Hi all
Is Satyajit Ray revant in this millennium? What is your opinion? I think he
is . What ishis impact on cinema? Any comment is welcome.
Arup
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F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y
Internet Salon (ISSN 1466-4615)
http://www.film-philosophy.com
Vol. 4 No. 8, March 2000
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David Sterritt
Speaking and Writing about Godard
A Response to Nochimson and Sutton
Martha P. Nochimson
A Modest Employee of the Cinema vs The Big Garage
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 4 no. 6, March 2000
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/nochimson2.html
Paul Sutton
More Histoire(s) du Cinema?
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 4 no. 7, March 2000
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/sutton.html
One clear message of the present book reviews, and the volumes they
discuss, is that Jean-Luc Godard is having a comeback. One of my reasons
for deciding to focus intensively on Godard in recent years [1] was the
extraordinary neglect he and his films had been suffering from critics and
scholars; yet, during the period when I worked on my book _The Films of
Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible_, two other full-length studies
appeared: one by Wheeler Winston Dixon, which arrived shortly before I
finished my manuscript, and the other by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki,
which arrived shortly after my book was completed. [2] More evidence of
Godard's resurgence has come directly to the movie screen. A revival of _Le
Mepris_ in American theaters in 1997 was greeted with an ecstatic critical
response that contrasted markedly with the grudging, grumpy reviews that
prevailed during its original United States run in the 1960s. Now two new
movies by latter-day auteurs are paying earnest homage to Godard's early
work: _Beau Travail_, a very loose adaptation of Herman Melville's great
_Billy Budd_, by French filmmaker Claire Denis, resurrects the protagonist
Bruno Forestier from Godard's second feature, _Le Petit soldat_, as one of
its key characters; and _Emporte-moi_, by Canadian director Lea Pool,
refers movingly to Godard's sublime _Vivre sa vie_ when its teenage heroine
goes to the movies and weeps while watching Anna Karina weep while watching
Falconetti weep in Carl Dreyer's classic _The Passion of Joan of Arc_.
Films within films, themes within themes, adventurous old traditions within
adventurous new traditions.
I read _Speaking about Godard_ with great curiosity as to whether Silverman
and Farocki had chosen to emphasize any of the same critical and scholarly
approaches that I had employed in _Seeing the Invisible_, or whether their
different backgrounds -- different from mine and (since they're a theorist
and a filmmaker) from each other's -- had led them in different directions.
I found a certain amount of common ground, in areas ranging from our love
for certain films (who could omit _Weekend_ or _Nouvelle Vague_ from such a
project?) to our shared interest in the *abject* and other
psychoanalytically related concepts. The largest single difference is, of
course, their decision to structure their book literally as a dialogue -- a
methodology that seems eminently Godardian at first, but would be more
persuasive if the conversations read more like lively, interactive
exchanges, and less like alternating blocks of self-contained insight and
opinion.
Such interactivity would certainly be present if the dialogues between
Silverman and Farocki had been transcribed directly from their actual
conversations, and although he doesn't directly say so, Paul Sutton appears
to indicate such a preference when he criticizes _Speaking about Godard_ as
'a book that should have been a film'. I assume that what he has in mind is
something like Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville's own _Soft and Hard (A Soft
Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject)_, and I agree that such
an audiovisual project would be fascinating to observe, for its fresh
contribution to Godard studies, as well as its additional clues to the
intellectual relationship between Silverman and Farocki as academic
theorist and practicing filmmaker. It's also true that such a work could
include film clips, obviating Sutton's complaint that the stills in
_Speaking about Godard_ serve 'simply to demonstrate the impossibility of
[the book's] project'.
