BEFORE OUR EYES: LES MOTS, NON LES CHOSES

JEAN-LUC GODARD’S ICI ET AILLEURS (1970-74)

AND NOTRE MUSIQUE (2004)

By

Irmgard Emmelhainz

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D., Graduate

Department of Art

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Irmgard Emmelhainz 2009

ii

“Before Our Eyes: Les mots, non les choses Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et ailleurs (1970-74) and Notre musique (2004)” Ph.D June 2009 Irmgard Emmelhainz Department of Art History University of Toronto

ABSTRACT Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made in 1970 a “political film politically” about

the Palestinian Revolution, Jusqu’à la victoire, which remained unfinished. Under the

framework of their audio-visual research project, Sonimage, Godard edited the

Palestinian footage with Anne-Marie Miéville. Working through the collapse of the

revolutionary project, imaging the Palestinian resistance became a matter of the

restitution of speech to the absent and to the dead Palestinians – to whom, as Godard

laments self-critically in the film, they had not listened to. Godard’s and Miéville’s

compass for action was reconfigured as “audiovisual journalism,” addressing the

changing conditions in political engagement, challenging the mediatization of mediation

prompted by the Leftist utopian belief in the emancipatory potential of the media. The

hegemonic discourse circulating within Leftist intellectual culture abandoned the iconic

referent of “The Revolution,” which became the fatal harbinger of totalitarianism. Since

then, Third World subjects have been figured as terrorists or victims who are incapable of

determining themselves politically, or to “develop” economically. Such a turn has given

leeway to new models of engagement and emancipation that account for the real of

reality, embedded in the non-discourse of rights or counter-memory, while beckoning for

a politics of infinite restitution. Godard returned to the Palestine Question thirty years

later in Notre musique, by stopping-over in post-war Sarajevo, a place where it became

possible for Godard to host a gathering of the Trojan poets and storytellers of sorts.

iii

Reconciliation and rehabilitation are the reverse-shot of a world of violent ethnic strife

evidencing the futility of the politization of forgiveness. By way of a montage, Godard

vouches for the mobilization of the powers of the false in order to save the real. The

beautiful becomes necessary to “cover” memories of catastrophe. The aesthetico-political

task is the regulation of the distance between the viewer and the screen. The conditions

are the belief in images, faith and the desire to see as our links to the world. Within the

pervasiveness of the hyperreal and culture, which Godard equates to ruins, the exiles and

vanquished call for the exception, which is art.

iv

Acknowledgments I thank at the end of this journey those who made it more bearable, exciting and supported it unwavering: In Toronto, Eshrat and Jeevan Erfanian, Bruce Parsons, Rosa Macip, Romi Mikulinski, Etienne Turpin, Alessandra Renzi, Christine Shaw, John Greyson and BH Yael. From Mexico, Miguel Ventura, Silvia Gruner, Fausto Esparza, Pilar Reyes, Helga Kaiser, Iliana Padilla, Ana Paola Frías, Jimena Acosta, Irma Robles, Diana Gónzalez, Karen Cordero Reimann and Stephen Vollmer. Elsewhere: Shay de Grandis, Margaret Schlubach-Rueping, Thierry de Duve, Nora Adwan. Kifah Fanni is present in every key typed. I am indebted to my dissertating friends who read drafts of this work and who contributed with invaluable feedback. Nathalie Khankhan, Romi Mikulinski, and Etienne Turpin. Tom Williams’ brilliant insights and editorial comments shed light not only on this work, but also on the project as a whole. I am forever grateful and touched by Maria José Bruña and Mélanie Potevin, who made sure I was not on my own at the rez de chausée at the Bibliothèque Nationale when I was going through hard times. To David Faroult and Michael Witt for their Godardian insights and materials. To Olivier Hadouchi, for our email exchanges on cinema and tiermondisme. To the Jumex Collection in Mexico City, for funding my research in Paris. To Elizabeth Legge, Kim Tomckzak, Lisa Steele, Eric Cazdyn and John Massey for their support at the University of Toronto. Without Mikki Kratsman, Haggai Matar, Matan Kaminer and Katie Miranda, I would have not been able to spend precious months in the West Bank. Such months were invaluable, productive and unforgettable. Sonia Nimr was my mentor in Ramallah; she generously answered questions, shared stories and transmitted insights to me. She showed me to open up my ears like Kifah Fanni, whose love for Arabic and poetry are contagious. Khadijeh Habashneh and Mustapha Abu Ali shared their lives’ stories and passion for cinema, revolution and political work with me. I am indebted to everyone at the Qattan Foundation, especially Sally Abu Bakr, for their hospitality, friendship and support, for encouraging my meeting with Mahmoud Darwish and for inviting me to present my work. Thank you, Romi Mikulinski, for your unwavering friendship and support from Tel Aviv. Finally, this work would not have been possible without Rebecca Comay, Peter Fitting and John Paul Ricco. They not only supported but also inspired and enriched this work in many different ways. I consider myself to be supremely privileged to have been able to work with them and to count on their generosity and commitment. Rebecca Comay was there since the beginning as a friend and as a mentor, encouraging me to keep on writing during critical moments. Her profound and knowledgeable insights turned the thesis upside down more than once, only to make it stronger. Peter Fitting helped me navigate the Marxist-Leninist French sixties, Godard’s films and scholarship about his work. I am indebted to his invaluable help and guidance, generous readership and always-enriching and available source of references and materials. John Ricco encountered stubbornness with infinite patience and grace. He “fell from the sky” to be a generous mentor and midwife, guiding me through the material and helping to deliver the thesis with great care and thoroughness. This work is dedicated to the memory of my father, Luis Emmelhainz

Irmgard Emmelhainz, Toronto-Paris-Ramallah, October 2005-May 2009.

v

Table of Contents Preface ................................................................................................................................. 1

Introduction Godard: Les mots, non les choses ................................................................ 11

Chapter 1

Here: Who Speaks? (1968)

1. Enunciative Positions and the Avant-garde .............................................................. 48

2. Art, Realism, Spectacle: Aragon and Debord ........................................................... 57

3. Engaged Positions: André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre ........................................... 61

4. The Dziga Vertov Group: Working Through the Ideologemes of the Left .............. 69

4.1 Maoism and the Dziga Vertov Group ................................................................. 77

4.2 From Zero and Self-critique ................................................................................ 81

4.3 Materialist Fictions, Realism and Materialist Filmmaking ................................. 83

4.4 The Cahiers-Cinéthique Debate .......................................................................... 88

4.5 Toward a Theory of Images and Sounds ............................................................ 92

4.6 Sound/Image Struggle = Class Struggle ............................................................. 97

5. Le Vent d’Est ............................................................................................................. 99

5.1 The Strike .......................................................................................................... 106

5.2 The Delegate (traduttore/traditore) .................................................................. 107

5.3 The General Assembly ...................................................................................... 108

6. Guernica and Ici et ailleurs, 1974 ........................................................................... 111

Chapter 2

Elsewhere: Dialogues of Points of View

1. A Deaf Point of View ............................................................................................. 123

2. A Short Genealogy of Points of View .................................................................... 127

3. Godard’s Tiermondisme .......................................................................................... 138

4. Radical Tourism and the Palestinian Revolution: The Seen and the Seers ............ 148

5. Constructing a Point of View: The DVG’s Jusqu’à la victoire: Méthodes de travail et de pensée de la révolution Palestinienne ................................................................ 161

6. The Demise of Third Worldism .............................................................................. 169

7. The Myth of Objectivity ......................................................................................... 174

8. Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger .............................................................. 182

9. From Jusqu’à la victoire to Ici et ailleurs .............................................................. 191

10. Godard and Suleiman: Points of View in Dialogue .............................................. 200

vi

Chapter 3

Technique (Theory + Practice):

The Expiration of Speech / Videographic Machinic Expression / Montage

PART I: The Mediatization of Mediation ....................................................................... 208

1. Maoist Activism ...................................................................................................... 209

2. Specific Intellectuals ............................................................................................... 212

3. The Mediatization of Mediation and the Expiration of Speech .............................. 215

4. Sonimage: Journalism of the Audiovisual .............................................................. 218

5. Cinema and Video against the Technique of the Social (Television) ..................... 225

PART II: Toward Videographic-Machinic Expression .................................................. 231

1. Cinematic Voice // Discursive Régime ................................................................... 231

2. Moi je suis un animal politique // Moi je suis une machine .................................... 240

3. Mise-en-scène of Direct Address // Free Indirect Discourse .................................. 247

4. Technique and Video: An Epistemology of Seeing ................................................ 260

5. Appropriation, Stoppage, Défilé ............................................................................ 268

Part III: Image, History, Montage ................................................................................... 275

1. From Spectacle to Flows of Information ................................................................ 275

2. Actuality and History (Images de marque) ............................................................. 281

3. Image, Perception, AND ......................................................................................... 294

Chapter 4

“To Go Toward the Light, Allowing it to Illuminate Our Night:” Notre musique

Part I: Image of Palestine ................................................................................................ 309

1. Human Rights and the Media ................................................................................. 309

2. Palestine, Documentarism, the Dignity of Fiction .................................................. 314

Part II: Notre musique ..................................................................................................... 329

1. The Wars of Annihilation ....................................................................................... 329

2. Notre musique, Text and Image .............................................................................. 336

3. Shot/Reverse-shot ................................................................................................... 354

4. Sarajevo, Intervention, Solidarity ........................................................................... 360

5. From Speaking in the Name of Others to a Simple Conversation .......................... 372

6. Culture, Exception, Annihilation ............................................................................ 379

7. The “Pure Past” and Phaedra .................................................................................. 392

8. The Memory of the Film: Elias Sanbar ................................................................... 397

vii

9. Apology of the Vanquished and of Loss ................................................................. 407

10. Our Music ............................................................................................................. 413

Some Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 418

Appendixes ..................................................................................................................... 426

Jean-Luc Godard Filmography ....................................................................................... 429

Works and Films Cited ................................................................................................... 433

1

Preface

I had a second encounter with Brownie, the giraffe in Qalqilya. The zoo where she is

housed is also home to three lions, four crocodiles, a sad and badly humidified

hippopotamus, gazelles (apparently here there is a connection between love in Arabic and

these animals – that the beloved one is called “gazeau” or “gazelle” is absolutely cryptic

to me at this point),1

Perhaps it is not obvious that we can no longer speak about people taking political

sympathy tours the old way, like the French in Moscow (1930s), the Italians in China

(1960s and 1970s), or Germans in Cuba (1960s), all united under the sisterhood of

a kangaroo in the corner of his pen was punching the air with left

and right hooks, guinea pigs sharing their cage with turtles, many birds and snakes, a

couple of camels, two panthers, a few of those monkeys with pink behinds – and more. I

had an interesting exchange with one of the monkeys. He was visibly upset by my

scrutinizing gaze that sought signs of recognition on his part. His eyes fleetingly and

furiously encountered my gaze, which he probably perceived out of habit as objectifying

before going back to the task of getting the dirt off a piece of carrot. The zoo has a

pedagogical museum with a taxidermy collection that feels like a chilling cemetery of the

unfortunate ones who found their death there. Now stiff, they have been dissected,

stuffed, reassembled, and sewn back in the best way possible and assembled in dioramas

that emulate their natural habitat.

1 My good friend and Arabic literature expert, Nathalie Khankhan, pointed out to

me that the old classical love poem is called ghazaal (gazelle). The beloved in the old Qasida or love poem is called ghazaal because her eyes are just as beautiful as gazelle eyes.

2

humanity as Allan Sekula foresees it2

2 I am referring to his piece at Dokumenta 12 (2007), a photograph of a Mexican

worker at the Ford factory in Detroit over which he detourned the famous sentence coming from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy:” “Alle Menschen werden Schwestern.” (All men will be sisters). Following Slavoj Žižek, the “Ode to Joy” represents a magic moment of ecstatic brotherhood. As such, it is an “empty signifier” that can stand for anything, from being an ode to the brotherhood of all people, to being played in 1938 for Hitler’s B-day. In the German Olympic Games in 1972 it was played whenever the German team of athletes from East and West won a medal. See “The Disturbing Sounds of the Turkish March,” In These Times, November 6, 2007,

of Marxist-Leninism fighting against imperialism.

In our contemporary globalized world, I think, we could posit these tours as prompted by

global-scale cultural sympathy and humanitarian solidarity. For the past thirty years,

ethics and solidarity have become the substitute of a politics of anti-imperialist struggle.

The Austrian artist Peter Friedl, doing the now mandatory solidarity-cultural tour to the

West Bank, was seduced by Brownie. He asked to take her on loan to show her as a

ready-made in Dokumenta XII last summer in Kassel. Brownie was the larger of the two

giraffes in the zoo’s taxidermy collection. I wondered how the smaller one died. As the

legend goes, Brownie was killed by a heart attack she suffered due to stress caused by the

explosion of a nearby bomb during the IDF’s incursion, “Operation Defensive Shield,” in

2002. Circumnavigating complex bureaucratic paperwork, which is not foreign to the

Kafkaesque hoops that Palestinians (those who can) jump through in order to travel

outside the West Bank or Gaza, Friedl, triangulating the German, National Palestinian

and Israeli authorities. Paying thousands of dollars, was able to borrow the giraffe with

all the honors pertaining to her new branding as work of art. She arrived to Kassel to be

shown in the newest pavilion of the cultural fairground. When I met Brownie for the first

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3393/the_disturbing_sounds_of_the_turkish_march. Date consulted: April 23, 2008.

3

time in Kassel, I angrily lamented the futility of aestheticizing good intentions. Eric

Alliez, a Deleuzean whom I ran into there, told me: “Là-bas, c’est pour de vrai,”3

Friedl’s intervention recalls Dario Fo’s 1972 theatre piece, Fedayn: La

rivoluzione palestinese attraverso la sua cultura e i suoi canti.

when I

mentioned I was just on my way home after my first trip to the Occupied Territories.

What is the “true,” the “authentic,” the “real”? Experience itself or an image-object as the

testimony of the experience? Is the real subjective or is it founded on an encounter with

the other, as something outside of myself?

Friedl declared that it was important for him to bring and to show the real, not an

image of Palestine. The giraffe thus is neither a witness of Israeli annihilation nor carries

information on herself about the Occupation – any photograph and caption could do that

job. Brownie is a piece of the real: the reified proof, the incarnation of her own reality, of

her fatal and tragic destiny. But what is Brownie’s “realness” or “reality” pointing toward

to? Perhaps it signals occupation and its ravages conjugated in the particular and in her

pathetic badly sewn snippets of skin. Maybe Brownie is the witness as a relic of her own

tragic death. Or we could speculate that she is the index of the “Third-World-like”

qualities of the Qalqilya zoo, incarnated in her quirky frame and crooked mouth. In

materialist terms, one could argue that she is the “real” of the reflection of a mirror

showing a society devastated by occupation.

4

3 “There it is truthful,” “There it is for real.” All translations are my own unless

otherwise noted. 4 The play was performed for the first time in February 1972 at the Campannone

in Milan. The script is published in Le commedie di Dario Fo (Torino: Einaudi, 1977).

In Milan, Fo staged an

extraordinary procession of nine PFLP fedayeen from Lebanon – they had been

4

disbanded after Black September in Jordan, and they were in a critical stage of their

struggle. The fedayeen told their story through traditional peasant and revolutionary

songs in Arabic, translated at times by an actor and, at others, accompanied by subtitles.

In the play, the fedayeen presented their stories not only about the revolution but also

their points of view on labor, world politics, and migration. For Fo, it was important to

present and to listen to their story in the first person, while posing the question in moral

terms of potentially making a “spectacle” out of the Palestinian revolution. Singularity

was achieved through the presence of the actors’ bodies and their speech. The materiality

and historicity of the Palestinian collective struggle was rendered at its most concrete by

way of the lament of the fedayeen, not only from their point of view of fighters, but also

as peasants and workers. The piece operates within the aesthetic paradigm of the political

theater, grounded on logos and poiesis. The aesthetico-ethical task is here, to bring to

corporeal proximity the vanquished embodying the their lament. In this sense, what is at

stake is not the self-presentation or the real presence of the fedayeen in a theater in Turin.

Debatably, the play’s inscription in the paradigm of theatrical representation is not an

overcoming of mimetical or identificatory enterprises but rather, the play purports an

understanding of theatrical representation as a practice that calculates the place of things

as they are observed. This is a geometrical task that reveals that what is far away

(Palestinian struggle) is brought closer, catalyzed by storytelling, recitation and singing

and mediated by the stage, the translation, the subtitles and the Italian actor.5

Back to Kassel. I wondered how the mandatory wall text explaining the giraffe’s

story affected the audience’s habitual experience of the white box of the museum space.

5 See Roland Barthes, “Diderot Eisenstein, Brecht,” Image, Music, Text, (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 69

5

What kind of emotions did the viewer register when learning about Brownie’s tragic

death: sorrow, curiosity, rage, sympathy, or even pity? I also pondered the reception of

the battered stitches on her skin and crooked teeth: perhaps they come across as signs of a

situation that is hindered to progress and develop – in the post-colonial cartographic

mapping of the world the teleological model of progress has been replaced by

“development,” as the “unquestionable good” of the burden to civilize and develop those

who are unable to define themselves politically and grow economically. Maybe Brownie

served the function of propaganda and inspired some viewers to travel to Palestine to do

something like sign up for an NGO or a solidarity movement. Or it could be that Brownie

made the European viewer feel disgusted with herself, reminding her of her own

privileges and making her appreciate them through a neurotic sense of guilt or awakening

a masochistic drive – because for sure German giraffes do not die of bomb-induced heart

attacks, and in any case the taxidermy process in Germany is certainly more “developed.”

Perhaps she reminded a lucid spectator of the destruction of the Berliner Tiergarten

during World War II. It is known that many of its animals perished and its trees were cut

down to be used as combustible materials. Repairs to the zoo did not begin until 1949.

Regarding Brownie’s – or rather, Friedl’s – “plea for the real,” it could be argued

that the Mexican visual artist Teresa Margolles is closer to the real than Friedl. She holds

a degree in forensic medicine and her studio is at the morgue in one of Mexico City’s

most violent neighbourhoods. The parts from the dead bodies that she turns into partial-

objects and thus relics incarnate the real of “pure violence,” as she makes artworks with

bodies of people who have suffered violent deaths (with the consent of the deceased’s

family). In Margolles’ work, it is not the body that testifies to violent death, but the artist

6

herself: autopsy comes from the Greek autoptes, which means “witness” from auto (self)

and optes (seen). Strangely enough, her artwork is rather successful in Germanic

countries where it conjures up the specter of the Vienna Actionists (a pioneer group from

the sixties experimenting with performance, bodily violent and sexually overt gestures,

and animal sacrifices). Should we think of Friedl’s Brownie as a sublimated Teresa

Margolles/Actionist piece sanitized of provocation and of fleshy, impure implications?

“White-boxed”?

What does this desire for “presence” of the real elsewhere – from Palestine –

mean? What does it hope for, what is it a collective projection of? Meaning is bound to

Brownie’s physical existence: once a living animal, she has been transformed into a

specimen. She then becomes a survivor of the wrongs that man has done to her as a

species; as a ready-made, she conveys affective impact. Perhaps this drive to bring home

foreign disaster “Tries desperately to assimilate to experience what defies all

experience.”6

6 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life trans. E.F.N.

Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), 115-116. Adorno further argues that zoos defy animals’ freedom by making boundaries visible, inflaming the longing for open spaces. For him, there is a link between zoos and Noah’s Ark, as animals displayed “in couples or as ‘specimens’ defy the disaster that befalls the species qua species.” (Adorno, 116). Further, he draws a link between zoos, civilization, and nineteenth-century colonial imperialism, in common strive to dominate nature.

No wonder I got so obsessed with Brownie. I realized I was haunted by the

image of a giraffe being slaughtered in Chris Marker’s Sunless (1984). We hear: “as an

exploration into the banality proper to the harshness of the mercenary hunter.” We see the

giraffe agonize and being given the coup de grace, right before the vultures start eating

out her eyes. Is there an ethical difference in the life that is taken from necessity (preys)

7

or by (lawful or unlawful) violence? Are animals our others? Are Others our enemies?

Are animals, victims or preys? Are enemies, preys or victims?

The fixation with conveying “the real” from the point of view of the ethics of

human rights, shadows Israel’s policy of house demolitions and incursions, the network

of three-dimensional borders such as the checkpoints, the apartheid wall and the low-

intensity war against besieged Gaza. I discussed the matter with a contemporary

Palestinian artist, who vouched for Brownie, saying: “It’s us. It is us dead, taxidermized

with the stitches made visible.” I wondered: “Do you mean, with the stitches, the process

is made visible so as not to cheat the viewer, it is a self-reflexive sculpture, the bad

taxidermization unveils the process of its own making?” He went on: “Brownie is us re-

dead (dead again and again) of heart attacks prompted by the bombs. See? We don’t even

have the luxury of a proper, dignified death.”

At this point I began to feel real pity for Brownie; this ethical, aesthetic and

political gesture, converted into the token of the relationships between the West and the

East, the North or the South, the developed and the underdeveloped (the chosen

coordinates do not matter), incarnating the victim as it is, that could appear as well on

CNN as in Kassel. I was so absorbed by the discussion with my friend that I did not have

a chance to ask Brownie what her return to Qalqilya was like, how she was affected by

the change in status from “European work of art” to “Palestinian taxidermized giraffe.” I

wanted to ask what she felt by having been dislocated from inciting pedagogic curiosity

along with her peers at the diorama (the visitors to the zoo are mainly schoolchildren), to

the position of inviting aesthetic judgment and then back to the zoo. I also wanted to ask

8

if she had come from Germany back to Qalqilya looking at things with Westernized, self-

critical eyes.7

As a phenomenon, Brownie highlights a moment in which cultural producers and

activists are caught between the unreliability of individual experience and the

insufficiency of a scientific or cognitive model to account for such an experience, while

having the imperative to make a cognitive mapping of the world, making global

processes accessible to the senses and to our own experience.

8

A comparison between Friedl and Fo highlights the demise of mediation

expressed since the 1970s and the ethical interventionist mandate to bring forth victims’

lament as a gesture of political solidarity. Both Friedl and Fo share a concern with the

How to understand the

current global exchanges of gazes embedded in this discursive degree zero of mediation

and the obsession with the real? Brownie is an allegory, insofar as she is made to mean

something of a supplementary and symbolic nature with a moral import. As such,

Brownie is an instance of the impulse to withdraw from the self-sufficiency of meaning

and representation. Is this withdrawal marked by the insufficiency of the representation

of catastrophe and victimhood themselves? Or does Friedl’s claim for Brownie’s

“realness” turn her into a relic with an apotropaic function, using the real (elsewhere) as a

shield against the real (here)?

7 Here I evoke a pathology described by Frantz Fanon in Black Skins, White

Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1994), what Said calls the “Spectre of Comparisons,” a double specter or inverted telescope through which one can see oneself only by way of the gaze of the colonizing culture. See as well Benedict Anderson’s reading of José Rizal’s novel Noli me tangere, in which the main character returns to Manila from Europe, where he was educated, and can only see Manila through the European lens, simultaneously close and far.

8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 411.

9

“real”, or rather, with the effort to bring real agents into presence, by means of a de-

contextualization re-framing them as aesthetic intervention. Mediated through the

theatrical apparatus, Fo’s intervention makes that text, voice, and body prevail: the

lament is embodied, brought forth in the flesh. Differently, Friedl’s indexical transfer is

without mediation of the giraffe’s direct self-presentation as a readymade. Moreover, the

indistinction between visualization and embodiment embedded in Brownie’s status as a

proof, reiterates the degree zero of discursivity embedded in ethical intervention. In Fo’s

intervention, presence is inextricable from voice, and political action (praxis) is

manifested as poiesis. In Friedl, bringing to presence a piece of the real, poiesis is

subsumed to praxis as an ethico-political imperative to attest to Occupation in the West

Bank. Both works highlight the differences of engagement elsewhere in two historical

moments: Third Worldism in the 1970s, at a time in which intellectuals and cultural

producers from the West had a political relationship to the Third World (a kind of proto-

global cartography with Marxist-Leninism as the common code) and a geo-political

moment in which the ethics of human rights has become the grounds for intervention

elsewhere. In aesthetic terms, interventionism is a practice that either functions as the

aesthetic supplement of journalism, speaking truth to power, or seeks to implement more

or less temporary site-specific liberogenic devices in public spaces or as social work

elsewhere. 9

9 As defined by Foucault (in 1979), intervention is a manipulation of the social in

order to introduce additional freedoms, a kind of Keynesianism, as an ensemble of ‘liberogenic devices’ that seek to produce freedom and through economic development. The problem here is that such devices risk may lead to exactly the opposite of what was intended, becoming instead the mainspring of control. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79, Palgrave, New York, 2008, pp. 67, 69

These tendencies prevail since the 1990s, at times inextricable from the

10

frame of ethnography and cultural analysis. Is it possible to disentangle the realms of

culture, art, information and neoliberalism, to extricate aesthetic practice from the “non-

discourse” of rights, and to re-politicize it?

11

Introduction

Godard: Les mots, non les choses10

Two of the recurring concerns that aesthetic theory and practice have inherited from the

twentieth century have been the relationship of ethics and politics, and the artists’ ability

or responsibility to represent or to be involved in historical or actual events. These issues

translate into matters of visibility and technique, how to render present the absent or give

voice and presence to those who lack it, in relationship between action or intervention

and poiesis. The work of Jean-Luc Godard is a rewarding opening onto some of the best

known contradictions or oppositions of these issues, including Vertov’s factography,

Brechtian pedagogy, Sartre’s engagement, Maoist direct action, Guy Debord’s

iconoclasm, the Post-structuralist demise of representation, the emancipatory potential of

the media, self-representation and the native informant, the capacity of images to bear

witness or to give testimony, the unrrepresentable, and the problem of the hyperreal

versus more dialectical approaches dealing with the privileged position of the

observer/reporter/artist-ethnographer. Godard’s works that have been dismissed as

partisan or politically “excessive,” especially his two films about the Palestinian question,

(initially Jusqu’à la victoire and the second version of the film, Ici et ailleurs, from 1970-

74 and his reprise of the question in Notre musique in 2004), are particularly rich sources

to study these matters that remain with us today as focal points of any number of

discussions. Jean-Luc Godard’s work is, despite attempts to ideologize, depoliticize, and

aestheticize it, a long meditation on these questions. Through an analysis of these two

10 Intertext from his 1991 film, Nouvelle Vague.

12

critically neglected films, I will track his attempts to lay out some of the contradictions

that are raised in his work.

Few would disagree on the difficulty of writing about Godard and the challenges

posed by devising methods of analysis for his work. For this study, I combined a variety

of approaches such as film theory, intellectual history, visual studies, art history, history

and theoretical analysis. In all chapters, different yet overlapping registers of knowledge

are brought together in order to account for the multiplicity of sensible, technical and

historical textures that Godard interweaves in his work: temporally there are actuality,

history, biography. Moreover, taxonomy of historical subjects or figures is necessary in

order to account for both, shifts in Godard’s positionality as author and for elucidating

the characters in his films: militant, filmmaker, Maoist, journalist, poet, writer,

revolutionary, worker, intellectual, diplomat, professor. At times, I follow Godard’s

method of juxtaposition as a means to discover resonances, parallels or affinities in ways

of addressing similar problematics or even intellectual conversations that are happening

within his films. For that, I invoke a variety of thinkers and filmmakers, some of which

may be influences, res/consonances, fellow travelers, discursive opponents, allies,

references, or distant companions. Some examples are, David W. Griffith’s Intolerance

(1916), Alain Resnais’ La nuit et le brouillard (1956), Michelangelo Antonioni’s The

Passenger (1974), Elias Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2001), Jean Genet’s Captif

Amoureux (1986) and his writings about Palestine, Debord on history and spectacle,

mechanized memory in Jorge-Luis Borges’ short story Funes el memorioso (1938), Elias

Sanbar and the image of Palestine, Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1948),

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), and Marin Karmitz’s La Cause du peuple

13

(1972). Evidently Dziga Vertov and less obviously, Gérard Chaliand as a chronicler of

the revolutions in the third world to paint the situation that Godard and Gorin might have

encountered in the Middle East. Finally, aspects of post-structuralist thought (Foucault,

Deleuze, Kristeva) and the ex-Maoists’ quandaries to date, most notably, Bernard H.

Lévy and Bernard Kouchner who represent paradigmatic shifts in modes and discourses

of militant engagement elsewhere. Godard is evidently in dialogue with the writers Juan

Goytisolo, Jean-Paul Curnier and Mahmoud Darwish (since the late sixties) who appear

in Notre musique. Chris Marker and Jean Rouch are palpable absences – and this is

because to bring them into dialogue with Godard would imply two new projects of their

own.

Godard explored cinematically the revolutionary potential here (France) and the

late sixties and early seventies, in work produced with the Dziga Vertov Group, creating

a revolutionary cinematic cartography in which Palestine acquired a privileged status

because of its connection with European history. Addressing the Palestine Question,

Godard (with Jean-Pierre Gorin and later on with Anne-Marie Miéville) made Ici et

ailleurs between 1970 and 1974 within the frame of Third World political tourism and

the subsequent demise of Maoism as the container of revolutionary politics. Godard

returned to the Palestine Question thirty years later in Notre musique, stopping-over in

post-war Sarajevo, where it became possible for Godard to host a gathering of the Trojan

poets and storytellers of sorts, the exiles and the vanquished of history. In the film,

hopeful reconciliation and rehabilitation are the reverse-shot of a world of violent ethnic

strife evidencing the futility of the politization of grace. Problematizing forms of

humanitarian intervention, Godard addresses the current question of the annihilation of

14

“the art of living together” and further efforts to bring in reconciliation by way of the

imposition of the ethnocentric imperative of “co-existence.” In addition, in 2006 Godard

made two films for Israeli refuseniks,11 and called them prayers: Prière pour les

refuzeniks 1 and 2, a double gesture of support as a prayer and as a gift.12 In May 2008,

the Jerusalem Post

11 In September 2002 Noam Bahat, Matan Kaminer, Adam Maor, Haggai Matar

and Shimri Zameret wrote to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stating that “they would not take part in the oppression of the Palestinian people by serving in the Israeli army.” All five of them were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment –apart from the 14 months they had already served. See

announced that Godard would teach a workshop in Tel Aviv in

connection with the Student Film Festival that was to take place in June. Immediately

PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott) addressed him an

outraged public letter under the headline, “Le Petit Soldat Dancing on Palestinian

Graves?” condemning him and asking him not to go. One who is not familiar with his

work (Prière pour les refuzeniks 1 recycles footage from Le Petit soldat!), or his earlier

direct interventions in the media (Most notably, his intervention in a televised newscast,

live, in 1982 during the Falklands war which I discuss in Chapter 3), and in accord with

the Boycott’s policies would join in condemning Godard. Not surprisingly, however,

Godard forwarded a symbolic statement a few weeks later saying that he “had decided to

call off his trip to Palestine.”

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=429199. Date Consulted: September 29, 2008.

Also in 2003, 13 members of the elite commando Sayeret Matkal unit signed a letter addressed to Ariel Sharon refusing to serve in the occupied territories. See http://oznik.com/news/021225.html Date Consulted: September 29, 2008. Haggai and Matan, generously helped me with visa matters in Israel and who shared with me their copies of the prayer-films which they got from Godard. 12 The films are available on line at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3opar_priere-pour-refuznik-1-jeanluc-goda_shortfilms And http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ou94_priere-pour-refuznik-2-jeanluc-goda_shortfilms. Date consulted: January 31, 2009.

15

Image and speech are at the center of Godard’s work in general, and meet at the

intersection of politics and aesthetics. In its Modern manifestation, representation brings

forth a point of view drawing a certain relationship between the masses, the individual,

and power. The condition for politics is language, and the privileged mode of political

expression is speech. That is, representation depends on speech in order to “make

visible.” If the essential function of speech is to make seen and to arrange the visible, it

does so by fusing two operations, a substitution (which places “before our eyes” that

which is remote in space and time) and an exhibition (which makes visible what is hidden

from sight – it shows). Speech thus makes visible by referring, summoning the absent,

and calling the hidden. In the political realm, representation implies that the state or

political parties deal with individuals who are “represented” in the universal sphere,

marking a gap between their empirical particularity and their legal universality. Yet

representation, in fact, operates through its own restraint because it presupposes a totality

and can thus become a form of control.13 In spite of the potential claims for totality of

representation, I will argue that the relationship between political engagement and

aesthetics as the problem of representation, following Fredric Jameson, “must be

perpetuated as a throbbing pain that won’t go away, rather than as an X-ray plate.”14

13 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London and New York: Verso,

2006), 133. 14 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World

System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 164.

From this we can infer that representation should be taken not as a formal device, but as a

tortuous mechanism that is a given, necessary to account for the act of mediation by way

of translation, intercession, negotiation, which are the means that are inherent to

conveying a world, a point of view.

16

The totalizing aspect of representation was underscored by post-structuralism and

by the May ’68 movement, bringing aesthetico-political representation into crisis.

Making a homology between knowledge, language and politics, students and workers in

May ’68 contested their authority as regimes of representation15

15 Michel De Certeau, “The Power of Speech,” The Capture of Speech and Other

Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 26.

15 Ibid.

by asking: “Who speaks

and acts, for whom and how?” This question can be traced back to Lenin’s inquiry,

“What is to be done?” which assigned intellectuals the role of anticipating or theorizing

the coming emancipation of the proletariat. Having inherited the Leninist model of

engagement, the intellectuals associated with the French Communist Party had the roles

of “fellow travelers,” or of the consciousness of the people. Along with professors and

labor union delegations, intellectuals’ scholarly theories, and the representativeness of

language, students and workers rendered them suspicious as totalizing enterprises. In

political terms, May ’68’s call for self-organization and direct intervention did away with

representation by breaking away from organizing around the fixed signifiers of the Party

and of class struggle. Beyond the struggle to take over power, the late sixties and early

seventies inaugurated a radical political praxis founded upon a struggle for visibility and,

in this sense, politics as a matter of recognition beyond class struggle and by way of

subjectivation. Activists dismissed the Party and organized around specific struggles in

groupuscules, emphasizing direct action and the capture of speech. At the same time,

students and workers brought knowledge and common sense to their limit by breaking

down language to demonstrate its paucity and inability to account for reality. This was

manifested through stammering, nonsensical speech, and by a refusal to speak. Speaking

17

in the name of others was deemed unworthy and anyone and everyone were encouraged

to speak in their name all in an attempt at non-mediated expression, exercising direct

democracy.

By many accounts, the capture of speech turned into a moment of logorrhea, a

noisy cacophony of passionate voices.16 In 1968 Gilles Deleuze taxonomized forms of

speech, dividing it into four moments: he defined passion-action as noise; possession-

privation relates to presence or absence, which is voice; intention-result is opinion –

exercised in the mass media by experts, and persuasion-rhetoric is speech – a more

traditional form of political speech.17

16 Gerald Raunig articulates the capture of speech and the subsequent exercise of

freedom of expression as parrhesia. He recently described the Volkstheater group that emerged in the context of the Viennese May ’68 as an instance of parrhesia from the Greek figure, parrhesiastés, the speaker of truth no matter at what cost. Michel Foucault devoted his last lectures to this figure. See Foucault, “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia,” Berkeley, November 1983. Available at

Along similar lines than Deleuze’s taxonomy,

looking back at May ’68 and self-reflexively, Godard and Miéville state in Ici et ailleurs:

“We put the sound too loud, covering the image inside.” For them, the sound of ideology

had been turned into loud noise (passion-action), hiding and silencing the image that

accompanied the sound – linked to their critique of practical Maoism, as we will see.

Later he brought up this issue as “speech that is shit that is illness” in his script for an

unrealized film, Moi, je (1973), exploring the migration of speech to the media, a

problem which he took further in Ici et ailleurs (1974) and Comment ça va? (1975).

http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/. See also Raunig’s Art and Revolution: Tranvsersal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008), 211-213.

17 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London: Athlon Press, 1990), 245.

18

The French movement of Third Worldism in the sixties and seventies implied

solidarity with revolutionary subjects seeking self-determination by way of de-

colonization and national liberation movements. Disinterested emphatic intellectuals,

cultural producers, and journalists engaged with Third World struggles on the basis of a

common political ideology. Ici et ailleurs is part of the body of (literary, cinematic)

works inspired by this movement. It has been said that in 1970, Yasser Arafat, through

the Information Service Bureau of Fatah, commissioned the Dziga Vertov Group (DVG),

the collective formed by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, to make a film about the

Palestinian revolutionary movement.18 The voice-over to the film narrates the story: in

1970 the film was called Until Victory and was to be assembled from footage shot in

refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria during a 3 month stay in the Spring of

1970.19

18 There are many versions of the story of how Godard came to the Middle East;

one source is the voice-over of the film itself. Godard made statements that are somehow vague. In an unpublished interview David Faroult conducted with Armand Marco (a member of the Dziga Vertov Group who went with them to the Middle East), Marco states that they made efforts to contact the PLO as early as 1969, somewhat linked to Anne-Marie Miéville’s political support of Palestine, and that they went six times between 1969 and 1970.

19 Some other radical political tourists who visited the refugee and training camps hosted by different factions of the PLO were: Bruno Barbey, Armand Deriaz, Francis Reusser, Masao Adachi, Jean Genet (who came to Jordan after the Black September massacres), Dario Fo, Manfred Vosz, Carole Roussoupoluos, Gérard Chaliand, and members of the Rote Armée Faktion.

Before finishing the film, Godard and Gorin planned to return to the Palestinian

refugee and training camps to show the footage and discuss it with the fedayeen. This

was before the Black September massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan:

because many of the actors of the film were killed, Godard and Gorin could not finish the

film as they had planned to and they decided to put the footage aside. It was not until

1973-74 that Godard, in collaboration with Miéville, decided to finally edit and complete

19

the film, titling it Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere). A kind of self-reflexive degree

zero of documentary, the new film is composed of heterogeneous materials of

expression: documentary, diegetic, didactic. The film includes didactic sequences and

non-diegetic elements of different kinds: video-mélanges, images filmed from television

monitors and a slide show, intertitles and videotext. The images filmed in Palestine were

shot in the documentary style – a genre, and now appear in conjunction with diegetic

images of social types: a French working class family and three workers. The family’s

diegesis concerns their relationship to the media, familial problems and the father’s

struggle to find work. Most importantly, the French family is depicted in the domestic

gathering watching television in the living room, becoming the allegory of the mediatized

social space, the site for the shared sensible, portraying the French as a public of

spectators that are part of the community of viewers constituted by the televisual screen.

The shared sensible (visibilities and discursivities) is the only channel available to access

the Palestinian state of affairs from “here” (France). The “French Family” emphasizes the

distinction between the public and private realms and the increasing dissolution of the

public into the latter due to the pervasiveness of the social technique of television. This

dissolution implies the retreat of doxa or opinion to the private realm, to the detriment of

the public sphere. It must be noted that the living room is decorated with Palestinian

tatris, tapestries and rugs. The shared sensible present in the artisanal souvenirs and in the

televisual screen, are the only means available to access the Palestinian state of affairs

from “here” (France). We also see in the film the frequent appearance of the word “ET”

(“and” in French) carved out in Styrofoam and placed like a sculpture on a pedestal.

About the role of the “ET,” Godard wrote:

20

. . . et on a pris ce titre, Ici et Ailleurs en insistant sur le mot et. Le vrai titre du film c’est ET, ce n’est ni Ici ni Ailleurs, c’est ET, c'est Ici ET Ailleurs, c’est-à-dire, un certain mouvement.20

Still from Ici et ailleurs

The word “AND” is the glue between the images. “AND” becomes a provisory zone in

which one cannot discern the signifiers of the images, and this allows for simultaneous

readings of the images in which past and present coexist. That is the movement between

here and elsewhere, which is comprised by a complex interweaving of temporalities and

sensibilities.

Ici et ailleurs is a film about utterances and figures gliding into one another in

relationship to cinematic voice, speech, discourse, and expression as they become

information. In the film we see a panoply of open mouths of politicians, militants, and

people speaking out: Henri Kissinger, Nixon, Golda Meyer, Léon Blum, Hitler, students,

Palestinians. We hear an array of sounds, speeches, and discourses proper to

20 “And we chose this title, Ici et ailleurs, insisting on the word AND. The true

title of the film is AND, it is neither Here nor Elsewhere, it is AND, it is Ici et ailleurs, that is, a certain movement.” Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1980), 303.

21

revolutionary songs, sounds, revolution, nations, and history. The film registers major

epistemological changes that took place in the seventies prompted by the demise of

representation, nationalism, Third Worldism, socialism and communism as ideological

vehicles for revolutionary politics. In Ici et ailleurs, the act of mourning the failure of the

Palestinian revolution – in the face of the Black September massacres in the refugee

camps in Jordan, and the wave of terrorism that followed – becomes the allegory of

failure of all revolutions, from which a lesson is drawn. Further, working through the

collapse of the revolutionary project and imaging Palestinian resistance became for

Godard a matter of the restitution of speech to the absent and to the dead Palestinians – to

whom, as Godard laments in the film, they had not listened.

When the Third World revolutions failed or were betrayed, the form of

engagement with the “elsewhere,” evidently shifted. Within the wave of anti-

totalitarianism, Jacques Juillard wrote that the revolutionary politics of emancipation had

begun to strangle former colonized people’s rights, and that this called for the imperative

to safeguard their human rights.21 Since then, Third World subjects have been figured as

either terrorists or victims who are incapable of determining themselves politically, which

goes hand in hand with their perceived incapacity to “develop” economically. Doing

away with political practice based on Marxist ideology, has given leeway to new models

for engagement and emancipation that seek to account for the real of reality at the degree

zero of ideology. Further, some forms of aesthetic expression “post” mediation and

ideology have been foregrounded in the “good choice” of “moral interestedness.”22

21 Juillard, Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979),145-46. 22 Barthes, Le Neutre : Cours au Collège de France (1977-78), (Paris: Seuil,

2002), 33.

22

Parallel to the passage to the “non-discursive” was the emergence of the cultural field,

which is a system of social relations in which creation became accomplished as an act of

communication.23 Debatably, if the late 1960s were characterized by struggles for

appearance – opened up by the capture of speech – as recognition in the singular and

within a polyvalent tissue, forty years after, voices keep on addressing power from a

moral discursive site of the “exception,” creating an excess of presence by amalgamating

voice and face.24

The demise of mediation and subsequently of revolutionary politics here and

elsewhere, and the urgency of the state of exception in most parts of the world, has thus

prompted morally interested observers to bring the precariousness of life to the fore in the

most direct and realistic way possible. Documentary form is the privileged genre to carry

out the ethico-political imperative to bear witness and to speak truth to power, because of

its capability to convey “reality effects” that signify immediacy and urgency. Moreover,

the domain of rights as “non-discourse” tends to efface the distinction between the

documentarist’s position as external observer. Victims and witnesses speak the language

of singular counter-memory, testimony or confession, denouncing oppression, injustice

and dispossession. The problem is that presence is imposed as immediacy at the cost of

speech, rendering the speaking subject and the subject of speech indistinguishable,

amalgamating voice and face as well as document and subject of speech. This is linked to

Arguably, the amalgamation of voice implies a forced intimacy and a

differential, transparent relationship with the elsewhere that is constructed a priori.

23 Debray, Le pouvoir intellectuel en France, in English: Teachers, Writers,

Celebrities: The Intellectuals in Modern France (London: Verso, 1981), 32. 24 Here I understand the “face” as the literalization and simplification of Lévinas’

conceptualization of alterity by sensibilities that denounce injustice and demand that rights be respected.

23

images’ burden to convey knowledge (or information) and their interexchangeability with

the kind of knowledge that can be acquired from empirical experience.

Krzysztof Wodizcko, The Tijuana Projection, 200125

Furthermore, from the eighties on, the Anglo-Saxon multicultural, pluralistic model

accommodated the post-colonial figure of the “subaltern,” which has co-existed since

with the figures of victims and terrorists, substituting the former figure of the

revolutionary Third World subject. To resist as subaltern, on the one hand, implies a

politics of recognition and self-representation: “I speak therefore I am” = “I am therefore

I resist.” The subaltern’s is a speech act that asserts presence as a way to be recognized.

26

25An example from contemporary interventionist aesthetic practice is Krzysztof

Wodiczko’s 2000 Tijuana Projection, for which he filmed women workers from the border sweatshops denouncing their working conditions and then projected their faces in the 60-foot-diameter façade of the Tijuana Cultural Center.

26 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 74. Spivak defined the term “subaltern” in 1988 as a “S/subject cautiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, which belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor.” She argued further that the subaltern cannot speak, because she is the poorest woman in the South. The postcolonial positionality “as subaltern” precisely veils the subaltern’s muteness because, for her, the Third World elite as “subalterns” function as agents for the First World, rendering their attempts to teach, listen, and let the subaltern speak futile.

The production of a subject is the political work as the main imperative is to provide a

24

singular and radical counter-narrative to hegemonic history. On the other hand, due to the

perceived urgency of the state of exception in most parts of the world, the discursive

functions of cultural producers, journalists, and intellectuals, as well as subalterns, have

the imperative to bring the precariousness of life to the fore in the most direct and

realistic way possible, rendering global processes accessible to the senses here. These

discursive functions address a consumerist public composed of an educated middle class

with unprecedented global mobility,27

Today, “Intervention” implies “to do unquestionable good elsewhere” in the form of

economic development or the creation of infrastructure. As defined by Foucault (in

1979), intervention is a manipulation of the social in order to introduce additional

freedoms, a kind of Keynesianism. As an ensemble of “liberogenic devices” intervention

seeks to produce freedom and economic development. The problem here is that such

devices may risk leading to exactly the opposite of what was intended, becoming instead

the mainspring of control. Currently “Site-specific intervention” is the prevailing mode of

aesthetic practice; biennials here and elsewhere are characterized by their implementation

of short-term culturalizing “liberogenic” aesthetic devices; interventionism creates a right

thereby imposing on them – by proxy – the

imperative to bear witness. Within this framework, self-representation implies speaking

truth to power, a politics of morality (the expression of the political as a right), making

infinite demands of restitution to the state and denouncing capitalist violence by inserting

oneself within the all-encompassing capitalistic machine that is resilient to interruptions.

27 A character from Chris Kraus’s novel Torpor wonders, ponders on what it

means to be Third-World-savvy. (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006). For a discussion about the links between cultural production and tourism see Boris Groys, “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction,” Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

25

angle with the politics of denunciation (of speaking truth to power) and subjectivation,

the struggle for the recognition of the equality of rights.

Some current aesthetic practices grounded on addressing power from a moral

perspective that may overlap with journalism and intervention are: confessing one’s

history as the alternative to hegemony, denouncing the wrongs done to the self or to the

other, making known the violation of one’s or the other’s rights.28 For Deleuze, a new

form of repression emerged from the journalization of authors, further prompted by the

widespread availability of technologies of communication, creating excess of speech and

the mediatization of expression (inevitably conditioned by the apparatus), a kind of

spurious freedom of speech that opened up the disappearance of the potential for

dialogue.29

28 Stefan Jonsson has argued recently that aesthetics current function is as the supplement of journalism. Instances are David Lamelas’ pioneering work, Information Station for the Vietnam War for the 1968 Venice Biennial, and works by Alfredo Jaar, Hans Haacke, and the Raqs Media Collective. This supplementary function is echoed as well as in the current documentary turn. See: “Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization,” Nordicom Review 1-2 (2004), Special issue of the 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, edited by Ulla Carlsson.

This includes to protest suffering and to speak truth to power, which

following Jacques Rancière, they are interminable efforts to fill the gaps between fact

http://www.nordicom.gu.se/common/publ_pdf/157_057-068.pdf. Date consulted: September 23, 2008.

29 “Les forces de répression n’empêchent pas les gens de s’exprimer, elles les forcent au contraire de s’exprimer. Douceur de n’avoir rien à dire, droit de n’avoir rien à dire, puisque c’est la condition pour que se forme quelque chose de rare ou de raréfie qui méritait un peu d’être dit. Ce dont on crève actuellement, ce n’est pas du brouillage, c’est des propositions qui n’ont aucun intérêt… Il n’y a pas de lieu pour discuter, jamais.” “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we are plagued by these days is not a blocking of communication, but pointless statements . . . There is never a place to discuss anything.” Gilles Deleuze, “Les intercesseurs,” Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 174. In English, Negotiations trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 129-130.

26

(dispossession, injustice) and law (rights), which precisely operate by creating

consensus.30 What does it mean to protest suffering, is it different from acknowledging

it?31

The crisis of the revolutionary subject prompted further the decline – almost total

disappearance – of the working class as a historical actor, and this decline was parallel to

the invention of social work. Reflecting this shift, new practices that engage with the

social tissue have emerged, attempting to reestablish lost or broken social links (relational

or aesthetics of participation), to palliatively undo capitalistic dispossession (artists’

collectives that operate similarly to NGOs), or to recuperate urban public space via

interventionist practice. Such practices are conceived not as the illustration, but as part of

the struggle – if not the struggle itself – for recognition, betterment and liberation.

32

30 Rancière problematizes the communicative model for politics because the partners on the exchange are pre-constituted. Rather, insofar as he locates the political form of exchange as dissensus, the political develops through argument, “developing a demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that she ‘normally’ has no reason to either see or hear.” He continues, “It is the construction of a paradoxical world that relates two separate worlds.” “Ten Theses on Politics,” translated by Davide Panagia, Theory and Event, Vol. 5, no. 3, 2001.

31 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 114.

32 Edward Said in conversation with W.T.J. Mitchell, “The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said,” Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, edited by Paul A. Bové (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), 49.

Debatably, emancipation here is less an effective or cathartic staging of the act of

liberation from within, and more of a reminder that capitalistic dispossession and

colonization are ongoing; moreover, by rendering immediate enduring voices, cultural

struggles purport an intransitive relationship between praxis and poiesis.

27

Debatably the cultural struggles prompted by the Anglo-Saxon multicultural

model have been projected at the global scale. These practices are situated within

conflicts and relations of power between global mass culture and local cultural projects

(as “site-specific” interventions), in a global zone of “in-betweenness” that celebrates de-

centering and renders a plural interpretation of the world.33 In the global distribution of

the sensible, subalterns and victims share the discursive site from which they address the

viewer. In the wake of the bi-polarity of the Cold War, third voices are consensually

accepted as the other of hegemony and tolerated within the democratic, convivial

coexistence of multiple, plural, or differential discourses. This is a place in which it is

possible to easily accommodate “otherness,” at the core of liberal multicultural ethics and

politics, as marginalized voices have translated their terms of emancipation into the

colonialists’ moral economy of sensible production. Such practices tend to render the

other immediate by way of a priori constitutive differences that render her transparent. At

the best, facile identificatory fantasies of transgressing ethnic boundaries may be

fueled.34

33 This zone has been called “Third Space” (Homi Bhabha), “Hybrid Culture”

(Néstor García Canclini), or “Border Culture” (Guillermo Gómez-Peña). Other terms used to describe this zone are transculture, postcolonial culture, interculture, multiculture and worldculture.

34 As problematized by Hal Foster in 1996, by way of a critique of James Clifford’s concept of “ethnographic self-fashioning” and artistic practices along these lines. See Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1996).

The question that rises is: What are the possibilities of progressive discursive

positions from and about the elsewhere? The references here are G. Spivak, when she

states that the subaltern cannot speak; or Lyotard, who argues that the victim can only

speak by bearing witness to the impossibility of bearing witness; the terrorist cannot

speak because terrorism is a passage a l’acte of annihilation that paradoxically gets

28

translated into a stupefying and terrifying mediatic event. The only possibilities seem to

lie with the native informant or collaborator; or with the interested external observer. By

the 1990s, various kinds of post-national multicultural forms of engagement appeared,

which moved beyond the familiar discursive positions of native informant or subaltern,

and which were embedded in practices of ethical intervention elsewhere or from

elsewhere. Aesthetico-political work tried to operate within “cultural fields of in

bewteeness” reflecting the varying degrees of transparency or opacity of the subject of

speech or image, based on cultural difference. More recently, there has also been a

tendency in artistic practice to strive toward overcoming cultural determination by

highlighting the common or the “universal,” allegedly emanating from the position of

impartial, yet interested citizens of the world from the position crystallized in the

neologisms of the “glocal” or “singuniversal.”

Debatably, the situation of the “culturalization of politics” has purported a further

transitive relation amongst morality, culture, and struggle, giving leeway to wars of

cultural self-expression. An example of such a war is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,

which exists in the global regime of the sensible as a cultural war of expression between

competing narratives of archeologico-historical entitlement and as victims of

annihilation. In the case of Palestinian self-representation, from the outside, the task has

been to elucidate what identity and what struggle is that of the Palestinian in diaspora or

exile; from the inside, it has been to recover memories of that which has been lost, and to

elucidate or to construct the symbols and histories that constitute “Palestinianness” at the

wake of an occupied simulacral nation. Bearing this in mind, the question that rises is: If

the forms of the conflict are occupation by apartheid and urbicide and annihilation by

29

“lawfare,”35 how should we address the expression the conflict, as xenophobic

nationalism, or as the current paradigm of neo-liberal colonialism?36 A dramatic shift in

the possibility of the mise en image of Palestine since the 1970s has become evident. In

the days of the Palestinian Revolutiona, ccording to Jean Genet, “Absence was in their

hands as it was under their feet.”37

35 See Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation,

(London: Verso, 2007) and “Lawfare in Gaza: Legislative Attack,” Monthly Review, March 27, 2009 Available at

This formulation implies agency for self-

determination, which has been translated by the ethical discourse of rights into the

insistent inscription of absence from the land, reiterating ongoing dispossession – from

the inside or from sympathetic points of view from the outside. This kind of ethical

interpellation amalgamates voice and face, seeking recognition affectively without

creating any distance between bodies, arguably hindering the possibility of political

subjectivation. Wars of cultural self-expression are generally based on ethnocentric

identifications and waged within fields of cultural co-existence, and function by seeking

to mobilize empathy and pity (perhaps also guilt?) as political emotions. Following Paul

Gilroy, the problem is that struggles based on racial difference obstruct empathy, thereby

making ethnocentrism inescapable. This further creates imagined communities of

oppressed groups, which lodge in their centre “wounded solidarities,” giving leeway to a

pageant of identities and discursive categories by which their subordination has been

http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/weizman270209.html. Date consulted: April 14, 2009. See also Stephen Graham, “Lessons in Urbicide,” New Left Review 19, (January-February 2003), 63-77.

36 Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, The Global Political Economy of Israel, (New York, Pluto Press, 2002) and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (Toronto: Knopf, 2007).

37 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, (New York: Wesleyan, 1982), 125.

30

either transacted or imposed.38 Perhaps these discursive categories have covered more

urgent matters, such as the world food and ecological crises, geo-economic polarities, and

the international division of labor, as well as the current normalized asymmetries of the

division the world into East and West, Islam versus Democracy or Israelis versus Arabs.

Furthermore, as many have pointed out, there is only one step from ethnocentrism to

annihilation.39

Alain Joxe argued in 2001 that the wars that are being fought at the beginning of

the twenty-first century are genocidal. In his view, Empire’s realist policy means the end

of the theoretical construction of social agents in conflict and their (discursive)

replacement by armed groups without perceived political and social interests. At the

geopolitical scale, in the struggle to assert one nation’s or one group’s power over the

other as a matter of rights, the political subject and the nation’s or the group’s interests

are erased.

40 For Joxe, this causes genocide or the threat of genocide.41

38 Paul Gilroy, Postmodern Melancholia, 55.

39 Susan Sontag wrote that, to the militant, identity is everything: “To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 10.

40 Alain Joxe describes further, current strategic wars as “calculated massacres organized by a decision-making political institution, empirically associated with the attempt to found or re-found a state.” Strategically such “renationalizations” imply a social strategy that concerns land and provokes massive refugee flight, a political strategy, which is the product of state corruption aiming at building a more narrow state power, and a military strategy, legitimated by a politico-military authority. Alain Joxe, “Empire of Disaster,” Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), 52-53.

Joxe draws a

41 He further taxonomizes recent genocides: as “ethnic and local mass murder” (Rwanda, Bosnia); “religious assassination” (Algeria, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan); “political assassinations” of citizens from the left supporting peasant guerillas (Columbia,

31

distinction between recent genocides (Serbia and Croatia); the kind ushered in by British

decolonization: Ireland, India, Palestine or South Africa, and Hitler’s extermination of

European Jewry – which consensually stands out because “Hitler prepared a core of

international imperial conquerors made up of a “master race” biologically selected

through a mythical defense of ethnic cleansing.”42 Today, the world is enduring

defensive, pre-emptive, interventionist and de-politicized wars that are justified in the

name of human rights abuses.43 “Just” wars are the end of the distinction between

aggressive and defensive violence.44 The distinction has been blurred by the prevailing

notion of “moral war,” which defines war as a defense of rights, and rights as the reason

for fighting.45 Evidently, economic interests are not foreign to these interventions.46

Mexico); “limpieza social” (outcasts, homeless, street children, drug addicts, prostitutes (Colombia, Brazil). Ibid, 51.

42 Ibid.

43 The General Assembly of the United Nations, adopted and proclaimed on December 10, 1948 the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights. Available at http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html. Date consulted: December 8, 2008. Seyla Benhabib recently pointed out that: “Article 51 of the UN Charter permits war of self-defense in cases of occurrence of armed attack against a member-state or a member of such an organization as NATO, while the Genocide Convention obliges states to undertake military action to prevent genocide, slavery, and ethnic cleansing – provided the UN Security Council authorizes such actions.” In: “The Legitimacy of the Human Rights,” Daedalus, vol. 137, No. 3, (Summer 2008), 94–104.

44 Alain Joxe, “Empire of Disorder,” 57. 45 Other wars that are justifiable are those that serve to help secessionist

movements (if they prove their representative character), to balance the prior intervention of other powers or to rescue peoples threatened with massacres. Examples cited to explain “just wars” include the Rwandan massacre, global stability, and “weak states” that might be havens for terrorist cells. First published after the Vietnam War, see Waltzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Paperbooks, 2000). Walzer further draws a distinction between “preemptive” and “preventive” wars, a distinction that is exclusive of the English language: A preemptive attack is the anticipation of an attack that one knows it’s coming and a preventive is presupposed by a speculative or distant threat. Michael Walzer in an interview in NPR on December 29, 2005. The radio capsule is available at

32

Highlighting the role of external military and humanitarian interventions in these wars,

Michael Ignatieff recently described them as “nationalist-building” projects (Kosovo,

Afghanistan, Iraq). For him, this situation is a kind of non-colonial imperialism (or

empire lite) that “attempts to order the world of states and markets according to its

national interests.”47 Such “nation-building” exercises are made possible by American

military power and for the sake of global stability and security. Evidently, interventions

take place in strategic zones where “the defense of a principle is simultaneously the

defense of a vital interests,”48 seeking to empower local elites acting in the name of

foreign interests. In sum, Nation-building seeks to align the interests of imperial power

with local self-determination.49

Within the global regime of the sensible, are liberalism and technique, in their

translation into moral cultural struggles, perhaps complicit with hindering the possibility

of the establishment of political relations at the global level? Žižek argues that the demise

of representation brought about by May ’68, inseparable from the end of a politics of

taking over state-power is simultaneously the end of all forms of direct self-organization,

because he wishes to understand self-presentation and re-presentation as interdependent

poles. In other words, for Žižek, direct presentation within absolute democracy is the end

of politics and the beginning of a post-political era. This era is characterized by the

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5073836. Date consulted: October 26, 2008.

46 See for example Tariq Ali’s account of the US invasion of Afghanistan: “Afghanistan: Mirage of the Good War, New Left Review 50 (March-April 2008). In Afflicted Powers, Retort argues that after September 11th, war is necessary “to keep the machine (of Empire) running.” In Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in the Age of War, (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 82.

47 Ibid, 2. 48 Ibid, 110. 49 Ibid.

33

emergence of pockets of resistance within capitalism that assume the logic of absolute

democracy as the background for action. Such pockets are predicated upon a retreat from

power that implies the disavowal of the gap between governamentality and the people.50

It is not that cultural production is uncertain of its politics but, rather, that sensible

production suffers from the deficit of politics – at the most, it reiterates politics’

unrealized democratic potentiality. The shrinking of public space due to increasing

privatization and mediatization, and the liberal consensus has debatably created a

situation in which aesthetic demonstrations – in their collection of objects, gestures and

traces – acquire a substitutive political function. Do these “substitutions” contain the

Absolute democracy implies further the constitution of individuals as singularities or

atoms, which are directly interactive and productive, expressing their creative power and

speaking truth to power (expressing what everyone knows to power that does not listen,

as Žižek says), what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have theorized as the Multitude –

a form of intervention that might also describe how terrorist groups operate, if we

substitute “terror or threat in the public sphere” for “creativity.” If the unacknowledged

gap (this gap is mediation) between governamentality and the people is wide here, the

gaps between foreign policy, transnational capitalist intervention, and activist and

aesthetic practices as solidarity interventions elsewhere are even wider. Bearing foreign

policy’s politics of economy in mind, thus, what does the ability to act globally rely

upon? In a sense, neocolonialism is a pharmakon that offers both the poisons of

destitution and destruction along with the “cures” of development, human rights, and

cultural exchange.

50 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 401.

34

potential for the creation of political spaces or should they just be happy to parody

them?51 A critique of spectacle following Debord’s indictment of the “totalitarianism of

the mass media,” is clearly untimely because such critique is predicated upon the notion

of the need for fixed forms of political representation, appealing to the utopia of social

authenticity as well as burdening images with the weight of “truth” and with the apparent

desires of the collectivity. A formulation that may prove more effective to describe the

relationship between aesthetics and politics is “sensible.” The sensible is the juxtaposition

of the “form of the visible” and the “form of the utterable” that creates a diagram or

figure made out of discursive and visible formations. This means that the visible and the

expressible define two different regimes that are irreducible to each other, as

incommensurable strata that cross over, regulating the “visible” through technologies of

observation and procedures of expression. Here, visibility and utterability are not sight

and speech, but what can be rendered as intelligible and knowable in a society at a given

epoch.52

51 Jacques Rancière, “Politiques de l’esthétique,” Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 84.

52 D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), 54-56.

Today, a kind of ‘world picture’ is drawn in the global regime of the sensible,

which has allowed for a plurality of visions to co-exist in opposition to a singular vision

as Susan Sontag pointed out, in drawing a distinction between Communist (or

totalitarian) regimes and the West. Debatably, what is at stake is not the plurality of

points of view but the visible and the forms of the intelligibility of the visible that we

have in common. Evidently it is not a question of the ‘truth’ of images, or their

relationship or non-relationship to the ‘original,’ but the fact that they are taken as an

equivalent for empirical experience, and thus as forms of knowledge, with the capacity to

35

sustain a discourse or to make concrete a concept according to which reality becomes a

system of signs. Following Baudrillard on ‘Sign Value,’ even the most ordinary things

have tended to become signs in Late Capitalism, and all the signs lead to another sign

creating chains of signs, decoding and recoding one another. This transformation of

things into signs is evidently one of the principles of cinema, and for Godard this implies,

“the submission of cinema to the narrative.” In this light, his project of cinema of ‘saving

the real’ can be interpreted as a conception of the image as a promise of flesh and as

vouching for maintaining a relationship of resemblance between image and text. For

Godard ‘the real’ is incertitude, it is ‘trying to see’ with the potential of ‘giving voices

back to their bodies.’

If Godard addressed in the 1970s predicament of the “sound having become so

loud that it drowned the image inside it,” in Notre musique, Godard poses the problem of

the relationship between text an image with the preposition: “the text has been re-covered

by the image.” Godard explains this quandary by demonstrating that a photograph’s

indexicality (as its caption) has been rendered irrelevant – the image of “a ruin” is “any

ruin,” which indicates a kind of disappearance of the invisible (the text). Because of

images’ de-sacralization, we presume that the image bears a relationship of difference (by

some accounts, arbitrary), as opposed to resemblance and incommensurability to its

object and thus the relationship between text and image is considered as arbitrary. In

consequence, a visualized reality may offer itself simultaneously to the gaze and to

knowledge.53

53 Marie-José Mondzain, L’image, peut-elle tuer? (Paris: Bayard 2002), 19.

D.N. Rodowick posited this problem as the “Figural” or the semiotic

regime of electronic and digital communication, where the world of things is penetrated

36

by discourse.54 Another example is the visualization of data or information, where a

relationship of total equivalence is established between the visual and the textual, or the

perception of reality as a system of signs. As a way to tackle these problems, Godard

since the 1980s subscribes to the paradigm of the icon, the Byzantine conception of the

Image as the ambivalence of the material apparition of an immateriality.55

Discourse, text, flesh, body, incarnation, image:

Still from Godard’s La Chinoise, 1967.

By way of

montage, he underscores this ambivalence seeking to secularly re-sacralize the image.

Godard is an iconophile. His theory of images has drawn upon interpretations of Marx

and realism in the sixties, such as Brecht and Althusser, as we will see in chapter 1. For

Godard, an analogue image “ce n’est pas le réel d’une réflexion mais la réflexion du ce

54 D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, 8.

55 In order to explicate Godard’s appropriation of icon theory I am drawing from Marie-José Mondzain’s investigations of Byzantine icon theory in her books: Image, icône, économie: Les Sources Byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1998) trans. Rico Franses; Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford: The University Press, 2004); and L’image: peut-elle tuer? (Paris: Bayard, 2002).

