Joachim Noller

 

Légende comme réalité.

Mimetic aspects in Jean-Luc Godard’s filmic oeuvre

 

Translation: Philip Marston    

                                                                                                                                                                  for Godard[1]

 

Just imagine, a film critic of (sorry!) middling quality or the editor of a TV magazine is given the task of making a thumbnail sketch of Jean-Luc Godard‘s film Notre musique (2003); he/she is asked to characterize the three parts of the film in a few words. There is the first part, known as Hell, with all its images of war, followed by the second part, Purgatory, with the scenes from Sarajevo and a series of conversations and speeches, centreing around a lecture by Godard himself (which might be entitled „on the nature of images”). And then finally comes Paradise, in which a female protagonist of the preceding Purgatory finds herself after her death – a natural landscape guarded by military personnel (albeit in a rather relaxed, almost playful atmosphere). Let us now imagine what a description according to the journalistic conventions might look like (the allusion to Dante‘s Divine Comedy would take a back seat): Hell, especially the war scenario, could be described in terms such as grimly realistic, harsh reality, while Purgatory with its conversations and speeches might be seen as the theoretical, philosophical component, not depicting reality but rather intellectual ideas of reality, reflecting or also – if we want to be critical – contradicting them; and finally Paradise, for which many commentators would be sure to think of the word „poetic” - poetic in the sense of far removed from the real world and thus on a plane at one remove from reality. If the strategy for explaining it is a modern one, i.e., one developed in the twentieth century, the everyday term „poetic“ would likely be replaced by the more intellectual-sounding „Utopian“, since whoever describes places „on the other side of” harsh reality is in the non-place of Utopia. Godard‘s Paradise enriches the iconography of Utopian imaginings.

So we might also say: what we have here is a mimetic process going on in the eye and the head of our imaginary observer as well as in the interpretation which then follows, according to which the film starts off with reality and then moves further and further away from it until we arrive at the suggested „real phenomenon” of U.S. Marines guarding Paradise and which might well - I trust I may be allowed the superlative – be thought to be the „most realistic” moment of the entire scenery. This is an interpretative path which attempts to follow the logic of mimetic conventions. The term realism is applied to a style of representation which corresponds to a certain image we have of reality, and this reception behaviour is not limited to the cinema: despite all the divergences between the two genres, we might even find comparable patterns of interpretation in music, credited per se with a far higher degree of abstraction than the cinema. If the title of a musical work contains terms like Hiroshima or Auschwitz, we speak of a high level of realism; a piece entitled „Love Song“, on the other hand, would be felt to be „poetic” with the added connotation of removed from reality, as if love songs had never been a part of reality too. There are obviously correspondences or at least relationships in the semantic reception, in the mimetic association of sounds and images here.

 

Godard puts the relationship between image and reality up for discussion, a discussion we would like to join in. What are the images of war in the Hell section of Notre musique actually reporting about the world? The conventional answer in our time normally runs something like this: such pictures shake us out of our lethargy, they encourage us to recognize evil and consequently to adopt a stance opposed to it. In the film essay The old place[2] (subtitled: „Small notes regarding the arts at fall of 20th century“) however, the purpose of such images is called into question: Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville point to the photography of William Haglund, who captured on film the horrors of the war in former Yugoslavia, thus bearing witness to crimes against humanity, and yet argue that this could not be sufficient legitimation for the enlargement and exhibition of the same photos – „on big canvases as if they were paintings“[3]. The elevation onto an aesthetic plane through the mere exhibiting of the images is being pilloried here. But is not Godard himself doing exactly the same thing? Are not very similar images being exhibited in a cineastic-artistic context, like paintings, on big canvases, in several of his films? Nevertheless, there is a difference in his art from modern shock-and-awe aesthetics, he distances himself from their direct appeal to our feelings, from their clear message, from the conventions of a politicized aesthetics developed in the twentieth century. Godard shows the photographic likeness of reality and simultaneously questions its value as evidence, its authority derived from showing the „real”. All and every pictoriality, every kind of illustration by images, is called into question (this is what is behind the invitation in Notre musique to activate our imagination by closing our eyes). The supposedly assured reference to the real world (the claim that this is what things are really like), of a style of depiction which only shows the surface of things, is rejected. And yet Godard is only applying ideas of so-called abstraction to filmic art which were already regarded as being classic in the visual arts, but have however, up to and including the present day, been misunderstood - sometimes as anti-mimetic. Abstraction does not mean turning away from reality, but revealing hitherto neglected layers of reality. It can be observed that Godard is primarily interested in levels of spiritual meaning here, in other words what he wants to show – by quasi bringing an x-ray to bear on the outward appearance of things – are mental states and thus, as it were, inner worlds. In the staged lecture which plays out in the middle of the Purgatory section of Notre musique, set in Sarajevo, he narrates a special story involving art in which the Madonna of Cambrai, also known as Notre-Dame de Grâce (Our Lady of Grace), an icon of uncertain provenance[4], is actually supposed to represent the visual form of Mary, Mother of Jesus. By the way, it is not the celebrated Cambrai Madonna, which has been preserved in good condition, superimposed at this point, but a representation of the Madonna in which the colours are already beginning to fade, so that the features of the face are hardly recognizable any more. The abstraction of the human figure and the possibility of embracing sacred realities seem to be exemplified in this painting. Godard‘s voice comments: „No movement. No depth, no artifice. The sacred“.

