Studies in European Cinema

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Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks

by Rick Warner, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2018, 288 pp., US
$34.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8101-3737-0

William Brown

To cite this article: William Brown (2022): Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks,
Studies in European Cinema, DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073778

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2022.2073778

Published online: 06 May 2022.

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STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA

BOOK REVIEW

Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks, by Rick Warner, Evanston,
Northwestern University Press, 2018, 288 pp., US$34.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8101-
3737-0

While focusing primarily on Godard, Rick Warner’s excellent Godard and the Essay Film: A
Form That Thinks is a valuable addition to discussions concerning the essay-film more
generally. In particular, Warner seeks to expand our understanding of the essay-film in
order to include works that might traditionally be categorised as ‘fiction’, while also identify­
ing a neat distinction between what we might call ‘essay-films proper’ and films that are
essayistic, or which ‘do essaying,’ with the latter being for Warner perhaps the essence of the
former. That is, all essay-films essay but not all films that essay have until now been
considered essay-films – a position that Warner cogently invites his readers to reconsider.
Warner sets the scene in his introduction, taking the reader through the usual points of
reference in relation to the essay-film (the writings of Michel de Montaigne; the scholarship of
Timothy Corrigan and Laura Rascaroli; the films of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Agnès
Varda, and of course JLG, among others), notably identifying the latter’s ‘essayistic spirit’ (p.
6), as well as the ‘errant improvisation’ that accompanies the form from Montaigne onwards
(p. 7). Warner then highlights the elements of self-portraiture, the critical poetics of citation,
the impulse towards dialogue and the notion of the essayist as narrator in Montaigne, before
suggesting that these are all present in Godard, including from his early work onwards.
Finally, Warner outlines the idea that essay-films involve active spectators, who are not
supposed to be convinced of any argument, specifically, but who in fact are urged to be
cautious in their viewing ‘even as . . . [essay-films] invite us into their unruly [and seductive]
enquiries’ (p. 18).
In the first chapter, Warner explores Godard’s own claims to be both an essayist and a
novelist, suggesting that ‘[h]is self-definition conveys not a lack of clarity so much as a refusal
to endorse generic norms established in advance’ (pp. 22–23), hence his tendency to be
essayistic even when not making essay-films. Warner considers how the early short films by
Varda were equivalent to the ‘improvised “sketch”’ (p. 28) and that work by Marker and Alain
Resnais ‘functions less as a thesis that has been worked out in advance than as a search for a
means to mount a reflection with the resources at its disposal’ (p. 29). In this way, essay-films
are ‘acutely self-questioning’ (p. 31) and have ‘the feel of ideas and relation still being tried,
the sense of a form being sought’ (p. 32). In this way, numerous techniques come into essay-
films, including ‘[r]eflexivity, direct address, stylistic and generic hybridity, epistolarity,
incompletion’ (p. 33). Turning to (Jacques Rivette’s analysis of) Robert Rossellini’s Viaggio
in Italia/Journey to Italy (Italy/France, 1954), Warner highlights the central role of ‘accident
and improvisation’ in the film (p. 35), before excitingly suggesting that ‘much of modern
cinema is functionally essayistic’ (p. 37). Warner then demonstrates how Le Mépris (France/
Italy, 1963) enacts this via an illuminating analysis of the long central sequence set in the
apartment of Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille (Brigitte Bardot), where JLG prefers ‘dis­
course’ (and experimenting with different shot/countershot techniques) to ‘course’ (pushing
the narrative forward). The chapter then ends with a detailed analysis of 2 ou 3 choses que je
sais d’elle/Two or Three Things I Know About Her (France, 1967), looking especially at how
Godard’s whispered voiceover interrogates the film, and how the film breaks down the
2 BOOK REVIEW

