L’esprit emprunte à la matière les perceptions d’où il tire sa nourriture, et les lui rend sous forme de mouvement, où il a imprimé sa liberté.Henri Bergson 1
Vladimir Lenin predicted that the background of the twentieth century would be wars and revolutions and thus the world’s common denominator would be violence.2 Taking Lenin’s statement further, and in historical materialist terms, Hannah Arendt argued in 1969 that revolutionary violence had brought history to a standstill worldwide as opposed to accelerating historical progress toward its completion. “The Revolution ” had been Western Modernity’s hegemonic referent and discourse within Leftist intellectual culture. As a discursive container, “Revolution ” became retroactively the fatal harbinger of terror and totalitarianism. With the increased prevalence of this casual arithmetic (Revolution + Realization = Totalitarianism), the enthusiasm for any potential human emancipation or redemptive change waned,3 or became its own cause for suspicion. Despite attempts to ideologize, depoliticize and aestheticize, and accusations of Eurocentrism, conservatism and classicism, Jean-Luc Godard’s work follows the educated, liberal and positivist tradition of radical Western leftist intellectuals engaged with proclaiming and helping to advance the Modernizing potential of the Revolution . Godard’s films are inscribed in a long-standing reflection of a complex meditation and are a rewarding exploration of the contradictions embedded in the relationship between ethics and politics and the artist’s ability or responsibility to represent or to be involved in historical or contemporary political events. These interrogations translate into matters of visibility and technique, how to render present the absent or give presence to those who lack a voice, in the relationship between action or intervention and poiesis . In order to pursue this, Godard encompasses in his work Dziga Vertov’s factography, Bertolt Brecht’s pedagogy, Jean-Paul Sartre’s engagement, Maoist direct action, Guy Debord’s iconoclasm, the post-structuralist demise of representation, militant film, the emancipatory potential of the media as counter-information, self-representation and the post-colonial native informant, an inquiry into the capacity of images to bear witness or to give testimony , the irrepresentable, the sacredness of the image and the problem of the hyperreal versus more dialectical approaches dealing with the privileged position of the observer/reporter/artist-ethnographer. Most importantly, his oeuvre must be inscribed within the tradition of materialist aesthetics and his films described as “dialectical materialist films.” Materialism is a method to produce objective knowledge through the cognition of this objective whole, describing it in action, focusing on the relationships of production. Moreover, materialism seeks to render the world visible by producing reflections or consciousness of the relationships of production by means of the dialectic between essence and appearance , thereby producing objective knowledge of the world. Rooted in debates in the late 1960s about engaged filmmaking and partly inspired by Godard’s own work, Jean-Paul Fargier defines political films neither as ideological nor as undoing ideology, but as achieving a non-ideological status by realizing a form of theoretical practice.4 Non-ideological films are truly political precisely because they are conscious of the materials they are based on, they are not confused with political practice, and in them aesthetic-ideological specificity is elevated to a stage of knowledge that transforms the subjective element and thus contributes to social change.5
In Le Gai savoir (1969) Godard establishes the foundations of his materialist filmmaking. In the film, two students, Patricia Lumumba and Émile Rousseau, meet in a television studio for seven days to investigate techniques and strategies to shatter representation and implement a new visual regime. The first year, the plan is to collect sounds and images; the second year, to critique, reduce, decompose and substitute them. In the third, they give themselves the task of building alternatives. All activities converge in Godard’s own filmmaking program, which is based on a radical questioning of the signifying and representational logic of filmmaking and an epistemological inquiry in tune with key structuralist and post-structuralist works like Louis Althusser’s Pour Marx (1965), Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Roland Barthes’ Éléments de semiologie (1964) or Julia Kristeva’s Séméiôtiké (1969). It could be said that the tasks Patricia and Émile give themselves of speaking, listening and seeing as a way to move from savoir (impersonal, objective knowledge) to connaissance (subjective or personal knowledge),6 were the methods followed for decades by Godard both alone and together with his long-term partner and collaborator, Anne-Marie Miéville. In the little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group (DVG) period that Godard made in collaboration and/or in dialogue with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Henri Roger, Paul Bourron, Isabel Pons, Raphaël Sorin, Nathalie Biard and D.A. Pennebaker—from One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil (1968), One A.M. (1968), British Sounds/See You at Mao (1969), Pravda (1969), Le Vent d’Est (1970), Luttes en Italie (1970), Vladimir et Rosa (1971) to Tout va bien and Letter to Jane (both 1972)—they take further the theoretical explorations Godard began in Le Gai savoir on the relationship between text and image, words and sounds in the context of the crisis of aesthetic representation (voice, image, text). In the DVG films, the crisis of representation is explored explicitly in terms of the political processes of the ordeals experienced by militants in the context of the effervescence of May 1968 and the demise of Marxism-Leninism epitomized in Tout va bien (1972) and of Tiermondisme (or Third Worldism ) in Ici et ailleurs (1976).
A film about the Palestinian Revolution, Ici et ailleurs (originally titled Jusqu’à la victoire) was made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Armand Marco and co-edited with Anne-Marie Miéville within the context of their Sonimage project. Critics such as Raymond Bellour and Colin MacCabe see in this film a radical break in Godard’s oeuvre at the level of his political commitment and aesthetic engagement, as they see a qualitative and quantitative change between the Marxist-Leninist period and the Sonimage one. This break is usually described as the quandary of an intellectual, who, realizing the limitations of his previous position of ...