This said, I emphatically disagree with Sutton's implication that books of
academic film criticism and analysis are inevitably dogged by the
'impossibility' and 'futility' of 'attempting to re-write or re-narrate'
the cinematic texts they take as their objects of study. For that matter, I
find it hard to grasp Sutton's underlying view of what film criticism is or
should be. The problem starts in his first sentence, when he states that
the book under review 'appears . . . to have no immediately identifiable
thesis beyond the obvious proposition that Jean-Luc Godard is, or rather
his films are, a worthy object of speech'. To be sure, there are other
motivations that may spur authors to produce works of film criticism and
analysis, such as the wish to explicate or disseminate particular
philosophical, theoretical, or political ideas. But qualities that Sutton
himself identifies in the Silverman-Farocki book -- a fascination with
'recurring themes', a pervading 'love for the cinema', and so forth -- seem
to me more than enough reason to write (or read) such a work, even if the
experience is inevitably different from what we'd see and hear if we sat in
on the original conversations, or attended a retrospective of Godard's
movies and videos. (Sutton doesn't reduce the confusion by stating in his
first sentence that the book's thesis is 'somewhat [unusual] for an
academic book', only to state in his second sentence that 'many academic
texts suffer . . . from just such an occurrence'!)
The key point here is that virtually all film-related books are 'dependent
on . . . description', in Nick Roddick's words, [3] and on the stills (if
any) that supplement the verbal text. Sutton may be right that Silverman
and Farocki attempt to construct a 'descriptive narrative [that] strives to
visualise specific sequences'. But surely these longtime cineastes were
aware of their project's ontological nature, and any inherent limitations
thereto, just as a descriptive poet is aware of appealing to the mind's eye
rather than the optical eye; surely their 'recourse to stills' is not a
measure of ultimate 'failure' to transmute words on a page into pictures on
a screen through some sort of semiological alchemy; and surely their
intention wasn't to 'demonstrate' the impossibility of their own project by
the odd device of conscientiously carrying it out.
Turning to Sutton's comments on Godard himself, he doesn't tell us exactly
when the filmmaker became 'a ponderous intellectual', a description that
many would vigorously contest. But the assertion that the 'humour that
remains in his later films is often directed unflatteringly at
intellectuals themselves', with Godard himself 'increasingly blind to the
ambiguity of his own position', suggests a perilously incomplete view of
the filmmaker whose uproariously *self*-deflating humour has led him to
satirize his own image (sometimes via surrogates, sometimes via personal
appearances) in a long list of films, ranging from _Sauve qui peut (la
vie)_ and _Prenom: Carmen_, to _King Lear_ and _Soigne ta droite_, among
others. Godard is rarely blind to any ambiguity, it seems to me -- indeed,
a passion for ambiguity is a bedrock quality of his entire aesthetic
project -- and he has taken remarkable care to make sure 'his own position'
doesn't constitute an exception.
I must add a word about _Le Mepris_, in which Sutton finds a
'portentousness' and 'pseudointellectuality' that place it into the
'purposefully inaccessible' and 'unpleasurable' category of Godard's work
-- and so self-evidently that not one specific argument is adduced against
the film. Critics are obviously entitled to their opinions, and I've been
known to embrace some ornery ones myself; but specific arguments would have
helped the credibility of Sutton's position vis-a-vis a film which many
commentators find one of Godard's key masterpieces, and which in any case
stands with the 'early, well-known' and 'popular' works (certainly today if
not in the '60s -- see above) that he criticizes Silverman and Farocki for
short-changing!
Specifics are a problem for Sutton's review, beyond its discussion of _Le
Mepris_. Just what are the 'later, more politically self-aware films' that
'wear their concerns so visibly' as to make analysis automatically anal?
And even if a film is 'self-reflexive' in the extreme, why does this make
writing about it 'a more or less pointless exercise'? Missing from this
review is a basic realization that all film criticism operates as paratext
to the filmic material upon which it comments. To write about films instead
of projecting them -- or to read about films as well as viewing them -- is
not to 'fail' on some ontological or epistemological level. Laura Marks is
hardly the first observer to note that 'one might 'write' about film
filmically, by making films/film essays', [4] but that is clearly not the
only way of writing about films. Another way is with words and sentences
and paragraphs and stills. And that way (as Godard himself recognizes to
this day) still serves a legitimate, illuminating purpose.
