Zsuzsa Baross

Cultural Studies Program

Trent University
zbaross@nexuicom.net

3 X 3 : In Praise of Godard

Paradoxes
The most prodigious and prodigiously creative among the auteurs of the New
Wave, if not in the whole short history of the cinema, Godard, or rather his cinema, is
also the least known seen, screened, and perhaps understood. I am an exile from
the world of the cinema, he says of himself in one of the many films in which he
appears in person.1 Yet his rich body of often difficult works constitutes a cinema
and I use this term as Godard himself prefers it, inclusive of writings, works on paper,
the innumerable projects never to be realized, essays on film and video, works that
predate the invention of found-footage is a corpus that is most self-conscious. Selfrevealing but this narcissism is intrinsic to the medium it never ceases to turn back
onto itself: show itself, give away its secrets. (Already in the much celebrated
sequence in Breathless: alone in the stolen car, Michel Piccard, turns to speak directly
to the camera.) If Serge Daney, the critic and theorist, speaks of a Godardian
pedagogy, it is because Godards cinema makes itself visible, exhibits itself as
cinema, as the work of the image which may explain the unhappy experience of the
common spectator, who, for the love of illusion, unlearned to see precisely the image.

Scnario du film Passion, 1982.

(Ils ont dsappris de voir, says one film2; when did the gaze collapse? asks
another.3)
This self-consciousness is irreducible to a late or post-modernism, and is not
confined to self-disruptive, deconstructive gestures, ubiquitous throughout his work,
mocking the conventions that maintain the illusion of reality in narrative cinema.
With Godard, rather, the question animating Bazins writing what is cinema?
becomes a quest, a mission, and a permanent problem (as the revolution was believed
to be permanent) for the cinema itself. Despite Daneys reference to pedagogy, the
uninterrupted turn to the medium is not didactic but purely cinematic. A geste in and
by the cinema, it does not interrogate, reflect on, or define what Panofsky called the
unique and specific possibilities of the new medium4; it rather creates them, creates
them by actualizing them. Just like Czanne, Godard no doubt knows very well that
what is possible for the cinema cannot be found except in the work at which he is at
work. 5 The true cinema, our cinema, he whispers and covers his eyes in
Histoires du cinma, has nothing to do with the movies of Saturday: already
forgotten, still prohibited, always invisible such is our cinema. One never saw it,
one had to love it blindly, by heart (3B).
In the work, and this is its post-modern dimension, the medium folds upon itself,
becomes its own reflection or mirror image, perhaps a crystal, in Deleuzes definition
of this term. But in between its (many) sides, and the adverbial phrase is a key
operator in his work in between sound and image, image and writing, voice and
text, music and sound something other than the disruption of the medium, the
exposition of the machinery of the work in the work takes place: on a wholly other
plane, there emerges a new creation and a pure film effect Godards cinema, which
2

Histoire(s) du cinma, Gaumont 1997-1998, 3A . The eight-part video work Histoire(s) du cinma
was produced for ARTE, Canal+ and Gaumont between 1988 and 1998; it was followed by an edition
of four volumes by Gallimard, comprising a selection of video stills and excerpts from texts read on
the soundtrack or printed on screen. The DVD edition by Gaumont, planned to coincide with the
exhibition by Godard, Voyage(s) en Utopie, at the Centre Pompidou in 2006, appeared in the following
year. References in the text are by chapter titles. Translations are mine.
3

loge de l'amour, 2001.

See Stanley Cavells discussion of this question in The World Viewed, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971, 30.
5
Maurice Blanchot, LEspace littraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1955, 246. My translation.

cannot be filmed. If it is also the most beautiful cinema in the world it can bring
tears into the eyes, says Alain Bergala, one of the few connoisseurs6 it is because
it actualizes a faculty that paradoxically is both intrinsic to the cinema and a pure
creation. A form unique to the cinema: seul le cinma, only the cinema, claims a
chapter title in Histoire(s) du cinma (2A). At the same time, the beauty of this
creation is impossible to dissociate from the condition the malaise of the cinema,
in which the work is inscribed, which it diagnoses, laments and mourns: namely, the
failure of the cinema to fulfill its role,7 its refusal and / or forgetting that it is made for
thinking, is an instrument of thought in short, the disappearance (not the death) of
the cinema.8 If Godards work situates itself at the limit of this failure (I have shown
and lived so many times this impossibility9), if it is cinema (always cinema) that retraces the retreat, mourns the forgetting of the cinema, it is also a cinema that does not
(aspire to) negate or overcome, and even less so to replicate the latter. It converts it
rather into the hollow ground of its possibility.