37

réel.”56 Aligned with Brecht’s critique of Lukács, Godard’s filmic materialism entails

that there is a gap between reality and its cinematic reflection, which is rendered opaque

by the cinematic apparatus. Through a scientific practice of filming and montage, it

becomes possible to pierce through the ideology of the apparatus and arrive at the real –

which is self-knowledge: “I try to see.” In a word play between reflection in the

materialist sense and réflexion (in French, “thought process”), he has stated: “Je réfléchis

des réflexions,”57 calling attention to his conception of the camera as an epistemological

tool and of montage as a site for thought: “Réfléchir, pas renvoyer une image.”

Furthermore, for Godard “capturing” an image (prise de vue) is mortal, although the

recording of reality can capture something that is neither visible nor audible otherwise.

That which is captured can be restituted and resurrected by way of montage and

projection. That is why for him, cinema is “la réalité vingt-quatre fois par seconde.”58

Depuis Platon et l’histoire de la caverne, on a conscience que la rétine garde un souvenir, que le langage est lié à cette persistance rétinienne, et qu’il y a quelque chose de mortel dans la vue. D’ailleurs, la “prise de vue,” c’est un terme très prédateur. Dans la fausse reproduction de la réalité en laquelle on arrive à croire, qui est un vrai/faux passeport par rapport au chemin vers le réel - même si le cinéma ne cherche pas à dire vrai ni à prouver -, il y a quelque chose de triste, de mortel, qui est le renoncement à l’essentiel. On a beaucoup reproché, les littéraires en particulier, la dimension mécanique du cinéma. . . quand on fait du cinéma, il faut essayer de résister à ce renoncement.

In

an interview in 2004 he stated:

59

56 “It is not the real of a reflection, but a reflection of the real.” The sentence is

written in a wall in the flat where La Chinoise (1967) was filmed. 57 In his film JLG par JLG, 1994. 58 “Reality twenty-four times per second.”

59 “After the Platonic story of the cave, we have come to believe that the retina keeps a memory, and that language is tied to this retinal persistence, and that there is something deadly inherent to sight. Speaking of which, the ‘prise de vue’ (the taking of a view) is a rather predatory term. In the false reproduction of reality in which we may

38

The cinematic apparatus consists of the projection of the succession of photograms in the

filmstrip. Human eye-perception has the particularity that the retina keeps a memory of

the previous photogram, and that is why in the projection, we see the illusion of

cinematic continuity. For Godard, this visual memory is tied to language because we

narrativize the film after-image. Furthermore, there is something mortal in sight insofar

as forgetting is immanent to the actualization by way of language of visual memory – this

is where the potential of the new is lodged. Godard’s call for resisting to give up the

essential is not a denigration of vision, but an acknowledgment of the limits of the

visible. The “essential” is the belief in images, which can only be sustained in

dissimilitude because things in images are substantially foreign to the things themselves.

This further implies, following the logic of the icon, that the image is found in the gap

between the visible and the subject of the gaze, as this gap is made visible by the voice.60

The “essential” is the possibility of “incarnation”, a promise of flesh: the becoming verb,

word, of the voice and of speech, and the body is the threshold for containing the verb.

For Godard cinema is a privileged site for the interplay between language and the image,

cinema is “des formes qui cheminent vers la parole.”61

come to believe in, which is a true/false passport in relationship to the road toward the real –even if cinema does not seek to tell truths or to prove something –there is something sad, something deadly, which is the renunciation of the essential. People have complained a lot, particularly people in the literary field, about the mechanical dimension of cinema… when we make cinema, we have to try to resist against the disavowal [of the essential). Godard in a public conversation with Elias Sanbar at the Volcan au Havre, as reported by Christophe Kantcheff in “Jean-Luc Godard – Elias Sanbar,” Politis, Sunday January 16, 2005,

http://www.politis.fr/article1213.html. Date consulted: March 22, 2008.

60 Marie-José Mondzain, L’image –peut-elle tuer?, 19. 61 “Forms that walk towards speech.” From the voice-over of 3a of Histoire(s) du

cinéma (1998).

39

Godard has launched a war against the culture industry, Hollywood and the mass

media, and has claimed to be “the Jew of cinema.” This statement is a paraphrase from

Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “German words of foreign derivation are the Jews of

language.”62 We can read Godard’s utterance as his ongoing effort to construct a

marginal position,63 a self-proclaimed position of an insider outside regarding Cinema –

his current production company with Miéville is called Périphéria. Evidently his theory

of image and site of enunciation modulate according to the state of affairs in the present,

in dialogue with current events. For example, in the sixties, he joined in the battle against

representation, transubstantiating class struggle into image/sound struggle by way of the

preposition: “Le son c’est le délégué syndical de l’oeil.”64

62 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 110. 63 Within the hegemonic historical discourse of Judeo-Christian Europe. 64 “Sound is the union delegate of the eye.” From the script of Le Gai savoir

(1967).

He has also posed the problem

of cinema’s failure or capacity to make visible or to see, engaging in the debates

regarding the mystification of the unrrepresentable, addressing the ban placed on images

and crystallized in his polemic with Claude Lanzmann, as we will see in chapter 4.

Godard argues that everything can be represented, and he has drawn distinctions between

the “unrrepresentable,” the “invisible,” the “inexpressible” and the “infigurable.” For

instance, in Soft and Hard (1985), a short collaboration with Miéville, she states that

images of tenderness between a couple are inexpressible, and that they can be made

visible only like the shell of an egg that gives us to see the surface but not what is

happening inside. The infigurable in icon theory is God’s face, and incarnation is the

becoming image of the infigurable. For Godard, the infigurable is “No movement, no

40

depth, no artifice: the sacred.”65 The sacred is linked to the redemptive aspect of his

project of the restitution of the verb to images by way of montage. Thus, in his films he

makes images appeal (comparaître) to the viewer, delivering (donne à voir) sensibilities

(the signs amongst us), as opposed to rendering or making visible. “Making visible”

presupposes concealment, an absence and invisibility as the opposite of visibility. For

Godard, to deliver sensibilities is to offer the possibility of seeing. According to the logic

of the icon to which Godard subscribes secularly, the invisible is not the negative of the

visible, but the ambivalence of the material apparition of an immateriality, an

ambivalence that is sustained by the voice. Exploring the image’s relationship to the

visible, that is, how it appears within the apparatus and how it addresses the viewer, he

experiments with technique, form, and a pedagogical mode of address – imbued by

anxiety of blindness and the desire to see. To deliver sensibilities, Godard invokes

allegories, performing the acts of naming, showing, juxtaposing, and citing. His methods

are the Kino-eye, appropriation and stratigraphy. For him, cinema is not “une pensée qui

forme,” (in-forms) but “très exactement une forme qui pense”66

History (“mon histoire, l’histoire du cinéma, raconter une histoire ou pas”)

– that is the power of

montage.

67

65 Line spoken by Godard in his lecture in Notre musique. 66 “It is not a kind of thought that forms but quite exactly, a form that thinks.”

From the voice-over of 3a in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998).

is a

pivotal concern. Godard’s history is Eurocentric and privileges World War II. Godard

was 15 when the extermination of European Jewry unfolded in silence: “On disait, qu’on

67 “My history, the history of cinema, whether to tell a story or not.” Godard in an interview with Oliver Bombarda and Julien Welter for Cahiers du Cinéma on November 2007. http://www.cahiersducinema.com/article1424.html. Date consulted: September 22, 2008.

41

n’avait rien vu, rien entendu . . . je me suis rendu compte beaucoup plus tard . . . qu’est-ce

qui c’est passé, tout ça; en regrettant souvent qu’il n’ont jamais fait des films de 40 au

45.”68 On another interview, he stated: “Alors c’est ici qu’on peut dire que là où le

cinéma s’est pris les pieds dans lui-même, c’est que cette obligation de voir, il n’a pas su,

n’a pas voulu, il n’a pas pu, il ne l’a pas fait au moment du nazisme.”69 Godard hints here

at his idea that the history of cinema is that of “a missed rendezvous with the history of

its century.” By this Godard does not mean that cinema was incapable of filming the

extermination camps but that cinema was unable to see. Godard thus constructs a history

in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) of films “forewarning” the extermination, comprised of

films like Faust, Nibelungen, La Règle du Jeu, The Great Dictator, Caligari, Nosferatu.70

The “missed rendezvous” between cinema and history are the fictional objects

constructed by the confrontation between poetics and temporalities in his monumental

Histoire(s) du cinéma (1978-98).71

68 “It used to be said that none had seen or heard anything; some time later, I

think, or a lot later I realized. . . what had happened; I regretted often that films weren’t made between 1940-1945 [in Europe].” Ibid.

69 “Thus, it is here that we could say that cinema caught itself against itself, because cinema’s obligation is to see, and at the time of Nazism, it did not know how, it did not want to see, it was unable to see.” Youssef Ishaghpour in dialogue with Godard, Archéologie du cinema et mémorie du siècle (Tours: Farrago, 2000), 73.

70 Debatably, Godard’s reading of cinema before and during World War 2 is aligned with Siegried Kracauer’s psychological reading of German film between 1918-1933 in which he argues that films were addressed to the middle-class, influencing mass behavior and shaping public opinion, creating “deep psychological dispositions predominant in Germany… which influenced the course of events during that time and which will have to be reckoned with in the post-Hitler era.” (Kracauer, 10) Examples are, Caligari’s idolization of power, insane authority and state omnipotence or Die Niebelungen as the triumph of the ornamental over the human and as the patterns of the film as used in Nazi pageantry; or Kuhle Vampe, a film in which young athletes glorify collective life. (Kracauer, 20) See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, (Princeton: The University Press, 1947).

71 Jacques Rancière, in the interview by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille

42

Like Walter Benjamin, Godard conceives the past as an infinite gallery of images

that we can interrogate, render eloquent, and charge with meaning. These images are

deposited in our memory. The filmmaker, as an archivist or a collectionist, gathers the

fragments of the past in order to save it, recomposing it by means of asymmetrical

juxtapositions that, rather than re-writing history, they ask questions. The method is the

Benjaminian-Reverdian juxtaposition of two images and/or sounds potentially evoking an

unthought third. The potential of seeing happens in montage, by juxtaposing two “good”

images. Good images bear with them, for Godard, a “passport” that allows them to “reach

the border to the real.” The “real” in cinema is the “false” reproduction that we come to

believe in. In Godard’s theory, cinema neither seeks truth nor stands as proof of

something other than the Image itself, which is at the border between two in montage. It

may be that sometimes two “bad” images (for example, low density images, stereotypes,

shield-images) do not make up a third. To juxtapose two images is to make two different

scales coexist, to associate two textures, to bring together two points of view; these

operations disturb our visual habits and that is how they provoke the unthought. For

Godard a good Image “comes from a long way” and it is a combination of Brunschwig’s

“trinity” composed of Montaigne’s “I doubt,” Descartes’ “I know,” and Pascal’s “I

believe.”72

Rosello in 2007, available at

Knowledge is self-reflexivity and machinic epistemology; for Godard (as for

http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html#_ftn5. Date consulted: September 20, 2008. See also Rancière’s La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 217.

72 He is quoting Léon Brunschwig’s Descartes et Pascal: Lecteurs de Montaigne (Neuchâtel: Balconnière, 1942). For Brunschwig, the three authors share the concern with taking the question of man away from a formal discipline (epistemology, empiricism) in order to address issues concerning man’s place in the world and destiny. “I doubt, I know, I believe” expresses fundamental attitudes of thought and denounce the mediation

43

Dziga Vertov), making images is not “taking images” (prise de vue), but a way of

considering the camera as an epistemological tool that can “capture” something that is

neither visible nor audible. Doubt in the image is the ambivalence woven in between

thing, text, and image; belief in the image is the search for man’s destiny and place in the

world, rooted in a desire to see. After the demise of revolutionary politics in the 1970s,

and Post-structuralism, which contested pragmatic perception and orthodoxy, the

problem for Deleuze became a world in which humans no longer act but have become

onlookers of the unbearable world. Because it is intolerable, the world has ceased to be

able to think a world or to think itself. The intolerable is not, in Paola Marrati’s reading

of Deleuze, serious injustice (the banality of evil), but the permanent state of everyday

banality. The way out is “To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man

and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as an impossible, the unthinkable, which

nonetheless cannot but be thought.”73

of metaphysics evidencing a relationship to Christian theology and French thought. Godard cited Brunschwig in “Jean-Luc Godard – Elias Sanbar.” 73 Paola Marrati, “The Catholicism of Cinema: Gilles Deleuze on Image and Belief,” Religion and Media ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: The University Press, 2001), 238.

In Notre musique Godard makes a plea for fiction,

denouncing our current incapacity to imagine a futurity and draw links to the world.

Along similar lines, in Ici et ailleurs he states: “Maybe a 1000 years from now

Scheherazade will tell this story differently.” Futurity comes up in Notre musique as

foregrounding the retrospective moment in which the two sides of a conflict can have

something in common, as the possibility of accounting for the two faces of an event as

the grounds for politics.

44

In Notre musique, going against the grain of works from and about elsewhere that

seek restitution, denounce oppression or stage emancipation, (under the privileged form

of documentary), another plea is made on behalf of the belief in images as the right to

fiction, when Jean-Paul Curnier states: “moi je ne crois que dans les histories ou les

témoins se font égorger.”74 This plea goes hand in hand with an appeal in the name of the

text and storytelling, as for Godard, the imaginary and the symbolic are the only registers

that can think horror and beauty, grace and redemption. As we have seen, Godard posed

the question of the image as having “re-covered the text,” which we could compare with

the indistinction between presence, voice, and face as the Figural, the semiotic regime in

which discourse permeates the world of things. Amending his famous aphorism, “Pas une

image juste, juste une image,”75

There is another significant shift from Ici et ailleurs to Notre Musique. The “in

between” in 1974 is a zone of indiscernibility where multiple spatio-temporalities from

here and elsewhere meet. Arguably, this liminal psychic space in the global regime of the

sensible has disappeared due to the new technologies of immediacy and co-presence,

turning space and time into abstractions collapsed onto one another. In Notre Musique,

space has the characteristics of exile; it is an abstraction, liminal and transitory: the

airport, the French Embassy, the Holiday Inn Hotel, the Vijecnica library. Sarajevo is a

site for the encounter of the vanquished and the exiles of history. “Our music” refers to

Godard in Notre Musique makes a plea for a simple

conversation between the past (the extermination of European Jewry) and the present

(Sarajevo, Palestine), the far past (the Native North Americans) and the future, who are

the young Israeli journalist and the Russian-Jewish-French filmmaker.

74 “I only believe in stories in which the witnesses get their throats cut.” 75 “Not an image/conversation that is just, just an image/conversation.”

45

the saying in French “sa musique à lui” which means, her own world or deal. There is

evidently a move from “what is between (entre) us” toward “what is amongst (parmi)

us.” In 2004, Godard puts forth Palestine as a palimpsest of wars of annihilation: the

Trojan War, Sarajevo, the Native North Americans, Palestine. In both films, and from the

European point of view, Godard thinks about the Shoah and the Nakba,76

“The truth has two faces”

as the shot/

reverse-shot, two sides of (a) (his)story(ies). Godard relates the different histories through

his montage practice of the in between in Ici et ailleurs, and by the logic of the

shot/reverse-shot in Notre Musique. This latter logic implies that you are always missing

one of the two sides of an image momentarily, because the following shot provides you

with the missing point of view. As Mahmoud Darwish states in the film:

Hannah Arendt’s quotation of Homer in her Promise of Politics can help elucidate

Godard’s use of the shot/reverse-shot principle in Notre Musique: “even the most hostile

encounter between peoples gives rise to something they have in common . . . so that

when both deed and suffering are over, they can become two sides of the same event.”77

This, Arendt continues, “means that the event itself has already been transformed from

conflict into something else that is first revealed to the remembering and celebrating eye

of the poet or to the retrospective gaze of the historian.”78

76 “Nakba” means “Catastrophe” in Arabic, and it is the name Palestinians have

given to their 1948 expulsion and ongoing erasure from their land. For an archival investigation of the Nakba see Ilán Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007) and Nakba: Palestine 1948, and the Claims of Memory, edited by Leila Abu-Lughod, and Ahmad Sa’di, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

77 Hannah Arendt, Promise of Politics, (New York: Shocken, 2007), 176-77. 78 Ibid.

Godard’s vouching for the

46

dignity of fiction is inextricable from the possibility of self-representation and from

political freedom and equality.

Sarajevo, the former European, multicultural, and multiconfessional Jerusalem at

the border between East and West, is for Godard, an abandoned Tower of Babel.

Sarajevo was a symbol of coexisting Muslim, Christian Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish

communities, embodying cosmopolitan, ethnic and cultural pluralism. The former

Yugoslavia is key to recent European history in the sense that there have been aggressors

(Serb Nationalists, Croats) and victims (Croats, Bosnians, the multiconfessional state).

Although some argue that all sides are equally guilty,79 by 1999 none had been found

responsible for the ethnic cleansing. The war criminals had not been brought to court at

the time when Notre musique was made in spite of the fact that the ethnic cleansing was

documented and denounced.80

79 Žižek ascribes this position to Alain Badiou: “There were ethnic cleansers on

all sides, he says, among the Serbs, the Slovenes and the Bosnians. Serbian nationalism is worthless.” Slavoj Žižek, “NATO as the Left Hand of God” (June 1999), available at:

Peace was imposed by NATO’s military intervention; as

Notre musique implies, this peace came at the cost of true reconciliation and in the name

of “humanitarianism,” evacuating the potential for the rehabilitation of the political,

imposing the ethnocentric model of “co-existence” as a way to restore the past of “living

together.” Can the world of human relationships that is destroyed by war of annihilation

be re-built through judgment, promise and pardon? The relationship drawn between

http://www.lacan.com/Žižek-nato.htm. Date consulted: November 11, 2008. 80 Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, both Bosnian Serb leaders held

responsible for the genocide, had been wanted since 1995 by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb President, was arrested in July 2008 and is now facing trial. Mladic is still at large. This is the latest update on the trials which I found in the Al Jazeera website. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2008/11/20081110125547591148.html Date consulted: November 20, 2008.

47

Greek tragedy, which establishes debt and redress, and the politization of grace and

forgiveness is established in Notre musique as asymmetrical: L’exode (the end of the

tragedy), ce n’est pas l’exodus (permanent condition of exile, expulsion).

Shot: Via the figure of Judith Lerner, Sarajevo is the potential future of the

reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, based on a collective memory constructed by

free individuals within the bonds established by politics, giving leeway to living together

in the manner of speech. Arendt wrote that “when a people loses its political freedom, it

loses its political reality, even if it should succeed in surviving physically,”81 and it

follows that the condition for freedom and politics is that physical necessity and brute

force end.82 Freedom here is the possibility to determine the past that will determine the

present, and a conversation as the pre-condition for the political as dialogue. For Arendt,

what perishes is a world of speech created by human relationships.83

81 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 161. 82 Ibid, 119. 83 Ibid, 161.

Reverse-shot: In

Notre musique, worlds and links amongst them are painted as violent ethnic strife

embedded in centuries of missed encounters and pending restitutions. It is a world

inhabited by different stories, marked by the wounds of exile and of dominance; that is,

racial wounds. This is emphasized by the citation by way of Olga Bodsky, a character

from the film, who reads David Goodis’s 1987 novel, Streets of No Return, a novel about

the race riots in L.A.’s Skid Row. The Godardian lesson in Notre musique points as an

ethics based on the fact that we are all guilty for everyone and for everything (but I am

guiltiest of us all). Forgiveness is grace and survivors are not the “Other,” but “someone

else.”

48

Chapter 1

Here: Who Speaks? (1968)

Faire 2, c’est connaître l’histoire des luttes révolutionnaires et être déterminé par elles. Faire 2, c’est produire la connaissance scientifique des luttes révolutionnaires et de leur histoire.

Jean-Luc Godard.84

Jean Genet.

Ce qu’on appelle révolutions poétiques ou artistiques ne sont pas exactement des révolutions. Elles affinent la vision (qu’on a du monde), elles la complètent, elles la rendent plus complexe, mais elles ne la transforment pas du tout comme une révolution sociale ou politique. Quand les révolutionnaires réussissent un changement total de la société, ils se trouvent en face de ce problème-ci: donner une expression, exprimer d’une façon aussi adéquate que possible leur révolution. Il me semble que tous les révolutionnaires se servent des moyens les plus académiques de la société qu’ils viennent de renverser ou qu’ils se proposent de renverser.

85

1. Enunciative Positions and the Avant-garde

Godard’s filmography between 1967 and 1974, periodized by Godard scholarship as the

“Marxist-Leninist years,” includes work produced by the Dziga Vertov Group. This era

culminates with the beginning of Godard’s collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville

within the framework of Sonimage, their production company, after the dissolution of the

1 To do (number) 2, is to acquire knowledge about revolutionary struggles and to be determined by them. To do (number) 2, is to produce scientific knowledge of revolutionary struggles and their history. Jean-Luc Godard, “Que Faire?” Handwritten by Godard in 1969. The facsimile was used for a collage published in the first number of the British Cinema Journal Afterimage, in 1970. It was reproduced in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, ed. Nicole Brenez and Michael Witt, (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006), 145-161.

85 That which we call “poetic” or “artistic” revolutions are not exactly revolutions. They sharpen the vision (that we have of the world), they complete it, they render it in a complex way, but they do not transform (the world) at all like a social or political revolution would. When revolutionaries manage to accomplish a complete change in society, they face the following problem: how to give expression or to express in an adequate manner their revolution. It seems to me that (so far), all revolutionaries have made use of the most academic means from the society which they just brought down, or which they intend to bring down. Jean Genet, “Entretien avec Robert Fichte,” L’ennemi déclaré: textes et entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 152.

49

DVG in 1972. The “Leftist trip period,” as Godard calls it, could be explicated by

bracketing it with two references to artistic practices loyal to a cause or committed

positions: opening with André Breton and closing with the apparition of a poster of

Picasso’s Guernica in Ici et ailleurs, which Godard used to situate himself vis-à-vis Jean-

Paul Sartre’s committed position. Arguably, Godard adopted Breton’s and Sartre’s

vanguardist positions as contradictory attitudes: Ascribing to Breton the position of

objective denunciation versus the unbridgeable activities of artistic enunciation and

engaged activism in Sartre, and synthesized them in the form of “militant filmmaking.”

We must consider, however, that Godard’s revolutionary constellation cannot be reduced

to these literary references. For Godard, Dziga Vertov and Bertolt Brecht are the

pioneers, Breton is a deviation, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a shared

paradigm, and Sartre is his bête noire. Godard was in dialogue as well with the French

militant avant-garde in and around ’68 and with their revival of the Russian Formalist

avant-garde (i.e., by making ciné-tracts, a genre invented by Dziga Vertov), along with

Brechtian instruction and Althusserian scientism, instilled by a self-critical theoretical

practice influenced by Marxist-Leninism. Finally, regarding filmic theory and practice,

Godard engaged with a debate centered on political filmmaking between the journals

Cahiers du cinéma and Cinéthique in 1969, in a “position” text he published in the latter.

Cahiers position entailed that you could not “change” people with revolutionary movies

as there can only be “revolutionary” critics looking at the contradictions inherent to

filmic practice. Cinéthique supported a radical film practice bordering on prescription, as

we will see below.86

86 In the seventies, the journal La Nouvelle Critique attempted to bridge both

50

The French literary references, Breton and Sartre, are inseparable from the history

and tradition of the French avant-garde. They should be considered in the light of the

intellectuals’ relationship to the French Communist Party (PCF) of which Althusser was a

member, Breton was a dissident and for which Sartre was a distanced “fellow traveler.”

Between the end of World War II and 1965, intellectuals had a pivotal role in the French

Communist Party (which was modeled after Lenin’s vanguardist party). As prescribed in

What is to be done?, Lenin’s Party functioned as the vanguard of the proletariat, a highly

centralized body organized around a core of experienced intellectuals called “professional

revolutionaries,” who were leading the social democratic revolution by producing and

conveying political knowledge for the proletariat. Specifically, on the role of the

intellectuals in the vanguard party, Lenin wrote:

[…] The intellectuals must talk to us less of what we already know, and tell us more about what we do not yet know and what we can never learn from our factory and ‘economic’ experience, namely, political knowledge. You intellectuals can acquire this knowledge, and it is your duty to bring it to us in a hundred-and thousand-fold greater measure than you have done up to now; and you must bring it to us, not only in the form of discussions, pamphlets, and articles (which are very often rather dull), but precisely in the form of vivid exposures of what our government and our governing classes are doing at this very moment in all spheres of life.87

This ideological avant-garde operated in the realm of opinion and Leftist common sense,

putting aesthetics and knowledge-production at the service of a political cause, ascribing

to artists the position of porte paroles of humanity. Such a notion of the avant-garde

posits a transitive relationship between art and politics, that is, a causal relationship

journals’ antagonistic positions.

87 Vladimir Ilych Lenin, What is to be done? (1901-02) URL: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/. Date consulted: December 12, 2008.

51

between the two, even allowing for the instrumentalization of art in the name of Leftist

political ideology.88 Traditionally, committed French avant-garde artists, intellectuals and

writers had to take a position regarding the French Communist Party and its dogmatic

aesthetic socialist-realist tendencies.89

The heyday of the PCF as a point of reference for intellectuals coincided with the

period of Structuralism, which was pervaded by a political and intellectual-ethical

discourse that was influenced by Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Structural Linguistics.

The term “intellectual” in France designates a

moral-political vocation that was confirmed at the time of the critical climate of the

Dreyfus affair and epitomized by Emile Zola’s famous 1898 letter “J’accuse.” The notion

of “intellectual” after the PCF’s definition, embraces writers, philosophers, scientists,

scholars, artists, and people in the performing arts and liberal professions. In short, it

designates the function of society’s disseminators of ideas.

90

88 The best example in filmmaking is Jean Renoir’s relationship to the Front

Populaire, who commissioned his film La vie est à nous (1936) for their electoral campaign. For a detailed analysis of the Renoir-FP liaison see Geneviève Guillaume-Grimaud, Le cinéma du Front Populaire (Paris: Lherminier 1986), and “La vie est à nous, a militant film”, co-written with Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, and Jean-Pierre Oudart, 1968-1988, originally published in Cahiers du cinéma 218, (March 1970). Reprinted in Nick Browne’s The Politics of Representation (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1989).

89 David Caute, Communism and the French Intelligentsia (Oxford: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 12.

90 The French Communist Party organized debates around Structuralism and Post-structuralism (addressing, for example, Althusser’s positions on ideology), as it had a policy of receptivity to debate in order to make sure that intellectuals remained within the party, in an attempt to stop their increasing departure since 1956. Two colloquiums were held at Cluny in 1968 and 1970, designed to give rise to a Structuralist Marxism. See François Dose, History of Structuralism: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 90. Around that time, however, progressive intellectuals were associated with the Gauche Prolétarienne, a Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) party.

According to Foucault, the Structuralist period treated “the signifier” (the author, the

52

phallus, the father, the Party) with the greatest respect, giving the floor to intellectuals as

public figures who spoke truths as the consciousness of the people. In the late sixties the

signifier, the phallus, the father and the party were contested along with intellectuals’

status as the consciousness of society. This was an unparalleled situation in which doing

revolutionary work independently of the French Communist Party became possible.91 A

combination of anti-hierarchical political practices took place, waging a symbolic war

against the despotic regime of the signifier, the figure from above who speaks truths.92

91 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” Social Text nos. 9/10 (Spring-

Summer 1984), 182. 92 These practices were later theorized as post-structuralism. See Michel

Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minesotta Press, 2001), xiii.

The war was hypostatized in the questions: Who speaks and acts, from where, for whom

and how? The question Who speaks? interrogates representativity, and it was addressed

to union delegates, intellectuals, professors, writers and artists, equating the production of

knowledge to power. The question From where? means from which regime of

enunciation or from which hegemonic or minoritarian discursive position is the voice

speaking? For whom? is the Maoist question of representability and asks, in the name of

whose interests or what community? How? is a practical question regarding the

relationship between theory and practice, form and content, an issue that stems ultimately

from the materialist quest for knowledge and a scientifico-pedagogical endeavor. In

activist practice, these questions were addressed from the regime of Maoist discourse to

the positions as mediators of the PCF and CGT (Confédération Générale des

Travailleurs). Students and workers contested engaged intellectuals’, artists’, and

delegates’ representativity, accusing them of being aligned with bourgeois interests.

53

Thus, their legitimacy as disinterested agents that could speak critically in the name of

universal values in order to accompany the emancipation of humanity by means of

announcing or advancing the Revolution was brought into question.

Walter Benjamin’s critique of Lenin’s professional intellectual was influential in

the French Sixties. For Benjamin, the problem is that when engaged intellectuals attempt

to integrate themselves into the proletarian forces, they become members of a stratum

that is in between classes, ignoring their own position in the process of production.

According to Benjamin, this “middle” position is impossible, because engaged

intellectuals risk becoming benefactors or ideological patrons, falling into the trap of

logocracy.93 This “middle” position was problematized by the Maoists, who argued that

mediation had failed on two grounds: one, because of the split between theory and

practice was doomed as irreconcilable. Two, because of the activist’s refusal to organize

in the name of a cohesive group formed according to socio-economic relations and

totalizing spatial fields of identification such as “proletariat.” Because of this, in Maoist

theory and practice there was a slippage from the ideologeme “proletariat” to

“revolutionary.”94

93 In earlier version of this text that Benjamin included the following citation of

Trotsky: “When enlightened pacifists undertake to abolish war by means of rationalist arguments, they are simply ridiculous. When the armed masses start to take up the arguments of Reason against War, however, this signifies the end of War.” Trotsky in History of the Russian Revolution vol. 1, p. 362. Trotsky puts forth here two different regimes of enunciation: the “enlightened” intellectuals’ speech, made up of “rationalist arguments,” which are opinions based on knowledge and theory, and the masses’ “speech” conformed by arguments of Reason or causal explanations, that is, arguments based on practice. The crossed-out citation appears in the version of “The Author as Producer,” published in New Left review vol. 1, no. 62 (July-August 1970), 83-19.

94 In linguistics, the suffix “eme” indicates units of structure in the lexicon, grammar, and phonology of languages. I am borrowing the term from Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” Social Text, No. 9/10, (Spring-Summer 1984), 189.

The alliance between students and workers in May ’68 was not only an

54

attempt to unite theory and practice. The students’ insistence on direct contact with the

workers, doing away with forms of mediation such as theory and unions, points to their

project of basing their understanding of the workers upon practice. The political

subjectivity that emerged out of this praxis was built on equality and the invention of

forms that put an end to representation, delegation, and political action based on theories.

The new positions and models of militantism were articulated through the Sino/Soviet

split in 1962-63 that took place within the French Communist Party. From this split, two

Marxist-Leninist factions emerged: the Trotskyites and the Maoists. The one that interests

us here is the anti-hierarchical Maoist faction, represented by the Gauche Prolétarienne,

active from 1968-1974. Rejecting the bureaucracy inherent to political parties,

intellectuals and “revolutionaries” affiliated loosely with the GP and with smaller groups

or groupuscules around specific struggles.95

Godard’s dialogue with the crisis of representativity and his response to the

intense political climate in and around May ’68 were articulated in a strategy based on a

theoretical praxis in a Marxist-Leninist line. He explored politically, aesthetically and

semiotically, within the realm of moving depiction, minding the contradictions inherent

to the question of the artist’s “function” and his/her relationship to empirical reality.

96

95 For an account of French Maoism, see A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and

Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York and London: Praeger, 1998), Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism and Utopianism (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), Christophe Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes: La folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Plôn, 1996), and Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

96 During the events of May ’68 Godard produced ciné-tracts, a form of filmic tracts conceived by Dziga Vertov in the 1920s. These short collaborative films are impossible to access, except one, a collaboration he did with the painter Gérard Frommanger. It is Le rouge, a 3-minute video in which we see red painting spilling over the rest of the French flag.

55

Further, Godard’s Marxist-Leninist vanguard was predicated upon a relationship to art of

the past in a movement of reclamation, contradiction and disavowal. His strategy

consisted of repeating, testing and incorporating different historical and contemporary

avant-garde strategies (Maoism, militant and materialist filmmaking) in a self-referential

rhetoric, pointing at the avant-garde’s contradictions and ideological pitfalls. Arguably,

the logic under which he was operating was not that of the avant-garde but of the war of

position,97

97 Godard’s radical avant-garde position somehow resembles – at least

metaphorically – Antonio Gramsci’s war of position, a combination of strategy and tactics, as opposed to a frontal attack like the vanguardist position. The war of position is a stage in the struggle that takes place behind the trenches, a battle against ideology. The war of position, thus, does not take place in armed struggle but in the political plane; for example, Gandhi’s passive resistance. See Antonio Gramsci, “State and Civil Society,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks edited and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 296-298, and Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,” Gramsci and Marxist Theory ed. Mouffe, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 195-198.

a strategic rather than an ideological stand. Godard’s differentiation included

the avant-garde’s negativity embedded in the Surrealist and Situationist positions, who

operated under an anarchic logic that posited one pole against the other; for example,

freedom against oppression. This negativity was predicated upon a synthesis that takes

place at the point of the destruction of the enemy, for example, “the bourgeoisie.”

Differently, Godard’s was a radical negativity influenced by the Maoist double negativity

or logic of contradictions. Rejecting the reconciliation of opposites by annihilation of one

of the members of the dialectic, Maoist contradiction can be described as some kind of

non-dialectical, eternal struggle of opposites, starting from a principal contradiction to

which sets of other contradictions are subordinated. Maoist contradiction is thus a self-

revolutionizing logic that, instead of reaching a higher order, advances from qualitative

(data) to quantitative (knowledge) through leaps forward and self-critique. Maoist

56

contradiction could be posited as an endlessly repeated negation. In trying to keep the

Revolution alive by avoiding temporary stabilization or restorations of the old Order, the

problem is that this form of non-dialectical struggle leads to a “bad infinity.” As we will

see below, Godard “leaped” out of the “bad infinity” by way of a rhetorical “explosion of

contradictions” in Ici et ailleurs.

Godard’s avant-garde was thus, nominal, insofar as it transformed proper names,

cries, battles and avant-garde positions into concepts and slogans, fictionalizing “class

struggle” and documenting the political actuality. Furthermore, his contradictory avowal

and critique of the history and tradition of political Modernism is at the crossroads of the

Post-structuralist epistemological shift of the separation of the referent from the signifier

and the signified, which pointed at the crisis of representation precisely embedded in the

theoretical and practical ideologemes of the Left: instrumentality, realism, reflexivity,

didacticism and historiography.98 Godard engaged with the French avant-garde as a

genealogical tradition inherited transversally.99

98 Following Fredric Jameson in “Periodizing the Sixties,” 186. The Leftist

ideologemes I mention are part of materialist theoretical practice that was derived from certain readings and practices of Marxism in the sixties.

99 As opposed to vertically. Sartre’s relationship to the Gauche Prolétarienne exemplifies this transversality: he was something like the “great uncle” of the Maoists – la mascote, as Deleuze put it. As we will see, Sartre’s iconic figure of political engagement took over the role that the PCF had occupied before; intellectuals, writers and artists needed to take a position regarding Sartre’s engaged position.

Such genealogical inheritance was

deconstructed and modulated in his work as series of contradictions according to the new

problems that Marxism could no longer account for, such as the unprecedented educated

middle class of consumers or art’s relationship to the explosion of the media and

information. The Marxist Weltanschaung was radically questioned through the crisis of

representativity brought by Maoist practice’s insistence on specifying struggles by way of

57

subjectivation, seeking recognition and equality as opposed to universalizing class

struggle. In this manner, Maoist practice changed classical political action, which had

been predicated upon space and position, embodied in national or class struggle with the

goal of taking over power. The Marxist problem of changing people’s “consciousness”

evolved toward a critique of the political, economic, and institutional regimes producing

truth and discourses (Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses). There was a

displacement of the Marxist struggle against ideology through science, toward contesting

production and propagation of “truth” and “knowledge” by those in power.100

2. Art, Realism, Spectacle: Aragon and Debord

Aside from Maoism, there are more elements to be considered in order to account for

Godard’s vanguardist war of position. During the events of May ’68, Parisian university

walls served as anonymous sites for expression; one of the graffiti at the Sorbonne read:

“L’art est mort. Godard n’y pourra rien.”101

100 Michel Foucault, “La fonction politique de l’intellectuel,” Politique Hebdo, 29

(November-December 1976), 31-33, reprinted in Dits et écrits, volume III (1976-1979). (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 113-114.

101 “Art is dead. Godard will not be able to save it.” Julien Besançon, Les murs ont la parole: Journal mural Mai 68 Sorbonne Odéon Nanterre etc…, (Paris: Tchou, 2007), 42.

This statement contains three conundrums:

the first one is the death of art understood as the failure of modern art’s political project.

By this I mean the general disenchantment with modern art’s utopian project of

announcing, accompanying or contributing to the Revolution. The second conundrum is,

as we have seen, the revolutionary’s problematization of artists’ representativity. The

third conundrum is the sublimation of the fate of art into a(n impotent) proper name. By

1968, “Godard” had come to stand for cinema and for the heir to the tradition of modern

58

art. In a text from 1965, Louis Aragon affirms: “C’est que l’art d’aujourd’hui c’est Jean-

Luc Godard.”102 Aragon saw Godard’s work as the contemporary realization of great art

of the past and compared Pierrot le fou (1965) to Delacroix’s La Mort de Sarandapale

(1827). For Aragon, who championed socialist realism and who was an ardent member

of the PCF, Godard was in 1965 “what we have become.”103 In contrast, the graffiti at the

Sorbonne, “L’art est mort, Godard n’y pourra rien,” bears the anarchic and iconoclastic

spirit of the Situationist International,104 recalling an acerbic text written in 1966 by Guy

Debord in which he rebuffs Aragon’s conviction that Godard was the “inspired leader of

modern art.”105

102 “The art of today is Jean-Luc Godard.” Jacques Aumont would further

Aragon’s conviction by equating Modern Art to cinema (as the most advanced art form of the 20th Century and thus Modernism) as proper name: Godard. See Jacques Aumont, “The Medium” (New York: MoMA, 1992).

For Debord, Godard and modern art had been outmoded immediately by

the May ’68 movement. In his view, Godard was a “spectacular manufacturer of a

103 Louis Aragon, “Qu-est ce l’art, Jean-Luc Godard?” Les Lettres Françaises no. 1096 (September 9-15, 1965). Available online at: http://tapin.free.fr/godard/aragon.html. Date consulted: February 1, 2007. We can see how Aragon would read Pierrot le fou and Une femme mariée as socialist realist films.

104 The graffiti was probably written by someone of the so-called group of enragés, a mixture of politicized students and members of activist cells who began to critique the French education system before the events of May, influenced by the IS. The enragés are associated with Nanterre, where Henri Lefebvre was a Professor, and should not be confused with the Marxist-Leninists or Maoists, who studied at the elite school at Rue d’Ulm (École Normale Supérieure, or ENS), who were Althusser’s students (He had been a member of the PCF since 1948) and founders of the UJC (ml). We know that Jean-Pierre Gorin had been a member of the Union de Jeunes Communistes-Marxistes-léninistes, or UJC (ml), a faction dissident from the French Communist Party (PCF) and the subject of Godard’s film of 1966 La Chinoise.

105 There was another graffiti at the Sorbonne that recalls Situationist animosity toward Godard: “Jean-Luc Godard est le plus con des suisses pro-chinois.” “Godard is the biggest pro-Chinese Swiss asshole.” Julien Besançon, Les murs ont la parole: Journal mural Mai 68 Sorbonne Odéon Nanterre etc…, (Paris: Tchou, 2007)

59

superficial, pseudo-critical art rummaged out of the trashcans of the past.”106 With an

anarchist standpoint toward tradition and images – evident in his monument to

iconoclasm, the 1959 film Hurlements en faveur de Sade – Debord’s avant-garde implies

a double negativity predicated upon a historical understanding of the avant-garde’s

project as the negation of art that ultimately finds accommodation within the institution

of art and therefore requires to be negated again. Debord’s battlefield is Spectacle, a stage

in capitalism in which everything has become its own simulacral inversed image (in the

negative Platonic sense): “Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une

représentation.”107 The conditions for Spectacle are the democratization of signs and an

unprecedentedly literate society that produces and consumes its own desires through

images. Debord’s double negation would result in anti-art: a utopian space beyond labor

and leisure in which the masses could be liberated from the oppression of the tyranny of

blinding Spectacle. Debord’s avant-garde negates both, Dada’s institutionalization and

Surrealism’s reverent desacralizations; in them, the logic of destruction served as an

ideological weapon against the field of bourgeois culture.108

106 Guy Debord, “The Role of Godard” (1966), Situationist International

Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), 175-76. Godard responded to Debord by describing his film Weekend (1967) in the intertitles as “A film found in the trash heap.” Kaja Silverman read this as a statement by Godard marking the beginning of his “authorial divestiture.”

107 “Everything that was directly lived has drifted away in its own representation.” La Societé du Spectacle (1967), (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 9. Available in English at

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm. 108 See Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing

the Language of Contestation in Postwar France 1945-1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: October, 2007), 103.

Differently, Debord’s avant-

garde is predicated upon the abolition of art as the realization of art aiming at making that

aesthetic production transcend the realm of Spectacle. For Debord, Spectacle invades

60

everything and allows for the totalitarian administration of the conditions of existence

and thus purpose of his negativity is self-emancipation from the material bases of

Spectacle’s inversion of truth.109

Godard and Debord hold two contradictory positions regarding the production and

consumption of images for and by an unprecedented highly literate middle class. In this

regard, there is clear a shift from the problem that the Russian vanguardists faced in the

1920s, of addressing an illiterate public. How was their art thus going to put itself to the

service of the masses? And how would it deal with the Russian art of the past?

Differently, Godard and Debord shared the problem of addressing an unprecedentedly

literate society. In contrast with Debord’s iconoclastic stand, Godard’s iconophile project

in the late sixties is inextricably linked to the question of representation posed as a

materialist quest for scientific knowledge; such knowledge would be laid out for the

viewer to decrypt as a kind of pedagogic visual literacy. Godard tackled further the

double burden of bearing a proper name that stood for the failed project of aesthetico-

political modernism (“L’art est mort, Godard n’y pourra rien”) and against being the

forced heir of the “realist” avant-garde embedded in Aragon’s phrase: “C’est que l’art

d’aujourd’hui c’est Jean-Luc Godard.” Godard eschews the discursive position that

Aragon conferred on him, the proper name of modern art in the sixties, by repeating

modern art’s aesthetico-political project in order to critique it through self-critique. At the

same time, as we will see in more detail in chapter 3, he addressed the problem of

The methods to overcome the tyranny of Spectacle are

détournement, psychogeography and unitary urbanism, which are aimed at inciting new

situations and new behaviors.

109 Guy Debord, La Societé du Spectacle, 176.

61

Spectacle opposing Debord’s iconoclastic position with his iconophilia.110

3. Engaged Positions: André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre

As I mentioned above, Godard’s Leftist period can be bracketed with two references that

claim different committed positions: Breton and Sartre. First, he claimed an avant-garde

position that he (maliciously?) misattributed to André Breton in Camera Eye, his

contribution to the collectively directed film from 1967, Far from Vietnam. The second

committed declaration is a scene from Ici et ailleurs that crystallizes the conundrum of

the Left around May ’68, in which we see a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica,

presumably bearing upon Godard’s relation to Sartre. We should recall that Guernica was

condemned by Sartre in 1960 and championed by Adorno in 1966; the image’s status as

both an icon for militant struggles and a kitsch object, unlikely to be hanging from a wall

in a working-class family home, renders its presence in the scene quite ambiguous.111

110 In chapter 3, devoted to image, technique and voice, I delve into Godard’s

aphorism: “Une image est quelque chose de vague et compliquée où le monde entre et sors à chaque instant” (“An image is something that is vague and complicated, from which the world comes in and out at every instant”), as Godard’s retort to Debord’s Spectacle.

111 The symbolic power that Guernica has acquired throughout the twentieth century was highlighted by its being covered up in the UN headquarters at the end of January 2003 when a Security Council meeting was held discussing the impending war in Iraq. The reproduction of Guernica was covered, to impede the production of photographs of the Security Council with the image in the background. The collective Retort begins their book Afflicted Powers with a reflection of the meaning of this event crystallized in the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld in front of the UN’s reproduction of Guernica as a way into the question of Spectacle after September 11th. See Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 16.

The painting’s role in this scene from Ici et ailleurs poses the question, Who speaks and

acts, for whom and how? vis-à-vis the relationship between art and politics, and the new

62

role of intellectuals in the relation to the encroaching obsolescence of the Marxist

vanguard.

Still from Ici et ailleurs

The scene takes place in a working-class family’s home, in a room where Guernica hangs

from the wall and in which a little girl is doing her homework. Off-screen we hear the

woman asking her husband: “T’as trouvé?” he answers, “Non, je suis arrivé trop tard.”112

The father goes into the room to greet the girl, who in turn, asks him: “Tu m’expliques

papa? Je ne comprends pas!!”, He answers while walking out: “Non, je n’ai pas le temps,

on verra ça plus tard.”113

112 “Did you find (a job)?” “No, I arrived too late.” 113 “Can you explain to me dad? I don’t understand!!” “No, I don’t have time

now, we’ll see later.”

The scene ends with the girl’s sigh of frustration. In this scene

Godard and Miéville stage the putting out of work of political representation, aligning it

with the crisis of patriarchy. The father can neither work nor help, like the union’s

delegate or the intellectual. Explaining and helping to understand – which are tasks for

intellectuals, militants and fathers – are deferred and put out of work. Godard and

63

Miéville draw in this scene an analogy between patriarchal responsibility and the

revolutionary’s responsibility to mobilize at home. Instead of answering the call to act,

the revolutionary postpones action indefinitely: “I don’t have time, we’ll see later.”

In Camera Eye, Godard claims and misattributes to Breton the avant-garde

position of the long revolutionary patience and of declarative, objective denunciation.

Such a position implies that the artist, while waiting for the revolution, speaks out

ceaselessly for others, conveying his indignation in the name of unjust causes – this is the

position of the French PC: attendistes –. Differently, however, Breton claimed that

although his avant-garde position was Communist, he criticized the PCF’s preference for

Socialist Realism. He wrote: “Les milieux politiques de gauche ne savent apprécier en art

que les formes consacrées, voire périmées . . . ”114 Breton expressed a preference for

Surrealist acts to socialist realism such as “Going down into the street, revolver in hand,

and firing into the crowd at random as long as you can.”115

114 “The leftist political milieu only knows how to appreciate canonical and out-

dated aesthetic forms.” André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, complete edition with a preface by Régis Debray (Paris: France Loisirs, 1962), 248.

115 Ibid.

Taking up the attendiste

position as Breton’s own, in Camera Eye, Godard calls for the imperative of listening to

and transmitting a scream of horror against injustice denouncing the barbarity of

humanity. He states that he is aware that art cannot change the world but what he can do,

as a French filmmaker, is to articulate his rage and criticism, transmitting a scream as

often as he can: that is why he had decided to mention the war in Vietnam in every single

one of his films until it ended (from Vivre sa vie (1962) to Tout va bien (1972), the last

film he made before the war ended in 1973).

64

Still from Loin du Vietnam, 1967

This position is that of objective denunciation, which implies aesthetics’ transitive

relationship to politics: art is put at the service of a critical function, denying the

autonomy of the artistic field with regard to the ethical and political one. Differently than

Godard’s attribution, Breton’s critical position implied that, “true art” or advanced art can

only be led on by social revolution. Breton declared – evidently critiquing Socialist

Realist tendencies of the French Communist Party:

True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time – true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains that bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights, which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture.116

Breton’s notion that “true art” or advanced art is necessarily revolutionary, stands at odds

116 André Breton, “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” trans. Dwight MacDonald,

Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 2nd edition (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 533. Originally published in English in Partisan Review IV no. 1 (Fall 1938), 49-53.

65

with Jean Genet’s assertion that post-Revolutionary art is reactionary art. However for

both, art is not completely foreign to a critical function aiming at emancipating humanity.

The position of objective denunciation that Godard attributes to Breton implies a causal

link between aesthetics and politics: if political freedom, then aesthetic liberation and

vice versa. In other words, objective denunciation entails that aesthetic activity be

intrinsically linked to political action as the means to achieve or announce the

emancipation of humanity.117

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that artists are not mandated by anyone but that they are

called to speak critically in the name of the emancipation of humanity. In that sense,

objective denunciation is close to Sartre’s principle of collective objectivity, which

implies the exercise of one’s freedom in order to act in the name of collective values.

Sartre’s stand implies a schizophrenic split between the “writer function” and the

“intellectual function.” In Sartre’s view, a writer inhabits a fundamental contradiction. On

the one hand, the artist/writer purports creatively her being-in-the-world through

language, producing partial yet universalizing non-knowledge, by which Sartre means

that creation is non-scientific knowledge.

118

117 In their typical self-reflexive mode of avowal and rejection, Godard and Gorin

mocked Breton at the end of the script for Vladimir and Rosa (1970): “Si on était des vieux cons de surréalistes on dirait que ces images immobiles de Vladimir et Rosa seront ‘explosantes-fixes ou ne seront pas.’ Mais comme on est seulement des braves m-l un peu cons, on ne le dira pas.” (“If we were old stupid surrealists, we would say that these fixed images of Vladimir and Rosa would be ‘explosive-stills’ or that they will not be at all. But because we are just a couple of brave and a bit stupid Marxist-Leninists, we will not say it.”) Published in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 164.

118 A distinction should be drawn between Sartre and Bataille’s notion of non-knowledge, which the latter analyzed in his lectures and writings from the 1950s. Whereas for Sartre creative production is non-knowledge because it is not “scientific knowledge,” Bataille experiments with the idea of non-knowledge as the antithesis of Hegel’s absolute knowledge: to “know nothing” as opposed to “knowing everything.”

66

The writer is also capable of producing practical knowledge, and she does so not

in her own work but by operating in “lived reality,” in the name of universal truth. What

is at stake here for Sartre is the “utility” of works of art and the contradictory situation in

which writers live: the writer produces non-knowledge that serves, for the most part, the

class in power and has limited outreach toward the masses because artworks are

mandated by class interests. That is why, for Sartre, the writer has two functions: the

intellectual function and the writer function. The intellectual is not mandated by anyone

and, therefore, produces practical truths in the name of the universal.119

(Bataille, 112) He then explores the hypothesis that non-knowledge comes from laughter and tears of sadness, both of which are experiences that are always knowable. From this point of departure, the question of non-knowledge shifts for Bataille toward thought and death. (Bataille, 146) Another formulation of the experience of non-knowledge is at the point of entering knowledge; here, “to know” implies that “I erase the figures from the blackboard.” This falling into obscurity, however, is not annihilation, but “the enjoyment of the night.” Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 204. For a discussion of Bataille, Sartre and non-knowledge see: Jean-Luc Nancy, “Concealed Thinking,” A Finite Thinking, translated by James-Gilbert Walsh, (Stanford: The University Press, 2003). Perhaps what is at stake here is the difference between the beginning and the possibility of thought as negativity, as going back to zero and as the shock of thought in relationship to sensibilities as creativity.

119 See Eric Losfeld, Du rôle de l’intellectuel dans le mouvement révolutionnaire selon Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Pingaud, Dionys Mascolo (Paris: Le terrain vague, 1971) and Sartre’s three conferences from Kyoto, Japan, in 1965, published in Situations, VIII Autour de 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

For Sartre the

two activities were unbridgeable. His double position is exemplary: “Sartre-the-writer,”

spent ten hours a day writing about Flaubert, and “Sartre-the-intellectual” threw himself

onto the struggle by going to speak to the workers, addressing them from atop a barrel

outside of the Renault factory. The “intellectual” fulfills the function to speak out,

differently from the writer, whose function or role is to work subjectively with

67

language.120

Sartre speaking out

Evidently, Sartre drew a distinction between the writer and the intellectual functions in

order to avoid a transitive relationship between politics and aesthetics. For Sartre,

objective denunciation must take place separately from the field of aesthetic production,

in the domain of engaged activism. For him, literature and art are severed from a critical

function. “Freedom” in the aesthetic and political domains is maintained not by a

transitive link, but by a separation: art is autonomous non-knowledge, it may be

subservient to the class in power, and because of that, the artist/writer is an unhappy

consciousness pushed forward to act politically in the empirical realm. For Sartre, a work

of art or literature does not have to be measured up according to its “effectiveness” in the

political or ethical realm because artworks should not be instrumentalized toward being

effective in the political realm. Taking Picasso’s Guernica as an example, he famously

120 Sartre’s position is, in a way, similar to Barthes’ position on the “author

function,” a conception of authorship based on a depersonalization in favor of subjectivity in writing, implying that there is an intransitive relationship between reality and fiction; thus, the writer function implies a separate subject from the real subject that becomes manifest or present in the “here and now” of the reader encountering the text.

68

stated: “Does anyone think that it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause?”121

Furthermore, Sartre’s intellectual function involves a “radical overcoming” (dépassement

radical) of the bourgeois conditions of the writer function in order to become a

“transcendental consciousness” and to bring truth to institutions that lacked it (as the

Party’s consciousness), as well as carrying philosophy to the streets (as the proletariat’s

fellow traveler).122

Evidently, Godard grappled with Sartre’s split between engaged activism and

artistic enunciation. In an interview in 1972, Godard claims that Sartre does not go far

enough because he should at least try to reconcile the intellectual function with the writer

function.

123

121 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (1947) trans. Bernard Frechtam (New

York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), 5. 122 See Pierre Bourdieu, “Sartre, l’invention de l’intellectuel total,” Libération

March 31 1983, 20-21.

He posed this problem as well in Manifeste, a text from 1970: “En littérature

123 Godard explained his relationship to Sartre in this manner: “J’ai participé à quelques actions avec lui [Sartre] pour ‘La Cause du peuple.’ Et par la suite lorsque j’essayais d’en discuter avec lui, ce n’était pas possible. J’essayais de savoir le rapport existant entre son réquisitoire du tribunal Russel et celui contre les Houillères de France, qui étaient des textes remarquables, et ses études anciennes ou récentes sur Flaubert et Mallarmé. Il te répond alors qu’il y a deux hommes en lui. Celui qui continue à écrire sur Flaubert parce qu’il ne voit pas quoi faire d’autre, et celui qui s’est jeté à corps perdu dans la lutte, en allant parler sur un tonneau aux ouvriers de chez Renault. On ne nie ni l’un ni l’autre. On prétend simplement qu’en tant qu’intellectuel se radicalisant, il doit faire le rapport entre les deux positions . . .” (“I participated in some actions with him [Sartre] with [the Leftist journal] ‘La Cause du people.’ After, I tried to have a discussion with him but it was impossible. I wanted to know the relationship that exists between his indictment of the Russel tribunal and the one against the Houillères in France, which were remarkable texts, and his old or more recent studies about Flaubert and Mallarmé. He would answer that there are two men in him. The man continues to write about Flaubert because he does not see what else he could be doing, and the man who has given himself in soul and body to the struggle, going to speak on top of a barrel to workers at the Renault factory. We don’t contest either. We just expect that as a radical intellectual, he would draw a relationship between both positions…”) Interviewed by Marlene Belilos, Michel Boujut, Jean-Claude Deschamps and Pierre-Henri Zoller, first published

69

et en art, lutter sur deux fronts. Le front politique et le front artistique, c’est l’étape

actuelle, et il faut apprendre à résoudre les contradictions entre ces deux fronts.”124

4. The Dziga Vertov Group: Working Through the Ideologemes of the Left

Holding the two stands in suspension allowed him to point at the contradictions inherent

to both models of the political avant-garde. This mirrors Godard’s effort to problematize

the transitive relationship between politics and aesthetics which is implied, on the one

hand, by objective denunciation – as speaking truth to power –, and on the other, by the

separation of artist and activist, implying art’s autonomy and therefore its severance from

a critical function. Bridging Sartre’s split between engaged activism and artistic

enunciation enabled him to claim the position of militant filmmaker, and to distance

himself from the model of objective denunciation. In this manner, Godard kept his

filmmaking practice somehow separate from the “intellectual” function of engaged

activism, yet the two positions – militant and filmmaker – can be easily conjoined

because in his Marxist-Leninist films, the relationship to the political is not clearly

intransitive, as we will see below.

Empirically, Godard was aligned with Marxist-Leninism, gravitating towards the

Proletarian Left Party, collaborating in actions around their journal La Cause du peuple.

Godard also wrote five articles for the Maoist journal J’accuse and participated in the

in Politique Hebdo no. 26-27 (April 1972), reprinted in Godard par Godard (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), 374.

124 “In literature as in art [the task is] to fight in two fronts. The political front and the artistic front; that is the actual stage, we’ll have to learn to resolve the contradictions between these two fronts.” Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 138.

70

creation of the newspaper Libération.125

Godard at the printshop of La Cause du peuple, and Sartre and Godard.

As a filmmaker, Godard reconfigured his practice as a collective enterprise in order to

rethink the notion of authorship and of auteur theory within the frame of the Dziga

Vertov Group. The group then developed a complex and contradictory position vis-à-vis

other militant film collectives and their avant-garde ambitions.126 The group was formed

mainly with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1969 under the banner of the Russian filmmaker, in an

effort to situate their praxis within the history of cinema. At the core of their slogan “Not

to make political films, but to make films politically” (as they put it in their first film, Le

Vent d’est (1969)) was, among other things: “How to discuss something we had lived in

May ’68, and how to account for the confusing “progress” to which May ’68 led?”127

125 See Michael Witt, “Godard dans la presse d’extrême gauche,” Jean-Luc

Godard: Documents, 165-177. 126 During this epoch, militant film collectives flourished in France and elsewhere:

Newsreel in New York, PLON or the Groupes Medevkine, Cinéthique and Cinélutte in Paris, etc.

127 Jean-Pierre Gorin and Godard met in 1966 while Godard was filming La Chinoise. After the events of May ’68, it is said that Godard was seeking to work with someone who was not a filmmaker. He and Gorin attended a meeting of the États Généraux de Cinéma, a collective of militant French filmmakers founded at the time of the events of 1968. For more information on the États Généraux assembly, see Cahiers

71

Afteir the DVG’s slogan, their praxis sought to underlie a break between political films

and films conceived politically. Political films correspond to a metaphysical conception

of the world: these films describe situations – for example, the misery of the world. For

the DVG such films are in accord with bourgeois ideology because they operate under

representational logic; in addition, this discursive position is similar to the notion of

objective denunciation which Godard, as we have seen, dismissed early on. In contrast,

the DVG’s discursive position is Marxist-Leninist (or Maoist), as their “films made

politically” belong to the dialectical conception of the world which implies: adopting a

proletarian subjective class position and doing concrete analyses of concrete situations

with the purpose of showing the world in struggle in order to transform it actively. To

make films politically entails further, to refrain from making images of the world that are

too whole in the name of a relative truth, to study the contradictions that exist between

the relationships of production and the productive forces, and to produce scientific

du cinéma (September 1968) and Silvia Harvey’s account on May ’68 and Film Culture, (1978). The legend tells us that Godard and Gorin, dissatisfied with the eclecticism reigning in the États Généraux, fled the meeting in order to form the Dziga Vertov Group. According to David Faroult, Godard filmed two DVG films with Jean-Henri Roger: British Sounds and Pravda, both in 1969. Gorin came into the picture as a collaborator while Godard was filming Le Vent d’est in Italy, also in ’69, and which is for Faroult the DVG’s manifesto. (David Faroult, “Never More Godard: Le Groupe Dziga Vertov, l’auteur et la signature,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 123.) Other militants who gravitated around the DVG were Gérard Martin, Nathalie Billard and Armand Marco. According to Julia Lesage, Pravda was filmed in Prague with Jean-Henri Roger and Paul Burron (see Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics, 1967-1972,” Jump Cut no. 28, (April 1983). The DVG members thought of themselves as a political group, as a groupuscule or a cell, demarcating themselves from both the politics of film collectives and militant groupuscules in France. The DVG’s first written manifesto appeared in the film journal Cinéthique (No. 5, 1969), titled “Premiers sons anglais,” where they began to outline their political praxis. The Dziga Vertov group revindicated nine films. None of their films are signed; rather, they are revindicated a posteriori in places such as interviews or written documents. See annex 1 for their complete filmography.

72

knowledge of the revolutionary struggles and their history. Their program underscores a

theoretical preoccupation with the relationships between world, image and

representation.128 The DVG’s battle was fought on the field of a scientific theoretical

practice, bringing together theory and practice they addressed the problem of art

becoming an act of communication and then of information. This led to semiotico-visual

experimentations inscribed in discussions about realism, ideology, science, knowledge

(SaVoir/Connaissance),129

Further, Godard and Gorin addressed the question of authorship in a quest for

anonymity and against the “bourgeois notion of auteur” in film, seeking to demarcate

themselves from militant film collectives who also tried to diffuse authorship. As we saw

above, Walter Benjamin’s paradigmatic notion of the “author-producer” was influential

and arguably, the DVG took this model of authorship further, contesting the signature’s

emblematic value, signing under the pseudonym “Dziga Vertov Group.”

mass media and film, which became the basis of the pedagogy

of their “Blackboard films.”

130

128 From the original manuscript, reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 145-

151. 129 In French a distinction is made between forms of knowledge: Connaissance is

any particular body of knowledge (like a discipline); savoir is the discursive condition necessary for the development of connaissance – empirical, subjective knowledge. See Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 2002), 15. Godard evidently emphasizes the ‘voir’ (or seeing) inherent to SaVoir, as part of his visual-epistemological and pedagogical enterprise.

130 See Faroult, “Never More Godard,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 122-125.

The DVG

never signed their films but rather, revindicated them in interviews and texts, while

positing a contradiction by insisting on using Godard’s reputation and name in order to

mobilize funding. Regarding the matter of production, the DVG struggled for the

autonomy of image-and-sound-making, aiming at having complete control of the

73

conditions of production and distribution of their films. Their slogan “To make films

politically” points as well, to the DVG’s self-management principle: “Let the production

command the distribution (and not the other way around).” Gorin declared that while the

French militant filmmakers were reforming the distribution of films, trying to make them

reach out to the masses, the DVG took an opposite stand and focused first and foremost

on changing the relationships and the forces of production of films.131

The DVG continued Godard’s project of carving up different avant-garde

positions, the most obvious one, under the banner of Dziga Vertov in order to situate

themselves within the history of cinema, differently than other film collectives. Militant

film collectives were usually grouped around particular ideological struggles, like Maoist

groupuscules that sought the recognition of specific struggles beyond class determination

– following the practice of subjectivation and a politics of visibility.

132 With the DVG,

the references to film history supplant the revolutionary cause around which the militant

filmmaking collective could be organized (i.e., “immigrant workers,” “women’s rights,”

etc.). Moreover, Godard’s and Gorin’s program took after Vertov’s affirmation that film

is a secondary task to the revolution, a task that they had decided to make their principal

activity.133

131 Michael Goodwin and Greil Marcus, “The Dziga Vertov Group in America:

An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin,” Double Feature: Movies and Politics (New York: Outerbridge and Lazard, 1972), 25.

132 See Godard’s interview with Yvonne Baby first published in Le Monde, April 27th 1972. Reprinted in Godard par Godard, 365.

Also, after Vertov they claimed to aim at seeing and showing the world in the

133 “Cinéma, tâche secondaire de la révolution pour nous actuellement en France; mais nous faisons notre activité principale de cette tâche secondaire.” “Cinema is for us, in France, a secondary task to the revolution, but we make of this secondary task our principal activity.” Manifeste (1970) reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 138. Godard wrote: “There is no cinema above classes, no cinema above class struggle: also we know that the cinema is a secondary task and our program is very simple: to see and

74

name of the revolution. Why Vertov? For the filmmakers, he was the inventor of film-

tracts and “the only Bolshevik filmmaker” in opposition to the “bourgeois filmmaker”

Sergei Eisenstein. This split within the Russian avant-garde is related to the fact that

Eisenstein was said to hold an “idealist” as opposed to “materialist” position in

filmmaking, because he accepted images without exploring their validity and constructed

them without being reflexive about their process of production. In contrast, Vertov’s

“materialist” position implied his concern with the constructive aspect of images. His

concept of the Kino-Eye directed his concern with drawing a distinction between the

naked eye’s and the camera’s relationship to reality, ascribing to the camera the role of

“seeing” the world. In other words, Vertov’s Kino-Eye is a documentary eye: “The

possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the

disguised overt, the acted, non-acted: making falsehood into truth.”134

I described above the DVG’s adoption of Maoist contradiction based on the

infinite negation of negation, noting that Godard implemented anarchic negativity

For Vertov,

cinema was a factory of facts (factography – as we will discuss in Chapter 2), a form of

visual thinking able to decode life “as it is.” Godard’s and Gorin’s repetition of Vertov’s

revolutionary paradigm in terms of image-production transformed Vertov’s practice;

leaping into the French context some 40 years later, they modulated the Kino-Eye

adapting it to the new “revolutionary” conditions. Beyond the old vanguardist logic

influenced by dialectical materialism, the DVG’s aim was not to supersede the history of

cinema through its negation but to create it anew by repeating the old.

show the world in the name of the world proletarian revolution.” Jean-Luc Godard, “Pratique révolutionnaire,” Cinéthique nos. 9-10 (Fall 1971), 74.

134 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 88.

