Deux ou trois choses …
2009; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8705.2009.01889.x
ISSN1467-8705
Autores ResumoGodard's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946–2006: À la recherche d'un théorème perdu, was in three rooms each consisting of a number of installations and a collection of objects at first sight seemingly set out higgledy-piggledy, as if each room were itself an installation. As with his Histoire(s) du cinéma, the materials were either cited (images, sounds, phrases), found (a bed, a broom, steps, a model electric train), or reconstructed and miniaturised (the maquette of the unrealised original exhibition for the Pompidou, Collages de France). These various materials from different provenances were brought together as in a super collage (the entire exhibit), not exactly a parody, but certainly a commentary on traditional museum classifications by genre, artist, period or nationality. The disjunctions between what was displayed provoked memories, associations and surprising, unlikely connections because of their apparent arbitrariness and the unfamiliarity of the joins, not unlike surrealist experiments from the 1930s. For example, the toy electric train that ran in a loop through a tunnel variously seemed to cite Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the Lumière brothers' L'Arrivée d'un train en gare à La Ciotat, Orson Welles's ecstatic comment on the studio machinery offered him at RKO for Citizen Kane (‘This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!’), and the trains that transported the victims of the Holocaust to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, images which Godard had reproduced in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, some taken from Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard, others from George Stevens's home movie that ends with his entry into the death camps just after D-Day, others from Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, and still others that were archival. Some of the material, such as the Collages de France miniature (like a model for a film set), was reduced in size and projected (looped on flat small screens of fragments from films by Godard and others – Nicholas Ray, Sergei Eisenstein, Otto Preminger – placed alongside anonymous pornographic images and images from sport), an odd collection, not unlike what might be found in a junk shop provoking one to dream and imagine and be transported. Though objects and associations tended to coalesce on contact, they also tended to disperse, going off in different directions to their origins and beyond, making of the exhibition a map of pathways and possible journeys that exceeded it, defying any presumed unity. No one thing sufficed, each was particular (none ‘served’ an apparent function) and all were plural because they suggested multiple places and entries. The exhibition, because of its apparent disorder, the density of citations, their heterogeneity and the evocations and banality of the collection of found objects, echoed works of Dada, particularly that of Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau and the common objects and odd conjunctions, some scandalous, displayed by Marcel Duchamp (his urinal, for example, and the moustache painted on a reproduced Mona Lisa, making the portrait doubly enigmatic). It also resonated with the Combines and installation pieces of Robert Rauschenberg, which in turn echoed strategies in cubist collages, those of Picasso, for example, and before Picasso, the purified, almost abstract, sculpted and geometric paintings of Paul Cézanne. There was as well an echo of the surrealists, their artworks, literary works and films, not only the Buñuel–Dali films and their improbable juxtapositions, but also Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936), a remake/citation of a mediocre Hollywood adventure/romance directed by George Melford called East of Borneo (1931). The ‘reality’ and everydayness of the objects in the exhibition gave them a documentary status. They seemed to be no more than what they simply were, like a tautology: a bed, a broom, a mirror, a table, a potted plant. This is equally true of the images and sounds of Histoire(s) du cinéma which, because they are citations, function as documents, only themselves yet filled with possibilities. Such a strategy tends to disorient rather than to clarify or exemplify, because connections to other elements cited or presented are indirect, open or obscure, and because there is no precise narrative or ‘line’ to contain them. It is as if the more concrete and real the materials in the exhibition or film are, the more separate, disparate, disruptive they become, and thereby are filled with the promise of significance but empty of precise meaning. The ‘real’– and its contrary multiple openings to possible other arrangements and references, including an opening to fictions not yet formed or articulated (in Histoire(s) these are films that ‘will be’ or ‘might be’) – is disruptive of any coherence, while the casual appearance of the quotidian, the sense of chance encounters between different materials (as in surrealist rencontres) gave the exhibition and gives Histoire(s) a sense of travelling (voyage), a wandering within an indeterminate geography without guidance, precise purpose or destination. It is not Godard who is the flâneur but the film that seems almost alive and palpable, a living being. The earliest drafts of Histoire(s) du cinéma, based on lectures given by Godard at the Montréal Cinémathèque in 1978, were divided into twelve voyages. The title of the Pompidou exhibition was Voyage(s) en Utopie, multiple wanderings to nowhere very exact, a vagabondage of memories, chance, histories, and an expectation–readiness for occurrences that might happen, the world and the past not so much invading the work but in dialogue with it. These works are exciting, wonderful and open precisely because nothing definitive can be deduced and directions are infinite. They are also uncomfortable