real and focus on the present day, Pasolini's project also tried to bridge the gap, but took a different direction; he distanced himself both in theory and practice from the Neorealist total reliance on the image alone and from its rejection of mise en scéne that served to achieve the greatest objectivity and naturalism (Viano, 1993, 69-70). In Accattone (1961), Pasolini juxtaposes film as image to film as writing and literature in the opening sequence of the film, in which four lines from Dante's Divine Comedy serve as a preface, to provide a key of interpretation that universalises the particular events of 1961 by placing them side by side with poetic events of the fourteenth century. One could object that as an established writer making his first feature film, this is a tactical move, playing to his (literary) strengths. However, Pasolini's own writing and dialogue with literature, especially poetry, allows him to get close to the real in Dante, however remote an author the Florentine might have seemed from the twentieth century point of view. Pasolini moved happily between historic eras, as is clear in reading a treatment in manuscript form which was never realised into film and is stored in the Fondo Pasolini in Rome. There he adopts the Dantesque Hell scenario for a modern journey. Something similar takes place also in a script for a film about St. Paul (Badiou, 2003, 36-39). Pasolini's Dante is not to be confused with the world of small-time Dante ‘experts', that is, a certain kind of intellectual in academic circles who is the target of Pasolini's derision in a scene of Uccellacci e Uccellini in which Totò visits his landlord's sumptuous villa, while a Dante Conference is taking place there, sponsored by the Association of Italian Dentists.
In La Ricotta, Orson Welles plays the role of the film director, forming a composite character which combines the subjectivity of the off-screen poet and director Pasolini (whose verses Welles reads aloud) with the voice and presence of a Hollywood rebel (out of favour at the time), himself a living witness to the history of cinema. Strictly speaking, Pasolini himself is technically absent, because he stays behind the camera. However, the character of Welles in the film within the film about the Crucifixion incorporates verses of Pasolini's poetry as well as his view of Italian society and of the interplay of media, producers and business.
Pasolini's only attempt at theorising the cinema of poetry is in Empirical Hereticism (1972), in a famous essay by the same title, 'Il cinema di poesia' which, in my view, makes sense when it is related to his own films, instead of in isolation, on its own terms, and as a separate text (Pasolini, 1991, 167-187). This is because his writing reflects a struggle to combine his film practice with structuralist concepts. However, in spite of its difficulties and even inconsistencies, Pasolini's cinema of poetry was taken seriously by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, 1986, 72-76). The foundation for cinema of poetry is the literary classification of the language of free indirect speech, theorised by Valentin Volosinov, alias Mikhail Bakhtin (Volosinov, 1973). Incidentally, I write 'alias' because nowadays critics have come to the conclusion that Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was co-authored by Mikhail Bakhtin.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Practically speaking, Pasolini's poetic realism includes the subject position (of the writer and director) in film making, while at the same time not rejecting a realist approach, but definitely repulsing naturalism; this Neorealist idea that there is an objective real that can be filmed objectively (which is not the same as accepting the historicity of the real, but being realistic in acknowledging that we see it nevertheless from a point of view, with whatever that may entail). The underlying principle is that language - including speech and writing - is essentially dialogical, even at the level of an individual utterance. It follows that it cannot be objective (a character incorporates the logic of the author and its own internal logic within the economy of the story), because both dialogue and monologue are the author's as well as the character's. This recognition is itself realist, in the more profound sense of being more accurate to the dynamic and process of script and the nature of writing. Thus, Pasolini challenges the Neorealist binary opposition of objectivity versus subjectivity, on the basis that it cannot be but subjective, as it always involves a point of view. But for him, this neither invalidates nor relativises subjectivity, nor does it question the factual nature of empirical events, but introduces a recognition of interpretation always already present.
The principle of free indirect subjective allows film writing to be in a state of flux, containing elements of fiction and of documentary, and combines narration and visuals in such a way as to openly recognise the authorial voice and blur the distinction between subjective and objective shots. In Pasolini's legacy, montage is to film what condensed poetry is to linear prose and it is precisely by using poetic procedures that Godard could condense meaning in less direct, more allegorical ways.
Pasolini does so through questioning the presumed objectivity of the lens by filtering the story, and creating an authorial distance from it, by, for example, including shots which may not be what the characters see, rather what the director wants the viewers to see for what they reveal as visual commentary, so that the reality of film and the film of reality are both acknowledged as part of the real. In Red Desert (1964), Michelangelo Antonioni seems to be showing the world as seen through the eyes of Monica Vitti, the protagonist. However, he is actually showing it through his own eyes, by using indirect free style (Pasolini, 1991, 167-187). In other words, while it might appear that we see it from Monica Vitti's perspective, despite the indexical nature of photography, we are really (hence the realism) seeing it through Antonioni's eyes.
