Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema by Morgan Daniel

Author:Morgan, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520273313
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2013-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

4

Cinema without Photography

1. BONJOUR, M. COURBET

At the very beginning of the book, I described a scene from Allemagne 90 neuf zéro that takes place in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It starts with a shot of a woman in the act of taking a photograph; a 180-degree cut over her shoulder shows that she is photographing Gustave Courbet’s painting The Wave (see figure 1). As she presses the shutter, Lemmy Caution says in voice-over, “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet,” and Godard cuts to a black-and-white film clip of a large wave rising up from the bottom of the frame and tossing a small ship. When I discussed this sequence earlier, I suggested that it serves as a meditation on the genealogy of cinema by way of painting and photography. The temptation is to understand this genealogy in terms of technological progress, from painting to photography to cinema, but the sequence of the shots in fact positions painting as the middle term rather than the starting point. The implication is that photography has to pass through painting in order to become cinema. That is, the sequence suggests that it’s only when photography learns from painting, when photography incorporates painting’s imagistic qualities into its own capacities, that it is able to turn into and become cinema.

In this chapter, I want to work through the issues about media history and definition that arise out of this sequence from Allemagne 90 neuf zéro. Short as it is, the sequence exemplifies a central preoccupation of Godard’s later films and videos: a concern with the cinematic image in terms that are drawn from painting rather than photography. Some of this has to do with the way an affinity between cinema and painting focuses attention on the pictorial qualities of images, allowing Godard to use what he calls “the sensuality in painting” to model his own creative practice.1 But I will argue that the move to painting is more centrally a matter of shifting the orientation of cinema away from photography, a deep change in the way cinema has been historically understood.

Godard’s turn away from conceiving cinema in terms drawn from photography and the consequences that follow from his interest in painting are at the heart of the aesthetic, historical, and cinematic project of the late films, yet these concerns reach their full development only in his video work. Speaking about the general ambitions of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard claims that video “belongs to painting history and it’s pure painting.”2 It is through the videographic investigation of the history of cinema—and the histories that cinema has told about itself—that Godard makes explicit something that was there all along: that cinema both emerges from and leads to a wider tradition of image making.3

The point is not one of substitution. Photography may be displaced from its position at the heart of cinema, but painting does not thereby become the sole determination of cinema’s abilities. Godard does not produce yet another Laocoön, reducing cinema to a single way of functioning; if

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