Haunted by Godard

Jean-Luc Godard was haunted by cinema. In his early films, he grappled with genres that had long possessed his thinking, as in the romantic melodrama Contempt (Le Mépris, France/Italy, 1963), where ancient literature and a venerable filmmaker represent the tenacious shades of traditional narrative whose confines he was eager to escape. The haunting takes a theological form in Hail Mary (Je vous salut, Marie, France/Switzerland/UK, 1985), where engagements with the soul and the divine manifest his quasi-spiritual faith in painterly and cinematic images. And in Histoire(s) du cinema (France/Switzerland, 1989–99) he conjures up cinema’s ghostly lineage by means of images translated from the crisp materiality of film to the ectoplasmic pliancy of video. These three masterpieces support my proposition that hauntology is an admirable tool for illuminating Godard’s body of work. As posited by Jacques Derrida, hauntology displaces ontology, figuring the specter as an unfathomable intruder that is, in the words of philosopher Colin Davis, “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive,” a state resembling cinema’s dual nature, both immanently present and physically unreachable (Davis 2005, 373). Another sense of the term, developed in psychoanalytic theory, emphasizes the phantom, the metaphorical presence of what Davis describes as “a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light,” which is pertinent to Godard’s fear of an “end of cinema” wrought by capitalist exploitation and political cowardice (Davis 2005, 373). Speculating along similar lines, Fredric Jameson has posited “spectrality” as an awareness “that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be [and] that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity,” another concept applicable to Godard’s anxieties about cinema’s convoluted past, living present, and threatened future (Jameson 1993, 39). In its revolutionary reworking of film history, Godard’s project exemplifies Derrida’s idea of “an interpretation that transforms what it interprets” (Derrida 2006, 87).

A major reference point for Derrida’s hauntology is Hamlet’s complaint that “time is out of joint” (Shakespeare 2012, I:5). It is through temporal displacement, philosopher Liam Sprod contends, that “the past invades, or haunts, the present with its return and in this disjuncture makes possible a new aesthetic that is hauntology,” marked by “a return of the ideas, images and ideals of a past age, which now grate and creak against the joints of the present” (Sprod 2012). This suggests an interesting entryway to Godard’s filmography, beginning with its earliest titles; these are very different from the pictures he made in later years, but although they are narrative movies with relatively straightforward structures, they offer clear signs that he was already haunted by film history, stalked by the spirits of traditional genres that he set about deconstructing and reconfiguring in what could almost have been a systematically charted program. Breathless (À Bout de souffle, France, 1960) reshapes the romantic melodrama; A Woman Is a Woman (Une Femme est une femme, France/Italy, 1961) does the same with the musical comedy; My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, France, 1962) takes on urban docudrama; Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier, France, 1963) is a secret-agent story, Les Carabiniers (France/Italy, 1963) a war picture, Bande á parte (Band of Outsiders, France, 1964) a gangster film, Alphaville (Alphaville: Une Étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, France/Italy, 1965) a science-fiction fantasy, Pierrot le fou (France/Italy, 1965) a lovers-on-the-run adventure, and Weekend (France/Italy, 1967) a road movie, while Masculin féminin (Masculine Feminine, France/Sweden, 1966) and La Chinoise (La Chinoise, ou plutôt á la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire, France, 1967) give absurdist twists to the youth-market trend that swept through cinema in the 1960s era. And so on. In each case Godard invokes, materializes, and perhaps exorcizes a particular set of spirits from cinema’s past. The success of the exorcism is signaled by his willingness and ability to cease operations along these lines at the end of the 1960s, making the break that brought about the esthetic radicalism of One + One (Sympathy for the Devil, UK, 1968) and Le Gai savoir (France/West Germany, 1969), then the political-esthetic radicalism of the Dziga-Vertov Group films, and then the decades-long avant-gardism of pretty much every work he created until The Image Book (Le Livre d’image, Switzerland/France, 2018) rounded off his career. Each film and video evinces a hyperreal present haunted by a visionary past, and while his palimpsests take many different forms, from the generic revisionism of the early years to the multifaceted tapestries of Histoire(s) du cinema and the three-dimensional kinetics of Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage, 2014), they always reveal shades of the rekindled past grating and creaking against joints of the inescapable present.