While Pasolini's cinema of poetry was completely at odds with Italian Neorealism and was in many ways his own response to it, in France, André Bazin had championed its naturalist film aesthetic which was inimical to montage (Bazin, 2005, 47). The emergence of cinéma vérité in the late 1950s spelled a new film documentary approach which drew on sociology and anthropology, which in hindsight, revived and refined the achievements of Dziga Vertov in the 1920s. A formalist contextualization of this is less helpful than thinking across disciplines, genres, and media, in terms of what Alain Badiou has called the 'passion for the real': what relationship does art entertain with the real? What is the real of art? For Badiou the real is always a gap (Badiou, 2007, 49-57). Badiou's question is Rossellini's question, Pasolini's question, Vigo's question, as well as Vertov's and Brecht's. Such a position was the ultimate consequence of rejecting Aristotelian mimesis; Brechtian distanciation in his theatre was one of the forms it has taken, but not the only one (unfortunately, in most of his plays it was not very effective, for the didactic, agit-prop element prevailed). From the point of view of Badiou's analysis and re-evaluation of the twentieth century (Badiou, 2007, 49, 50), what emerges is the constant tension to work on the gap between the real and its semblance. For Badiou this was central to the art of the century. I would argue that the passion for the real in film appears in ethnologist Jean Rouch's and sociologist Edgar Morin's ciné vérité which translates Kino Pravda or 'film truth', coined by early Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov, and in subsequent attempts at grappling with the gap between film and reality and so it seems crucial to the seam of European film-making we are exploring. In the ground-breaking film Chronique d'un été (1960), Rouch, who had already made Moi, un noir (1957) and Human Pyramid (1959), filmed outside the studio, using a less cumbersome 16mm cine-camera than the norm, theorising and putting into practice a new way of connecting with everyday life, so that a more direct kind of filming was made possible (Morin, 2003 in McDonough, 2007). What was at stake was doing away with mise en scéne and getting closer to the real of everyday life, using the camera to increase participation and break the barrier between the camera and the people in the street, such an extraordinary concept for the time.
The real is inscribed in the everyday. That is where to find it; but, how to work with it? In France, the framework for connecting film and the unglamorous everyday owes much to the sociologist Henri Lefébvre whose Critique of Everyday Life (1947) was an influential text. Years later, in his sequel, Everyday Life in The Modern World (1958), Lefébvre analyzed the everyday life of society and suggested the ways in which it might be transformed, on the basis of a critique of moral and psychological alienation, fetishism, and inequality (Lefébvre, 1991, 148). As a sociologist, he also questioned the contradictory nature of leisure, demystifying it as distraction, alienated entertainment, and passive spectating, and sees the space of the everyday as the place in which to be involved politically (Lefébvre, 1991, 29-42).
A direct rebuttal of Rouch's approach came in the form of a film, Critique of Separation (1961), by Guy Debord, who was close to Lefébvre at the time and had known him since 1958 (Lefébvre, 1991, xxvii). Although it was short-lived, their collaboration was very productive for both (Lefebvre, 1991, ibidem). Debord's Critique of Separation attacks documentary film, and extends his critique to what he calls 'the cinematic spectacle'. How can documentary resist the spectacle? How can it not film appearances? Commodification? The title echoes Rouch's title, but with an ironic twist. Debord's challenge was to deny that it could be possible to film the reality which Rouch proposes as documentary, unless first we demystify documentary cinema, by dissolving its subject matter.
La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard)
Godard incorporated aspects of documentary film-making directly into fiction, even co-opting Rouch's cameraman Raoul Coutard, as well as his cinéma verité techniques. Many of his films, even the early ones, combine elements of documentary with a fictional plot. Such is the case of La Chinoise (1967) which cannot be reduced to formal aesthetics or rejected as failed propaganda, as some critics have tried to do. Secondly, in terms of the thin line between documentary and fiction, its dénouement happens in a train scene in which a philosopher, the real Professor Francis Jeanson, a witness therefore, carries the authority of a text, of a real document, engaging in fiery dramatic exchanges with his Maoist student. Here was the real former ringleader of Algerian resistance fighters who had been put on trial in 1960 telling the fictional would-be terrorist that political actions need to come from within the mass movement, not be separate gestures of defiance against the system. The scene crosses the thin line between fiction and documentary, while continuing to existing in both, thus defying classification.