Form
The question of the cinema for Godard is neither one of representation (of the
world or the real or society or man) nor of narration (Una storia!, I need a story
cries out the unhappy producer in Passion). It is a question of thought under a
certain form of the visible. In a letter to Freddy Bauche, he writes of one of his plans
(one of many never to be realized) for a film of pure thought, where pure thought is
pure spectacle.10 In his Self-portrait in December,11 in Histoire(s) du cinma, among
other places, he insists that the medium is a form of thought, or rather, a form that
thinks.

Nul Mieux que Godard, Paris: ditions Cahiers du cinma, 1999, 240.
Le cinma na pas su remplir son rle, le cinma na pas jou son rle dinstrument de pense,
Godard par Godard, tome 2, 1984-1998, Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 1998, 335.
7

Pas la mort, la disparition, Godard / Amar, Cannes 97, Godard par Godard, Ibid., 409.
Jean-Luc Godard, Letter to Freddy Bauche, Documents, Paris: Editions Centre Pompidou, 2006,
348.
10
Documents, Ibid., 348.
11
JLG/JLG - autoportrait de dcembre, 1995.
9

But the thought of what? To what concept of thought does the form cinema
correspond? Printed in red on black screens of Histoire(s) is the prose poem, the
threefold complication (folding) of Bazins question: What is cinema? / Nothing /
What does it want? / Everything / What can it do? / Something (Histoire(s),3A). The
three couplets delineate a field: in between nothing pre-established and
everything desired, Godards cinema gives birth to something new. A form that
thinks that is, itself is creative of something. For thought, and here Godard comes
ever so close to Deleuze, does not represent or illuminate or reflect on the meaning of
something that is. Just as philosophys creation, the concept, the form-cinema is
formative, it creates a possible world. (In the extraordinary film and crystalline
structure Scnario du film Passion, Godard says that to create a scenario is to
create not a world but the possibility of a world, which then the camera will
actualize.)

Movement
In the limited space of this essay I can only approach this notion of a form that
thinks, which I will do from the direction of movement, with the aid of the following
guiding hypothesis: it is movement that links the cinema to thought. Or to phrase this
same proposition differently: insofar as the cinema is a form that thinks, it is also a
quest, or as Godard himself would say, a prayer for movement (make a camera
movement, as if you were in prayer12). Thought and spectacle meet in the dimension
or register of the movement each effectuates, and therein lies not their identity but
profound affinity. In this register (which is temporal, not spatial) image and thought
communicate, or rather, mutate, ex-change, metamorphose into one another,
incessantly. Deleuze spoke of the image of thought. On the reverse side of the
thought that is image we will find, and this is my hypothesis, the form of the image
that thinks.
But how are we to conceive this movement, as that which may or may not happen
but on which everything depends? As something precarious sought, awaited, hoped

12

Scnario du film Passion.