No early film better expresses Godard’s fascination with spirits of the departed than his sixth feature, Contempt, based on Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel Il disprezzo, known as A Ghost at Noon in its English translation. This was almost literally a haunted project, created only a few years after Godard’s mother died in a Swiss traffic accident, an event that appears to have made a bitter and long-lasting impression on the second-oldest of her four children, then in his middle twenties. I synopsized the film in a 2001 essay:

Contempt centers on Paul Javal, a French screenwriter…who agrees to rewrite the screenplay of an Italian film production based on The Odyssey in order to pay for the Rome apartment where he and his wife want to settle down. Paul is troubled by taking a motion-picture assignment, since he sees himself as a serious writer more attuned to high-flown theater than to lowbrow movies. His intellectual side is soothed by the idea of working with legendary German filmmaker Fritz Lang, played in Contempt by Lang himself, one of Godard’s longtime heroes. But he also has to work with Jerry Prokosch, a Hollywood producer who is less interested in Homeric poetry than in the naked women he gets to ogle when viewing the daily rushes. Jerry is instantly smitten with Paul’s wife, Camille, and flirts with her from their first moments together. When he invites the couple for a drink in his villa, Paul unhesitatingly agrees to let Camille ride in Jerry’s two-passenger roadster while he finds a taxi for the trip. Camille takes this as a sign of Paul’s decreasing commitment to their marriage – she gathers that he is indulging the producer’s lust as a way of currying his favor – and begins revealing her own anxieties and insecurities about their future.

The situation grows more complicated as it proceeds, especially when the threesome move to an exotic villa on Capri, where the Odyssey production is being filmed. Camille endures and even encourages Jerry’s continuing flirtation; Paul shows a casual romantic interest in Jerry’s attractive assistant; and Lang maintains a philosophical air while trying to keep his movie on a reasonably high plane despite Jerry’s interventions. At one point Paul places a loaded pistol into his pocket, clearly intended for use on Jerry and/or Camille if her growing contempt for him (hence the film’s title) erupts into a full-fledged refutation of their marriage. But fate intervenes before he can fire it, assuming that he could actually have brought himself to do so. Camille leaves Paul for a new life with Jerry; the producer’s luxurious Alfa-Romeo is crushed in a crash that kills him and Camille instantly; and Paul prepares for his departure from Capri as Lang films a sweeping seaside shot that concludes Contempt on a note of intricately blended lyricism, melancholy, and resignation (Sterritt 2005, 177-8).

