The Language of Emotion in Godard's Films
2010; Issue: 80 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoSo, to the question 'What is Cinema?', I would reply: the expression of lofty sentiments. --Godard, in an essay. (1) Nana: Isn't love the only truth? (2) Emotion in the New Wave films is a fraught concept. Critics like Raymond Durgnat have commented that the New Wave films are characterized by emotional dryness, but such a view fails to engage with the complexity of the films. (3) In what may seem like a paradoxical statement, these films display a passionate concern for the status of emotional life while being simultaneously engaged in the critique of emotion. This paper seeks to discuss the complex dynamics of emotion in three of Jean-Luc Godard's films--Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live, 1962), Alphaville, une Etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution, 1965) and Week End (1967). of them belong to the fertile period of the 60s in which Godard's aesthetic strategies became increasingly daring. These will be examined in relation to some of his critical writings. An important paradigm within which Godard's films will be analyzed is that of cinema's relationship to reality. A foundational principle of the New Wave was the faith in the intrinsic realism of the cinema, something Bazin had expounded upon. However, according to Godard, Bazin's model of cinema was novelistic, the realist description of relationships existent elsewhere. In his model, the director constructs his film, dialogue, and mise-en-scene, at every point: Reality is formed as the camera is framing it. For Godard, All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction ... each word implies a part of the other. And he who opts wholeheartedly for one, necessarily finds the other at the end of his journey. (4) His first two films especially try to capture a non-fabricated, spontaneous reality, lending a documentary realism to them. Through the use of jump cuts, non conventional angles, natural settings, non-stylized acting and free wheeling, elliptical dialogues, the scene before our eyes becomes less of a scene. The bedroom scene in Breathless (1959) and the restaurant conversation between Belmondo and Karina in A Woman is a Woman (1961) typify this everyday feel that Godard wanted to create. The director uses or simulates spontaneity in order to naturalize the artifact, to make the fiction seem natural and real. Yet, paradoxically, calling attention to the discontinuity and arbitrariness of reality draws attention to the apparatus of the film, thus reinforcing the fictionality of the film. Each implies the other, as Godard said. However, in Godard's later essays spontaneity is no longer celebrated simply and directly as a thing or quality existing in the world, which is seized or copied by cinema. It is no longer the 'natural.' Godard situates spontaneity decisively within discourse. I would argue that from Vivre Sa Vie onwards, Godard's films display themselves as constructs in increasingly radical ways. They display meta textuality through a range of techniques, with the characters self consciously staring into the camera (a characteristic of almost all his movies); talking to the audience (Vivre sa Vie, A Woman is a Woman, Pierrot le fou); commenting on the genres within the film (Pierrot le fou, A Woman is a Woman, Week End); commenting on the film within a film (Week End) and acting out certain poses to reinforce the impression that the film is not mimesis (A Woman is a Woman), amongst others. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This exposure fundamentally questions what we take for granted as reality. Kavanagh calls Godard revolutionary because from the 1960s onwards, he does not accept the real world as being the film's referent. The epistemological imperialism that spoken language and the language of the image exercise over us has to be shattered. Thus Godard's cinematic technique, as a revolutionary praxis, consists in restoring, on an explicit level, the implicit contradictions rendered invisible by the normal inclusion of every sound-image unit in a similarly oriented ideological context such that can the real be shown in its arbitrariness, in its highly motivated service to a definable political system. …
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