On the subject of my own book of interviews with Godard, spanning his
filmmaking career from 1962 to 1996, I'm pleased that Martha P. Nochimson
finds much of value in it. In some respects such a volume (here I refer to
the interview-book genre, not just my contribution to it) does give access
to its subject 'in the heat of an ahistorical eternal present', or rather
an intermittent series of such presents. I see more importance, however, in
the fact that an 'effect of the confluence of multiple sources for [the
subject's] statements is the placement of [the subject's] stream of
consciousness into the flood of history', as Nochimson puts it. Indeed, as
I note in my introduction, the periodicals from which my interviews are
derived themselves 'represent an interesting cross-section of
English-language venues open to serious cultural discussion', [5] and their
heterogeneity is of course a factor in producing the 'adventure in . . .
dissonances among multiple representations of Godard [and] his work' that
Nochimson observes. She is completely on target when she notes that the
interviews most directly representing Godard allow his 'aesthetic of
self-contradiction [to emerge] in all its ambiguity', whereas the 'more
filtered accounts tend to assimilate him into an unthreatening image for
wider public acquaintance' and thereby illustrate the complex process by
which we 'culturally attempt to digest our artists'.
She is also right to emphasize the fact that Godard steadily 'rejects
received notions of polarities', and that he often 'appears as a man
attempting to outrun his last statement'. From the beginning of his career,
Godard has been a radically intuitive artist down to his bones, bent on
evading predetermined patterns of cinematic (and other) convention through
techniques conducive to spontaneity (he prefers 'last-minute focusing' to
extensive preparation) and practices designed to render filmmaking a
fundamental part of his life's daily ebb and flow -- so that he works on
his movies 'not only when I'm shooting but as I dream, eat, read, talk to
you', as he said in a 1967 essay. [6] I have argued elsewhere that the
improvisatory impulse in post-war art -- from the spontaneous flights of
modern jazz to the Beat Generation's affection for 'spontaneous bop
prosody', as Jack Kerouac dubbed it -- reflects a desire to restore what
Walter Benjamin calls the 'auratic' quality of art as a way of combating
tendencies towards depersonalization in twentieth-century culture. [7]
Godard accepts the mechanical reproducibility of motion pictures as a
defining characteristic of the medium, but he also feels that the film
industry's demand for indiscriminate mass distribution has drowned modern
cinema in a sea of commercialization and commodification. He has therefore
set out to revitalize film's potential by discombobulating film-industrial
norms through the cultivation of improvisational methods meant to produce
(in Jonathan Rosenbaum's well-chosen words) an 'ungraspable, intractable,
unconsumable' form of cinema. [8] In terms of his statements regarding
film, this helps explain his predilection for romanticized rhetoric about
individuality and eccentricity as pathways to originality and uniqueness,
and also his fondness for deliberately slippery and unwieldy wordplay. 'I
think the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera', he said with
regard to his 1967 film _La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la chinoise_, arguing
that 'the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the
camera'. [9] This is an excellent example of Godard's penchant for murky
clarifications, but his insertion of an ineffable gap between the film and
its means of realization points to his frankly idealistic desire for a
discourse of auratic artistry that seeks to replace the demands of
commercially driven cinema (and of his own socially constructed ego) with
what Benjamin terms the 'unique existence' and 'essentially distant . . .
unapproachable' [10] quality that only an art created profoundly *in* and
*of* its moment can attain. Nochimson recognizes Godard's appropriation of
the interview format itself as a means of asserting an ever-changing form
of personal 'distance' and 'uniqueness' and 'authenticity' that takes on
its own artistic-aesthetic life even as it supplements and underscores the
ambitions he strives to realize in cinematic works per se. His enterprise
may be imperfect and frustrating and even insufferable at times. But so are
his movies, and they're no less stimulating for all that.
