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Abstract
This paper takes issue with the idea recently promulgated by film-philosophers that the relationship between philosophy and film is untroubled by the encounter between reason and art. To do this I consider how in Je vous salue, Marie Jean-Luc Godard uses allegory, cinematic automatism and montage not to provide rational arguments but to raise questions about the legacy of the Christian aesthetics for contemporary cinema.
Notes
Thanks to Lone Bertelsen, Mick Carter, Robert Sinnerbrink, Moira Gatens and Lisabeth During for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project scheme (DP1092889) supported the author's research for this essay. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the ARC.
1 Between the professor's explanation and the students’ demonstration of its axioms, memory is exchanged for vision. Godard here creates an identity between the memory of the intelligent designer and the image in film.
2 “Philosophy Bites: Top Philosophers Interviewed on Bite-Sized Topics,” Sunday 3 Feb. 2008, available <http://www.philosophybites.libsyn.com/category/Stephen%20Mulhall>. See also Stephen Mullhall, On Film, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), “Introduction” 3–11; and chapter 5: “Film as Philosophy: The Priority of the Particular” 129–55.
3 My discussion here refers to the podcast interview.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Athlone, 1989) 171.
7 Ibid.
8 Writing on the occasion of François Truffaut's Quatre cents coups being nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes, Godard encapsulated these very yearnings:
In attacking over the last 5 years in these columns the false technique of Giles Grangier, Ralph Habib, Yves Allégret, Claude Autant-Lara, Pierre Chenal, [the list goes on and on] … what we were getting at was simply this: your camera movements are ugly because your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless, in a word, you don’t know how to create cinema because you no longer even know what it is … … Each time we see your films we find them so bad, so far aesthetically and morally from what we had hoped, that we are almost ashamed of our love for the cinema. We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them everyday, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent, in other words, things as they are … (In Godard on Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1986) 146–47) | |||||
9 Cinema 2 173.
10 See also Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993). By virtue of the structure of analogy between the professor's discourse and the students’ demonstration, chance becomes blindness. Intelligence (memory in the verbal account and vision in its performative counterpart) intervenes into the random operations of nature as chance and overrides the blindness of the mechanical apparatus. For Pascal's blindness shows us the randomness that is embedded in the mechanical. The behaviour of the machine may be repetitious and always in the order of the same but it does not discriminate what it operates on.
11 “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13 (1972) 7.
12 Ibid.
13 The World Viewed, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974) 23.
14 “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in What is Cinema?, vol. I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967) 13.
15 “Bicycle Thief” in What is Cinema?, vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1971) 52.
16 Inez Hedges: “the celluloid, even though it passes in front of the aperture of the lens, though it receives an inscription (an impregnation) by the opening of the camera (which is a body), still communicates an unmediated image” (“Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary: Cinema's “‘Virgin Birth’” in Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film, eds. Maryel Locke and Charles Warren (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993) 64).
17 Ibid. 62.
18 Ibid.
19 “Montage, mon beau souci,” Cahiers du cinéma 65 (1945) 30–31. The essay was republished in English as “Montage my Fine Care” in Godard on Godard.
20 “Montage my Fine Care” 39.
21 Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” in What is Cinema? 24. The latter occupied themselves with “everything that the representation on the screen adds to the object represented” – on the one hand, the plastics of the image (“the style of the sets, of the make-up, and up to a point, even the performance, … the lighting and finally, the framing of the shot which gives us its composition”) and on the other, montage, which he understands in this essay as “simply the ordering of images in time” and within which he distinguishes four kinds: the invisible montage of American cinema, parallel montage, accelerated montage and montage by attraction (“Evolution” 24–25).
22 Ibid. 29.
23 Ibid. 26.
24 Ibid. 29.
25 Ibid. 32.
26 Ibid. 34.
27 Ibid. 33.
28 Ibid. 36.
29 Ibid. 26.
30 Ibid. 35.
31 Ibid.
32 In “The Photographic Message” in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977) 30, Roland Barthes hypothesises that the political connotations of the photographic image are generally entrusted to its accompanying text, that the same photograph can yield opposed political readings and that denotation in and of itself does not have the power to affect political opinion.
33 Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image” 14. Similarly, Barthes argues that the photographic image appears as a message without a code, a denoted message, the analogon itself and that even while it has a code, the connoted or coded message operates as if it were independent of it. For Barthes this structural paradox of the photographic image is also an ethical paradox: “when one wants to be ‘neutral’, ‘objective’, one strives to copy reality meticulously, as though the analogical were a factor of resistance against the investment of values” (“Photographic Message” 19–20).
34 Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image” 14.
35 Ibid. 13.
36 Ibid. 15.
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