 

What therefore should, indeed, what can be represented? The filmic essay The old place (whose sections are designated „exercises in artistic thinking“) puts this question up for discussion. Let us begin with the conclusion. The film tells the Malaysian legend of A Bao A Qu passed on to us by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings. At the end of the film, Godard/Miéville point out that this legend summarizes everything the film had said up to then:

„If you want to look out over the world’s loveliest landscape, you must climb to the top floor of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. There, standing on a circular terrace, one has a sweep of the whole horizon. A winding stairway leads up to the terrace, but only those people dare to go up who don’t believe the tale:

In the stairway of the Tower of Victory has lived since the beginning of time a being so sensitive to the shades of the human soul: the A Bao A Qu. It lives in a lethargic state on the first step, and only becomes consciously alive when someone climbs the stairs. The vibrations of the approaching person breathe life into it, and it is filled with an inner glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir.

When someone climbs the spiral stairs, the A Bao A Qu follows closely upon the visitor’s heels and climbs along the outside of the steps which are worn down by the feet of generations of pilgrims. With each step its color becomes more intense, its shape more perfect and the light it gives off more brilliant. The proof of its sensitivity lies in the fact that it only achieves its ultimate form at the top step, and only when the person climbing is a spiritually evolved being. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu remains, as if paralyzed, short of its goal, its body incomplete, its color undefined and its glow faltering. The A Bao A Qu suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, like the rustling of silk.

But when the man or woman bringing it back to life is totally pure, the A Bao A Qu can make it to the top step. Having achieved full form, it glows with a vivid blue light. But its return to life is very brief, for when the pilgrim descends, the A Bao A Qu rolls and tumbles back down to the first steps, where, already faded and looking like an engraving with vague contours, it awaits the next visitor.

He can’t be seen clearly until it’s halfway up the stairs, when the little tentacles that extend from its body, which it uses to climb, take on a clear definition. It is also said that it can see with its entire body, and that at sunset it looks like the skin of a peach. In the course of the centuries, the A Bao A Qu has only once achieved perfection.

Sir Richard Burton recounts the legend of the A Bao A Qu in a note to his version of A Thousand and One Nights“[5] .

 

A Bao A Qu is „so sensitive to the shades of the human soul”. It only achieves its perfect shape „when the person climbing is a spiritually evolved being”, when he or she is „totally pure“. Godard‘s filmic essay deals with art; and A Bao A Qu is adapted accordingly to this context, so that it stands here for art, represents it in a mythical narrative, while the image of Man ascending the steps symbolizes a cathartic process. From a traditional perspective, catharsis can be realized or furthered through art, through psychic-mental processes triggered by means of fear and pity as Aristotle termed them (much though the original Greek terms may have different associations), through gaining insight in a post-Aristotelean (not necessarily anti-Aristotelean), modern way of thinking. A Bao A Qu's function within the framework of the story is now not to trigger catharsis, but to bear witness to it, and that happens when this fantastical being illumines, expresses the stage of (spiritual) evolution of an individual human being by means of its luminescent form (and now we are genuinely in the realm of aesthetics, even in the language used). According to this thesis, art would be an indicator, not a catalyst.

The spirituality of a human being is not judged by spiritualist ideas, but by the potency of human perception. Godard/Miéville use the metaphor of the stars and their constellations (the images read into the star clusters); they refer our everyday reality to the order of the universe and call upon us to perceive things both simply as themselves and in the manner in which they may appear together as an image (which is charged with ideational associations). In the first instance then, we are asked to focus on things themselves; so far, this is in line with the objectivism postulated by classic Modernism. In the scene or exercise entitled Deception and magic the authors quote a passage from Paul Valéry, from his Cahiers:

„There’s a moment when the light begins to strike things, making them stammer out their shapes and then their successive names, starting out with the very ,thing’ that is the beginning. First there’s ,something’, and then ,some things‘. Exactly like in the Book of Books. There’s an infancy of the features of the world, of a day, of any given place“[6].