and disturbing for their apparent chaos and fortuity, their refusal to arrive or to come. To enter either is like being lost. Cubist collages not only recruited fragments excised from reality, as did the Godard exhibition, and mixed them together with paint and graphic lines (as in a ‘painting’), but they did so in order to compromise the traditional two dimensions of painting which historically had created a third dimension by the use of perspective – that is, an illusory one at the interior of a painted scene whose model was theatrical and dependent upon a strict respect for framing. The fact that these works recruited real objects constituted an intrusion into an imaginary and essentially fictional, representational space which the real compromised simply by its presence, as the will toward abstraction in Cézanne disturbed a prevailing naturalism, still evident in Impressionism. His paintings presented a new, ‘other’ note in a heretofore homogeneous space. What had been traditional was now confronted in Histoire(s) with radical differences (abstraction, the actual, the found, commentary), a remaking which was disruptive like parody, signs of reordering that were neither beautiful nor even ‘skilful’ but, rather, questioning as different forms of questions and as questions of forms, so wonderfully argued by Nicole Brenez in her essay, ‘The Forms of the Question’.1 1 Nicole Brenez, ‘The Forms of the Question’, in For Ever Godard, ed. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog, 2004), 160–77. The cubist collage created discontinuities (gaps) between the various items ‘in’ the collage and, by the addition of a mix of material (cloth, wood, feathers, toys, matchboxes, newspaper clippings, rather like the miniature boxes of scenes and objects in the work of Joseph Cornell) side by side with the painted, the effect was to highlight the materiality of paint … and of painting. Nor was there glue (continuities) to hold these differences together. The cubist work moved beyond its pictorial boundaries to an exterior third dimension (as opposed to a traditional illusory one interiorised within a frame by perspective, trompe l'oeil, and by a carefully wrought scenic composition). The actual ‘third’ dimension in the cubist collage brings the exhibited work (like a painting) toward sculpture (cut-outs) and, later, installation works. The cubist collage, because of its mix of materials (paper, wood, metal), its straining beyond the boundaries of the work and its resonance with the origins from which real objects that constituted it came or could be associated with it, seems unfinished and infinite, in part owing to the fact that the frame has been traversed, focus endangered and thus painting, as it was traditionally recognised, put at risk. For Picasso, it seemed that anything could become a subject for a work, and anything could be a starting point. The ‘idea’ had to do primarily with suggestions inherent in material. It was making do, an improvisation, a creation and transformation with whatever happened to be around, no object having a necessary permanence or definiteness, no reality thereby stable, and none belonging to some hierarchy of importance or significance. The collage was perpetually going ‘off’, away from itself, beyond the framed limits that had been crucial for creating the illusionary scenes and figures of traditional painting, which had framed beauty and had indicated skill and genius. Even Picasso's purely painted canvasses seemed to be like cut-outs, not because they consisted of diverse materials (everything in those paintings is made of paint), but by virtue of their diverse and overlapping-intersecting volumes, their re-conception of space. The cubist ‘scene’ not only lacked a fixed perspective and point of view, but it was not, strictly speaking, representational, or if it was, it was close to parody. It did not describe, narrate or illustrate. Instead, it demonstrated (and cited). The work of Francis Bacon is of further interest in this regard. Bacon's frames, rather than being traversed toward an outside beyond them, have the effect of constraining their subjects, tearing them apart by placing them under extreme pressure, as if the painting and everything represented within it were about to explode and disintegrate, taking with it the fact and idea of representation, stressing its fragility and temporariness. Certainly, the frame, rather than being a frame of perspective, depth and clarification, tended toward so extreme a distortion that whatever was represented became purely form, shape, paint, rhythm, imbalance, as if the painting had dissolved into the pureness (chastity) of its constituents at the price of the coherence, stability or focus of any subject. The same occurs with Picasso's art. Some of the films of Orson Welles similarly used the frame to distort, squeeze, put pressure on figures and objects, literally reshaping them, and, combined with depth of field, created odd, grotesque conjunctions not simply of things but of space itself, which makes of the Wellesian world not only other, puzzling and mysterious, but abstract. Rauschenberg's Combines and Schwitters' Merzbau are heirs to cubist experiments and innovations and to the revolution in painting cubism initiated. A number of things were accomplished by that revolution: the frame was discarded, the anecdotal narrative–theatrical scene dissolved, points of view were multiplied, the centre was destroyed, heterogeneous material put into play and completeness and originality compromised. The consistencies and homogeneities characteristic of painting were made inconsistent and its unities (scenes) shattered into fragments by disjunctions in matter, temporality and dimension. These works spilled over boundaries and definitions that might contain or fix them, exceeding not only the practices but the categories, understandings, ideas, discourses and criticism that had served to define the artwork: frame, centre, point of view, perspective, description, meaning, significance, originality, beauty