for, but never guaranteed? Analogous to the radical incertitude of which Blanchot
speaks as the works work that escapes the one who creates it?13
In the field of thought, there are familiar examples: Deleuze admires the speed
with which Bergsons thought moves form one plane to another, from simpler to
more complex formulations, crossing the interval that this very thought cuts into the
fabric of thought. But we need not go farther than Deleuze: he transports Bergsons
three propositions on movement (indivisible, a mobile cut in duration, an expression
of change in the whole) to the plane of the cinema, where he recapitulates them as the
three aspects of the movement image.14
But how are we to conceive movement in the cinema as that which is wished for
but may never take place, for it is not (a) given and may not be given by the cinema
as apparatus? Is not the movement of the image (in the apparatus), or the movement
(represented) in the image, or even the movement-image: a temporal perspective, a
mobile cut in duration?
With respect to thought, we may say that it moves or is not thought at all. The
linguistic equivalent of non-thought is propositional discourse: dead blocks of
mortifying phrases that firmly hold to their fixed stationary places, anchored as they
are to their absent referents. Thought, on the other hand, is interior to discourse and
passes (takes place) in between phrases. (Space does not permit to cite here some of
Derridas most spectacular virtuoso passages that rely on trajectories opened by
languages metonymic chains, but the examples are well known.) Indivisible to
stations, steps, or elements, thought is the leap over the hiatus it opens, the indivisible
movement (lan) of its passage. An analogy with the sense of the cinema the child
born of montage already suggests itself: the coupling of the first and the second
element will be visible only in the third.15 What we may take away from the
movement of thought is that it must take place, or it is nothing. In so far as it is
movement, it is not represented but present in the present tense. It is this quality of

13

LEspace littraire, op.cit., 245.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986. See especially chapters 1-4.
15
Documents, op.cit. , 199.
14

presentness, rather than presence, of taking place in the present, on the screen, that we
must also look for in Godards cinema.
Excursus: Godard, the painter
In the documentary film La sociologie est un sport de combat (Pierre Carles,
2001) we witness a curious scene and a precise symptom of Godards condition in the
world as exile: we are in the sociologist Bourdieus office when a package arrives by
messenger from Godard. Histoire(s) du cinma? Bourdieu does not tell. He opens the
envelope and, while musing to his companion, perhaps a graduate student: All this is
mysterious. I do not understand a single sentence he unceremoniously drops its
contents to the waste basket. In an interview, however, Godard recalls a more
generous comment by Bourdieu, calling him a painter. A happy characterization easy
to embrace, even if Bourdieu may have meant to refer only to Godards practice of
digitally reworking images, borrowed and his own, often with bright colors (most
spectacularly, perhaps, in the last part of loge de lamour, where images are being
washed over with brilliant chemical colors whose fields shift and metamorphose, in
the films time, as if the northern lights). But more significant than the digital brush
strokes, strikingly beautiful especially in the later work, is the sense of the image at
work in the work of Godard. Whether a still life (a pair of domestic shoes set at the
foot of his bed, a reading lamp in yellow competing with the twilight), or the famous
clich of the evening sky being traced by the white chalk of a jet liner (in Passion, for
example, where it is filmed by Godard himself, with a camera especially designed for
him), or that magnificent ruby-red robe in The Bolero, a film within a film (Forever
Mozart, 1996), spread out on a desolate beach in winter . . . an image by Godard bears
the promise of happiness (Oui, limage est bonheur16) not ours, for it is
indifferent, even oblivious of the subject. Hence its distance from that other cinema,
which is about and for the desire of the subject and the subject of desire, whereas the
force and (memory) work, but also the happiness of an image by Godard, are
impersonal affects that bypass the subject.

16

Notre Musique, 2004.