Godard's relatively recent Notre Musique (2004) juxtaposes clashing montages of newsreels with mise en scène, and is built on a structure which, like his Le Mépris (1963) and Pasolini's Accattone (1961), also cites Dante's Divine Comedy. In the first part, 'Hell', Godard's documentary film clips condense the horrors of the twentieth century into just ten minutes, using some of the same footage from his collection which appears in Histoire(s). The second part takes place in the 'Purgatory' of postwar Sarajevo, where Godard restages The European Literary Encounters, an event he attended in 2002, and the third part features a 'Paradise' that is tongue-in-cheek, made in USA, including American GIs. In Notre Musique history is conveyed by individual witnesses in interviews, conversations, and a lecture. Poets and architects appear as themselves in Notre Musique, having been chosen for their stand in the public sphere, because they had spoken out against EU indifference to the war and genocide in the Balkans and in Palestine.
In one scene, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, stands in the ruins of Sarajevo public library. He is an example of organic intellectual: here is someone who witnessed directly what was going on in 1993 in Bosnia-Herzogovina and took a public (and therefore also political) stand directed against the European Union's failure to intervene to stop the war, with his eye-witness account of the siege of Sarajevo, Cahier de Sarajevo (1993). In Notre Musique, when the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich is interviewed by the fictional character Judith Lerner in the role of an Israeli journalist, he repeats what he really said to the Israeli press: "Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest is in you, not in me... You've brought us both defeat and renown." This is a political statement, subtracted or rescued from everyday life into a film.
In Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard almost entirely rejects fiction and mise en scène for documentary-based videographic work, overlapping video images, which serve as cyphers of multiple histories and the cultural politics of the image, with his voiceover and the many voices of his memory and of collective history, including Ezra Pound's, Michel Foucault's, Alfred Hitchcock's. Godard's recurring theme is cinema's great failure in the century's tragic moments: that it did not apply its technical potential to engaging with the real. Only Neorealism proved an exception. Godard's montage of film clips are combined and transformed, shot by shot, and in so many ways that, to some extent, the fragments cease to be such, bound together by colour, assonance, echoes, implicit and explicit reference. Several hours of hundreds of film clips, sequences, and sounds from a century of cinema, combined or juxtaposed with texts, paintings and photographs, merge words and image with dissolves, jump cuts, superimpositions, intertitles, voice-overs - almost impossible to convey only in the medium of words.
Godard's voiceover co-exists as one layer of sound interlaced with other sound, just as clips from his films overlap with clips from his own archive of cinema, so you hear the real voice of poets as documentary sound-texts: Pound's, Celan's, of film makers, Hitchcock's and Renoir's, of politicians, De Gaulle's, Hitler's, and of the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. In Section 4A of Histoire(s), you hear Hitchcock's voice explaining ‘editing' in his Cockney accent, overlapping with Godard's commentary in French. The effect is to disturb one sound track with another, so that neither can be heard clearly. The two overlap and co-exist in deliberate disharmony. In this respect, Jacques Ranciére's concept of the distribution of the sensible as: 'a recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying' (Rancière, 2008, 45) tallies with Godard's practice of film as a privileged form of multimedia criticality.
Jean-Luc Godard in his Histoire(s) du cinema
The viewer's perception of the Histoire(s) - its recurring and declared theme being the betrayal of cinema's ethical and political potential and its ability to witness, lost to entertainment industry - is immediately confronted with the familiar Godardian loss of linear narrative, compensated for in many ways, one being the voice over citations, some in whispers, some spoken out, of texts by poets, philosophers, and critics. Godard's sound montage includes the use of his own voice - a practice he began in his 1960s films, mostly in the form of a monologue. In Histoire(s) Godard introduces an anti-mimetic form of montage which divides the film into much smaller fragments. He relies on the commentary as the common thread to connect what might seem a haphazard selection of moving images and stills. What is also at stake is the notion of time and the relation between the past and the present. The unifying principle is Walter Benjamin's Theses of History. In particular, Benjamin's mental conception of the 'constellation', as Godard and his collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville readily acknowledge in the voice-over of The Old Place (1999): 'This image that you are, that I am, which Walter Benjamin speaks of, of that point where the past resonates with the present for a split second to form a constellation' (Godard and Miéville, 54). Benjamin's ‘constellation' bursts on to the screen in The Old Place in which the shots of paintings and photographs are transformed into artworks; these images form a composite image, integral to that part of the film and its voiceover, and feature two ancient mask-like sculptures which flash on the screen, then one is superimposed on the other, before dissolving and juxtaposed with a montaged starburst, producing startling and unexpected visual comparisons. The ‘piece' does no consist in the images taken separately, nor in the commentary, but in their combination and complementarity.
