14 September 2022

Jean-Luc Godard 1930-2022

Predictably I won’t be able to gather my thoughts on Godard’s death into one blog post right away but.. 

* Bazin's speculation "If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis.. the process might reveal that at the origin of the plastic arts there lies a mummy complex" was a coy way of suggesting the unprecedented potential for film as a sarcophagus, with Godard's oeuvre to become thereafter the most advanced mummy of all for this sad occasion.

* The point at which you’ve gone to so many gallery shows you are sick of attempts at referential postmodernism came long ago for me and I embrace the path into the unknown horizon that results from this phenomenon. My enjoyment of Godard, however, the most postmodern and referential of them all, was never affected by this. The grandfather clause, as well as his ability to in turn keep it new and express so much through this proliferation of quotations. There was no one whose films I would anticipate more up to and including right now, with the only certainly being surprise. The essay style from the late 60s on, imho began to reach its full potential with Notre Musique and did not let up with the subsequent offerings until the last breath. 

 

 

* One such postmodern gallery show: four years ago when Miguel Abreu exhibited the models Godard made for his Collage(s) de France installations which he intended for attendees to walk through in his 2006 Pompidou Center retrospective. After reportedly “relations between the artist and the museum had soured” the museum displayed the models for the installations at the show rather than executing them at the intended scale, which seemed to me to be Godard’s version of Langlois’ museum, which also encountered much institutional resistance. I can think of no better way for Paris to remember Godard than installing these rooms by the Cinémathèque française in Bercy, and indeed any backwater could immediately have one of the headiest things going for miles by attaching these rooms to their municipal museum. 

 


 

* Recently, no other major director embraced the manifold functions of the cell phone camera for the future of cinema like Monsieur G, especially in Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language. Or was it Godardian parody? Notre Musique: Godard recounts the story in Malraux's book about Picasso when in 1858 the peasant girl Saint Bernadette of Lourdes was asked to identify the Virgin Mary that had been appearing to her, and after being shown many paintings using natural settings and perspective, was shown a Byzantine icon and said "it's her!" Godard: "An icon: no movement, no depth, no artifice. The sacred." At the end of the lecture, Godard is asked "Can the new little digital cameras save the cinema?" He is silent, with the high-key lighting without fill, for celluloid, creating contrast on his face that, in the past, video couldn't handle.

 


 

* Staring at my computer from time to time I occasionally entertain ‘should my social media avatar be a Godard image’ but that last shot of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her never gets old for me, in addition to the obvious meanings you can invent others. 

* Four days ago I was listening to Bolivia's President Arce promote the managed ‘plural’ economic model by saying “the state is us” and of course I immediately thought of the line from Notre Musique: “A young German CathoIic said, in 1943: ‘The dream of the individual is to be two. The dream of the State is to be one.’ She was beheaded.” Bolivians know better than anyone how the European races will export their tortured Hegelianism but the show must go on. 

 


r.com/KawsachunNews/status/1568443542040715264?s=20&t=N2vxRxYjZKGlzUgT_8-I2* In the Goodbye to Language extras there’s an interview in which he complains of holding forth in a bar during a festival or shoot and no one wants to stay up and chat. Such a tease! When there’s a lapse in the conversation you work the word ‘Cinemascope’ into a sentence and he goes off on a tangent that I can’t fully appreciate (as in the case of that interview) until you think up the next question, gazing two spaces away like an undeveloped pawn longing to protect Queen Agnes’ adolescent tears outside the door of Chez JLG in Faces Places.

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