The geste of this promise, we may say, is Godards inimitable, ineffaceable

signature: instantly recognizable without ever being the same, irreducible to
something as predictable as habitus, an image by Godard is testimony to a vision.
A glance has been cast upon the world and extracted a singular image from it, which
deserves the name that is, is an image in so far as it owes nothing to its creator.
Autonomous, it is something of the world, a phenomenon of nature not the snow
flake to which Bazin likens photography, but rather a force of nature, independent of
the plans, projects, intentions of its creator.17 In Allemagne Neuf Zro (1991), to give
one example, an image as perfect as Vermeers much admired (by Proust, for
example) View of Delft. The resemblance/remembrance is not by design, or imitation
or allusion. It is anamnesis: the memory work of the image itself, which, according to
the formula Godard borrows from Bresson, recalls other images: inside the frame,
Lemmy Caution, the last secret agent, is seen moving away from us, crossing a frozen
canal in Berlin. In the foreground, just as in Vermeer, a patch of yellowed winter
grass covers an oval patch of dry land, in the distance, at the waters edge on the other
side, tiny colorful figures are skating, and even further, the contours of a red-brick
building are outlined against the perfectly clear air rather than sky.
The same discerning eye is cast upon the world of the image as well: photographs
from the archives, innumerable clips and stills from the history of the cinema,
Manets paintings of modern life, Goyas prisoners, several works by Giotto,
Rembrandt, Delacroix . . . In Godards extraction and decoupage the face of Kim
Novak framed by the waves of San Francisco Bay (Hitchcocks Vertigo), the skeletal
hand of a Giacometti bronze, the angry face of an angel by Giotto, a horses head by
Ucello the image is reborn. (The order of the image is redemption [Histoire(s) du
cinma, 3B].) Detached from its origin, it is no longer attributable, the question of
origin simply falls away. (In the exhibition, Voyage(s) en Utopie at the Centre
Pompidou, Godard refused to identify the source for any of the numerous film and
video clips that he simultaneously had playing on the tiny television screens placed
all around on the walls of the exhibition space.) The three rough brush strokes in blue,

17

Andr Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 9-16.

meeting in sharp angles, for example, which I think to attribute to van Goghs last
work, with its inverted black Ws signaling rather than representing the black crows
flying over the corn field the blue zig-zag in Godards extraction becomes an
invocation. In chapter 3A of the Histoire(s), it takes on the function of pure form
which metonymically links together as repetitions the tormented, martyred bodies in
several distant images: a buckled corpse falling into a mass grave (documentary),
another taken off the cross (gravure), a pair of emaciated legs of a half-naked prisoner
in Dachau (filmed by George Stevens on 16mm, in color), an inverted W form,
exposed from under a skirt, assaulted by a dog in the mud (Munks Passenger). . . .
The borrowed/ extracted / reframed visions of another cinematographer or painter
are often reworked, often simultaneously, often in the films own time their field
washed over by color and / or invaded by other distant images (the more distant an
image, the more just is the idea). Pulsating, metamorphosing, invading, dissolving
into one another, they yield a vision of an altogether different order, on another plane.
The vision of no-one, it is the pure work of the image.
*
But what is the significance of all this regarding the solidarity of image and
thought?
First, movement (thought) passes by way of the image: it may be hoped for, even
anticipated, but will not be preconceived first and actualized later. If and when it
happens, if one image accords with another or others, when images contract to form
something like a musical accord it happens as if by miracle. Histoire(s) is entirely
composed of such miracles (of montage). In one such magic (not an illusion of reality
but the fraternity of fiction and the real), the window, whose dark secret a watchful
Jimmy Stewart tries to penetrate with the aid of the lens of his camera (in Rear
Window), holds not a domestic murderer but a youthful Hitler in its frame. Signs
among us, says one chapter title in Histoire(s): the cinema does not read or interpret
them, only registers and later projects them, as signs that have never been read or
seen (which is proof for another marvel: the cinema does not see what it looks at.
quelle merveille que de pouvoir regarder ce quon ne voit pas, Oh the sweet
miracle of our blind eyes. [Histoire(s), 1A]). It may be Godard who performs the

coupling Stewart / Hitler, the imaginary / the real, fiction / history but it is an
image (of Hitler) that spontaneously substitutes itself, slips into the place another (of
a New York courtyard). Movement issues from within the space of the image; Godard
is there only to witness it.18 If it happens, it comes from the dimension of the
unforeseeable (in another expression of Blanchots radical incertitude of the
future). If it does not, two images mortifying solitudes remain in indifferent
contiguity, each fixed to its referent outside the frame.
Second, the thought of the cinema, of Godards cinema is not an abstraction. On
the one hand, the image is not born of a comparison (JLG/JLG); on the other had,
the offspring of the montage that succeeds to bring together two distant realities (the
more distant, the more just [JLG/JLG]) is not an analogy, allegory or metaphor
giving expression to a concept or idea (Eisensteins three rising lions standing in
for the idea of revolution or uprising). When, again in Histoire(s), Godard reworks
three non-consecutive shots which he abducts from Hitchcocks The Birds (a cloud of
black birds filling the frame and the sky; then, filmed from above [the sky], a column
of terrified children fleeing from the birds once toward, once away from the
camera) the transport is non-linguistic, the movement(s) effectuated is (are) not in the
direction of language or concept. Right on the screen, in the films own time, the
transfiguration(s) of the image take(s) place in fact, of the whole film called The
Birds by way of the image. (An image must be transformed by contact with other
images as is a color by contact with other colors.19) In one set of manipulations
multiple repetitions, redoubling, fragmentations, superimpositions, freeze frame, etc.
Hitchcocks originals are made to stagger and vibrate as if to the rhythm of the
flapping of wings and the silent cries of the children below. In another, archival
images of a single WWII bomber both flash up between the fragments and are
superimposed on, infiltrate, the now hysteric, trembling images of Hitchcock. In
between the two sets of operations, in the flickering of their reciprocal after-image,