75

towards the Institution of Cinema. After Peter Wollen’s assertion that Godard’s filmic

practice was the equivalent of terrorism in film,135 Godard’s anti-filmmaking approaches

the destruction of film by way of a reversal of the anarchist logic. It does not aim at the

destruction of film in order to begin tabula rasa to create the conditions for a new

beginning from a blank screen. Rather, in Godard, the history of cinema makes up for a

black screen from which the clichés need to be extracted by means of confrontational

juxtapositions of sounds and images. In addition, instead of aiming at cinema’s ideal

form, Godard and Gorin reinvented the rules of cinema by expanding them to the general

regime of image-production. In other words, revolutionizing the institution of cinema

meant on the one hand, making films that were considered as “non-cinema,” or at the

margins of cinema136 and, on the other, taking up a battle in all modes of the techniques

of production of images: film, painting, photography, journalism, television,

advertisement,137

135 See Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Le Vent d’est,” Readings and

Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), 79-91. 136 What would be the difference between non-film and marginal film? 137 Here again we encounter the influence of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The

Author as Producer,” as well as Brecht’s position regarding the matter of the relationship between form and content as a matter of technique. Benjamin argues that instead of asking whether a work of art is reactionary or revolutionary on the basis of its awareness of its position within the relationships of production of its time, we should ask: how does the work stand in them? In other words, what is the function that the work has within the artistic relationships of production of its time, its technique? With the notion of technique we can overcome the sterile opposition between form and content; this notion also indicates how we can determine the relationships between tendency and quality. A work’s artistic tendency can be found in the progress or regression of literary technique.

hoping to expand their innovations into the realm of televisual

production and technique. Television was for them the place where they could create new

relationships of production. It was a site that could offer them a wide range of

technological innovations, the possibility of creating new relationships between spectator

76

and text, and the chance to exploit the pedagogical potential of television, which had been

so far repressed in institutional television practice.138 The DVG’s films – British Sounds

(1969), Pravda (1969), Lotte in Italia (1969), and Vladimir et Rosa (1971) – were co-

produced by London Week Television, Munich Tele-Pool, the European Center for

Radio-Film-Television, and RAI, respectively.139

There has never been revolutionary film within the System. There cannot be. There is the need to be at the margins, trying to profit from the contradictions inherent to the System in order to survive outside of the System. In this manner, we can profit from the System, attempting to radicalize it if it is reformist, like a student reformist: to radicalize it.

In most of the cases, the producers

refused to show the films. The DVG also critiqued the Institution of Cinema by staging

Godard’s “disappearance” as auteur. Since 1968 he retreated to the margins of the

mainstream ways of production and distribution of films. Godard clarified his position as

follows:

140

Following Colin MacCabe, in disappearing Godard demonstrated that films and

filmmakers exist only with a specific set of production relations. Godard’s gesture is

linked to two aspects of cinema that Godard criticizes reflexively: one, the financing of

films, that is, the methods of production and distribution (what comes to mind is the

opening sequence in Tout va bien in which we see Godard signing the checks that will

pay for the cost of production of the movie), and on the other, the notion of auteur which

implies a certain way of organization of sounds and images in particular films.

141

138 Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, with Mick Eaton and

Laura Mulvey (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 120. 139 David Faroult, “The Dziga Vertov Group filmography,” Jean-Luc Godard:

Documents, 132-133. 140 Godard par Godard, 334.

141 Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, 18.

77

4.1 Maoism and the Dziga Vertov Group

In ideological and general terms, the DVG’s political line was Marxist-Leninist or

Maoist,142 opposing in their scripts the revisionism of the PCF and of their faction, the

CGT (Conféderation Géneral de Travailleurs).143

142 For Gérard LeBlanc, the general political line that underlined the DVG’s

practice was theoricism, which he characterized as the production of abstract analyses of real contradictions of social formations. LeBlanc analyzed the specific political lines of Pravda, which he saw as dominated by “dogmatic spontaneism,” –t he same line followed by the students who had quit the PCML-F, critiquing its revisionism. Le Vent d’est was dominated by “Right wing opportunism,” the same line followed by those who tried to maintain the organizations that attempted to take over the student movement in May ’68. For LeBlanc, Lotte in Italia was dominated by “Leftist opportunism,” which he defines as the first line of the Proletarian Left as it was “democratized.” See his “Sur trios films du Groupe Dziga Vertov,” VH 101 no. 6 (September 1972), unpaginated.

143 Another example of a militant film collective aligning itself with a political party is the collective SLON (of which Chris Marker was a member), which chose to work closely with the CGT.

As we have seen, Maoism in France

was a means to take a position against the PCF in accord with the Sino-Soviet split and

yet disengaged from its links to Chinese state-power interests, disconnected from the dark

outcome of the Cultural Revolution. As we have seen, during the sixties in general,

intellectual militant practice impinged directly on advanced cultural practice and

production. In this respect, militant filmic practice was very much in line with a

“tradition” linking political parties and filmmakers. Militant practice in film entailed

introducing class struggle into the sphere of culture, just like the Formalists’ and the

Protekult’s avant-garde strategies in Leninist Russia. In historical terms, the coming

together of students’ contestation with workers’ struggle in May ’68 brought about new

forms to engage with workers, most notably, those created by the GP Maoists. Many of

the members of the former UJC (ml) – Union de Jeunes Communistes Marxistes-

78

Léninistes – were or had been Althusser’s students. Amongst them were Jacques

Rancière, Alain Badiou, André Glucksmann… and Jean-Pierre Gorin. During the events

of May and June, the UJC (ml) as a Party decided not to participate in the strikes,

provoking the Party’s breakdown. Some of them mythically gathered in September 1968

to discuss the events, to study most notably Lenin’s What is to be done? They also

created a Maoist “party,” La Gauche Prolétarienne, and the journal La Cause du Peuple,

both of which were made illegal by Pompidou’s régime.144 Wanting to overcome the

limitations of CGT delegates, the Maoists targeted their bureaucratic structure and

denounced their inability to go beyond attempting to satisfy workers’ bread and water

demands. The Maoists also rejected the model of the Leninist vanguardist party and any

kind of permanent organization with leadership functions. The crisis of professional

intellectuals and mediators inspired them to seek direct communication, and to listen to

workers. They gave themselves the task to learn from workers as opposed to being at

their side or in the front leading their struggle. Their goal was further to create anti-

despotic and anti-hierarchical forms of battle with the working class rendering their

position immanent to the struggle.145

144 By 1972 many gépistes were in prison on political grounds. This drew

attention to the deplorable state of French prisons, prompting the creation of the GIP or “Groupe d’information sur les prisons,” led primarily by Foucault.

145 Michele Manceaux, Les Maos en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 201. Cited by Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism, 102.

They evidently aimed at going beyond old

intellectual types, prioritizing people’s speech as opposed to intellectual expertise or

knowledge: “la parole des gens: que le pouvoir révolutionnaire se fixe comme prioritaire

79

l’expression”.146 In the Maoist war against despotic power, they sought not to take power

in the singular (the power of the State), but to diffuse power in the plural sense by

diffusing speech. They further emphasized action, creating operational models and

drawing theoric-strategic lessons from actions. Seeking to bridge the gap between manual

and intellectual labor, they operated directly in the production plants, laboring alongside

the workers, a practice known as établissement.147 Further, the Maoists confronted the

police at the factories and organized base committees and general assemblies. Other

Maoist tactics included occupying plants, kidnapping bosses until they accepted the

workers’ demands, sabotage and resisting the paramilitary CRS when it attempted to take

over the occupied plants, which garnered media attention.148 A notable Maoist action was

the confrontation with the police at the Renault Factory in Flins in June 1969; violent

confrontations reached a peak in February and March 1972 when Pierre Overney, a

Maoist worker who had been fired, entered the gates of the factory and was shot by the

head of security. Allegedly, 200,000 people (including Sartre and Foucault) attended

Overney’s funeral at Père Lachaise.149

Godard and Gorin engaged directly with Maoist practice in their films. Maoist

materialism is a tool for understanding the development of a thing. This should be done

146 “People’s speech: that the priority of revolutionary power is established as

expression.” Pierre Victor (Bernard-Henry Lévy’s pseudonym), On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 103.

147 The practice of établissement was not new. In the mid-1930s, the thinker and activist Simone Weil experienced the assembly line by enlisting in a factory. See Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1955), (London: Routledge, 2001) and La Condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). See also Robert Linhardt’s L’Établi (Paris: Minuit, 1978), where he narrates his experience in a factory describing the dehumanizing conditions of Taylorist assembly lines.

148 Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism, 103. 149 Ibid, 101-130.

80

by starting from the inside outward, looking at the thing’s relationships to other things,

focusing on self-movement and interaction. This method is grounded on Mao’s principle

that complex things hold many contradictions in their process of development, and it is

contradiction that makes them change. Mao’s contradiction differs from the principle of

dialectical materialism, which conceives change as the sublimation into a higher unity or

step. Maoist materialism implies quantitative changes and leaps into qualitative

changes.150 Strategically, Godard and Gorin called their films materialist fictions.

Following Maoist method, Godard and Gorin would locate a particular contradiction

dominating a concrete situation. Then, they would subordinate secondary contradictions

to the principal one (i.e., “class struggle”), and then examine the contradictions from

various points of view applying different methodological grids for comprehensive study.

After, they would build images accordingly and proceed to self-critique. Their films

British Sounds, Pravda, Lotte in Italia, Vladimir et Rosa, Jusqu’à la victoire (1970), and

Tout va bien (1972), are concrete analyses of the political situations in Britain,

Czechoslovakia, Italy, France, Palestine and France respectively – I will address the

foreign-excursion films in the following chapter within the context of “political tourism,”

aligned with the movement of Third Worldism. Regarding the concrete situation at home,

Godard made La Chinoise in 1967 about a Maoist groupuscule that in a way, foresees the

events of May ’68. Vladimir and Rosa and Tout va Bien engage with the Parisian

situation during the moment of full-fledged Maoist activism.151

150 Mao Tse-Tung, “On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and

Practice, between Knowing and Doing,” and “On Contradiction,” Slavoj Zizek presents Mao on Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), also available at www.marxists.org.

Bearing in mind that the

151 For analytical descriptions and analyses of the DVG films see those by Peter

81

DVG aimed at bridging form and content in their films without amalgamating them, we

can describe them as concrete analyses of the political actuality seen through the lens of

engaged theory and practice, perhaps aiming at de-familiarizing Maoist militant theory

and practice. For example, the phenomenon of the “factory established” is explored in

two of the DVG’s films: Lotte in Italia and Vladimir et Rosa. Lotte in Italia shows a

militant student, Paola, dealing with the contradictions inherent to her subjectivity as

conditioned by her objective modes of existence. In the film we learn about her

experience of establishment in a factory and about her relationships with the Ideological

State Apparatuses such as family, love, university and language.152

4.2 From Zero and Self-critique

Vladimir et Rosa is a

taxonomy of French and American militant Leftist factions, transposed into a fictional

account of the trial of the Chicago Seven situated in Paris. In La Chinoise, Vladimir et

Rosa, and Lotte in Italia, the characters are militants assembled in cells or groupuscules,

dealing with the contradictions inherent to their militant practice. Tout va bien (1972),

addresses Maoist activism four years after May ’68. Here, the activists are older and their

engagement is in conflict with their adult life.

Godard and Gorin built each one of their films following the method of Maoist self-

critique. In an interview that took place during a visit of the DVG to the United States in

Wollen, Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin's Le Vent d’est: Looking at a Film Politically,” Jump Cut, No. 4 (November-December 1974), David Faroult, “Du Vertovisme du Groupe Dziga Vertov,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006), James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution, (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1975), Colin MacCabe, Godard; Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press, 1980), and Gérard Leblanc, “Sur trois films du Dziga Vertov Group.”

152 According to David Faroult, Lotte in Italia is a mise-en-scene of Althusser’s text “Ideological State Apparatus” to which Godard had access because it circulated clandestinely amongst his students before it was published. After David Faroult, as told in a conversation with the author in October 2006.

82

1970, they described this method as the means that enabled them “to go one step

forward.”153 Self-critique is a distancing, self-referential tool that they further used in

order to condemn their films to failure and therefore to “rescue” them from being

ideological accounts of the political actuality. For example, they disavowed Pravda in a

text handed out on the occasion of the projection of the film in 1970 because they saw it

as bourgeois, insofar it had been shot through the means of “political tourism,” and for

being a superficial analysis of the current situation in Czechoslovakia. According to this

text, neither the montage nor the shooting had been successful.154

153 Jean-Luc Godard, “Interview with Godard and Gorin (with Goodwin and

Marcus),” Double Feature, 36. 154 I cite a passage from the handout from the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in

February 1970, on the occasion of a projection of Pravda: “Tournage hâtif, opportuniste, petit-bourgeois. Tournage qui n’est pas du ‘montage avant le montage’ (Vertov). Montage qui n’est que du montage avant le montage, au lieu d’être du montage dans le montage . . . Des images encore fausses parce que produites dans le camp de l’idéologie impérialiste.” “Hasty, opportunistic and petit-bourgeois shooting. This shooting is not ‘montage before montage’ (Vertov). Montage that is not montage before montage, instead of being montage within montage . . . False images because they were still produced within the field of imperialist ideology.” Reprinted in Godard par Godard, 340. In an interview, Godard and Gorin stated about another one of their films, self-critically: “We made the effort to finish it, and not to quit and say it is just garbage. But having made the psychological effort, we must also put a sign on it, to indicate that this is a garbage Marxist-Leninist movie, which is a good way of titling it. At least now we know what not to do anymore. We’ve visited a house in which we’ll never go again (sic). We thought it was a step forward but we realized, how do you say, a jump into emptiness. It was a learning process. And the first thing we learned was that it was not done by group work, but by two individuals.” Kent E. Carroll, “Film and Revolution: Interview with the Dziga Vertov Group,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 83 (October 1970), 54. In another instance of self-critique, Gorin states about One A.M.: “The principle was all wrong. We tried to produce some fiction out of a certain reality, but the problem was the reality itself. You can’t do it like that.” About Sympathy for the Devil, Godard states: “There are a lot of things in the movie that are not understandable, and the picture can be faulted for that because it was dealing with things in an absolute unclear way.” Both quotes are from Double Feature, pp. 10 and 20 respectively.

In a way, self-critique

is a means to do something other than synthetic critique or anarchic obliteration –

Brecht’s V-effect, for example, is another form of critique that refuses synthetic critique.

83

Furthermore, starting at zero meant on the one hand, to begin with the Althusserian basics

of “hearing and seeing,” as Godard sketched out in Le Gai savoir. “Zero” resonates, on

the other hand, with Roland Barthes’ key essay from 1953 in which he argues that

starting at zero implies wiping out écrivance – écrivance is for Barthes the ideolect of a

collectivity and of an intellectual group, a socio-linguistic notion that is at the core of

cultural production.155 For the DVG, “back to zero” meant beginning at the blackboard at

the zero of non-knowledge. In a way, DVG’s self-critique is a victory embedded in a

defeat: they use revolutionary practice, language, form and content nominally and

methodologically in order to be able to disavow it. Further, self-criticism in the DVG’s

work functions as Maoist self-revolutionizing, implying not only overcoming the

contradictions, but creating grounds for an arborescent proliferation of contradictions.

Discursively, self-criticism is not only a correction of the program once the pitfalls

become evident, but also, it is a tool for changing from one stage of development to

another, in order to produce subjective knowledge (leaping forward).156

4.3 Materialist Fictions, Realism and Materialist Filmmaking

Godard and Gorin’s materialist fictions are at the crossroads of Brechtian Realism,

Althusserianism and materialist filmic practice. Realism stems from the historical

materialist Weltanschaung, which presupposes an objective whole based on the

relationships of production as the basis for history. Materialism is a method to produce

objective knowledge through the cognition of the objective whole, describing it in action,

focusing on the relationships of production. Materialism seeks to render the world visible

producing reflections or consciousness of the relationships of production by means of the

155 See Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), 263. 156 Mao Tse-Tung, “On Contradiction,” 63-64.

84

dialectic between essence and appearance, producing objective knowledge of the world.

In literature, after Lukács, realism is the reflection of the objective reality constituted by a

materialist worldview that, following the line of a political party, functions like an

ideological weapon. In Lukács’ prescriptive formulation, realism perceives the overall

significance of the phenomenon described, depicting social types in struggle that have

objective meaning in the total context of the materialist worldview.157

Thus, in the sixties there was a shift from the kind of French Socialist realism

represented by Aragon. The shift was influenced by Brecht’s critique of Lukács and

Barthes’ writings on Brecht. Brecht contested Lukács’ realism on the basis of his

“contentist” definition of realism, which overlooked the question of form by privileging

the nineteenth-century genre of realistic novels from which he developed his own notion

of realism. Militant art and literature were further problematized because they were based

on representational logic. In realism, things are observed from the given point of view of

“Objectivity”

implies here, that the thing depicted exists independently from the subject that perceives

it and thus, perception is the reality of the object. Materialist filmmakers problematized

the objectivity of filmic images, arguing that cinema’s transparency is rendered opaque

by the ideology of the cinematic apparatus. Whereas the object may exist independently

from the subject, the cognition of the object is inevitably imbued with ideology and

therefore it is not necessarily true to objective reality. That is why the true existence of an

object can only be known transcending sensory cognition through a scientific reflection;

in other words, true reality can only be cognized by piercing through its ideology-imbued

reflection, verifying its “objectivity” by means of theoretical practice.

157 Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance” (1938) trans. Roney Livingstone,

Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ernst Bloch (London and New York: Verso, 1987), 33.

85

the relationships of production, presupposing a horizon toward which the author or reader

casts his/her gaze as the basis of meaning. This is a pyramidal logic that bestows the

object a materialist horizon (the base) and to the subject, the author’s eye (the apex). This

horizon constitutes the Law (of society, which is class struggle) as the point of meaning,

equating subject and object of perception.158

Brecht’s work was influential in the discussions of realism in filmmaking. For

Brecht, a scientific-theoretical practice is crucial in an effort to innovate technically and

formally in order to be able to address the proletariat, fusing form and content with

popular culture when required. His practice can be defined as a scientific enterprise that

tackles the problem of realism by seeking experimentally to transform the process of

“knowing the world” into a form of aesthetic experience bound to the real, making the

viewer see it in a new way. In Brecht, the concept of realism acquires cognitive (the

mode of apprehension of reality) as well as aesthetic and pedagogical status.

The challenge posed to this kind of

materialist realism was how to break away from the pyramidal logic of representation not

only by producing self-knowledge of the “horizon” but also through technical

innovations and by means of practice. The contradiction inherent to the difference

between the subject and object was played out in practice, understanding it as the locus of

the mutual modification of subject and object.

159

158 Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” (1973), Image, Music, Text,

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 69-78. 159 Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” Aesthetics and Politics (New York: NLB, 1979), 205.

He sought

to discover the “causal complexes of society” by building new models (away from given

literary models, aiming at Lukács’ socialist-realism) and then testing them. His aim was

to unmask the prevailing view of things, which is the view of those who are in power, and

86

to go beyond realism’s premise of bringing class struggle into narrative content. Brecht’s

theoretical practice of producing self-knowledge, his mandate of technical innovation and

of unveiling the truth inherent to power discourses, became influential within the French

filmmaking context, instilled by a critique of Bazin’s film theory and by the post-

structuralist notion of “reality” as an autonomous discursive product with a symbolic

function.

Materialist film practice sought to critique realism by transforming it formally.

Bearing this in mind, the Leftist filmmaking doxa of the sixties could be described as

taking images “live” based on the preoccupation of showing “reality” represented by

social types in struggle. Further, materialist film is at the service of “good causes,” and

formally, it observes the discourse of the cinematic apparatus – it is self-reflexive. There

are, however, nuances; distinctions must be drawn between materialist cinema, which is

a kind of filmic theory and practice, militant films, which are addressed to an activist

audience that are dependent on a political reality,160 and the DVG’s materialist fictions

which, in a Brechtian vein, pedagogically address an active viewer who has the potential

of decoding the film as differently than consuming the film.161

160 For a critical analysis of Leftist films, see the interview with Jacques Rancière

in the special issue of Cahiers devoted to trademark-images from 1976. 161 In an interview from 1970, Marin Karmitz, who used to be a Maoist filmmaker

and member of the GP, who has now become the major tycoon in alternative cinema in France, owning the cinema chain/production/distribution company MK2, stated:, “there are two possibilities in film; militant film and what I call the democratic front film. Militant films are in the form of a tract and are designed to attract an activist audience. The democratic front film is designed to unify all those who can be unified politically, whether they are militant or not.. . . a film cannot be independent of political reality and political reality at the moment consists of militants who do their political work through a party or through mass organizations… a democratic front film is aimed at those mass organizations.” “Towards a Proletarian Cinema: An Interview with Marin Karmitz,” Cinéaste Vol. IV, no. 2 (Fall 1970), 20-25.

In “realist” filmmaking (or

87

militant films), content (social types in struggle) pervades over form. Examples of

militant films based on a materialist cinematic practice are SLON’S A bientôt, j’espère

(1967) or Marin Karmitz’s La Cause du peuple, (1972). As a practice, materialist cinema

sought formally to demystify the process of the film’s own making, deconstructing the

apparent “objectivity” (discourse) of the filmic apparatus by producing self-knowledge.

The formula of materialist militant films is: to film the reality of a concrete struggle and

to introduce the mechanisms of cinematic self-reflexivity (i.e., a shot of the camera in

front of a mirror filming itself). Godard problematized materialist militant films, most

notably in a letter addressed to Carole Roussopolous in 1979, accusing her of “hiding

herself” behind the images she filmed.162

162 First printed in Cahiers du cinéma no. 300, special issue by Godard (1979),

reprinted along with a response from Roussopolous in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 298-299.

More concretely, the differences between a

(realist or materialist) militant film and the DVG’s materialist fictions become evident if

we compare Karmitz’s La Cause du peuple with Tout va bien, which came out the same

year. Starring “real” female workers, La Cause du peuple is a documentary fiction of a

factory strike in the North of France. The issues raised by the film are predictable, as the

narrative is centered on women’s oppression in the familial and working environment.

Godard’s and Gorin’s Tout va bien is a remake of Karmitz’s film. The film begins like

the first one, with a strike where the workers have kidnapped the boss. Jane Fonda is a

leftist journalist arrives at the factory to do an enquête about the strike, accompanied by

her partner, Yves Montand. They end up being held hostages in the factory where Fonda

is able to observe first-hand how the workers are oppressed by their working conditions.

She and Montand “put themselves in the place of” the workers, as we see them making

88

sausages and cutting beef in the factory. When the strike ends and they come out, they

face the frustrating aspects of their contradictory lives: Fonda’s story is refused by her

boss, the couple enters a crisis, and Montand is unhappy because as former militant

filmmaker, he is now forced to make commercials to earn a living. Tout va bien aside

from staging Pierre Overney’s funeral, it shows the ransacking of a supermarket by

activists – all real events in which Maoist activists were involved. A number of devices

allude to the ideological condition of the filmic apparatus in Tout va bien, such as the

legendary panning shot of the two-floored factory set; or the initial sequence of checks

being signed toward the production. Perhaps we could compare Tout va bien with La

Cause du people like Brecht and Aragon, self-reflexivity and comedy, versus Socialist

Realism and orthodox form.

4.4 The Cahiers-Cinéthique Debate

In the discussions around materialist filmmaking, the Marxist notion of the “objective”

whole of the historico-dialectical Weltanschaung was contested next to Bazin’s cinematic

realist ontology. The critique of filmic “objectivity” was laid out in a 1969 debate

between two influential film journals, Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinéthique, around the

matter of realism, indexicality and cinematic reflexivity.163

163 In 1969 Godard broke with Cahiers, for which he had written since the late

fifties, and joined Cinéthique, demanding Cahiers to take a position regarding Cinéthique and to elicit a political program. See the Cahiers/Cinéthique debate: Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 216-17 (October-November 1969) and Cinéthique no. 5 (September-October 1969).

Bazin conceived

photographic images as the impression of reality; that is, as the transference of reality

onto its own reproduction. In Bazin’s view, photographic image-production is an

essentially objective, natural phenomenon, a genesis without mediation that attests to its

own veracity. For Bazin, photographs are founded on the absence of man and thus they

89

are essentially objective; this gives photographic images a power of credibility that

painting does not have because it is “illusionistic.” In contrast, with photography, nature

shows itself to the camera and because of that, images are transparent windows to reality.

Cinema, for Bazin, temporalizes the imprint of reality into the filmstrip. The credibility of

cinematographic images is further achieved by means of montage, which should seek to

unify the factors of the action in a single cinematographic plane in order to elicit our

belief in them. In the famous debate, Cahiers accused Bazin of “phenomenological

positivism” and “materialist mechanism,” which considered photographic images as

creations based on the absence of a human hand, and the camera as an unmediated

source. Taking a classic avant-garde position, Cinéthique underlines the need for a

cinema based on the transformation from “a neurotic ideological discourse to a scientific

and revolutionary discourse” that could help the proletariat in its struggle for power. This

transformation could be made possible by making a break (coupure, in Althussers’s sense

of a split between ideology and science) in the history of cinema between idealist and

materialist films.164 Based on practical theory, Cinéthique hoped to overcome cinema’s

ideological functions by conceiving it as self-knowledge. By “rendering visible” its

physical and social materiality, they further aimed at showing the ideological, political

and economical functions proper to cinema. “Rendering visible” is the act of unveiling

the apparatus by which the film accedes a theoretical level, breaking away from film’s

verifiability as an “impression of reality.”165

164 For a taxonomy of “ideological” and “materialist” filmmaking see Jean-Louis

Commolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique,” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 216 (October 1969).

165 Jean-Paul Fargier, “La parenthèse et le detour,” Cinéthique no. 5 (September-October 1969), 21.

Cahiers opposed this program because they

90

believed that a cinematic theoretical practice is impossible and that theory is impotent in

transforming the ideology inherent to film and science. In their view, there can only be

“revolutionary critics,” and this meant that they did not want to prescribe a political

program for cinema. Further for them, the knowledge that a film can produce is of the

epistemological order, not scientific knowledge. Cahiers further critiqued Cinéthique’s

“false” opposition between materialist and idealist film; for them, Cinéthique’s aim at

transforming cinema into self-knowledge was futile because it did not modify cinema’s

ideological nature. In their view, the practice of “unveiling” the process of fabrication

does not convey scientific or objective knowledge, but transforms film into its own

discourse: “A camera filming itself is neither science, theory nor ‘materialist cinema’:

reflection of a reflection, ideology mirrors itself.” Cahiers situated their battleground

elaborating a mode of critique that would make evident how certain films display

ideological conformity to the system. They further set themselves the task to do detailed

critical work about the conditions of possibility of representation, analyzing how the

mechanisms of representation are rendered innocent in cinema. 166

To summarize, for the DVG and for Cinéthique, the critical function of cinema

was to cut through ideology formally, rendering visible the techniques or the social

relations of filmic production by means of cinematic reflexivity in order to produce self-

knowledge. Godard starts with the presupposition that images and sounds belong to

ideological discourses and thus his aim was to establish a program to test images and

sounds in a way that would allow him to get beyond ideology. Godard presented his

166 Jean Narboni and Jean-Louis Commolli, “Cinéma/idéologie/critique 2: D’une

critique a son point critique,” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 217 (November 1969), 9.

91

“theoretical practice” for the first time in Le Gai savoir (1967-68).167 The method he laid

out here claims to be scientific filmmaking, focused on a concern with the relationships

between world, image, sound, discourse, and representation.168 This method is loosely

based on Louis Althusser’s own theoretical practice, which was aimed at demystifying

Ideological State Apparatuses through the process of gathering heterogeneous

information and experiences. In Le Gai savoir, the main characters Patricia Lumumba

(Juliet Berto) and Emile Rousseau (Jean-Pierre Léaud) set themselves the tasks of first,

gathering images and recording sounds in order to make experiments with them. Second,

they criticize them by means of decomposition, reduction, substitution and recomposition

of ensembles of images and sounds. Finally, they fabricate models of relationships

between sounds and images, followed by an auto-critique. The three steps – gathering,

criticizing, and building models – overlap most of the time. Le Gai savoir and the DVG’s

films further experimented with the recent epistemological shifts prompted by Post-

structuralist thought. Such shifts dealt with a new object that emerged from the

contestation of the figure of truth and origin, which was paired up with ideological

deconstruction: the text in Barthes’ sense, which opened up meaning to the infinity of the

signifier.169

167 For an account of Le Gai savoir through the lens of Post-structuralism see Kaja

Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard, (New York: The University Press, 1998).

168 Debatably Le Gai savoir inspired the position Cinéthique took in the 1969 debate with Cahiers.

169 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971), 155-164.

Post-structuralism implied further a fundamental reorganization (or

revolution) of Barthes’ “pyramidal-representational” notion of writing that I described

above, in favor of difference: the redistribution of the relationships between writing and

speech, space and representation (subject and object), by way of theoretical practice.

92

Godard would explore this redistribution and introduction of differential relationships

between word, image and sound in the domain of cinema.

4.5 Toward a Theory of Images and Sounds

Departing from the materialist principles of Cinéthique, the DVG shares Bazin’s anti-

Platonism insofar as, for the latter, the photographic image is the transference of reality

onto its own reproduction. The photograph’s origin is by contact, entailing a physical and

material process of transference from reality to its reproduction. From this perspective,

analog images are transparent insofar as they verify their own origin, conferring thereby

credibility. In a scene from La Chinoise, we see written on the wall in the background: “Il

faut confronter des idées vagues avec des images claires.”170

170 “To confront vague ideas with clear images.”

This sentence evidences that

like for Bazin, for Godard (here) images are not “pure” or “good” copies or originals but

that they belong to a different domain than ideas or essences. Parting from the post-

structuralist differentiation of Plato’s subordination of false appearances (bad copies) to

the realm of ideas (truth), Godard shares with Bazin the notion that an image’s origin is

the image itself. Bazin and Godard diverge, however, in the role they bestow upon

cinematic montage with regard to images’ transparency. If, for Bazin, montage gives

cinematic images verifiability, for the DVG, montage is a means not only to shatter

images’ and sounds’ verifiability but a way to prompt our suspicion toward the ideology

infused in them, because ideology renders them opaque as opposed to transparent. This

means that, in addition to the post-structuralist splintering of Platonism, Godard takes a

materialist position regarding the status of images as reflections of reality. When he

93

states: “La photographie n’est pas le reflet du réel, elle est le réel de ce reflet,”171

Still from La Chinoise, 1966

Godard

puts forth an understanding of images as “opaque” mirrors subordinated to the “reality”

of the mode of cognition proper to the filmic apparatus. Images are thus real reflections

of themselves: they are material presences (as opposed to appearances) bearing the code

of social practice. As we saw in the introduction, Godard’s theory of the relationship

between image and text is inextricable from montage, a relationship that is explored

through Reverdy’s, Breton’s and Benjamin’s notions of the image as that which emerges

from the juxtaposition of two other images.

The DVG’s aphorism, “Pas des images justes, juste des images,” is a rearticulation of

Mao’s theory of knowledge that asserts that “correct ideas” come from social practice.

“Not [to make] correct images, but simple images” or “Not [to make] images that are

just, only [to make] images” implies differentiation in kind, “simple” as opposed to

“correct”; the latter would imply a moral or ethic judgment, “good” or “true” as opposed

171 Jean-Luc Godard, “Premiers sons anglais,” Cinéthique no. 5 (September-

October 1969), reprinted in Godard par Godard, 338.

94

to “bad” or “false.” The contradiction raised by the differential opposition between

“simple images” and “correct images,” as qualitative differentiation versus moral

judgment, seeks to set a leap toward conceptual knowledge. This leap, according to Mao,

happens in two stages: first, when sufficient perceptual knowledge is accumulated (from

objective matter to subjective consciousness, from existence to ideas); second, the

qualitative leap from consciousness back to matter, from ideas back to existence, in

which all knowledge gained in the first step is applied to social practice. There is an extra

third leap (auto-critique) that proves the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in

cognition and/or the measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective

external world. In Marxist-Leninist terms, therefore, cognition is the process of

codification of qualitative resemblances and its application to practice, whose success

can be measured by quantitative equivalences, or by its efficacy in its application to

social practice.172

172 See Mao Tse-Tung, “Where do Correct Ideas Come From?” (1957), Slavoj

Zizek presents Mao, 167-168.

The DVG’s application of Maoist method for the acquisition of

knowledge implied making “simple” images that reflect a double process of cognition

and codification, the analysis of concrete situations and its application to social practice:

a pedagogical enterprise in a Brechtian vein that retained the fiction necessary for artistic

discourse (Barthes’ effet de réel), in order to distance the filmmakers (and the viewer)

from the ideological implications inherent to the concrete situations. Finally, the DVG’s

films can be seen as “semiotic machines for making viewers think actively about the

world in a new way, rather than as vehicles for communicating a filmmaker’s own pre-

95

existing ideas to a passively receptive audience.” 173

Regarding the question of fiction, following Julia Lesage, Brecht’s Me-Ti was a

key influence for Godard and Gorin as a model to render current political events

fictional.

174

The DVG’s films further postulate the political actuality as a historicizing fiction,

Me-Ti is a collection of short anecdotes inspired by the ancient writings of

Mo Tzu (Me-Ti in German), relating them to contemporary politics, Brecht’s own life,

and the Russian Revolution. The entries in Me-Ti are didactic and whimsical, and the

Chinese fictional characters referred in code to Marx, Lenin, Engels, Stalin, etc. It is

widely known that Brecht was influential in the way Godard constructed the characters in

his films. Differently than Socialist realist characters, which are indexes of a preexisting

social class with its specific ideological values and worldview, the DVG’s characters, like

Brecht’s, are socio-historical figures that transcend individual and collective events.

Differently than being coded by the politics of visibility and thus of subjectivation,

Godardian characters are tissues of citations, ready-made voices and discourses,

something in between taxonomies and “original” copies indexing the actual state of

affairs embedded in contradictions. The DVG’s characters could be understood as social

categories, as “species” inscribed in social processes – rendered as narratives –; the

characters are further made up of agglutinations of codes that may or not correspond to

the “species.” For example, the “feminist” character played by Anne Wiazemsky in

Vladimir et Rosa is an MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femme) member whose

emancipatory struggle is contradicted by her traditional relationship with her boyfriend.

173 See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (expanded edition),

(London: BFI, 1998). 174 See Julia Lesage, “Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics: 1967-72,” Jump Cut, No.

25 (April 1983).

96

placing actuality beyond individual and collective events, turning “social types,” e.g.,

“worker,” into historical figures within a narrative, e.g., “Third World revolutionary as a

dysfunctional paternal figure” in Ici et ailleurs, or “Militant filmmaker facing the

quandary of making a living” in Tout va bien. Historical specification becomes relevant

here because the DVG films describe history in action, specifically, by conceptualizing

French militantism as a historical phenomenon as opposed to engaging in a universalizing

discourse of “class struggle” – like socialist realism. Thus, the figurants are the actors of

the actuality that will become history. Further, Maoism in the DVG’s films functions as

the metonymy of revolutionary struggle. In this way, they literalize Political

Modernism’s call for depicting class struggle from a proletarian point of view, rendering

political modernism’s call as a specific relationship between theory and practice in and

around May ’68, as practiced by Maoist militants. Thus, at pivotal concern in Godard’s

work during the DVG years is the task to find new modes of expression (new images and

new techniques) that would logically account for the Maoist bringing into crisis of

mediation as representation. As a provisory conceptualization, I will argue that the

DVG’s films transform Marxist-Leninist “dogma” (content, theory) into Maoist “action”

(form, practice). Maoism becomes the code of representation and the method for making

images – rendering Maoist practice literal. “Revolutionary struggle” is the referent that is

inscribed in the image. In other words, in the films there is an overlap between the code

and the encoded: the images’ “message” is “revolutionary struggle” by Maoist militants.

As we have seen, as “militant filmmakers,” Godard and Gorin claimed to adopt a

proletarian subjective class position, in order to perform concrete analyses of concrete

situations with the purpose of showing the world in struggle. Further, their “concrete

97

analyses” stand in for scientific reflection of their subjective cognition of class struggle.

Evidently, the DVG takes materialist method à la lettre, demarcating themselves from the

branches of “realist” as well as “materialist” filmmaking by calling their films

“materialist fictions.” The DVG’s reflections of social practice place art to the side of the

domain of non-knowledge, in between (pedagogical) utility extracting surplus value (by

way of creating signification-machines) from the political actuality.

4.6 Sound/Image Struggle = Class Struggle

By way of montage, the DVG systematically disjointed sound-image relationships, most

of the time opposing one another through interpretative confrontations. In the DVG’s

view, sound’s property of being the most powerful mediator of images, and images’

quality of mediating or reflecting reality through the mechanism of representation,

needed to be put out of work. As we have seen, the DVG’s project included bridging the

gap between (political) form and content. A way by which they sought to make this

bridge, was by transubstantiating the militant problem of “class struggle” into the domain

of sound/image relationships. In that sense, there is a Structuralist project at stake, insofar

as the bourgeoisie-versus-proletariat opposition that founds class struggle is the

conceptual basis for the DVG’s films’ struggle over sounds and images. This project is an

early concern of Godard, articulated in Le Gai savoir when Patricia Lumumba states: “Le

son c’est le délégué syndical de l’oeil; il va de soi que l’image, elle est le bureau politique

de l’oreille.” 175

175 “Sound is the union’s delegate of the eye; it goes without saying, that the

image is the political front desk of the ear.” From the script of Le Gai savoir: Mot-à-mot d’un film encore trop réviso, (Paris: Union Ecrivains, 1969), unpaginated.

According to Godard, because sound coincides exactly with its index, it

is thus inseparable from the referent, and that is why it is more powerful than images. It is

thus likely that sound takes over images and determines our reading of them. When

98

Patricia states that sound is the delegate of the eye, she points to sound’s ability to

enforce an image’s signifier by becoming its mediator. In her conceptualization of the

problem, the image becomes a site for listening. The cinematic image is made

problematic on two grounds: an image is not only representative of something, but is in

turn represented by a sound that has been put “on top” of it. The task of montage is,

therefore, to liberate images and allow them to speak for themselves, by means of

bringing sounds and images together in such a manner that the juxtaposition would give

leeway to interpretative confrontations. Here Godard seeks to contest sound’s denotative

quality, which is that which bestows a connotative dimension upon language, voice, and

images in cinema, deconstructing them and impeding their becoming vehicles for specific

messages. Put differently, sounds have the property of hindering images’ intertextuality.

In cinema, we do not hear an image of a sound, we hear a “sound-image” which is sound

itself,176

176 Jean Baudry quoted in Kaja Silverman, Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in

Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 4.

and thus, sounds speak in the name of images. For Patricia Lubumba, if sounds

are true, then images are false when they are adequate to reality –this is Spectacle, which

according to Debord, we tend to assimilate. For Godard, images are true only when they

fail to represent us. The main lesson to be drawn from Le Gai savoir is therefore that

neither images nor sounds present a true mirror – a lesson that can also be drawn from the

Post-structuralist demise of the linguistic signifier and the prevailing conception, since

then, that images and the textualization of sounds are discursive formations. The DVG

continues the task that Le Gai Savoir set forth, equating the representational basis of

cinema to the representational logic of class struggle, as a means of bringing together

99

form and content. In Ici et ailleurs, this is evoked outlining the problem of slogan-words

and the “sound too loud”:

Prendre le pouvoir est possible quand l’image // au même temps qu’elle renforce un son en se présentant à sa place // quand l’image à son tour elle est représentée par un autre son // comme un ouvrier se fait représenter par son syndicat // et que cette organisation traduit ça par des mots d’ordre // qu’en les appellent elle les retourne à l’ouvrier comme mots d’ordre.177

5. Le Vent d’Est

Godard and Gorin were associated with the Maoists as their “fellow travelers,”178 and as

we have seen, they followed closely what they were doing because Maoist practice was

the metonymy of class struggle here and now. While acknowledging that they had

contributed with radically new elements to political practice, Godard and Gorin, however,

held that the May ‘68 Maoist contestation of intellectuals’ role in the revolution had not

gone far enough.179

177 This section of the voice-over is more poetic than theoretical: “Taking over

power is possible when the image // at the same time that it reinforces a sound by presenting herself in the place of a sound // when the image in return lets itself be represented by another sound // like a worker letting himself be represented by his union // and the union translates this fact (of representation) // into slogans which are in turn applied and given back to the worker as order-words.”

178 Following Christophe Bourseiller, who stated that the Proletarian Left used the generic terms of “democrats” or “fellow travelers” to designate the intellectuals who gravitated around the party. Some famous intellectuals gravitating around them there were Sartre (who lent his name to the directorship of the Maoist journal La Cause du Peuple), de Beauvoir, Karmitz, Katia Kaupp, Mariella Righini, Alexandre Astruc, Agnes Varda, and Gérard Fromanger. Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes, 152, 198.

As we have seen, for the Maoists, intellectuals were supposed to put

179 Jean-Pierre Gorin stated: “Le gauchisme, en tant que pratique politique, a apporté des éléments radicalement nouveaux, mais en ce qui concerne les intellectuels, ce qu’il propose est une solution de type révisionniste réadaptée aux exigences d’une lutte et d’une pratique anti-révisionniste.” In an interview with Marlene Belilos, Michel Boujut, Jean-Claude Deschamps and Pierre-Henri Zoller, Politique Hebdo nos. 26, 27 (April 1972), reprinted in Godard par Godard, 374. “Leftism as a political practice has brought in radically new elements, but in what concerns intellectuals, what they propose is a kind

100

themselves humbly at the service of the working class, being thereby “reeducated” by

them by communicating directly as opposed to speaking in their name. According to

DVG, in the Maoist dynamic, intellectuals still kept a position of power, denying their

privileged position only in appearance. This was due to the fact that in the end, workers

expect that intellectuals tell them things, as opposed to intellectuals refusing to speak to

them, while they insisted on listening because they believed that the workers possessed

the truth. Another of the DVG’s critiques of the relationship between Maoists and

workers was the fact that the former belong to the realm of non-productive labor, and the

latter to productive labor. In order to breach that difference, Maoists used the format of

the interview or the enquête, which, through dialogue and collective work, had the

purpose of placing the project under the direction and control of workers, who discussed

and elaborated a text, sentence by sentence.180 Still, for Godard and Gorin, the method of

enquête does not obliterate the main source of difference between workers and Maoists,

which is the question of salary. In a public discussion, when someone justified and

praised militant practice on the basis that it was non-salaried work (the rhetoric of self-

sacrifice pervaded),181

of revisionist solution that is re-adapted to the demands of a struggle and a practice that are in principle anti-revisionist.”

180 The enquête thus serves the political role of regrouping workers around a project, the production of the text acting as a unifying force that initiates or sustains the process of self-formation of the group, reinforcing the group’s consciousness of its own existence as a group, and breaking down the hierarchy between manual and intellectual work and the activist’s directing position. See Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 110-111. I will touch upon the question of the enquête in relationship to journalism and as taken up by Godard and Miéville in Comment ça va? (1975) and Six fois deux: sur et sous la communication (1976), in Chapter 3.

181 See the 1973 discussion on sacrifice and militantism between Philippe Gavi, Pierre Victor and Jean-Paul Sartre in Victor, On a raison de se révolter, 178-198.

Godard responded:

101

Mais ce n’est pas vrai, ces gens ne travaillent pas avec salaire. Excuses-moi c’est un discours fasciste, même pas fasciste, un discours d’esclave du fascisme –c’est pire que tout. Tu vas interviewer des gens et t’a pas de salaire ? Et tu vas interviewer un mec dont le seul problème c’est d’en avoir un ? Et tu n’en as pas ? Qu’est-ce que tu vas lui dire pauvre pomme ? RIEN !!! 182

The bottom line was that Maoist activists did not have the means to breach their

differences with workers in order to address them. Arguably, the two groups spoke

different languages (salaried, productive work as opposed to non-salaried and non-

productive labor) and could not understand each other simply because they operated in

different realms of production: factory labor and education or activism. What comes to

mind here is Gayatari Spivak’s critique of the post-structuralist demise of representation.

Spivak displaced the question as a matter of self-representation, meaning that it is

necessary to learn how to speak and represent oneself, in order to address the

subaltern.

183 The DVG critiqued Maoism further through self-critique in Ici et ailleurs.

When Godard states in the voice-over, “On a mis le son trop fort,”184

182 “This is not true these people don’t work without a salary. Excuse me, but this

is a fascist discourse, not even fascist! This is the discourse of a slave of fascism, which is as bad as anything. You go off to interview people and you do not earn a salary out of it? And you go interview a guy whose sole problem is to find one? And you do not have a salary? What are you going talk with him about? Poor thing! You have nothing to talk about [with workers]!” From unpublished material transmitted on June 22, 1976. Source: the archives of the phonothèque at l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris. Date consulted: February 2006. For the television series he did with Miéville, Six fois deux: sur et sous la communication (1976), they do interviews with a painter, a prostitute, a peasant, a photo-journalist and a young man. Godard puts forth the interview as work, and makes a point to have remunerated them the equivalent of an hour of work.

183 Gayatari Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988).

184 “We turned the volume too loud.”

the realm of

enunciation of the “we” is Maoist –When we hear this in the voice over, a hand is turning

the volume up and down a stereo playing L’internationale, thus extending their critique

102

to ideological French communism as well.185 For Michel de Certeau, May ’68

symbolized the “capture of speech” by the minoritarian majority by means of

stammering, blabbering, refusing to speak, etc.186 Consistent with the theory that sound is

more powerful than images, Godard and Miéville point here at the passage from the

(Maoist) capture of speech to passion-action, and then to despotic sound or noise

(ideology) as Leftist voice. In order to articulate the transition from the sites of “captured

speech” to “despotic sound”, we must look at the DVG’s account of “captured speech” as

“liberated speech,” when the utopia of May ’68 was a society completely transparent to

itself by means of the direct exchange of free direct speech (without mediation) in the

“General Assembly.” As I described in the introduction, in May ’68, the limits of

knowledge or common sense were put to work by demonstrating language’s paucity and

its inadequacy to account for reality. The Maoists’ efforts for direct communication and

for producing equal spaces to speak in one’s name created a moment in which everyone

spoke. This “liberation of speech” evidenced the paradox of democracy: in democratic

regimes, everyone is free to speak and yet, only a minority speaks and acts in the name of

the majority.187

185 Their critique is parallel to Claude Lefort’s critique of communism (and

totalitarianism) on the basis that they refuse to see the determinism inherent to leftist discourse, erasing the difference between discourse and reality. See his Un Homme en trop. Réflexions sur “L’archipiel du Goulag,” (Paris: Seuil, 1976).

186 Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

187 See Foucault’s lectures at Berkeley in November 1983, Truth and Discourse, available online at: http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/. Date consulted: April 5, 2007.

May ’68, symbolized the capture of speech by the majority, who liberated

themselves from the despotism of the minority in power. The collective moment of free

speech quickly became one of logorrhea. Loghorrea is a moment of “bad parrhesia” or

103

inadequate free speech (passion-action, noise), defined as verbal activity that reflects

uncritically anything that comes out of someone’s mind. The crisis of the “General

Assembly is staged in Godard and Gorin’s Le Vent d’est, and its limits were described by

Philippe Gavi in the following terms:

On ne discute jamais dans une assemblée générale. Tous les gens repartent frustres en disant ‘ce n’est pas possible’. Pire, certaines organisations, comme l’AJS ont pour triste habitude de s’accrocher au micro et de faire voter la motion quand ils ne restent plus qu’eux dans la salle. Au contraire, la vraie discussion apporte à chacun. Comment peut-elle devenir un moyen de lutte, une pratique politique?188

During May ’68, the position of the speaker as knowledge-producer – and thus

knowledge as a question of power was contested. The momentary “liberation” of speech,

however, was taken hostage, unconsciously by the Maoists (by turning their speech into

despotic sound), and in reality, by the French government’s repressive response to Maoist

activism.

189 Once the institution avowed the disorder provoked by the capture/liberation

of speech, it had to censor it through repression. A new problem emerged: beyond the

egalitarian tradition of everyone being equally endowed to speak, and having free speech

as the basis for democracy, who can utter what needs to be heard and from what regime

of enunciation?190

188 “We never have discussions during a general assembly. Everybody leaves

frustrated saying ‘it can’t be possible.’ Worse, in certain organizations, like the AJS they have the sad habit of hanging onto the mike to ask people to vote for a motion when there’s only they who are left in the room. On the contrary, true discussion concerns everyone. How can discussion become a means of struggle, a political practice?” In On a raison de se révolter, 280.

189 For an account of the repressive measures taken by Raymond Marcellin, the French Minister of the Interior, between 1968 and 1973, see Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998).

190 See Tom Conley’s “Afterword” to de Certeau’s The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, 183.

104

Godard and Gorin’s Le Vent d’est (1969) reflects “liberated speech” and the

problems it posed to militants and militant filmmakers in the aftermath of May and June

1968. The film was scripted by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and

starred Gian Maria Volontè (Italy’s box-office favorite at the time).191 Young militants,

intellectuals, and actors, also participated, gathering in Italy to make an “Italian Western

about the May ’68 French events.”192 In it, two discursive realms were brought together,

provoking a kind of clash of codes: the discourses, voices, speeches, and sounds of May

’68, which are put “on top of” the genre of Western film. In other words, the form of the

content or genre is the Western and the form of expression (or code) is class struggle.

There are three scenes in the film that are particularly relevant to the question of Maoist

“liberation speech”: 1. The chronicle of a strike in which we hear “lying” and

“stammering” voices; 2. the delegate sequence, in which workers and the delegate are

shown to speak in different languages; the delegate is thus put forth as a traduttore-

tradittore, and mediation as an inevitable instance of mis-translation; 3. The General

Assembly, a sequence in which Godard and Gorin reflect on a moment of frenzied

speech, logorrhea and dialogue that leads nowhere.193

191 James Roy MacBean, Film and Revolution (Bloomington and London:

University of Indiana Press, 1975), 118. 192 Following David Faroult, Godard and Henri Roger (with whom he had been

working in previous DVG films), were approached by a rich Italian patron who wanted to bring together fashionable names to make a politico-collective film with figures such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gian Maria Volontè. After a few days of shooting, most of the members of the group fled to Italian bistros and beaches with the money of the film. Godard asked Gorin to come and help him. They took over the “production team,” and the result was Le Vent d’Est, their first film together. David Faroult in an interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin cited in “Never More Godard: Le Groupe Dziga Vertov, l’auteur et la signature,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 123.

193 The film is structured through screen titles in the following manner:

In the film, in terms of the

1. La grève

105

embodiment or figuration of speech, some of the voices are dissociated from the

characters who are speaking putting “speech” outside of the diegesis – except that, for

example, the bourgeois and the delegate speak in French with Italian accents. Even

though some of the voices are outside the diegesis and to an extent, disembodied, we

could not say that they have discursive exteriority, insofar as such exteriority would

imply mastering speech, vision, or hearing from a point of view external to the action.

Rather, we hear a multiplicity of voices stemming out from different regimes of

enunciation. Images, in turn, are liberated from their representative role and given a

semantic function, producing a kind of pictography creating images reflexive on their

own relationship to language.194

2. Le délégué

In other words, speech and image are disjointed along

with what is “sayable” and “visible”: May ’68 is the content translated into the genre of

3. Les minorités agissantes (et leur Liaison avec les masses) 4. L’assemblée générale 5. La répression 6. La grève active 7. L’état policier (échec provocation nouvel Echec Nouvelle provocation Until victory – la logique du peuple)

These sections of the film are a diagram of the mechanic of the events of May ’68; Godard and Gorin include possible outcomes to the events of May ’68, on the basis of the theoretico-practical problems that the militants are facing and how they relate to the events:

1. Minorités agissantes Liaison avec les masses 2. La grève active La théorie (la grève, les minorités agissantes, l’assemblée générale) (Critique, practice, lutte, autocritique, transformation) “L’étudiant-médécin” (Critique, lutte, transformation); 3. L’autogestion grève, les Minorités agissantes, l’assemblée générale 4. La théorie (Invention de la photographie: pour qui? Contre qui?) (photo-journalisme) 5. La lutte armée 6. La violence civile “On a raison de se révolter!”

194 Peter Wollen, “Godard and counter cinema: Vent d’est,” Readings and Writings, 80.

106

the Western that is figured in the Summer Italian countryside landscape. Godard and

Gorin further convey “lying speech,” “stammering speech,” and a third voice, a female

voice that embodies “militant cinematic speech,” which becomes the regime of

enunciation of the collective that got together to make the film. The role of this voice is to

make sense of what the two other voices are saying and to elaborate, self-critically, a

program for the militant filmmakers.195

5.1 The Strike

The first scene of Le Vent d’est opposes two kinds of speech against each other:

stammering, figured by students and workers who are the “acting minorities,” and lying

speech, figured by revisionist or bourgeois discourse, embodied by the patron, his

daughter, and the delegate. The worker’s voice is dictated by another voice (presumably

Godard’s). The “stammering speech” and the “lying speech” speak out their positions

during the narration of a strike. The voices are “on top of” the image of Anne Wiazemsky

and a young man, who are the Maoist activists. In a scene in which they are lying on the

grass, the female “cinematic voice” states twice: “Il y a deux voix qui ont continué à

mentir deux voix qui ont continué à bégayer. Quelle est la nôtre? Comment le savoir?

Que faire?”196

196 “There are two voices that have continued to lie, two voices that continued to stammer. Which one is ours? How to know it? What is there to do?”

This was the question asked by Maoist militants in September 1968, at the

moment when they gathered to discuss what to do in the aftermath of the events of May,

when they founded La Gauche Prolétarienne. In this first moment of Le Vent d’est, the

DVG reflect upon Maoist discourse as the problem of the “militant filmmakers.”

107

Still from Le Vent d’est

5.2 The Delegate (traduttore/traditore)

The following sequence didactically figures the negotiation between workers and the

factory-owner through the mediation of the delegate. The background of the image is

beautiful landscape, populated by characters dressed up in nineteenth-century attire,

figuring “the bourgeois,” “the patron,” (Gian Maria Volontè) and “the delegate.” The

“worker” is wearing “Indian” attire. Godard and Gorin stage here the failure of the

delegate to speak for the workers. For them, the delegate represents by translating: “Le

délégué traduit dans la langue du patron la lutte ouvrière,”197 and he fails because as the

Renaissance exclamation attests, the translator is a deceiver (traduttore, traditore):

“Quand le délégué traduit, il trahit.”198

197 “The delegate translates workers’ struggle to the language of the factory-

owner.” 198 “When the delegate translates, he betrays.”

In this scene, the delegate’s efforts of translation

and failure to rightfully articulate the workers’ concerns are put forth didactically. The

delegate speaks in Italian and the worker in English; we see that the former fails to

108

convey adequately the workers’ demands to the patron.199 This delegate figures the CGT

delegate, the target of the DVG’s and the Maoists’ critique. We know that he belongs to

the PCF because, in the scene that follows, the delegate reads out passages from a book

on May ’68 by one of the predominant militants of the PCF: Waldeck Rochet’s L’Avenir

du Parti Communiste. In off-screen voice, we hear the voice of Anne Wiazemsky – the

Maoist militant –shouting: “C’est faux!” and “il parle, il parle, il parle!”200

5.3 The General Assembly

Here, Godard

and Gorin, in a didactic move, sketch out their position regarding militant practice,

parallel at this point to the Maoists’ position. Workers’, delegates’, and Maoists’ speech

are laid out in this sequence not as representing various diverging political positions but

as different languages, and thus the problem of representation is presented as a process of

mis-translation.

The following sequence is a staging of a General Assembly.201

199 Godard and Gorin bestow the worker the “imperialist” language, English. The

dialogue goes: The delegate to the striker: “Che cosa vuoi? Che cosa vuoi?” “What do you want?, What do you want?” Striker: “Down with the moving lines! Power to the working class!” The patron to the delegate: “Che cosa vuole?” “What does he want?” The delegate: “Vuole migliori condizioni de lavoro ed essere pagato mélio; lo vede c’e un poveraccio d’indiano; lui a la moglie malata, gli figli malati. Secondo me, possiamo anche metterci d’accordo. Io non me ne posso occupare… lei e responsabile de portarli al campo di concentramento…” “He wants better working conditions and to be paid better; see? He is pityful Indian; his wife is ill, his children are ill. I think that we can reach an agreement. But cannot take care of this, you are responsible for bringing him to the concentration camp…”

200 “He is lying! He speaks, speaks, and speaks!”

Following de Certeau,

during a General Assembly everyone has the right to speak only in his or her own name

201 On May 17th, 1968 the Parisian film community held their own General Assembly, the États Généraux de Cinéma. In it, the filmmakers gave themselves the task to interrupt the Cannes Festival with the purpose of showing their solidarity with the

109

because the Assembly refuses to hear anyone identified with a function or speaking in the

name of a group. In a General Assembly, “to speak is not to be the ‘speaker’ in the name

of a lobby, of a ‘neutral’ and objective truth, or for convictions held elsewhere.”202 In this

sequence, as in the previous one, we are given very little visually and we only know what

is happening through the voice-over. We see everyone who is involved in the film

production sitting and lying down, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit who is wearing a

cowboy hat.203

striking workers and students, to protest against police repression and to contest Gaullist power along with the actual structures of French cinematographic industry. The EGC published three bulletins and a dossier in Cahiers du Cinéma. At the end of May, they prescribed the total or partial nationalization of the cinematographic industry, administered through a self-managing scheme. Many collectives would spawn from the EGC’s efforts, such as SLON, ISKRA, the Gropes Medevkine, Cinélutte, etc. See the editorial of Cahiers de Cinéma No. 202 (June-July 1968), and the editorial and the dossier of the EGC published by the following number of Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 203 (August 1968).

202 Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.

203 Cohn-Bendit was the leader of the group of students from Nanterre, Le mouvement du 22 mars; he became one of the main figures of May ’68, he is known as “Danny Le Rouge” and it is him who famously stated: “On est tous des juifs allemands.”

The purpose of this general assembly is to find the “correct line” (ligne

juste) of the film’s political tendency. Specifically, the debate centers on whether the

image of a Leftist tract, whose front page has the phrase: “Wanted for murder” scribbled

over an image of Stalin and Mao, could successfully signify repression, and whether the

inclusion of Stalin’s image in the film would compromise their pro-Sino-Soviet split

position and rather indicate a pro-Soviet alliance, along the lines of the PCF (which,

evidently, as Maoists they were against).

110

Still from Le Vent d’est

During the sequence, we hear the members of the assembly talking, but we cannot follow

what they are saying. What we hear is an agitated cacophony of utterances, allegedly

speaking out opposing views on whether to show the image in the film or not. When

everyone speaks, Godard and Gorin tell us didactically, debate is hindered because no

one listens to each other, and no one can agree on anything. The impossibility of making

sense is one of the consequences of the capture/liberation of speech – a moment of

loghorrea, in which the contradictions of democracy and the dangers of the relationship

between logos, freedom, and truth became evident.204

204 See the section on “Parrhesia and the Crisis of Democratic Institutions” from

Foucault’s lectures at Berkeley in November 1983, Truth and Discourse available on line at: http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.DT3.democracy.en.html Date Consulted: 17.04.07

In the General Assembly, soliloquy

takes over productive debate, doxa (opinion) over aletheia (truth), and common interest is

barred by the Assembly’s format (because everyone must speak in his/her own name),

resulting in a logorrheic state of confusion and disorder. This sequence allegorizes the

crisis of the political sphere while pointing at its dialogic condition.

111

In Le Vent d’est, the DVG the modes of speech that were exercised during the

moment of the capture and/or liberation of speech are staged. All four modes of speech:

lying, stammering, mis-translating speech, and logorrhea bring speech to a limit. None of

these forms of speech is an effective solution to the problems of representation and

mediation, however. By portraying it in crisis, Godard and Gorin explore how speech

“normally” works. One of the conclusions of Le Vent d’est is the articulation of the tasks

of “progressive cinema,” which are: first, to address the problem of filmic distribution as

a question of commodity production, second, to “liberate” images from sounds and third,

a call for the democratization of the instruments of production of images and sounds.

“Bourgeoisie” in Le Vent d’est “Proletarians” in Ici et ailleurs

6. Guernica and Ici et ailleurs, 1974

As we have seen, Godard’s films of this period show the political actuality, the now of

political struggle, opposing in this way, the logic of the avant-garde that envisions an

emancipatory world-image. As we have seen, regarding the matter of the transitive

relationship between aesthetics and politics in Debord and the position of objective

denunciation, and Sartre’s separation of activism and literary (artistic) production,

Godard takes a position as a “militant filmmaker” taking a different position than

engaged, self-reflexive materialist filmmaking (i.e., Agnes Varda, Carole Roussopolous,

112

Chris Marker, PLON, Marin Karmitz…). Creating materialist fictions, the DVG make

real reflections of political action resembling a political function: this means that images

and sounds have a different origin than politics. Using Marxist-Leninism as the code and

as the method, transforming the discourse of politics into a political enterprise, they seek

not to make political films but to make films politically. If for Breton and Debord the

aesthetic is inextricable from representational politics aiming at emancipation, in Godard

the aesthetic and the political coexist, insofar as one does not imply the other. The DVG’s

films seek to construct a mode of address in their films that veers toward the political by

means of pedagogy.205 For the DVG, image and sound-making imply analyzing

situations and exposing and sustaining their contradictions, as opposed to transitively

letting images speak or stand for a given objective reality and denouncing it. Debatably,

Godard’s discursive reclamation of historical avant-garde positions was a strategic war of

positions that allowed him to explore the transitive relationship between aesthetics and

politics at a stage in which avant-garde critique had become desirable only via self-

critique. His war of positions led to a shift to an analogical and reflexive relationship

between the two. An example of this is his citation of Picasso’s Guernica in Ici et

ailleurs. As we have seen, the painting appears reproduced mechanically, much smaller

than its real size, and hanging on a wall in a “working class” home interior. The painting

appears in an earlier DVG film, British Sounds (1969), in a sequence for which Godard

and Henri Roger filmed a reunion of Trotskyite workers in London.206

205 After Charlotte Nordmann in: Bourdieu/ Rancière: La Politique entre

sociologie et philosophie, (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006), 117. 206 According to Faroult, Gordard and Roger wanted to hook up with Maoists in

London but because they didn’t find any, they filmed the Trotskyite workers instead. David Faroult, “Never More Godard,” 123.

Guernica both

113

punctuates the middle and stands at the other end of the bracketing of Godard’s Leftist

trip years.

As we will see in the following chapter, Godard’s and Miéville’s Ici et ailleurs is

usually interpreted as putting forth a revisionist discourse that attempts to flush out or

“correct” the DVG’s “militant excesses;” it also has been read as using repentant

discourse sketching out an erroneous engagement in the “wrong” direction. These

readings of the film entail that the disaster of the Black September massacres and wave of

terrorism that ensued, made Godard realize the limitations of his previous engagement

and compelled him to change the direction of his thought: a “turn” in his work. However,

Ici et ailleurs does not differ drastically from other DVG films: it articulates an avant-

garde attitude (here, the militant abroad), points at the contradictions inherent to the

situation it analyzes, and proceeds to self-critique. Yet, instead of being a reflection of the

political actuality, it is temporally and spatially larger in scope than other DVGfilms,

encompassing the transitional and transitory moment opened up by the acknowledgment

of the practical and theoretical consequences of May ’68.

Ici et ailleurs, and Godard and Gorin’s collective project as the Dziga Vertov

Group, coincide with the moment between the capture/liberation and the recuperation of

speech described above (1968-1974). In this cleft, as we have seen, the Maoists sought to

construct a revolutionary organization without becoming a dry, senile, despotic power-

machine (like the CGT and the PCF, whom they critiqued), asking, as we have seen, two

questions: D’où tu parles?, which meant contesting the position of power from which the

speakers spoke, and D’où je parle?, putting forth a self-reflexive, non-despotic and anti-

hierarchical site for enunciation. This was also the moment of capitalism’s transition

114

from the production system of Fordism, characterized by mass assembly lines (as shown

in British Sounds and Ici et ailleurs), mass political organization, and welfare-state

interventions, to a mode of production characterized by flexible accumulation or the

pursuit of niche markets, a decentralization and spatial dispersal of production and the

withdrawal of the nation-state from interventionist policies coupled with deregulation and

privatization.207 This moment of transition saw, as well, the emergence of the self-

management model epitomized by the short experiment (1973-77) at the LIP factory in

Besançon, which has a relevant role in Ici et ailleurs. The workers at Besançon were able

to organize themselves without the intervention of Maoist activists or Union

representatives.208

207 David Harvey, “Capitalism: The Factory of Fragmentation” (1992), Spaces of

Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, (Edinburgh: University Press, 2001), 123. 208 See LIP 73, edited by Edmon Maire and Charles Piaget; with texts and

interventions by Andre Acquier, Raymond Burgy, Jacques Chereque, Fredo Moutet, J.Paul Murcier, Claude Perrignon: militants CFDT (Paris: Seuil, 1973) and LIP 20 ans après (propos sur le chomage) by Claude Neuschwander and Gaston Bordet (Paris: Syros, 1993). For a recent English source see : Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (London: Berhahn Books, 2004), 63. In the film, the reference to LIP signifies the struggles here in addition to the struggles elsewhere. LIP was also one of the most mediatized strikes in France, as even Henri Cartier-Bresson documented it. This is perhaps the reason why Godard chose to show the LIP through newspapers, as opposed to showing images from the mass media or made by photojournalists whom he critiques fiercely later in the film. The collective Groupes Medvekine from Besançon made a movie about LIP in 1969 called “Classe de Lutte.”