Contempt contains a host of ghostly presences, many of them linked to practices of traditional narrative that Godard wrestled with as fiercely as Jacob wrestles with a God-sent adversary in the Book of Genesis, an incident wittily reprised by Godard in Passion (France/Switzerland, 1982), the story of a Godard-like filmmaker who can’t bring himself to tell a story. The most concrete of these presences is Lang, triply figured as an actor, a character, and an icon of classical cinematic practice whose days as an active director are now behind him. The most abstract of the presences is the spirit of Homeric epic, a template for narrative art of every subsequent millennium. Although the Lang of Germany and Hollywood never essayed an adaptation of Homer, the Lang of Contempt has taken on the challenge, as has his money-minded producer, who is evidently thinking of the profits racked up by Italy’s long string of Hercules peplums, which were still being cranked out when Contempt was released. Contempt itself has clear Homeric echoes, frequently mentioning The Odyssey, vividly depicting Greek statuary, draping Paul in a sheet resembling a toga, and building to a climax with a jolting deus ex machina twist. Although some critics have attacked the latter device as arbitrary and outmoded, it is utterly appropriate in a film that makes continual reference to ancient Greek culture and is profoundly rooted in ideas of fate, destiny, and the mysterious power of godlike figures. Godard does not show the smashup that kills Camille and Jerry, but he does show their corpses in its aftermath, and the tableau is silent and still, a scene of horror rendered paradoxically peaceful by the precision of Godard’s mise-en-scène, the gentle motions of Raoul Coutard’s camera, and the calming texture of Georges Delerue’s music. The deus who presides here is Thanatos, identified by psychoanalysis as the unconscious drive toward impassivity, stasis, and the death that obviates all sorrows and strivings. This god governs the climax and also haunts the denouement, where Godard and Lang are both shooting their final scenes. Lang’s camera is filming a sword-wielding actor and Godard’s camera films Lang’s camera with the same lateral movement, but then its motion carries beyond the ostensible subject of the shot, leaving behind the human figures and embracing the sunstruck waters of the sea as Lang’s assistant, played by Godard, calls out the film’s last word, “Silence,” recalling another line from Hamlet, the prince’s own last words: “The rest is silence” (Shakespeare 2012, V:2).

Simultaneously filling the screen with plenitude and emptying it of detail, the sea here becomes a specter in one of Derrida’s most interesting senses, representing “what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects – on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see” (Derrida 2006, 153). Like the end of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (Canada/USA, 1967), the end of Contempt shows practically nothing and almost everything, rendering pictorial reality as both visually present and materially ungraspable. The sea presents, like Derrida’s specter in Davis’s words, “a deconstructive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate” (Davis 2005, 376). Established certainties are among Godard’s greatest adversaries, and one of his chief weapons against them is the dislocation of time. Contempt is one of cinema’s most striking architectural achievements, moving through a series of visually unique locations, and its ostensibly linear chronology is even more complex, most conspicuously on the three occasions when the narrative is surprisingly interrupted by flurries of flashback or flashforward shots that serve less to flesh out the narrative than to offer moments of rhythmic punctuation and poetic reflection. More broadly, Contempt educes a heroically vast time span encompassing the legacies of Homeric epic, the exigencies of classical cinema represented by the real and fictional Lang, and the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague in which Godard played a formative role.

Somewhat similar dynamics animate Hail Mary, a work haunted not by a small-g god of antiquity but by the capital-G God of Christianity, the religion in which Godard was raised; he has said that although he didn’t practice the Protestant religiosity of his family, he became “very interested” in certain areas of Roman Catholic thought, and a starting point for Hail Mary was his impulse to place “Catholic images and Protestant music” into contrapuntal dialogue. “I’m not a religious person,” he remarked, “but I’m a faithful person. I believe in images” (Shafto 2001). The chief temporal displacement in this film is the transposition of the biblical account of Mary and the Virgin Birth from the New Testament era to modernity, portraying Mary as a young Swiss woman who works in her father’s gas station, plays basketball in her spare time, receives the Annunciation when the angel Gabriel arrives by airplane, and has a taxi-driving boyfriend named Joseph who has not slept with her and is understandably nonplused when she tells him she is pregnant. Here again we find a hauntological esthetic, a spectral mingling of temporalities in which the world of the present and visitations from the past are impossible to disentangle. “There are several times of the specter,” Derrida writes. “It is a proper characteristic of the specter…that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future. For the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being” (Derrida 2006, 151). In the multidimensional Hail Mary the living past is embedded in the living present, and both point toward a living future when the film concludes with a seemingly unmotivated closeup of Mary’s mouth. At first the mouth is closed, distantly recalling the shape of a diagram drawn by a professor in an earlier scene, meant to illustrate his theory that earthly life could not have originated through random chemical reactions; the very spuriousness of this notion points away from ordinary logic and toward a conception of science haunted by the mysterious and the mystical. But in the film’s last seconds the mouth is open, recalling moments when Mary or another woman has widened her mouth in a gesture of astonishment and delight, the two emotions that constitute the film’s ultimately triumphant and fundamentally mystical essence. The cultural critic Michael Goddard describes mysticism as a set of practices that actualize a “prediscursive seeing and hearing,” by means of which “the ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirits’…can be conceived of as virtually inhering in the material world in the form of temporalities, or conversely the material world can be conceived of as existing in the spiritual or in God in the same way that it exists in time” (Goddard 2001, 54, 62) Hail Mary displaces not only discrete temporalities but the concept of temporality itself; as I have observed elsewhere, this is cinema that breaks the “link between man and the world,” in Gilles Deleuze’s words, confronting the viewer with “something unthinkable in thought” (Deleuze 1989, 169).¹ This resonates powerfully with Davis’s discussion of the hauntological specter, whose “secret is a productive opening of meaning rather than a determinate content to be uncovered,” much as the secret of the ghost for Derrida is “not a puzzle to be solved” but rather “the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future….The ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought” (Davis 2005, 377-9). Like established certainties, determinate contents and boundaries of thought are foes Godard never tired of opposing.