‘hierarchy that distinguishes readily between the significant and insignificant’ (p. 53), giving
‘micro-analytic attention’ (p. 56) to details – like the swirl of froth in an Espresso cup – that
many other films might overlook. Formally, Godard continually tries to ‘repurpose even the
most familiar and abused forms of mainstream cinema,’ mixing techniques typically assigned
to documentary and fiction, rendering him what Warner calls a ‘possibilist’ – or someone
investigating the possibilities of cinema.
Godard is ‘mischievous’ in his citational practice, which is the focus of the second chapter,
with Warner explaining that ‘[t]o be an essayist is to reshape and sometimes to subvert the
very “authorities” to which one turns’ (p. 66). For JLG (and others), citations are not
intertextual but also ‘intensely textural in the forms and relations they weave’ (p. 69), with
citation, from citare, meaning to call forward, fostering ‘the attempted dialogical bond
between filmmaker and viewer that lies at the heart of essayistic cinema’ (p. 70). Warner
impressively demonstrates how literary references deepen our understanding of the relation­
ship between Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia (Jean Seberg) in A bout de souffle/
Breathless (France, 1959) (p. 75), while the scene of Nana (Anna Karina) watching Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (Falconetti) in Vivre sa vie/My Life to Live (France, 1962)
‘unsettles the limit between fictional worlds’ (p. 76). As such, ‘the citations are not mere
references but sensory events to be closely beheld for their values onscreen’ (p. 79).
Warner then provides an enlightening account of the discrepancies between Godard and
Guy Debord, highlighting the latter’s overt didacticism and iconoclasm, which traits come
through also in the former’s films with the Dziga Vertov Group. From here, Warner segues
into Godard’s burgeoning collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville, and the introduction not
just of self-reflexivity but also autocritique into his work, especially via the ‘wipes, patchy
dissolves, [and] multi-layered superimpositions’ of the video mixer, which are ‘texturally
distinct from film editing’ (p. 88), involving a logic, or method, of AND that invokes the ‘yes
and’ logic of stage improvisation (although Warner does not make this link). Godard also at
this point begins to include viewers of his own images within his films, while video makes
possible his monumental Histoire(s) du Cinéma (France, 1989–1998), a text that via montage
rethinks cinema especially in light of the Holocaust – ‘the site of cinema’s most unforgivable
failure’ (p. 97). While montage can link distant phenomena, then it also has the potential to
lead to such genocidal acts, and it is for this reason that ‘the viewer must become a skilled
montagist also,’ bringing their own critical thought to bear on what they see (p. 101). Godard
furthermore stages dialogue through the couple, or what Warner after Daniel Morgan refers
to as ‘twoness’ (p. 105). Such ‘twoness’ allows Godard ‘to keep in check, and if possible shed,
one’s narcissism’ (p. 109).
The third chapter explores the concept of the (heterosexual) couple in further detail, while
also considering gesture as a key component of essay-filmmaking. For, gesture is the product
of ‘forces extending between the domestic and public spheres’ (p. 118), and as such extends
beyond the self, while montage is itself a gesture that in essayistic mode is, after Vilém Flusser,
in search of others – hence the couple (p. 119). Love thus emerges as a focal concern and
aspiration for Godard, with philia/friendship being above eros, as JLG suggests in the Joseph-
Marie partnership of Je vous salue, Marie/Hail Mary (France/Switzerland/UK, 1985). This
(cine)philia is also seen in Godard and Miéville’s collaborations, Soft and Hard (France/UK,
1985) and The Old Place (France/USA, 2000), with ‘charitable’ attention to detail, the practice
of the image and montage as ‘constellation’ (exploding outwards to create new links) and
‘thinking with one’s hands’ (via montage) as guiding concepts in these and other works.
The self-portrait takes centre stage in the fourth chapter, with self-inscription being ‘a
vital component of . . . [Godard’s] ongoing research into the capabilities of his craft’ (p.
153). But these self-portraits are less narcissism and more attempts to ‘provoke and sustain
 STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA 3