In Ici et ailleurs, we see an image of a newspaper bearing the headline:

“LIP: Failure Yesterday in Dijon.” The headline has been encircled in red. Further, we

see more images of newspapers giving us news from LIP. LIP was a watch factory in

Besançon France, owned by the Lipman family created in 1867. The action-owners of the

factory wanted to close it and in an effort to resist unemployment, the workers occupied it

on July 12th 1973. The occupation of the LIP factory became the paradigm for struggle

115

against unemployment. It became one of the most famous factory-occupations in France,

because the workers kept it functioning under the principle: “We work, we sell and we

pay ourselves.” It was also one of the first worker-managed factories, and the paradigm

for self-management in France. On August 14th 1973 the factory was occupied by the

police, people were arrested and condemned, but the workers continued to run the factory

until 1977. If the Maoist enterprise was founded on symbolic action in order to

accomplish material action, the LIP workers accomplished both at the same time. Not

seeking the power to take over the factory, they sought their own freedom of organization

without mediation, rendering Maoist practice obsolete and becoming an icon of resistance

against cumulative capital.209

Ici et ailleurs builds up precisely during this cleft, transubstantiating to the

domain of film the seizure or liberation of speech, the emergence and the demise of

Maoist activism,

210

209 An account of the LIP strike from a Maoist point of view is articulated in the

series of interviews between two Maoists: Philippe Gavi, Pierre Victor and Jean-Paul Sartre in: On a raison de se révolter, (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

210 The demise of Leftism is indexed by many historians through the “discovery” of the Gulag when Solzhentzin’s book Gulag Archipielago was published in France in 1974. See Kristin Ross’ May ’68 and its Afterlives and Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible.

and the shift from Fordism to the flexible accumulation of capital.

These are reflected in Godard’s and Miévielle’s disavowal of montage as a chaining of

images and putting it forth as an accumulation of images. Other new historical events that

appear in the film pointing at the waning away of Leftism around 1974 are: Pinochet’s

anti-communist coup d’état and the dissolution of La Gauche Prolétarienne marked by its

members’ metamorphosis from activists to parachutists elsewhere as “doctors without

borders,” or journalists, congealing their practice around the foundation of the newspaper

116

Libération in 1973.211

On a fait comme pas mal de gens. On a pris des images et on a mis le son trop fort. Avec n’importe quelle image: Vietnam. Toujours le même son, toujours trop fort, Prague, Montevideo, mai soixante-huit en France, Italie, révolution culturelle chinoise, grèves en Pologne, torture en Espagne, Ireland, Portugal, Chili, Palestine, le son tellement fort qu’il a fini par noyer la voix qu’il a voulu faire sortir de l’image.

Ici et ailleurs differs from other DVG films in its spatio-

temporality, partly due to the problems posed by the Palestinian footage I will discuss in

the next chapter, expanding Pravda’s self-critique on “Political tourism” and Third

Worldism. Editing the material three to four years after having shot it, Godard and

Miéville articulate a position from which they analyze the immediate Parisian and

Palestinian aftermath of May ’68, six years and four years back, respectively, from

Grenoble. In the voice-over, Godard declares:

212

Here Godard and Miéville are addressing the predicament of May ’68: the putative

speaker’s position was problematized because the intellectuals had spoken out too loudly,

drowning the voice inside images. According to Le Goff, the logic animating Maoists’

denunciation of power was not theoretical but practical a kind of “settling of accounts,”

denouncing oppression, exploitation and racism. Exploiting the potential of dissent,

Maoists created considerable mediatic events, putting forth the State as fascist. By many

211 The Gauche Prolétarienne dissolved on November 1st, 1973 in what is known

as “la réunion des chrysanthèmes.” 212 “We did what many others were doing. We made images and we turned the

volume too high up. With any image: Vietnam. Always the same sound, always too loud, Prague, Montevideo, May ’68 in France, Italy, Chinese Cultural Revolution, strikes in Poland, torture in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Chile, Palestine, the sound so loud that it ended up drowning the voice that it wanted to get out of the image.”

117

accounts (including Godard’s and Miéville’s) their goal of people’s exercise of power

without delegation or mediation led to their project’s failure in an excess of dissent.213

Now their gesture of summoning silence is more allegorical than self-critical. In

Ici et ailleurs, Godard and Miéville amalgamate the crisis of patriarchy with the

revolutionary’s responsibility to take part in revolutionary action at home (as opposed to

going abroad), thus critiquing the intellectuals who had gone abroad and brought back

materials to speak about others’ struggles without looking at what was happening at

home. Moreover, in the scene with Guernica, a call to action (or to help) gets postponed

indefinitely. When Godard declares: “On a mis le son trop fort,” he is making a further

positioning move, this time with regards to Sartre. As we saw above, Godard took up

Sartre’s position of the separateness between art production and engaged activism

working on bridging the gap between the two in his practice of “militant filmmaking.”

The impending breakdown of activist practice at home was analogous to

intellectual’s failure to engage with revolutionaries abroad. In the General Assembly

sequence, sound is to image as militant ideology is to art. Art had been drowned by

politics. When Godard and Miéville say, “People always speak about the image and

forget about the sound,” it means that the ideology that informs the discourse of political

art-making takes power over the image. We thus speak the image as opposed to seeing

the image, forgetting the sound that has taken power over it. The citation of Guernica

summons silence; with it, Godard and Miéville call for silencing Leftist ideology because

in the face of the failure of the Palestinian Revolution, which embodies the failure of all

revolutions, they are speechless.

213 See Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 201.

118

after first having contested him for being unable to bridge his double position as writer

and intellectual. Citing Guernica enables Godard and Miéville to contest Sartre, this time,

regarding his skepticism about the power of visual images as a medium with which to

effectively convey indignation and to denounce injustice, embodied by his dismissal of

Gurenica.214 For Sartre, insofar as images are mute, they are open receptacles of meaning

and therefore invoke ambiguous readings, as opposed to conveying a clear, unified

message, like writing. That is why for Sartre only literature can be successful as

committed art, because the writer guides the readers through a description, making his

audience see the symbols of social injustice and thereby provoking their indignation.215

Godard’s and Miéville’s citation of Guernica is a quiet, visual scream: the citation makes

a statement in favor of a flight from the prison of language, from logocracy, or the

becoming sound of speech. As they state in the voice-over in Ici et ailleurs:216

Il y a un moment // un points dans le temps ou un son prend pouvoir sur les autres // un point dans le temps ou le son cherche // quasi désespérément à conserver ce pouvoir // Comment ce son a pris le pouvoir? Il a pris le pouvoir parce que a un moment donné il se a fait représenter par une image // Celle-là par exemple…

217

214 Guernica is the symbol par excellence of intellectual militant struggles. It was

doomed by Sartre in What is Literature?, (1960) and championed by Adorno in Commitment, (1966). In 1968 protests in America against the war in Vietnam used Guernica as a peace symbol; in 1967, some 400 artists and writers petitioned Picasso: “Please let the spirit of your painting be reasserted and its message once again felt, by withdrawing your painting from the United States for the duration of the war.” In 1974, a young Iranian Artist, Toni Shafrazi, sprayed Guernica with the words, “Kill Lies All.” (etc.) See: Picasso’s Guernica, Ed. Ellen C. Oppler, Norton Critical Studies in Art History (New York, London: Syracuse University, 1988)

215 Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is writing?” in What is literature? 216 Walter Benjamin calls the power that intellect “logocracy,” an already made

activist position in which the intellectual does not acknowledge his/her own role in the process of production. This position implies a system in which words are the ruling power. In, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review I/62, (July-August 1970).

217 “There is always a sound that takes over the rest // A point in time when one sound takes power over the others // [we hear Hitler giving a speech] // The sound seeks

119

This fragment from the voice-over recalls scenes from One A.M., a film that Godard

filmed in 1969 in New York in collaboration with the documentary filmmakers Richard

Leackock and D.A. Pennebaker. The film was produced and edited in 1972 by D.A.

Pennebaker, who titled it One American Movie. In one scene, a shaky-voiced Godard

interviews Eldridge Cleaver, who is both aloof and annoyed by the filmmaker’s

questions. Throughout the film, a white actor dressed up at various times as an Indian,

cowboy, or policeman walks around the streets of New York with a tape-recorder,

playing over fragments of Cleaver’s speech and repeating after them. Through echolalia,

revolutionary discourse is decomposed, disqualifying the syntagmatic quality of speech

in favor of its phonetic quality. Passing through the (white) actor, (black) revolutionary

speech (syntagm) becomes sound (phoneme).

Guernica is not a speech act, and that is perhaps the reason why it became the

epitome of an autonomous yet committed work of art, because while it remains separate

from the social sphere (the domain of opinion, speech), it lets the German

guilt/culpability surface, and at the same time, it does not have as an end Picasso’s

desperately to keep its own power. How did the sound take power? // It took power because at a given moment it made itself to be represented by an image // this one, for example…” “While we hear this part of the voice-over, we are looking at the amplifier that is measuring the given sound’s intensity (a fragment of the ‘International’).

Immediately after comes the video-collage of “Powerful men:” first, the photograph of Nixon, “A gangster who represents the mafia,” which is superimposed by that of Moshe Dayan’s, “A foreman who represents his boss,” according to Godard. Following we see a photograph of soldiers standing next to a machinegun, one of them is holding binoculars (it is presumably the image of the Israeli Army extracted from a journal like L’express). This image is mixed electronically with that of Moshe Dayan. Next we see a shot of a printer of newspapers in Arabic –presumably from a print shop in the Middle East?

120

declaration of indignation.218 While we can doubt with Sartre whether Guernica

converted anyone to the Spanish cause, this painting, like much of Godard’s work (a later

example of this is his film Passion), posits a reflexive and analogical relationship between

aesthetics and politics, as opposed to a transitive link. Transitivity is the effect of an

action on an object: here, the effect of politics on art or vice versa. Differently, an

analogical relationship between art and politics implies a linking via aesthetics and ethics:

If aesthetics is to ethics what art is to politics, each term necessarily acts individually.

Arguably, Godard replaces an ideological and transitive relationship between art and

politics with an analogical and reflexive link between the two. A reflexive or analogical

link between aesthetics and politics implies a relationship that acknowledges the presence

of the other: they are separate, but aware of each other. Such a link presupposes art’s

autonomy as relying on its having an end, as different from being an end, or being

instrumental to a cause: art appeals to viewers (as opposed to presenting itself), calling

for judgment or consideration like appearing in a court and interpellating the viewer. This

is Adorno’s and Pierre Macherey’s position regarding the relationship between aesthetics

and politics. For Macherey, art has an end insofar it presupposes a subjective pact

between viewer and author based on general trust: the author’s word is to be believed

because the receiver’s is an act of faith. This implies that before the work appears, there

is an abstract space presupposing the possibility of the reception of the authors’ word.219

218 According to Theodor Adorno in “Commitment.” He further quotes a about

joke of a Nazi officer coming into Picasso’s studio and asking him: “Did you do it?” Picasso’s answer being: “No, you did it!”

219 Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire Collection “Théorie” par Louis Althusser, (Paris: François Maspero, 1966), pp. 89-91.

Godard echoes the conception of the artwork as based on trust when he states that for

121

him, an image is like a proof in a process, and he compares filmmaking to “building a

new proof.”220 Issues of trust and faith in the image will become recurrent themes in

Godard’s work. As he wrote for in a collage he made for Cahiers du cinéma in 1979:

“L’image comme preuve. L’image comme justice, comme résultat d’un accord.”221

Godard’s war of position between 1967-1974 can be summarized as the

production of contradictory images and sounds that appeal to viewers calling them to

produce meaning with the film as readers/viewers, as opposed to consuming meaning.

Name it a politics of address, a “the(rr)orising” pedagogy (Serge Daney’s indictment,

which I address in chapter 3), or Brechtian didacticism. Godard’s collaborations with

Gorin and Miéville call for a radical way of hearing and seeing. In their work the task of

art is to separate and transform the continuum of image and sound meaning into a series

of fragments, postcards, and lessons, outlining a tension between visuality and discourse.

Godard reconfigures Sartre’s split between writing and commitment once more: if for

Sartre the subjectivity of the committed artist is universal, as opposed to the tradition of

speaking in the first person in the name of universal values, Godard articulates in his

video-essays of the mid-1970s a depersonalized discourse, not as an intentional process

but using the camera as a tool for encountering reality, thinking out loud while editing in

video, positioning himself seeing = re-see-(v)ing-re-sending, formulating a site for

220 See “Économie politique de la critique de film: Débat entre Jean-Luc Godard

et Pauline Kael,” published originally in Camera Oscura nos. 8-9-10 reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, 481. 221 “The image as a proof. The image as justice, as the result of an agreement.” Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du cinéma no. 300 (1979),125.

122

enunciation in between the sites articulated by the double pragmatic expression: Moi je

suis un animal politique // Moi je suis une machine.222

222 “Me, I am a political animal // Me, I am a machine.” From the script of 1973

of an unrealized film, Moi, je

123

Chapter 2

Elsewhere: Dialogues of Points of View

1. A Deaf Point of View

En France, tous les Colomb de la modernité crurent, derrière Godard, découvrir la Chine à Paris quand ils abordaient en Californie. C’est le vent d’Ouest qui gonflait leurs voiles, mais ils se guidaient sur le petit livre rouge qui disait le connaître, comme les découvreurs sur la Géographie de Ptolémée. Le président Mao n’eut jamais une telle apparence d’infaillibilité aux yeux de ses disciples européens qu’en ce moment précis de l’histoire ou, en Europe, le vent d’Ouest commençait à l’emporter sur le vent d’est. En mai ’68, les mots ont toujours eu raison contre les choses, mais les choses ont fini par avoir raison des mots: il faut seulement leur laisser le temps.

Régis Debray.223

Critics such as Raymond Bellour and Collin MacCabe see in Ici et ailleurs a radical

break in Godard’s oeuvre at the level of his political commitment and aesthetic

engagement, as they see a qualitative and quantitative change in his engagement from the

Marxist-Leninist period to the Sonimage years.

224

223 “In France, all the Columbuses of modernity thought that behind Godard they

were discovering China in Paris, when in fact they were landing in California. Their sails were filled by the West wind, but they were steering by the “Little Red Book,” which said the opposite, like explorers equipped with Ptolemy's “Geography.” Chairman Mao never seemed so infallible to his European disciples as he did at the exact moment in history when, in Europe, the West wind began to prevail over the East wind. In May ‘68 words were always preferred to things, but in the end things prevailed over words: it was just a matter of time.” Régis Debray, Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officielles du dixième anniversaire (Paris: François Maspero, 1978), 35-36, in English: “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” New Left Review, 115 (May-June 1979).

This break is usually described as the

224 Christa Blüminger called it “a radical farewell to militant filmmaking,” in “Procession and Projection: Notes on a Figure in the Work of Jean Luc Godard,” Forever Godard, edited by Michael Temple (London: Black Dog Publishing and Tate Modern, 2004), 182. For Raymond Bellour, it announces a radical break in Godard’s work as “the end of militant politics, the exportation of concepts and the credo that images cannot embody words and that images bear upon them the task of expressing a political truth,

124

quandary of an intellectual, who, realizing the limitations of his previous position of

“erroneous engagement,” enacted a “turn” that would prevent such a “mistake” from

occurring again. I, however, along with Michael Witt, see coherence in Godard’s work.

The changes in his engagement were qualitative insofar as they responded to the actuality

and to the shifting historical conditions prompted, for example, by the mediatization of

mediation.225 Moreover, the editing of Ici et ailleurs coincided with the end of the

“French Cultural Revolution” at a time in which the limitations of the second communist

hypothesis of “how to win” and “how to organize the new power”226

that is, the political (la politique) like truth.” Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images, Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo. (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1990), 117. For Serge Daney “nothing has protected him from the average illusions of his day (and when his films became more political, crafty though he was, he came up against the same naivety and dead-ends as any other “Maoist” of the age).” Serge Daney, “The Godard Paradox,” Forever Godard, 70.

225 See further: Michael Witt, “Godard dans la presse d’extrême gauche,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 165-173; Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images; and Colin MacCabe, A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).

226 I cite Badiou: “The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917 to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the years 1966–75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to hold out—unlike the Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of the possessing classes; how to organize the new power so as to protect it against the onslaught of its enemies? It was no longer a question of formulating and testing the communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what the 19th century had dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obsession with victory, centered around questions of organization, found its principal expression in the ‘iron discipline’ of the communist party—the characteristic construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The party effectively solved the question inherited from the first sequence: the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popular war, in Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and succeeded in establishing a new order.” “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49, (January-February 2008). URL: http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2705. Date consulted: March 3, 2008.

and of activist

practice had become evident here (France). This went hand in hand with the betrayal or

125

the failure of revolutions elsewhere and with the beginning of a new reactionary period in

general, specifically in France.227

The last ten minutes of Ici et ailleurs are dedicated exclusively to a shot of four

fedayeen discussing a failed operation in the Occupied Territories. In a text he wrote in

1991, the Palestinian intellectual and the Dziga Vertov Group’s translator and native

informant in the Middle East, Elias Sanbar, recalls being present during the filming of the

fedayeen in Jordan.

228

Still from the last sequence of Ici et ailleurs

According to him, Godard had wanted to film “live” the statement

of account of a commando unit that had just returned from an operation in the Territories.

Sanbar describes four fedayeen covered in sweat, displaying bodily tension, on the verge

of a breakdown. Two members of the commando unit had fallen down and the rest were

directing their anger at the commander. After that, Sanbar tells us, they sat down in front

of the camera allegedly discuss their operation in terms of self-critique.

227 Deleuze, “La gauche a besoin d’intercesseurs,” Pourparlers (Paris: Les

Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 165. 228 Elias Sanbar, “Vingt et un ans après,” Traffic no. 1 (1991), 115-122.

126

In the 1991 text Sanbar further recalls being at the side of Godard’s editing table two

years after filming, translating the conversation amongst the fedayeen: “Vous êtes des

inconscients, notre ennemi est féroce et ne prend pas les choses à la légère (comme vous).

Cela fait trois fois que les unités de reconnaissance nous font traverser le Jourdain au

même endroit et cela fait trois fois que l’ennemi nous y attend et que nous perdons des

frères . . .”229

229 “You are completely irresponsible, our enemy is ferocious and unlike us, they

take things very seriously. It has already been three times that the ‘recognizing’ units make us cross the Jordan River at the exact same spot and every time the enemy is waiting for us there . . . Now we have lost our brothers.” Ibid, 116.

Then, they insulted each other, an action rather removed from Marxist-

Leninist self-critique. Looking at this material in 1972 was shocking for both Godard and

Sanbar; for the former, because he realized that he had not “listened” to the

revolutionaries. For the latter, he says, because he had been deafened by theories and

unfaltering convictions that had caused him to idealize the struggle in spite of the

fedayeen’s discussion being in his own language. In other words, theories and

convictions had “covered” up what the fedayeen were saying along with the fact that their

dialogue was not self-critique, but a matter of life and death. Along similar lines, in the

voice-over that accompanies this longest and final scene in Ici et ailleurs, Godard

reiterates in the voice-over that “his” voice as a Maoist had covered up the voices of the

men and women they had filmed, pondering on the fact that he had denied these voices

and reduced them to nothing. Evidently, the film ends revealing the limits of aesthetic

practice grounded on the politics of the signifier and the signified. The politics of the

signifier could be defined as formal Modernism, an ontological reflection of images tied

to self-reflexivity of the cinematic apparatus. A politics of the signified implies a coding,

decoding, and recoding of images through ideological auto-critique. This last scene

127

points as well, first at the need for the restitution of the voice of the dead Palestinians,

second at the need to show and listen to images of Palestinians. Godard and Miéville

condemn and lament the wave of terrorism that followed the Black September massacres

of the fedayeen and refugee bases in Jordan. Godard’s shocked voice says in the face of

the outcome of the Palestinian resistance, “On a filmé les acteurs du film en danger de

mort.”230 Sketching out the links between resistance, revolution, television, cinema, and

journalism, the film ends with a plea: “Passez cette image de temps en temps.”231

2. A Short Genealogy of Points of View

While Latin America bemoans its general wretchedness, the foreign interlocutor cultivates a taste for this wretchedness not as a tragic symptom, but rather as simple formal information for his field of interest. Neither does the Latin convey his true wretchedness to civilized man nor does civilized man truly comprehend the Latin's wretchedness.

Glauber Rocha.232

Within the context of a world polarized by the Cold War, struggles were organized

around anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism in France. Leftists supported

decolonization, ascribing to the revolutions and national liberation movements in the

third world the role of an Outside from which the new would emerge. Through this

unmediated other, the imperialist West would be immanently overcome and its

contradictions would be solved as new Socialist nations.

233

230 “We filmed the actors of the film in deadly danger.” 231 “Pass these images [of the Palestinians] from time to time [in Western

television].”

This sixty-eighter utopia –

whose principal geopolitical axis was Cuba-Algeria-Vietnam – encouraged political

232 Glauber Rocha, “The Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965), http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/t_estetica.html. Date consulted: September 3, 2008.

233 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso 2008), 337.

128

revolutionary tourism in the Third World, constituting a particular genre of aesthetico-

political intervention elsewhere.

The relationship to revolutions elsewhere had been part of the history of the

European Left since 1917. In the twentieth century, enthusiastic utopias and depressing

realities became the core of the relationships between countries of developed capitalism

and those of the Second and Third World.234 External observers to political movements

were moved by ideological kinship and sympathy. This tendency was echoed in Kant’s

assessment of the German intellectuals’ reaction to the French Revolution, calling it a

“moral tendency in humans,” bordering at times on enthusiasm. For Kant, enthusiasm

provokes the external observer to express universal yet disinterested sympathy for one set

of protagonists against their adversaries. This is based, according to him, on a moral

disposition of humans.235 Such conjunction was the basis of the Leninist vanguardist

party, which ascribed to intellectuals the role of producing knowledge for the proletariat,

speaking in the name of universal values anticipating the emancipation of humanity. This

model put forth the foreign nationalist-revolutionary movement elsewhere as the “form”

of the political real, making it easily collapsible into aesthetic practice.236

234 Rossana Rossanda, “Les Intellectuels Révolutionnaires et l’Union Soviétique,”

Les Temps Modernes no. 332 (March 1974), 1523. She further analyzes the impasse of the Left in its different factions regarding the USSR, as well as Sartre’s, Paul Nizan’s and Ernst Fischer’s positions in relationship to the USSR.

235 Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of the Faculties,” Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: The University Press, 1991), 182-183.

236 Alain Badiou, “Seven Variations on the Century,” Parallax, Vol. 9 No. 2 (April 2003), 72-80.

Revolutionary

sympathy drove the Third Worldist movement, and was put to work in the realm of art

and literature, bringing together aesthetic production and political militantism. In this

129

context, How it possible for the subject to suspend herself disinterestedly from the

context of observation?

As early on as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and ¡Qué viva México!

(shot in 1931), filmmakers pondered their role in relationship to the revolution here and

elsewhere, asking what political cinema is, what is the most adequate genre

(documentary, vérité or fiction) and how an image producer plays a role in the revolution.

Political cinema has its roots in the tradition of recording actuality, like the films of the

Dutch Joris Ivens, especially Spanish Earth (1937), Les 400 Millions (1939) filmed with

Robert Capa in China, or How Yukon Moved the Mountains (1976). Ivens is a pioneering

legend as a Socialist filmmaker, as he made about 50 documentaries between 1911 and

1988, traveling from the Soviet Union (which he visited in 1930, invited by Pudovkin) to

Spain (during the Spanish Civil War), Indonesia, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, and Laos.

Journalistic examples are Ernest Hemingway’s reportages of the Spanish War for the

North American Newspaper Alliance from 1937, and the Magnum Agency’s photographs

of war.237 Sensible political interventions “elsewhere”, as we will see, share concerns

with the quandaries that arise with the Soviet delegacija system238

The Soviet delegate system consisted of state-sponsored visits to Socialist

countries: to the Soviet Union in the nineteen-twenties, and to China and Cuba in the

as well as with the

genres of journalism and documentary, in terms of the “myth” of objectivity, the question

of propaganda or how to render others elsewhere transparent yet differential.

237 For a compilation of essays on films and documentaries about revolutionary

wars and decolonization struggles made by outsiders and/or locally, see Sylvie Dallet’s Guerres Révolutionnaires, histoire et cinéma (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1984).

238 See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Tourists of the Revolution” (1973), The Consciousness Industry (New York: Continuum, 1974), 133.

130

fifties and sixties, in accord with the Western position on the Sino-Soviet split. Famous

accounts of visits to the Soviet Union are André Gide’s Rétour de l’URSS (1936) and

Retouches à mon rétour de l’URSS (1937) and Brecht’s critique of Gide.239 An example

of a photojournalist intervention in China is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s accompanied by

Sartre’s text, “D’une Chine à l’autre.”240 Simone Weil’s was a different type of

intervention. She worked in a factory and as a peasant in the 1930s in France. Moreover,

aside from contributing with poetry and documentation written about the Spanish Civil

War, Weil fought for two weeks as a volunteer for the Republicans.241

Later on, revolutionary sympathy was channeled in the French Leftist political

imaginary toward decolonization movements, side by side with a critique of imperialism.

This was brought together under the umbrella of “Third World” struggles. The term

“Third World” referred in the 1960s to a group of countries other than the capitalist and

the socialist industrialized.

242

239 Bertolt Brecht, Kraft und Schwäche der Utopie, Gesammelte Werke vol. VIII

(Frankfurt am Main: 1967), 434-437. 240 Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Cartier-Bresson, “From one China to another”

(Paris: Éditions Delpire, 1954).

Third World revolutions were characterized by armed

struggle and a national (de-colonizing) project embedded in either a Socialist or a

Communist project. The two key referential axes were the Algerian War for

241 See Weil’s “Lettre à Brenanos,” http://www.paris-philo.com/article-6293570.html and “Journal d’Espagne,” and “Non-intervention generalisée,” in Écrits historiques et politiques, (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

242 The Bandung Conference in 1955 in Indonesia, grouping African and Asian nations, posited an alternative to Western powers and popularized the term. The term was coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in the fifties, describing an “ignored, exploited world” in his article “Trois Mondes, Une Planète,” for the Nouvel Observateur. There he makes an analogy to the notion of “the Third State,” which dates from the French Revolution and referred to everyone aside from the nobility or the clergy. The term was quickly adopted by intellectual discourse in the rest of the world. Cited by Gérard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World (New York: Penguin, 1977), 198.

131

Independence and the Cuban Revolution. Taking up the political and social problems of

the former colonial or semi-colonial Asian, Latin American, and African countries, in and

around 1968, French revolutionaries addressed geopolitics, denouncing the Soviet

collusion with American hegemony and condemning the latter and its manifestations, like

the Vietnam War. The movement (project, or ideology) of Tiermondisme became

essential to the engaged intellectual’s imaginary; for the French Left, it became a way to

catalyze the issues of slavery, past and present colonialism, Socialism, and revolution.243

This genre of political engagement was influenced by Mao’s revolutionary call to unite

with the Third World against the “Paper Tiger”244 of imperialism, and his emphasis on

the revolutionary potential of the Third World’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, and

with Che Guevara’s call: “¡Hasta la Victoria! Crear dos, tres, muchos Vietnam.”245

The Soviet delegacija system of intellectual exchange was imported by Third

World national struggles, sponsoring official intellectuals’ visits to, for example, Vietnam

or Palestine. Sympathizers of the Black Panthers’ cause went to visit them in the United

States – Jean Genet was famously denied entry to the US and smuggled himself to New

York from Canada. An intervention that is unique in kind is Régis Debray’s trip to

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Paul Nizan’s Aden Arabie (1960),

Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Anthology of Negro and Malagasy Poetry (1949) and Sartre’s

prefaces to these books are considered manifestoes of Tiermondisme.

243 Claude Liauzu, “Le tiersmondisme des intellectuels en accusation: Le sens

d'une trajectoire,”Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, no. 12 (October - December 1986), 74-75.

244 Mao Tse-Tung, “U.S. Imperialism is a Paper Tiger” (July 14, 1956), available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_52.htm. Date consulted: July 8, 2007.

245 “Until Victory! To make two, three, many Vietnam!”

132

Bolivia to fight alongside Che Guevara; during and after his three-year imprisonment in

Bolivia, Debray theorized Guevara’s foco guerrilla strategy. Another eminent

intervention was by the filmmaker and revolutionary Michèle Firk. She had been a

member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and participated in

revolutionary actions in Cuba and Guatemala, where she committed suicide in order not

to be made to talk in 1968.246

No matter what attitude or position one takes toward these countries – and they run the gamut from blind identification to vitriolic dislike – the verdicts are invariably raced from the outside. No one who returns from a sojourn in socialism is a genuine part of the process he tries to describe. Neither voluntary commitment, nor the degree of solidarity with which one behaves, no propaganda action, no walk through the cane fields and schools, factories and mines, not to mention a few moments at the lectern or a quick handshake with the leader of the revolution, can deceive about the fact. The less the traveler understands this and the less he questions his own position, the greater and more justified will be the animosity that the voyager into socialism encounters from the very onset – from both sides.

Another series of interventions were by Gérard Chaliand, a

freelance researcher who has written about most of the Third World revolutions,

producing a valuable body of chronicles and historico-empirical investigations. Further

artists, writers, journalists, and filmmakers produced accounts speaking for and about

revolutionary struggles in the Third World. These interventions mixed the genres of

documentary, travel diary, photojournalism, and reportage. Political tourism came with

its self-critique, and this fragment from an essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

summarizes it:

247

246 Godard dedicates 2b of Histoire(s) de cinéma, “Fatale beauté” to Michèle Firk.

A collection of her writings was published after her death: Michele Firk, écrits réunis par ses camarades (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1970).

247 Hans-Manus Enzensberger, “Tourists of the Revolution,” 130. My italics.

133

Enzensberger’s quote denotes a concern with the travelers’ awareness of her position as

an outsider. The self-reflexive examples of this body of works activate diverse

mechanisms in order to render an awareness of the speaker’s position as external

observer who is aware of his position as such. One can argue that these interventions

imply empathy on the part of the speaker prompted by ideological sympathy and

solidarity. Contrary to the idea that these works could be dismissed because they might

be made by intellectuals for the intelligentsia, or partisan and blind propaganda for the

sponsor, we could consider them to be part of a reassessment of how the West interpreted

and produced new discourses about the “other” in the light of Europe’s post-colonial

identity crisis and the ideological scission of the world during the Cold War: a proto-

global cartography characterized by the First/Third World division and by ideological

alliances having Marxism as the common code. These interventions were prompted by

ideological kinship – by the Marxist-Leninist belief in the revolutionary potential of

Third World peasantry, coded through a global Western Marxism translated into local

specificities.

Literary examples assumed the form of récits de voyage in, for example, Pier

Paolo Pasolini’s Guerre Civile (U.S./Black Panthers) in 1966 and in Susan Sontag’s Trip

to Hanoi in 1968.248

248 She also visited China, glimpses of which are found in her 1978 On

Photography.

Sontag’s text highlights her frustration with the delegacija system in

Vietnam because it hindered her freedom of movement. This, in her view, segregated her

from the “working population, reality, loss.” She felt thus forced in a position of an

uncritical ingratiation with her hosts because she had been given access to privileges

134

which, above all, made her uncomfortable in the face of people’s evident lacks.249

From the 1970s, there is Julia Kristeva’s Des chinoises (1974), a sociological

investigation and also a récit de voyage based on a trip she made to China with her Tel

Quel team: Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet, François Wahl and Roland Barthes.

Years

later, Sontag visited Sarajevo during the siege to stage Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for

Godot, for which she was harshly criticized and even mocked. The Spanish writer Juan

Goytisolo coincided in Sarajevo with Sontag; his Cuadernos de Sarajevo (one of the key

texts in Godard’s Notre musique) sums up his experience from the point of view of a

journalistic witness, a more recent kind of intervention elsewhere that I will touch upon

in chapter 4.

250 The

trip was tied to Kristeva’s search for new and different ways of thinking old problems,

based on a kind with romance of exile and travel. In her account, she wrote about the

heroism of the rebellious Chinese women and their role in the Cultural Revolution, while

she realized the impossibility that the solution to French women’s difficulties could be

enlightened by an inquiry into Chinese women’s problems. Kristeva discovered

irreconcilable differences between the women: the French are cornered in monotheism

and capitalism, and the Chinese in feudalism and Confucianism. The lesson for Kristeva

was the urgent “waking up” of women – “here” and “there” – in order to fulfill their

internationalist role in structuring Socialism.251

249 Susan Sontag, “Trip to Hanoi” (1968), Styles of Radical Will (New York:

Picador, 2002), 156-7. 250 The journal devoted issue 59 (Fall 1974) to their three-week trip. 251 Tel Quel no. 59, (Fall 1974), 28-29.

Three years later, Kristeva wrote that her

trip to China had been an effort to perform a jolt inside of Marxism, seeking a solution to

the Occidental deadlock. She then criticized China (concurring with Tel Quel’s disavowal

135

of Maoism) for being a repetition of Stalinist Marxism, and sought a new solution of the

Western impasse in three trips to the United States – where she then located the potential

realization of French post-Maoist politics facilitated by what she characterizes as

American polyvalence.252

Barthes expressed disappointment with the trip to China and reported having

come home empty-handed except for having found common political foundations

(briques) with the Chinese. Upon his return he manifested a light hermeneutical crisis,

wondering if “ces objets, dont nous voulons à tout prix faire des questions (le sexe, le

sujet, le langage, la science), n’étaient que des particularités historiques et géographiques,

des idiotismes de civilisation?”

253

252 See Kristeva’s editorial to the Tel Quel issue dedicated to the U.S., nos. 71-73

(Fall 1977), 3. 253 “Apart from the political answer, we come back with nothing . . . What if these

objects which we insist at any price at bringing into question (sex, subject, language, science) are only historical and geographical particularities, civilizational idiotisms?... China resists delivering sense, not because it hides it, but because, more subversively, it undoes the constitution of concepts, themes, and names: she does not share common targets of knowledge like us . . . it is the end of hermeneutics . . .” Roland Barthes, “Et alors, la Chine?,” Le Monde, May 24, 1974.

For Barthes, the French semiotician, the perceived

absolute otherness of China lay in the disorganization of the Chinese semantic field as a

system of knowledge: “La Chine semble résister à livrer ce sens, non parce qu’elle le

cache mais, plus subversivement, parce que elle défait la constitution des concepts, des

thèmes, des noms: elle ne partage pas les cibles du savoir comme nous . . . c’est la fin de

l’herméneutique.” Barthes goes as far as to assert that there were hardly any signifiers in

China. The adjectives he uses to describe the country are: insipid, colourless, uniform,

and calm. In spite of being “hermeneutically impenetrable,” in his view, “China donne à

lire son Texte politique” in the direction of common places, topoi and clichés of which

136

“nous étrangers, n’entendons-nous jamais que la voix de la ligne triomphante.”254

Debatably, the account of the trip to China is a sub-genre of its own; cinematic

examples are evidently Godard’s La Chinoise (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung

Kuo Cina (1972),

Barthes

thus, came back from China with an hermeneutic anxiety assuaged by the legibility of the

Chinese common political text.

255 and other documentaries by the pioneer Joris Ivens: China’s Four

Hundred Million (1939), Early Spring (Letters from China) (1958), Rencontre avec le

Président Ho Chi Minh (1969), and Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (1976). A

famous partisan account is by a member of the Italian Communist Party, Maria

Antonietta Macciocchi, whose Dalla Cina dopo la rivoluzione culturale (1971)256

Further cinematic instances of accounts from trips engaging with struggles

elsewhere are Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers – Huey! (1968) and Loin du Vietnam

(1967), made collectively by Varda, Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch,

Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais. Dealing with the post-colonial there are Gillo

is an

enthusiastic look into Maoist China’s industrialization. Macciocchi’s outlook contrasts

deeply with the account that was the result of a three-year-long trip by the French

Maoists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle and Evelyne Tschirhart. Their book Deuxième

rétour de Chine (1977) traces their increasing disappointment with what they saw, lived,

and heard.

254 “Delivers to read her political Text,” “Us foreigners can only hear the

dominant line.” Barthes, “Et alors, la Chine?”, 13-14. 255 Antonioni’s film and its Chinese reception are discussed by Susan Sontag in

On Photography (1978). 256 Hans Manus Enzensberger presents a harsh critique of her book and “blindness

toward the situation, her incomprehension of production relationships and of human and social costs entailed by them, and her typical admiration of colorful and sensuous aspect of books becomes evident . . .” See his “Tourists of the Revolution,” 150-152.

137

Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger (1965)257 and René Vautier’s Algérie en flames (1958).

India could be another sub-genre, as there is Pasolini’s travel récit Viaggo in India

(1960), Roberto Rossellini’s, India, Matri Bhumi (1959), Louis Malle’s film L’Inde

Phantome (1969) and Marguerite Duras’, India Song (1975). André Gide’s and Marc

Allégret’s trip to Congo in 1925-26 was an early intervention denouncing French

colonization, after which they produced an anti-colonialist récit and documentary,

respectively, both titled Voyage au Congo. A distinctive case that is at the crossroads of

cinéma vérité and ethnography is Jean Rouch’s work in Africa between 1958 and 1971,

which includes Moi, Un Noir, Jaguar, La Pyramide Humaine, and Les Maîtres Fous.

Another case is Chris Marker, who visited and made films about countries that

experienced socialist revolutions: Sunday in Peking (China), the Lettre de Sibérie, (Soviet

Union 1967), Cuba Sí (1961), etc. A Grin Without a Cat (1977) is a culmination of this

era and the memory-images it left behind. Since then, states of affairs regarding the

geopolitical sensible imaginary have been configured from the points of view of the

European Third Worldists as well as from Third World filmmakers. Third Cinema has

been institutionalized as the genre of films “from elsewhere,” characterized by hybridity

and by having self-representation and counter-hegemonic narratives as mandates related

to the issue of nationalism and to the re-writing of the narratives of formerly colonialized

states.258

257 Which is not a documentary, but a re-staging.

258 The main theorists in the Anglo-Saxon world regarding “Third Cinema” are Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. The latter, in his article “Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity,” defines this kind of cinema as emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s as an alternative to Hollywood at a time in which Third World intellectuals called for a tricontinental revolution (with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon the main referential figures). The principles of Third Cinema were established in a series of

138

3. Godard’s Tiermondisme

Godard’s and Gorin’s Jusqu’à la victoire, the film that will later become Ici et ailleurs, is

part of the corpus of Tiermondiste works. Before going to the Middle East, Godard had

done a “Revolutionary Tour” between 1967 and 1970 – (virtually) to Vietnam and

actually to Cuba, Czechoslovakia, London, Italy, Québec, the U.S., and Palestine. These

visits resulted in his contribution to Loin du Vietnam, “Camera Eye” (1967), in which we

learn that Godard had tried to film in Vietnam but that the Vietnamese denied him a visa

to enter the country – he thus made a film with appropriated footage (from Joirs Ivens’

films), while he describes the images that he would have filmed, had he been allowed to

enter the country. He then gives the militant filmmaker the tasks to “transmit a scream”

as often as he can. British Sounds and Lotte in Italia are accounts of the struggles in

London and Italy respectively, and Pravda (1969) is a film about the situation in

Czechoslovakia in 1969 that is highly critical of the Soviet Occupation and of Socialist

Capitalism and bureaucracy. These films were made within the framework of the Dziga

manifestoes: Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965), Fernando Solanas and Otavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969), and Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969). Stam sums it up in this manner: “Rocha called for a ‘hungry’ cinema of ‘sad, ugly films,’ Solanas and Getino called for militant guerilla documentaries, and Espinosa called for an ‘imperfect’ cinema energized by the ‘low’ forms of popular culture, where the process of communication was more important than the product, where political values were more important than ‘production values.’” The themes of Third Cinema were in general Fanonian: “the psychic stigmata of colonialism, the therapeutic value of anti-colonial violence, and the urgent necessity of a new culture and a new human being, stressing anti-colonial militancy and violence, literal/political in the case of Solanas-Getino, and metaphoric/aesthetic in the case of Rocha.” Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (London: Routledge, 1994), 248. See also Rethinking Third Cinema, edited by Anthony Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (London: Routledge, 2003), 31. Today Third Cinema is considered to consist of a wide range of alternative cinematic practices, and the genre of Third Cinema may include films from the diasporic point of view. See also Ella Shohat’s “Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern/North African Film and Video,” http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/Jouvert/v1i1/shohat.htm. Date consulted: September 4, 2008.

139

Vertov Group self-critically posing the question of political tourism. One A.M. was

filmed in collaboration with the Newsreel collective from New York and as we saw in the

previous chapter, it included an interview with Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver. In

an interview during one of their trips to the U.S., when asked about the relationship to

revolutionary processes in their films, Godard and Gorin stated:

We are fighting Hollywood, Newsreel, and the Underground. But sometimes we work on a united front with the people of Newsreel because it is important at a certain point to work with them to fight both Underground and Hollywood. For example, we took a movie made in Laos (we think it is a revisionist picture, even if they call it a Marxist picture), and brought it to the Palestinian fighters just for them to see others in another part of the world fighting against imperialism. So at that moment we were working on a united front. It is like when you make a demonstration in the street. Sometimes you must coordinate it with a group you are fighting ideologically. Having a revolutionary form is part of being related to the struggle and an expression of that struggle.259

Taking a position distinct from the genre of militant interventions elsewhere as political

tourism, they insist on the revolutionary potential of making that images transmigrate in

the world, by way of meeting with groups fighting anti-imperialist struggles and

discussing the images with them so that other people who are struggling worldwide can

learn from each other. They also insist on purporting revolutionary form and content and

of aligning themselves with people with whom they disagreed, or whom they fought

against ideologically. As I mentioned above, the Algerian war of independence lingered

in the back of the discourse of French Third Worldism; however, only a minority of

French intellectuals actually supported the FLN openly. Godard was amongst them,

259 Godard and Gorin in an interview with Kent. E. Carroll, “Film and Revolution:

Interview with the Dziga-Vertov Group”, from Evergreen Review 14, no. 83 (October 1970), reprinted in Film Focus: Focus on Godard ed. Royal S. Brown (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 55.

140

addressing the matter of torture in the war in Le Petit Soldat (which was censored when it

first came out, in 1961). He posed again the question of engagement with the FLN and

terrorism in La Chinoise in the dialogue between Anne Wiazemsky and the French

philosopher Francis Jeanson.260

Godard and Miéville were invited to Mozambique to make a project outlining the

new country’s television industry three years after it had won its independence (1978).

Jean Rouch had been invited in 1977 and Sonimage had approached representatives to

the Popular Republic of Mozambique proposing to come and study their national

television. Sonimage went there funded by a French producer with a 2-year contract,

hosted and also funded by the National Film Institute whose director was the filmmaker

Ruy Guerra. At the time, Godard and Miéville were experimenting with television, and

Mozambique appealed to them as an ideal laboratory to explore with the Mozambicans

the relationships between nation and image, propaganda and community, self and

collective. Traces of the project, Le Dernier rêve d’un producteur: nord contre sud, ou

naissance (de l’image) d’une nation, are printed in a special issue of Cahiers de

Cinéma,

261 in which Godard put together images and diary entries from Sonimage’s

experience. Sonimage wanted to take advantage from the audio-visual situation in

Mozambique, before it flooded the whole social and geographic corpus of the

Mozambicans, studying how the image and voice of a newly independent country make

themselves little by little.262

260 Jeanson was a collaborator of Les Temps Modernes, part of the French

resistance during World War II, and creator of the “Réseau Jeanson” which transferred funds clandestinely to support the FLN.

261 Cahiers du cinéma no. 300 (1979) 262 Ibid, 73.

As they put it:

141

La voix du Mozambique. De quelle bouche sort cette voix? Quel est son visage?263

They further gave themselves the tasks “d’étudier l’image, le désir d’images (l’envie de

se souvenir, l’envie de montrer ce souvenir, d’en faire une marque, de départ ou

d’arrivée, une ligne de conduite, une guide moral/politique en vue d’une fin:

l’indépendance).”

264 In a similar approach to the DVG’s Palestinian images, as we will

see, Godard and Miéville insisted in the relational process of building the images with the

Mozambicans. Godard placed the emphasis on the moment of production, technique, and

the participation of the spectators (who are evidently for him, images) and their desires in

the making of the images, which was difficult to realize at that stage, due to the

embryonic character of the audience. The producer felt after half a year that Godard was

spending too much money on theorizing as opposed to making films and dissolved his

contract at the end of the year.265

L’image comme justice, comme résultat d’un accord.

The lesson that Sonimage drew from the experience

resonates with the conclusions drawn from Ici et ailleurs:

Pouvoir des images. Abus de pouvoir. Toujours être deux pour regarder une image, et faire la balance entre les deux. L’image comme preuve.

266

263 “The voice of Mozambique, what mouth does this voice come from? What is

its face?” Ibid, 93. 264 “To study the image, the desire of images (the wish to remember, the wish to

show this memory, to make a trace of departure or arrival, a line of behavior, a moral/political guide toward one goal: Independence.” Ibid, 73.

265 As stated by Manthia Diawara, “Sonimage in Mozambique” (1999), The Tvideopolitics of Jean-Luc Godard (Berlin: James and Zeyfang, 2003), 105.

266 “Power of images. Abuse of power. Always to be two to look at an image, and to make a balance between the two. The image as a proof. The image as justice, as the result of an agreement.” Cahiers du cinéma no. 300 (1979),125.

142

Godard met in Cuba with the filmmaker Santiago Álvarez, whose work (especially his

newsreels-assembla-collages) arguably influenced his method of montage as much as

Debord and Vertov did; especially his films such as Now (1965), Hasta la victoria

siempre, (1967) or 79 Primaveras (1969).

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Dziga Vertov Group’s first film was Le Vent d’est

(1969), in which Godard and Gorin ask the question, “Quoi faire?”; they posed this

question too in regards to anti-imperialism and the Third World, opposing the two to

Hollywood film (whose archetypical genre is the Western) in a scene in which a white

cowboy shouts: “Io sono il Generale Motors!” The cowboy is towing an “Indian” tied to

the horse who responds: “I’m black! I’m Palestinian, I’m Vietnamese, I’m Indian, I’m

Peruvian.” At the same time, we hear in the voice-over: “Quel film fait on à Alger? Quel

film fait-on à la Havane? On prétend qu’on lutte contre Nixon-Paramount; mais qu’en

Godard and Santiago Álvarez, San Juan de Baños, Cuba, 196?

143

est-il en réalité?”267 This scene asks the question of what kind of cinema should be

produced in the First and Third Worlds, if militant cinema is an obvious battle with or

against Hollywood. A scene follows in which Glauber Rocha, the Brazilian filmmaker

who wrote what is considered to be the Third Cinema manifesto, “The Aesthetics of

Hunger” also known as “The Cinema Novo,”268 plays himself. Rocha appears at a

crossroads, standing with extended arms in a crucifixion pose (chin down, making the

peace/victory sign with both hands), chanting: “e preciso estar atento e forte // no

tenhamos tempo de temer a morte // e preciso estar atento e forte.”269

267 “What kind of film do we make in Algeria? What film do we make in Havana?

We pretend to be struggling against Nixon-Paramount; but what is it, really?”

Coming from the

horizon behind Rocha, we see the “militant filmmaker” (a pregnant young woman played

by Anne Wiazemsky), who approaches to ask him about his struggle, about the relations

between film and politics; in the voice-over we hear: “Tu disais au début, une route que

l’histoire des luttes révolutionnaires nous a apprise à connaître; mais où est-elle? Devant,

268 For Rocha, the problem of the situation of the arts in Brazil and its relationship to the world is that the arts are taken as truths which really are “formal exoticisms that vulgarize social problems . . . that contaminate the terrain of politics and satisfy the European observers’ nostalgia for hybrid primitivism – conditioned by ongoing colonialism which causes sterility and hysteria, stemming from hunger.” For Rocha, hunger is the very nerve of its own society and the originality of Cinema Novo and the external misunderstanding of this hunger. According to Rocha, whereas “Miserablism” and hunger are for Europeans a “strange tropical surrealism” for Brazilians, it is national disgrace, and evidently “and the noblest cultural manifestation of hunger is violence.” There are, however, films made that are “Official tales of hunger that ask the colonizing countries for money in order to build schools without creating teachers, to build houses without giving work, to teach a trade without teaching the alphabet.” In this picture: diplomats, economists and politicians solicit, but not Rocha’s Cinema Novo. Cinema Novo does not have anything in common with cinema around the world because it is a project that is carried out in the politics of hunger. Glauber Rocha: “The Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965), http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/t_estetica.html. Date consulted: September 3, 2008.

269 “It is necessary to be attentive and strong, we have no time to fear death, is necessary to be attentive and strong.”

144

derrière, à droit, à gauche et comment? Alors tu as demandé au cinéma du tiers-monde où

était-elle?”270 Wiazemzki asks Rocha, “Excusez-moi camarade de vous déranger . . .

votre lutte, a-t-elle de l’importance dans la direction de la lutte de classes?”271 Rocha

points at two roads. The first one leads to a cinema aligned with power interests: “Para

tal, e um cinema desconhecido? . . . um cinema d’aventura.”272 He points in the other

direction and states: “aqui e um cinema do tecer mondo; e um cinema very good um cine

maravilhoso e um cinema da opressão do consumo um cinema imperialista um cinema

perigoso um cinema maravilhoso um cinema de opressão do terrorismo e um cinema

perigoso; um cinema perigoso divino e maravilhoso um cinema que vá construir tudo a

técnica cinema do distribuição . . . perigoso da tecnologia . . . vai construir tudo as casas

de distribuição a técnica, um cinema para todos . . .”273 In the voice-over we hear: “Et là,

t’as senti la complexité de la lutte; t’as senti qu’il te manquaient les moyens de les

analyser; t’es revenu a ta situation concrète: en Italie, en France, en Allemagne, à

Varsovie, à Prague… t’as vu que le cinéma matérialiste n’aidera seulement au tiers

monde à lutter contre le concept bourgeois de représentation.”274

270 “You were considering at the beginning the road that the history of

revolutionary struggles has shown us; but where is the struggle? At the front, at the back, to the right, to the left, and how? So you asked Third World cinema, where is the struggle?”

271 “Sorry to bother you, comrade…is your struggle relevant in the direction of class struggle?”

272 “That way, there is the cinema of forgetfulness, a cinema of adventure.” 273 “This way is the road to a cinema of the Third World, it is a very good cinema,

a marvelous cinema, it is a cinema of the oppression of consumption and imperialism, it is a dangerous cinema, a cinema of the oppressed, of oppression, of terrorism, a dangerous cinema; dangerous divine and marvelous cinema, it is the cinema that will construct everything, technique and distribution, dangerous . . . we must build everything, distribution houses, the technique, it is a cinema for everyone.”

The “militant

274 “At that moment, you sensed the complexity of the struggle, you felt that you lacked the means to analyze the struggle, you came back to your concrete situation in

145

filmmaker” then decides to walk in a different direction than the ones described by

Rocha, after realizing that the Third World struggle is too complicated for the European

filmmaker, as she lacks the means to analyze the foreign concrete situation. She realizes

after pondering the problems, the options, and the history of revolutionary cinema, that

her concrete struggle is against the bourgeois notion of representation. The weapon,

which is common to Third World filmmakers, is materialist cinema.

Stills from Vent d’est, the Dziga Vertov Group, 1969.

Godard discusses issues of production, distribution, auteur cinema, the “liberation” of the

filmic apparatus, the “imperialization of cinema,” and the liberation of creation, in an

interview from 1969 with Fernando Solanas, the Argentinean filmmaker and author of La

Hora de los Hornos (1968), another pivotal Third Cinema manifesto.275

Italy, France, Germany, Warsaw, Prague… and you saw that materialist cinema is useful beyond the Third World, in the fight against the bourgeois concept of representation.”

Solanas vouches

for films that go beyond bearing witness to the decay of bourgeois values and social

injustice, to create alternative models of production and distribution; Solanas sees the

potential unification of Third Worldists and Third World filmmakers in anti-imperialism.

Solanas was influenced by Godard, and both of them agree in the interview that the role

of film is the liberation of man, to raise consciousness, to induce reflection, and to clarify

275 Written with Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema:N otes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World”, available at http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/4669/. Date consulted: September 4, 2008.

146

things.276

After the Palestinian film and the Mozambique experiment in 1978, Godard’s

work moved onto a predominantly Eurocentric geopolitical imaginary. Junji Hori notes a

passage in his work from an active Third Worldism (and, I add, an inquiry into the mass

media) to a melancholic reflection about Europe’s destiny and its complexities.

Evidently, Godard’s position regarding cinema and Third World struggles was

self-critical solidarity. Such empathic engagement, however, was imbued with an anxiety

of blindness, manifest in Ici et ailleurs, but also in the Le Vent d’est in the encounter

between Wiazemsky’s “militant filmmaker” and Glauber Rocha that I just described.

277

Against the idea that Godard “retreated” from his engagement or that he “retrenched back

to Europe” (his position has always self-reflexively Eurocentric) one can argue that the

historical conditions for engagement changed and Godard’s work along with them. The

impasse of the Left regarding Marxist engagement elsewhere was spelled out by

Merleau-Ponty: the militant could, on the one hand, accept the factual reality that allows

for effective militantism and engaged practice, and on the other, seek refuge in a quiet

philosophical state in which the principles of Marxism could be maintained (i.e., at the

level of the “imaginary” proletariat).278

276 The interview is unpublished and it was recorded by the Third World Cinema

Group in Paris (from Berkeley, it seems) in 1969. David Faroult kindly forwarded me a digital copy.

The choice here is between an objective long-

term engagement and a subjective immediate intervention – both overseeing the “bastard

reality.” Godard took up neither of Merleau-Ponty’s options, insisting on practice and

engaging with material reality. Godard was evidently skeptical (with others) of Third

277 Junji Hori, “La Géopolitique de l’image dans les Histoire(s) du Cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard,” unpublished in French and available at http://www.desk.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/download/es_3_Hori.pdf. Date consulted: April 15, 2008.

278 Merleau-Ponty cited by Rossana Rossanda, “Les Intellectuels Révolutionnaires et l’Union Soviétique,” Les Temps Modernes no. 332 (March 1974), 1537.

147

World revolutions and Second World Socialism and Communism (which were perhaps

theoretically right, but empirically disastrous) – evidently previous to the frantic anti-

totalitarian wave in French intellectual circles – while taking sides with them against

imperialism, catalyzed through a war against Hollywood films. Godard evidently

suspected that Marxism would be unsuccessful in liberating the Third World, and his

inquiry into its revolutions ceased to make sense eventually because Vietnam won the

war in 1975 and other Third World revolutions either failed or were betrayed (even in

Mozambique). Upon his return from the Middle East, Godard tells us in Ici et ailleurs,

the “contradictions exploded.” This explosion is real and theoretical – he is referring to

the Black September massacres and the wave of terrorism that followed – and it evidently

does not indicate a new positive order after the revolution, the possibility of tabula rasa

predicated upon the avant-gardist notion of creative negativity. The explosion of

contradictions is theoretical in the sense that it became Godard’s way out from the Maoist

“spurious infinity” and its endless bifurcation of contradictions. His two television series

done in collaboration with Miéville, Six Fois Deux: Sur et sous la communication (1976)

and France Tour Détour Deux Enfants (1978-79), and their video-film Numéro Deux

(1976) deal with a kind of “familial politics,” exploring the private sphere in relationship

to the pervasiveness of television at home. After the end of the Leftist period, Godard

continued to explore the contradictions between the political and the aesthetic, by

constructing the confrontation of the subjects and the objects of history and the actuality,

exploring further the European historical, philosophical and aesthetic imaginary.

Moreover, the relationship between aesthetics and the political as exclusive of each other

but crossing paths is enacted in Passion (1982) and in Nouvelle Vague (1990), in which

148

we see signs not of the notion of Marxist class struggle but of class antagonism.279

4. Radical Tourism and the Palestinian Revolution: The Seen and the Seers

Another example is Godard’s Allemagne 90 Neuf Zéro (1991), in which he outlines the

change of the world politically, economically, cinematically, and historically due to the

shift prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall. When Godard takes up the question of

Palestine again, in 2004, the geopolitical sensible is divided in two points of view, that of

the conquerors and of the vanquished, bringing to the fore missed encounters and failed

restitutions. The point is, that the question of geopolitics for Godard is inevitably

Eurocentric and inextricable from the actuality, privileging certain historical events,

ethical and political questions, and paradigmatic shifts in art and filmic practice,

technology, politics and thought. I am getting ahead of myself but one of the differences

between 1974 and 2004 is the necessary transition from the subject of Historical

Materialism grounded class relations and relationships of production, to Dialectical

Materialism in Histoire(s) du cinéma, to a kind of Homeric history whose (post or pre-

political) subjects are established either as victors and vanquished.

Sulla sorgente, ti giuro Meglio sono i colpi di coltello Che essere governato da un tiranno Andro in cima alla montagna Da dove si vede tutta la valle Urlerò

279 Yosefa Loshitzky argues that “Godard’s former subscription to the Marxist

utopia of a classless society has been replaced by a belief in the Christian utopia of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ promised by Jesus to his poor followers . . . In Godard’s new semi-religious vision, the world of money is the world of materialism and the world of nature is the world of spiritualism.” I disagree with Loshitzky on the grounds of the necessity to avoid turning religion into an episteme. This argument, however, would be worth exploring more in terms of Godard’s rhetorical (secular) shift to Icon theory in terms of montage and to some religious motifs that have appeared in his films since La Chinoise (1967). See Yosefa Loshitzky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (Detroit: Wane State University Press, 1995), 97-98.

149

Popolo ribellati O vento del mio paese Tu che gonfi le vele sul fiume Gonfia anche i nostri mantelli Spingici alla lotta.

Fragment of a song by a Feddai.280

In 1969 the Dziga Vertov Group decided to make a film about the Palestinian Revolution,

wanting to get to know its practice in order to derive “sensible knowledge” from it. They

thought that the situation there was more complex and original, less clear than

elsewhere.

281 In the DVG’s view, the signs of the revolutionary will to change were

present in the Palestinians’ struggle, embodied in their refugee camps, centers for

children, in the formation of cadres and schools, the creation of alphabetization,

healthcare and aid centers, and in the work for the sake of the emancipation of women, as

well as the training camps that had been created by the PLO.282

The Palestinians established themselves on the geopolitical map with a different

status than that of refugees from the outside of their territory, by becoming a nation

without a state, embodied in a representative organization, the PLO. This organization

not only grouped the diverse militant factions that were fighting for Palestinian self-

determination, but it also provided education, healthcare, and basic services to the

They were also interested

in the Palestinian struggle because of its ties to recent history and to European colonialist

history.

280 “On the water source, I swear / a fight with a dagger is better / than being

governed by a tyrant / I will go to the top of the mountain / where it is possible to see the whole valley / I will shout / people rebel / oh wind from my country / blowing on the sails on the river / blow on our cloaks / and push us toward the fight.” From the script of Dario Fo’s play Fedayn, 185-186.

281 As Godard wrote in “Manifeste,” published in El Fatah (July 1970). Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 138.

282 From David Faroult’s interview with Armand Marco for his DEA in Paris, August 2, 2002 (unpublished) 253.

150

refugees. The plight of displaced refugees was then transformed into a political force that

won considerable visibility, especially after the battle of Karameh in 1968. The PLO was

seen as a new national movement, a national fact beyond the problem of the refugees that

achieved recognition from other Arab regimes.283 Sympathetic political tourists

(journalists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries from elsewhere) flocked to the Palestinian

resistance’s militia bases, refugee and training camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to

document the revolution.284 These Western sympathizers – including Bruno Barbey,

Armand Deriaz,285 Francis Reusser, Masao Adachi,286

283 Gérard Chaliand, “1969: La résistance Palestinienne entre Israel et les états

arabes,” Voyage dans vingt ans de guerillas (Paris: l’Aube 1987), 7. 284 This drive to document and support the struggle from the outside dwindled

during the eighties and the nineties – parallel to a shift in the mode of engagement of Leftist movements in the West and constricted by restrictions to journalists during the first Intifada. The international support for the Palestinian struggle revived after the second Intifada, which is sometimes called the “Media Intifada.” Since 2000 there has been a third awakening of the world in solidarity with the Palestinian cause linked to anti-globalization struggles in the West. Founded in 2000, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is an organization that gathers human rights activists from all over the world that go to Palestine to do solidarity work. A perceived discursive and practical shift is evident, from third worldism to Susan Sontag’s paradigm of the 1990s of “enduring in solidarity with” to becoming “human shields” and witnesses of the horrors elsewhere.

285 Deriaz produced a book of photographs of refugees and fedayeen in relationship to the film Biladi une Révolution, shot in Jordan in 1970, directed by Francis Reusser. The book was printed in Switzerland with photographs by Armand Deriaz accompanied by texts written by Palestinians.

Jean Genet (who came to Jordan

after the Black September massacres hosted by PFLP), Dario Fo, Manfred Vosz, The

286 Adachi’s film, Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai senso sengen or The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), was produced by Koji Wakamatsu featuring Fusako Shigenobu, Georges Habache and Leila Khaled. This film-essay describes the anti-imperialist struggle by the Palestinian extreme Left, stressing the necessity of propaganda as counter-information and as a means to resist the power of the Western media. Adachi spent twenty years fighting for the Palestinian cause in the Middle East. See: http://www.firecracker-media.com/features/the-nippon-connection-fra.shtml. Date consulted: April 29, 2008.

151

Dziga Vertov Group, Carole Roussoupoluos,287

Jean Genet and Bruno Barbey in Jordan with the PFLP, 1970.

Gérard Chaliand, and members of the

Rote Armée Faktion– came to put themselves at the service of the Palestinian struggle,

either on their own or as invitees from the Information Services Bureau of the PLO,

having aligned themselves first with its different factions ideologically.

Palestinians then were perceived from the outside as the epitome of progressive artistic

and political sophistication,288

287 Carole Roussopolous, made two films about the Palestinian cause in the early

seventies. The first was a 12-minute film, Munich (1972), about the kidnapping of the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympics by Black September. This film combines footage from European television and the images shot by the group Video Out in the refugee camps in Jordan in 1971. The second was a 13-minute video from 1973, Burial of Mahmoud Al Hamchari, recording the funeral of the first representative of the OLP in Paris, attended by those who supported him politically and the Palestinian community in France, which takes place in a cemetery in the Parisian banlieue. These two films resonate very much with Godard’s work: The combination of found and filmed footage in Roussopolous films is evidently a technique pursued in Ici et ailleurs.

Al Hamchari’s funeral as a subject for a film echoes the DVG’s staging of Pierre Overney’s funeral in Tout Va Bien, and also Deutschland im Herbst in 1977 by Fassbinder, a film about the burial of RAF members. The link between funerals and resistance is hypostatized by Antigone’s predicament (to have the right to bury one’s dead), and could be a matter of further research within the context of the mediatic proliferation of images of Palestinian funerals of martyrs, filmed for televisual viewership elsewhere.

288 It must be noted in passing that the Palestinian Revolution had her own cinema and photography department, that operated as a branch of Fatah’s Information Services Bureau, led by Sulafa Jadallah, Hani Johariyyeh, Mustapha Abu Ali, and Khadija Habshneh. This department created a cinema of the people based on political analysis that documented the revolution for internal and external distribution. Khadija Habshneh, “Palestinian Revolution Cinema,” This Week in Palestine (January 2008), available at

resulting in images prompted by political sympathy that

152

positioned Palestinians as “sexy” revolutionaries fighting for political self-determination.

This was encouraged through the PLO’s astute manipulation of the empathy of Third

Worldists, creating an exchange of gazes that posed the fedayeen for foreign cameras as

patriotic heroes who were dedicated to recovering the stolen land. Back then, differently

than today, the fedayeen were seen from the inside barely as heroes, definitely not as

martyrs, as is evident in Genet’s recollection of a comment by a bold Palestinian mother

in a refugee camp in Jordan, in a passage from Quatre Heures a Chatila: “Des héros!

Quelle blague. J’en ai fait et fessé cinq ou six qui sont au djebel. Je les ai torchés. Je sais

ce qu’ils valent, et je peux en faire d’autres.”289

It is difficult to imagine what kind of situation the radical tourists encountered

during their trip to the Middle East in February-July 1970. Gérard Chaliand’s study of the

Palestinian resistance – he went to the Middle East many times from 1967 on – can give

us an idea of the way in which the Revolution was presented to visitors as well as the way

in which the outsiders coded the resistance. Chaliand’s inquiry is based on a comparison

between the two main member parties of the PLO, Fatah

290

http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2355&ed=149&edid=149#

and the Popular Front for the

Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), focusing on their structure in cadres or frames, analyzing

the nature of their political work from the theoretical point of view, as well as listing the

. Date consulted: January 15, 2008. A longer version was published in Arabic in the Newspaper Al Quds, January 2008.

289 “Heroes! What a joke. I have made and slapped the bottom of five or six who are up at the mountain [Ajloun, where the resistance was concentrated in Jordan]. I have wiped them. I know what they are worth, and I can make more.” Jean Genet, “Quatre Heures a Chatila,” Revue d’études palestiniennes, special number dedicated to Genet and Palestine (January 1983), 15.

290 El Fatah is the revolutionary Palestinian movement founded and led by Yasser Arafat in the mid fifties. “Fatah” is the acronym in Arabic for Haarakat Tahrir Falastin (Palestinian Liberation Movement). The acronym is reversed because HATAF in Arabic means “sudden death,” and FATAH means “conquest.”

153

methods of training and the weapons they used.291 Both parties made contacts with the

population by ameliorating their material living-conditions through medical help; local

intellectuals and activists did political work in the refugee camps.292 This kind of political

work was propagandistic in the sense that they used Marxist-Leninist ideology, turning it

into a political weapon293 in order to turn the refugees into an acting or participating

community that believed in the positive effects of their mobilization.294 Fatah and PFLP

followed the strategy of two principles: education and organization. “Education” was not

only intellectual education or the propagation of information, but it aimed at giving a new

view of the world to the individual; it also involved “political mobilization” by way of

propaganda and slogans in order to set the masses in motion. “Organization” meant

assigning every individual to a network of many organizations in order to make him or

her active within them, creating unions and groupings in order to disseminate slogans and

to discuss them in groups.295

291 See also Genet’s passages describing the training of the young lions (achbal)

in Prisoner of Love (New York: Wesleyan, 1992), 59-63. 292 Khadija Habshneh, for example, not only worked for Fatah’s information

service bureau as a filmmaker and archivist, but also worked as a psychoanalyst with women in refugee camps in Jordan and in Lebanon. Her political work further consisted of teaching and managing workshops in order to enable them to live better. (Habshneh in conversation with the author in February 2008.)

