Deux ou trois choses

Godard's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946–2006: À la recherche d'un théorème perdu, was in three rooms each consisting of a number of installations and a collection of objects at first sight seemingly set out higgledy-piggledy, as if each room were itself an installation. As with his Histoire(s) du cinéma, the materials were either cited (images, sounds, phrases), found (a bed, a broom, steps, a model electric train), or reconstructed and miniaturised (the maquette of the unrealised original exhibition for the Pompidou, Collages de France). These various materials from different provenances were brought together as in a super collage (the entire exhibit), not exactly a parody, but certainly a commentary on traditional museum classifications by genre, artist, period or nationality. The disjunctions between what was displayed provoked memories, associations and surprising, unlikely connections because of their apparent arbitrariness and the unfamiliarity of the joins, not unlike surrealist experiments from the 1930s. For example, the toy electric train that ran in a loop through a tunnel variously seemed to cite Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the Lumière brothers' L'Arrivée d'un train en gare à La Ciotat, Orson Welles's ecstatic comment on the studio machinery offered him at RKO for Citizen Kane (‘This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!’), and the trains that transported the victims of the Holocaust to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, images which Godard had reproduced in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, some taken from Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard, others from George Stevens's home movie that ends with his entry into the death camps just after D-Day, others from Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, and still others that were archival. Some of the material, such as the Collages de France miniature (like a model for a film set), was reduced in size and projected (looped on flat small screens of fragments from films by Godard and others – Nicholas Ray, Sergei Eisenstein, Otto Preminger – placed alongside anonymous pornographic images and images from sport), an odd collection, not unlike what might be found in a junk shop provoking one to dream and imagine and be transported. Though objects and associations tended to coalesce on contact, they also tended to disperse, going off in different directions to their origins and beyond, making of the exhibition a map of pathways and possible journeys that exceeded it, defying any presumed unity. No one thing sufficed, each was particular (none ‘served’ an apparent function) and all were plural because they suggested multiple places and entries. The exhibition, because of its apparent disorder, the density of citations, their heterogeneity and the evocations and banality of the collection of found objects, echoed works of Dada, particularly that of Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau and the common objects and odd conjunctions, some scandalous, displayed by Marcel Duchamp (his urinal, for example, and the moustache painted on a reproduced Mona Lisa, making the portrait doubly enigmatic). It also resonated with the Combines and installation pieces of Robert Rauschenberg, which in turn echoed strategies in cubist collages, those of Picasso, for example, and before Picasso, the purified, almost abstract, sculpted and geometric paintings of Paul Cézanne. There was as well an echo of the surrealists, their artworks, literary works and films, not only the Buñuel–Dali films and their improbable juxtapositions, but also Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936), a remake/citation of a mediocre Hollywood adventure/romance directed by George Melford called East of Borneo (1931). The ‘reality’ and everydayness of the objects in the exhibition gave them a documentary status. They seemed to be no more than what they simply were, like a tautology: a bed, a broom, a mirror, a table, a potted plant. This is equally true of the images and sounds of Histoire(s) du cinéma which, because they are citations, function as documents, only themselves yet filled with possibilities. Such a strategy tends to disorient rather than to clarify or exemplify, because connections to other elements cited or presented are indirect, open or obscure, and because there is no precise narrative or ‘line’ to contain them. It is as if the more concrete and real the materials in the exhibition or film are, the more separate, disparate, disruptive they become, and thereby are filled with the promise of significance but empty of precise meaning. The ‘real’– and its contrary multiple openings to possible other arrangements and references, including an opening to fictions not yet formed or articulated (in Histoire(s) these are films that ‘will be’ or ‘might be’) – is disruptive of any coherence, while the casual appearance of the quotidian, the sense of chance encounters between different materials (as in surrealist rencontres) gave the exhibition and gives Histoire(s) a sense of travelling (voyage), a wandering within an indeterminate geography without guidance, precise purpose or destination. It is not Godard who is the flâneur but the film that seems almost alive and palpable, a living being. The earliest drafts of Histoire(s) du cinéma, based on lectures given by Godard at the Montréal Cinémathèque in 1978, were divided into twelve voyages. The title of the Pompidou exhibition was Voyage(s) en Utopie, multiple wanderings to nowhere very exact, a vagabondage of memories, chance, histories, and an expectation–readiness for occurrences that might happen, the world and the past not so much invading the work but