18

Cest que cest le film qui pense ...il ny a quun tmoin de cette pense. Cest ma satisfaction de
faire du cinma., Marguerite Duras et Jean-Luc Godard: entretien tlvis, Godard par Godard,
tome 2, 1984 -1998, Cahiers du cinma, 1998, 143.
19
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. J.M.G. Le Clzio, London: Quartet
Encounters, 1986, 9.

the birds and the war-plane trade places, without exchanging identities, without
surrendering to a common meta-image (allegory or metaphor) their difference.
This is not a symbol or metaphor of war in general, war as such. Nor a
representation of one pointing to or finding the anchor of its support outside the
image. An event of a different order, let us say provisionally (the reason for his
caution will be soon apparent) an act of war, concrete and actual, takes place right on
the screen, in the films own time. This metamorphosis, moreover, is not the terminus
of a thought (movement), as it would be in the case of metaphor or representation. It
does not exhaust the capacity of the images to be affected by and to affect others.
Godard often cites Bresson on this point: if an image . . . will not transform upon
contact with other images and other images will have no power over it . . . it is not
utilizable in the system of cinematography (Histoire(s) 1B, but also Passion,
JLG/JLG).20 More receptive to contact, even more fertile after Godards intervention
(transfiguration does not give a new image; it maintains images in contact), the new
sequence for the sake of economy, let us call it Godards miniature gives birth to
an open series of movements: expressions of the changes that transfigure relations in
the whole.
In one direction, toward a cinematic past, the hystericized images of the children
in flight activate the cinemas own memory, assemble in virtual montage with the
countless images stored in the archive: columns of refugees fleeing a menace that
arrives from the sky, in real and imaginary, historical and actual wars filmed since
the beginning of the history of the cinema, or perhaps of world history, as the
precisely this difference is blurred in our collective consciousness by the cinema..
In another direction, toward the future, projecting images still to arrive when The
Birds and Godards little film are made, but since then played ad nauseam
exhausted, emptied of their force on our television screen: terrified New Yorkers
feeling from an enormous cloud of dust descending on the city, swallowing
everything in its path, advancing like a tsunami with a terrifying speed.

20

See also Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, Ibid., 10. My translation of the text as read
by Godard in Histoire(s) 1B.