293 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). 294 Ellul argues further that the relationship between propaganda and ideology is such as that propaganda organizes itself in conformity with ideology – propaganda, in other words, depends on an ideological content (Ellul, 193-94). Further, propaganda takes over ideology, as ideologies are mere epiphenomena and propaganda consists on “making believe” in the epiphenomena in order to mobilize individuals (Ellul, 197). Ideology, furthermore, can be translated into slogans, and the purpose of propaganda is to call to action, creating public opinion (Ellul, 203), thereby transforming the public into an acting or participating crowd, creating a community. (Ellul, 208).

295 Ellul, Propaganda, 303-305.

154

Stills from Ici et ailleurs: the Uard and the Achbal

Furthermore, Fatah and PFLP recruited combatants, mostly young refugees, along with a

few intellectuals that were to be formed at the political and at the military levels. The

resistance movements created bases, clandestine cells. They further organized urban and

rural guerrilla action, originally aimed to operations inside cities in the Occupied

Territories. The military aspect of the resistance was based on rigorous physical and

military training for two or three months in clandestine bases, which included learning

how to use heavy and light weapons, topography, camouflage, and study of the Israeli

army’s methods. According to Chaliand, PFLP trainees studied Marxist-Leninist theory,

analyses of the era, the political problems of Palestine, imperialism, Zionism and the

Arab world, the history and evolution of the PFLP, and theories of close combat by

Clausewitz and Giap. The political formation was divided into two phases: first the

beginners were taught about the Palestinian question, its history, its situation and

perspectives: they read Clausewitz, Guevara, Castro, Mao Tse-Tung, and Giap. In the

second phase, they studied the problems of the revolution, class struggle, and Lenin.296

296 Gérard Chaliand, “1969: La résistance Palestinienne entre Israël et les états

arabes,” 81-82.

155

The fedayeen had night courses on math and geography. The average age of the fedayeen

was twenty-five. Most of them were workers and peasants, some of them intellectuals,

artisans, and businessmen. The fedayeen were not only of Palestinian origin but also

Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese.297 Georges Habbache’s tendency (PFLP), posited Zionism

as imperialism; thus theirs was in principle an anti-imperialist Marxist struggle. Fatah as

a movement was nationalist and its political culture was based on similar yet different

readings – it is hard to understand today, but slight nuances in their reading lists, really

mattered then – and discussions of Castro, Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung, Giap, Rodinson, the

Mémoirs of General De Gaulle as well as Mein Kampf, Frantz Fanon, and Régis

Debray.298

Every morning they have two hours of physical training . . . their stage lasts for three or four months and it is rather severe . . . the individual weapons are generally of Soviet model and Chinese fabrication like the famous Kalashnikov. The combatants are taught how to use the fusil, the F.M., the machinegun, bazooka and to shoot rockets. They are given special courses on dynamiting. The fedayeen are mostly Palestinians and they are not older than thirty. Most of them come from a privileged social background and in general they have studied in Arab countries.

Describing a Fatah training camp sixty kilometers from Damascus, Chaliand

notes:

299

Both PFLP and Fatah had sections for women and for children; those for boys were

called the Achbal or Cubs; those for girls, the Uard or Roses.

300

297 Ibid, 95-96. 298 Ibid, 69. 299 Ibid, 68-69. 300 Chaliand describes the Achbal training camp close to the refugee camp of

Abakaah, lodging three hundred and fifty young boys who did not frequent the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency) schools. In the camp they were taught how to read and write and follow a sportive, political and military program. At fifteen they would join the fedayeen. Chaliand, La résistance Palestinienne, (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 72.

Following its own

ideological tendency, Fatah was accused by PFLP of being bourgeois, and Chaliand

156

described it as “theoretically mediocre.” The DVG was associated with Fatah’s

Information Services Bureau. In his text, “Manifeste,” Godard made a statement about

having chosen Fatah over PFLP because of the kind of discussions they led with Fatah

people, with whom they disagreed most of the time:

Avec les camarades du Front démocratique, on a les mêmes discussions qu’entre militants a Paris. On n’apprend rien. Ni eux, ni nous. Avec le Fatah, c’est différent. Il est plus difficile de parler avec un dirigeant de l’image qu’il faut construire de la révolution palestinienne, et du son qui doit accompagner cette image (ou la contredire). Mais c’est justement cette difficulté qui est positive.301

From the outside, the Palestinian resistance was seen as “new” and “beautiful.” The

Palestinian (Marxist-Leninist) Revolution was perceived as new insofar as it presented a

perspective that was something other than the Orientalist image produced by colonial

Europe of the Arab world. Jean Genet made a prolonged visit to the refugee and training

camps in Jordan, spending many months at a time in the Ajloun mountains with the

fedayeen. In an interview he made a statement full of pedagogical irony, remarking how

he had noticed right away a dramatic shift from the traditional literary depictions of the

Middle East framed by the French. Furthermore, the newness of the Palestinian struggle

was tied for him with Modernity, because for Genet, the Palestinians were the first people

in the Arab world that produced a modern relationship with themselves, that of

301 “With the comrades from the Democratic Front we have the same discussions

as with the militants in Paris. We don’t learn anything. Neither us or them. With Fatah it is different, it is more difficult to discuss with a leader about the image that needs to be built of the Palestinian revolution and about the sound that should accompany (or contradict) this image. But it is precisely this difficulty that is positive.” Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 138. There was apparently a mythical discussion between Godard and Kamel Adwan because he wanted the DVG to go to Cairo and shoot a traditional Arabic dancing troupe to include it in their film – they were strongly against this, as they were evidently trying to avoid any kind of Orientalism in their movie. (Anecdote told to the author by Khadiyeh and Mustapha Abu Ali, January 2008).

157

revolutionary self-affirmation.302 For him, this air of modernity was an important break

from the French mythologies that romanced Orientalism. The Palestinian Revolution was

thus characterized, according to Genet, by a new beauty,303 which was transmitted by

their determination to recuperate the freedom that they had lost. This determination was

made visible in a certain kind of casualness and insolence on the part of fedayeen

regarding those who had humiliated them. Genet describes the fedayeen as socially and

politically emancipated warriors.304 He further wrote: “The fedayeen were very beautiful;

and since this beauty was new, shall we say pristine, naive, it was fresh, so alive that it

discovered at once what connected it to all the beauties of the world, freeing themselves

from shame.”305 For Genet beauty is tied to insolence and rebellion, while for Godard the

“newness” is the “beauty” of the Palestinian revolutionary struggle. In the voice-over that

accompanied the images and sounds of Jordanian refugee and training camps in Ici et

ailleurs, he states: “En disant ceci qu’il y avait du beau et de nouveau dans le Moyen

Orient // Cinq images, et cinq sons qu’on n’avait jamais ni entendu ni vu sur la terre

arabe.”306

302 Jean Genet, “Une rencontre avec Jean Genet,” Revue d’études Palestiniennes

no. 21 (November 1986), 30. 303 Jean Genet in “Près d’Aljoun,” from his notes from his trip to Jordan between

October 1970 and April 1971, published posthumously in L’ennemi déclaré, écrits complèts vol. IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 182.

304 Jean Genet, “Un rencontre avec Jean Genet,” 29.

305 Jean Genet, “Four Hours in Chatila,” first published in 1983, translated by Daniel R. Dupecher and Martha Perrigaud. Available at http://www.abbc2.com/solus/JGchatilaEngl.html. Date consulted: February 8, 2009. Genet also famously stated that he would no longer be interested in the Palestinians once they’d won their revolution. 306 “Saying that this is what was new and beautiful in the Middle East, five images and five sounds never seen or heard before on Arab land.”

158

Still from Jean-Luc Godard’s, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s and

Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et ailleurs (1970-74)

For Godard and Miéville, photographs are exchanges of gazes conditioned by the regime

of visibility in which the image will circulate. For them, there is always difference

between the photographer, the seen, and the viewer, bearing in mind that this exchange of

gazes is determined as well, by the potential target market of the image. As Godard states

in Ici et ailleurs: “une image photographique est un regard, sur un autre regard présenté à

un troisième regard, déjà représente par l’appareil photographique”307

Stars, that’s what we were. Japan, Norway, Duesseldorf . . . We knew we existed, we must be doing surprising things since people came from such far-off places to see us – but did the far-off places exist? And the journalists used to stay about two hours: they had to catch a plane in Amman to cover the Lord Mayor’s show in London in six hours’ time. Most of them thought Abu Amar and Yasser Arafat were two different people, possibly enemies. Those

What is the nature

of this exchange of gazes? Genet in his book Prisoner of Love describes the point of view

of a fedai and talks about how the fedayeen saw themselves being seen by the political

tourists and journalists:

307 “A photographic image is a gaze upon another gaze that is presented to a third

gaze, already represented by the camera’s lens.”

159

who got that right would multiply the numbers of Fatah and the ALP by three or four because they counted all the members’ pseudonyms as well as their ordinary names . . . Whenever a European, man or woman looked at us their eyes shone. Now I understand why. It was with desire, because their looking at us produced a reaction in our bodies before we realized it. Even with our backs turned we could feel your eyes drilling through the backs of our necks. We automatically adopted a heroic and therefore attractive pose. Legs, thighs, chest, neck – everything helped to work the charm . . . you’d turned us into monsters too. You called us terrorists! We were terrorist stars. What journalist wouldn’t have signed a fat cheque to get Carlos to sit and drink one or two or ten whiskies with him! To get drunk together and have Carlos call him by his name! Or if not Carlos, Abu el-Az.308

308 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, 12-14. This passage can be compared to

Herberto Padilla’s poem, “Los Viajeros,” about a Cuban perspective about political tourists from elsewhere who were characteristic of the sixties. The poem evidences the idealization of the tourist and the mistrust on the part of the locals. Cited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Tourists of the Revolution,” 130, 131. See Appendix 1.

This passage is telling about the desire embedded in the exchange of gazes and of the

relationships that were created between those being seen and those observing. The former

were heroes posing for foreigners with cameras who had only come for short visits in

order to capture the image of the Palestinian Revolution before moving on to the next

reportage. To the exterior, the revolution was a theatre. Here Genet subtly points at the

ignorant lack of distinction between Abu el-Az (a Palestinian commando) and “Carlos”

(Carlos Ilich Sánchez, “The Jackal”); between a legendary transnational mercenary

terrorist from Venezuela, and a revolutionary and member of the PFLP.

160

Photo by Bruno Barbey from the Agency Magnum, 1970

Another telling description of the kind of encounters that took place between foreigners

who were driven to photograph the fedayeen by previous expectations, and the fedayeen,

has been provided by Elias Sanbar, whose point of view as native informant oscillates

between the inside and the outside:

J’avais été impressionné par l’apparition soudaine des miliciens. C’était la première fois que, grands défiles funèbres mis à part, je voyais autant de combattants, dans leur décor en quelque sorte. Ils semblaient sortis de nulle part, comme une illustration in vivo de toutes les images romantiques qui emplissaient les têtes d’adolescentes de ma génération. Je suppose aujourd’hui, je suis même certain, que ces homes informés, sachant qu’il s’agissait “de cinéma”, avaient à leur façon imagine la scène pour nous accueillir, écrivant ainsi leur propre film probablement fait de réminiscences de Westerns et notamment de cette scène-type lorsque le cavalier ou le convoi de pionniers voient soudain une multitude de “braves” indiens se découper, silencieux et immobiles, sur les crêtes alentour. Mais cette fois, nul mouvement du chef levant sa lance, nul cri de guerre ne préludèrent au déferlement des poursuivants, mais des chansons et très vite une joyeuse mêlée.309

309 “I was really impressed by the sudden appearance of the combatants. It was the

first time I saw so many of them in their own setting, kind of, apart from the great funerary parades. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like a real-life illustration of all the romantic images that had filled teen-agers’ heads of my generation. Today I suppose,

161

5. Constructing a Point of View: The DVG’s Jusqu’à la victoire: Méthodes de

travail et de pensée de la révolution Palestinienne

On a pensé qu’il était plus juste, politiquement, de venir en Palestine plutôt que d’aller ailleurs, Mozambique, Colombie, Bengale. Le Moyen Orient a été directement colonisé par les impérialismes français et anglais (accords Sykes-Picot). Nous sommes des militants français. Plus juste de venir en Palestine parce que la situation est complexe et originale. Il y a beaucoup de contradictions ; la situation est moins claire que dans le Sud-Est asiatique, en théorie, du moins.

Jean-Luc Godard, July 1970.310

The DVG (Gorin, Armand Marco, and Godard) came in February-July 1970 to film the

refugee and training camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In an interview that took place

in Amman in July 1970, Godard stated that the film “Had been commanded by the

Central committee of the Palestinian Revolution, thus, it is an Arab film financed by the

Arabs.” In the same interview, and from the viewpoint of a self-reflexive political tourist,

he problematizes the interventions of militants elsewhere. Rather than shooting the film

out of enthusiastic political sympathy, Godard insisted that the “political” aspect of the

film resided in the fact that it was aimed at being the result of political discussions and

no, I am sure that these men, knowing that we were there to make “cinema,” had in their own way imagined a scene to greet us, creating in this way their own film, probably made of reminiscences of Westerns and notably, of this typical scene, when the cavalier or the convoy of pioneers suddenly saw a multitude of “brave” Indians spread themselves silent and immobile in the surrounding hills. But this time, there was neither the movement of the chef raising his spear, nor a war cry to prelude the chase; rather, songs and very quickly, a joyful melee.” Elias Sanbar, “Vingt et un ans après,” 117.

310 “We thought it would be more just, politically, to come to Palestine as opposed to elsewhere: Mozambique, Colombia, Bengal. The Middle East was directly colonized by French and English imperialism (the Sykes-Picot agreements). We are French militants. It is more just to come to Palestine because the situation is original and complex. There are a lot of contradictions: the situation is less clear than in South-East Asia, in theory, at least.” From “Manifeste.”

162

study of the thinking and working methods of the Palestinian revolution. In other words,

Godard held a theorico-political position by arguing that he was not “putting himself at

the service of the cause” based on political sympathy but insisted on dialogue and on

political analysis with the Palestinians.311 Thus, under the banner of the Russian avant-

gardes, Godard posited himself neither as the bearer of an individual message or as the

spokesman of the fedayeen, but as a technician making use of the medium that he knows

well in order to express the ideas of the Palestinian Revolution. From this interview,

moreover, we can infer that in 1970, the film had as its purpose to show “just images and

sounds” from the Palestinian camps, different from those that appeared in Western press

and television.312

Godard, Gorin and Armand Marco in the Baqa refugee camp in Jordan, 1970.

The original title of the DVG’s film, Until Victory: Working and Thinking Methods of the

Palestinian Revolution, underscores their effort to convey the logic of the Palestinian

311 Interview with Michel Garin, “Godard chez les fedayeen,” L’express, June 27-

August 2, 1970, 44-45, reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, 165. 312 Ibid.

163

guerilla through revolutionary pedagogy. The film would conclude with lessons drawn

from the Palestinian scheme that could be useful to other revolutionary movements. In

“Manifeste,” a text published in July 1970 in El Fatah (a Palestinian Journal published in

France), Godard declared:

Faire de la propagande pour la cause palestinienne, oui. Avec des images et des sons. Cinéma et télévision. Faire de la propagande, c’est poser les problèmes sur le tapis. Un film, c’est un tapis volant qui peut aller partout. Il n’y a aucune magie. C’est du travail politique. Il faut étudier et enquêter, enregistrer cette enquête et cet étude, et ensuite montrer le résultat (le montage) à d’autres combattants. Montrer le combat des fedayins à leurs frères arabes exploités par les patrons dans les usines en France. Montrer les miliciennes du Fatah à leurs sœurs des Black Panthers pourchassées par le FBI. Tourner politiquement un film. Le monter politiquement. Le diffuser politiquement.313

In this text Godard articulates the propagandistic aspect of the film as an educational

enterprise, conveying to revolutionary movements elsewhere lessons from the Palestinian

guerilla.

314

313 “To do propaganda for the Palestinian cause, yes. With images and sounds.

Film and television. To do propaganda is to put the problems on the table (carpet). A film is a flying carpet that can travel all over. There is no magic. It is political work. One has to study, to inquire, to record this inquiry and this study and then show the result (the montage) to other fighters. To show the fedayeen’s fight to their Arab brothers, exploited by their patrons in the French factories. To show the Fatah militants to their Black Panther sisters [who have been] bought off by the FBI. To make a film politically. To edit it politically. To distribute it politically.” Godard, “Manifeste,” 138-140.

314 David Faroult insists that we take into account that with this text Godard and Gorin were seeking to reassure the financial support of Fatah; and that is why they prove publicly their support to them. See Faroult’s “Du Vertovisme du Groupe Dziga Vertov,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 134.

For Godard, furthermore, propaganda means “political discussion and

analysis” rather than reporting or documenting the revolution. He further emphasizes his

goal of showing relationships between images and sounds, as opposed to images of the

struggle. In other words, Godard and Gorin were not interested in portraying the

ideological propaganda of the Palestinian struggle in order to fit Fatah’s agenda, as their

164

image-making did not have as an end the image of the Palestinian revolution; rather, they

saw these images as instruments, in the sense of pedagogical tools for discussing

revolutionary methods and their contradictions, that needed to be disseminated elsewhere.

The DVG filmed different aspects of Fatah’s movement, and from the start they

claimed that they were seeking to differentiate their images from those taken by

journalists and reporters. This became supposedly the source of a political struggle with

the Palestinians. According to Godard and Gorin – and as Genet notes in the passage I

cited above – the Palestinians were used to receiving journalists and reporters who would

come and take images of training camps or hospitals. For this reason, the Palestinians

resisted the idea that for the DVG it was important to see these places only to be able to

build pictures after, as opposed to taking pictures of these places – that is what they mean

that making the Palestinian images was for the DVG a political struggle in itself. Godard

and Gorin’s emphasis on the construction of images was based on Dziga Vertov’s praxis

of concrete analysis of a situation by the construction and analysis of images’

signification.315

Once the material for Jusqu’à la victoire had been filmed, Godard and Gorin

intended to come back to Palestine in order to show the material to the fedayeen with the

aim of concluding its political aspect in discussion with them and with Fatah militants in

order to achieve the “definitive montage” of the material. This method follows Dziga

Vertov’s procedure of “editing before shooting, during shooting and after shooting”

which consists of the following steps: the writing of the script, the orientation of the

Moreover, taking a step further than Vertov, for the DVG it was pivotal

that images were the results of contradiction, discussion and of struggle.

315 Godard and Gorin, Double Feature: Movies and Politics, 45.

165

“disarmed” gaze, the mental organization of that which has been seen in function to what

has been seen, montage during shooting, the orientation of the armed gaze, montage after

shooting, definitive montage, and the emphasizing of the pivot [direction] of the film.316

Vertov’s method of “uninterrupted montage” was based on a notion of cinema as a

“factory of facts,” what we also know as the Soviet practice of factography. Factography

aims at “integrating ideological systems by producing signification not as a mimetic

reflection but as an act of productive labour.”317 In other words, factography implies a

reduplication of reality as an act of signification, as a coding and production of reality

drawn from the components of daily experience. Factography, moreover, is a model of

production that seeks to reorganize the symbolic codes of language and art according to

the new social configurations, ideological principles, and forces of production that

emerged in the post-revolutionary epoch in Soviet Russia. Factography as a genre is close

to propaganda, insofar as it uses analogue images not as visual facts but as the fixation of

visual facts, a kind of writing that is not only historically constituted from a subjective

point of view.318

In the DVG’s images, the Palestinian struggle is visualized in the same style of

documentary or reportage, and their images resemble those that appeared in the mass

media and other publications.

We can infer from Godard’s and Gorin’s statements that they had

Vertov’s practice of factography in mind.

319

316 Dziga Vertov, Articles, journaux, projets (Paris: UGE ‘10/18’, 1972), 102-103.

Cited by Faroult in “Du vertovisme du Groupe Dziga Vertov,” 135. 317 Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October no. 30 (Fall

1984), 107. 318 Ibid, 114.

Formally, the DVG’s Palestinian images are framed in

319 For example, Bruno Barbey’s, which were published in the French magazine Zoom No. 8 (1971), accompanied by a commentary by Jean Genet in 1970, reprinted in

166

objective indirect or photojournalistic style (fixed-frames), a style characterized by a

steady camera showing a point of view of someone who is external to the set.320 Such

way of framing, cuts out objects from “reality,” determining artificially a closed system

as slices of space and time. In the DVG’s Palestinian footage, fixed-frames predominate,

except in a few instances in which the camera follows the action or jumps to the out of

field. This is where a critical distinction must be drawn between the genres of

factography and documentary. The term “documentary” was coined in 1926 by the

filmmaker John Grierson to designate the depiction of reality at its most objective,

passive, and impartial rendering. Factography, in contrast, does not claim to reflect reality

veridically, but to actively transform it. Factography is praxis, the outcome of a process

of production. As a method, truth is an effort not to reflect human experience but to

organize it.321 Signification in factography not a system of mimetic reflection like

documentary, but one of productive labor, an inscription of facts, a kind of writing

(écriture), as opposed to a set of codes establishing a series of reality effects.322

The DVG had planned to bring the rushes back to the Middle East after July 1970

to discuss them with the fedayeen in order to organize the montage of the film, but they

The

difference between factography and documentary lies in recording facts as opposed to

producing and inscribing facts.

his collection of interviews L’ennemi déclaré. This resemblance becomes also evident in Elias Sanbar’s compilation of photographs Les Palestiniens: La photographie d’une terre et de son people de 1839 a nos jours (Paris: Hazan, 2004).

320 Deleuze gives a nominal definition of “objective” image, which is when a thing or a set of things are seen from someone who is external to that set. Deleuze, Moving-Image Cinema 1, translated by Hugh Tomnlison and Barbara Habberjan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 71.

321 Devin Foe, “Introduction,” October no. 118 (Fall 2006), 3-5. 322 Ibid, 8.

167

were unable to return to the Middle East because of the Black September massacre of

September 1970. This event was administered by King Hussein of Jordan; with the

support of Henry Kissinger, it led to the slaughter of a number of the fedayeen in the

PLO’s refugee and training camps in Jordan. The Dziga Vertov Group had filmed

extensively in these camps. Moreover, the massacres in Jordan and the Black September

wave of terrorism that followed in 1970 were perceived as the failure of the Palestinian

struggle for self-determination.323 In France, for example, the Palestinian impasse in 1972

was articulated as lacking a cohesive strategy to resist Israel, conflating the guerrillas’

failure to defeat the enemy to a perceived incapacity of coming up with a solution for the

refugee problem.324

323 By 1971, observers of the conflict were convinced that the movement had no

chance to act, to survive, or to succeed, as about 700 of the 3000 fedayeen who had remained in Jordan after Black September had been killed by King Hussein’s army in the Summer of 1971 with the help of the Americans and the Egyptians. Only 500 stayed in Jordan, and about 300 fled to Lebanon. The 200 remaining fedayeen were put under the control of the Syrian government. During this period, many experts in Arab affairs brought seriously into question the future of the fedayeen. Zeev Schiff and Raphael Rothstein, Fedayeen: The Story of the Palestinian Guerillas (London: Vallentine and Mitchell, 1972), 218.

324 See Gérard Chaliand, Voyages dans vingt ans, 110-115.

The report by Jean François Kahn, the French journalist from

L’Express, cites Arafat’s auto-critical statement post-Black September: “After the poetic

illusion and unbridled verbalism, we let ourselves get carried away by revolutionary

exhibitionism.” Salah Khadaf known also as Abu Ayad, Arafat’s second in command, is

cited as saying: “Many of our slogans were impetuous, we had become bourgeois . . . and

had given an immeasurable importance to parades and acclamations.” Condemning the

hijacking of planes, Kahn’s diagnosis was that the Palestinian resistance had withdrawn,

168

and what was left was their cause.325

According to Chaliand, the PLO used terrorism from Jordan and from Lebanon

because they had no chance to hit the enemy otherwise, thinking that the strategy of

terrorism which had substituted for guerrilla warfare was more effective.

After having been expelled from Jordan, the

Palestinian resistance regrouped and concentrated in Beirut, initiating a new era in the

history of the PLO.

326 Such

transnational hijackings and bombings by Black September had become bad propaganda

for Western supporters of the Palestinian cause, creating a negative image, especially

after the Olympic Games operation in Munich. Many condemned this operation as

thoughtless, and argued that instead of asking the State of Israel for impossible things, the

hijackers should have asked for a few minutes of access to the mass media to explicate

their cause in a convincing way, in exchange for the liberation of the hostages.327 Godard

and Miéville felt the same way. Like other Western sympathizers, they withdrew their

support, condemning Palestinians’ resort to terrorism.328 At the end of their film, Godard

and Miéville state: “On pense qu’il y avait autre chose à faire . . . on trouve con le fait de

devoir mourir pour sa propre image . . . ça nous fait peur”329

325 Jean François Khan, “Les Feddayeen victimes de l’utopie,” L’Express, 18-24

(January 1971), 38-39. 326 Chaliand provides us the following statistics: Between 1963 and 1967 there

were four airplane hijackings, between 1968 and 1970 there were 55. In 1971 alone, 61 attempts were recorded, 26 of which were successful. In 1972 there were 72 attempts, only half of which succeeded. Gérard Chaliand, Terrorismes et Guerrillas: Techniques Actuelles de la Violence (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 125-128.

327 Ibid, 136. 328 An account of the state of the resistance post Black September massacres, Jerash battle, etc., is given in Dario Fo’s play. Further testimonials by the fedayeen are found in Gérard Chaliand’s book La Résistance Palestinienne (Paris, Seuil, 1970).

329 “We think that something else could have been done . . . we find it stupid to have to die for one’s own image . . . It frightens us.”

Along similar lines, Silvère

169

Lotringer wrote not too long ago: “. . . in 1974 we were in the last gasp of Marxism, and I

knew the terrorists were right, but I could not condone their actions. That is still the way I

feel right now.”330 A combination of their impending failure and their resort to terrorism,

resulted in the waning away of the enthusiasm of Third Worldists for Palestine by the

mid-seventies.331

Cartoon published by Haaretz in the early 1970s.

On humanistic grounds, terrorism is outside of the laws of war and

because of this, engaged intellectuals drew a line in their support.

6. The Demise of Third Worldism

Le droit des peuples est devenu le principal instrument d’étranglement des droits de l’homme.

Jacques Juillard.332

. . . This was yet another chapter in the sad saga of Western radical intellectuals projecting their fantasies

330 In Silvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus, “Introduction: The History of

Semiotext(e),” Hatred of Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 10. 331 Not the case of Jean Genet, who came after Black September and kept coming

back until the beginning of the eighties. 332 “People’s rights of the people have become the principal instrument of the

stranglement of the human rights.” Jacques Juillard, “Le Tiers monde et la gauche,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 1978 Reprinted in Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche edited by Juillard, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), 145-46.

170

into an exotic foreign zone of turbulence, which allows them to satisfy simultaneously their emancipatory desires and their secret “masochistic” longing for harsh discipline and oppression . . .

Slavoj Žižek.333

As we have seen, the years 1973-1974 mark in France the churning out of Marxist

discourse and the demise of the revolutionary project and subject, provoked by a critique

of Left-wing totalitarianism spawned by the publication in French of Solzhenitsyn’s

Gulag Archipelago (in 1974).

334 The critique of totalitarianism also ensued from the

collapse of Third World revolutions elsewhere and the disappointment at home, informed

for example, by Chaliand’s Mythes Révolutionnaires du Tiers Monde (1976). A wave of

anti-totalitarianism and the eschewal of Marxist-Leninism were further driven by

critiques of Mao’s China, like in Deuxième Retour de Chine. Published in 1977, the book

appeared side by side with those denouncing Soviet totalitarianism, unveiling what was

covered up by the grandiloquent discourses of Socialist regimes. For Le Goff, the

Broyelle’s book is an illustration of the crisis undergone by a number of activists in the

mid- to late seventies.335

Pour nombre de militants, la désillusion est à la hauteur de l’engagement total qui l’a précédé. Cette crise est vécue douloureusement par beaucoup. On peut comprendre le désarroi et

Commenting on their disappointment not completely without

irony and not far from the rhetoric of the violent disavowal of the revolutionary politics

of May ’68, Le Goff wrote:

333 This quote is a commentary by Žižek on what he calls “liberal critic’s

insinuations” about the nature of Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian revolution. Žižek argues against this assumption and gives a complex account and analysis of Foucault’s engagement in Iran. See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 115. 334 See Jean Daniel and André Burguière, Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979).

335 As we saw above, Claudie and Jacques Broyelle and Evelyne Tschirhart wrote Deuxième rétour de Chine (1977), in which they condemn Mao’s regime while describing their increasing disappointment with what they saw and lived there.

171

l’anxiété qui les envahissent. Mais, après avoir bridé et refoulée leur subjectivité, quelques ex-maoïstes vont l’étaler à longueur de colonnes. De l’illusion au désespoir, quel triste chemin.336

The discourses of Third Worldism and anti-imperialism drifted away, giving way to a

new discourses new humanism. The French journal Tel Quel broke with Marxist-

Leninism in 1976-77, coinciding with Mao’s death and with general disappointment over

the “discovery” of the outcome of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Julia Kristeva, for

example, shifted focus to a model of dissidence that rejected Leftist politics that could be

potentially realized in American polyvalence.

337

336 “For a number of militants, the disillusionment is at the level of the preceding

absolute engagement. This has been a reality painfully experienced by many. The disquietude and anxiety invading them is understandable. After having given free rein and then repressed their subjectivity, some ex-Maoists will stretch it as far as columns can go. From illusion to despair, what a pitiful road.” Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 403. La faute à Fidel! (2006) by Julie Gavras, the daughter of Costa Gavras, a political filmmaker (Battle of Algiers, Amen), is a film that, through the eyes of a nine-year-old, tells the story of a couple who become Leftists and get engaged with Feminist activism and Chilean revolutionary politics in 1970-71 until the fall of Allende. The movie is a fictional portrait of radical Leftists’ lifestyles, their passion for political causes, and the disappointment and disillusionment that followed.

337 For Kristeva, “Le sujet d’une nouvelle pratique ne peut être que le sujet d’une nouvelle pratique discursive: la structure sociale et linguistique acceptée pour être pulvérisée d’abord et pluralisé pour finir par ce rythme sémiotique où le sujet se perd dans une jouissance sans communauté et sans mesure, à la quelle il réclame son droit.” “The subject of a new practice can only be the subject of a new discursive practice: first, the social and linguistic structure was pulverized, second, it was pluralized in order to end up in a semiotic rhythm in which the subject dissolves in a jouissance without community and without measure, which the subject demands as a right.” Julia Kristeva, “Sujet dans le langage et pratique politique,” Tel Quel No. 58, (Summer 1974), 27. See also Kristeva’s dialogue with, Pleynet and Sollers, “Pourquoi les États-Unis?” Tel quell 71/73, (Fall 1977), 4.

Philippe Sollers began to fully support

the human rights discourse of the New Philosophers. From then on, some ex-

revolutionaries began to produce a forceful repentant and confessional discourse,

claiming previous blindness, disavowing their activist practice, marginalizing Marxist

172

thought, and undermining the legitimacy of the French Revolutionary tradition.338

Jacques Juillard – the director of Le Nouvel Observateur, embodied this position, whose

agenda, like that of the New Philosophers, was allegedly to project the Gulag into the

entire Third World, sketching out a new “us” and “them.” Dismissing Third Worldism as

a sort of aberration of decadent Socialism, Juillard foregrounds a new de-ideologized

form of emancipation of the people of the Third World. He wrote in 1978: “En tant

qu’ersatz d’une eschatologie socialiste aujourd’hui ruinée, se trouve à son tour sans

avenir; l’illusion tiers-mondiste est morte. Vive, plus que jamais, l’émancipation des

peuples du tiers monde!”339 If Third Worldism implied universalizing or giving a name to

a political wrong that mobilized activists in the West, in spite of the fact that the

relationships between the political problem of self-determination and military questions

(the facts on the ground, i.e., war) were at times interchangeable or idealized, the

relationship that this movement established with the Third World was political. The

“wretched of the earth” emerged for a specifically historic period of time as a new

figuration of “people” in the political sense: the Other became the immigrant worker, the

Chinese barefoot doctor, the revolutionary from elsewhere.340

338 For a historico-intellectual account of the “exit from Leftist ideology” and a

genealogy of the New Philosophers, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (London: Berhahn Books, 2004).

339 “As the ersatz of a Socialist eschatology that is today in ruins, which is without a future; the Third Worldist illusion is dead. Long live, more than ever, the emancipation of the people of the Third World!” Jacques Juillard, “Pour ne pas conclure…,” Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), 145-46.

340 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 11.

After, the Third World

articulate revolutionaries and fighters became victims unable to present solutions to their

own political problems, creating a new Third World imaginary characterized by

173

“ambulance-politics remobilizing neo-romantic colonialist tropes.”341 The collapse of the

Socialist ideal was followed by a fear of radical politics and the death of the political as

the grounds for relating with the elsewhere. The relationship to the Third World shifted

from a political stance to an ethical one, under the rhetoric of human rights.342

In retrospect, Third Worldism could be posed as the last utopia in the

etymological sense, as a “new land,” and understood as a kind of Orientalism that failed

to highlight aspects of Third World realities that still remain.

343 Today, the ephemeral

framework within which the term “Third Worldism” was coined – the Cold War – has

disappeared, and the new framework that has replaced it does not bring to light the true

issues, either: the unbelievable polarization of the capitalist world-economy, its structural

crisis and Neoliberal hegemony. The post-colonial and post-Cold War cartographic

imaginary maintained a colonial division of the world, by idealizing the principle of “de-

centering,” culturally and in terms of the production of knowledge, parallel to the

geographical de-centering of the concentration of wealth. Since then, the distinction

between First and Third Worlds has become more and more irrelevant in economic and

cultural terms. The world market, in its ability to go beyond state divisions, has created

pockets that are working not only inside but outside the First World within the Third

World and vice versa.344

341 Ibid. 342 Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, 267. 343 For a historical account of the ‘Third World’ not as a place, but as a project

and its demise see Vijay Prashad, The Dark Nations, A People’s History of the Third World, New Press, New York, 2007.

This integration is based on the idea of difference in terms of

344 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 182. “The states of the centre not only have each an exterior Third World, but they have Third Worlds inside them that are growing and working them from within.” Deleuze brings this matter up again in his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, (Paris: Flamarion, 1977), 175. See

174

their stage of capitalist development; thus the model of transnational interaction has

forced Third World countries to “develop,” creating pockets of wealth within the Third

World. How to account for these differences and their interaction? Are “Gated

Communities” the new paradigm?

7. The Myth of Objectivity

“I speak, therefore I’m not” Le Gai Savoir, 1968.

As we have seen, interventions elsewhere raise questions regarding how to account for

foreign struggles within the frame of state- or militia-sponsored visits and the danger of

blind naive identification. Objectivity becomes doubly problematic for a foreigner and as

a sympathizer to the cause: is it possible to go beyond the ideological veil imposed by the

framework of the official visit? How is it possible to account for one’s position as an

external observer? What is the discourse of objectivity and what is its relationship to

expertise and authority? 345

also Samir Amin, Le développement inégal: Essai sur les formations sociales du capitalisme périphérique, (Paris: Minuit, 1973), and Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, A People’s History of the Third World, (London and New York: The New Press, 2007).

345 Writing about the “mediatic” turn of the intellectual function in the late seventies, which I address further in the following chapter, Régis Debray defined objectivity as the opinion of the expert as the new “intellectual power.” Debray, Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979), 95.

In the case of images produced for the mass media, how to

account for the compromising angle or point of view, probably subject to interests foreign

to the journalist? There is evidently a contradiction inherent to objectivity and political

intervention elsewhere: how can the political emotions of sympathy and enthusiasm,

which are apparently inextricable from “disinterestedness,” suspend the subject from the

conditions of viewing and create a discursive position for the external observer whose

175

dispassionateness and disinterestedness are the very condition to convey the states of

affairs?

In the seventies, Deleuze denounced writers for having become journalists and

journalists for having taken the position of authors.346 In his view, journalism had

become a way of thinking in its own right and particular way of production of knowledge

by means of creating events that were then transformed into objective information.347

346 Deleuze, according to Debray, handed out this text in a “feuille volante et non

marchande” in 1977: “Le journalisme, en liaison avec la radio et la télé, a pris de plus en plus vivement conscience de sa possibilité de créer l’événement (les fuites contrôlées, Watergate, les sondages)? De même qu’il avait moins besoin de se référer a des événements extérieurs, puisqu’il en créai une large part, il avait moins besoin aussi de se rapporter a des analyses extérieures au journalisme, on a des personnages du type ‘intellectuel,’ ‘écrivain’: le journalisme découvrait en lui-même une pensée autonome et suffisante. C’est pourquoi, à la limite, un livre vaut moins que l’article dont le journal qu’on fiat sur lui ou l’interview a laquelle il donna lieu. Les intellectuels et les écrivains, même les artistes, sont donc conviés à devenir journalistes s’ils veulent se conformer aux normes. C’est un nouveau type de pensée, la pensée-interview, la pensée-entretien, la pensée-minute. On imagine un livre qui porterait sur un article de journal, et non plus l’inverse. Les rapports de forces ont tout a fait changés, entre journalistes et intellectuels. Tout a commencé avec la télé, et les numéros de dressage que les interviewers ont fait subir aux intellectuels consentants. Le journal n’a plus besoin du livre. Je ne dis pas que ce retournement, cette domestication de l’intellectuel, cette journalisation, soit une catastrophe. C’est comme ça: au moment où l’écriture et la pensée tendaient à abandonner la fonction-auteur, au moment où les créations ne passaient plus par la fonction-auteur, celle-ci se trouvait reprise par la radio et la télé, et par le journalisme. Les journalistes devenaient les nouveaux auteurs, et les écrivains qui souhaitaient encore être des auteurs devaient passer par les journalistes, ou devenir leurs propres journalistes. Une fonction tombée dans un certain discrédit retrouvait une modernité et un nouveau conformisme, et changeant de lieu et d’objet. C’est cela qui a rendu possible les entreprises de marketing intellectuel.”

347 Deleuze, “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un problème plus général,” Deux Régimes de Fous, 130.

The

privileged tools for producing information are interview and reportage, and the standard

form of reportage is a summary of activities, experiences, intentions, and finalities

elsewhere spoken in the third person in the past tense. For Deleuze, in journalism, form,

content, and expression (a recording of a state of affairs from a given angle) are fused

176

with the apparatus. Journalism stands also for the transformation of facts into events by

spatio-temporalizing and rendering them public. Furthermore, trans-national journalism

as a phenomenon could be related to Heidegger’s notion of the “Modern World Picture,”

that is, the idea of modernity as the achievement of reading the world as a single map or

picture from a unique point of view. Representing the interests and desires of the

Occidental observer, the world is conceived and grasped as a picture purported by

technology. This implies that the specific geopolitical location of the observer assumes a

universal relevance, transforming Western subjectivity (or expertise – valuing insight

over cognition) and objectivity into the same thing.348

By many accounts, journalism took hostage the author-function and evacuated the

possibility for self-reflexivity for the sake of credibility. Godard and Miéville, like

Deleuze, posed it as a discursive problem in their work, emphasizing the fact that the

journalist never speaks as “I.”

Moreover, as part of the industry

of information and mass communication, objectivity hides its own production of surplus

value.

349

348 Martin Heidegger, “The World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology

and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115-136. 349 Unpublished material from an interview with Godard by Paula Jacques. The

conference-interview was aired on June 22, 1976. Source: The archives at the Phonothèque at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris. Date consulted: April 14, 2006. I would like to thank Mme. Amélie Briand-Le Jeune from the phonothèque and Mme. Sylvie Fegar from the INA for granting me access to this material.

The problem is that “I” carries the authority of

testimony, of the “having been there,” and thus an “it speaks” covers the relationships

between appearances, discourse, power, and the form of inscription of information.

Sonimage’s engagement with journalism and communication coincided with efforts in

the late sixties and early seventies to diffuse the authority of the speaker of truths. This

177

was prompted by a critique of the traditional role of the intellectual, which had been to

incarnate knowledge and to produce ideology and opinions.350 In and around May ’68,

the author was posited as the author-function: either as signifying through his or her own

death (Barthes), as having disappeared within a variable discursive function (Foucault),

or as an enunciation that through agencement (assemblage) created a subject

(Deleuze).351

350 Barthes distinguished three realms of speech: artistic enunciation

(artist/writer), engaged activism (intellectual), and a pedagogical project (professor). The three forms of speech are intrinsically linked: the professor is on the side of speech, the artist/writer is the “operator” of form on the side of écriture, and the intellectual is in between the two, printing and publishing his speech. Barthes’ realms of speech are aligned with the Aristotelian distinction between mental experience, speech, and written speech, all of which are intrinsically linked to their signifiers. For Barthes, when the professor speaks, there is an intrinsic connection between voice and mind, and thus with the voice’s signifier; when the intellectual writes, there is also a production of the signifier through writers’ or intellectuals’ operative symbolization through conventions of written words or artworks. What is at stake, then, is the production of a signified by mental experience or written speech. For Barthes, writing (écriture) is a site in which the subject is absent, his/her identity is lost, and writing has as its sole function the practice of the symbol. Écriture is a hand that loses its voice and thus its origin; writing begins when the author enters his/her own death. For Barthes thus, writing implies death and destruction insofar as enunciation as an empty process, writing is a gesture of inscription and not of expression. Barthes’ solution to the problem of political engagement and literary enunciation was embodied in the figure of the scripteur, “situated halfway between the party member and the writer, deriving an ideal image of the committed man and the idea that a written work is an act.” See Roland Barthes, “Écrivains, Intellectuels, Professeurs,” Tel Quel no. 47 (Fall 1971), 3, and “The Death of the Author” (1968), Image, Music, Text, 142-146. See also Derrida’s Of Grammatology, 11.

Arguably, objectivity is the discursive function par excellence that has the

351 Foucault’s critique of Barthes’ concept of écriture opposes the notion of the “death” of the author. For Barthes, it is a matter of the separation between speech and appearance – the author “disappears” into his/her text, as opposed to dying for a signifying voice. For Foucault, the relationship between text and author lies in the manner in which the text points to the “figure” of the author which is outside of it and antecedes it: this “figure” is an appearance, as opposed to an absence or effacement. Foucault critiques the notion of “death” of the author because, in his view, this idea transposes the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity, creating an enigmatic excess and the a priori of neutralization of the voice. What is important for Foucault is also to draw a distinction between writing and expression (as self-expression), as for him, writing refers only to itself, to its own unfolded exteriority,

178

“disappearance” of the author as its condition. Unlike écriture, however, objectivity is

imbued with the authority of the “having been there,” that is why Deleuze describes

journalistic writing as a recording. Objectivity is an empty author-function which, by its

very structure and functions, in its pretension to “aspire to knowledge that bears no trace

of the knower, to knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment,

wishing or striving,” is “blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or

intelligence,”352

Régis Debray formulated the problem of the journalization of intellectuals along

the lines of Deleuze, referring to reportages written during the Spanish War and arguing

that then, there were great writers covering the war in Spain that produced “fake

journalism, true literature.”

which masks as well by the authority of expertise. Another problem with

objectivity is that it is a regime of enunciation which is unable to denounce the links

between power and knowledge, thereby ensuring a system of given interests.

353

effacing the writing subject’s individual characteristics and canceling out the signs of his/her particular individuality. For Foucault, the author did not die in a discursive voice but disappeared before the text, before the text’s general conditions of space and time. Foucault insists that the author had disappeared, and even the author’s name is the manifestation and appearance of a certain set of discursivities indicating the status of this discourse within a society and culture. Thus, Foucault considers the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1970), Écrits Complets, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard), 821. Translated to English by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, “The Author Function,” available online at

He argues that journalism had caused the detriment of

creation by having become communication, insofar as the shift from the journalist to the

http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.authorFunction.en.html. Date consulted: August 7, 2008. Here a distinction must be made between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s notion of assujetisation; the former understands it as a subjectification in the sense of an instance of power asserting itself and the latter, subjectivation implies an operation of substraction subjetivation and it implies the creation of the new. For Foucault, however, assujetisation may also carry the potential of subjetivation in Deleuze’s sense as the new.

352 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 17.

353 Debray, Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979), 95.

179

author implies the destitution of the work by the event. For Debray, to cover the actuality

should mean to unveil that which links the “I” to other men:

Quand l’observation à force d’exactitude et d’humilité redevient poème. Un témoin qui s’annule derrière son témoignage annule aussi sa contingence: paradoxe et récompense des modestes qui savent faire attention. En se troublant, le cristal historique se brise “en actualité;” en l’émiettement du sens libéré une poussière d’événements et de “sensations” qui ne doivent plus leur valeur a leur pouvoir de révélation, mais a leur mise en scène et a leur force de percussion.354

Like Deleuze, Debray vouches for creativity, for paying attention as opposed to bearing

witness or seeking scoops, for producing sense without eliminating contingency. In

Deleuze’s and Régis Debray’s accounts, the demise of mediation and the Leftist faith in

the liberatory potential of the media displaced creativity and production in favor of

communication. Debray actually identifies the latter with a new autonomy of the

intellectual field, understood by him as “le système de relations sociales dans lesquelles

s’accomplit la création comme acte de communication.”

355

354 “When observation aims at being precise and humble, it becomes a poem; a

witness that effaces herself behind her testimony, annuls as well her contingency: paradox and reward of the modest ones who know how to pay attention. Disrupted, the historical crystal breaks into “actuality,” the crumbling of sense liberates a dust of events and “sensations” that owe their power not to the value of their revelation but to their staging and to the force of their striking.” Debray, Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979), 101-102.

355 “The system of social relations in which creation is accomplished as an act of communication.” Régis Debray, Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979), translated into English as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals in Modern France (London: Verso, 1981), 32.

Evidently targeting the New

Philosophers, Debray argues that intellectuals’ “journalist” tendency transformed their

status from “mediator” to that of a “medium” dedicated to the production and circulation

of events, values, facts, and symbolic norms – I discuss this further in the following

chapter in terms of the “mediatization of mediation.” For Debray, the dominant

180

intellectual position in 1978 was situated within the “apareil d’information,”356

demonstrating a new organization of ideological state apparatuses in which objectivity

(expertise, editorialism) equaled intellectual power.357 Finally, after Debray, to “know”

and to be informed took over belief and faith, as he drew a parallel between the power of

Catholic priests and author-journalists in France, arguing that the former had been

substituted by the latter.358

For Godard and Miéville, as they put it in the voiceover in Ici et ailleurs,

objectivity is a doubling of silence, the hidden silencing of the already silent, and “un

silence qui devient mortel parce qu’on l’empêche de s’en sortir vivant.”

Another question that Debray raises that Godard will grapple

with along with the “problem of communication,” is that of temporality. For Debray, the

crystal of history that is writing is shattered by the actuality. In his view, with journalism

sense crumbles into a dust of events and sensations that acquire value not in their

revelatory powers, but in their mise-en-scène and in the force of their own propagation or

diffusion.

359

356 “Apparatus of information.” 357 “Bien qu’insérée dans le mode de production capitaliste et dépendante de lui,

l’intelligentsia ne se définit pas par sa place dans le processus de production matérielle et ne peut être référée à une catégorie économique simple (rente foncière, salaire ou profit) comme à son principe d’existence: ce n’est pas une classe.” “Although inserted in the capitalistic mode of production and depending on it, the intelligentsia does not define itself any more within the process of material production, and cannot be considered to be simple economic category (receiving income from property, salary or wealth) as their principle of existence: it is not a class.” Régis Debray, “Traité de médiologie,” Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979), translated into English as, Teaches, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals in Modern France (London: Verso, 1981), 32.

358 Ibid. 359 “A silence that is deadly because it impedes the image from coming out alive.”

Objectivity

implies that a state of affairs that is being “covered” in the double sense: a journalist

“covers” a story while she “hides” (by creating an event) the situation. For them,

181

objectivity is a form of silent complicity that in the case of the Palestinian resistance, it

proved to be deadly. The ethico-political imperative became thus for them, first, to take

enunciative responsibility which implies to speak images, acknowledging authorship over

them and for the intentionality immanent to the act of speaking for and of others as an act

of expression, emphasizing direct address and free indirect discourse (in the voice-over).

Second, to make images speak and to open up a space in which the speech that has been

taken away from them could be restituted. These forms for accounting for speech and

image are absolutely different from confessional or situated knowledges; in the manner of

écriture, they are at the crossroads of the social techniques of television, the media, and

cinema.360

360 According to Jacques Derrida, in the domain of écriture there is a movement

in language at its origin that conceals and erases itself in its own production, which means that in écriture the signified always already functions as a signifer. With écriture, Derrida undermines the Aristotelian idea of the Logos as the mediation of mental experience along with the movement of exteriorization of the mental experience as a sign of presence. The function of écriture is therefore to conceptualize the dissolution of the signifier in the voice by splitting signified and voice: in écriture, the subject of a text is coherent with the text, becoming the object of écriture, displacing the signified from the author. See Derrida’s Of Grammatology, translated by G. Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). In Deleuzean terms, écriture is a regime of enunciation in which speech dies into the signifying voice that becomes a discursive voice. For Deleuze, écriture is articulated as a machinic assemblage or collective agent of enunciation; a becoming of partial subjects appropriating ready-made discourses. Once we separate the “subject of speech” from the “speaking subject,” the question that needs to be asked is, what subjectivity is articulated and what realm(s) of enunciation is his voice speaking from? Thus, whereas for Derrida écriture is a voice that is rendered present which is an absent trace from the author, for Deleuze, writing is an instance of subjectivation. The notion of “machinic assemblage” is perhaps the most adequate to describe Godardian écriture, as we will see in the following chapter.

While editing the Palestinian footage, it became pressing for Godard and

Miéville to articulate a regime of enunciation that would continue the DVG’s critique of

auteur theory in film, while addressing the discursive regime of information in a

pedagogical manner. For them it was inconceivable to produce work in the reportage or

182

documentary genres (which we could relate to the tradition of realism discussed in the

previous chapter). Godard and Miéville further wish to understand objectivity – as they

explore it in Photo et Compagnie (1976) and Comment ça va? (1975), – as a form of

inscription and a discursive regime in which the gesture of framing, that is inherent to

making an image is either erased under the non-ideological pretense of “no one speaks,”

posited as the third person neutral in “it speaks,” without attribution: “someone said.” In

contrast, exploring the exchanges of gazes inherent to the production of images in accord

with Godard’s politics of the image, as I mentioned, Sonimage starts from the premise

that all images are always addressed to a third, and thus images must be understood as

immanent to an interlocutionary act.

8. Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger

Cinema was quicker to ask the question of journalism than the philosophers (Debray and

Deleuze): Antonioni addressed the relationship between engaged intervention elsewhere,

reportage, and objectivity after his 1972 visit to China, where he was invited by the

government to produce his documentary, Chung Kuo Cina. In the introduction to the

script, he poses the question: “How to get to know the Chinese, how to deal with the

‘idea’ of China from books and images, is it possible to portray revolution and Socialism,

is documentary film possible?”361

361 Michelangelo Antonioni, “Est-il encore possible de tourner un documentaire?

Chung Kuo Cina, 1972” (1974), Écrits de Michelangelo Antonioni: Fare un film e per me vivere (Paris: Éditions Images Modernes, 2003), 272-273. See Susan Sontag’s discussion of the film and its Chinese reception in On Photography. The film and her own experience in China became pivotal in her discussion on the difference between empirical knowledge and the knowledge offered by images.

This question is evidently shared by journalists and can

be summarized as the problem of how to make sense of the state of affairs to achieve an

assessment of a foreign situation. Three years after he filmed Chung Kuo Cina, Antonioni

183

made a film along the lines of Zabriskie Point (1968), insofar as the script revolves

around contemporary figures: the activist and the pacifist (brought together by love). His

film The Passenger or Professione Reporter (1975) is a fictional rendering of the

contradictions inherent to the mode of intellectual engagement with Third World

struggles in the 1970s. Asking similar questions than Godard and Miéville, the script

takes up the question of engagement within the context of the mediatization of mediation.

Putting forth the contradiction of militant engagement versus objective mediation, in The

Passenger, the figures of the journalist and the engaged Tiermondiste get folded into one

another through the existentialist “passage” from journalist to arms dealer, or, as some

would put it, through an escape to a different order of experience. John Locke (Jack

Nicholson) is a journalist working on a story about a guerrilla movement in Central

Africa. His attempts to contact the rebels who want to overthrow the dictatorial

government fail after his guide deserts him and his jeep gets stuck in the sand, causing

him to shout: “I don’t care!”

Still from The Passenger, 1975

184

Locke walks back to his hotel where he finds the corpse of Robertson, a fellow

Englishman on a “business trip” who has died of a heart attack. Locke swaps identities

with his compatriot and his life becomes determined by Robertson’s appointment book

and airplane tickets. After he meets with one of Robertson’s contacts at the airport in

Munich, he realizes that Robertson was an arms dealer helping the Chadian rebels. This

turn of events recalls Arthur Rimbaud’s activities selling weapons to a tribe in North

Africa during the 1880s.362 Poet and businessman, we can draw a parallel between the

figures of Robertson and Rimbaud: while Locke is busy pasting his photograph into the

dead man’s passport in the process of becoming him, we see a flashback comprised of a

shot of Robertson and Locke in a terrace facing the desert discussing the different ways

in which they engage with the landscape: Locke asserts that Robertson does so in the

manner of a poet.363

362 See Rimbaud’s letter of December 1887 to the Minister in which he demands

permission to unload materials to fabricate rifles, cartridges and weapons of war in the Somali coast held by France, destined for King Ménélik of Choa. In The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to be Good, translated by Wyatt Mason (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 292.

363 Robertson: It’s so beautiful here . . . It’s the immobility – a kind of waiting, an eternal suspension.

Locke: You seem unusually poetic – for a businessman. Robertson: Do I? Doesn’t the desert have the same effect on you? Locke: I’m interested in men more than landscapes. Robertson: But there are men who live in the desert […]

Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen, and Michelangelo Antonioni, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, the Complete Script (New York, Grove Press Inc., 1975), 27.

The figure of Locke, the objective journalist, folds into Robertson-

Rimbaud, the absolute sympathizer to the cause, the poet and arms dealer. Locke

continues Robertson’s journey across Europe, now made out of missed appointments, as

no one shows up to the meetings marked in Robertson’s agenda. Back in London,

Locke’s wife and his media agency colleague, Knight, discuss his African footage and his

185

journalistic ethics, as they plan to edit this material into a posthumous homage to his

journalistic career. Locke, we learn, in a self-reflexive vein, always put himself in every

shot of his documentaries. Rachel and Knight show us three fragments from Locke’s

footage: an interview with Rama Fadeda (an outlaw from the Chadian United Liberation

Front) and his execution, and an interview with the African president at a luxurious and

campy hotel stating the official version regarding the repression of the rebels in the

mountains. While we are shown this footage, Rachel points at the out of field of the

images where the dilemmas of journalistic objectivity that her husband grappled with are

located. “He accepted too much,” she says, addressing the question of the compromises

that the reporter needs to make with regard to the subjects of the scoop that is necessary

in order to let the news out. Also, Rachel tells us, highlighting the dismissal of the

aesthetic by the imperative to inform: “He thought all fiction was unnecessary,

frivolous.”364 In a flashback in Africa, she confronts Locke, directly accusing him: “You

involve yourself in real situations but you have no real dialogue,” and “Your neutrality

becomes a form of acceptance.”365

In The Passenger, engagement is figured by objective enunciation in the mode of

journalism, as artistic enunciation is considered superfluous. Where do the ethics of

engagement remain? Locke’s expression at the beginning of the film – “I don’t care!” – is

consciously symptomatic here. We can ask if “carelessness” (as detachment) is the

emotion that necessarily replaced enthusiasm and empathy after the generalized

disappointment that followed the unmasking of totalitarianism and the betrayal of Third

World struggles. Is carelessness (as detachment) the emotion necessary to speak for a

364 Ibid, 64. 365 Ibid, 69.

186

cause from a neutral point of view? Or is carelessness the condition to overcome the

contradictions of journalism? In the film, absolute sympathy is figured by the poet/arms

dealer, but both men’s pursuits become purposeless. Not only does the camera wander

aimlessly in the film’s famous last sequence; so does this double character, a journalist

who becomes a supporter for a rebel cause by proxy, in a pursuit that becomes senseless.

Locke, now Robertson, fails to realize that his displacements to meet with the rebels

across Europe have ceased to make sense, and he pays with his life.

Antonioni had been invited to make a documentary in China in 1970, which

gained him harsh criticism from the Chinese.366

Mr. Locke, there are perfectly satisfactory answers to all your questions . . . But I don’t think you understand how little you would learn from them. Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers would be about me . . . Mr. Locke, we can have a conversation but only if it is not just what you think is sincere, but also what I believe to be honest.

Five years later, facing the failure of

Third World struggles and the waning of revolutionary ideology, in The Passenger the

possibility of intellectual engagement abroad is figured in the aporia of a Westerner being

either an impartial Rimbaudian poète maudit or an accepting journalist. Further, the

matter of the angle hiding a (Western) personal or ideological, non-reflexive intention is

addressed in The Passenger when Locke interviews Rama Fadeda, who responds to his

questions with the following:

367

One of the contradictions that Rama Fadeda raises here is that the format of the interview

is inevitably an effaced projection of the interviewer that inserts itself within the

economy of information, expertise, opinion and economy. Along similar lines, Godard

366 See Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), (New York: Picador, 2001). 367 Ibid, 75.

187

and Miéville defined objective intervention as an instance of the author hiding herself

behind the image produced, welding authorial disappearance with objectivity. In the

auto-critique section in Ici et ailleurs, we hear: “On ne voit jamais l’image de celui qui

met en scène,”368 while we hear Godard’s voice asking her to tilt her head in the out of

field. For Godard, documentary filmmakers and journalists in hiding behind the images

they film, they purport the image as effacement, as opposed to a trace.369

Stills from Ici et ailleurs

(Godard shows this image panning it from top to bottom)

368 “We never see the image of she who realizes the mise en scene.” 369 Letter from April 12th, 1979, first published in a special number in Cahiers,

1979, reprinted in JLG Documents, 289. Followed by Roussopolous’ answer in 2005.

188

Stills from Photo et Cie., 1976

Godard grappled with similar questions Ici et ailleurs, as did Antonioni in The

Passenger. Having been hosted under the delegacija system in Palestine, Godard and

Miéville needed to account for the footage in relationship to the production of

information about revolutionary struggles elsewhere in relation to journalistic objectivity,

propaganda and ideology. Not by coincidence, Antonioni’s description of The Passenger

places the myth of objectivity as the central problem of the observer abroad.370

It is evident that Godard needed to account for his footage in relationship to the

body of journalistic and documentary production of information regarding revolutionary

struggles elsewhere – most importantly, because of the ethical and political problems

raised by the Palestinian footage. The myth of objectivity and observation raise the

questions of blindness and seeing in Godard. According to Odile, one of the main

characters in Comment ça va? (1975), objectivity is a crime since he or she speaking in

the name of others does not use the other’s voice. Speaking in the name of others implies

occupying their place – Odile’s is a critique of vertreten as a crime, as he or she who

speaks in the name of others does not use the other’s voice. Keeping her own place, the

documentarist or reporter speaks in the name of others, which falsely implies occupying

370 Ibid, 189. Deleuze diagnosed another problem pertaining to the observer

abroad, the “Oedipus-in-the-Colonies” phenomenon, which he described as the “I came and I saw this” genre, recorded and filtered through the traveler’s personal drama. Deleuze, “Les Intercesseurs,” 130.

189

their place. For Odile, it is necessary to take responsibility in enunciation, speaking in

one’s own name. In order to speak in one’s name of others, it is necessary to see first.

Here Odile champions darstellen: a description of the other, speaking in one’s proper

name. In order to be able to see, a displacement (translation in French) must take place:

one must lose one’s place because to speak of others is an act of translation (traduction in

French), considering that the speaker belongs to a different discursive regime than those

being spoken of.371 For Godard, the problem of objectivity is inextricable from the

question of communication, which means to work blindly, unable to read or write.372

In Godard and Antonioni, empathy and observation are inextricably related to the

anxity of blindness. Psychoanalysis grounds empathy on the possibility of sharing our

experience with the object of desire by the way of an introjection –a projection inward,

which prompts identification with what is seen, and which is the condition for empathy

and the grounds for ethics. The trope of blindness and seeing in relation to speaking

comes up in one of the last scenes of The Passenger at the Hotel La Gloria, when Locke

asks the Girl: “What can you see?” Looking out a window, she describes inaccurately

what she sees – it is not the girl that makes the cinematic spectator see, but the camera

itself, rendering evident the gap between the sayable and the visible, giving primacy to

the latter, acknowledging Vertov’s belief in the filmic camera’s superiority to the human

eye in rendering things visible.

371 Sonimage’s critique of photojournalism resonates with Susan Sontag’s own

critique, articulated in On Photography from 1977. She takes up the issue in Regarding the Pain of Others in 2003, where she provides a short history of war photojournalism on pages 36-39.

372 Godard from an interview in Le Monde, September 25, 1975, cited in Philippe Dubois, “Video Thinks what Cinema Creates, Notes on Jean-Luc Godard’s Work in Video and Television,” Jean-Luc Godard, Son + Image 1974-1991 (New York: MoMA, 1992), 170.

190

Still from The Passenger, 1975

Invoking Diderot’s Letters of the Blind, Locke tells the story of a man who got his sight

back with an operation when he was forty. “At first,” Locke says,

he was elated, really high. Faces, colors, landscape . . . then everything started to change. The world was much poorer than he imagined. No one had ever told him how much dirt there was, how much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere, and danger. When he was blind, he used to cross the street alone with a stick. After he could see he became afraid . . . he started to live in the dark. He never left his room. The curtains were always drawn. After three years he killed himself.373

Bringing into tension the definition of objectivity as an intransigent codification

according to a set of rules, and the act of seeing or rather, the ability to see, The

Passenger ends with linking the act of seeing and death – seeing as an act of vision is a

kind of phenomenological reduction (as opposed to a Godardian epistemological filmic

quest and redemptive montage – as we will see), that impedes or excludes the possibility

of discourse and speech, leading to death. The ultimate seer in The Passenger is the

camera, which, becoming a consciousness of its own, acquires complete agency and

ultimate mechanical objectivity in the famous last sequence of the film. Godard too

373 Antonioni et. al., The Passenger, the Complete Script, 161-163.

191

privileges the camera but as an epistemology of seeing, designing his own discursive

practice and a site of enunciation as reactive and pragmatic, starting with a Je vois, rather

than seeing as a deadly phenomenological reduction. In Godard, the condition of seeing

is closer to Rimbaud, for whom seeing implies a derangement of the senses, an

“encrapulation” or intoxication of the self.374 Rimbaud’s violence to the senses (as a

shock in thought, as Deleuze would put it, or as shock as the beginning of thought, for

Arendt-Aristotle) actualizes in Godard as an explosion of contradictions, as we hear in

the voiceover/off in Ici et ailleurs: “Très vite, comme on dit, les contradictions éclatent et

toi avec // et je commence à voir // et je commence à voir // et je commence à voir que

moi avec.”375 Finally, Godard displaces the question of seeing and blidness to the mass

media and spectacle. He formulates it as the uninterrupted “chains of images” in which

we are all caught and from which we build our own images (Foucault’s and Deleuze’s

subjectivation). They framed it in this manner, in Ici et ailleurs: “Ami ou ennemi, on

produit et on consomme son image avec celle de l’autre.”376

9. From Jusqu’à la victoire to Ici et ailleurs

Two years after having shot the material for the film in the Middle East, Gorin declared

that the Dziga Vertov Group had the film “en plain le dos,”377

374 Rimbaud, letter to Georges Izambard, Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, 28.

The translator wrote “encrapulation” for encrapuler (similar to débauchement, dérégler) which in French means to intoxicate oneself, to become filthy, vulgar, dishonest, to live in the excess of carnal pleasures. Baudelaire put it as: se délivrer à la crapule.

375 “Very quickly, as they say, the contradictions explode and you with them // and I begin to see // and I begin to see // that I explode with them.”

376 “Friend or foe, we produce and consume our images with the image of the other.”

377 A French expression that means, something like, “To be fed up.”

having worked on two or

three phases of the montage. For Gorin, the material had become impossible to edit and

192

they were looking for a creative solution attesting to the hopelessness of the film’s

montage – the problem at this point was that the footage taken in the Palestinian camps

had acquired in their view a historical status; therefore the material posed the same

problems and interrogations as writing history.378 Moreover, Gorin stated, the film could

not become a “film-reportage” with a voiceover or a documentary with objective

implications that would attempt to explain all the aspects and contradictions of the

Palestinian struggle; rather, for Gorin, the material had the potential of becoming a

“continuous addition” summing up all the aspects of the history of Palestine.379 The DVG

dissolved in 1972, and Godard edited the material in collaboration with Anne-Marie

Miéville within the frame of their workshop Sonimage. According to Miéville, they

worked on editing the film every day for eighteen months.380

Considering that the speaker belongs to a different discursive regime than the

imaged, for Godard and Miéville, the speaker needs to displace herself spatio-temporally

in order to be able to translate the codes. Vouching for a politics of objectivity, or rather,

of “subjectivation,”

For many, this film is the

intellectual peak of Godard and Miéville’s collaboration. The question in Ici et ailleurs

became, for Godard and Miéville, how to create a point of view to edit the Palestinian

images, images in which the Palestinian people appear as revolutionary movement now

betrayed.