in dialogue with it. These works are exciting, wonderful and open precisely because nothing definitive can be deduced and directions are infinite. They are also uncomfortable and disturbing for their apparent chaos and fortuity, their refusal to arrive or to come. To enter either is like being lost. Cubist collages not only recruited fragments excised from reality, as did the Godard exhibition, and mixed them together with paint and graphic lines (as in a ‘painting’), but they did so in order to compromise the traditional two dimensions of painting which historically had created a third dimension by the use of perspective – that is, an illusory one at the interior of a painted scene whose model was theatrical and dependent upon a strict respect for framing. The fact that these works recruited real objects constituted an intrusion into an imaginary and essentially fictional, representational space which the real compromised simply by its presence, as the will toward abstraction in Cézanne disturbed a prevailing naturalism, still evident in Impressionism. His paintings presented a new, ‘other’ note in a heretofore homogeneous space. What had been traditional was now confronted in Histoire(s) with radical differences (abstraction, the actual, the found, commentary), a remaking which was disruptive like parody, signs of reordering that were neither beautiful nor even ‘skilful’ but, rather, questioning as different forms of questions and as questions of forms, so wonderfully argued by Nicole Brenez in her essay, ‘The Forms of the Question’.1 1 Nicole Brenez, ‘The Forms of the Question’, in For Ever Godard, ed. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog, 2004), 160–77. The cubist collage created discontinuities (gaps) between the various items ‘in’ the collage and, by the addition of a mix of material (cloth, wood, feathers, toys, matchboxes, newspaper clippings, rather like the miniature boxes of scenes and objects in the work of Joseph Cornell) side by side with the painted, the effect was to highlight the materiality of paint ... and of painting. Nor was there glue (continuities) to hold these differences together. The cubist work moved beyond its pictorial boundaries to an exterior third dimension (as opposed to a traditional illusory one interiorised within a frame by perspective, trompe l'oeil, and by a carefully wrought scenic composition). The actual ‘third’ dimension in the cubist collage brings the exhibited work (like a painting) toward sculpture (cut-outs) and, later, installation works. The cubist collage, because of its mix of materials (paper, wood, metal), its straining beyond the boundaries of the work and its resonance with the origins from which real objects that constituted it came or could be associated with it, seems unfinished and infinite, in part owing to the fact that the frame has been traversed, focus endangered and thus painting, as it was traditionally recognised, put at risk. For Picasso, it seemed that anything could become a subject for a work, and anything could be a starting point. The ‘idea’ had to do primarily with suggestions inherent in material. It was making do, an improvisation, a creation and transformation with whatever happened to be around, no object having a necessary permanence or definiteness, no reality thereby stable, and none belonging to some hierarchy of importance or significance. The collage was perpetually going ‘off’, away from itself, beyond the framed limits that had been crucial for creating the illusionary scenes and figures of traditional painting, which had framed beauty and had indicated skill and genius. Even Picasso's purely painted canvasses seemed to be like cut-outs, not because they consisted of diverse materials (everything in those paintings is made of paint), but by virtue of their diverse and overlapping-intersecting volumes, their re-conception of space. The cubist ‘scene’ not only lacked a fixed perspective and point of view, but it was not, strictly speaking, representational, or if it was, it was close to parody. It did not describe, narrate or illustrate. Instead, it demonstrated (and cited). The work of Francis Bacon is of further interest in this regard. Bacon's frames, rather than being traversed toward an outside beyond them, have the effect of constraining their subjects, tearing them apart by placing them under extreme pressure, as if the painting and everything represented within it were about to explode and disintegrate, taking with it the fact and idea of representation, stressing its fragility and temporariness. Certainly, the frame, rather than being a frame of perspective, depth and clarification, tended toward so extreme a distortion that whatever was represented became purely form, shape, paint, rhythm, imbalance, as if the painting had dissolved into the pureness (chastity) of its constituents at the price of the coherence, stability or focus of any subject. The same occurs with Picasso's art. Some of the films of Orson Welles similarly used the frame to distort, squeeze, put pressure on figures and objects, literally reshaping them, and, combined with depth of field, created odd, grotesque conjunctions not simply of things but of space itself, which makes of the Wellesian world not only other, puzzling and mysterious, but abstract. Rauschenberg's Combines and Schwitters' Merzbau are heirs to cubist experiments and innovations and to the revolution in painting cubism initiated. A number of things were accomplished by that revolution: the frame was discarded, the anecdotal narrative–theatrical scene dissolved, points of view were multiplied, the centre was destroyed, heterogeneous material put into play and completeness and originality compromised. The consistencies and homogeneities characteristic of