Benjamin's idea that the past can be reclaimed by the present, indeed, that it can exist in the present once more, but transformed (Benjamin, 1992, Thesis III, 246) is a far cry from 1980s ideas about appropriation (that is, where the reproduction of an artwork becomes a new artwork, thus challenging ideas of artistic originality and authorship). Ultimately, Benjamin is theorizing the philosophical event, condensed into what he names now-time, that is to say, 'the present, which comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment' (Benjamin, 1992, Thesis XVIII, 245-255, 255). Benjamin insists on thinking of the present in terms of its emancipatory potential, as opposed to a view of the everyday as the site of a serialized, unchanging present (Benjamin, 1992, Thesis XVIII, 255). This concept of now-time, not to be mistaken for the empirical event, is what in some instances Godard's montage enacts, when he engineers a verbal montage of people and presence, a meeting of real witness and fictitious character, as in Fritz Lang, the veteran of early German cinema, who quotes Dante's verses about Ulysses in Hell, whose scenes of a film about Ulysses are imagined by Le Mépris. Lang faces the fictitious producer in Le Mépris; while, in Notre Musique, the real poet interacts with the fictitious journalist. The interplay of documentary and fiction thus also serves to defy Aristotle's Poetics, and namely his call for a unity of time and space, which is what makes classic cinema truly classical in its obedience, because the time of documentary and witnessing is opposed to the time of the fictional story.
Godard's De L'Origine du XXIe Siècle (1999) is an uncompromising retrospective of the 20th century, also a combination of video montage, text and voiceover. I see parallels with Alain Badiou's recently translated The Century (2007), a philosophical overview of art against the backdrop of tragedy. The philosopher juxtaposes the intellectual triumphs of Brecht, Celan, Mandelstam, Malevic and Beckett (among others), to the suffering that characterized the century. In Badiou's book and Godard's film, an organic intellectual speaks out, the kind for whom the role of the intellectual is to 'disturb people's habits' and raise 'embarrassing questions and confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them)' (Said, 1994, 11). You hear words inserted into the soundscape that sound like medieval French, as well as remarks about body, soul, state and love. The images fade in and superimpose war, displaced people, atrocities, humiliation, suffering, marching armies, gunfire, prisoners, goods trains carrying innocent victims, mountains of corpses, frozen bodies, torture. This on-going and cumulative montage produces an expectation, something the film cannot promise or provide: a desire for its opposite - the community to come which the century in fact negates.
In the earlier minimalist Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo (1993), a two-minute film of a documentary photograph of soldiers kicking civilians on a kerb during the war in Yugoslavia, close-up panning explores, lingers through movement, thus reversing the page-flicking viewing patterns of images. All the while a voice analyses the image. It is Godard's voice. He explains how he sees the combination of expressive forms in an Adornian distinction between culture and art: "There's a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule: cigarettes, computers, T-shirts, TV, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn't spoken, it's written; composed; painted; filmed; lived".
Part 3 of this essay will appear in the next issue of Experimental Conversations.
David Brancaleone lectures in social art history and theory on the undergraduate courses and critical theory on the new MA in social art practice in the environment, in the Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT. He was short listed in 2008 for the Shannon Consortium Teaching Excellence Award, which he won in 2011. He studied History of Art at La Sapienza, Rome University. In 2002, he earned his doctorate in Combined Historical Studies at the Warburg Institute. David has worked as a researcher for Christie's in the National Archives, Kew, on the Sotheby's MA course, and as Deputy Directory of the Central Registry of Information on WWII Looted Art, after being a Design Manager in publishing, and winning the Duke of Edinburgh Award for Educational Publishing in 1992. A contributor to Circa magazine, Enclave Review, Vertigo, with an extended article on the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and on documentary and cinema of poetry for Experimental Conversations, he has also published a translation of a Renaissance Italian text on printing, a critical edition of a medieval work by Raymond Lull, and has given several conference papers on the philosophy and aesthetics of Alain Badiou, published articles on the commodification of education, on World War II looted art, and is currently researching a book on aesthetics and politics.