381

378 Interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin by Christian Braad Thomsen, Jump Cut no. 3 (1974), 17-19. 379 Ibid.

380 In “Un entretien avec la réalisatrice: Il faut parler de ce que l’on connaît,” interview with Miéville by Daniele Heyman, Le Monde 18, January 1989.

381 In chapter 2 I draw the distinction between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s notions of assujettissement; here I am thinking about it in Deleuze’s sense.

Godard and Miéville made it an imperative to acknowledge that

193

the real does not speak in images in any instance. For them, all images are always

addressed to a third and thus images must be understood as acts of communication,

especially documentary and photojournalistic images, which conceal the mechanism of

mediation. For Godard and Miéville, as they put it in the voiceover, “objectivity” is

silences images’ silence, a “silence which is deadly because it impedes the image from

coming out alive.” The ethic-political imperative takes enunciative responsibility to speak

images (acknowledging authorship over them), to make images speak, and to restore the

speech that has been taken away from them. This accounts for the intentionality

immanent to the act of speaking for and of others as an act of expression – minding the

gap between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation.

In the new film they created a multiplicity of points of view guided by a main

category: “Re-thinking about the elsewhere (Palestine), then (1970), from here (France),

now (1973-74),” and assembled it in three main axioms: Palestine, France, and the

conjunction “AND”. In creating this spatio-temporalizing, conjunctive and geo-political

axis, Godard and Miéville emphasized their French perspective (although they are both

Swiss, they were residing in Grenoble and in dialogue with the Parisian intelligentsia),

especially in relationship to the media, and began to explore the Palestinian material in

relationship to history. The main category is further subsumed to a multiplicity of spatio-

temporalities and points of view on the Palestinian Revolution including and

problematizing the domains of journalism, documentary, Third Worldist intervention,

history, cinema, Maoist discourse, materialist self-reflexivity, pedagogy, and (chastising)

female and (repenting) masculine discursive voices. Not only different points of view

coexist through image/sound juxtapositions and voiceover – also, different material forms

194

of expression of the Palestinian conflict manifested here (France) appear in the film:

newspapers, Gérard de Villiers’ novels,382 television, songs, cartoons and poetry (“I will

resist” by Mahmoud Darwish (1968) and “Bisan… and the Martyr” by Khaled Abu

Khaled (1970)). Through montage, every point of view is defined in relationship to series

of transformations, through which the images and sounds pass by means of repetition and

juxtaposition. Working in series, Godard and Miéville make different versions of basic

themes or categories, arranging the images and sounds accordingly. The Palestinian

visibilities are thus included in the points of view, not as a window open into their

struggle but as a table of information, which means that the images are opaque with

information containing stratigraphic layers of images within them.383

The first section of the new film, the Jusqu’à la victoire section, is made out of

repetitions of the images filmed in the Palestinian camps in 1970, assembled together in

five different series.

The editors, then,

consult the table of information, making it pass through a table of categories, using

seriality as a method, peeling off and putting on layers of images within the images

through fruitful juxtapositions.

384

382 In the film we see the character of a “French worker” flipping through Gérard

de Villiers’ books. De Villiers’ books are sort of “proletarian pedagogical fictions” about conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and they appear repeatedly in the film, as the fictive mode of the material existence of the Palestinian conflict in France.

383 The practice of stratigraphy implies to uncover strata, and Deleuze-Foucault defines strata “as historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As ‘sedimentary beds’ they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from bands of visibility and fields of readability, from contents and expressions.” Deleuze, Foucault, 47.

384 See Godard and Gorin in “First Feature,” Take One, vol. 2, no. 11 (May-June 1970). Reprinted in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 142-143.

This section gives us an idea of the way in which Godard and

Gorin had originally planned to edit the film. The film was going to be organized around

five chapters framed by the slogans of El Fatah’s guerrilla theory and different factions,

195

each one practicing a slogan, constitutive of the logic of the resistance. The repetition of

the Palestinian images does not follow Godard’s drive for mastering the images, as Alain

Bergala argues;385 rather, it has the purpose of posing sets of problems inherent to the

images and sounds according to different categories. The arrangement of images and

sounds in series allows further for a stratigraphic practice, unearthing the visual and aural

indexes in the images and sounds through contradictory juxtapositions. The series, which

are subordinated to spatio-temporal relationships, allow the Palestinian images to pass

from constructed symbols to “designated figures,” from documents to de-ideologized

figures, to lessons. This happens not only by marking the images through spatio-temporal

states, but by creating a space of ambiguity through montage and speech in the voiceover

in which Godard designates the images, imbuing them with intentionality. The series in

Ici et ailleurs are divided into sub-series. The first sub-series is framed by screen-texts in

Arabic and in French,386 in which we can read the five slogans from the different sections

of the Palestinian guerrilla movement representing the schema of their liberation

movement: “The People’s Will,” “The Armed Struggle,” “The Prolonged War,” “The

Political Work,” and “The Fight Until Victory.”387

385 Alain Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard, (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma livres, 1999),

34. 386 Godard’s use of screen-text is structural, differently than in silent cinema. In

Godard text functions as material object, the screen becomes a blackboard in which statements, calligrams, or words become poetic processions of texts as images. The text blinks, moves, dances, repeats, writes, and rewrites itself.

This series introduces the Palestinian

387 “The People’s Will” refers to the core of the organization, that is, the Party, from which the revolutionary army is developed. The Party’s aim is to form the combatant units; it divides itself into the popular army and the irregular guerrilla units. “The Armed Struggle” refers to the guerrilla, which is fought by autonomous combatant units that are dispersed in the territory. “The Political Work” or the political fight is the theoretical aspect and the pedagogy of the armed fight. The political work is the form of fight proper to the arrière-garde. It is the mobilization factor with the task of raising the

196

Revolution as explained by the Palestinians, while Miéville translates their Arabic into

French. The second series is framed by the screen-text: “Re-thinking about that.” This

time the five slogans are spoken out by Godard while he situates the material in the past,

elsewhere: “On a filmé et organisé le film comme ça.”388

Stills from Ici et ailleurs

In the third series the slogans

are repeated and added up verbally, underlining the word “and” – here Godard’s speech

evidently mirrors the syntax of the montage of the film.

Godard performs further through the voice-over an act of designation of the images,

stating: “On a filmé ça au Moyen Orient.”389

political consciousness, the fraction where women and children are integrated. The political work goes hand in hand with the armed fight and includes the work of agitation and propaganda. “The Prolonged War” or “The Long March” embodies the idea of the impending reform of Arab society, the necessity for its unification in order to be able to lead a “total war” against Israel. After the El Fatah’s guerrilla theory, this unification represents for Palestine a great effort that will necessarily prolong itself for years; thus, there is a long way to go. “Until Victory” references the Arab victory over Israel after a long historical war. See Yoshafat Harkabi, El Terrorismo en la estrategia árabe, edited by Dror-Kibutz Hameujad (Tel Aviv: Israel, 1968), 27.

388 “We filmed and organized things like this.” 389 “This is what we filmed in the Middle East.”

Arguably, in the first three series the images

pass from being self-referential symbols of the Palestinian resistance as constructed facts

that equate the expression (the sensible thing or image) with the discourse, to a separation

between the sensible and speech by way of designation. In other words, the images

become appropriated by Godard’s speech, and this places the signifier not as an arbitrary

pairing up (as in symbols), but, through designation in speech, it imbues the images with

197

intentionality. Intentionality, following Lyotard, implies a space of designation at the

border, not rendering visible but allowing the visibility to particularize itself. With

Godard’s speech the images thus become expressions that undo their code (coded through

factography as the “Marxist-Leninist fact of the Palestinian Revolution) while delivering

sense – the lateral semantic reserves, creating a figural space – not the space of

signification but a space in which the images reach the limit of their discourse and are

appropriated by speech.390 The particularizing speech marks the images in order to de-

ideologize them through the statements: “On nous a montré ça,” “On a filmé ceci et

cela.”391

In the fourth series, the Palestinian images are juxtaposed with those of the French

family, whose members are introduced to us by coming slowly into focus, articulating the

here and Godard’s return to France. In the fifth series, we see more footage of the

training and refugee camps, this time untranslated. Godard in this series creates again a

figural space with deictics, pointing at the deadly danger in which the actors of the film

were filmed. The categories underlining the first five series are spatio-temporalizing:

“there and then,” “this is what they showed us,” “there and then, this is what we filmed,”

“then we came back to France” and “the actors of the film were in deadly danger.”

Opening up a sixth series containing not only the potentiality but the necessity to

continue the narration of the Palestinian ordeal, Godard states: “Peut-être dans 1001 ans

Throughout the series, the images pass from icons or symbols of the resistance’s

propaganda to decoded images that have the potential of becoming trademark-images,

slogan/factograph-images, and pedagogy-images.

390 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksiek, 1971), 50-72. 391 “They showed us this,” “We filmed that.”

198

Scheherezade racontera ça autrement.”392 Arguably, the invocation of Scheherezade here

is more staking a theoretical position than making an Orientalizing reference. It is related

to the debates of authorial death and cinematic voice that rose around May ’68 in France.

Sherezade’s narration had as its motivation to push death away, which Foucault makes

parallel to the inevitability of the narrator’s need to close his mouth at some point. Thus,

for Foucault, Sherezade’s storytelling is the opposite of death because her forced nightly

effort to tell stories keeps out the possibility of imminent death. Foucault opposes,

furthermore, this mode of affirmative narration to the subject of narration in écriture,

which in Barthes’ theorization is a subject tied up to the sacrifice and to the voluntary

self-effacement of the writer. In this account, in order for the characters to appear, the

writer needs to be dead.393 Godard’s voice-over is an operation of écriture by way of free

indirect discourse, a voice that becomes for instance the discourse of the “pauvre con

révolutionnaire milliardaire en images d’ailleurs”394

In the Jusqu’à la victoire section, the image of the Roses doing clumsily

calisthenic exercises recalls a scene from Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) in which

the fascist youth (who are characters representing Fellini’s childhood friends from

that at the same time takes

enunciative responsibility (I, we filmed this), in an affirmation of the speaking voice,

shunning authorial death. Invoking Scheherezade, furthermore, Godard vouches for

narrative affirmation as a futurity. This series ends up with Khaled Abu Khaled’s poem,

“Bisan… and the Martyr,” being recited in Arabic and the image of the Baqa refugee

camp in Jordan.

392 “Maybe in 1001 days Scheherezade will tell this story differently.” 393 Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”, 821. 394 “Poor revolutionary idiot, millionaire in images from elsewhere.” From the

voice-over in Ici et ailleurs.

199

Rimini) are doing gymnastics – such exercises were compulsory for young people under

Mussolini and Hitler, as shaping collectively the body was part of the fascist program the

total collective. In another image, we see men working on the field, their Kalashnikovs

neatly arranged between them. Not only does this image recall Jean-François Millet’s

peasants and other Socialist realist representations of field workers; furthermore, the idea

of “working the land” in conjunction with “fighting for the land” brings to mind similar

Israeli representations from the 1930s in which we see Zionists both fighting and working

for the land.

Images by Hani Johariyyeh, Jordan and South Lebanon, 1970 and 1969 respectively

Suddenly, we begin to notice the layers of images beneath the DVG’s Palestinian images.

The images and sounds of Ici et ailleurs construct the facts of Fatah’s propaganda,

insofar as we see instances such as the Fedayeen reading from the little red book, the

Roses doing calisthenic exercises, the Cubs training, and women participating actively in

the revolution, as well as different aspects of military training and political work.

200

Stills from Ici et ailleurs

But they do more than that: these fact-images are juxtaposed with images that depict the

contradictions of the struggle – the pedagogical images. The contradictions come to the

surface, for example, in images in which Godard and Gorin show the leaders of the

resistance as despotic, speaking from “above” to their people, or when the Palestinian

militants are shown repeating or reading from political texts, making it evident that they

are told what to say, that they are being indoctrinated. The DVG’s images, furthermore,

depict the Palestinian political theatre not to convey it as propaganda, but to reflect upon

it by means of pedagogy by de-ideologizing the images and sounds through montage and

the voiceover. As constructed facts, they become historical documentation while

evidencing the character of the images as revolutionary theatre. This gets further

complicated by Godard’s and Miéville’s reflection upon images’ relationship to history

and their circulation in the media. In addition, they evidence the passages from fedayeen

to victims, stating “Ceci est devenu cela,”395

10. Godard and Suleiman: Points of View in Dialogue

showing images of casualties from Black

September filmed directly from French television.

The image of the feddai grows more and more indelible: he turns into the path, and I’ll no longer be able to see his face, only his back and his shadow. It’s when I can neither talk to him anymore, nor he to me, that I’ll need to talk about him . . . Did he vanish deliberately in order that the portrait might appear?

Jean Genet.396

395 “This became that.” 396 Genet, Prisoner of Love, 23.

201

According to Serge Daney, Godard’s project is a painful meditation on the topic of

reparation, an effort of giving back images and sounds to those from whom they had been

stolen. For Daney, this restitution-reparation takes place, at least ideally, in Ici et

ailleurs.397

This becomes evident in the auto-critique section of the film, where Godard and

Miéville analyze the relationship between image, history, and revolutionary discourse by

discussing an image: a little girl from Fatah standing by the ruins of a building in

Karameh, reciting Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “I Will Resist.” Karameh is a village at

the border with Jordan where a crucial and mythical battle for Fatah took place on March

21, 1968. The actions and successes of the fedayeen in Karameh were embellished in

radio and press communiqués with the purpose of getting the support of Jordan, Lebanon,

and Syria, and the rest of the Palestinian population in the diaspora.

In this case, to whom is the image restituted, if the people he filmed in

Palestine are dead? Is restitution a form of mourning? “We did not listen,” as Godard

laments in the film. In the film, Godard reflexively analyzes the political theatre of the

dead, as opposed to opening up the Palestinian images to speak in the name of the (failed)

Palestinian revolution after Black September. Yet the Palestinian cause was as alive in

1974-75 as it is now. In Ici et ailleurs, their image is transformed into an allegorical

lesson on revolutionary failure, while laying out of a futurity embedded in the

preposterous possibility of narration.

398

397 Serge Daney, “La thérrorisé (Pedagogie godardienne),” Cahiers du Cinéma

No. 262-263, special issue on five essays on Jean-Luc Godard’s Numéro Deux (1976), 39.

They were

398 During this battle, a column of Israeli tanks and aerial cover crossed the Jordan valley. The Palestinian commandos received the order to hold on – and they did so for 12 hours. Hundreds of houses were destroyed in the village, and the Israeli troops suffered considerable losses and had to leave their tanks behind. Andrew Gowers and Tony

202

successful, as that battle had a huge psychological impact in the Palestinians’

consciousness, consolidating the resistance and enabling Fatah to recruit thousands of

combatants and allies outside.399

Walter, Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution (London: Butler and Tanner, 1990), 58. See also Rolf Tophoven, Fedayin – Guerilla ohne Grenzen: Geschichte, soziale Struktur und politische Ziele der palaestinensischen Widerstandsorganisationen Die israeliesche Konter-Guerilla (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Köllen Druck und Verlag, 1973).

399 Chaliand, La Résistance Palestinienne, 78.

In Ici et ailleurs, Karameh appears as a ruin that

threatens to crush the little girl standing in front of it. In spite of her apparent fragility,

however, her words and gestures give her power, which is increased by borrowing a

poem from Mahmoud Darwish, the militant poet speaking in the name of the Palestinian

people. In the voice-over, Miéville analyses the image pedagogically, emphasizing the

image’s theatrical aspect in relationship to the history of political theatricality, drawing a

link to the conventionists of the French Revolution. The conventionists were legislators

during post-revolutionary France, largely coming from the middle class, who became

administrators or functionaries of Napoleon’s empire. The conventionists, it is said,

wanted to be active in public life and were allegedly horrified of anarchy. In the film,

Miéville problematizes the little girl’s big rhetorical gestures as the genre of poetic

declamation, also practiced by the conventionists, which she condemns as the spectacle

of the political theatre of persuasion (an older regime of political speech). We could draw

a link here to Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, which as we have

seen, has the task of giving man a place in the world either through a surface of depicted

signs, what he calls, “the rhythm of a dancing chorus,” or the gap between the stage and

the public in theatre. Evidently the latter interests us here, because theatre is the site for

politics, played out as games of proximity and distance, stage and audience. A question

203

that is raised if in the seventies Godard dismissed political theatre as spectacle, Can we

imply that the political question necessarily got transferred to the surface of signs? We

will address this in chapter four in relationship to the paradigm of the icon and as we will

see, Godard’s plea in the name of the text in Notre musique vouches for a political task of

the regulation of affect (as fiction) between stage and audience.

Who or what is made visible in the image of the girl in Karameh? The little

Palestinian girl from Fatah, Darwish himself through his words, or the Palestinian cause

as failed political theatre? Godard keeps bringing this image back in his films.

Specifically he cites it in Histoire(s) du cinema, Je vous salue Sarajevo, and in Vrai/Faux

Passeport (2006). A tradition has existed since the sixties in Palestine and in the Middle

Eastern Palestinian diaspora of children reciting resistance poetry. Some instances are the

end the film Driving to Zigzigland (2006) by the Palestinian director Bashar Da’as, and in

Mai Masri’s documentary Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), about a refugee girl

from Lebanon who is taken to the White House to recite a resistance speech at the rise of

the second Intifada. Godard’s little Uard is today almost a cliché of Palestinian resistance

iconography. In the filmmaker’s rendering, however, the little girl is the icon of

revolutionary failure, still resisting on the ruins, paradoxically a resistance predicated

upon the futility of political theatre while becoming a vessel for a form of resistance as

nationalistic poetry. Moreover, as spectators, looking at this ghost in front of the ruins,

we could lament not the failure of the revolution, but the loss of the land, by drawing a

link to the tradition in Arabic poetry of lamentation. After Darwish, in Arabic tradition,

Andalusia symbolizes the collective lamentation over the lost paradise, a dramatic appeal

to the past. This recalls the anti-Islamic poetry of the Jâhiliya in which wailing happens

204

on site, at the home that it is no longer. Popular poetry of the sixties and fifties drew a

comparison: Palestine is a lost paradise like Andalusia.400

400 “In this tradition the chant should begin with the lamentation over the stones

and the lost site. In the chant the poet advances and finds the stones, and laments that Layla passed by, Lubna passed by, but the beloved is no longer there. Following this, we go to a description of the horse or the camel, and then proceed to metaphysical questions. Andalusia took the place of the lost place and then Palestine was transformed in Andalusia.” Mahmoud Darwish, in an interview with the Israeli poet Helit Yeshurun, first published in Hadarim no. 12 (Tel Aviv, Spring 1996), reprinted in La Palestine comme métaphore (Paris: Actes Sud, 1997), 117-118.

Here, however, Palestinians

and their plight are effaced insofar as Godard and Miéville make an effort to sketch out

the temporal relations (and therefore, the history) constituting their Palestinian images,

and such relationships cannot be reduced to the present. The “present” of Palestinians is

put forth as that of historical agents, as opposed to political subjects, replacing the

identification of social and political struggle with that of a failed armed group gone

terrorist. Palestine and Palestinians dissolve into the objective movement of history, as

they come across as its anonymous machinery. The film is far away from the political and

social reality of Palestine – yet Godard avows the impossibility of accounting for the

political reality with his emphasis on seeing the matters from the point of view of the

“here,” obviously/necessarily subject to an Eurocentric point of view, whose only resort

becomes that of instrumentalizing the Palestinian images to criticize French Maoism via

self-critique.

205

Still from Divine Intervention, 2002 Still from Ici et ailleurs

An example of an insight into Godard’s way of thinking (which is montage) and his

ongoing dialogue with other filmmakers, is his juxtaposition in Vrai/Faux Passeport of

the image of the little girl in Karamah with a scene that he appropriated from Elia

Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002). In Vrai/Faux Passeport, Godard presents the

viewer with appropriated images making them appeal for the viewer, not to judge, but to

lay out images as a pact between viewer and image. Captioning each image with the

labels: “true,” “false,” “good,” “bad,” Godard puts forth images as a matter of belief with

regards to whether images bear with them a “passport” to allow them to reach the border

to the “real.” The scene from Suleiman’s film begins with the IDF training with five

targets, each shaped as a kind of feddai-woman (feddaia). The target in the middle is

indestructible and suddenly, we see it come to life, incarnating a fighter who launches a

defensive attack against the IDF trainees with ninja-like moves and warfare under the

form of an array of Palestinian nationalistic symbols: Moon Crescent-shaped darts, a

slingshot, grenades that make their targets vanish, leaving as a trace the Palestinian flag,

and a shield in the shape of historical Palestine that becomes a boomerang to destroy a

helicopter hovering behind her. This super-feddaia converts the bullets shot at her into a

saintly nimbus around her head, in the only take in which she and the IDF soldiers appear

206

in the same frame. This shot is taken from the point of view of above the feddaia and it

recalls the iconography of the crucifixion as a stratigraphic layer. Here, the Palestinian

fighter is crucified, but by whom and for what are quite ambiguous. She then disappears

behind her own image – the target – before the general’s astonished eyes. Arguably in

dialogue with Godard’s little Uard reciting Darwish, Suleiman brings back Godard’s icon

of the Palestinian cause almost forty years later in the image of a grown woman in a

fantastic and defensive passage à l’acte against the oppressors, enacted through

nationalistic symbols. Godard’s juxtaposition of the Uard in Karameh and the feddaia

confronting the IDF actualizes the passage from the theatre of politics to a parody of

symbolic resistance by means of a fantastic allegorization: from the Tiermondiste image

of political theatre acknowledging its limits, to Suleiman’s singular sense of humor and

his refusal to sublimate self-representation into an allegorical rendering of the

predicament of the oppressed nation – which is prescriptive description of the genre of

Third Cinema.

Stills from Divine Intervention, 2002

The question of whether, after the PLO became a political organism, a Palestinian

national cinema was possible and what would be its particular traits (in a simulacral

nation) has been posited and concludes with its impossibility, due not only to the

complexity of the situation but also to the fragmentation and dispersal of the Palestinian

207

experience.401 At a time in which it appears that nation-states are a thing of the past,

Palestine is the last unrealized nation of the twentieth century, and Suleiman’s

videogame-like parody of the national symbols not only evokes Godard’s Uard but can

be read as a statement regarding “Third Cinema,” characterized by Fredric Jameson in the

mid-eighties as a fundamental allegorical nationalism. Suleiman’s feddaia proves that

such a claim is no longer tenable in cinema from elsewhere in today’s era of marketable

identities and localities; much less in Palestine, as it is an unrealized nation. Jameson’s

theory of cognitive aesthetics of the Third World rests upon the hypothesis that what

distinguishes Third World from First World texts is that the former are necessarily

national allegories through which a project of a political dimension transpires. The

nation’s conundrum is catalyzed as the story of the private individual whose destiny is

always embedded in the allegory of the embattled situation of the public Third World

culture and society – a situational consciousness, arcane to the First World.402

401 See Livia Alexander, “Is there a Palestinian Cinema? The National and

Transnational in Palestinian Film Production,” Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005) and Dreams of a Nation, On Palestinian Cinema, edited by Hamid Dabashi (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

402 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text (Fall 1986), 65-88.

The

possibility of the nation in Suleiman’s film is embedded in the allegory of the feddaia’s

“divine intervention,” not an allegory of the nation to come but a parody of national

symbols. Juxtaposed with the Uard’s political theater in Godard’s Vrai/Faux Passeport,

both images are icons that embody the aesthetico-political struggles then and now. Their

juxtaposition opens up a space beyond geographical situational consciousnesses, beyond

First and Third World points of view, opening up dialogue.

208

Chapter 3

Technique (Theory + Practice):

The Expiration of Speech / Videographic Machinic Expression / Montage

PART I

The Mediatization of Mediation

Traditionally, the function of the Left intellectuals was to give France her

universal values. Historically, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, the paradigm of

intellectual intervention in the media in France is, Émile Zola’s famous open

letter to the French president, “J’accuse,” published on the front page of the

Parisian newspaper L’Aurore, in 1898. As we have seen, intellectuals announced

in May ’68 the end of ideology and an epistemological break. This, linked to the

fact that the paths traced by information changed, led to the obsolescence of the

model of traditional engagement represented by Zola, as the form and the space of

inscription of the “J’accuse” had changed.403

403 Jacques Derrida, Ecographies of Television: Filmed Interviews

(Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 24.

For Godard and Miéville in the

context of the early seventies, the aesthetic-political task became to explore the

new conditions for the inscription of the J’accuse in relationship to activism and

intellectual engagement. In dialogue with the post-’68 forms of activism that

emerged, they explored the problem of how knowledge becomes information and

how it is communicated. In this way, Sonimage marks a shift in Godard from

“militant filmmaking” to “Journalism of the Audiovisual,” and Ici et ailleurs,

could be read as purporting both and as the passage from one to the other.

209

1. Maoist Activism

As we have seen, breaking away from the model of vanguard intellectuals, the

Maoists established themselves in factories laboring side by side with workers, all

the while imbued with a Christian sacrificial rhetoric that claimed to serve the

people, rejecting what they considered the exteriority of discourse in favor of the

interiority of practice, and believing in the workers’ creative potential. Maoist

struggles, however, were rendered obsolete by the self-managerial breakthrough

at LIP. In a 1973 interview with two Maoists, Philippe Gavin and Pierre Victor

(Bernard-Henri Lévy’s pseudonym), Sartre discusses the LIP strike at length in

relationship to how it evidenced the limits of Maoist revolutionary practice.

Posing the question “Who speaks?” again, now in humanist terms, Sartre, Gavin,

and Victor sketch out the figure of the “New Political Man,” a synthesis between

Maoist activist, intellectual and politician. The New Political Man’s tools would

be critical awareness, persuasion and a renunciation of the superstructure, acting

in the public domain of the diffusion of information while remaining aware of the

danger of becoming a “mediatic vedette.”404 A parallel figure – or perhaps a

branching out of the New Political Man – was the journalist: an intellectual who

rendered pressing debates to the public domain. An early index of the shift in

intellectual politics toward the mass media is the weekly journal Le Nouvel

Observateur, founded in 1964.405

404 Jean-Paul Sartre et al., On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard,

1974), 288-340.

According to Christofferson, Le Nouvel

405 The impact of these journals in intellectual and political debates is indexed in Godard’s films from Le Gai Savoir on, as he begins to quote images from Le Nouvel Observateur, L’express, and other mass media publications. An index of the bridge between Maoism and journalism is Olivier Rolin, formerly

210

Observateur was both a commercial and a Left-wing enterprise, aiming at the

increasingly educated audience that valued intelligent discussions away from the

extremist poles. This weekly magazine came to occupy the center of political

debates in the 1970s, in tandem with a decline in political interventions in the

academic and in the practical realms (e.g., factories).406 These “Mass media

mandarins,” as Christofferson calls them, found “in the politics of autogestion a

way of bypassing the political elite in favor of their direct connection with the

people via the mass media.”407

Around 1973, revolutionary mediation was even more fully mediatized.

After the dissolution of the Proletarian Left in 1973, it became necessary for the

Maoists to reconceptualize engaged practice in order to further politics of direct

democracy – this bearing in mind their public retraction from earlier Maoist

activism, which went hand in hand with their critique of anti-totalitarianism. A

new project, supported by Sartre and Foucault, was the founding of the daily

newspaper Libération in the spring of 1973.

408 Maoists demonstrated that they

were increasingly media-savvy by producing a number of spectacular symbolic

events covered by the media – therein the genealogy of “tactical media.”409

head of the “military wing” of the Gauche Prolétarienne; he has written for Le Nouvel Obs and Libération.

406 Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (London: Berhahn Books, 2004), 43-44.

407 Ibid, 44. See also Alain Badiou, interview with Eric Hazan, “Roads to Renegacy,” New Left Review 53 (September-October 2008).

408 La Cause du people and J’accuse were journals directly linked to the Proletarian Left supported by Sartre (amongst other intellectuals) but dissolved due to internal conflicts in 1972.

409 In chapter 1 I address their engagement with the Renault factory in Flins. See Christofferson, French Intellectuals, 56.

Not

211

unsurprisingly, they rearticulated the practice of revolutionary journalism in terms

of a collective “public writer.”410 One of the key themes of the May ’68 utopia

was a society completely transparent to itself; this transparency was supposed to

be achieved by the direct exchange of free speech without mediation, a theme that

was then realized in Libération’s redefinition of mediation. The newspaper sought

to democratically let speak all sides in a given conflict. Serge July defined the

mission of the newspaper as the struggle for information under direct and public

control of the population, continuing the Maoist task of helping people to “capture

speech” as in their slogan: “Peuple prend la parole et garde-la.”411 The

newspaper’s mission included the production of an “everyday critique of

everyday life,” leading to debates on divisive issues like racism, the family, and

sexuality.412

410 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 114-116.

411 “People seize over speech and keep it.” 412 Serge July quoted in Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible, (Paris: La

Découverte, 1998), 257-259.

Libération’s impulse to democratize and to subvert content, to

restore the “transparency of the code” by giving control of the information

process to the people, was an attempt to reverse the circuit of information by

initiating debate, as well as an attempt to realize the classic position of the Left

regarding the democratic potential of the mass media. Influenced by theorizations

of the mass media in Benjamin, Brecht and Enzensberger, their argument was that

capital has hijacked the means of communication to promote and to realize

ideology. In this account, the media is posited as intransitive because it produces

non-communication, or in other words, communication through the media is

212

unilateral.413 Ideally, the democratic potential of the media could be realized

breaking through this intransitivity by revolutionizing the apparatus and its

content.414

Another branch of the New Political Man is, of course, the New

Philosopher. Following Kristin Ross, many ex-Maoists focused on becoming

intellectuels de service, giving back autonomy and specificity to the intellectual in

militant struggle, opening up to their pre-May status. Right after 1975, the New

Philosophers were “reborn” as a unified subject, a false collective, the

generational “we” as comprised of individual “I’s” endowed with more authority

than before: “the authority of being the makers of history and the seismologists of

the future.”

415

2. Specific Intellectuals

In contrast to the Maoists’ post-May “New Political Man”, Deleuze and Foucault

theorized their version of Maoism in a public discussion in 1972, asserting that it

is contemptible (indigne) to speak in the name of others.416

413 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media” (1972), New Media Reader,

edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 280.

414 See: Brecht’s “The Radio as an Apparatus for Communication” (1932); Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”; Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “Constituents of the Theory of the Media,” The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 95-128; and Baudrillard’s critique of this position in “Requiem for the Media” (1972), New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2003).

415 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 176.

According to them,

416 See Gilles Deleuze, interview with Michel Foucault, “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir,” March 4, 1972, L’Arc no. 49, 1972, 3-10. Reprinted in L’île déserte et autres textes (Textes et entretiens 1953-1974), (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 2002), 290. Translated by Mike Taormina, “Intellectuals and Power,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, 205-212. This discussion had as its

213

during and after May ’68, intellectuals had discovered that the masses no longer

need them because the masses know perfectly well, even better than intellectuals,

the power structures that oppress them. Subscribing to Nietzsche’s definition of

knowledge and truth as productions of forms of power, they argued that

intellectuals should not represent others not because there cannot be a signifier

that could bring a community together based on common interest, but because

there is always a struggle between interest and desire in the coming together a

community. They further deemed speaking in the name of others as unworthy as

they assert that there is always an unconscious desire behind this form of

representation, which is the desire to know the other, to appropriate the other, to

exercise one’s own power over the other, and at the same time, to have a “good

consciousness.” Although the representative consciousness aims at unveiling a

truth, in reality, she produces a new truth at the same time that the intellectual

negates the other the right to her own consciousness. Beyond accompanying the

proletariat on the front or to the side toward emancipation, their task had become

to provide struggles with tools to denounce oppression, to create networks, and to

context the GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons), established in 1970 with the support/guidance of Daniel Defert and Michel Foucault. Two years later, Deleuze stated that the aims of the GIP are “to organize activist help, which first must be led by former inmates and the families of inmates, but then must recruit more and more workers and democrats to the cause . . . A new kind of public gathering, which has nothing to do with “public confession,” and which is not the classical town meeting either. Former prisoners, who have settled in the cities . . . are coming forward to say what was done to them, in the form of a personalized critique.” The GIP was dissolved in December 1972 and was replaced by the ADDD (Association for the Defense of the Rights of Prisoners). See Deleuze, “What do our Prisoners Want?,” Le Nouvel Observateur, January 31, 1972, reprinted in Desert Islands, 203-204. For more information on the GIP, see P. Artieres, ed., Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons: archives d’une lutte 1971-1972 (Paris: IMEC Editions, 2002).

214

function as relays, negotiators or intercessors. Furthermore, for Deleuze, the shift

in the role of the engaged intellectual was linked to the new way in which

intellectuals lived the relationships between theory and practice. Practice was

formerly understood as a theory to come or as the application of a given theory to

empirical reality (i.e., the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”), but now, he argued,

theory needed to be replaced by a kind of “theory-action” and “theory-

practice.”417 Theoretical practice replaced the application of Marxist-Leninist

theory to empirical reality, as Deleuze and Foucault vouched for a more

fragmented, non-totalizable relationship between theory and practice. Networks

became the alternative to political parties, which they problematized, along the

lines of the Maoists, on the grounds that parties are guided by passions and desire,

as opposed to groups of individuals guided by reason. They further argued for

widening the struggle of the proletariat to a multiplicity of struggles organized

against diverse forms of power – which will ground the practice of subjectivation.

Substituting representative political struggle with action, Foucault offered a new

model of engaged practice, that of the “specific intellectual.”418

417 Ibid, 208. 418 Foucault articulated his notion of specific intellectual in “Truth and

Power,” in an interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Paskino, in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

This model

implies the demise of the universal intellectual or consciousness at the service of

the State, Capital or the proletariat. The new intellectual worked on specific

struggles, within a particular regime of truth, seeking to articulate power’s

specific mechanisms and to derive concrete and immediate knowledge from them.

Beyond producing theoretical identifications in the guise of truth, for Foucault

215

truth and power relate as the said and the unsaid, the visible and the invisible. To

work on a particular regime of truth implies to map out the power relationships

inherent to that specific regime and then, to speak truth to power, rendering

visible the invisible.419

3. The Mediatization of Mediation and the Expiration of Speech

As we saw in chapter 1, for Godard and Miéville the Leftist voice incarnated in

Maoist activism did not go far enough in its contestation of intellectuals’

vanguardist position as the producers of common sense for the proletariat; in their

view, their activist voice was imbued with Leftist ideology and had become noise.

For Godard and Miéville, therefore, the new problem was the propagation of

Leftist doxa by the becoming information of Leftist discourse. Miéville and

Godard would agree with Baudrillard’s critique of a Leftist utopian view of the

media. The Leftist view argued that unlimited democratic exchange is possible

through communication. Such position, however, overlooks the fact that in

essence, the media is speech without response. Even if efforts are geared toward

the problem of the idle, passive reader-consumer whose freedom is reduced (like

the viewer of political films) to the acceptance or rejection of content, such efforts

are fruitless because mediatization implies the coding of information in an

objectified support for messages transmitted at a distance which, because of the

very nature of the apparatus, never get feedback. As Baudrillard put it, with the

media “speech is expiring.” Baudrillard compares the media to voting, to the

referendum and to the polls. For him, all three share the logic of providing a

419 Deleuze and Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207.

216

coded state of affairs with which we must either agree or disagree without having

any agency on the content.420

. . . Oser dire avec modestie (hélas, c’est précisément cette modestie même qui sera jugée provocante) que lorsqu’on déclare de ce que quelqu’un dit que c’est de la merde, puisque cela sort de sa bouche, ce ne peut être que parce qu’il (je) parle avec son (mon) cul, et qu’il est donc temps de chercher le traitement de ce genre de maladie, et dans ce qui nous concerne, le traitement de son information.

Godard and Miéville sought to break away from the

dichotomies of producer/consumer, transmitter-broadcaster/receiver, addressing

them as a matter of the transformation of knowledge and communication into

information (or codes), as a problem of cinematic voice and address. Furthermore,

Godard posed Baudrillard’s conundrum of the expiration of speech in the script

for an unrealized film, Moi, je (1973), where he wrote:

421

Arguably, Godard’s critique of the “illness of information” derives not only from

the ex-Maoists’ journalistic turn but also from his problematization of 1968

logorrhea – what Deleuze referred to in The Logic of Sense as noise, which is

driven by passion-ideology. “Moi-je” is the name given to a phenomenon related

to a particular style of revolutionary speech, portrayed in the General Assembly

scene in Le Vent d’est analyzed in the first chapter. The “Moi-je” is a form of

420 Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media” (1972). 421 “To dare say modestly (in particular this modesty will be judged as

provocative) that when we declare that someone speaks shit because it comes out of her mouth, it cannot be because she (I) speaks with her (my) ass, and that it is about time to seek the treatment of this illness, and concerning us, the treatment of her information.” From the script of Moi, je (1973). The facsimile of the script was published in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents. Note Godard’s play with deictics or shifters, which will become an important tool in designing Sonimage’s discursive practice and site.

217

speech that could be defined as speechifying logorrhea, a phenomenon

condemned by Feminists as particular to a masculine activist practice:

Ils causent pendant des demi-heures pour dire un truc qui tiendrait bien en trois phrases. De fois, on se demande s’ils sont lents de la tête; ou bien tiennent-ils le crachoir pour empêcher que les autres l’aient. On est obligées de noter qu’il y a beaucoup de psychologie dans cette politique-là.422

Godard’s reference to speech coming from the ass is linked to the mode of speech

exercised by Feminists who, linking “the personal and the political,”

differentiated themselves from male discourse and base their discourse basing

theirs (as speech) on lived experience, on their own “histoires de cul.”

423

The problems of expiring speech and “speech is shit is information is

illness” may explain why Godard in Ici et ailleurs needed to designate a “Maoist”

enunciative position and a discursive site in order to deconstruct his own

discursive regime as an intellectual-filmmaker – vis-à-vis the propagation of

information. In Ici et ailleurs, Godard speaks in the first person, playing with

deictics: “Je, tu, il, elle, on est allé au moyen Orient . . . on m’a montré . . . j’ai vu

At

another level, Godard’s emphasis on speech coming from the ass as an illness that

is called information means that it is an illness that calls for urgent treatment.

422 “They babble for half-hours to say something that they could make

sense of in only three sentences. Sometimes we ask ourselves if they are not too slow in the head; sometimes they just hold on to the crachoir (spitting bowl) to impede others from having it . . .” Unknown author, “Pourqoui je suis dans la lutte des femmes,” Le Torchon brûle, supplement of L’Idiot libéré no. 1 (December 1970), cited by Le Goff, Mai ’68, l’héritage impossible, 302.

423 “Ass stories.”

218

. . .”424 Voicing a failed revolutionary, he states: “Pauvre con révolutionnaire,

millionnaire en images d’ailleurs.”425 This utterance has an indeterminate

referent, because it is not clear whether the “poor idiot” is Godard himself, the

worker in the film, or a Maoist activist. “Godard’s” is a speech act insofar the

voice is not a collective “we,” but a gendered subjective “I.” Insisting on

reflexivity and responsibility in enunciation, speech acts become acts of

expression, by designing a complex, self-reflexive ways of accounting for voice,

speech, discourse, enunciation, address, voice-over, and voice-off: “Osant dire

avec modestie . . . que lorsqu’on déclare de ce que quelqu’un dit que c’est de la

merde . . . ce ne peut être que parce qu’il (je) parle avec son (mon) cul.”426

4. Sonimage: Journalism of the Audiovisual

Miéville, as I discuss below, similarly than the female voice-over in Le Vent d’est

has the role of the “female chastising voice.”

Il faut être deux pour regarder une photo ; l’information circule. . .Toujours être deux pour s’approcher à un troisième.

Godard and Miéville.427

424 I, you, he, she, we went to the Middle East . . . they showed me . . . I

saw . . .” 425 “Poor revolutionary idiot, millionaire in images from elsewhere.” 426 “Daring to say with modesty, declaring that that which comes from the

mouth is shit because he (I) speaks with his (my) ass.” I am referencing here Oswald Ducrot’s theories on allocution, which I will explore further below, and which will help me explain (along with Benveniste) how Godard accounts for an addressee in Ici et ailleurs. See Oswald Ducrot, Logique, structure, énonciation: Lecture sur le langage (Paris: Minuit, 1989) and Les mots du discours (Paris: Les Éditions du Minuit, 1980). 427 There need to be two to look at a photograph; information circulates. . . for it takes always two to approach a third. From the voice-over in Photo et Compagnie (1976).

219

In “Les après-midi de France Culture,” a radio broadcast organized by the

Cahiers de Cinéma in 1976 to mark the release of the second Sonimage film,

Comment ça va?, Godard declared: “That which interests me from the strikes in

Paris, Normandy, Besançon . . . interests me as a reporter or as an audiovisual

journalist.”428 Situating their engaged practice as audiovisual journalists, Godard

and Miéville put images and sounds on trial in their Sonimage laboratory by

means of montage, by subsuming images to questions about their origin (who

speaks?) and about their purpose (for whom?). Theirs was a practice of looking,

dissecting exchanges of gazes and the economy of information. With their project,

they deconstructed the media by exploring the tools of journalistic production,

including photography, the interview, reportage, and the figure of the reporter as

foreign correspondent in relationship to the “angle” of the story. Godard’s interest

in information and the media was not new; as we have mentioned, he had been

active in the world of militant French journalism and had published articles in the

Maoist journal J’accuse, as well as participating in actions around La Cause du

Peuple.429

428 Unpublished, unedited material from an interview with Paula Jacques.

The conference-interview was aired on June 22, 1976. Source: The archives at the phonothèque at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris. Date consulted: April 14, 2006. I would like to thank Mme. Amélie Briand-Le Jeune from the phonothèque and Mme. Sylvie Fegar from the INA for granting me access to this material.

429 See Michael Witt’s “Godard dans la presse d’extrême gauche,” Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 165-177.

A sketch of what would become Sonimages’ ferocious attack on the

post-Maoist “new objectivity” that the newspaper Libération represented, appears

in the character Susan (Jane Fonda) in Tout va bien (1972). Susan is a travailleuse

artistique de l’information, an American journalist in Paris whose effort to

220

publish her reportage about a Maoist occupation in a factory is refused by her

boss.430 This film was followed by Godard’s and Gorin’s last collaboration – a

vindictive and acerbic 50-minute tract, condemning Fonda’s photographs

published in the French journal L’Express taken during her trip to Hanoi in

August 1972.431 Letter to Jane denounces journalism and its virtual complicity

with the propaganda of the star-system; Godard and Gorin accuse the “star-

activist” of putting on a mask of concern for others for the sake of self-promotion.

Godard and Gorin find that “the power to the people” is missing from Fonda’s

photos of her visit to Hanoi. In the film they analyze what they consider

reactionary connotations within the image. According to James Roy Macbean,

Fonda is put down by Godard and Gorin in a kind of “more radical than

thorough” one-upmanship. In terms of gender politics, Dusel Makavejev is said to

have stated after seeing the film that it amounted to “a double rape – to men

taking turns assaulting one woman.” 432

430 For an account of the presence of journalism in Godard’s work

previous to the DVG’s films, see Michel Marie’s discussion about the figures of Le Petit soldat and Lemmy Caution in Alphaville as journalists, the latter for the newspaper Figaro-Pravda. Michel Marie, “Godard et le mythe de la guerre révolutionnaire.” Guerres révolutionnaires, histoire et cinéma, edited by Sylvie Dallet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984), 281-89.

431 Fonda’s trip to Vietnam is framed by L’express in the following manner: “Pendant son séjour au Nord Vietnam, Jane Fonda s’est improvisée reporter photographe. Son appareil, un Pentax objectif 50 mm ne l’a pas quittée. Dès son arrivée à Paris, ses photos de la guerre vue d’Hanoi ont été tirées et développées, les voici.” “During her trip to North Vietnam, Jane Fonda became an impromptu photo-journalist. Her camera, a 50 mm Pentax did not leave her. Since her arrival to Paris, her war photographs seen from Hanoi have been developed; here they are.” Joseph Kraft, “Le reportage photographique de Jane Fonda,” L’Express, July 31 – August 6, 1972.

432 See James Roy Macbean, Film and Revolution (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1975), 174-176.

221

Godard considered television a direct domain of intervention.433 Their Six

fois deux: sur et sous la communication (1976), for instance, is a 12-episode

project for television, in which they “donnent la parole”434

433 In 1976 and in 1978 they made two television series, Six fois deux: Sur

et sous la communication and France Tour Detour Deux Enfants, respectively. Six fois was commissioned by Manette Bertin from the INA. According to Michael Witt, both series, but especially Six fois, “seek to construct a ‘softer’ decentralized televisual practice, and to actively resist the centralized universalizing homogenization of broadcast television.” Six fois deux was filmed in Grenoble and France tour in Rolle, and was held from broadcast by A2 television, their commissioners, for almost two years. “France tour, as opposed to Six fois deux’s complicates television’s flow through a process of ‘amateurisation’ and intertextual cross-referencing, using as their principal tactic the exaggeration and redoubling of familiar televisual codes, and especially the magazine format of the journal télévisé.” For a brilliant and detailed analysis of the series and of the Sonimage project overall, see Michael Witt’s doctoral dissertation (which he kindly lent me), “On Communication: The Work of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard as ‘Sonimage’ from 1973 to 1979.” University of Bath, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, 1998.

434 “Give floor to speak.”

to a worker, a cleaning

lady, a prostitute, a painter, a photo-journalist, and in the last chapter of the series,

Godard gives it self-reflexively to himself. As we have seen, the enquête or

interview was a Maoist technique. It was used, for example, by the Groupe

d’information sur les prisons (GIP) as a means to allow prisoners and their

families to denounce the conditions in which they lived. In Six fois deux, this

strategy was meant to give visibility and voice to those who did not usually have

it in television; he paid them for the interviews the equivalent of an hour’s wages,

calling attention to the relationship between work and the act of taking over

speech as labor. Comment ça va? (1975) features a specialist in computer science

and old delegate from the CFDT (Confederation of Women Delegates of

Workers), and a journalist who works for a Leftist newspaper, Le Parisien Libéré.

222

Joining forces, they go through the process of making an “engaged” video to

show to their comrades in the Parisian banlieue that will explain how information

is selected, written, and communicated in their newspaper. The video has as its

objective to shed light into how information works and has as its target the

recently founded Libération, directed by the former Maoist Serge July. In the

video, Godard and Miéville deconstruct a photo and a text by Serge July about the

Revolution in Portugal, published in the newspaper in September 12, 1975. They

deconstruct the photo by juxtaposing and superimposing it with a similar image

from the French May ’68. As Godard wrote in a 1977 letter addressed to Elias

Sanbar, “Une image ne sert à rien si elle n’est pas accompagnée par sa semblable

dans une situation différente.”435 If Ici et ailleurs they juxtapose two states of

affairs (France and Palestine); in Comment ça va?, they superimpose the

Carnation Revolution in Portugal and May ’68, asking: “Comment regarder, ce

qui nous regarde?”436

Stills from Comment ça va? 1975

Comment ça va? Can be described as a reflexive mise-en-scene of Sonimages’

efforts to examine the mechanisms proper to the transformation of knowledge and

435 “A single image is useless if it is not accompanied by a similar image in a different situation.” The letter is dated July 19, 1977, and published in the special number of Cahiers du Cinéma no. 300 (special issue, 1979), 16-19.

436 “How to look at that which concerns us?” For an account of French intellectuals’ reception of the Portuguese revolution in 1975, see Christofferson, French Intellectuals, 129.

223

perception into information in the mass media, asking “forme-in-formation:

Comment ça va de l’entrée a la sortie?”437 According to Nicole Brenez, asking the

question “comment ça va?” persists throughout the work of Godard, going from

the mise-en-scène of a question.438

437 “Form-in-formation, how does it work from the entry to the exit?” 438 Nicole Brenez, “The Forms of the Question,” Forever Godard ed. Michael

Temple, (London: Black Dog Publishing and Tate Modern, 2004), 165.

First, narratively or figuratively: “What is the

form of information?” And second, to an ethical and formal order “How to look at

that which concerns us?”

Journalistic practice as a mode of production of visual information is

characterized by speed, velocity, immediacy, and presence. In Photo et Cie.,

Godard and Miéville deconstruct photojournalistic practice in an interview with

the photojournalist Christian Simonpietri (from the Sygma Agency), whom they

ask to describe the techniques of his profession. Simonpietri does so by telling the

story behind a photograph he took in Dakar in December 1971, three days after

the departure of the Indian troupes at the end of the Indo-Pakistani war; to

celebrate the independence of Bangladesh, a public meeting was held in Dakar.

224

After the evening prayer, the prisoners that were accused of collaboration with the

Indian troupes were beaten and then executed. Simonpietri took a photograph at

the same time as did Michel Laurent, a journalist from Associated Press, whose

very similar image won the Pulitzer Prize. Discussing the economy of

information, Simonpietri and Godard address the qualities of photo-journalistic

production. Simonpietri defines a good journalistic photograph as one that should

reach the eye right away by immediately conveying information. Such an image

has the power to “say” right away, and presupposes a viewer who engages with it

quickly, ready to receive information instantly, speedily, equating the image’s

“here and now” to the moment of viewing. Against the grain, Godard and

Miéville in this context insist on the need to stop the circulation of images, by

slowing down the viewing process: “On va plus lentement à décomposer en

uniforme,”439

439 “We will slow down, uniformly decomposing.”

says Odette (Miéville) in Comment ça va? in order to “Montrer des

225

rapports, plutôt que des vérités.”440 Slowing down, decomposing, and showing

relationships are actions that call for an active viewership that counters the speed

proper to the photojournalistic image. Evidently the mass media narrows if not

hinders the events presentified, by spatio-temporalizing empirical facts turning

them into events seen from a single point of view, and coded by the information

apparatus. For Godard and Miéville, the image-event renders us powerless as

viewers. As Godard says, is necessary to stop images in order to open up the

possibilities of seeing and acting, thereby undermining our impotent power to

make images.441

5. Cinema and Video against the Technique of the Social (Television)

As we have seen, by the late seventies, the mediatic post-Maoist intellectual had

taken her public role as the speaker of truths back with a vengeance, refusing to

distinguish between voice and appearance while incarnating a figure of authority.

Invited to participate in a televisual broadcast in 1978 as an intellectual, Lyotard

problematized these kinds of interventions by de-synchronizing his own voice

with his image during the broadcast.442

440 “Show relationships, as opposed to truths.” 441 Godard in his letter to Elias Sanbar, Cahiers du Cinéma no. 300,

(Special issue, 1979), 16-19. 442 The broadcast was part of a series entitled “Tribune Libre” which

appeared on the FR3 on March 27, 1978. Lyotard’s broadcast has been transcribed in “A Podium without a Podium, Television According to J.-F. Lyotard,” Political Writings, translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

He further addressed the conditions of the

production of speech and televisual appearance, as well as the expectations of the

public, critiquing the broadcasting of expertise in the media. Making a distinction

between scientific expertise, objectivity (which he ironically defines as

226

“empiricist omniscience”), and philosophical “simple opinions,” Lyotard defines

expertise as a discourse emitted by someone who believes and who is believed to

know what he/she is talking about – thus, expertise on a subject is having

authority over given matters and is able to speak freely about them. For Lyotard,

the paradox of philosophical expertise lies in the fact that at that given historical

moment (post-May ’68), philosophers pondered the matter of authority while

drawing a distinction between philosophy and scientific knowledge, saying that

the discourse of philosophers and intellectuals does not purport to be objective

knowledge but belongs to the domain of opinion. Lyotard is pointing to the public

broadcasting of the intellectual function, problematizing the authority and

credibility bestowed on expertise while pointing at the need of the public to

believe in figures of authority and knowledge.443

Four years later, Godard intervened along the same lines as Lyotard in a

news broadcast from Antenne 2 Midi coinciding with their coverage of the

Falklands War.

444

443 Ibid, 25. 444 On May 22 1982. The broadcast is available for consultation at the

archives at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel lodged at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Via live satellite transmission, he presented his film Passion

(1982) from Cannes while interacting in the broadcast, acerbically and wittily

commenting on the images shown in the televised news and articulating his

critique of the mass media in terms of a ratio: televisual speech is as profuse as

the images shown are poor: “C’est difficile avec vous à la télé vous parlez

beaucoup à la télé [sic] vous montrez des images assez pauvres qui peuvent pas

227

dire grand chose.”445 He also describes his relationship to television, by raising

the matter of seeing: “Si j’étais à la télévision je me servirais des images pour voir

quelque chose.”446 In the program, Godard further brings up the subject of images

of war, lamenting the fact that the images shown on television are provided by the

army (which since then has been pretty much the case in every war). He further

compares war to the circus, suggesting that images of war be broadcast live: “Moi

je pense que ça passionnerait les gens de voir la guerre en directe, on y viens voir

les gens du cirque; moi je pense que la guerre est faite pour être montrée à la

télévision . . .”447 In fact there have been drastic restrictions to media access since

Vietnam, and in the case of the Falklands War, Thatcher granted access to the

campaign to only two photojournalists, and no television transmission was

permitted at all.448

445 “It is difficult with you on television, you speak a lot on television

[sic], you show images that are too poor to say anything.” 446 “If I worked on television I would make use of images to see

something.” 447 “I think people would be excited to see war live, after all, we go see

people at the circus; I think that war is made to be shown on television.” 448 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and

Giroux, 2004), 65.

Godard’s idea that “war is made to be shown on television,”

became a self-realized prophecy in 1989 when the Romanian “revolution” was

televised; soon thereafter, CNN gave 24-hour live coverage to the Gulf War

(1990-91) and the Balkans genocide (1992-93). Finally, pointing at the question

of the hyperreal and authority in relationship to journalism, Godard pushes the

228

anchor to admit during the broadcast: “Je n’ai pas vu ce qui s’est passé aux

Malouines.”449

As opposed to cinema, television is the everyday, and Godard and

Miéville sought to analyze ordinary, everyday images contained in and produced

by television by means of exploring the techniques of film and video. Godard and

Miéville constructed a discursive site for moving beyond asking “What is there to

be done?” to “How can one see and give to see?” The political questions in the

early seventies became, for Godard and Miéville, the necessity of adopting the

techniques of television by using video as the other of television and, by this

analogy, cinema as its “supplement.” They did so by “dressing videos” as films,

shooting and editing in video and then printing and projecting the result in

cinema. They used the technique of video to further analyze the techniques of

television, understanding them as the materialization of a code of certain societal

desires that have created the machines in question. In this case, the desire is

humanity’s fundamental drive to possess its own image, a desire that corresponds,

in their account, to man’s instinct of self-presentation. This, for Godard and

Miéville, explains our ongoing exploitation of techniques that preserve an

instant.

450

449 “I did not see what took place in the Falkland Islands.” In Godard’s

2006 exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, a scene from Ridley Scott’s reenactment of the Black Hawk Down operation in Somalia was shown on a flat screen. According to the collective Retort, the broadcast of the Black Hawk Down operation damaged American deterrence, which was restored in the Gulf War. In a conference in April 2007, Thomas Keenan discussed the proliferation in the web of videos posted by Iraqi insurgents attacking the American Army.

450 Jean-Luc Godard, “Jean-Luc Godard fait le point,” 156.

Godard and Miéville see television a consensus par excellence with the

social function of power and control. Moreover, its immediacy and directness (by

229

being live, doing broadcasts, and emphasizing presentness) imply that there is no

delay between television and the social, and that is what renders it “pure” social

technique.451 In contrast, cinema has an aesthetic function, which enables critique

because, contrary to television’s immediacy, there is delay between the viewer

and cinema.452 Video in its manifestation as commercial television is a “whole

flow,” a visual stream assuming quality of continuousness, as the contents of the

screen unroll before us all day without interruptions. The commercials are more

intermissions than the possible moment of critical distance.453 Thus it is not only

cinema’s aesthetic and non-everyday aspects which are crucial to Godard, but also

to explore its ontology by way of video. As we have seen, in videos like Photo et

Cie., Ici et ailleurs, Comment ça va?, and, most famously, Letter to Jane, Godard

and Miéville dedicated many minutes of screen time to still images.

Photography’s essential role in the early Sonimage films should be seen as that of

the arrested image, as the “atom” or the smallest building block of cinema.454

451 David Joselit takes Deleuze’s premise that cinema is “against”

television and poses the same relationship between art and television in the context of an analysis of the apparatus of television during its “network” era in the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s. He recounts events in the video ecology of mid-century America that disrupted or reconfigured television’s closed circuit, such as in works by Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Michael Asher, Timothy O’Leary, Stan Brakhage, Frank Gillete and Ira Schneider, Peter Campus, etc. David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007).

452 Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre à Serge Daney: Optimisme, Pessimisme et Voyage,” Pourparlers, 105.

453 Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious,” Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 70.

454 Philippe Dubois, “Video Thinks what Cinema Creates,” 173.

In

the 1980s, Godard would claim that Video is to Cinema like Abel was to Cain.

230

The death of cinema as a trope would crystallize in the Histoire(s) de cinéma,

further doomed by the homogenizing qualities of digital reproduction and its

subsumption to the Culture Industry.

231

PART II

Toward Videographic-Machinic Expression

1. Cinematic Voice // Discursive Régime

Jacques Aumont has argued that Sonimage’s work in the early seventies uses

deliberately and productively the contradiction between sight and voice in which

the (abstract) narrator uses both channels simultaneously and in a perverse way:

writing with the visual and diegeticizing the enunciation.455 Following Jean-

François Lack (with an emphasis on Histoire(s) du cinéma as the culmination of

earlier trajectories in his work), Godard’s voice functions as “A device for

imagining the unity of the speaking subject,” creating, following Bellour, a

“Multiplicitous signifier or singular presence,” so that the use of sa voix and not

son image, opens a gap between voice and text.456 In Godard’s work, body and

voice are deployed separate signifiers. His voice can function as a self-portrait; or,

in Ici et ailleurs, we hear it narrating, reciting, and in dialogue with Miéville,

oscillating toward functioning as a kind of vessel for the discourse of failed

activist.457

455 Jacques Aumont, “Godard: The View and the Voice,” Discourse:

Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, no. 7 (Fall 1985), 42-65. 456 Jean-François Lack, “Sa Voix,” Forever Godard, 312-313. 457 For a taxonomy of Godard’s use of dialogue, interview, and

questioning in the Socratic, Aristotelic, or Merleau-Pontian views see Nicole Brenez, “The Forms of the Question,” Forever Godard, 160-177.

Voice is also used as the trope for cinematic self-reflexivity, becoming

a sign of absence from the image, through which Godard creates a distance from

what is filmed.

232

As I mentioned, Godard and Gorin took the position of militant

filmmakers in the DVG’s films, a regime of enunciation carved out from a

historical and contemporary revolutionary constellation. As opposed to speaking

in the name of a cause or by describing situations through narrative, they adopted

the master discourse of Marxism. Self-critically and pedagogically, they repeated

Marxist-Leninism in Pravda and Le Vent d’est, Althusser’s lesson on ideology in

Struggles in Italy, Brecht’s comments on the “role of intellectuals in the

revolution” in Tout va bien, and finally in terms of Feminist discourse in Numéro

deux.458 The master-discourse (or the “political lines”) in the DVG’s films is

present as a cinematic voice in the voice-over almost systematically uttered by a

female voice that inverts the relationships between discourse traditionally

gendered by Modernism as male and speech traditionally gendered as female, as

we saw above. In other words, in Godard’s films, male discourse becomes female

discourse (formerly speech) – and the other way around.459

458 Following Serge Daney in “La thé(rr)orisé (Pédagogie godardienne),”

36. Below I problematize Daney’s insistence on Godard’s repetitious gesture as a means to avoid his own discourse, as Daney oversees the differential potential of repetition Godard’s method of appropriate appropriation.

459 Ibid, 37.

Male speech is

figured, for example, by the filmmakers in Vladimir et Rosa, who appear walking

along the net in a tennis court, interviewing each other, stammering, oblivious of

the game being played “over” them. I have already discussed an instance of the

masterly female discursive “cinematic voice” from Le Vent d’est in chapter 1.

Such a discursive voice has the function of laying out problems, playing devil’s

advocate, and figuring out a program for action and for being critical of the

233

filmmakers. Miéville’s voice-over in Ici et ailleurs has a similar function; in

addition to translating the Palestinians’ speech into French, “she” chastises,

advices, teaches, and contests Godard’s speech as a militant filmmaker. His

cinematic voice, in turn, oscillating between the voice-off/voice-over460

Pascal Bonitzer predictably attacked Godardian voice-overs for being

despotic on the generalizing basis that voice-overs are overpowering and censor

the sixty-eighter questions: “Who is speaking, for whom and, when?”

in

dialogue with Miéville, provoked suspicion in the critical reception of the film.

The filmmakers were challenged for their immanent presence in the diegesis or

filmic space, mastering their images, articulating a discourse from a subjectivizing

point of view asserting their authorial presence as “voices coming from above.”

What model of cinematic authorship is pertinent to explaining how voice-overs

and montage work in Godard and Miéville? Where is their site of enunciation

when voice-over is so predominant in some of Godard’s films? Shall we too

accuse him of narcissism?

461

460 Following Mary Ann Doane, voice-off in film is a case in which we

hear the voice of a character who has established or who will establish her own presence in the space of the film (or in the diegesis), a space that the camera has chosen not to show at that particular moment. For Doane, the efficacy of the voice-off lies in the knowledge that the character can be easily made “visible” through a reframing of the diegetic space. Differently, voice-over is common to documentary practice; it is a disembodied voice presented outside diegetic space, which means that it is radically other in relationship to the diegesis. See Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” (1980), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen (Columbia: The University Press, 1986), 338-342.

461 See Pascal Bonitzer, “J.-L. G et J.-M. S,” Le regard et la voix (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976), 68, and “The Silences of the Voice” (1975), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen (Columbia: The University Press, 1986), 324. As Kaja Silverman’s, Serge

234

Debatably, Bonitzer is taking voice-over as an act of will to power, which implies

force, taking over someone else’s place to speak in her own name. Since voice-

over is a form of direct address, for Bonitzer, the audience is presented with the

characters without mediation, thereby enabling the voice to acquire a certain

authority, potentially becoming acousmatic (spectral, disembodied and

authoritative speech).462

Daney,’s Michel Chion’s, Mary Anne Doane’s, and Pascal Bonitzer’s investigations on the cinematic voice have proved, this interrogation is especially complex in cinema, where sound and voice, more than the image, convey faith in cinematic veracity – and, as we saw in chapter 1, sound is more powerful than images, because it has the ability to bestow mimetic signifiers on images. Following Kaja Silverman, who draws from Derrida, Ricoeur, and Barthes, the idea that cinema can deliver “real” sounds (as voice) is an extension of the Western episteme which identifies the voice with proximity, with the here and now of a metaphysical tradition which defines speech as the essence of presence. Voice’s equation with presence in cinema implies closing the gap between signifier and signified, giving sounds the meaning of the here and now. Further, the metaphysical Western tradition supports the idea that speech expresses the speaker’s inner essence, equating the “subject of speech” to the “speaking subject,” promoting not only presence but self-presence. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 43. It is not that the author has ceased to exist, was put to rest or needed to sacrifice him/herself – as Silverman argues that Godard does: an ever-repeating and imminently unsuccessful authorial suicide, for the sake of the democratization of knowledge and collective production or as a means to resist the retorritorialization of authorship by Capital – rather, subjecting the author to disappearance was a means to locate authorship in such a way that it would reveal the forms of discourse and how the author-function is exercised in a given regime of enunciation. See Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969).

462 Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema.”

Bonitzer’s critique of acousmata in film is linked to the

general effort of filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals in the late sixties to diffuse

authorship (as Maoists sought to diffuse power) and to the critique of the problem

of the regime of mastery and power of the auteur defined as the ability to render

235

filmic text cohesive with meaning.463 In this context, voice-overs in cinema

represent power because they relate to the images from a place that is absolutely

other to the image and thus transcendent because they are outside the visual

regime, in a different cinematic space. Because this voice comes outside, it is

presumed to know, and that is where its power resides. Furthermore, the signifier

of voice-over is at work rendering evident the accent (opposing Barthes’ “grain”

of the voice) of an era, a class, neutralizing meaning as opposed to opening up the

surface of intertextual meaning. That is why Bontizer recommends that voice in

film speaks as little as possible, because for him, the mastery of wisdom is: No

commentary. In his demise of voice-over, Bonitzer collapses the regimes of

discourse, speech, and cinematic voice, championing the proliferation of

documentaries that reject voice-over and in favor of a “democratic system” that

allegedly allows events to speak for themselves, giving montage the weight of

discursive enunciation, vouching for the ça parle of the real.464

463 The auteur in film has been defined as a signature, a style, as the origin

and meaning of the cinematic text, putting emphasis on the auteur’s ability to equate the way in which he feels and thinks with the way in which the film looks and moves; those looks and moves are responsible for the film’s intrinsic meaning. An auteur is someone with “the ability to put a film together with some clarity and coherence,” and the auteur’s films “almost always run true to form.” See Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture Reader, edited by P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 133.

464 Bonitzer commends Gudie Lawaetz’s May 68 from 1973, Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia and Antonioni’s Chung Kuo Cina. See Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice” (1975), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen (Columbia: The University Press, 1986).

464 See Bonitzer, “The Silences of the Voice.”

Arguably, the

problem with the ça parle is that it reduces language to the signified; it is speech

in the third person, presenting a world imbued with intentionality. For Godard and

236

Miéville, as we will see, it will become necessary in Ici et ailleurs not only to

create a discursive site by way of montage but also to take responsibility over the

images filmed – which they do by way of voice –. By way of positing a complex

interweaving of temporalities, they transform voice into expression.

