Encounters with Godard

Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics

James S. Williams

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438460628, 9781438460635
• eBook ISBN: 9781438460642
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

1

The Politics of Violence and the End(s) of Art

Speaking (for) the Other in La Chinoise (1967)

—Ethics are the aesthetics of the future.

—V. I. Lenin

—La Chinoise is a queer film.

—J.-L. Godard

With its explosive style, frenetic action, and inflammatory talk of revolution, La Chinoise, a study of Maoist activists in training shot in Paris in 1967, is generally considered a uniquely prescient film forecasting “les événements” of May ’68.1 As Colin MacCabe has stated, no major artist was more closely linked to May ’68 than Godard, and La Chinoise dealt directly with the anarchist/situationist and Maoist movements just as they were coming into full political being in de Gaulle’s France (MacCabe 2003: 180). Yet although the film won the Special Prize at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, it was pilloried on its release as excessive and unrealistic. For those Marxist-Leninist students in particular whom Godard had consulted while preparing it, La Chinoise constituted both personal and political betrayals. If one of the filmmaker’s intentions had been to inform his audience of the increasing impact of Maoist ideology and thinking on the student population, those same students believed he had caricatured them as “irresponsible terrorists” by making it appear that individual terrorism was their primary and absolute concern, as opposed to mass mobilization and class struggle.

Godard himself acknowledged there were fundamental problems with La Chinoise and much later, in January 1969, while downplaying its prophetic value, castigated himself for having produced a “reformist” film, that is to say, the work of a “solitary poet,” rather than a collaboration with those that mattered. Clearly still reeling from the collective feelings of failure and disappointment at the shattering of the utopian dreams of May (the Pompidou government won the June parliamentary elections with an increased majority), he lamented that La Chinoise was nothing more than a film made in the lab about what people were actually doing in practice (Bergala 1985: 335). Godard was seeking here, typically, to reassess and redefine his original aims for La Chinoise, which included, as he had proposed in a brief “manifesto” for the 1967 Avignon Theater Festival where it was unofficially premiered, a form of aesthetic and economic counterattack (“two or three Vietnams”) against the imperialistic might of the film industry (Hollywood, Cinecittà, Pinewood, Mosfilms) in order to create free, “fraternal,” national cinemas. One aspect of the film he never questioned or retracted, however, was precisely its depiction of violence extending to terrorism. This was of particular personal interest and concern to Godard and formed part of his ongoing enquiry into the workings of violence at both the individual and social/political levels.

What I would like to do in what follows is to examine the various processes of violence in La Chinoise, at once thematic and formal, in the light not only of the events of May ’68 but also of Godard’s work both immediately before and after. It is a question that assumes all the more urgency in the context of the recent fortieth anniversary of the crisis and the fiftieth now just around the corner—a date that is certain to provoke yet more postmortems of its legacy (we recall that during the May 2007 presidential election campaign Nicolas Sarkozy dismissed the entire period of May ’68 as nothing more than an “immoral” blip that needed to be “liquidated” from the national consciousness). I will attempt to argue that La Chinoise has never really been taken seriously enough as a far-reaching interrogation of the political limits of emancipatory violence and terrorism, and of cinema’s very capacity to represent that process. For the film engages with something far more permanent and universal than can be accounted for by any one political crisis, however disruptive, and puts into question the very possibility of revolutionary agency promoted in the words of its jaunty, satirical theme song “Mao Mao,” specially composed by Gérard Guégan and sung by Claude Channes. By examining how the militants attempt to speak on behalf of others, La Chinoise forces us to consider what form political action and activism should take and whether, with its latent potential for violence, language can ever help to effect change. But it also asks more generally whether one can ever hope to engage mutually with the real other at all. As we shall see, the answers to these related ethico-aesthetic questions about language, representation, and alterity require us to establish not only who is included in the radical cinematic frame and extended history of La Chinoise (a story that has still to be fully told), but also those others who are deliberately left out and consigned to silence.

Prehistory of La Chinoise

During the 1960s, the Vietnam War had begun to make itself increasingly felt in Godard’s work, with odd references and allusions in films like Pierrot le fou, where Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) suffers brief torture before quickly divulging the information required and eventually blowing himself up, and then Masculin Féminin, where Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) sprays a car with the words “Paix au Vietnam.” Yet it is the ostensibly “minor,” cartoon-style film, Made in USA (1966), that reveals most where Godard stood politically by the mid-to-late 1960s, for it is informed by a new understanding that politics had irrevocably changed with the infamous Ben Barka affair of October 1965, explicitly mentioned in the film. This crisis involved the bogus arrest and kidnapping in Paris in broad daylight of the exiled leader of the left-wing Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka. The French secret police was eventually revealed to have conspired with both the CIA and the criminal underworld to deliver Ben Barka to Moroccan agents and then stage an elaborate cover-up (the tortured body was never found, and the file still remains open).2 What the affair revealed for Godard was that the most important American influence was no longer simply popular culture or Coca-Cola but rather geopolitical terrorism and international conspiracy “made in USA.” Indeed, Cold War France appeared now to be directly infiltrated by Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara and terrorized by a secret police force. The film, which includes the close-up of a book cover proclaiming Gauche année zero (Left year zero), ends with Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) responding to journalist Philippe Labro’s comment that the Left and Right were now essentially the same with an open question: How then does one engage politically?