and sometimes narrative. As a result, what had previously been simply accepted and enjoyed for its skill and beauty, and had given comfort by its sense (the represented, the anecdote, the piece of theatre), was now open to question (‘what is art?’), to doubt and to uncertainty that went to the heart of the traditional artwork (pierced it) and its institutions, as Duchamp's urinal and Warhol's Brillo boxes and serialised images later provocatively made clear, as if such questioning was one of the principal purposes, if not the principal purpose, of the artistic strategies of surrealism, Dada and later their heir, Pop. Godard's films in general, and Histoire(s) du cinéma in particular, as is evident in the Pompidou exhibition, echoed these accomplishments, especially by the structuring of the artwork in such a way, and in relation to other works, as to bring itself into question (not only for its motives but for its design). Moreover, by extension it brings all art into question where the work and the commentary upon it (‘a musical and the idea of a musical’ as in Une femme est une femme) have come together, thus making every element, image and sound both concrete and discursive, representational and critical, focused and digressive. One of the achievements of Histoire(s) du cinéma is to so isolate images or sounds (decontextualise, denarrativise them) that they are refreshed, and it is like seeing or hearing them anew for the first time, no longer belonging to their origins or to an artist, nor immediately ‘connected’ to what surrounds and is contiguous to them; and doing so it gives back to images, sounds and objects their autonomy, frees them for any number and kind of associations and encounters, none of which would cause them to lose their identity as a continuous narrative might do by restricting movement to fixed directions, by holding elements in place. In this multiplication of identities and possibilities, nothing is lost, and what seems to have been lost can be seen once more (returns, memories), but differently, anew; for example, Ethan Edwards taking Debbie in his arms in John Ford's The Searchers, an image sequence fragmented, pulverised, retimed, broken down in Histoire(s), but with nothing destroyed – to the contrary, enabling one (almost for the first time) to see the scene (because remade differently) and to bring it into a relation with other scenes elsewhere, not in the Ford film necessarily, but in other films, and even the entirety of Histoire(s), the entire range of its citations, all of history, as if the function of Histoire(s) were not only for the film to be open and ready (attentive, as in Rossellini's cinema) but to open up the cinema in general and in its details, both to other works and to an outside. Historically, the questioning of the cinema – what it was, what it could become – an act of criticism and therefore necessarily an historical undertaking, had been the achievement of the films of the Nouvelle Vague, of its reflections on film in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and 1960s; and coincident with both efforts, perhaps if not their source, certainly their inspiration, were the writings of André Bazin and his philosophical questioning of the cinema, Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, which made of films and their forms instruments of thought, giving them an unaccustomed and extraordinary range and density. In film, the frame has been defined by three interrelated aspects, the frame of the shot, the frame of the narrative which it served (a beginning and an end) and the continuities between shots that established scenes and sequences within a narrative to provide not only coherence and unity, a focus, but fictions as simulacrums of the real. In other words, the frame(s) in film, as it had functioned in painting (and in theatre), was to contribute to the creation of an ideal illusory space within which a scene could be described, enacted and performed. The frame was functional for narrative and therefore crucial to it. The destruction of the frame, or at the very least the compromising of it, a deframing (the Nouvelle Vague was central in this process as were some of the directors it celebrated: Fuller, Lang, Ray, Welles), affected an entire range of practices, ideas and histories where film and the commentary on film, contemporary film and the historical past of film were no more distinct or distant from each other than was fiction to documentary, precisely because borders were crossed and separations interconnected as a consequence of the voyage. One of the virtues of Godard was to bring into doubt categories and their (false?) oppositions, in order to begin to bring together what had been kept apart. In doing so, Godard's work proposes differences as disjunctions that work upon and with each other, that are active rather than fixed, in movement rather than still, heterogeneous rather than classifiable. What Godard unravels are categories. His films are the instruments of such unravelling; hence the difficulty his work imposes on any criticism that would seek to constrain his films by classifications and categories, as is evident I think in the dialogue between Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour which was made all the worse by an inexcusably dreadfully ignorant English translation.2 2 Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du siècle: Dialogue (Tours: Farrago, 2000); translated by John Howe as Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century (Oxford: Berg, 2005). This freedom (almost casual and instinctive, like the freedom and curiosity evoked in surrealist encounters) and the intensity of play that it involves are the reason why Godard's films can be so exhilarating and liberating. Histoire(s) du cinéma accomplishes a massive deframing of the cinema, and in doing so it initiates a new history while not exactly closing a previous one but instead cleansing it, as Cézanne cleansed painting. The traditional history of the cinema has been presented