Serge Daney provides a model of Godard’s use of cinematic voice and

authorship, based on his practice of authorial divestiture by repeating the already-

said-by-others as a kind of ventriloquism. For him, Godardian voice-overs are like

lectures; in his account, in Godard’s films, the filmmakers become professors

repeating their lesson and reiterating word by word that which others have said.

Furthermore, for Daney, Godard’s appropriation of citations, slogans, posters,

jokes, histories, and newspaper headlines, is a questionable anti-archeological

procedure. This is because Godard takes word by word that which others have

said with the purpose of avoiding establishing his own regime of enunciation.465

A l’obscénité d’apparaître comme auteur (et bénéficiaire de la plus-value filmique), il a préféré celle qu’il y avait à se mettre en scène dans l’acte même de la rétention.

Daney thus locates the weight of Godard’s authorship in montage, because:

466

While Godard does reduce theory to noise, to completely agree with Daney would

be, to further disregard the differential quality of repetition. Godard not only

465 Serge Daney, “Le Thé(rro)risé (Pédagogie godardienne),” 33. 466 “To the obscenity of appearing as auteur (and beneficiary of the

greatest filmic surplus value), he has preferred to stage himself in the very act of memorization.” Serge Daney, “Le thé(rr)orisé (Pédagogie godardienne)”, Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 262-263 (1976), special issue on five essays on Numéro Deux by Godard, 37. This article has been translated by Bill Krohn and Charles Cameron Ball and is available at http://home.earthlink.net/%7Esteevee/Daney_Godard.html. Date consulted: October 15, 2008.

237

repeats a given discourse, but he seeks another discourse, enunciation, image, or

sound that will bring the two into creative contradiction: montage includes voice,

and both constitute enunciation.

Still from Scénario du film Passion, 1982

According to Daney, Godard’s archeological method turns him into an empty

place, a blank screen through which images and sounds coexist, neutralize,

recognize, designate, and struggle with each other. Furthering Daney’s argument

about Godard’s discursive site as a blank screen through which others’ quotations

pass, Kaja Silverman uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytical model to

explain it. She argues that Godard’s is a project of authorial divestiture that

implies an infinite staging of authorial suicide, rendering him a receiver. In her

view, the first time Godard committed suicide as an author was in Weekend

(1967), by consigning the film in his opening title sequence to “the scrap heap.”

From then on, Godard’s research into authorial divestiture consisted of

incessantly staging his own authorial death by ceding responsibility to quotation.

In Silverman’s account, Godard is something like Veronica’s veil, the total

238

embodiment of a blank screen, a “pure receiver” with a double function: the

surface onto which perceptual phenomena project themselves and the wall from

which such phenomena bounce back toward the spectators. In Silverman’s model

of reception/deliverance techne and poiesis are inextricable, the former defined as

“making appear,” the latter as “bringing into presence” or “unveiling.” In

Silverman’s Heideggerian reading, Godard, in his double being as receptacle and

reflector, offers his own authorial death so that the world can appear. For

Silverman, Godard’s alleged attempt to receive Being and to display what comes

to him from the world, becomes a pure act of giving.467

Silverman’s explanation of Godard’s model of authorship falls short to

explain Ici et ailleurs. I suggest an alternative way of articulating his relationship

to the cinematic apparatus: as a technical and operative, rather than metaphorical.

Debatably, Silverman’s argument of Godard’s theological fusion with the

apparatus embodying the blank screen is a misreading of Godard’s exploration

about seeing and writing in Scénario: “La loi (le scénario), ça s’écrit ou ça se voit,

d’abord?”,

This notion of authorship

follows a model that implies that all expression realized in a medium must

disappear in the fully realized expression; once the medium disappears, it “gives

to see.”

468

467 Kaja Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” October no. 96 (Spring

2001), 17-34, and Silverman’s interview with Gareth James, “I said I love. That is the promise,” The tvideo politics of Jean-Luc Godard (Berlin: oe + b Books, 2003).

468 “The law, the script, is it first seen or written?”

a phrase that he utters stretching out his hands toward a blank

screen. Godard’s relationship to the apparatus is operational insofar he is sitting in

239

between two black screens. As I will explain below, this is how video-editing is

done. In Ici et ailleurs and Numéro Deux we see images of two or more monitors

and of slides appearing simultaneously on a black background, showing images

that are “coming out” of pools of blackness. Unlike the idea that the black screen

is a sign of an undeveloped image or of the absence of an image, Godard’s first

black screen is opaque with information, charged with the world’s images, bad

and good, but mostly clichés.. Such a screen acquires the role of the reflexive

apparatus of television (and cinema).469 The editor, through the acts of

designation and conjunction, subtracts an image from the black screen, signaling

its passage onto the second screen, commenting on the images in the voice-

over/off as if broadcasting or diffusing a message live, for example: “L’image

d’un gangster qui représente la mafia, ou par exemple, l’image d’un contremaître

qui représente son patron”470

469 Here we can make an analogy with Deleuze’s critique of the idea that

the painter begins to work in front of a blank canvas. For Deleuze, Modern painting is invaded, cornered by photos and clichés that have installed themselves in the canvas even before the painter begins her work. Thus, it is an error to believe that painting works upon a white and virgin surface. The surface is invested completely and virtually by all the clichés that one must break away from. See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Logique de la Sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 18.

470 “The image of a gangster who represents the mafia, or the image of a foreman who represents his boss.”

corresponds with a montage of Richard Nixon and

Moshé Dayan in Ici et ailleurs. We could make an analogy here to the festaiolo,

the Renaissance painting moralizing eye from the inside who invites the viewer’s

participation. In Piero de la Francesca’s Brera altarpiece (1472), for example, the

240

festaiolo is the angel standing behind the Virgin Mary and summoning the viewer

with his gaze.471

Far left: Still from Numéro Deux (1976), and stills from Ici et ailleurs (1975)

2. Moi je suis un animal politique // Moi je suis une machine

Godard has stated that at the beginning of the “Sonimage period” he situated

himself within the contradiction of cinema’s resistance to the new and television’s

lack of originality. For him, to be within this contradiction is to be blind, unable to

read or write as he seeks, stammering, to respond to the question of

communication.472

471 Alberti wrote about this figure in his treatise Della Pittura: “I like there

to be someone in a historia who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them.” See L.B. Alberti, On Painting, translated by Graydon, C. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 78.

472 Godard from an interview in Le Monde, September 25, 1975, cited in Philippe Dubois, “Video Thinks what Cinema Creates: Notes on Jean-Luc Godard’s Work in Video and Television,” Jean-Luc Godard, Son + Image 1974-1991 edited by Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Brandy, (New York: MoMA, 1992), 170.

Insisting on expression, Godard and Miéville explored diverse

tools and methods such as dialogue, pedagogy, and emphasis on shifters –

exploring designation and address as alternatives to the communication model. In

their audiovisual/journalistic workshop they became self-managed producers

working from a “library” of images and sounds and their studio became a factory

241

for seeing and thinking. Sonimage’s site of enunciation is situated within the

“inter-media” realm of cinema, photography, television, and the printed media,

one that is made possible by video, which, because of its technical qualities, is

able to integrate these media. Video is thus a virtual and operational site for

moving back and forth different media, a technical and mental place operating in

between mobility, stillness and two monitors.473

473 Raymond Bellour, L’entre-images, 2.

What is crucial here is Godard’s

and Miéville’s response to the intransitivity of the media by creating their own

mode of pragmatic enunciation activating a speaking subject in the act of seeing:

Moi, je vois. Their starting point is blindness, and they privilege searching as an

intensive way of seeing; they purport a subject that sees and speaks, a subject that

get sewn together in an utterance: “I try to see.” Bearing in mind that video in

Latin means “I see,” an analogy can be drawn to the seer, Bernardette de

Soubirous, who appeared for the first time in Godard’s Passion (1982). Like

Bernardette de Soubirus, the seer confirms both, the image’s status as a sacred

imprint and herself as a seer in an indicative speech act. Somehow close to

Blanchot’s distinction between saying and seeing, which for him are situated in

different registers in relationship to thinking. Blanchot talks about finding and

doing research as possible alternatives, and speech as the “origin of devil”

because “in speaking, we depart from all directions and all path.” And yet speech

gives us a path: “To talk straight.” With his emphasis on speaking, he further

attempts to get away from the Western optical imperative as “Speaking frees

thought from the optical imperative . . . which has subjugated our approach to

242

things, and induced us to think under the guarantee of light or under the threat of

its absence.” For Blanchot speech is freed from the limitations of sight: a

transcendent way of seeing, speaking without saying.474

As I mentioned, Ici et ailleurs, Godard speaks in the first person and calls

for an ethics of enunciation as a means of accounting for intransitivity as well as

undermining the code of objectivity proper to the media.

475 In the script for Moi,

je, Godard articulates a regime of enunciation as a double statement that

structures the film into two parts: Moi je suis un animal politique // Moi je suis

une machine.476

474 See Maurice Blanchot, “Speaking Is Not Seeing,” The Infinite

Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 25-31.

475 I am referencing here the linguist Oswald Ducrot, who argues that the talking subject introduces sentences (in enunciation) that necessarily contain the responsibility of the utterer; in other words, in enunciation the speaker is committed to the semantic content; that is why for Ducrot speech acts constitute expression. Oswald Ducrot, Logique, structure, énonciation: Lecture sur le langage (Paris: Minuit, 1989), and Les mots du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1980).

476 From Jean-Luc Godard: Documents.

Further, in a rather dense yet poetic passage from the same script,

he situates “his” realm of enunciation within “the social,” so that the “I” is part of

what he calls “shared phantasms.” The acknowledgement of shared phantasms

makes “him” hope that that they will open up “his right” to criticize the social

regime to which “he” belongs and where “his motor” (or drive) is “packaged.”

Moreover, in proximity to Benveniste’s theory of enunciation as an

interlocutionary act, Godard uses direct address and speaks in his name in the first

243

person, thus emphasizing the objective activation of an addressee inherent to the

speech act:477

C’est parce que je suis groupé avec la représentation de ces fantasmes, parce qu’il y a une filiation directe entre le “je” et le ‘il” qui l’objective, parce que “je” est un autre (un autre je comme un autre il ou elle et il et elle comme un autre nous comme des autres ils comme des autres elles) que je puis enfin critiquer réellement cet “il’ dont “je” fais partie, et que c’est parce que j’en fais partie et que je ne le cache plus que j’ai maintenant réellement le droit de critiquer ce régime (social) ou “il” fait s’emballer “mon” moteur (désir).

478

Godard’s “I” invokes Rimbaud’s articulation of the site for the potential of

objective poetry, “I is someone else,”

479

477 Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale 1 (Paris:

Gallimard, 1966). 478 ““It is because I am part of the group of the representation of these

phantasms, because there is a direct relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘he’ that it objectivates, because the ‘I’ is an other (an other I like he and other he or she and he and she like another we like other they) that I can finally really criticize this ‘he’ of which ‘I’ am a part of, and it is because I am part of this that I do not hide it anymore and that now I really have the right to critique this regime (social) where ‘he’ is enveloped with ‘my’ motor (desire).” From the script of Moi, Je, 6.

479 Godard often quotes Rimbaud’s famous phrase Je est un autre from his letter to Georges Izambard, from The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, 28.

and this can be linked to the division of

the Moi, je in two: Moi je suis un animal politique // Moi je suis une machine.

Arguably, the first one is a reference to Aristotle, for whom man is a “political

animal” living in the polis. The polis is the “natural” state of the human animal, as

opposed to the idea that civilization is artificial. What differentiates humanity

from the animals is the faculty of speech, which enables humans to emit ethical

and moral judgments about the society in which they live. Using reason and

speech, humankind must figure out how to live together, by creating laws that

make it possible for a human community to survive. For Aristotle, the political

244

man says “I” as an individual in the domain of the polis. The domain of action, for

Godard, is a kind of shared space composed of discursive practices in which the

Aristotelian polis is transformed into a subjectifying realm for speech, a space that

contains a systematized field of objects: the phantasm, the group, the production,

desire, the social, and capital – what he would later call in Histoire(s) du cinéma,

les signes parmi nous. As a way to explain how he is tackling the problem raised

by the systematized field of objects – which is the question of communication and

the mass media – Godard tells us that that his method is to bring these objects

together, making them interact through the perspective that is facilitated by the

work and methods of Eisenstein and Vertov, and through the activities of seeing

and listening (which are the videographic apparatus). The systematized field of

objects I listed appears in a drawing/diagram in the upper left corner of page 9 of

the script. As we can see, the field of objects appears “outside,”480

480 It must be noted that, in the conversation between Sartre, Gavin, and

Victor, discussed earlier, their theorization of the New Political Man was also based on Aristotle’s “Political Animal.”

and “Jean-Luc

Godard” is “inside,” rendering himself immanent to the videographic apparatus –

illustrating the second statement: Moi, je suis une machine.

245

Fragment from the script Moi, je (1973).

Moi je suis une machine refers to his videographic practice that echoes the Post-

structuralist critique of humanism: if Aristotle’s man was a living animal with the

additional capacity for political existence, modern man, in Foucault’s view, is an

animal whose politics call his existence as a living being into question.481

481 Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 188.

This

does not mean that the death, disappearance, or overcoming of man is at stake, but

rather, that the forces composing “man” have entered into new combinations

which bring the old combinations into question. For Foucault, notions such as

human nature, justice, and the essence of man or civilization are types of

knowledge. Class struggle, which is the modern configuration of the realm of

action for the political animal, is based on these concepts along with the ideal of

overcoming the state as the will to power. Foucault problematizes the political

existence of man within this regime of class struggle, because this regime pushes

the subject to identify herself either as opposing “proletariat” to “bourgeoisie” or

246

in between them, as mediator.482 As we have seen, in the 1972 debate with

Deleuze, Foucault they condemned the act of mediation as unworthy, and

proposed the notion of a post-humanist “specific intellectual,” which is proper to

the period “after” class struggle.483 Articulating the new role of intellectuals as

socio-cultural facilitators, Foucault argued that they are now characterized by

being plugged into the informational machinery, channeling and propitiating the

diffusion of the knowledge proper to workers and prisoners. Neither a subject nor

a representative consciousness, the specific intellectual acts as a multiplicity

creating networks. Foucault’s specific intellectual484

482 See Foucault’s discussion with Noam Chomsky in Eindhoven on

November 1971, “De la nature humaine: Justice contre pouvoir,” published in his Écrits vol. 2, text no. 132, and also available as a book (Paris: Harmattan, 2007).

483 Deleuze and Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power.” 484 While Deleuze, Foucault, and Godard share with Sartre and the post-

Maoist New Political Man the media as the domain for action, they differ insofar as the Sartrean post-Maoist intellectual produces knowledge in her own name and operates by means of persuasion. In this manner, Sartre’s position was never really overcome by the Maoists, who, as the New Philosophers, relapsed to the pre-May ’68 position of the vanguardist intellectuals. Deleuze would later develop the notion of the intellectual as “intercessor” or “negotiator,” and Foucault would devote his last seminar to the Greek figure of the parrhesias, who speaks truth no matter at what cost.

shares with Godard’s

political animal/machine the media as its operative domain, diffusing knowledge

rather than producing it; Godard differs from the “specific intellectual” insofar as

he introduces a division between sight and speech. In their Sonimage practice,

Godard and Miéville become broadcasters/pedagogues immanent to the

videographic apparatus, operating in the double discursive regime: Moi je suis un

animal politique // Moi je suis une machine, and in the machinic discursive site of

montage that I call “Videographic Machinic Expression.” They speak from an

247

inter-media site constituted by video (“I see”), rendering their site of enunciation

immanent to the technique. As Godard stated:

De penser ma bouche et mon cul comme “entrée” et “sortie” d’un appareil qui enregistre, ou . . . de penser la synchronisation comme une unité obtenue dans le fonctionnement social, m’aide à réfléchir tout à fait autrement. C’est en ce sens que je trouve la technique intéressante . . . 485

The question they ask in their film, Comment ça va?, “Comment ça va, de l’entrée

a la sortie de la machine?”

486

3. Mise-en-scène of Direct Address // Free Indirect Discourse

sums up Sonimage’s workshop project, while

“interface” best describes the subjects operating in the videographic apparatus, as

opposed to “authors” or “producers.”

Sonimages’ concern with direct address stems from their critique of the false

“objectivity” of documentary voice-overs and journalism, and is linked to their

experiments with communication and language. To account for the severance of

the viewer in the communication process, they sought to undermine the traditional

communications model of the media, which implies a source, a message, a

transmitter, and a receiver, and which produces unilateral speech acts, blocking

feedback. Godard and Miéville took into consideration the absence of any

possibility of feedback in three ways. First they did so by way of pedagogy,

485 “To think of my mouth and my ass as the points of entry and exit of a

recording machine, or . . . To think of synchronization as the unit obtained from measuring social functions has helped me to understand things differently. It is in this sense that I find technique interesting.” “Jean-Luc Godard fait le point,” interview with Philippe Durand, published in Cinéma Pratique 93 (January 1973), 156.

486 “How does it work, from the entry to the exit of the machine?”

248

deconstructing the many components of the mass media and analyzing them one

by one, as we have seen. Second, they use montage as a way of countering the

media’s reduction of information to an objective and scientific structure – to a

series of given codes. Their third strategy is staging instances of direct address,

which emphasizes not the communicative potential of language but its role as the

basis for intrasubjective relationships.487

Le sujet c’est le ‘je’ qui se projette dans le monde ou dans l’autre // celui qui dit ‘je’ ouvre la bouche et fait un angle // le je se projette dans la télévision // on la reçoit et on est asujeti.

By means of direct address, the

speaking subject in Ici et ailleurs is located at the juncture of the

broadcaster/interface, diffusing information, receiving/emitting/resending images,

and decoding and recoding them. Godard thereby renders himself immanent to the

film’s space or diegesis by speaking from the out-of-field, and like in literature,

he makes use of pronouns as a technique. In Soft and Hard (1985), Godard

explicates the intransitivity of television that subjectifies the viewer:

488

When we, as televisual spectators, receive the “I” that has been projected from the

televisual screen toward us, we are subjected in Foucault’s sense, meaning that

television is a form of asserting power by imposing certain modes of subjectivity

on the viewer. Here Godard is posing the problem of subjectivation as the

intransivity of the media, that is, the absence of address. Godard and Miéville

487 For description of the staging of direct address in other Sonimage films

see Dubois, “Video Thinks what Cinema Creates,” 170. 488 “The subject is the ‘I’ projecting herself into the world or in the other //

he/she who says ‘I’ opens his/her mouth and makes an angle // the ‘I’ is projected in television // we receive it and we are subjected.”

249

tackle this problem by staging direct address, as it is sketched out in the first

image of Ici et ailleurs, a screen text/title that can be read like a calligram:489

The words “Son Image” are blinking. “Mon,” “ton,” and “son” are pronouns and

pronouns are deictics; following Emile Benveniste, they are empty signs that are

filled in by the subject via interlocution in speech acts.

MON (My) TON (Your) SON IMAGE (His/Her/Sound Image)

490 This play of shifters

announces Godard’s and Miéville’s emphasis on the interlocutionary aspect of

language. They insist on language as the basis for intrasubjective relations, in

their wish to understand language as the foundation of dialogue and the addressee

as the condition of the communication act.491 Playing with the possibilities of the

sliding of codes embedded in the graphic aspect of the calligram, they announce

their use of pronouns as shifters as a mode of direct address, underscoring their

emphasis on the relationship between the speaker and the addressee and their

images and sounds.492

489 Philippe Dubuois has called them “Verbal collages.” See “The Written

Screen: Jean-Luc Godard and Writing as the Accursed Share,” Forever Godard, 232.

490 See: Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale 1. 491 Here they part from Roman Jakobson’s conception of language as a

code that provides the basis for the communication of a message. See On Language, edited by Linda Waugh (Harvard: The University Press, 1995).

My/Your, His/her, and sound and image are marked by

492 This is was not the first time that Godard used propositions in his work. In Le Gai savoir (1968), a film about the production of images, language, and sounds in which Godard explains his method of making films, Patricia Lubumba tells Emile Rousseau, emphasizing the deictics: “Ce long discours que je suis, j’ai beau me tourner vers toi.” (“The long discourse that I am, I could turn it [myself] towards/into you.”) In this phrase the condition of enunciation, or the existence of the speaking subject, depends on the presence of the addressee and posits the addressee and the speaker as interchangeable. Further, the enunciator reflects

250

spatial and temporal deictics obviously contained in the title and at other instances

in the film: now and then, here and elsewhere. In this manner, they counter the

logic of the event, as the spatio-temporalization of facts by spatio-temporalizing

the voice-over instead: “Here” is France; “elsewhere,” Palestine; “then” is

“February-July 1970,” referencing the DVG’s trip to Palestine; and the “now” is

1973-74, the period of the editing of the film. Furthermore, Ici and ailleurs (as

well as this and that – which Godard points at: we filmed this, we saw that, they

showed us that) are acts of indexing; Godard is pointing at the things and places

rendering inextricable his “I” from what he shows. With this gesture, an opening

is created in which the sensible happens. Following Lyotard, pointing at

something (indicating, indexing) is not a simple reference through which the thing

shows itself unequivocally; rather, it is a movement engendering the here.

Godard’s speech cannot have meaning if it is not placed in a spatio-temporal

situation. To indicate is a way of escaping saying (for Lyotard, dia-deictics, the

dialectic of space and time), of putting forth a Dasein (being-there) and different

from Sinn (or meaning).493 Following Rodowick’s interpretation of Lyotard,

“here” is grounded on the body, and indicates a correlative function between body

and space, incommensurable with the experience of language and of a specific

enunciating subject, drawing on shifters to indicate spatial and temporal

location.494

upon his “I” in relationship to the Alter Ego – the Other “I” with Rimbaudian tones.

493 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure, 39-41. 494 D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New

Media (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), 6.

In other words, the referent is dissolved in its spatio-temporalization.

251

Godard’s “showing” relates to the an eye that scans intensively, thereby pacing

the mobility of the body in space, creating a “moving frame,” and a “jumping

eye” within a spatio-temporal frame – this is jumping eye is literal in the camera

movement in Godard’s Lettre à Freddy Buache à propos d'un court-métrage sur

la ville de Lausanne (1982).

Most importantly, the dual “Godard” of Ici et ailleurs marks the reallocation

of the “I” of enunciation, due to the passage of time between “his” visit to the

Middle East and the present moment when “he” is editing the film: “Les jours

sont passés, les mois sont passés” and “En re-pensat à cela.” 495 In the first

sentence there is a wordplay: the word Moi (me), and mois (month and “me” in

plural), which means that the “me’s,” or the partial-subjectivity, elapsed along

with the months. Thus, the spatio-temporal break between the Palestinian trip and

the moment of montage (the me’s/months that lapsed) marks a change in

Godard’s “I’s’” (or me’s): the “mois qui passent” designates a temporal passage

and the imminent reconfiguration of the partial-subject located in the film’s

perpetuated present.496

495 “The days passed, the months/me(s) passed” and “Re-thinking about

that.” 496 This is what Deleuze calls the transcendental-empirical Cogito of art,

or Free Indirect Discourse, which I will discuss below. As I discussed above, Miéville’s place with regards to the diegesis or filmic space remains outside, as voice-over, the self-critical pedagogic and chastising discourse, while Godard’s enunciation becomes part of the diegesis.

These “passing I’s” could be thought of in the Rimbaudian

sense of “I is another.” For Kant, on the one hand, the ego is passive and

receptive, experiencing changes in time. On the other hand, the “I” is an act (for

Deleuze: subjectivation) that constantly carries out a synthesis of time, dividing it

252

into past, present, and future at every instant: the “I” (as an utterance) and the ego

are separated by time. “I is someone else” that affects this ego: “I” is separated

from myself by the form of time. This leads to a double division of the “I” and the

ego in time, relating them to each other and stitching them together by the thread

of time. Time moves into the subject, distinguishing the ego from the “I”; the “I

is” oscillates between the two, and this oscillation constitutes time.497

Moreover, the temporal delay between “Godard” filming, speaking, and

seeing-editing plays off from the reflexive structure of video as feedback. It is

worth making a comparison to Richard Serra’s 1974 video, Boomerang, in which

Nancy Holt, wearing technicians’ headphones, speaks while her own words are

fed back to her through the headphones. In the video there is a delay between her

speech and the audio-feedback, which makes it impossible for her to coincide

with herself as the speaking subject.

498

497 Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the

Faculties (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), ix. 498 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October vol.

1 (Spring 1976), 54.

Similarly, in the voice-over of Here and

Elsewhere, Godard underscores his own site of enunciation as a temporally and

spatially dislocated subject of speech by creating an acoustic mirror for his visual

and sonorous image that does not coincide with his “self” (editing or filming)

through a closed-circuit mirror play. “Mon Image” is that of Godard, who sees

himself looking (now, here) at the Palestinian images he filmed in 1970

(elsewhere, then), as he introduces the diachronic and self-reflexivity into direct

address, underscoring the spatio-temporalizing quality of shifters and the

intransient quality of speech acts. Further, in the filmic space (diegesis), Godard

253

shows himself as having filmed in Palestine, as he reflects upon the changing

conditions of production and the stakes in the film, three or four years later.

Furthermore, the act of enunciation and of the indexical presentation of the

images produces a singularity, an inscription of the utterance that acquires

meaning through the spatio-temporal displacement that marks the singularity

along with the historical and actual events to which the singularity refers.

Pascal Bonitzer argues that the question Godard has set himself in Ici et

ailleurs is to answer the question: “Comment rendre justice à l’énoncé, au délà de

la barre d’énonciation?”499 This question implies the limit of the act of

enunciation itself; as in representation, there is always difference between the

enunciation and its subject. The question further entails a distinction, or rather, a

gap in speech between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of

enunciation.” On the one hand, the subject of the enunciated is the third person in

a statement that keeps stable the speaker’s subjective position (in the first person).

Differently, a statement from the subject of enunciation enacts a subjective

change accounting for it, taking responsibility in the first person.500

499 “How to do justice to the enunciated, beyond the blockade presupposed

by enunciation?” Pascal Bonitzer, “La Surimage,” Cahiers du Cinema, no. 270 (September-October 1976), 33.

500 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, (London: Verso, 2008), 48.

In Godard’s

voice-over, the gap between the subject of the enunciated, which is the reported or

the content, and the subject of enunciation (or speech-act), is rendered “visible”

self-reflexively. As we have seen, Godard’s speech act oscillates between “je”

and “on.” “On” in French is a de-personalizing device. Godard’s the voice

oscillates between “je” and “on”: from the point of view of the accused (the failed

254

Maoist) without renouncing to present the side of the accuser (kind of like: I told

you so-I saw it coming by way of self-reflexivity). Here “on” marks a medium

distance from the world, a self-distance device to judge and to analyze.501 In this

manner, Godard’s speech act dissolves the distinction between the public and the

private: the failure of the Palestinian Revolution is equated to the militant

filmmakers’ failure to speak in the name of national struggles abroad. Thus, an

empirical event becomes a collective here and now as it is allegorized and equated

to the private person. The figure of Revolution and the figure of “Godard” are

made to mean something other than themselves, putting forth sheer immanence by

emphasizing the spatio-temporal coordinates of enunciation in which the here and

now becomes a moment in which social life coincides fully with private life: in

this case, militant failure.502

The belief that interlocution is impossible in cinema accounts for the fact

that Godard and Miéville chose not to address a viewer outside of the diegesis, as

in the (famous) scene in Le Vent d’est when a character interpellates the audience

and describes it, saying that there is a man in the balcony and a pretty girl he

would like to court. The actor situates himself inside the screening room by

stating, “It is dark,” and inside the cinematic frame by describing the landscape

501 Bernard Pingaud, “Je, Vous, Il,” Esprit 7-8 (July-August 1958), 91-

101. 502 See Fredric Jameson’s discussion of Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) and

The Parallax View (1974), in which he discusses the main characters as allegories for socio-historical processes, becoming sheer immanence in the film, pointing at the here and now. Because he speaks in voice-off, Godard could also be understood as a character in the film. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London and Indiana: BFI and the University Press, 1992), 55-56.

255

behind him. In Ici et ailleurs, the authors’ staging of direct address underscores

their enunciation as immanent to the diegesis, pointing (indexically) at the

images: “Je, on, tu, il, elle, on a filmé ça” and “J’ai organisé le film comme ça.”503

This is how “Godard” becomes part of the diegesis; as the broadcaster, he utters

his own actions of seeing and filming.504 Thus, in Godard, the act of

communication is accounted for as an act of expression that implies responsibility

not only for the speech act but also for the images filmed, edited and seen. Instead

of reporting on what the DVG filmed in Palestine in the journalistic form of “it

speaks” or “someone said,” Godard speaks and shows in his (proper) name,

reflecting upon the ways in which his own discourse (or angle) affects the bodies

and the actions (in the images) he is designating. In other words, that which is

expressed in the speech act contains the actions and the multiple temporal

displacement of the point of view of the subject of speech, affecting the bodies,

constituting the expression.505

503 “I, we, you, he, she filmed this,” and “I organized the film like this.” 504 Here language is used not as a code for communication but as

embedded in a relational act, presupposing an addressee. I am thinking of the theories of the linguist Oswald Ducrot, distinguishes language as communication, which implies an emitter/message/receiver, from an understanding of language as the basis for dialogue, as an allocutionary act that implies a relationship between the addresee/locutor. Further, for Ducrot, the act of illocution is pragmatic, that is, language is performative insofar as it makes the subject and the object coincide in the speech act. Further for Ducrot, in the employment of shifters, the I does not imply the locutor and you the destination of the message, but the place from which the characters speak in a particular instance of communication, which gets effectuated when we employ them. Oswald Ducrot, Logique, structure, énonciation : Lecture sur le langage, (Paris : Minuit, 1989), 162. See also his Les mots du discours (Paris : Minuit, 1980).

505 Oswald Ducrot, Logique, structure, énonciation: lecture sur le langage (Paris : Minuit, 1989), 44.

256

In chapter 2, I addressed the question of “repentant discourse” proper to

the script of Ici et ailleurs, which has been read as proclaiming disavowal for the

“political excesses” of the DVG films, allegedly provoking a “turn” in Godard’s

work. This issue is evidently comparable to the actual ex-Maoists’ self-critical

discourse that hatefully repudiated May ’68 after the dissolution of the Proletarian

Left.506 More specifically, I am thinking of the repudiation of militantism by the

New Philosophers who made “public confessions” in the media, trying at all cost

to “make themselves be forgiven by their youth follies,” in an effort to propagate

the ex-Maoists’ disavowal of politics and their passage from radical activism to

defending a discourse based on a critique of totalitarianism, ethics and human

rights.507

Godard’s self-critique does resemble (if not prefigures) Maoist repentant

discourse – in the same sense that the DVG’s films repeat militant discourse. For

example, when Godard states in the voice-over in Ici et ailleurs: “On n’a pas

voulu voir…” or the sequence discussed in chapter 1, “On a mis le son trop

506 Régis Debray wrote about the effects of the disavowal of revolutionary

politics and action and May ’68 which were propagated by its actors: “On the tenth anniversary, revolutionaries are showered with hatred and imbecility: they are our sour assassins, cold monsters, Gulag warrant officers, mass murderers. On the tenth anniversary of Che’s death, there was no homage, no round-table discussion or memorial program on Bolivian television.” Régis Debray, “A Modest Contribution to the Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” New Left Review 115 (May-June 1979), 45. Following Kristin Ross, by 1976 the ex-gauchistes propagated a moralizing discourse reconfigured around personal ethics, not politics, violently disavowing earlier politics. See also Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s, (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004).

507 Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, L’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 408; see also Guy Hocquenghem, Lettre ouverte a ceux qui sont passés du col mao au Rotary (Paris: Agone, 2003).

257

fort…” (notice that Godard is using in both instances the ambiguity inherent to the

shifter “on”). Debatably, in Godard repeating such discourses implies to use them

as Free Indirect Discourse (FID). FID is an enunciation that is contained in an

utterance depending on another utterance that renders perceptions and discourses

partially subjective: it is discourse that traverses the speaker and that he can never

appropriate while it invests words with authority. FID is a stylistic and

grammatical procedure, defined by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a device used in order to

speak through the intermediary of another speaker, following or accepting the

psychological and sociological modification that the other speaker brings in. FID

belongs to the category of the infinitive it is a de-personalizing device close to the

infinity of history or narration.508 FID can be put to use: a) in order to render

fictitious the object that the writer wants to express, for example, a particular

vision of a world; b) to seek to render narration objective from the point of view

of a subjective world that is different from the author’s point of view (for

example, class).509 FID is an enunciation containing many voices. Similar to what

Deleuze calls the “cogito” in art: an empirical subject which cannot be born into

the world without simultaneously being reflected into a transcendental subject

which thinks it and in which it thinks itself, two egos or “mois.”510

508 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Sur le discours indirect libre,” L’expérience

hérétique: Langue et cinéma (Paris: Traces, 1976), 41-49. Originally published in Italian as Empirismo eretico (Roma: Ando Garanti, 1972).

509 Ibid, 44. 510 Gilles Deleuze, Time-image, Cinema 1 trans. Hugh Tomnlison and

Barbara Habberjan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 71-72.

Godard and

Miéville use FID in their self-reflexive male speech and the female discourse, as a

Maoist and as a Feminist.

258

In a scene in Ici et ailleurs they also reflect upon an instance in which a

body is put forth as vessel through which discourse passes. It shows a Palestinian

woman repeating a Marxist-Leninist text that is being whispered in her ear.

Miéville states, addressing the interlocutor, beginning with “Tu vois”:

Elle a l’air d’être joyeuse de faire ce travail . . . elle est toute contente de participer à la lutte même en faisant que répéter un texte. Mais dans la mesure cette répétition, elle a l’air de plus en plus morose, embêtée; elle a l’air d’avoir envie de retourner à ses occupations dont on ne le demande pas de parler, même si ses occupations ont a avoir avec la répétition, le quotidien, les taches du quotidien, à l’intérieur ou pas, de la révolution. L’automatisme s’installe à fin de répéter des mots dans un certain ordre qu’elle n’aurait sûrement pas dites comme ça, mais quoi aura-t-elle dites? Et comment? Les syndicats ne se posent pas cette question; les textes parlent, et parlent et l’on ne parle jamais du silence.511

511 “You see, she is happy to participate in the struggle . . . even if her task

is reduced to repetition. In the course of the repetition of the text, however, she appears more and more morose, bored; she looks like she would rather return to her daily chores, which are activities in which nobody asks her to speak; even if the chores deal with repetition, the everyday, the tasks of the everyday, working within the revolution or not. Automatism sinks in so she can repeat words in a certain order that she surely would not have said like that. What would she have said? And how? The unions do not pose this question; texts speak and speak, and we never talk about silence.”

259

Still from Ici et ailleurs

Here Godard and Miéville employ FID to construct Miéville’s self-reflexive

Feminist voice, who indicates that the body has become a vessel for

Revolutionary ideology, which is spoken through the Palestinian woman.

Miéville’s voice-over gives us the woman’s thoughts, inferring them based on her

appearance (she looks bored), addressing the issue of women’s work, and

representation, revolution and the everyday. Other instances in Ici et ailleurs in

which the authors’ concerns are voiced through the characters via FID are:

through the father who cannot find work and who spends most of his time with

his buddies from the union; the mother, who voices Feminist concerns; and the

daughter, who voices problems in the French educational system. In that sense,

the characters function as Godard’s and Miéville’s intercessors for their

reflections and concerns. Finally, Godard himself speaks in FID, as a voice-over

addressing the revolutionary filmmaker immanent to the diegesis, via auto-

critique – which can be and has been equated to ex-Maoist confessional, repentant

discourse. Debatably, Godard’s own voice oscillates between voice-off and voice-

260

over (as inside or outside the diegesis), direct address and free indirect discourse,

by laying out a multiplicity of discursive regimes that are not easy to disentangle:

“The Radical Tourist,” “Militant Filmmaker,” “Poor Revolutionary Idiot,” “Ex-

Maoist,” “Political Man,” “Journalist,” “Pedagogue,” and “Failed Voyant.”

4. Technique and Video: An Epistemology of Seeing

La seule possibilité pour moi est de le montrer à quelqu’un d’autre. C’est la seule possibilité que j’ai de dire quelque chose: regarde ce que j’ai fait; regarde cette tomate. C’est de la pensée. C’est fait pour garder des traces de la pensée et qui appartient à un moment donné.

Jean-Luc Godard.512

Jean-Luc Godard.

Cogito ergo sum (Descartes) // Cogito ergo video

513

Godard’s practice is specifically, a question of SaVoir, an epistemology and

pedagogy of seeing. As screen-text, we read repeatedly in Ici et ailleurs:

“apprendre à voir, pas à lire.”

514

512 “My only chance is to show to someone. It is the only chance that I

have of saying something: look at what I did; look at this tomato. It is thought. It is made to keep the traces of thought that belong to a given moment.” Godard in the chapter “Jean-Luc” in his television series Six fois deux: Sur et sous la communication.

513 Histoire(s) du cinéma, chapter 1b. 514 “To learn to see, not to read.”

Debatably, Godard does not imply here that he

vouches for pedagogy of seeing as opposed to reading; the world is neither visible

nor legible but we can see it in the ambivalence inherent to the relationships

between visibility and legibility. For them it is first necessary to arrive at SaVoir.

The French have two words to designate knowledge, “savoir” and

“connaissance.” “Savoir” means objective or impersonal knowledge, and implies

261

a will to knowledge based on desire, as opposed to “connaissance” or subjective

knowledge, which is a will to truth and its production or invention.515

515 In French a distinction is made between forms of knowledge:

connaissance is is any particular body of knowledge (like a discipline); savoir is the discursive conditions that are necessary for the development of connaissance, or empirical, subjective knowledge. See Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 2002), 15. Godard evidently emphasizes the “voir” (or seeing) inherent to SaVoir, as part of his visual-epistemological and pedagogical enterprise.

Godard’s

SaVoir is an intensive seeing based on an epistemology rather than a

phenomenology of the illegible and the invisible. In this sense, Godard and

Miéville practice a kind of stratigraphy, working in the fields of visibility and

sayability of things, words, things, the visible, and discourse, bringing into

movement the relationships between discourse and the visible. Pointing at the

discrepancies and at the heterogeneous quality of the relationships between

visibilities and utterances, Godard’s seeing does not imply the designation of the

visibility or visualization of a discursive field. Godard’s SaVoir is inextricable

epistemology and thought process, and implies, as we have seen, the rendering of

a potential actualization of an image by way of montage, potentially rendering

things visible (to the viewer) that wouldn’t be visible under other conditions. It is

not by chance that Ici et ailleurs, Comment ça va?, and Letter to Jane are called

video-essais: literally, “I try to see.” Video is Latin for I see, and essayer means to

try. In Ici et ailleurs, Godard, as we saw above, has constructed a discursive

regime radically different from his earlier militant filmmaking, embedded in the

double statement: Moi je suis un animal politique // Moi je suis une machine, a

Videographic Machinic Expression that bestows primacy to the act of seeing and

262

listening. Videographic Machinic Expression is a form of thinking out loud while

looking at images, editing in dialogue with Miéville. As I have pointed out, video

lends itself to a particular form of editing because it is done in front of two

monitors: one monitor shows the already edited material while it receives raw

material live from the other screen,516 enabling the editor to consider the images

side by side in the two monitors; this form of editing becomes one of the main

tropes in the film. By privileging video as a medium because it allows images to

co-exist on the screen, Godard highlights limitations in the medium of cinema,

because in the filmic projection it is technically impossible to show images side

by side, as cinema is made up of a procession of images that follow one after the

other in the projection. Godard’s instrumentalization of the video-machine could

be understood in a similar manner to the way in which Diderot’s blind man

describes the looking glass, a reflective/reflexive machine “that places things in

relief from out of ourselves if properly placed: it is like my hand, which I must

place properly to see an object.”517

516 Bearing in mind that this is the apparatus of video in the seventies. For

an interview with Godard in which he talks about the technical aspects of video and Sonimages’ video studio in Grenoble, see Wildfried Reichart, “Interview mit Jean-Luc Godard” (AUS: Filmkritik no. 242, February 1977), reprinted in Video Apparat/Medium, Kunst, Kultur, ein internationaler Reader, edited by Siegfried Zielinski (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 198-208. For an account of Godard’s first experiments with video in the Parisian context, see Jean Paul Fargier, “Histoire de la vidéo française: Structures et forces vives” (1992), La vidéo, entre art et communication, edited by Nathalie Magnan (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1997), 50-51.

517 Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works trans. Margaret Jourdain, (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972), 144.

The looking glass is thus a machine that

enables us to examine things closely, but only insofar as they are placed properly

in front of the machine in the same way that things are distanced from us in the

263

looking glass. In the script for Moi, Je, Godard diagrams his relationship to the

visual and the aural in filming and editing similarly to the blind man’s description

of the looking machine:518

image(s) son(s) lecture

(re)voir (re)entendre (re)lire or

519

As we can see/read, for Godard, “reading” images and sounds consists of an

epistemological inquiry that implies the repetition of the activities of seeing and

listening that occur in the first instance as filming; now the actions are reiterated

in the process of montage. This mode of seeing, reading, and listening to images

and sounds is inextricably related to Godard’s camera-eye, influenced by Dziga

Vertov. The Kino-Eye implies that the camera has a consciousness of its own that

sees reality and shows it to us. The Kino-Eye is for Vertov an X-ray of reality, an

“assault” on the visible. The camera-eye operates transmitting of visual

phenomena and as a factory of facts producing visual thinking. In Vertov

epistemological inquiry and cinematic consciousness converge in a dialectical

image, seeking not something given in appearance but something from which

things and processes derive.

520

518 While Godard is concerned with aspects of production and distribution

relating to video and exploring its potential, I do not think that he is interested in the ontology of video. Video functions for Godard, as the “other” of film as a way to explore an ontology of translation from cinema to video, from an analogical process to its transformation into data. For Godard it is also obviously a tool and a technique for seeing and thinking with which he experimented widely.

519 (re)see (re)hear (re)read or

image(s) sound(s) reading

With montage, thought is given back to the

520 Annette Michelson, “The Man with the Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Artforum (March 1972), 63. See also Dziga Vertov’s “The

264

invisible, by imposing an angle of vision that functions by means of the passage

from shot or frame to fragment, creating an image of thought (dialectical

montage). Godard adds one extra step to Vertov’s dialectical formula of the Kino-

Eye that consists of seeing/ re-see-ving/re-sending the visual through fruitful

juxtapositions in the form of a potential Image of the unthought.

Further, Godard’s eye is not an intentional eye looking at something but

an intensive eye that sees things.521

Birth of Kino-Eye” (1924), “Factory of Facts” (1926), and “On The Eleventh Year” (1928), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

521 See Jacques Aumont, “La valeur-cinéma,” Jean-Luc Godard: Un Hommage du Centre Culturel Français et du Museo Nazionale del Cinema de Turin ed. Jean Esselinck and Sergio Toffetti, (Torino: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1990), 25, and Jacques Aumont, “The Medium,” Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 208.

The principle of Godard’s Videographic

Machinic Expression, the Moi je suis une machine, is this seeing/re-see-ving/re-

sending that contains the factual/epistemological qualities of the camera-eye plus

the intensive je vois that thinks, in a movement of differentiation decoding and

recoding the images and sounds. How does the videographic machine work?

What is Godard’s technical relationship to video that I have insisted upon?

Godard diagrams his relationship to the videographic apparatus in the

graph/drawing Moi, je that I analyzed in part above:

265

Fragment from the script Moi, je (1973)

We can see that the operative site that Godard occupies in relationship to the

apparatus is, first, nominal, as he inscribes “J-L G.” twice: behind the video

camera, evoking the similar position in Loin du Vietnam (1967), and inside the

TV monitor. The hand joining them both recalls again Diderot’s blind man and

the obvious emphasis on his hand as a site for sight. The hand is also a tool for

seeing because it is the hand that designates and links images together. In this

image, “J-L G.” is the subject of the image, the subject filming, the editor, and the

means of transmission from the camera to the two monitors. This rendering

immanent of himself to the video-apparatus defines it as literally an act and a

technique for seeing that resembles the blind man’s looking glass. The

reflective/reflexive machine also brings to mind the research into spatio-temporal

simultaneity in the work of early video artists. Rosalind Krauss argued that the

video apparatus in video art is a mere accessory; for her, video is a psychological

(narcissistic) condition rather than a physical (objective) medium due to the

technical nature of video, which allows for the simultaneous reception and

266

transmission of images (feedback). Because of this, in Krauss’ view, the medium

of video art is the narcissistic psychological condition that is generated by

feedback, which prompts the drive toward the projection of the self. Feedback

produces a split between the subject filmed and the subject projected onto the

monitor, allowing for the temporal coincidence of both unfolding reflexivity and

reflectiveness. Reflexivity is the separation of the subject from thought and from

its objects (a bracketing or reduction in Husserl’s sense), while reflectiveness is

the subject’s external symmetry as embodied by the mirror-monitor.

Reflectiveness allows for radical symmetry from within, while the reflexivity

produced by feedback causes a “fracture into two categorically different entities

which can elucidate one another insofar as their separateness is maintained.”522

This is why for Krauss the psychological situation of self-reflexivity induced by

reflectiveness, allow to draw attention from an external object – an Other – and

invest it in the Self.523

522 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October Vol.

1, (Spring 1976), 56. 523 Ibid, 58.

In this way, the narcissistic drive toward the projection of

the self creates the situation of a body bracketed between the camera and the

monitor.

267

Still from Numéro Deux, (1976)

Godard’s relationship to video is comparable to the reflexive/reflective condition

of video art that Krauss describes, and like Diderot’s blind man in front of the

looking glass, both emphasize the simultaneous yet bracketed presence of the

object/subject between itself and its own perception. Godard’s site of address,

however, is radically different from that of narcissistic video art. Comparing, for

example, Godard to Vito Acconci in Theme Song (1973), it becomes evident that

in Acconci the speaker is situating himself as an “I” projecting the Self not only

onto the monitor but onto the world: “Come over here!”, “I know you must find

me a little creepy now,” etc. Differently, Godard does not speak from the

narcissistic psychic realm as a Self projecting himself into the world, but from the

realms of the social, capital, desire, production, the phantasm, and the group: as a

political animal/machine. Further, this Self functions as the operational subject,

diffusing and disseminating in the act of seeing and thinking, for seeing=re-see-

ving/re-sending. A instance in which Godard explains this reflexive/reflective-

diffusion can be seen in the first sequence of Numéro Deux, which shows seven

268

minutes of Godard in his studio explaining his new working conditions in

Grenoble, the project of Sonimage, and his relationship to video. The camera

shows him standing next to a monitor into which his own image is being fed live.

Technically, Godard points here to a triple site of enunciation: film, his self, and

video, comparing his studio to a library as well as to a factory in which the

patron/worker (unlike a producer in the Benjaminian sense) posits himself as an

active agent performing a specific task: “You see, I listen to the machine.” Later

in the film we see a calligram with the word “Montage” becoming the word

“usine” (factory) by way of “joining:” “MONTAGE / JONTAGE / USNTAGE /

USITAGE / USINAGE / USINEGE / USINE E / USINE.”

In summary, in Godard, video allows for a machinic vision that

acknowledges the philosophical phantasm of the reflexive consciousness of the

eye that sees, an eye that apprehends itself through its own constitution of the

world’s visibility. Godard’s seeing eye is, furthermore, the expression, the

utterance, the speech act: Je vois. The speech act is effectuated not in the

recognition of the Self in the constitution of the world’s visibility, but in montage,

in a spatio-temporal passage between the two monitors, here and elsewhere, now

and then. Godard’s eye is not a reflexive consciousness but an eye that jumps,

decoding and recoding reality, opening up the potential for the actualization of the

image of the unthought.

5. Appropriation, Stoppage, Défilé

Le cinéma c’est une “forme qui pense” au lieu d’être une “pensée qui forme.”

269

Jean-Luc Godard.524

From the voice-over from Comment ça va?

Partir d’une image, d’une seule image, comme des atomes; pour voir comment ça bouge… Comment ça va de l’entrée a la sortie de la machine ?

525

524 “Cinema is a form that thinks, as opposed to something that forms

thoughts.” Godard in the interview with Youseph Ishanghpour, Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du siècle (Tours: Farrago, 2000).

525 To begin with one image, from a single image, like an atom; to see how it moves… How is it going, from the entrance to the exit of the machine?

As I have mentioned, Sonimages’ inquisitive analysis of media images was

translated into their montage method, characterized by the operations of

appropriation and stoppage or halting. In an attempt to counter the speed and

velocity inherent to the visual transmission of information, Godard has

appropriated images at least since Le Gai savoir (1967), taking them “out of

circulation” by devoting several minutes of screen time to still images.

Furthermore, he staged the autonomous transmigration of images within the

media, making processions of cut-out images from journals and magazines,

passing them under the camera’s lens, an early example being Une Femme mariée

(1965).

270

Défilé of journalistic photographs from Comment ça va?

Image by Bruno Barbey of fedayeen in action (from Le Nouvel observateur?), 1970 In the voice-over of Ici et ailleurs, Godard asks, “Comment s’organise une

chaîne?”,526

526 “How is a chain organized?

while we see different images: that of an automobile production line

(chaîne in French), an advertisement for a chain of hotels, and that of a DNA

sequence. “How is a chain organized?” refers not only to the economy of images

and to their transmigration in the media, but to montage and to the genetic

element of cinema: the still image or “photogram.” In Vertov’s Man with a Movie

Camera (1924), there is a sequence in which we are shown a piece of filmstrip

followed by a series of static images singled out and repeated from other

sequences from the film. Suddenly the images begin to move; in this way Vertov

underscores the photogram as the genetic element in film. The photogram is the

source of movement in cinema insofar as it is “chained” into a mechanical

procession of still images contained on the filmstrip. According to Thierry

Kuntzel, the function of the parade of photograms is of the dialectical order of the

271

presence/absence of the image, and that which defines the filmic dispositif

(apparatus) is neither movement nor stasis, but what is in between the film

projecting itself and the photograms chained in the strips: the parade of the virtual

and mechanical passage of photograms that beinge made visible in the

projection.527 Taking Kuntzel further, Serge Daney argues that the dispositif of

the procession has a double sense, as in the double meaning of the word défilér in

French (parade and procession). Daney theorized Godardian processions, which

are not exclusively made of appropriated or stopped images, but also of people

walking in front of the camera. The first such procession appears in Tout va bien

during the demonstration accompanying the funeral of Pierre Overney and the

arrest of young activists that followed. One by one the activists pass in front of the

camera, hands in the air. 528

527 See Thierry Kuntzel, “Le défilement,” Cinéma: Théories, Lectures,

edited by Dominique Noguez (Paris: Kliincksieck, 1973). 528 I am relying on the most recent account of the cinematic dispositif of

the procession-image and of this sequence in Ici et ailleurs, which is Christa Blümlinger, “Procession and Projection: Notes on a Figure in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard,” Forever Godard (London: Tate, 2004), 178. There is another famous procession in Godard’s film of 1986, Grandeur et décadance d’un petit commerce de cinéma, where he emphasizes the relationship to voice, text, and body, and their becoming image. Another défilé appears in On s’est tous défilé (1988).

In Ici et ailleurs we see a similar procession, this time

staged in the studio: five actors walk in front of the camera, holding enlarged stills

of the Palestinian Revolution’s images. The procession is repeated four times,

enacting not only the succession of the cinematic frame in the filmstrip but the

becoming-image of bodies, figures, and events in film which is the transformation

or translation of space-flesh into time. The “bodies and photograms” parade

sequence from Ici et ailleurs has been extensively commented on, and it quotes

272

not only Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camara but the first film of the Lumière

Brothers, which shows workers coming out from a factory.529 In these procession-

films, the camera is conventionally placed in such a way that the bodies come out

from the point of flight in the frame and move towards the viewer before passing

the camera and out-of-field.530

In the processions in Ici et ailleurs, every image is represented by a body,

and each image is accompanied by one of the five slogans that frame the

Palestinian images (turning them into slogan-images): “The People’s Will, “The

Armed Struggle,” “The Political Work,” “The Long War,” and “Until Victory.” In

Ici et ailleurs, Godard asks in the voice-over: “Comment s’organise une chaîne?”

and “Comment construire sa propre image?”

531 In this way, Godard makes a link

between the procession of bodies and a projection of photograms: the visible and

the sayable in their becoming visible and utterable.532

529 The Lumière Brothers were French and among the first filmmakers.

The procession of workers coming out from the factory was their first film from 1985. They made other défilé movies, filming parades of the army, cyclists, schoolchildren, etc. 530 The workers’ procession in the Lumière brothers’ film is included in Harun Farocki’s Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (1995), a film that cites instances of workers leaving the factory of the history of cinema, from Metropolis (1927), Modern Times (1936) and Il deserto rosso (1964). Allan Sekula’s Untitled Slide Show (1972) shows workers coming out from a factory as well; some of them look directly into the camera’s lens as a way to acknowledge the engaged artist making their image. A proto-cinematic défilé is arguably found in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1949-50) and The Painter’s Studio (1855).

531 “How is a chain organized?” and “How to construct one’s own image?” 532 Christa Blümlinger, “Procession and Projection,” 178.

In this meta-

cinematographic episode, the cinematic procession may be read as a sequence of

immobile images coexisting within an ensemble of images that cannot be placed

next to each other or halted during the projection. Godard also points to the fact

273

that spatio-temporal “reality” is converted into linear time in cinema, as he says in

the voice-over:

Cet espace n’est plus un tout, mais une somme de translations, une sorte de somme de traductions, une sorte de sentiments qui sont dans l’espace, c’est-à-dire, du temps // Et le film, c’est-à-dire, une somme des images à la chaîne // rend bien compte, au travers de cette série // d’images de ma double identité // espace et temps, enchaînés l’un à l’autre, comme deux travailleurs sur la chaîne où chacun est à la fois la copie et l’original de l’autre // Comment employer son temps et occuper son espace? Comment s’organise un emploi du temps? Comment s’organise une chaîne?533

Godard points to how film transforms space from a whole into a sum of temporal

translations (transformations and displacements); film is space and time chained

together, reflecting each other like an original and its copy. Put in Deleuzean

terms: “Cinema does not reproduce bodies, it produces them with particles, and

these are particles of time.”

534

533 “This space is not a whole anymore, but a sum of translations, a kind of

sum of translations, a kind of feeling floating in space, that is, time // And the film, that is, a sum of chained images // accounts for through this series // of images of my double identity // time and space, chained one to the other, like two workers on the line where each is at the same time the copy and the original of the other // How to employ one’s time and to occupy one’s space? How to organize one’s own schedule? How to organize a chain?”

534 Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview With Gilles Deleuze,” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 291.

With the processions of still images and bodies,

Godard also poses the question of the postmodern nomadic image in relationship

to the new technologies of memory and perception. The question of imaging

others becomes the paradigm of the iconic image underlined by the process of

becoming images of bodies, as photograms and as slogans. After Marie José

Mondzain, we ask with Godard: What does it mean, then, to make a person

274

visible? Is it to make her voice audible? Is it to incarnate an essence or to

personify? Is it to restitute the verb to the flesh or to give body to a discourse?

Godard lays out somehow in Ici et ailleurs a metaphorical alternative to the

cinematographic dispositif of the défilé by video, a space of co-existence of

images made possible by the technical properties of video-montage, which rather

than a chain of images is a sum or addition of images and sounds, coded

electronically.

275

Part III

Image, History, Montage

1. From Spectacle to Flows of Information

The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is multiplied by itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be more signs for signs . . . we have lost all poetry of the universe. Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. Algebra and money are the essential levelers.

Simone Weil.535

Fragment from the script of Moi, Je (1973)

As we have seen, since the 1960s, artists have shared the problem of the explosion

of the media and information, and of addressing an audience from an educated

middle class that emerged as consumers of cultural productions.536

535 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947), quoted by Chris Kraus in Aliens and Anorexia (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001).

536 A visionary literary rendering of the generation of middle-class educated consumers (product of WW2) can be seen in the characters of Georges Perec’s novel Les Choses (1962).

The

276

transformation of perception and knowledge brought about by mechanical

reproduction and its links to capitalism are further inseparable from the

emergence of new social identities and subjects of history brought about by the

liberation from social class. According to Jean Baudrillard, in late capitalism,

equality is presupposed by the transformation of the citizen into a consumer with

the right for equality and happiness, measurable in terms of signs and objects.

This new class of consumers sought to overcome the “exclusiveness of signs” by

initiating a proliferation of “signs on demand,” challenging exclusivity through

copies, imitations, and counterfeits, thus de-stabilizing the equation of mimesis

with social power. For Baudrillard, this is the moment of Spectacle, when sign-

value takes precedence over use-value, and when the regime of appearances

becomes indistinguishable from the consumption and production of the signs of

equality based on the Rights of Man.537

As we have seen, Guy Debord, with his conceptualization of Spectacle,

condemns the fusion of memory, perception, and appearance, defining it as a

stage of capitalism in which everything has become its own simulacral inversed

image (in the negative Platonic sense),

538

537 Jean Baudrillard, La societé de consommation: ses mythes, ses

structures (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 60. Quoted by Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents edited by Tom McDonough, (Cambridge, Massachussets: the MIT Press, 2004), 256.

538 Guy Debord, La Societé du Spectacle, 9.

in a regime in which a highly literate

society produces and consumes its own desires as false images. Furthermore, for

Debord, Spectacle is an economy of self-representation that subjugates workers

277

because the sign-making machinery is aligned with power interests.539 Spectacle

is also a shift in perception that Jonathan Crary describes (using Bergson and

Benjamin) as the emergence of “perceptual consumption” – defined as a shift in

the relationships between memory, shock, attention, and perception. For Crary,

this shift is presupposed by a rift between memory and perception that occurred at

the end of the nineteenth century, when memory acquired the capacity to rebuild

the object of perception primarily as redundancy. This form of was offered by

mechanical reproduction, which led, according to Crary, to the inhibition and

impoverishment of memory and to a standardization of perception.540

A critique of spectacle following Debord’s indictment of the

“totalitarianism of the mass media,” however, was not pertinent to Godard’s and

Miéville’s analysis in the seventies, nor is it today, primarily because such a

critique burdens images with the weight of truth, and is predicated upon the

notion of the need for fixed forms of representation which appeal to the utopia of

social authenticity. Godard and Miéville also reject this analysis because it is

based on a totalizing conception of a world in which it is impossible to separate

life, capital, and appearance, imbued with the negativity of the false. Godard and

Miéville would not disagree with the idea that perception has been rendered

redundant by mechanical reproduction or that capitalism has reached the stage of

the preponderance of sign-exchange value. However, for them, images are neither

true nor false; rather, images transform each other constantly insofar as they are

539 Len Bracken, Guy Debord: Revolutionary, A Critical Biography (Venice: Feral House, 1997), 131.

540 Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Countermemory,” 455-466.

278

events that transmigrate autonomously in the media: “N’importe quelle image

quotidienne fait partie d’un système vague et compliquée où le monde entre et

sors à chaque instant.”541 This definition coincides with the notion of the nomadic

postmodern image, characterized by the traffic of images, people, and

information, in a mode of circulation of values, a distribution of symbols within

which we happen. Godard and Miéville further state in the voice-over from Ici et

ailleurs: “Le monde c’est trop pour une image // Non, dit le capitalisme, le monde

ce n’est pas trop pour une image.”542 Hinting at capitalism’s collapse of world and

image, they do seem to be in dialogue with Guy Debord. For Debord, Spectacle is

not to be confused with media images, which are for him only a “glaring

superficial manifestation of spectacle.” Spectacle is not, echoing Marxist analysis,

a collection of images but “a social relationship among people mediated by

images.”543 Similarly, for Godard, images are a social relationship insofar as

images are subjects: “On produit et on consomme son image avec celle de

l’autre.”544 Unlike Debord, however, who in his film The Society of the Spectacle

(1973) throws back to Spectacular society the images with which it depicts itself

thereby incriminating them,545

541 “Any everyday image is part of a vague and complicated system in

which the world comes in and out at every instant.” 542 “The world is too much for one image // No, says capitalism, the world

is not too much for one image.” 543 Guy Debord, Thesis No. 4 from La Societé du Spectacle. 544 “We create and we consume our images with that of the other.”

545 Len Bracken, Guy Debord: Revolutionary, A Critical Biography (Venice: Feral House, 1997), 190.

Godard and Miéville insist on an understanding of

images as relational and as acts of communication. For Sonimage the act of vision

must be considered as three-dimensional and subjectifying, which means that they

279

highlight the exchange of signs proper to image-consumption. For example,

Godard and Miéville explore images as the basic, primary exchange of signs

using an image that recurs in the Sonimage films, that of a mother and her child;

or experimenting with address and the technique of video as I explained above.546

Still from Photo et Cie., 1976

Experimenting with a semiotic approach to images, focusing on the language-

operation inherent to the act of imaging (mise en image), for them, images are an

exchange of signs that presupposes a virtual viewer because images are always

addressed to a third, who is represented by the camera’s lens (objectif, in French).

This leads to the inference that the first person is the photographer and the second

is the viewer of the photograph. The third is the gap in between the two. The

problem that rises is that in the dynamic of the communication of information,

there is no possibility for the exchange of signs, and the viewer is rendered

546 Experimenting hinting at Lacan’s theory of the mirror-stage.

280

powerless confronted with the events she is shown on the screen. This possibility

opens up with montage.

Montage for Godard and Miéville starts within the realm of reproduction

by means of an appropriation aimed at stopping the flow of information, an

examination of the layers beneath images (which in Serge Daney’s terms can be

thick or thin), and an exploration of how images, discourse, the editors, and the

viewer could glide into one another (Deleuze’s third age or function of the

image). Images function as tables of information in which the editors glide in and

out as givens; by means of archeology and stratigraphy, Godard and Miéville seek

to peel off the different layers of images. These operations do not ask, “What is

there to see behind the image (the image as a door-window behind which . . .),”

nor “How can we see the image in itself (the image as a frame-plane in which . .

.)”. They ask, rather, in a mix between Serge Daney’s conception of thick and

light images (which implies that that “the bottom of an image is always already an

image”)547 and the notion that as viewers-images, we insert (or map out, as Tom

Conley would say of cinema) ourselves as accomplices, victims or impotent

witnesses inside the images.548

547 Nelson Goodman’s “picture,” or what Bonitzer calls “la surimage.”

Nelson Goodman argues that images can be understood as the variable application of a visual syntax: what he calls pictures, the fact that images carry a palimpsest of references, being made up of many images of which we see only one face (the wall of the signifier) at a time. This is similar to Daney’s conception of images as thick or thin. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: an Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), and Pascal Bonitzer, “La surimage,” Cahiers du Cinema no. 270 (September-October), 1976.

548 Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre a Serge Daney: Optimisme, Pessimisme et Voyage,” first published in Serge Daney, Ciné-Journal, reprinted in Pourparlers, 101-107.

Godard and Miéville point to a global system

281

arranged around the control and flow of information and our position within, as

opposed to Debord’s totalizing domain of false appearances and position as

iconoclast.

2. Actuality and History (Images de marque)

Quand il s’agit d’histoire ancienne, on ne peut pas faire d’histoire parce qu’on manque de références. Quand il s’agit d’histoire moderne on ne peut pas faire d’histoire parce qu’on regorge de références. . . L’histoire se fait aussi contre les documents. Elle se fait même surtout contre des documents.

Clio.549

Godard is concerned with reproducible images and sounds as a form of historical

memory; such a concern is clearly in dialogue with Guy Debord’s articulation of

Spectacle as the annihilation of historical knowledge – in particular, the

destruction of the recent past.

550 For Debord, “Spectacle has irradiated into

everything and has absolute control over production and perception, and

especially over the shape of the future and the past.”551

549 “When it comes to ancient history, we cannot write (make) history

because we lack references. When it comes to modern history, we cannot write (make) history because we are packed with references. History is written (made) as well against documents. She is written (made) above all, against documents.” Charles Péguy, Clio: Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne, (Paris: Gallimard, 1932), 194-195.

550 According to Agamben, Godard and Debord share this paradigmatic messianic attitude towards cinema, and they both use repetition and montage in order to construct a restitutive memory. See Giorgo Agamben, “Le cinéma de Guy Debord,” Image et mémoire: Écrits sur l’image, la danse et le cinéma (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004), 89.

551 Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Countermemory,” 462.

In the age of Spectacle or

of hyperreality, “remembering” is not to recall a story, but to be able to invoke an

282

image.552 Spectacle is thus the reign of a perpetual present dominated by the

economy of information, which, by selling the “here and now” as novelty,

annihilates and replaces history.553 An interesting link could be drawn here to

Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men (2006). The narrative takes place in

twenty year’s time in an apocalyptic future, which is rendered visible by mixing

signs of the recent past of war, oppression and disaster elsewhere that have

circulated in the Western media – Gaza, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,

Baghdad, polluted landscapes – all of them extricated from their geographical and

historical context, thus rendering the “actuality” elsewhere as Britain’s

apocalyptic future. The fusion of these stages a further stage of Debord’s

Spectacle in which “false appearances” and their indistinguishability from life

have proliferated into signs of oppression and purport a false, terrifying “real”

present here (North-West).554

This should be understood in terms of how mechanized memory has

changed the way in which we remember, hindering our capacity to imagine the

future. Borges’s short story “Funes el memorioso”

555

552 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 89. 553 Guy Debord in Commentaires (1988), 17-19, cited by Jonathan Crary,

“Spectacle, Attention, Countermemory,” 463. 554 See Žižek’s commentary included as a special feature on the DVD.