This question, and with it the issue of what new form politicized art should take, seems to have provided the intellectual starting point for La Chinoise. On one level it couldn’t be simpler: the American-inspired capitalist democracy of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was encouraging state terrorism, which contaminated the symbolic order itself. The film Godard made at the same time as Made in USA, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, linked, for example, the destructive regeneration of Paris by the new technocrats to the social alienation experienced by wife and mother Juliette (Marina Vlady), living in the new housing project of La Courneuve, who finances her craving for consumer goods with part-time prostitution. So intense would become Godard’s disgust with French society and its contempt for its own citizens, in particular through its ossified education system and repressive forms of censorship, that when the culture minister, André Malraux, banned Jacques Rivette’s film La Religieuse (The Nun) in April 1966, Godard published an open letter in Le Nouvel Observateur in which he described himself as “submerged in hate” and accused Malraux, a Resistance hero, of being a “collaborator.” At one point in La Chinoise Véronique suddenly turns to the camera and takes a pot shot at Malraux with a snarling reference to his 1957 essay on the transcendence of art: “La métamorphose des dieux, M. Malraux!” (“The metamorphosis of the gods, Mr. Malraux!”). In Godard’s thinking, institutional acts of cultural and political “terrorism” demanded decisive counteracts of terrorism at every level. He quickly became alert to what he saw and heard on the Nanterre campus when he drove his new young partner and student Anne Wiazemsky there for classes. For in France, as in other Western countries, Maoist cells had been slowly forming since 1966. The Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJCML) sought to transform into Marxist rhetoric and gestures the radical philosophy of Louis Althusser, who emphasized Marxism as a science and promoted a return to the doctrinal purity of early Marx. The group published a theoretical review, the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, founded by militants of the Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) based at the École Normale Supérieure, where Althusser taught philosophy. Among the ranks of the UEC were Robert Linhart, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, Alain Badiou, and Étienne Balibar, all of whom endorsed in 1966 the Great Cultural and Proletarian Revolution in China. Affecting the same idealist fervor as the young officers of the Red Guard, they fancied that they were now the political new wave in France. In fact, by the mid-to-late 1960s Mao was seen by many on the left as the sole guarantor of Marxism-Leninism. Another dissident extreme left group, the Parti communiste marxiste-léniniste de France (also mentioned in La Chinoise), similarly called itself Maoist although claimed allegiance to Stalin and refused Kruschev-style détente. Godard was put in close touch with the UJCML by a young journalist working for Le Monde, Jean-Pierre Gorin, who, while not a Maoist himself, began to influence the tone and direction of Godard’s new film and even inspired him to visit the Chinese Embassy while on tour in Algiers.

Reprendre à zéro: Revolutionary Rhythms

La Chinoise was thus conceived as a strategic raid on prevailing reactionary aesthetics. Its “Aden-Arabie” cell (named after the communist writer Paul Nizan’s violent 1931 essay, which included a famous preface by Sartre in the 1960 edition) is composed of five major characters whom Godard considered comparable to the five different levels of society established by Maxim Gorky in his play The Lower Depths (1902). They are: Véronique (played by Wiazemsky), a philosophy student at Nanterre and the only “bourgeois” as such; her boyfriend and actor Guillaume (Léaud); a working-class economist Henri (Michel Séméniako); a nihilist painter Kirilov (Lex de Bruijn) (his name borrowed from Dostoyevsky’s The Devils); and finally Yvonne (Juliet Berto), originally from a peasant background and working as a maid for Véronique’s parents (in an ironic comment on the rhetoric of class struggle, she will continue to polish the shoes of her fellow revolutionaries). When Yvonne warmly embraces Véronique in the first five minutes of the film, it is as if Godard were quickly referencing Louis Malle’s 1965 film, Viva Maria! (a comedy western romp set in nineteenth-century Mexico where two feisty Marias [Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot] wage a terrorist war on a corrupt priest) in order to transport the problematics of terrorism in film into new and more difficult territory. A transient member of the cell who arrives seventeen minutes into the film to deliver a short lecture on new perspectives of the European Left is the student Omar Diop playing himself. Introduced by Véronique as a fellow philosophy student at Nanterre and sporting a vermilion (Chinese red) jumper, Omar (Blondin) Diop was, in fact, a brilliant Senegalese student whom Godard had met at Nanterre through Wiazemsky while scouting for ideas for La Chinoise. A leading figure among pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist students, he was the one authentic Maoist in the film and would later work closely with Daniel Cohn-Bendit in the Mouvement du 22 mars, founded at Nanterre on March 22, 1968, when students occupied the university’s administration building.