10

Projections
The cinema, as we know, not only screens but also projects. It screens images that
themselves project, essentially two distinct realities: what cannot be filmed and what
the cinema looks at but cannot see.
With respect to the first, what cannot be filmed is the purely cinematic, the pure
film effect. This includes the sense of montage, the third element of Godards
celebrated formula: 1+1 = 3, the coupling that appears in neither of its elements.21
Montage, mon beau souci, montage my beautiful concern, we read in texts,
interviews, and on the screen of Histoire(s). But what could be the care of the one
who is only a witness, a facilitator of the form? Not the fabrication of sense. As we
said with regard to the miniature and I will stay with this one example as space does
not permit to introduce others from the thousands of possibilities offered by the later
work the re-vision / perversion of Hitchcock is not in the direction of metaphor,
allegory, nor in support of another interpretation of (the meaning of) the film. The
miniature does not say: The Birds projects not desire (the mothers for Mitch, his for
Melanie, Melanies for Mitch . . .) but war. Instead, it transports Hitchcocks images
to another plane, outside the field of interpretation and commentary; indeed, it itself
constructs such a plane, is the creation of a possible space where the imaginary and
the real show their fraternity, without surrendering their distance (difference).
Where the truth of one is neither subordinated to nor superordinates the truth of the
other (Equality and fraternity, between the real and fiction [Histoire(s), 3B]).
So what sense is born of the fraternity of a hystericized imaginary (the birds
attack) and the archives (of a war plane)? Not yet another vision of war so
successfully fictioned, imagined, and passively documented in and by the medium
since the beginning. Whether fictional or real, war is always material, whereas the unfilmable of the miniature is immaterial sense (in another sense of this word), an affect
that can only be projected: menace (just as Hitchcocks masterly mise en scne of the
birds gathering in the schoolyard projects a temporality, imminence). Born of the
coupling of the two distant realities, from the fraternity of killer birds and war plane,
each operating on a different plane and maintaining their distance, is the menace of a
21

Documents, op. cit., 199.

11

catastrophe that arrives from the sky, from the dimension of the unforeseeable, and
instantaneously changes not the world, but as Stockhausen said so scandalously of
9/11, consciousness. In the film, the consciousness of birds. In the instant of
recognition, which as always is delayed, an army of feathered weapons.
As it happens, the cinema and catastrophe share an anachronic dimension, a
certain productive belatedness that is structural, which may explain their affinity.
One shoots today and projects tomorrow, says Godard of the cinema, whereas the
disaster, and this is Blanchots lesson, never takes place, is always already past.22
The traces of the one and of the other both become visible a posteriori, after the
passage of another event. Full scale war in The Birds; the intervention in the dark
room, in the case of the cinema. The interval that separates the post-catastrophic
present from the past will not be bridged or breached, just as the gap in time dividing
the registration of the passing of the present and its projection as images will not be
closed, as long as the image is by and of the cinema.
Visibility, appearance in the world in the phenomenological sense of the term, is
an after-effect in both cases, a posthumous re-appropriation. This is precisely the
manner in which Godards little film transfigures, from a distance and long after The
Birds is released in 1964, a crucial and very precise mise en scne, not included in the
miniature: three quick shots in rapid succession a gull in flight, the crash into
Melanies forehead, a gull flying away which give the first air-born attack by a
solitary gull that draws Melanies blood. To be sure, this short sequence, initially a
freak incident, quickly forgotten, is already transfigured in the course of The Birds,
whose narrative retrospectively recuperates it as the precise record of the invisible,
the first sign (writing) of the disaster whose arrival remains unseen. But Godards
little film will transfigure this transfigured image: arriving from the future, it infects
its pure timeless description of menace, which is at once imminent and already past,
infects it with the fraternity of the birds and the plane, that is, the fraternity of the
imaginary and history, of the cinema of Hollywood and the archives of history. This
secondary transfiguration, which inscribes Hitchcocks imaginary in the time of
22

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Anne Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1986, 1.

12

history, turns the face of the latter toward the future, transforming it to a Cassandra
face, a projective surface of the future.
The other reality concerns what the cinema does not see: Signs among us. But
Godards miniature is also cinema. It projects but does not see that The Birds projects
images of a future yet to come as memory. The Memory of a Future says the title of a
film by Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon.23 It traces visions (images) of a war yet to
come inscribed in the photographs taken (registered as memory) by Denise Bellon
years before the war. Now such a schism of time, as we learned from Barthes, is
structural to photography.24 But the cinema is a projective apparatus. It registers first
and projects later. One operation is separated from the other by an interval (creative
interval, says Deleuze) in a relation of repetition, a posteriori re-appropriation. The
projector does not hide what the objectif, the lens of the camera passively registers
but does not see. Cinematographic projection is machinal is a machinism, as
Deleuze says of the assemblage of movement-images that constitute the material
universe.25 Constitutive of the apparatus cinema, it is the dispositive par excellence of
the signs among us, or what Benjamin calls the secret historical index inscribed
on the interior of images. If they accede to legibility only at a particular time,26 it is
because they are missives from the past to a future, or better still, project the
memories of a future yet to come.
Such is the nature of the cinematic apparatus that this projection itself can be
archived (filmed). Godards monumental Histoire(s) entails the production of
precisely such an archive. In the case of The Birds, but also of Godards own little
film, the task falls on a third filmmaker. With or without thinking with Godard, it is
the found footage filmmaker Johan Grimonprez who in Double Take27 develops this
secret virtual correspondence, between The Birds, Godards little film, and a future
23

Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon, Le souvenir dun avenir, 2001.