a critical rapport with the spectator’ (p. 154), with Godard often obscuring himself onscreen
(as per Scénario du Film ‘Passion’, France/Switzerland, 1983) and remaining resolutely
private. Indeed, JLG/JLG (France, 1994) is, in the director’s own words, ‘an attempt to
see what cinema can do with me, not what I can do with it’ (p. 162). Godard thus emerges
as ‘a figure who repeatedly stakes his historical significance as an artist on his capacity to
strip away the myth of individual creative genius, clearing the ground for the collaborative
thought to which his essaying devotes itself’ (p. 172). Histoire(s) . . . emerges again as a key
text here, as Godard elides being an author and a spectator, thereby achieving ‘dual
perception’ (p. 178), while he and Farocki both employ ‘soft montage,’ simultaneously
involving two or more images/screens, and seeking ‘a sharpness of perception and a
sinuosity of thought that they aim to impart to us, while placing our habits of viewing
under strain’ (p. 191). Godard puts himself into his films in order not to assert but to
challenge ‘the imperious projection of the “I”’ (p. 193).
Warner concludes by looking at Godard’s 3D work, with Adieu au langage/Goodbye to
Language (Switzerland/France, 2014) acting as a summation of many preceding ideas,
including an emphasis on the couple, the presence of the filmmaker (and his dog), the
search for love and the state’s inhibition of twoness as it seeks to become one. The dog,
Roxy, in particular embodies ‘friendly love’ (p. 214), while also suggesting a (future) dog
world beyond the human, with the stereoscopic imagery conveying a move beyond twoness,
even, and towards an equally futural ‘third co-investigator’ (p. 221), as exemplified by the
baby’s cries that we hear over a final black screen that itself ‘obliges us to think through the
very limits of our not-yet-seeing’ (p. 220). Godard thus wants to help us to see, short-
circuiting ‘the machinery of narcissism, [and] suggesting how thought, vision, and feeling
with and for others can begin to break beyond it’ (p. 222).
In Notre Musique (France/Switzerland, 2004), Godard gives a lecture in which ‘a bombed-
out cityscape’ is revealed to be not Stalingrad, Beirut, Sarajevo or Hiroshima, but rather
Richmond, Virginia, 1865 (p. 185). Although Warner engages with this mention of the
American Civil War, he does not pursue how Godard’s work is interested in the role that
the so-called ‘colour line’ plays in not just his work but also in the creation and the shaping of
modernity as a whole. Indeed, numerous references to obscurity and darkness do not
translate into considerations of the epidermal, while the linking of the essayistic to improvi­
sation and to irreverent citational practices would suggest that the essay-film springs also
from jazz and hiphop, musical forms traditionally associated with Black culture. Godard’s
pursuit of twoness over narcissism cannot but also recall W.E.B. Du Bois’s (2008) notion of
‘double consciousness’ as being endemic to Blackness in a post-slavery world. That is, if the
essay-film is or seeks always to be ‘two’ (or three; or 2 + 1; or one plus one [plus one]), then
Blackness is always already so. In other words, there is a whiteness to the essay-film, and to
cinema more generally, that arguably appropriates Blackness, while also occulting that
appropriation, thereby affirming an antiblackness at work in the form (to continue to think
about this in musical terms, is the effort to prove that cinema can think not also an effort to
prove that cinema got soul – i.e. to find in cinema something produced by, expropriated from,
and then denied to Black culture?). That Warner’s Godard fixates on the Holocaust, together
with its infamous figure of the Muselmann (p. 187), as the tragedy of modernity, perhaps
overlooks Godard’s own understanding and ongoing consideration – contra the medium he
uses and in some senses beyond the essay-film form as defined here – of slavery and the
pillaging of Africa as prior holocausts that all too often pass now as unremarked and
unremarkable. If modernity is founded on these invisible holocausts, then we might reread
the European Holocaust not so much as the failure of modernity and a failure of the cinematic
enterprise, but rather as simply an extension of holocaustic logic. That is, the real tragedy is
4 BOOK REVIEW

not that cinema failed to avert ‘the’ Holocaust, but that holocaust is inseparable from cinema,
with ‘the’ Holocaust functioning as a terrible technology to occult holocaust more generally,
which in turn functions as a means to perpetuate holocaust across the colour line.
While I would not want to put this objection down as a mere quibble, I would all the same
say that, within the remit of its unaddressed (unthinking?) whiteness, Godard and the Essay
Film is a superb piece of work, reaffirming cinema as a (potentially) philosophical machine
that can lead us to think (that we have not yet begun thinking). All the same, if we can through
Godard ‘think’ metaphorical blackness and obscurity, then surely it is high time – and
ethically imperative – that we think about embodied Blackness and how it lies at the centre
of our cinematic world. If we do not think (about) Blackness in this way, then our thought
may not yet have achieved a quality worthy of the name.

Reference
Du Bois, W.E.B. 2008. The souls of black folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

William Brown
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Faculty of Arts, Department of Theatre and Film, The University of British Columbia,
6354 Crescent Road | Vancouver BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada
wjrcbrown@gmail.com
© 2022 William Brown
https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2022.2073778