This returns me to the basic point, worth stressing once again, that
Nochimson goes beyond the volume she's reviewing to consider issues raised
by the type of book it represents, building a creatively reasoned,
persuasively stated case that stimulates productive consideration of the
genus as a whole. And finally, her treatment of critical issues deserves a
nod. Only a genuinely imaginative critic would think of mobilizing Martin
Buber's perceptual categories to cast light on Godard's feisty interchange
with Pauline Kael, and only a truly articulate one could zero-in on Kael's
notoriously self-righteous style with a phrase like 'constructed opinions
misperceived as truth', an intellectual zinger that cuts to the heart of
Kael's critical shortcomings. Felicitously, another of Nochimson's most
perceptive observations has to do with Kael's former colleague, Penelope
Gilliatt, whose New Yorker profile indeed gives us what Nochimson labels a
'stylish Godard with interesting opinions to entertain sophisticated
readers'. Has anyone ever summed up Gilliatt, or the New Yorker style she
represents, with more subtly sardonic accuracy?
Also strong is Nochimson's pithy assessment of death-of-the-author theory
(it's true, something is lustily twitching under that shroud), and of 'the
complex relationship between cultural constructions in general and art as a
special instance'. I agree with her that the 'documentary . . . intent' of
individual interviews in my book (and in other such volumes dealing with
first-rate artists) gives way to a 'found poetry' when they are taken
together -- a perception which reminds us that Godard is an artist, and a
mighty poetic one at that, at least as much as he's a sociopolitical
analyst, an agitprop activist, or an object of dissection by critics and
scholars. These are exactly the sorts of issues that should be discussed
when books on artists and artistry are at hand, and it's not surprising to
find Nochimson raising them so effectively, given the incisive work she has
done on David Lynch, another impossible-to-pin-down filmmaker whose work
presents hugely complicated cultural/critical challenges. [11] Godard is
indeed an aesthetic adventurer who 'lives . . . the mysteries of the
oblique search for contingent truths', and I am gratified that Nochimson
has put her impressive intellectual resources into such a judicious
assessment of the ways in which a dialogic collection of cinema-centered
conversations can help to illuminate aspects of that quest.
Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus
New York, USA
Footnotes
1. Chiefly in my books _The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and _Jean-Luc Godard:
Interviews_ (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998).
2. Wheeler Winston Dixon, _The Films of Jean-Luc Godard_ (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1997); and Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, _Speaking about Godard_
(New York: New York University Press, 1998).
3. As quoted in Sutton's review: Nick Roddick, Review of _Speaking about
Godard_, _Sight and Sound_, vol. 9 no. 5, May 1999, p. 31.
4. Sutton is refering to comments made by Laura Marks at the 1998 Screen
Conference.
5. _Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews_, p. xiii.
6. 'One Should Put Everything into a Film', _L'Avant-Scene du Cinema_ 70,
May 1967; reprinted in Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, eds, _Godard on Godard_
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), pp. 238-239, cited at p. 238.
7. See David Sterritt, 'Revision, Prevision, and the Aura of Improvisatory
Art', _The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_, vol. 58 no. 2, Spring
2000 (forthcoming).
8. Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'The Importance of Being Perverse: Godard's _King
Lear_', _Chicago Reader_, 8 April 1988; reprinted in Rosenbaum, _Placing
Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism_ (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), pp. 184-189, cited at p. 189.
9. Quoted by Gene Youngblood in 'Jean-Luc Godard: No Difference between
Life and Cinema', _Los Angeles Free Press_, 15 March 1968; reprinted in
Sterritt, _Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews_, pp. 9-49, cited at p. 29.
10. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction', in _Illuminations_ (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp.
217-251, cited at pp. 221 and 243.
11. Martha P. Nochimson, _The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in
Hollywood_ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 2000
David Sterritt, 'Speaking and Writing about Godard: A Response to Nochimson
and Sutton', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 4 no. 8, March 2000
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/sterritt.html>.
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