Godard Jean-Luc - Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any project that takes many years to bring to completion incurs a variety of debts along the way. For me, two institutional occasions were especially important and timely. At the University of Chicago, a year-long study group devoted to Histoire(s) du cinma profoundly shaped my understanding of that work. I remain indebted to the participants: James Chandler, James Conant, Bradin Cormack, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Gabriel Mitchell, W. J. T. Mitchell, Richard Neer, Robert Pippin, Joel Snyder, Yuri Tsivian, and Candace Vogler. At the University of Pittsburgh, a graduate seminar on Godards late work allowed me to refine and test many of the ideas found in this book. I am deeply grateful to the students in that class, and especially to Rick Warner, who read and offered careful suggestions on an earlier draft.

At the University of California Press, Mary Francis helped guide and shape this book, and I owe much to her knowledge and care. The Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Publication Fund at the University of Pittsburgh provided additional support for the publication.

A number of people generously provided feedback, conversations, and suggestions: Dudley Andrew, Jonathan Arac, Paul Bov, James Chandler, Lucy Fischer, Michael Fried, Lydia Goehr, Marah Gubar, Alfred Guzzetti, Gregg Horowitz, Heather Keenleyside, Marcia Landy, Adam Lowenstein, Colin MacCabe, Joshua Malitsky, Travis Miles, Laura Mulvey, Robert Pippin, Gayle Rogers, Kieran Setiya, Jennifer Waldron, and Jennifer Wild. Yuri Tsivian repeatedly gave me new ways to think about the arguments I was making about Godards films and videos.

Special thanks go to three people in particular. Richard Neer has been a constant interlocutor on this project, and I have profited immensely from his intelligence and friendship. Tom Gunning has encouraged and stimulated my thinking about Godard, as well as cinema more generally, and I have treasured our conversations. Few people are able to impart so much knowledge with so much pleasure and grace. Miriam Hansen was both a friend and a mentor. She provided a model of how to think about cinema and intellectual history and of what standards of insight and clarity could be; she also taught me how to make the stakes of my arguments clear, that it was important to say why things mattered. She is present all through the pages of this book; I miss her terribly.

My parents, Mickey Morgan and Barbara Herman, have continued to teach me how to think (and why); for this, as for so many things, I owe much to them. Kristin Boyce has been central to everything in and around this work. Without her intelligence, criticism, and care, neither this book nor my life would be half what they are.

The Work of Aesthetics

1. FILM ART?

If my argument is for the importance of aesthetics within Godards films and videos since the late 1980s, two kinds of questions quickly arise. First, if I am taking a tradition of philosophical aesthetics to be not only an interpretive framework but also explicitly present within these works, what evidence is there in the films and videos? Where does this concern manifest itself? Second, if aesthetics is as prominent as I am claiming, why have critics by and large failed to bring it up, much less discuss it as a central orientation?

Though the primary purpose of this chapter is to work through the first question, to begin to discuss the place of aesthetics in Godards late work, Im going to start with the question about criticism, the question of why aesthetics has rarely figured in writing about these works. To a certain extent, I think this is a mistaken, if natural, way of phrasing the question. Aesthetics may not have received explicit attention in critical writing on Godards late films and videos, but a range of associated terms (natural beauty, form, free play, and so on) are staples in the discourse. Yosefa Loshitzky, for example, discerns in Nouvelle vague a sustained treatment of natural beauty: Nature is celebrated through adoring shots of the Swiss forests, lakes, and meadows which serve as contrapuntal points of reference to the decadent world of the power-lustful industrialists. From an observation about the presence of images of nature, Loshitzky draws a set of conclusions: to work in terms associated with aesthetics is to be uninterested in questions of history and politics, even to evince an idealist or conservative position.

Im going to spend much of this chapter laying the groundwork for a more expansive and intricate account of the role of aesthetics in Godards films, one that encompasses modes of perception and experience, judgment and knowledge, and is wholly intertwined with history and politics. But whats needed is more than a revisiting of Godards late work. The terms of criticism deployed in response to it emerge out of a long-standing tradition within film studies, one that minimizes or rejects aesthetics as a category of valuation. Its a tradition in which Godard himself played a prominent part. Getting clear about the nature of Godards cinematic project in the late 1980s and 1990s will require working through and undoing central elements of this critical legacy.

The place of aesthetics within film history, and within film studies as well, goes back to the first decades of the twentieth century. As film was struggling to be recognized as a genuine art, more than a mere recording of the world or a form of canned theater, film critics and theorists frequently made use of terms from aesthetics to demonstrate the mediums artistic legitimacy. Film had emerged not in the context of high artistic culture, the spaces of the theater and the museum, but rather at the fairground, in the vaudeville theater, and in the traveling exhibition. As Tom Gunning argued, early films functioned as a cinema of attractions: their appeals were predicated less on traditional artistic values than on the creation of sensory thrills, new experiences, and a direct solicitation of the viewers attention. a number of filmmakers and critics sought to raise the standard of the cinema, to improve not only the films being made but also the character of the audiences watching them. They sought, in short, to give film the status of the other arts.

Two basic strategies for this effort emerged. The first was articulated by D. W. Griffith in the wake of the controversy over The Birth of a Nation (1915). Decrying its censorship, Griffith argued that cinemas status as a legitimate art form was bound up with debates over the freedom of speech. Labeling cinema a medium of expression, he wrote, A people that would allow the suppression of this form of speech would unquestionably submit to the suppression of that which we all consider so highly, the printing press.printed word. As a result, Griffith concluded that the development of the moving picture industry constitutes the birth of a new art, and so can claim the protection the law gives to artistic productions.

The second strategy had to do with cultural legitimacy. Anton Kaes argues that, in the period from 1909 to 1920, cinema felt pressure to legitimize itself vis-vis literature as the dominant medium in cultural life. As it developed its own theaters and new forms of technology, cinema was able to edge into a competitive relationship with mainstream literature, especially with the novel (which offered ready material for cinematic representation) and with the theater (which lost famous directors and actors to the new medium).

Early theories of film emerged in the context of this debate. As Nol Carroll remarks, The philosophy of the motion picture was born over the issue of whether film can be art.