Godard’s magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinema, is his most haunted and hauntological work; it doesn’t simply allude to the cinematic history that preoccupied his imagination, it resurrects and reconfigures that history through a plethora of favored shots, sequences, and scenes that together constitute a chronologically displaced history of film as well as a stream-of-consciousness record of Godard’s drastically intuitive thinking processes. It also demonstrates his view of video possibilities not yet explored; in my 1994 interview with him, he said that “television discovers nothing, even though it could, it should. I think I'm the only one interested in film and video this way – to sometimes make a show, but other times an experimentation” (Sterritt 1998, 177). Histoire(s) du cinema shows his double identity as modernist and postmodernist in unfiltered form. In his discussion of Godard’s idiosyncratic Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, critic J. Hoberman notes that the Godard of Histoire(s) du cinema is “a quintessential twentieth-century high modernist – the author of an ongoing…project comparable in ambition to In Search of Lost Time or The Cantos, composed in an idiolect that, as with Joyce or Picasso or Gertrude Stein, effectively reinvented a medium.” Yet at the same time, “high modernist is only one way to characterize Godard. As the first filmmaker to fully recognize not only that the classic period of movies was over but also that preexisting movies were a text that he was free to quote, rework and otherwise pillage, he may also be considered cinema’s first postmodernist and, despite his disclaimers, a model for postmodernists in other disciplines” (Hoberman 2015). The film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon captures the flavor of the massive Histoire(s) du cinema collage when he states that “all is simultaneous, endlessly overlapping, one image and another swirling together to create a hybrid construct which deconstructs…original images and adds something new to them. All is context, history, archival research, and speculation here…. Godard is immersed in his images, which become phantoms haunting our combinatory consciousness” (Dixon 1997, 183; emphasis in original).

The artifacts that Hoberman calls “preexisting movies” are more than that, however; they are what Derrida calls revenants, the specters hovering ambiguously between a living past and a living future. The same goes for the work’s sophisticated sonic elements, which comprise music, ranging from Gustav Mahler and Giacomo Puccini to Leonard Cohen and Rita Hayworth, and “spoken collages,” in which Godard’s treatment of the human voice as a musical instrument calls attention to “accent, intonation, diction, vocal color, and…the sound of human breath,” to borrow Michael Witt’s catalogue of ingredients (Witt 2013, 205). The film theorist Céline Scemama has written that by “returning to what has been forgotten, Histoire(s) du cinema…does not raise the dead,” but while that may be literally true, Giles Fielke and Ivan Cerecina have responded that Godard’s exorbitant montage techniques give the work a “necromantic prescience by elaborating the historical conditions for the memory of cinema” (Fielke and Cerecina 2022).² In various ways, they continue, it “points to the fact of the supposition of death in the cinema, proposing instead that an expansion of the narrative tradition can take place through the new [medium] of video, a moment where the ‘undead’ nature of the technology is revealed” (Davis 2005, 379).