 

Godard/Miéville do not want only to capture the thing, but the thing in its original untrammeled purity. In the sequence of images in the chapter, or „exercise“ Destiny of things, everyday, ordinary things are shown and we are prompted to treat them as if they were museum exhibits. The aim seems to be a kind of transfiguration of the banal such as was intended by artists and theorists of art in the last century, and yet this is far from exhausting the aesthetic of Godard‘s films, it only describes a partial aspect of it. We find ourselves in a late Modernist scenario, we are confronted with a flood of images, led into a labyrinth of images, sounds, texts (written and spoken). It is a collage assembled largely from pre-existing materials; scenes from films, paintings or philosophical and literary texts are all summoned to testify. Accordingly, it is hardly possible to verify the originality, simplicity etc. of the means of representation. Originality is the telos, the objective to be reached, as is actually stated here and there, and sometimes shines through in an image. Under the heading Infancy of art there is an almost naive scene: a little girl is playing around with her paintbox and painting a picture; the scene is accompanied by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and we hear the girl’s voice saying (and this is where the naivety ends): „Mummy, what does it mean: modern people?“. And together with the superimposed slogan Origine des images we see a canvas which is set in motion by a mechanical apparatus (almost hidden in the darkened background). It is a scene from abstract theatre, a moving white rectangle, or perhaps - referring autoreflexively to the art form of the cinema – a screen on which to project things, at once active and activated. An elemental constructivism is expressed in this, which might very well be interpreted as a continuation of the experiments of the early twentieth century in the visual arts and theatre. In this, too, Godard is a late Modernist artist, who gathers together different experiences in an unrepentantly mannerist way. His last films assert an aesthetic encompassing all the art forms which follows traditions of synthesizing, pan-artistic theatrical art (Kandinsky, Schlemmer, Meyerhold among others). Nevertheless, it may seem astonishing that a film-maker in 2000 still needs to fight to establish his genre as an art form against the social pressure of illusionistic expectations. The artistic emancipation of the film, it seems, still has a long way to go.

 

In order to reach the objective of originality, it appears, we are forced to take a labyrinthine path via innumerable impressions and images, but also their abstraction. The last sentence from Henri Bergson‘s essay Matter and Memory is quoted in The old place: „The spirit borrows from matter the perceptions it draws its nourishment from, and gives them back as movement stamped with its freedom”[7] - a truly ingenious attempt to circumscribe the relationship to the outside world, whose perception does not end with imprinting a likeness of reality, but in a reaction of the perceiving mind, a reaction which is described as movement, and which, here too, thus refers to something elemental. In connection with the Bergson text a painting which depicts faceless people is shown while before that, we see people who seem to be blind feeling sculptures with their hands. The perception of the world is filtered, as it were, in these exemplary images, reduced on the one hand to the haptic senses, reduced on the other in its reproduction, stylized in a way which depersonalizes it. The apparent impression of outside worlds our eyes give us is transformed by the human mind and reduced in the process to its individual elements. We do not see reality, we see something of what comprises reality. Art produces – in terms of mimesis – some of the ingredients of so-called reality, anything else would be illusionary in several respects, and we could only assign it to the phenomenology of the purely illusory nature of perception.

And once again Godard stands in a proto-modern tradition which he continues, but also modifies. Bertolt Brecht was not the only author to postulate the separation of dramatic elements in his dramaturgy, often declared to be non-Aristotelean, with the aim of penetrating into realities with rational, analytical means. Godard separates image, sound and words too, and distinguishes in the latter between visualized dialogue, the voice from the off, and written text, whereby he carries the dissolution of the naturalistic continuum to extremes: in one scene from the film Passion (1982) workers, most of them women, meet to discuss their jobs and plans for trade union action and exchange political slogans (the scene is headed „réunion syndicale“ [trade union meeting] on the DVD). From time to time the speakers can be seen, then their voices come from the off, sometimes - in an extreme example of alienation – the lip movements of the person shown are not identical with the speech we are hearing. This is the truly elemental separation of heard from read speech, a separation which could not be achieved on the live stage. Yet it is precisely in the scene described here that a synthesizing, unifying element mitigates against the analytical tendency; and it should be pointed out that this is in no way true of the political statements, which stand utterly unmediated, as if they could no longer be melded into a coherent theory, no: it is music which, as it were, rises out of this heterogeneous exchange, the sounds of Mozart’s Requiem, in the sublimity „which produces the sacral out of the everyday“[8], and if it is not sacral, it is at least sublime in the philosophical tradition, hinting at a cathartic solution, the path that humanity could follow with A Bao A Qu, not persisting in languishing in old emotional worlds, but striving towards new worlds of the spirit (even if they can for now only be expressed in musical terms).