chronologically (a progressive narrative), where each film or group of films cited is made to belong to some kind of order – that is, the cited work as exemplary and illustrative (the ‘silent’ period, neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague, national cinemas, realism, formalism, and so on), part of a classification system where every film represents and illustrates the history of the cinema and can be accounted for (counted), as Godard notes was done by Mafia accountants. Such a history typifies. What Histoire(s) cleanses from the history of the cinema (and therefore cleanses from its practices) is the typical. The citation in Godard is not an example but a form that acts, and does so specifically in relation to other citations (forms), one of whose functions is to disturb and dismantle orders and unities. The Godard citation is not an illustration. His Histoire(s), unlike most histories and stories, is no longer dependent on structures of reference and direction or a narrative – that is, on a frame, a practice crucial to illustration and the establishment of the exemplary. The citation in Histoire(s) from Ford's The Searchers is less a reference to it than a field which Godard works upon and rewrites. It is reactivated to become other than it once was (an anecdote); thereby it is remade (into a form and a potential). Most Histories (Histoires), most histories of the cinema (histoires du cinéma) and most of the films that form part of that history and that tell stories (histoires) are narratives. As is proper to narratives, they narrate events that have already occurred. The events so narrated are usually presented chronologically, a series of sequences, scenes, shots that progress in a more or less linear fashion, fixed in their pastness, that begin and are then concluded. One of the features of such narratives is that their elements belong to a hierarchy of importance and significance. Some passages are strong, others weak, some dominant, others merely transitional or intermediary, serving as punctuations in a succession. Narrative itself is the consequence of an historical situation codified in the nineteenth century in the novel and in history writing, though also in painting and in theatre, and, after the turn of that century, in film. (Words and images are inherently unstable, strikingly so in film, which from its beginnings sought to limit that instability by accords and continuities in order to obscure gaps and ‘cover’ them over.) Godard's films, from his first to his most recent, dismantle that essentially narrative tradition. His work is less a rejection of narrative as it had been practised (and largely still is), than it is a fragmentation and reordering of it, by making it subject to insistent interruptions, like a bell sounding or a telephone ringing in its midst, or by a turning away from the subject toward the image and its form. In a Godard film, interruptions are not less important than what is interrupted; indeed, the distinction between major and minor, representation and punctuation, representation and what forms it, the narrative and digressions from it, have little sense. All elements are equal (equally forms) and there is no classification system as a reference with all that implies of order and illustration. If his films, and especially his Histoire(s) du cinéma, are dense with citations and examples from the past, these are more like a collection of artistic options than a museum or archive ordered by fictions of classification. The combination of the indifference of elements to hierarchy, their resistance to a fixed order and place and their apparent equality in Godard's work, establishes each element as autonomous and particular and as available for rearrangement; hence the instability, circularity and sense of possibility in his films, their lack of finish and their energetic ceaselessness, porosity and meandering, and thereby, also, the problem of speaking about them. Instead, perhaps, they need to be spoken to or spoken with, and not in order to conclude them but literally to accept them as openings, invitations to wander, digression as an artistic strategy wanting your participation, beckoning you to accompany them. How do you get hold of, begin to possess, a Godard work, which is unfixed and often opaque, so that you have a place and it has a place? Even when you believe you can render it in an explanation, it slips beyond your grasp, and so you slip. It is designed to do this. What had been crucial to narrative – its coherence, unity, homogeneity, linearity, continuity, sense and order – are, in Godard's work, broken apart, constantly intruded upon. The citations that compose his films – overwhelming in Histoire(s) du cinéma– arrive from elsewhere, so that the film is always moving away not only from where its elements originated, but into new combinations and encounters with other elements, other citations, and thereby moving away from itself (even the identity of ‘itself’ is doubtful). The narrative (if it ever existed) is consumed by such movement. Alternative arrangements created by the unorthodox and plural succession of materials are not connected as linear motivated consequences. They are simply and merely successive. Their true place depends on encounters difficult to state or foresee, which are often simultaneous – hence overloaded (the superimposition, fade, mix) – and which disrupt time, or nearly so (by rapid alternations, the flicker as with the films of Paul Sharits). Most narratives, the grand narratives of History (Histoire) and the smaller histories (histoires), the stories and anecdotes they may contain, integrate the two. For example, to better understand Greek classical architecture, the political and social context of fifth-century Athens under Pericles might be discussed, and the political History of Athens might be illuminated by a detour through its architecture and sculpture. Similarly, the forms of the American cinema in the 1930s might be incorporated into a history of the studio system, a