For a discussion on the temporal dimension of photography in Barthess Camera Lucida, see my
Lessons to Live, forthcoming in Deleuze Studies, 2009.
25
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, Movement-Image, op. cit., 59.
26
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1999, 462.
27
The project in progress was presented by Johan Grimonprez in the Confrences - dbats rencontres
series at the Centre Pompidou, June 4, 2007.
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/0/8F8E01C1A1EF09CCC12572AA0032E572?O
penDocument&sessionM=2.10&L=1
24

13

yet to come. His own three-shot montage from The Birds shows with great precision
that the images of 9/11 had been announced, were shown by Hollywood: from the
close up of a dreamy Melanie crossing the bay (1), he cuts away to a slow panning
shot of a jet liner in a distance, moving from left to right in the frame (2). Just before
the plane would hit the tower, in view at the right hand corner of the frame,
Grimonprez cuts back to another close-up of Melanie (3), in the very instant that the
sea gull crashes into her forehead: entering the frame from left to right, the birds
flight seamlessly completes that of the jet liner in the previous image. The next frame
(4) is not of the explosion, whose images will be recalled, projected by this montage;
it is rather a visual echo of Blanchots disaster: it shows from behind the behind of a
very ordinary bird as it unceremoniously perhaps indifferently would be a more
precise word flies away from the camera.
But to return to Godard, whose thesis is confirmed by both Marker and
Grimonprez but finds a systematic demonstration only in Histoire(s): if cinema is the
prophet of the future, it is because under a certain form of the visible thought is
(once again) a sort of anamnesis, an act of memory. Not the form of memory
(Gedchtnis) that is predicated on an archive, actual or virtual, Bergsonian or
Platonic, which is then searched for a lost item, for a matching recollection, or a
memory forgotten. It corresponds rather with movement, with the movements that
characterize the form of memory for which English does not have a precise word:
ressouvenir in French, Erinnerung in German, both of which preserve the memory of
an act of repetition. A memory image surges up from the past and, just like the
disaster, arrives from nowhere. This memory, however, does not imitate human
recollection: the memory of the image is not of the world or the word but of other
images. This is why under a certain form of the visible thought will exceed both
language and the concept. It only moves toward language (chemine vers la
parole). However, in the case of Godard but not for example of Farockis film
essays or Forgacss found footage cinema especially in the case of Godard, this
thought is indissociable from an extraordinary aesthetic dimension, which is not the
property or force of the image as such, the image qua image, but the singular force of
Godards cinema: Yes, the image is happiness . . . and all its power can express itself

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only by appealing to it. ( Oui, l'image est bonheur . . . et toute la puissance de

l'image ne peut s'exprimer qu'en lui faisant appel). The multiple affects it liberates, or
to borrow another concept of Deleuze, the percepts it creates, are new every time,
singular every time.
A field of such percepts, Godards cinema that will frustrate and escape writing
every time whether it hopes to speak for it, represent it, or only tries to engage it.
_______________
Works by Godard cited in the text:
Histoire(s) du cinma, DVD version, Gaumont, 2007.
Histoire(s) du cinma, book version, Paris: Gallimard, 1998
Allemagne Neuf Zro, 1991
Forever Mozart, 1996
Eloge de lamour, 2001
Passion, 1982
Scnario du film Passion, 1982
Notre Musique, 2004
Documents, Paris: Editions Centre Pompidou, 2006
Godard par Godard, tome 1, 1950-1984, tome 2, 1984-1998, Paris: Cahiers du
cinma 1998

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