The idea of cinematic necromancy aptly captures Godard’s implicit vision of a cinema forever dying and being reborn, like the supranatural figures at the core of religious belief systems through the ages, and being repeatedly transformed and refashioned in this endlessly cyclical process. He proclaimed the end or death of cinema multiple times in the course of his career; within specific works, the closing title of Weekend proffers the pithiest statement of the theme and Histoire(s) du cinema delivers the most extensive elaboration, positing no fewer than five such deaths, which Daniel Morgan lists as “the demise of silent cinema; the failure of cinema to record or show the Holocaust; the end of the studio system in the 1950s; the May’68 call for the end of bourgeois cinema; and, from the 1970s on, the crisis stemming from newer media technologies (Morgan 2013, 203).”³ Taken together, Godard’s numerous alarums and perturbations bespeak a concern that the history of cinema harbors the phantoms postulated by psychoanalytical hauntology, dead forebears nested in the living ego, bringing corruption and decay that the apparatuses of show business must keep deeply hidden lest the driving powers of blind commercialism and sociopolitical ignorance come shamefully to light. Fears about cinema’s dark substructures have been a motivating force throughout Godard’s career, from the genre revisions of the 1960s through the tantalizing puzzles and audacious perplexities of the 2000s, but he was keenly aware that however often an end of cinema seemed imminent, none of its deaths, demises, and dissolutions have been fatal, as the existence of Histoire(s) du cinema, and a long list of subsequent Godard works, amply proves. When he announces the death of cinema, Morgan observes, “he generally does so within a film…and with the full intention of making more films.” Nor does he seem to want the announcements to be taken all that literally. “The death of cinema?” he remarked in 1984. “For me, I say, not at all…. That idea has always existed in French cinema…. You find artists in 1910 who say that the cinema is in crisis (Godard 1984–1985; quoted in Morgan 2013, 204).”

Histoire(s) du cinema is not an obituary, then, but a history and a story, as its title plainly indicates. In many contexts the term “history” connotes some sort of linear chronology, but Godard obviously has the other meaning of histoire clearly in mind, and stories need rules of straight-ahead recitation less than histories do; asked if a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, Godard famously replied, “Yes, but not necessarily in that order (Tynan 1966, 24).” This stipulation applies many times over to Histoire(s) du cinema, which displaces, dislocates, and discombobulates linear time with a freewheeling abandon that unmistakably evokes the elusive temporality of the hauntological specter. Derrida writes:

What is the time and what is the history of a specter? Is there a present of the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a present-future, between a “real time” and a “deferred time”?

If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present actuality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, nonpresence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in general, and so forth. There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself. Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the specter of the past and the specter of the future, of the past present and the future present, one must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other (Derrida 2006, 72).

A crucial factor in the spectrality effect of Histoire(s) du cinema is its conversion of a teeming succession of film images into a teeming flow of video images. This transfiguration has two crucial outcomes: it deemphasizes the plastic physicality of the film stock on which most of the motion-picture materials were photographed, and it places clips from narrative movies onto the same ontological plane as the television images, the reproduced paintings, photographs, and advertisements, and (less directly) the spoken narration and musical accompaniments that are coequal parts of the mix. This connects Histoire(s) du cinema with a pair of well-established artistic practices. One is sampling, which has its own cultural history in diverse forms including musique concrète, musical instruments such as the Chamberlin and Mellotron, and the digital borrowings that became a major force in popular music in the 1970s; the other is appropriation, a timeless modus operandi in art that will surely survive the largely ill-informed attacks often leveled at it nowadays. The hauntological esthetic, according to Sprod, profits from “the anachronisms of…samples and appropriations, mainly through the maintenance of the distance from their origin and the decay that occupies that distance: as crackles and scratches, or faded colors and images that become almost literally ghostly. Instead of mere repetition, this distance provides a sense of loss and mourning, making the present the future of that past, and in turn providing the possibility of another future for the present….” (Sprod 2012) A sense of loss and mourning is indeed detectable in the visual content, first-person narration, and overall tone of Histoire(s) du cinema, as it is in less ambitious displays of aging footage compiled by archivists and preservationists, such as Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (Lyrisch nitraat, Netherlands, 1991) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (USA, 2002). These and similar instances of commingled deterioration and preservation evoke the lesson that Jameson finds in spectrality: a recognition that what we take as the dense and solid present is less self-evident and self-sufficient than we would like to think it is.