discussion of the films of John Ford or an analysis of the great Depression and the coming of sound to films. In these instances, the differences of Hollywood, the Depression, the studio system, John Ford, economy, ideology and art are grouped together within a homogeneous historical time, with a foreground and background that are meant to explain both the significant and the less significant, marked lines of power, control, dependence and subordination. This could be done with the citation in Histoire(s) of the sequence in The Searchers which I referred to earlier. There is another way, however, the one chosen by Godard in his films, in the Pompidou exhibit: that of associations (thematic, formal, remembrances) between discontinuous elements (Godard breaks up the scene, disperses its elements) in sheets or layers of heterogeneous time and substance, as in, for example, André Malraux's Le Musée imaginaire, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Aby Warburg's Mnémosyne, and Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, collage-montages of non-contiguous and non-continuous fragments (citations), networks of echoes, resonances, rhythms, colours and space, like memories, or like pieces of music – in any case, nothing very definite or fixed; rather, encounters which press upon the present, which suddenly appear and bear witness. In Histoire(s) du cinéma, general history (wars, battles, economic arrangements, philosophical writings, the Holocaust, Hitler speaking, always a mixed bag), the history of the cinema (the films of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Chaplin, the Nouvelle Vague, Italian neorealism, the studio system under Irving Thalberg) and the stories (histoires) of films evoked in cited fragments (from The Searchers, M, Ordet, Potemkin, Broken Blossoms, La Règle du jeu, Cries and Whispers, Gigi, Paisà), the history of art (from Van Gogh, Picasso, Goya, Rembrandt, Utrillo, Matisse, to pornography), all notable for their range, differences and distance from each other, are criss-crossed, made to intersect. They are not coordinated in the film, but rather overlap, are superimposed, flickered, appearing as simultaneous and distant, autonomous and in counterpoint as notes and phrases in a musical composition. Taken together, they do not ‘explain’, but rather ‘detonate’, act, break open, dissonances that may coalesce or may separate, being redrawn – and not just occasionally or once and for all, but ceaselessly as new things are met and discovered, things brought together not in order to explicate (and thus put an end to) but to activate (and thus resurrect and keep alive and in play). What is presented is a field marked by movement and intersections; that is, one whose boundaries and space and time are ever shifting and opened up, reconfigured as part of a composition, and not a narrative, or a history, or illustrations in the usual sense. The different cited histories, temporalities and scenes that are brought into contact become multiple points of view, and multiple beginnings and entries, appearances and disappearances, histories, but not a history, documents, but not a documentary. In the film, there are only citations that illustrate nothing. They simply point. The fragments of histories, ruins of history and of narratives gathered in Histoire(s) interact to form not a new narrative, certainly not a new history. The history of the cinema as a narrative of narratives ceases to be sustainable. All the images and scenes in Histoire(s) du cinéma are citations even if they may not seem so at first. Some scenes in the film are staged; for example, the various monologues by professional actors: Alain Cuny, Sabine Azéma, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche and by Godard. These monologue-performances are for the most part quotations from philosophy and poetry, often in a collage of joined fragmented phrases from different sources. There is an argument in Histoire(s) (or allusions to one) that the cinema historically did not realise its true potential of registering the real (this is perhaps the History ‘in’Histoire(s)). For example, the cinema failed (except in rare instances) to foresee or engage with the horrors of war, the death camps, World War II or Sarajevo. For Godard, it seems, this failure has to do with a history of film as a history of narratives – that is, as illusion, as a verisimilitude enacted by means of continuities and motivated connections. Thus, to reinstate the ‘real’ in the cinema (its vocation and its origin) and thereby reconnect film with the world and its history, requires the dissolution and break-up of narrative (narrative is for the most part the subject and object of the history of the cinema), one that Histoire(s) du cinéma accomplishes – and not simply the dissolution of little narratives (Debbie and Ethan Edwards) but of the grand narrative of History (this occurrence, then that, and their consequences, what follows) and the narrative in between, the history of the cinema. The dismemberment of these histories (together and different) is the work of citation (extraction from a context, from some kind of narrative) and of montage (a recombination of what remains into forms, instruments and musical ‘notes’). French Impressionism, even if it had precedents in an earlier history of painting, created images out of doors, en plein air, in touch with the direct experience of nature – not an idealised view, but an actual one, the immediacy of the sketch, in order to capture the effects of light and mood, not eternal or immobile or idealised, but found, encountered, if not exactly in a moment of time, within time in an actual present and in the reality of its passing. The paintings of Impressionism mark out temporality and the subjectivity necessarily attached to it in the capturing of an instant (like a photograph). What comes after Impressionism – Manet, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso – is less an attempt to capture the
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