In the absence of the owners (the parents of one of Véronique’s friends) and thus with the rule of authority temporarily suspended for the summer, the secluded apartment functions as a crucible for revolution. It is mapped out as a series of different spaces, from the classroom to the lecture theater, and is centered visually around the display of two red books: the Little Red Book and the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes. As Rancière has put it in perhaps the most compact account yet of the film, it is as if we were witnessing here an exercise in Marxism with Marxism, that is, the “matter” of Chinese Marxism infused by the “principle” of Althusserian Marxism (outlined in Reading Capital [1965]) of learning to “see, listen, speak, read.”3 This is only half the story of La Chinoise, however, for it also represents Marxism in the process of becoming cinema. The cell’s motto, written over the wall, is expressed in virtually cinematographic terms: “We must confront vague ideas with clear images” (“Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires”). One of the film’s many formulas and refrains is the “unity” of art and politics, as well as of form and content, and Véronique even utters at one point the Sartrean mantra that aesthetics is the realm of the imaginary.4 The film’s original full title, À la chinoise, un film en train de se faire (“In the Chinese way, a film in the process of being made”), the second part of which is presented, as the first title in the film, against a black background in first blue (“Un film”), then yellow (“en train/de se”), then still larger red (“FAIRE”), underlines that this is an instance of self-consciously performative, materialist cinema. Godard had even intended to use the newly available Philips video cameras so that the students could record their own conversations and provide their own critique, yet this proved too difficult and costly to obtain. Devoid of any initial or final credits, the film simply arrives, suddenly and dynamically, on the screen, its antirealist, “degree zero” style conveying a raw and pulsating energy and urgency. Organized around blocks of primary color (red for Maoism, blue for the workers’ overalls, yellow for the Chinese race, to be contrasted with the briefly glimpsed neutral green of the countryside), it has a scattershot, pop-art feel due to its intensive collage of multiple gadgets and false revolvers, intertitles, intermittent black spacing, sudden rapid inserts, tricks of stage lighting, comic-strip images, dialogues, slogans denouncing the hypocrisy of American foreign policy and imperialism, provocations, fragments of interviews (mostly responses to Godard off-screen), assorted minihappenings, covers of magazines (notably one of Malcolm X), graffiti, a barrage of citations and dogma from journals and books by authors such as André Gorz, allusions to topical events, and agit-prop skits about Vietnam (the characters mime at one point Mao’s assumption of power and act out those Chinese being killed by evil “revisionists”). On the soundtrack we hear news-flashes from Radio Peking, quick snippets of Stockhausen, and odd bursts of the title song “Mao Mao” based on certain formulas culled from Mao’s Little Red Book.

Figures 1.1–3. Subversive rhythms: Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a cartoon diptych, and Kirilov (Lex de Bruijn) in La Chinoise (1967).

The composite sonic and chromatic effect of this extraordinary work of montage (Godard claimed the film took one month to shoot and three months to edit) is of a modern symphony of sound and noise in three “movements” that, typically for early Godard, has a distinctly Brechtian ring. Indeed, Brecht is explicitly mentioned in the film and the only name to remain on the blackboard when all the other now outmoded European writers and dramatists (from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Giraudoux and Pinter) written up in chalk by Guillaume have been wiped away one by one in a silent and systematic purge. As Adrian Martin has indicated, La Chinoise’s formal construction was effectively dictated by one of Althusser’s articles on Brecht, “Le ‘Piccolo’ Bertolazzi et Brecht (Notes sur un théâtre matérialiste),” the conclusion to which, a paean to a new type of spectator, Guillaume read...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Encountering Godard
• 1. The Politics of Violence and the End(s) of Art: Speaking (for) the Other in La Chinoise (1967)
• 2. The Signs in Our Midst: European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98)
• 3. Beyond the Cinematic Body: Digital Rhythms and In/human Breakdown
• 4. Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben
• 5. Music, Love, and the Cinematic Event
• 6. Crossing the Darkness: Metaphor, Difference, Dissymmetry in Notre Musique (2004)
• 7. Entering the Desert: Giving Face in Film socialisme (2010)
• 8. Soft and Hard/Back to Back: Erotic Encounters between Voice and Image in the Zone
• Coda: Cinema after Language
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Select Filmography/Discography
• Index
• Back Cover