Yet while it is never difficult to find overtones of loss, mourning, decay, and ghostliness in Histoire(s) du cinema and other Godard projects, the exuberance, multiplicity, and superabundance of the works lead in exactly the opposite direction; even as his turn to video implies that the death of film may be at hand, the vibrancy and vigor of the funeral ceremony show that the ghosts of cinema have a thrilling life of their own, different in form and structure from their more tangible progenitors but no less robust and exciting in their impact. Histoire(s) du cinema is a festival of welcome revenants and lively ghosts, and it is also a farsighted exploration of how video expression might evolve in time to come. The logic of the ghost, Derrida wrote, “points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic,” transcending the limits of actuality and effectivity in ways exemplified by “the fantastic, ghostly, ‘synthetic,’ ‘prosthetic,’ virtual happenings in the scientific domain and therefore the domain of the techno-media and therefore the public or political domain (Derrida 2006, 104).” The intricate logic of Histoire(s) du cinema is dialogical rather than dialectical, rhizomatic rather than binary, and all of Derrida’s descriptors for developments in scientific, public, and techno-media territories – fantastic, synthetic, virtual, ghostly – readily apply to it. A hauntological account of Godard’s achievement in choosing, assembling, interweaving, and integrating multitudinous components must reserve a place of honor for the word “spirit,” in the sense that Derrida intends when the “spirit of Marxism” is under discussion: “spirits in the plural and in the sense of specters, of untimely specters that one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back.” This calls for a selectivity that will “guide and hierarchize” the spirits that are chosen, and will also “exclude [and] even annihilate, by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others,” thereby engendering “new ghosts…by choosing already among the ghosts, its own from among its own…. (Derrida 2006, 136; emphasis in original)” Godard’s towering summa is both a historiography and a metahistoriography that will be reborn and renewed as other cineastes follow in its path. So in the Godardian spirit of dislocated time, I close by returning to my starting point: Godard was haunted by cinema; cinema remains haunted by Godard; and cinephiles are haunted by them both.

This essay was given as a keynote address in the Second International Philosophy and Film Conference presented by the Philosophical Society of Macedonia in May 2023. Thanks to Viktor Jovanoski for the invitation and for skillfully facilitating my participation.

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Notes on contributors

David Sterritt

David Sterritt, Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, is author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge University Press) and editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi). He has lectured on Godard at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, the Harvard University Film Archive, and elsewhere, and his writing on Godard has appeared in Cineaste, Cinema Scope, Film-Philosophy, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, and numerous edited collections and publications.

Notes

1 See also Sterritt, “Schizoanalyzing Souls,” 384.

2 See also Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinema de Jean-Luc Godard, 221, cited by Fielke and Cerecina (their translation).

3 Alifeketi Brown also gives a useful summary of turning points that Godard laments: “the abandonment of the creative and poetic possibilities posed by cinematic imagery of the silent era; the collapse of an American studio system of mass-production which indirectly fostered a range of visionary artists and popularized film as an art form; the failure of poetic, artistic and socially-engaged cinema to counteract the fascistic and capitalistic roles of cinema in history; and how the Hollywood model of Steven Spielberg and spectacle came to dominate internationally, curbing the survival and development of other models of film production and development.” Brown, “Histoire(s) du cinema.”