 

But to return to the metaphor of the stars: in the same way the stars configure themselves into constellations which present a picture, so do things; in the cinema they eventually form themselves into sequences of images. The smallest unit in this sequential organization is the juxtaposition of two images (with Godard, this is very often a repeated, quick alternation of the two), and the perfect model of this pairing is called by the film-maker champ et contrechamp, shot and reverse shot. This is how he describes the interaction of opposites, a certain dialectic or polarity; reality seems to be determined and defined by such polarity. In this, the field of tension between documentation and fiction plays a particularly important part in deciding what art is (réalité comme légende – légende comme réalité, a text formula which is faded in several times in The old place). Artistic thinking - as Miéville‘s voice says in the film - begins „with the invention of a possible world“, and then confronts this with the outside world by means of artistic activity. This dialogue between imagination and work enables „an ever-clearer representation of what we agree to call reality“[9]. In the confrontation between the invented and the reproduced world, reality configures itself from moment to moment (precisely not by following the classical dramaturgy of space and persons: perspective, that 3-D illusion invented in the Renaissance – thus we hear in Histoire(s) du cinema[10] – is the original sin of Western painting). In this sense, reproduction and invention are constantly played off against one another in Godard’s work, e.g. by alternating a documentary photo and a painting. Scenes played by actors in films are also „complemented” by paintings. Naturalistically represented persons meet imaginary figures, i.e., figures from imagined worlds. In the film Weekend (1967), the two protagonists meet a pair who keep telling stories and are dressed in historical costumes. Driven to distraction by not getting answers to their questions, they burn the woman stranger (who represents Emily Brontë). The man tries to dispel his companion’s qualms: „Can't you see they're only imaginary characters?“ „We're little more than that ourselves“ is her answer. A scene from Godard‘s film Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (1991) is quoted in The old place: the driver of an East German Trabant (the emblematic car of the old GDR) which has broken down meets a Don Quixote on a horse, to which Godard’s voice recites a quotation from Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain): „Kann man die Zeit erzählen, diese selbst, als solche, an und für sich? Wahrhaftig, nein, das wäre ein närrisches Unterfangen!“ („Can one narrate time, time itself, taken just by itself? Truly, no, that would be a fool’s errand!”). Miéville‘s voice answers, paraphrasing Maurice Blanchot: „L'art n'était pas à l'abri du temps. Il était l'abri du temps” („Art was not sheltered from time. It was a shelter for time“). What we see here is a demonstration of what the confrontation between invented and documentary images can achieve: it can translate into visual terms the insight that time is the basic impetus of our human reality. An „abstract“ becomes capable of being represented, a feat which could only be achieved indirectly in a conventional narrative framework.

Conventional narrative dramaturgy cannot satisfy this will to show things, and this is one reason why the essay form is favoured. But this does not mean that the narrative genre is abandoned, rather it is taken back to its roots: we have already mentioned that the essay film The old place ends with a story (about the imaginary being A Bao A Qu) and that this is the culmination of the film’s content. After the labyrinth has been traversed, elemental truths are brought together on the basis of a myth, i.e., they are forged anew in an archaic narrative form. This mythic narration is the end product of the tissue spun out of words/sounds/images, be it ever so complicated (this process can be observed in contemporary dramaturgical ideas in spoken and music theatre), irrespective of whether we wish to interpret it from the viewpoint of depth psychology or otherwise. Once again, the telos of originality rears its head.

 

Godard leads us through a labyrinth of signs, and here too, he can make the connection to forms of artistic Modernism, first and foremost the post-war avant-garde. One of the linguistic artists of this school is the Italian writer Edoardo Sanguineti, who spoke of the treacherous path through the marshes of irrationalism and formalism, of anarchy and alienation, but who saw himself forced to take this path in the hope of finding the way out on the other side of the infernal mess, even if it meant emerging covered in mud[11]. He wrote the text to the radio play Laborinthus II for the composer Luciano Berio, which ends with a double metaphor, as it were with champ and contrechamp: here the man soiled from wading through the marshes, there dreaming children. Godard attempts to break free of the ideological fetters which still bind Sanguineti and others. He sets out together with his audience on a quest for meaning which does not exclude any level (although it does not take them all into account) or aim at easy success (such as can be seen in those struggling for battlefield supremacy through programmatic reduction, whether in the materialist or spiritualist camp). But if we have understood his intentions correctly, he himself seems to be convinced that at least something of this meaning does gleam through in one image constellation or the other. Of course, the contrechamp of the image is not only the other image, but in its most radical form the non-image. „L’image est bonheur, mais, près d’elle, le néant séjourne“ („The image is bliss, but right next to it lurks the void“: Godard quoting Maurice Blanchot, also in Notre musique), and beside it yawns an abyss of the non-perceptible, but just maybe also the chance of achieving an aniconic renewal[12].