painting were made inconsistent and its unities (scenes) shattered into fragments by disjunctions in matter, temporality and dimension. These works spilled over boundaries and definitions that might contain or fix them, exceeding not only the practices but the categories, understandings, ideas, discourses and criticism that had served to define the artwork: frame, centre, point of view, perspective, description, meaning, significance, originality, beauty and sometimes narrative. As a result, what had previously been simply accepted and enjoyed for its skill and beauty, and had given comfort by its sense (the represented, the anecdote, the piece of theatre), was now open to question (‘what is art?’), to doubt and to uncertainty that went to the heart of the traditional artwork (pierced it) and its institutions, as Duchamp's urinal and Warhol's Brillo boxes and serialised images later provocatively made clear, as if such questioning was one of the principal purposes, if not the principal purpose, of the artistic strategies of surrealism, Dada and later their heir, Pop. Godard's films in general, and Histoire(s) du cinéma in particular, as is evident in the Pompidou exhibition, echoed these accomplishments, especially by the structuring of the artwork in such a way, and in relation to other works, as to bring itself into question (not only for its motives but for its design). Moreover, by extension it brings all art into question where the work and the commentary upon it (‘a musical and the idea of a musical’ as in Une femme est une femme) have come together, thus making every element, image and sound both concrete and discursive, representational and critical, focused and digressive. One of the achievements of Histoire(s) du cinéma is to so isolate images or sounds (decontextualise, denarrativise them) that they are refreshed, and it is like seeing or hearing them anew for the first time, no longer belonging to their origins or to an artist, nor immediately ‘connected’ to what surrounds and is contiguous to them; and doing so it gives back to images, sounds and objects their autonomy, frees them for any number and kind of associations and encounters, none of which would cause them to lose their identity as a continuous narrative might do by restricting movement to fixed directions, by holding elements in place. In this multiplication of identities and possibilities, nothing is lost, and what seems to have been lost can be seen once more (returns, memories), but differently, anew; for example, Ethan Edwards taking Debbie in his arms in John Ford's The Searchers, an image sequence fragmented, pulverised, retimed, broken down in Histoire(s), but with nothing destroyed – to the contrary, enabling one (almost for the first time) to see the scene (because remade differently) and to bring it into a relation with other scenes elsewhere, not in the Ford film necessarily, but in other films, and even the entirety of Histoire(s), the entire range of its citations, all of history, as if the function of Histoire(s) were not only for the film to be open and ready (attentive, as in Rossellini's cinema) but to open up the cinema in general and in its details, both to other works and to an outside. Historically, the questioning of the cinema – what it was, what it could become – an act of criticism and therefore necessarily an historical undertaking, had been the achievement of the films of the Nouvelle Vague, of its reflections on film in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and 1960s; and coincident with both efforts, perhaps if not their source, certainly their inspiration, were the writings of André Bazin and his philosophical questioning of the cinema, Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, which made of films and their forms instruments of thought, giving them an unaccustomed and extraordinary range and density. In film, the frame has been defined by three interrelated aspects, the frame of the shot, the frame of the narrative which it served (a beginning and an end) and the continuities between shots that established scenes and sequences within a narrative to provide not only coherence and unity, a focus, but fictions as simulacrums of the real. In other words, the frame(s) in film, as it had functioned in painting (and in theatre), was to contribute to the creation of an ideal illusory space within which a scene could be described, enacted and performed. The frame was functional for narrative and therefore crucial to it. The destruction of the frame, or at the very least the compromising of it, a deframing (the Nouvelle Vague was central in this process as were some of the directors it celebrated: Fuller, Lang, Ray, Welles), affected an entire range of practices, ideas and where film and the commentary on film, film and the historical past of film were no more or from each other than was to precisely because were and as a of the One of the of Godard was to bring into doubt and their in order to to bring together what had been In doing Godard's work differences as disjunctions that work upon and with each other, that are rather than in movement rather than heterogeneous rather than What Godard are His films are the instruments of such the his work on any criticism that would to his films by classifications and categories, as is evident in the dialogue between Godard and which was made all the by an Jean-Luc Godard and du cinéma et du by John as The of and the of a This (almost casual and like the and in surrealist and the of play that it are the Godard's films can be so and Histoire(s) du cinéma a deframing of the cinema, and in doing so it a while not exactly a one but it, as Cézanne painting. The traditional of the cinema has been presented (a where each film or of films cited is made