Joanna Walsh - My Life as a Godard Movie

15 faits divers sur ma vie comme un film de Jean-Luc Godard

Joanna Walsh

Published by Transit Books

2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

www.transitbooks.org

2021 Joanna Walsh

ISBN: 978-1-945492-64-8 (paperback) | 978-1-945492-68-6 (ebook)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2022939667

COYER DESIGN

Anna Morrison

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This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Within the framework of conventional understanding, the desire for a New Look skirt cannot be seen as a political want, let alone a proper one.

If, approaching the end of the world, were forced to choose a single surviving monument to human art, it wont be how any particular work looks, but the act of looking. We know that already, but how can looking be recorded? I guess in paint or stone, but its better in photographs and best in film. I like film because the paint is human. So many paintings have been made about women by men, the womens gaze only pigment the man has put there: on camera the woman is a real person and, no matter how much the director tries to turn her into a colour, there she is looking through the mask of the colours that make up the makeup on her face, and also her face, her hair, her eyes.

Before I taught myself to paint, I never used the colour green. Id go as far as the sour, dark turquoise of tables and other objects in my childhoods schools. I wanted to live in primary colour; something uncompromised that couldnt be mixed from anything else. A man once looked at me and said I looked like I was filmed in Eastmancolor. That was the colour filmstock Jean-Luc Godard used, and Godard didnt like green either. His films take place against the pale limestone city of Paris or the pale sand-coloured earth of the Maquis. Add the blue of the Mediterraneanand sometimes his characters wear red. There are no secondary colours in Godard and green is a secondary colour.

Ive been thinking about Godard because of the insideness of his film La Chinoise, in which a cell of teen Maoists hide out in an Hausmannian apartment where they helplessly play out the gender, race and class structures theyve quarantined themselves against. The film takes place in interiors, where the colours are entirely controlled both by the camera and available resources. Godard liked to show thissome of the walls are works in progressand I have some degree of nostalgia for having a man tell me what colour I am, and this is partly a nostalgia for my own willingness to subject myself to entire aesthetic control by another, as a work in progress, and specifically by a man, out of curiosity, to find out something about men and what they desire. And that nostalgia has a colour.

There have been essays about falling in love with a colour; how about falling in hate?

When I began to teach myself to paint, I became obsessed with capturing green. What colour shifts more, what shade can be mixed from a wider palette of other colours and still hook to its name? I endlessly copied the mid-twentieth century British artist Edward Ardizzones green-layered-over-dirt-red watercolour wash. What looked more like ground? Not the squares of violent turf Id grown up with, designed to keep the weeds down between marmalade-bricked blocks. They looked like astroturfand wouldnt that have been more convenient for upkeep and consistency? That colourthe WhatsApp logo; the FaceTime logois cold sports halls and terrifying walks home between municipal playing fields. It is terror. The green were told is green is not a colour. It resembles nothing in nature, though were told it does and that, when we get our first box of paints, this is the colour we should paint the earth, and the colour we should love as though it were the earththe same kind of lie that told me I should enjoy living within those secondary-colour bricked anglesaccommodation that, real enough, refused to accommodate anything but its own realityand that I should not think of changing my spots. In a little while I would be able to push a pram there around the square of green-approximating nature. That green could not be worn down or changed. I prefer art to life. But it has to be the right art.

Louise Bourgeois hated green too. If someone wore a green shirt she would ask him to change it, wrote her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, soon after her death, or she would refuse to look at him. He doesnt say why.

Though it was not a deliberate choice, at least three of the men who have looked at me have had green eyes, and two of them have looked at me with this green gaze across a number of years. Green is a recessive eye colour, which means increasingly few people see through its lens. But if you looked into the irises of those three men closely, you would see that they were made up, not of a solid colour, but of small strands, some of which were not green at all.

Theres a resistance, in Godards women, that is at the heart of his work (and theirs). And its in the way they look at Godards men. Their uncomprehending faces, turned to his camera (or his protagonist) are, I guess, the eternal irony of the community. They are something the camera finds alien, filmed finding something alien. They desire the man, but they dont know what the man is, and theyre quite aware that, though he may satisfy some of their needs, he may be otherwise incomprehensible, difficult, dangerous. They look out of curiosity, to find out something about men. They look and they evaluate, not only the men, but their chances.

Godard, who is said to have advertised for a lead actress and girlfriend (and found Anna Karina), isnt often thought ofin his early films at leastas a feminist film maker, but that moment of resistance he notices in his women, his study of their hesitation, of the kind of interest that holds its object at a distance, is something I do not often see recognised.

And its not true that Godard never uses green: he uses sage, he uses sea-green; he uses eau-de-nil, he sometimes uses green that is almost black. At other times, fields and trees intrude: how would they not? Of Godards regular stars, Jean-Paul Belmondos eyes are said by some websites to be green-grey, and others, dark brown; Anna Karinas: blue, Anne Wiazemskys: no info; Jean-Pierre Lauds: N/A. I dont know Godards eye colour. Perhaps it is the colour of the camera lens.

Green has looked at me. At the end of the world, the monument to human art will not be any art object but a kind of look. It will have green eyes, and it will look at nothing green.

Imagine a world of only three colours: red, yellow and blue.