to to some kind of order – that is, the cited work as and (the the Nouvelle Vague, and so part of a where every film and the of the cinema and can be for as Godard was by Such a What Histoire(s) from the of the cinema (and therefore from its is the The in Godard is not an but a that and so in relation to other one of whose is to and and The Godard is not an His Histoire(s), unlike and is no longer dependent on of and or a narrative – that is, on a frame, a crucial to and the of the The in Histoire(s) from Ford's The is a to it than a which Godard works upon and It is to become other than it once was thereby it is remade a and a of the cinema du and of the films that part of that and that are As is to they narrate that have The so are presented a of shots that in a more or fixed in their that and are One of the of such is that their elements to a hierarchy of importance and significance. Some are others some others or as in a itself is the of an historical in the in the and in also in painting and in and, after the turn of that in and images are so in film, which from its to that by and continuities in order to and them Godard's films, from his first to his that essentially narrative His work is a of narrative as it had been (and still than it is a and reordering of it, by making it subject to like a or a in its or by a away from the subject toward the image and its In a Godard film, are not than what is the between and and and what forms it, the narrative and from it, have elements are and there is no as a with all that of order and his films, and especially his Histoire(s) du cinéma, are with and from the these are more like a collection of artistic than a museum or by fictions of The of the of elements to their to a fixed order and and their apparent in Godard's work, each as and particular and as for the and sense of in his films, their of and their and and the of about them. Instead, they to be to or and not in order to them but literally to them as to as an artistic strategy to them. do hold to a Godard work, which is and so that have a and it has a Even can it in an it beyond and so It is to do What had been crucial to narrative – its coherence, unity, sense and order – are, in Godard's work, broken The that his films – in Histoire(s) du arrive from elsewhere, so that the film is away not only from where its elements but into and encounters with other other citations, and thereby away from itself the identity of is The narrative it ever is by such arrangements created by the and plural of materials are not as They are simply and true on encounters to or which are – (the – and which time, or so the as with the films of Paul the of and the the and they the For example, to the and of under might be and the of might be by a through its and the forms of the cinema in the might be into a of the studio a of the films of John Ford or an of the and the of sound to In these the differences of the the studio John and art are together within a homogeneous historical time, with a and that are to both the and the lines of and This could be with the in Histoire(s) of the sequence in The which to There is way, the one by Godard in his films, in the Pompidou that of associations between elements up the its in or of heterogeneous and as for example, André and Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, of and fragments of and like memories, or like pieces of – in any nothing very or rather, encounters which upon the which and In Histoire(s) du cinéma, general philosophical the speaking, a mixed the of the cinema (the films of the in the the Nouvelle Vague, the studio under and the of films in cited fragments The Searchers, La du and the of art Picasso, to all for their differences and from each other, are made to They are not in the film, but rather are as and and in as and in a musical together, they do not but rather that coalesce or separate, being – and not just or once and for but as things are and things brought together not in order to (and thus put an but to (and thus and alive and in What is presented is a by movement and that is, one whose boundaries and space and are ever and as part of a and not a or a history, or in the The different cited histories, and scenes that are brought into become multiple points of view, and multiple and and histories, but not a history, documents, but not a In the film, there are only that They simply point. The fragments of histories, of and of in Histoire(s) to not a certainly not a The of the cinema as a narrative of to be the images and scenes in Histoire(s) du cinéma are even if they not so at Some scenes in the film are for example, the various by Alain and by These are for the part from and in a collage of from different There is an in Histoire(s) to that the cinema historically did not its true of the real is perhaps the For example, the cinema in to or with the of the death or For Godard, it this has to do with a of film as a of – that is, as as a enacted by of continuities and to the in the cinema and its and thereby film with the world and its history, the and of narrative is for the part the subject and object of the of the one that Histoire(s) du cinéma – and not simply the of and Ethan but of the narrative of and their what and the narrative in the of the The of these and is the work of from a from some kind of and of (a of what into forms, instruments and musical even if it had in an of painting, created images out of en in with the of – not an view, but an actual the of the in order to the of and not or or but found, if not exactly in a of time, within in an actual and in the reality of its The paintings of out temporality and the necessarily to it in the of an (like a What after – – is an to the

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