This brings to mind Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s cathartic practice of improvisational tableaux vivants for which performers interact with props creating images charged with the signs of oppression embedded in images from the media, re-enacting from the visual unconscious this terrifying present reality, thereby exorcizing it.

lays out the obliteration of

the present and of analytic thinking by the impossibility of forgetting prompted by

555 Published in Ficciones (1944). The short story is available in Spanish at www.zap.cl/cuentos/cuento158.html. Date consulted: April 21, 2008.

283

mechanical reproduction. In the story, Ireneo Funes is a boy of humble origins

with a prodigious memory enabled by a fall that has given him clarity of vision of

the present and of the past. Funes is not only able to memorize everything in

complete detail, but he can also remember events, sounds, and things in real time.

His prodigious memory, however, prevents him from being able to analyze, think

abstractly, or really be in the present. Funes embodies the prodigious memory

from Pliny’s Natural History, a compendium of encyclopedic informational

descriptions.556

556 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, available at

Like Funes, this compendium does not claim to analyze or to give

an opinion on the facts that have been recorded, and they are conveyed as

information with a pedagogical voice. In Funes’ case, the possibility of fully

documenting the world through visual and aural memory is realized similar to

today’s analog (and digital) inscriptions and projections. When Funes remembers

in real time, he is subtracted from the present because his ability to remember the

core of events is accomplished by registering and reproducing duration. This

recording is previous to history, as Funes’ memory is an unmediated witness of

events capturing not only their immediate traces but duration itself, transcending

subjectivity and testimony, a document, a kind of public (objective) duration.

Funes’ memory is not unlike a movie camera registering events that have the

potential to become history. Following Péguy (who influenced Godard’s notion of

history), history, the event and memory must not be confused; rather, “History

and memory make a right angle. History is parallel to the event, and memory is

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plin.+Nat.+toc. Date consulted: August 11, 2008.

284

central and transversal to it.”557 Péguy considers writing history in two manners:

one, as a parallel to the course of the event and their unfolding; two, to go back to

the event, taking one’s place within it stretching in two directions (or a double

cone, in Bergson-Deleuze’s sense), one into the past and another into the future –

this axis is memory. Memory is capable of traversing the event, kind of like

geological aging. For Péguy, however, the remembrance of the survivor is a

narration (un récit), not a testimony, but a fiction.558 With Funes, we see the

symbiosis of memory, event and testimony of mechanical reproduction. Evidently

the ability to register real duration through mechanical memory (a recording) has

changed the way in which we perceive, remember, and write history, although

mechanical memory itself cannot remember. We could see Funes’ non-differential

remembrance in real time as the hypostatization of Jameson’s televisual “total

flow” because “nothing haunts the mind or leaves after images… structurally

memory (remembering) is excluded and so is critical distance.”559

Accounting for that shift in memory and perception, and influenced by

Bergson (who defined consciousness as a dark plate on which images develop)

and Péguy, Deleuze defines memory in the age of mechanical reproduction not as

a matter of remembering but of actualizing the hidden virtualities contained in an

image. For Deleuze, an image is never in the present – what is in the present is

whatever the “image” represents. Because the image is made of temporal

557 Charles Péguy, 231. 558 Ibid, 242. 559 Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism without the Unconscious,”

Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 70-71.

285

relations, images contain the potentiality to render visible the temporal relations

that cannot be reduced to the present or to representation. In other words, a

multiplicity of durations coexist in an image and their common denominator is the

present.560

As he is a materialist filmmaker, Godard’s perception of the world is

shaped by his historical consciousness of it. Thus his film practice aims at

exploring how the mechanical reproduction of the material world can affect

consciousness and memory, and how images shape historical consciousness by

becoming emblematic of historical events. These attitudes crystallize in his

Histoire(s) du cinéma (1978-1988-1998) in an exploration of the relationship

between cinema and history throughout the twentieth century. Godard addresses

embryonically the problem of History in Ici et ailleurs by exploring the images

(and sounds) that have shaped the historical consciousness of “Revolution,”

Deleuze does not make a distinction between the images we perceive

empirically and those images we perceive in cinema and photographs or on

television. In his account, perception and memories are made out of stored

memories. In their actualization, mechanized streams of memories or chains of

images can be invoked to account for events. Along similar lines, Godard’s

problem is not how to write history using mechanized memory, but how to

account for mechanized memory as it is written with “trademark-images.” While,

in Cuarón and Debord, reality and media images have become inseparable,

collapsing actuality, memory and reality as a single register of visibility, Godard’s

montage activates the relationships between the three.

560 Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen,” 290.

286

conceptualizing them as trademark-images, that is, as images that carry and leave

traces, and that go on to become part of history, such as the photograph of Che on

his deathbed or the little girl burning in napalm at My Lai. These kinds of images

first of all evidence the paradox of photography as John Berger put it, namely,

that a photograph is an automatic record of a given event which uses the event to

explain or to justify its recording, thereby rendering the process of observation

self-conscious.561 Photographs also become emblematic by acquiring power

through their circulation in the regime of visibilities. In other words, events make

images and then their circulation makes them part of history, thus forming a

collective historical consciousness composed of mechanical reproductions. For

Godard, there are also trademark-sounds, such as “L’internationale,” Hitler’s

discourses, and “Patria o muerte, ¡Vencermos!”, which we hear in Ici et ailleurs.

The concept of the trademark-image – or sound, has evident market connotations,

as it denotes the recognizable logo or mark of a company in the public domain. In

this sense, trademarks are characterized by being easily recognizable because they

have simplified the facts.562

In 1976 a special issue of Cahiers de Cinéma was published, inspired by

Ici et ailleurs and devoted to trademark-images.

563

561 John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph,” The Look of Things edited

by Niko Stangos (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 180. 562 Remi-Pierre Heude, L’image-marque (Paris: Eyrolles, 1989). An

obvious reference regarding a more recent consideration of trademarks is Naomi Klein’s No Logo (New York: Harper and Collins, 2000), that explores “branding” as the creator of surplus value as opposed to commodities.

563 Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana, “Presentation,” Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, “Images de Marque” special issue (July-August 1976), 4.

According to the editors, Serge

Toubiana and Serge Daney, the trademark-image has a power of its own and is

287

marked by power relationships, thereby becoming an emblem; as an emblem, a

trademark-image is an instrument not of domination but solidified power. In the

same issue of Cahiers, Alain Bergala defines trademark-images as stereotypical

historical photographs, images that come back incessantly in the information

apparatuses. For Bergala, the existence of these images is inseparable from the

apparition of photographic reportage, which has been used to construct a

historical imaginary of official history.564 These images are dominated by written

discourse, thus making the photographer into a secondary, imaginary figure, while

creating a consensus that keeps coming back as simulacra in collective

memory.565 In this sense, trademark-images may come from the mass media and

share with them the trait of being figural (in Rodowick’s sense of the mass image

that is addressed to the atomized collective) or textualized: the semiotic regime of

electronic and digital communication where the world of things is penetrated by

discourse.566

564 Which Godard problematizes through his parades of cut-out images

from journals such as L’Express and L’Observateur. 565 Alain Bergala, “Le pendule (La photo historique stéréotypée),” Cahiers

du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, “Images de Marque” special issue (July-August 1976), 40-46.

566 D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, 8.

Trademark-images in Godard imply power, repetition, circulation,

and the stereotypical vision of events that conceal other aspects of history while

constructing a collective visual historical consciousness. The concept of

trademark-images, furthermore, points to the fact that the distinction between

publicity and information is no longer relevant because the image has entirely

swung to the side of power. In terms of images of the Palestinian conflict,

Toubiana and Daney discuss trademark-images in the context of the media as a

288

scandal, the example being the Olympic Games in Munich ’72 in which the

Palestinian cause burst onto the international scene. Paradoxically, they write, the

existence of these images is threatened by the event itself, as this “scandal”

menaces to obliterate the image of the Palestinian cause.567 For Godard, however,

it is not a matter of which images are made to circulate, or of which events are put

into images, or even if the image of the Munich events blocked the image of the

Palestinian cause. Rather, he is concerned with, as we have seen, the potential of

cinema and video function as the other of the mass media that could bring into

question how the actualities are delivered to us, as readymade facts in the form of

the traffic of grammatical propositions that affirm events – and that potentially

write history. For Godard, cinema is capable of “touching” and relating to the

events themselves.568 This happens through montage, which has the potential not

only of remembering, but of reviving the obliterated faces of states of affairs by

delivering forgotten virtualities.569

567 As I have discussed, some Western intellectuals withdrew their support

to the Palestinian cause after the intensification of terrorism. Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana, “Presentation,” Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, “Images de Marque” special issue, (July-August 1976), 4.

568 Youseph Ishaghpour, Archéologie du cinéma, 19. 569 Evidently this means forgetting other virtualities, which is Péguy’s

paradox. In Godard, montage is a means of bringing together and connecting virtualities by means of citation and juxtaposition, methods which Godard has mastered by being able to evoke an entire work or historical event by bringing only in a small piece. See Jacques Aumont, Amnésies, 155.

For Godard, montage is the site for a

redemptive virtuality which, when it is actualized, creates the “real” or truth in the

present (an Image). Godard’s own version of history operates within the

relationships between historical (trademark) mechanical images and reproducible

sounds, the actuality of the mass media and the present. In Ici et ailleurs, as in

289

Histoire(s), Godard is working between the urgency of the present and the

retrieval of the forgotten in the past. This demands not only a history that

underscores discontinuities and jumps – the formula in Ici et ailleurs can be stated

as: “The History of the Revolution(s) here and elsewhere as the history of

actuality as the actuality of history, embedded in Godard’s cartographic

biography.”570

As we have seen, in Ici et ailleurs, the “now” and “then” are the “here”

and “elsewhere,” in 1970 and 1974-75, in Grenoble and the Middle East,

respectively. By putting forth these spatial and temporal relationships rather than

by situating themselves in the present, Godard and Miéville counter the

temporality of the mass media (which is that of actuality and urgency) and

introduce the time of history while drawing a Revolutionary cartography. Godard

and Miéville, interweave two kinds of history: “Recent history” (the news on

television) and “far history” (the history of all revolutions from 1789 to 1973).

This formula echoes Fernand Braudel’s “Une histoire avance vers nous a pas

précipités; une autre histoire nous accompagne à pas lents,”

571 which appears on

the screen in chapter 4a of Histoire(s).572

In 1972 Jean-Pierre Gorin described the then-unrealized montage of

Jusqu’à la victoire as the “somme continue de tous les aspects de la Palestine.”

573

570 Youseph Ishaghpour, 36. See also Junji Hori, “Godard’s Two

Historiographies,” Forever Godard. 571 “One kind of history advances on our side with quick steps; another

kind of history accompanies us with its slow steps.” 572 Alain Bergala, Nul Mieux que Godard, 224-229.

573 “The continuous sum of all the aspects of Palestine.” Jean-Pierre Gorin interviewed by Christian Braad Thomsen, Jump Cut no. 3 (1974), 17-19.

290

Following this premise, the histor(y)ies of all revolutions are accounted for as an

addition of images and sounds. The “Until Victory” series that I analyzed in the

previous chapter ends with a “calculator” scene showing a hand “adding up

mistakes,” or revolutionary dates (later it becomes an addition of revolutionary

sounds and images). The operations performed with the calculator are:574

By way of the two additions of dates, Godard renders two parallel histories,

tracking what is common to the French, and to the Palestinian revolution –

specifically 1917, which is the year that arguably defined the twentieth century:

the year of the Russian Revolution and of the Balfour Declaration: the collapse of

the former and the triumph of the latter led to the outcome of the Palestinian

Revolution in 1970. These dates lay out as well what Alain Badiou recently called

the “two sequences of the Communist hypothesis.” The first sequence sets in

place the Communist hypothesis from the French Revolution to the Paris

Commune (1792 to 1871), popular mass movements in which the seizure of

power is accomplished through the insurrectional overthrow of the existing order

and by the abolition of the old forms of society, leading to the installation of a

“community of equals.” This sequence ends with the Paris Commune, because its

1789 + 1917 + 1936 = May 1968 1789 + 1917 + 1968 = September 1970

574 The calculator functions as a metaphor for the passage from the

mechanical aspect of cinema to the electronic aspect of video. A link can be drawn to a sequence in Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera in which Vertov makes an analogy between mechanical processes such as sewing, weaving, and printing, and the work of the monteuse. Specifically, the monteuse’s work is compared to a process that is both mechanical and manual: the abacus, which brings us to Godard’s calculator in Ici et ailleurs.

291

failure demonstrated the limits of working-class leadership and armed

insurrection.

Stills from Ici et ailleurs

The second sequence runs from 1917 to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to

the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The problems posed by the second

sequence were, “How to hold out?” and “How to protect the new power against

the onslaught of its enemies?” In other words, these questions sought to realize in

the twentieth century what the nineteenth had dreamt of, making the revolution

prevail either through insurrection or prolonged popular war (Russia, China,

Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba), implying not only the establishment of a

new order but its preservation by means of the party. Following Badiou, this

second sequence created a new problem that could not be solved using the

methods developed in response to the problems of the first: the problem was the

party-state, which developed into a new form of authoritarianism (the police-

state) characterized by corruption and ineffectiveness. The end of the second

hypothesis came with the Cultural Revolution and May ’68, which were both

attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party. Since the mid-1970s, the ideas

of Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the

292

proletariat, and the Socialist state – all inventions of the twentieth century – have

no longer been useful at the level of practical politics.

In Ici et ailleurs, Godard constructs the history of revolutions along

similar lines as does Badiou, by evoking images such as that of Léon Blum when

the Popular Party took power during the celebration of the Commune on July 14,

1936.575 The image signifies the coalition of Socialists and Communists for the

first time in France, which led to negotiations between factory owners and

workers under the aegis of the French state, an image that points to a historical

double victory for the Left.576

1936: Léon Blum, still from Ici et ailleurs, and photograph by Robert Capa

Another image in Godard’s history of revolutions is that of a young woman

behind the doors at the Renault Factory in Flins, published on the cover of

presumably L’Express in 1968 that appeared frequently in other Godard films of

this period. This image references June 7, 1968, when the striking Renault

workers, with the help of students, prevented replacement workers from entering

575 On July 14th July 1936, Socialists and Communists celebrated the end

of the strikes of May/June that reunited 2 million strikers in France, when they voted for the 40-hour week, paid vacation and a pro-union law.

576 See Georgette Elgey’s commentary on the images taken by Robert Capa, David Seymour, and Henri-Cartier Bresson documenting these events, reprinted in Front Populaire (Paris: Chêne, Agence Magnum, 1976).

293

the factory. This image stands, therefore, for the mythical junction between

proletarians and students in 1968. In Ici et ailleurs, the addition of the historical

dates, and of the images and sounds of betrayed or failed revolutions (or

“mistakes,” as Godard puts it), lays out the history of Palestine in relationship to

European history and especially to the Shoah. In order to do this, Godard makes a

controversial juxtaposition of Golda Meir and Hitler in a video-collage, as well as

quotes from Alain Resnais’ archival footage of the Nazi concentration camps in

his 1955 Nuit et brouillard. Here Godard’s conception of history seems close to

Benjamin’s dialectical image.577 For Benjamin the historical mark that images

carry (der Historische Index der Bilder) does not only indicate that images belong

to a given era but that they are only legible at a given epoch.578 For Godard, the

historical mark that images bear (trägen) can only be read within an ensemble of

images: an image never exists by itself. For the filmmaker, it is not chronological

history that needs to be activated, but a Benjaminian messianic history that

implies that something needs to be saved, an eschatological history seeking to

accomplish something in a different temporality.579 Attributing to cinema the

power to reestablish a redemptive past, a past that cinema itself failed to capture,

Godard juxtaposes critical historical periods, transforming by way of montage

both the subject and the object of history and actuality.580

577 As he discusses in the interview with Youseph Ishaghpour in

Archéologie du cinéma and as noted by Junji Hori. See Junji Hori, “Godard’s Two Historiographies,” Forever Godard (London: Tate, 2004).

578 Walter Benjamin, (N3, I), Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 577-578.

579 Giorgio Agamben, “Le cinéma de Guy Debord,” 89. 580 Junji Hori, “Godard’s Two Historiographies,” 340.

In this manner, cinema

294

saves the real because it makes the real.581

3. Image, Perception, AND

The messianic jetzt of the recognition

of the historical images takes place at the interstices between the addition of

images and sounds in Godard. These additions “de-mark” or decode trademark-

images and sounds, inscribing them in a movement within a process of

crystallizations and metamorphosis that recalls the origin of trademark-images

themselves.

Une image ne montre pas forcément. Une vraie image c'est un ensemble d’images.

Gilles Deleuze.582

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nous éclatons de rire rien qu’à voir voisiner l’homme et monde, séparés par la sublime prétention du petit mot et.

583

As we have seen, Godard’s relationship to the videographic apparatus is technical

rather than metaphoric. I also discussed how Bellour and Daney argue that

Godard speaks from the tripartite realm of enunciation located in the passage

between cinema, video, and photography, and I would add that we can situate the

place from which he speaks in between two monitors: one showing raw data and

the other receiving the edited material. In this way, Godard is an interface and the

glue in the film that designates and joins images and sounds and then diffuses

them. The passage from one monitor to the other, the chaining together of images

and sounds, is montage. Montage in Godard is inextricable from his speech act:

the expression I (try to) see/show. Designation and chaining produce signs that

581 Jacques Aumont, Amnèsies, 248. 582 Cited by Jacques Aumont, “La valeur-cinéma,” 24. 583 Nietzsche, Le Gai savoir, “Marx, Economie et Philosophie,” (Paris:

Pléiade II, 1963), 88-90. (Cited by Godard in the script of de Moi Je, 1973).

295

refer to a single aspect or face of images/sounds, which conceals a hidden content

(expression) within its manifest identity (visualization). As we have further seen,

Godard’s I see is a “jumping eye” that aims at revealing other facets of the thing

that is designated, an eye that generates an interstice in between images and

sounds where there is the potential for the actualization of an Image: the

unthought is lodged.584 Godard’s montage consists not only of linking and

chaining but de-chaining and re-chaining images and sound-images. His method

is comparable to photomontage described by John Berger as “cutting out with

scissors events and objects (drawings or verbal slogans) from the scenes to which

they originally belonged, in order to arrange them in a new, discontinuous

scene.”585 With photomontage, for Berger, we look at things and then at the

symbols that are achieved through bringing them together. De-chaining (or

cutting out with scissors) implies taking the image/sound out of its

commonsensical chain of signification,586

584 I address the question of the Image and icon theory in the following

chapter. 585 John Berger, “The Political Uses of Photo-montage,” The Look of

Things, 185. 586 Godard does not make a distinction between the images he appropriates

or those he films.

and re-chaining it on the basis of a

break with the former codes. Here we must bear in mind the paradox of

photographic and filmic images: they have an indexical relationship to the object

they depict and yet, they are messages without a code because they are coded in

regards to the context in which they appear. When an image is de-chained or

displaced, the world to which the image belongs is destroyed and the out-of-field

disappears or undergoes a transformation. We can also compare Godard’s

296

decoding/de-chaining with Guy Debord’s method of détournement, which is

based on the appropriation of ads, news photographs, media clips, film footage,

texts, and soundtracks, and which seeks to expose the ideological nature of mass-

cultural images by infusing them with critical negativity. Each détourned element

may lose its original meaning for the sake of becoming part of a new meaningful

whole, as the Situationists liked to put it: the old elements are sublated into a

higher ensemble through dialectical juxtaposition.

Godard, however, is not a dialectician. He also differs from the notion that

the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary; as we have

seen, for Godard who follows Bazin, images are imprints of the real. In Godard,

de-chaining an image implies taking it out of its commonsensical chain of

signification, pulling or pushing it out from a signified, which is always either

lacking or in excess.587 Once two incommensurable images are re-chained on

Godard’s editing table,588 they enter into disparity and a potential thirdness

emerges.589

587 Gilles Deleuze, Time-Image Cinema 2 trans. Hugh Tomlison and

Robert Galeta, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 179-80. 588 The Table de montage understood as the Kantian Table of Categories.

In other words, an Image (the unthought) emerges at the interstices

589 For Deleuze, Thirdness is double-edged: it can evoke either a cliché (a dialectical image) or the unthought. Thirdness is where signs take part in mental operations that make general statements about qualities and events: it is the realm of interpretation and symbolization. Peirce’s semiotic terms associated with Thirdness are first, the sign itself, namely, the legisign, an agreed-upon general type; second, the relation of the sign to its object, which is symbolic, that is, the sign denotes the object through its relation to an interpretant; and third, how the interpretant represents the sign, namely, as an argument – for Deleuze, a mental image or relation image. A mental image “takes as objects of thought objects which have their existence outside of thought, just as the objects of perception have their own existence outside perception.” Gilles Deleuze, The Mouvement-Image, 189. The mental image intervenes in the clichés of the sensory-motor

297

between images in a spacing-out that makes that the Image pulls out in a

differential operation. For Godard, having been influenced by Benjamin and

Breton, the potential actualization of an image is only possible at the junction of

two others: “Le cinéma n’est pas une image après l’autre, c’est une image plus

une autre qui en forment une troisième, la troisième étant du reste formée par le

spectateur au moment où il voit le film.”590

In one of the sections of Ici et ailleurs, Godard lays out a series of binary

additions. We hear in the voice-over: “Révolution Française et, et révolution

Arabe, ici et ailleurs, dedans et dehors, national et étranger, lente et vite.”

591 This

sequence is interspersed with images of newspaper headlines about terrorism in

the Middle East and about the LIP factory strikes. “Parlant de riches et de

pauvres,”592

schema by making us aware of the subtractive nature of perception. The mental image either reinforces clichés, or opens the film to the whole, to the outside (toward the unthought). Thirdness tends to degree zero. See also Laura U. Marks, “Signs of Time,” The Brain is the Screen, ed. Gregory Flaxman, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 199. “Thirdness” here is not to be confounded with Barthes’ “third meaning,” which is not far from Deleuze. For Barthes the “third meaning” is an obtuse meaning, a field of permanences and permutations, a trace which by difference compels a vertical reading, an aleatory combination, a signifier prompted by chance, something that seems to open the field of meaning totally, extending outside culture into the infinity of language. It is the supplement, the “too many” that one’s intellection cannot succeed in absorbing. Barthes linked this concept to Kristeva’s signifiance, which he calls “a word which has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not by signification),” a semiotics of the text. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” Image, Music, Text, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 54-55.

590 “Film is not one image after another, it is an image PLUS another image forming a third – the third being formed by the viewer at the moment of viewing the film.” Godard in “Propos Rompus,” Godard par Godard, 460. 591 “French Revolution and, and Arab Revolution, Ici et ailleurs, inside and outside, national and foreign, slow and fast…”

592 “Speaking of Rich and Poor.”

Godard says, while we see images of Nixon, Vietnam, an African

298

woman, Prague ‘68, LIP. The soundtrack is composed of a Chinese hymn, the

Shoah Lied “Auschwitz, Madjanek, Treblinka,” the Cuban revolutionary song

“Déjame estrechar tu mano,” and the Nazi song “Adolf Hitler sollt uns führen . .

.” Lastly, Godard shows us images of contemporary revolutionary struggles here

and elsewhere: LIP and Palestine.

Stills from Ici et ailleurs: LIP and Palestinian Revolution

Differently than in the voice-over, these “binaries” are asymmetrical, as Godard

anti-dialectically states that dividing the world in two: “c’est trop simple et trop

facile.”593

This method of the in between is operative and could be understood as the

matrix of Ici et ailleurs. As we have seen, the film is composed of heterogeneous

materials of expression: documentary, diegetic, didactic. The film includes

didactic sequences and non-diegetic elements of different kinds: video-mélanges,

images filmed from television monitors, a slide show, intertitles, and videotext.

The images filmed in Palestine were shot in objective form as we saw in chapter

2, and now appear in conjunction with diegetic images of social types: a French

working-class family and three workers. As we also have seen, the family’s

The way in which the images and sounds are linked is through an

additive logic of non-opposing binaries, the method of the in between.

593 “It’s too simple and too easy.”

299

diegesis concerns their relationship to the media, familial problems, and the

father’s struggle to find work. We also see the recurrent appearance of the word

“ET” (“AND” in French) carved out in Styrofoam and placed like a sculpture on a

pedestal. In the film, the French family and worker enter into a relation of

disparity with the group of fedayeen: as socio-historical figures, these two

(French/Fedayeen) are meant to be perceived as irreducible. The

conjunction/disjunction of these figures creates a fissure in the film’s signifying

chain of association. The interstice between the states of affairs of the two figures

allows resemblances to be ranked, and a difference of potential is established

between the two.594

The word “AND” is a syncategoreme, which means “a category-with.”

Such difference of potential is lodged in the syncategoreme

“AND”. The “AND” is literally in between images; it is the re-creation of the

interstice, bringing together the socio-historical figures along with the diverse

materials of expression in the film, in a relation without relationship.

595

In Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia as evoked by Foucault in The Order of Things,

there is a division between words and things; the use of the word “AND” allows

for a heterogeneous taxonomy. It implies a juncture/disjuncture, announcing

association/dissociation. “AND” has a linkage function that authorizes

heterogeneous enumerations, allowing for divisions or for chaining unities

together or to postulate relationships without relationships.596

594 Gilles Deleuze, Time-Image, 198. 595 See Jacques Derrida, Et cetera (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth,

et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.), (Paris: L’Herme, 2005). 596 Ibid, 42.

In Ici et ailleurs,

“AND” is literally in between images: through montage, the syntax of the film, as

300

expressed by the film’s title, is rendered visible.597 The mixture of images, texts,

and sounds joined with “AND” allows Godard to bring together sounds and

images in relationships that are far more complex than identity or contradiction.

“AND” is the glue of the film, but it also means consequence, consecution,

conjunction, disjunction, connection, opposition, strategic alliance, or

juxtaposition.598 The manner in which Godard assembles images in Ici et ailleurs

recalls the manner in which Vertov, in Three Songs about Lenin (1933), structures

a combination of documentary images and staged images based on a systematic

play of binary alternation by progressive substitution of one visible series for the

other.599

597 Another instance in which Godard juxtaposes two socio-historical

figures is in One +One: Sympathy for the Devil (1968), where he brings together staged, diegetic images of the Black Panthers with documentary images of the Rolling Stones in the studio recording their famous song.

598 Jacques Derrida, Et cetera, 55. 599 Gilles Delavaud, “Composer (avec) le réel: Trois Chants sur Lénine,”

Vertov, L’invention du reel!, edited by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 245.

Three Songs is an homage to Lenin, expressing the fact that the Soviet

people lives and works for its leader and for the Soviet future. The logic inherent

to the film is that of the passage from the “masses” to the “people,” resulting

directly from the new relationship established between the people and power after

the revolution. The assemblage of images is realized according to a visual formula

describing the logic of a totality. This formula is composed of logical

relationships established between the signifying regimes: “Masses,” “Lenin,”

“USSR,” “Work,” and “People.” Through the juxtaposition of images of the

leader, the people, agricultural technology, women, workers, etc., what becomes

intelligible is a propagandistic effort in favor of Communism. Unlike Vertov, (and

301

Debord), as we have seen, Godard is not a dialectician, and in the filmic syntax of

Ici et ailleurs Godard does not associate images in a chain of signification, but

differentiates them so that their signifiers enter into disparity. Following Deleuze,

the juncture of two images with the syncategoreme “AND” allows signification to

emerge at the interstices between the images. Unlike the (Vertovian) interval,

which is a dissociative force, the interstice creates an accumulation of images,

creating a series of heterogeneous spaces that are incommensurable with each

other and which establish incomparable, open relationships.600 The distinction

between the Godardian interstice and the Vertovian interval as principles of

montage lies in the fact that, in Vertov, the construction of the object-film is done

by intervals, a visual and auditory spacing opened up between two actions that

becomes a signifying space. In order to make film visible to the viewer, Vertov

sublates the multiplicity of intervals to a single equation or global visual formula

that expresses the film-object in those signifying spaces. For example, Man with a

Movie Camera is based on the relations between planes, foreshortenings,

movements, lights and shades, speeds and movements. The composition of the

relations points to Vertov’s dialectic of the Kino-eye, which oscillates between

cinematic consciousness and epistemological research: the dialectic of the

filmmaker is between magician and epistemologist.601

600 See D.N. Rodowick’s discussion of Ici et ailleurs in Reading the

Figural, 195-197. 601 Annette Michelson, “The Man with the Movie Camera: From Magician

to Epistemologist,” Artforum, March 1972, 62-72.

Differently, the Godardian

interstice is a crevice opened up in between two states of affairs, images and

sound-images, destabilizing their signifiers, opening them up to signifiance.

302

Signifiance is a model of meaning that fluctuates between the expulsion and the

mastery of signifiers, implying a passage and a fluidity of meanings. Through the

conjunction of images, the expulsion dislocates the sign without annulling the

markings or its indexicality, differentiating rather than mastering meaning.602

602 Julia Kristeva’s use of Plato’s concept of the chora (as matrix, mobile,

merging, contradiction) functions similarly to the way in which Deleuze conceptualizes Godard’s “ET” as the matrix; as in the chora, the elements are without identity or reason and the idea of chora is the site of a chaos: “The contradiction between expulsion and mastery engenders precisely the process of signifiance which traverses any finite formation and presents itself as passage, fluidity, effacement of the limits between inside and outside, assimilation of an ‘object’ in a ‘self without contours.’ The process of signifiance is precisely that Va-et-vient between mobility and resistance: expulsion itself pushing on and away its semiotic moments of stasis. It is their struggle which assures life and text. Expulsion works precisely on those elements of the natural and social environment with which the individual tends to identify under biological and social constraints. In the family structure, it is the parent of the same sex who is subject to expulsion.” See Julia Kristeva, “The Subject in Process,” The Tel Quel Reader, edited by Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 156-160.

That is why the images and sounds in Ici et ailleurs function as more or less

autonomous units, because in this case an image’s meaning does not depend on

the image next or previous to it, nor on the sound put “on top” of it. The interstice,

“AND,” is thus a provisory zone of indiscernibility in which the fluxes of

meaning are exchanged, allowing simultaneous readings of the images in which

past and present coexist: actualization does not stop. This is because the

assemblage destroys the images’ identities, insofar as “AND” substitutes the

ontological attribution of those images: their this is, the eidos of images: their

Être=ET (being = and) is taken over by “signified AND signified AND . . .”

Sometimes resorting to repetition, Godard produces a sort of mnemotechnics that

enables us to recognize images and sound-images and to link their signifiers in

303

diverse contexts. Repetition and juxtaposition become tools to pull out what the

signifiers lack or to push out any excess of meaning, allowing us to see the images

as multiplicities, instead of showing us a single face of the thing, as in ordinary

representation or description.

Godard and Gorin present pedagogically in Tout va bien their conception

of images as a multiplicity or as a collection, in a scene where the characters

Suzanne (Jane Fonda) and Jacques (Yves Montand) have an argument about their

crisis as a couple. When they talk about how they “see” their relationship,

Montand describes it as: “On va au boulot, on mange, on va au cinéma ou pas, on

couche ou pas.”603 Fonda’s taxonomy of the relationship includes more images:

“On se réveille, on va au boulot, on bouffe, on se dispute ou pas, on va au cinéma

ou pas, on couche ou pas.”604 She then states that in order to be able to think

about and understand their crisis, she needs to add an image of Yves at work, and

an image of herself at work. The “unthought” image in this particular scene is

crystallized in a photograph of a woman’s hand holding a penis, which Fonda

asks Montand to hold on his forehead while she tells him: “Ça te satisfait moins

maintenant qu’il y a trois ans.”605

Evidently for both Deleuze and Godard, an image is always incomplete

because, when it is perceived, only one of its faces is accessible to consciousness.

While the referent remains, an ambiguity is

instituted: What is it that satisfies him less? Their sex life, or his job?

603 “We go to work, we eat, we go to the cinema or not, we have sex or

not.” 604 “We get up, we go to work, we eat, we fight or not, we go to the

cinema or not, we have sex or not.” 605 “This satisfies you less now than three years ago.”

304

Here I would like to draw on Deleuze’s model of prehension, which is the data of

perceptions, defined in The Fold as a concrescence of elements and as the

function of the point of view. The movement from the prehending datum to the

prehending subject is a subtractive operation insofar as prehension is a movement

of framing in itself. The prehending subject selects what she can manage: the

subject perceives an image minus what does not interest her, minus what she does

not know, minus what she does not need to perceive.

Following Deleuze, with his method of the “in between,” Godard means

that prehension equals images and the whole that is stored in them. According to

Deleuze, in Godard “[The] whole is the outside.”606 Godard’s films as I discussed,

are not articulated through images carrying a given code, but are rather a mixing

of the materials of expression (i.e. diegetic, didactic, documentary) and of the

forms of content (i.e. series, categories and genres). For Deleuze “readable”

images are “pure images”; they are a form of visual communication that demand a

specific use of eyes and ears. In the case of Ici et ailleurs, the spectator is obliged

to appreciate the series through pedagogy,607

606 Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, 179. The whole implies not petrified

meaning but ever-changing matter, animated by peristaltic movements, folds, and foldings that constitute the inside and the inside of the outside. The outside is a redoubling of the Other, a differential repetition.

607Gilles Deleuze, “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Moviegoer,” Two Regimes of Madness, 217.

which is based first on the

appropriation and repetition of “that which others have said,” as we have seen:

citations, slogans, images, cartoons, jokes, etc., and second, in seeking another

enunciation, sound, image, or text that could induce a certain effect (distantiation,

the unthought) into the first appropriated element. As I mentioned, for Godard-

305

Deleuze an image is only one face of the thing, if we understand an image as a

picture, as depicting something it carries with it as a discourse, a verbal code. For

Godard, what is denoted in the pictures (the signified, the verbal code) are

categories that constitute genres. The categories and genres introduce a reflection

upon the image itself, expelling the signifier. If we understand figuration as a

form of signifiance as opposed to the figural, the image becomes a movement of

figuration, because through montage, images are both inside and outside

discourse. At his editing table Godard works through categories and establishes

genres and discourses, reshuffling, separating, and defamiliarizing images.

Categorization, unlike a simple listing of items or a collage procedure, is a

method for the constitution of series, each one in turn marked by a genre.

Godardian categories are words, things, people, and actions. These categories are

re-distributed, re-managed, and re-invented in every one of his films.608

608 “In Les Carabiniers, Godard films the categories of the war film genre:

“occupation, countryside, resistance.” In Sauve qui peut (La vie) (1980) the categories are: “the imaginary,” “fear,” “commerce,” and “music,” which constitute the big problem of “What is Passion?” – the next film moves on to explore that.” Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, 185.

In Ici et

ailleurs, the categories are “Palestine,” “France,” “Revolution,” organized

deictically, creating a cognitive map of Palestine as seen from the point of view of

“France,” necessarily and inevitably through the mass media. Palestine is divided

into “then” and “now” for the purpose of presenting the differences between the

Palestinian revolutionaries then, before the Black September massacres (1970),

and now (1974). The “here” is visually presented through the television monitors,

which show images of the casualties of the 1970 Black September massacres in

306

Jordan. “France” is further divided into the categories of “labor,” “family,”

“leisure,” and “media.” The genres in the film are photojournalism, documentary,

Brechtian epic, and “blackboard didactic” film. As we have seen, the Palestinian

images resemble mass media images of the Palestinian conflict insofar as they

have been filmed in an “objective” style: they are fixed frames that stylistically

attest to their own indexicality, and that signify mutely the authenticity and

immediacy of the “Palestinian Revolutionaries in action.” Arguably, mass media

and documentary images are “image acts,” analogous to “speech acts,” because

they carry a judgment within them, and such judgments centralize the image by

rendering it commonsensical.

Such “centralization” is the signifier as such, centralized in the face. For

Deleuze, an image is pre-linguistic, however, insofar as it corresponds to signs

and utterances; and language (signs and utterances carrying information) always

centralizes images. Deleuze compares language to un coup de tampon

(stamping): language authorizes and certifies images, normalizing them,

subtracting that which we “should not” perceive in them.609 For Deleuze language

is neither communicational nor informative, but the transmission of order-words

(Brian Massumi’s translation of mot d’ordre from the French, literally slogan or

command in English); language is pragmatic, and every statement accomplishes

an act – that is why language authorizes or approves a state of affairs.610

609 Deleuze, “Trois questions sur Six fois deux: A propos de Sur et sous la

communication,” Cahiers du Cinéma No. 271 (Novembre 1976), 10.

If

610 “A distinction is sometimes made between information and communication; some authors envision an abstract signifiance of information and an abstract subjectification of communication. None of this, however, yields an

307

language is the variable and pragmatic application of a preexisting syntax,611

When we look at an image in a film, it becomes a crible or “filter”

images can be said to behave in the same way – particularly mass-media and

documentary images – by accomplishing certain actions. In Ici et ailleurs, an

example of the pragmatics of the image is “The Palestinian Revolution.”

According to Deleuze-Godard, each subject has its own place in a chain of images

and is trapped in it; this chain is a network of ideas that behave like order-words

(or slogans/commands). Ideas function like order-words by being incarnated in

images and sound-images, thus dictating what should interest us through images

that direct our perception, in-forming us (subjectification, in Foucault).

612,

mapping out “prehensions of prehensions” that refuse to distinguish affective

forces from visible lexical forms.613

implicit or primary form of language. There is no signifiance independent of dominant significations, nor is there subjectification independent of an established order of subjection. Both depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given social field. There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enunciation.” Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaux, 79.

611 Ibid, 78-79. 612 Crary has brought up the genealogy of the notion of concretion: “The

physicist André-Marie Ampere in his epistemological writings used the term concretion to describe how any perception always blends with a preceding or remembered perception. The words mélange and fusion occur frequently in his attack on classical notions of “pure” isolated sensations. Perception, as he wrote to his friend Maine de Biran, was fundamentally “une suite de différences successives.” (Ampere quoted by Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October Vo. 45 (Summer 1988), 11.

On the one hand, Godard in Ici et ailleurs

613 See Tom Conley’s introduction to his translation of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Furthermore, “The image is not in the present. What is in the present is whatever the image ‘represents,’ but not the image itself. The image itself is a bunch of temporal relations from which the present unfolds, either as a common multiplier, or a common denominator. Temporal relations are never seen in ordinary perception, but they can be seen in the image, provided the image is

308

reflects upon the forces that constitute images (through categories and genres) and

on the other, through Godard’s additive-yet-dissociative montage. Predicated

upon the logic of the “in between,” the film’s montage aims at reaching a high

degree of concretion by means of the prehension of a state of affairs, by way of

accretion of data. In a way, Godard’s method attempts to restore the exterior of

images to the whole, making our perception equal to the image and all that is

stored in it, thereby providing a way to fight against the authorization of order-

words of mass media’s image acts.

The French word for “actor,” “figurant,” describes well the state of affairs

as “figured” by the Palestinians. Bearing the historical traces of the failure of all

revolutions, the expressions are molded from objective document into allegory,

from slogans, or trademark images, to figures of the failure of all revolutions. As

allegories (theorems, in Deleuzean), the images are opened up to the outside: they

have different layers of meaning, and different kinds of signs collide in and across

them. Images then can be said to function like signals, differently than signs,

insofar as a signal is a structure by which differentials of potential are distributed,

a switching mechanism that assures the communication by way of rapprochement

of distant, uneven images enabled here by Godard’s method of the in between.

creative. The image renders visible, and creative, the relations which cannot be reduced to the present.” Gilles Deleuze, “The Philosopher as a MovieGoer,” Two Regimes of Madness, 290.

309

Chapter 4

“To Go Toward the Light, Allowing it to Illuminate Our Night:” Notre musique

Part I: Image of Palestine

1. Human Rights and the Media

. . . On revient aux valeurs éternelles, à l’idée de l’intellectuel gardien des valeurs éternelles…. Aujourd’hui, ce sont les droits de l’homme qui font fonction de valeurs éternelles… est c’est au nom de ça que toute pensée est stoppée. . .

Gilles Deleuze.614

Alain Badiou.

I learned how absolute radicalism can have terrifying consequences. As a result, I know that above all else we must ensure the preservation of humanist democracy as a barrier against revolutionary enthusiasm.

615

After the demise of Maoism in France, the new function of the intellectual came with the

assertion of a politics of morality, inseparable from the newly emerged Third World

political subjects, which had been figured first as colonialized, then as revolutionary and

articulate subjects. When Vietnam and Mozambique won the war and became totalitarian

dictatorships or Third Revolutions failed (Chile, Cambodia), became narcoguerrillas

(Colombia), corrupt (Somalia), totalitarian (Vietnam) or “terrorist” movements

(Palestine), the French began to see the peoples of the Third World either as the figures

of victimhood, without the means or the rights to create political solutions to their own

614 “We have returned to the notion of eternal values and to the idea of the

intellectual as the guardian of such values… today, it is the human rights that have the function of eternal values. And it is in the name of the human rights that all thought has been blocked.” Gilles Deleuze, “Les intercesseurs,” Pourparlers, 165-166; Negotiations, 113.

615 Alain Badiou ventriloquizing the “totalitarianism or democracy turn” voiced by the former Maoists in France. Interview with Eric Hazan, “Roads to Renegacy,” New Left Review 53 (September-October 2008).

310

problems,616 or as condemnable terrorists with whom it was impossible to sympathize.

Jacques Juillard, the director of the journal Le Nouvel Observateur, dismissed Third

Worldism in 1978 as a sort of aberration of decadent Socialism, foregrounding a new de-

ideologized form of contribution to the emancipation of the people of the Third World:

humanitarian intervention and development. As Kristin Ross put it, intellectuals

substituted revolutionary and political sympathy for empathy, transforming pity and

moral indignation into political emotions within the discourse of “pure actuality” and

emergency. This led to the new figure of alterity in the 1980s and 1990s as the “suffering

other” that needs to be rescued.617

The media became the privileged site for ethic-political intervention in the name

of human rights, particularly in light of the Leftist belief in its emancipatory potential.

Stripped of Leftist ideology, engaged intellectuals grounded the discourse for speaking

for others as a depoliticized universal “we” and an objective “it speaks” from a

community of “civilized” nations – predicated upon a “we” and a constitutive “other,”

embedded on the “non-discourse” of rights. By the late seventies, as Lyotard argues,

granting the respect of human rights had entitled everyone equality and visibility as well

as to exercise the right to be informed and the right to be heard and to bear witness: “the

world thus began to see itself in the media, ready to hear and speak, discuss, protest,

explain ourselves, look at ourselves as humans fulfilling the duty of making rights

prevail.”

618

616 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, (Chicago and London: The University

of Chicago Press, 2002), 167. 617 Ibid.

618 Jean-François Lyotard, “The General Line” (1990), Political Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 110-111.

What is more, human rights movements claim to do unquestionable good and

311

to have a prescriptive status that is independent of political interests, aiming at proving

that the wrongs of the unfit should be solved by those who are fittest, as Gayatari Spivak

puts it, which is an agenda of a kind of social Darwinism: it is the “white man’s burden”

to civilize and develop those who cannot constitute themselves politically.619 In such a

dynamic, images are used to validate humanitarian aid, and the human rights are alibis for

economic, military, and political intervention.620 The impulse to denounce and to bear

witness to the abuses of human rights was fuelled by the professional foreign

correspondents, documentarists, and agents who served the industrial production of

witness-images for a consumer market.621

Over the past forty years, witness-images have sought to address a disinterested

and liberal viewer, who would potentially act upon the events on the screen; moral shame

and indignation were believed to be the catalysts to prompt outrage in the observer as a

potential agent for intervention. Paradoxically, the media renders the viewer impotent, as

it presents events to a spectator who consumes information passively. Unable to act upon

the events depicted by the images shown on the screen, the media purport “consensual

stupor.”

622

619 Gayatari Chakravorti Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly

103, nos. 2-3 (Spring/Summer 2004), 524-525. 620 See Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and

Afghanistan, (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), 45-74. 621 See Jonathan Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (London & New York:

I.B. Thauris & Co. Ltd., 1993). This industry (as well as that of war-photojournalism) has a history over a hundred years old, accounted for by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). 622 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 47.

In addition, when packaged for consumption, images of desolation and

disaster provoke in the spectator a powerful fascination, voyeurism, horror, compassion,

and guilt, as well as relief and Schadenfreude. This kind of “disaster pornography” enacts

312

a crisis of viewership in the media, as the viewer-consumer is either in denial or acting as

a voyeur. However, the crisis goes the other way, as well, as Thomas Keenan has pointed

out; photo opportunities are performances done for the camera that attempt to bring in

international pressure upon the governments violating the imaged’s rights.623 The

overexposure of the subjects of the images thus, is not accidental, as those who appear

before the camera contribute actively to the proliferation of images of real dead and

wounded bodies and disaster zones, in a craze to bear witness to the wrongs done to

them. However, because of an excess of visibility, images of tragedies and violence have

lost their potential to call for an ethical or political response, while at the same time

justifying economic, political and relief interventions that aim at “breaking in” by

developing “intractable” problematic communities and subsuming them to international

economical interests.624

In the case of Palestine, the status of images as documents has been overwhelmed

by their rhetorical framing (or discourse), so that images can be deployed to support

either the Palestinian or the Zionist narratives.

625

623 Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 nos. 2-3

(Spring-Summer 2004), 435. 624 Gayatari Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” 524-525. 625 The suspicion cast on documentary images has given rise for example, to the

notion of “Pallywood,” underscoring the idea that Palestinians fake media images and lie shamelessly; the context of this accusation is a case of doubt cast on footage recording the death of Mohammad Al Dhura in 2000 in Gaza. For an account of the case from diverging points of view and the footage itself see: http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/434526 http://ehad-aham.newsvine.com/_news/2008/07/08/1648692-muhamed-al-durah-shot-to-martyrdom http://www.theaugeanstables.com/category/al-durah-affair/page/3/ http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2008/06/return-of-charles-enderlin-al-durah.html http://youtube.com/watch?v=A4g0NSmtLwo

Therefore, it is not surprising that

313

efforts – from the inside or outside points of view – to witness and to render transparent

occupation, apartheid, bantustanization, siege, low intensity warfare, displacement, and

erasure of Palestine have proved to date to be ineffective.626 Arguably, the images’

excess of witnessing in the global realm of sensibilities has disabled their power to

provoke an ethical response from the viewer, transforming them into shields that veil

states of affairs. The proliferation of images in a global media has diminished their

capacity to speak for themselves. In other words, the capacity for images or for empirical

reality to be self-evident is no longer viable. Palestinians’ image is that of the “others” of

the Israelis: on the one hand, “the intractable, anti-Semitic terrorist refugee,”627

The proliferation of witness-images has led to a devalued experience insofar as

images documenting the real are less and less intelligible. At the very moment when

reality is deployed as most concrete, it becomes abstract because it is divorced from a

meaningful context. What is even more problematic is that, with the inflation of images

depicting back-to-back disasters and violence, consumers are overwhelmed by

information about events that are so remote and removed from any familiar context. Jean

and on

the other, the figures (gender is underscored) of helplessness and victimhood.

http://www.lepost.fr/article/2008/07/02/1217862_un-reportage-de-france-2-toujours-controverse.html http://palestine1967.site.voila.fr/photo/P.photos.batailledelimage.htm I am indebted to Peter Fitting for pointing this controversy to me as well as for the links as they have been collected by him.

626 Norman Finkelstein has a more optimistic approach, arguing that today more than ever the policies of Occupation have become less tenable, specifically in North America. According him, current historical scholarship in Israel and mainstream human rights reports are not hiding the facts, and more and more, the international community finds it hard to believe that Israel is committed to peace. From a conference in Toronto on November 29 2007. Available at http://www.zcommunications.org/zaudio/2455. Date consulted: April 24, 2008.

627 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), 54.

314

Genet wrote that when we contemplate a dead body, or look closely at a dead person, a

curious phenomenon happens: the absence of life in a body is the equivalent of its total

absence; the dead body’s image is its uninterrupted receding. Even if we approach the

body, according to Genet, we will never touch it.628 Alarmingly, the contemplation of the

dead body has become an ethical intervention in itself,629 while its exposure in the most

profound desubjectification as victim reinforces its status as “precarious life.”630

2. Palestine, Documentarism, the Dignity of Fiction

“It is the same thing to sin through an excess of reality as through an excess of the imagination.”

Gilles Deleuze.631

Michel Foucault.

“A whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.”

632

628 Jean Genet, “Quatre Heures à Chatila,” Revue d’études palestiniennes no. 6

(January 1983), 9. 629 This drive to document disaster as an ethical intervention comes across in Jackie Rowland’s accounts of the 2007 siege of the refugee camp of Jabaliya in Gaza, in which she frantically points at the traces left by Israeli tanks on the street (“Look! Look!”), or in the account of Allan Johnston, a BBC reporter who followed Hamas’ militants with a camera to document their coup d’état against Fateh in June 2007, reporting on the events while the militants were destroying Fateh’s headquarters. This is further exacerbated by the proliferation of cameras distributed by NGOs in Gaza and in the West Bank. Documenting (as video-activism) is also the mandate of the current international activist mode of intervention posting recordings of injustices and disaster on the internet. 630 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 33-34. Let’s recall the fact that, when disaster hits the West, wounded or dead bodies are rarely shown in the media. The widely disseminated images of September 11 showed rubble, dust, destruction, people’s outrage, and desperation, but no blood, bodies, or images of people falling down from the towers; those images were immediately banned from circulation. An attempt to come to terms with the hidden images of falling bodies from the towers is Don Delillo’s Falling Man, (2007). In the novel he questions the post-9/11 mourning and trauma in the public sphere.

631 Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” Essays Critical and Clinical trans. Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.

632 Michel Foucault, Interview with Paul Rabinow, May 1984. Aailable at http://www.foucault.info/foucault/interview.html. Date consulted: October 10, 2008.

315

In a staged lecture at the Centre André Malraux shown in Notre musique, Godard

juxtaposes two photographs from 1948, one of the future Israelis docking in Israel and

one of Palestinians fleeing by sea, and states: “En 1948 les Israélites marchent dans l’eau

dans la terre promise; les palestiniens marchent dans l’eau, dans la noyade: Champ et

contre champ; le peuple juif rejoint la fiction, le palestinien, le documentaire.”633 He

means that, after the history of Zionism, Israelis were finally on the land of their

fiction.634 “Israeli fictions,” following the reading by Gilles Deleuze, can be interpreted

as Israel’s “right” to negate the existence of Palestine and Palestinians. By having

evacuated them geographically, Israeli apologists argue that theirs is not a colonial

enterprise, since the Palestinians were not exploited but expelled from the land,635 a

situation that Elias Sanbar has compared to the forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing

of the “redskins” in North America.636

633 “In 1948 the Israelites walk on water into the Promised Land; the Palestinians

walk on water toward drowning: Shot and reverse-shot: the Jewish people joined fiction, the Palestinian people, documentary.”

Israelis defend themselves from the charge of

genocide because, for them, the elimination of a Palestinian presence is a means to ensure

the Jewish identity of the Israeli State. The cost of the Jewish identity is physical

634 This corresponds to Godard as well to a phrase by Elias Sanbar (also quoted in the film): “When an Israeli dreams at night, he does not dream of Israel, but of Palestine, while when a Palestinian dreams at night, he absolutely does not dream of Israel, but of Palestine.” From a public discussion between Godard and Sanbar on January 16th, 2005 as recounted by Christoff Kantcheff. Available at http://www.politis.fr/article1213.html. Date consulted: April 1, 2008.

635 Gilles Deleuze, “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat,” Revue d’études Palestiniennes No. 10, (Winter 1984), 41-43. It must be noted that Deleuze’s formulation of the “Israeli fictions” Reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007).

636 This is one of the hypotheses Elias Sanbar advances in his Figures du Palestinien: Identité des origines, identité du devenir, (Paris: Gallimard, 2004) and in the interview with Gilles Deleuze, published in Libération, 8-9 May 1989, reprinted Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007).

316

expulsion of others, contingent upon geographical evacuation and ongoing erasure.637

This problematic equation of nation, religion and ethnic identity has not only transformed

the Palestinians into the “others” of Israelis, but it has also allowed critiques of both

Israel’s exclusive origins and its enduring policies to be characterized as anti-

Semitism.638

Sixty years after the Palestinian Nakba or “transfer,” many accounts bear witness

to the ongoing dispossession, collective punishment, and systematic erasure of

Palestinians.

639 When Palestinians lost the war in 1967, they lost the autonomy of their

remaining territories, adding up the burden of Occupation to the 1948 catastrophe. The

current situation of the territories is difficult to define. What kind of political entity is the

Palestinian Authority, and in what kind of political space? Who are the Palestinians in

terms of a political community? Who may speak for them and how, if they are impeded

to be collectivity identified with a territory because they lack state sovereignty?640

637 For an analysis and brilliant theorization based on facts on the ground of the

urban and architectural strategy to erase Palestine, to perpetuate occupation and the IDF’s strategies of warfare, see Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, (London: Verso, 2007). See also Graham Smith, “Urbicide,” New Left Review 19 (January-February 2003)

638 Gilles Deleuze, “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat,” 41-43. 639 For a historico-archival analysis of the ethnic cleansing plan instigated by Ben

Gurion in Palestine in 1948-1949 and the ongoing annihilation policies of Israel, see Ilán Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007). 640 Since 2006 two “authorities” split the Palestinian territories into two geographic zones, Hamas’ Gaza and the West Bank’s Fatah, the former a walled-in prison, the second, with no established borders. See Beshara Doumani, “Pour une autre representation des Palestiniens.” Revue d’études Palestiniennes, 108 (Summer 2008), As I write, the siege of Gaza has been prolonged for twenty-five months. The October 2008 strifes in Akka have been compared to pogroms. The extreme right turn of the recent Israeli elections (March 2009) and the restricted access of humanitarian aid after the massacres in Gaza perpetuated after 22 days of attacks (December 2008-January 2009), have turned Palestinians into hostages of Israel. .

For

317

many, Palestinians today pose a threat to the ethnic and religious Jewish majority of the

State of Israel, and this is the reason for the ongoing project of the erasure of difference,

through a low-intensity war, in a new paradigmatic strategy that combines urbicide,

expulsion, occupation, apartheid, isolation, bantustization, borders, and water and

airspace control,641 all subject to the economic interests of Israel and of the Palestinian

governing elite. Following Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, the political

consensus of Zionism has given way to a new economic consensus of free market in

Israel.642 This “political economy” begs another question: How to address the conflict? In

terms of Neoliberalism or as xenophobic nationalism? Following the line of the political

economy, Naomi Klein suggests that the extraordinary performance of Israel’s homeland

security companies, which are at the centre of its export economy, has coincided with the

recent abandonment of peace negotiations.643 In her account, on the one hand, the

conflict is subject to the colonialist logic and thus to the movement of capital, which

constantly seeks to push its limits away by two complementary movements: one that

imposes limits at the interior in order to administer and exploit its own system (the

manufacturing of consciousness),644

641 Ilán Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 261. 642 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of

Israel, (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 643 Naomi Klein writes: “Wars and terrorist attacks have been increasing but the

Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has been rising to record levels right alongside this violence… its politics is disastrous and resilient in the face of major political shifts… Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence. The homeland security industry dominates the sector today.” In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (Toronto: Knopf, 2007), 515.

644 See Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, (London: Verso, 2006).

and another that pushes the limits further (the

increase of settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid wall, the intensification of

318

oppression and dispossession, etc.),645 so it can overcome them with the purpose of

reconstituting its basis more intensively and to reaffirm its power of deterrence.646 Klein

sees a clear strategy on Israel’s part to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a

battle against a nationalist movement that is fighting for self-determination with specific

goals for land and rights, but as a fight that is part of the global War on Terror, in the

name of “security” and “counter-terrorism.”647

From different perspectives, Eyal Weizman’s and Daniel Monk’s description of

the conflict are aligned with Edward Said’s assertion that constructions and demolitions

as facts on the ground are the “atoms” of the conflict. In these accounts, historical

monuments, architecture, and urban design play a role as ways to assert domination to

produce surplus value. In Eyal Weizman’s description, the Israeli Occupation is a new

paradigm of colonialism as occupation by design. For Weizman, in the Occupied

Palestinian Territories, people and space are not organized by the occupying power as in

traditional colonialism, which implies certain modes of intervention on the part of the

foreign power (healthcare, education, etc.). In this case, there is the selective absence of

governmental intervention, and thus the actors of this colonization become, in Weizman’s

view, the young settlers, the Israeli military, capitalist corporations (such as cellular

In her account, Israel is creating a fortified

gated community in which Palestinians are no longer just being treated like Bantus; they

have become a human surplus to be administered and controlled.

645 See Tania Reinhardt, The Roadmap to Nowhere: Palestine Since 2003,

(London: Verso 2006). 646 According to Norman Finkelstein, what has been at stake in Israeli wars since

1967 to the recent massacre in Gaza has been an effort to increase its power of deterrence in the Middle East. Norman Finkelstein, “Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza,” http://www.mydd.com/story/2009/1/21/124213/447. Date consulted: January 24, 2009.

647 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 528.

319

network providers), human rights and political activists, the armed resistance,

humanitarian and legal experts, government ministries, foreign governments, supportive

communities overseas, state planners, the media, and the Israeli court of Justice. All these

actors have created a diffused power, a “political plastic” that puts occupation at work as

the map of the relations of all the forces that have shaped it. Occupation is for Weizman

manifested in rooftops, stones, street and highway illumination design, housing, the form

of the settlements, the enclosures and spatial mechanisms of circulation control, and the

Israeli flow management of people.648 Beginning with the fact that the areas under

Palestinian control include 200 fragments of land surface (as of 2006), and that Israel

controls the land around them, Weizman addresses the relationships between the

fragmented geography and the fact that the settlements are built in the high summits, and

how these relationships have prompted the construction of raised and extended (Israeli)

bridges covering Palestinian routes and lands while narrow Palestinian roads are buried

under Israeli highways. The three-dimensional matrix of maps and tunnels serves as a

way to divide and sustain a fragmented division of this “indivisible territory.”649

Godard filmed Notre musique after the mandate for infinite justice against the

“Axis of Evil” was proclaimed by US President George W. Bush, establishing a new

world cartography during the peak of the Second Intifada and the Israeli incursion known

as “Operation Defensive Shield” in 2002. This was a time in which streams of images

covering suicide bombings, the razing of the Jenin refugee camp and the old city in

648 Weizman draws a map of power relationships enabling this new form of colonialism in a similar manner than Sartre, in his Introduction to Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” Jean-Paul Sartre: Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, (London: Routledge, 2001), 136-155. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1961/preface.htm

649 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, 28.

320

Nablus by the IDF, the siege of Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, etc., invaded the media.

Notre musique was also filmed before Sharon “disengaged” the Gaza Strip and began to

build the “Security Fence” in 2005, isolating Palestinian cities and villages, and

transforming the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison. Furthermore, since the outbreak of

the second Intifada and the 2002, hundreds of documentaries have been made presenting

and bearing witness to the violence, destruction, and abuses of people’s rights.

Indisputably, the Palestinian conflict has had a significant presence in the global regime

of sensibilities – evidence of this is that Palestinian film festivals have spawned around

the world, privileging documentary as the means to present their ordeal.

Godard’s assertion in Notre musique that Palestinians fell into documentary,

refers to the fact that through documentary and documentation, Palestinians have

presented themselves as a people with a history and as victims of Israeli expulsion and

occupation, putting forth their cause as a liberation of the territory where their history

was written. Documentary form in the Palestinian case is inextricable from memory,

which functions as the tool against forgetting. Documenting means getting politicized for

the sake of restitution, and documentation is the beginning of national history.

Palestinians’ relationship to documentary is thus a type of politicized memory

documenting their collective lives before the Nakba. This history is reconstructed by

means of recollection through oral history and storytelling, which attempts to create a

logical order to the obliterated identity of a Palestinian heritage. According to the Oral

Historian Sonia Nimr, remembering replaced the centenary tradition of storytelling in

Palestine.650

650 In a conversation with the author in February 2008.

Such attempts act and serve to transmit and preserve “what was,”

321

inseparable from the actuality that Palestinians had been regrouped in refugee camps

according to their clans and villages when forced into exile. As Rosemarie Sayigh argues,

recreating Palestine through memory was not only a natural reaction to expulsion, but

became the only way of passing inheritance to the displaced children. Remembrance was

embodied, for example, in the creation of village memorial books by Palestinian

refugees. These books, published for a local readership, served the purpose of collecting

information about their villages and preserved a visual perception that illustrated lost

villages and origins. In addition, remembering the stolen land became a form of

resistance for politicized refugee ex-peasant Palestinians, a way of witnessing what they

went through and what they lost, which they utilized to be heard in forums internally and

abroad.

Palestine is a site in which morally interested gazes, especially since the Second

Intifada (2000), have interwoven the sensible regimes of the mass media, documentary,

and aesthetic intervention. Debatably, for the international regime of the sensible,

Palestinians have created a collective identity of a people of victims.651

651 It must be noted that the dispossessed Palestinians have counter-created a

collective identity in the “victim,” comparable only asymmetrically to what Norman Finkelstein has termed and condemned as the “Holocaust Industry.” Memory in both cases has become fetishized and instrumentalized. For the former, memory founds the discourse to sustain a state, recorded in Eyal Sivan’s Izkor: Slaves of Memory (1991), a documentary about the educational system in Israel in relationship to the excessive emphasis on Jewish victimhood in school celebrations of Passover and of the remembrance of the Holocaust. For the latter, memory is a tool of resistance. Both parts seek to instrumentalize memory to demand restitution. The Palestinian excess of memory does pass through melancholia, and the traumatizing dispossession brings the past to the fore erasing not memory, but the present. Slavoj Žižek has diagnosed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as both sides undergoing pathological attachment to the land and that their “cultures of memories” contribute to this attachment. Slavoj Žižek, On Violence, (London: Verso, 2008), 117. For an analysis on the two traumas and their relationship see

These are the

322

reasons why, regarding Palestinian self-representation, the struggle is still one for the

“right to narrate,” following Said and after Hamid Dabashi, who argues that there is a

“mimetic crisis,” operative in Palestinian self-representation as:

Everything has become too fictive to be fictionalized and too unreal to accommodate any metaphor, thereby creating a ‘traumatic realism’652 producing visual and literary documentaries in a frenzy to create records of silenced crimes and victimization.653

Thus, some efforts attempt to find the human emotions remaining in situations like these,

taking form of confession, writing-reportage or literary responses to the events.

654 The

documentaries are characterized by oral testimonies that show people bearing witness to

and denouncing the injustices.”655

Yosefa Loshitsky, “Pathologizing Memory,” Third Text 20, no. 3-4 (May 2006), 327-335.

652 Along similar lines to Dabashi, Michael Rotheberg associates “realism” with the victim insofar as the victim necessarily demands documentation. Rotheberg uses the term as a means to break away from the dichotomy between two positions representing the Holocaust; that is, the “Realist Position,” which suggests that the Holocaust can be approached by existing epistemological premises, turning it into a subject of knowledge, and the “Antirealist” position (Lanzmann, Wiesel), which assumes that all structures of knowledge are rendered obsolete and irrelevant by the Holocaust, understood as the “area of the extreme.” Rotheberg’s reworking of realism under the sign of trauma implies that trauma is a sign under which realism is to be reworked. Realism implies the implication of extremity in the everyday, as all extreme events demand documentation and the ethical imperative not to detach reference from meaning. Michael Rotheberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

653 See Rosemarie Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979), 27. 654 Ahadaf Soueif poses the Palestinians’ problem given the circumstances to produce aesthetic responses to the events in a raw state with no distance. In her article she interviews Palestinian writers about this problem, wondering if there room to talk outside the situation, insofar their souls are shaped by the situation? Ahadaf Soueif, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 320-325.

655 Hamid Dabashi, Introduction to Palestinian Cinema: Dreams of a Nation (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 12.

Documentary is a form of expression that claims to be

323

“bare” filmed records of events, allegedly repressing judgment and subjectivity.656 As

Paula Rabinowitz has argued, the rhetoric of politicized documentary lays out within its

address, on the one hand, an agenda of advocacy and, on the other, the representative

function of self-definition. They provide, she claims, both its subjects and its addressees

with an understanding of a situation or a community.657 The rhetoric of documentary

advocacy in politicized documentaries, therefore, is characterized by the use of “reality

effects” to highlight problems within a determinate social fabric, sometimes prescribing

partial solutions to the crisis documented.658 Using stylistic traits and mechanisms that

emphasize the effects of the real, like shaky cameras and grainy or out-of-focus

images,659

. . . Convey, regulate, and administrate huge emotional potentials that they both keep in check and unleash explosively. They bring distant events close enough to get under our skin, and alienate what is closest to us. They heighten a sense of fear that increasingly is being used as a political instrument – like power which targets our

paradoxically, documentaries increasingly propagate uncertainty as they:

656 John Grierson first coined the word “documentary” in 1926 to describe a style

influenced by Vertov’s Kino-Eye. Documentary must not be confused with “cinéma vérité” which, in principle, utilizes mechanisms to convey to the audience the feeling of “being present” at the shooting of the actual event. Cinéma vérité has as its purpose “to capture life as it is being lived rather than re-enacted or re-invented.” Jean Rouch is one of the main authors of cinéma vérité. In his Chronique d’un été (1960), he sought “to eliminate fiction to get closer to real life, to pose the question of ‘truth’ and to arouse questions in the spectator,” and “to observe, record, present reality without controlling, staging and re-organizing it.” Rouch believed, furthermore, in the necessity of acknowledging the impact of the filmmaker’s presence in the film as the “generator of a reality” rather than allowing a reality to unfold passively before the camera. See M. Ali Issari and Doris A. Paul, What is cinéma vérité? (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1979), 5-11.

657 Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented (Verso: London New York, 1994), 7.

658 Ibid, 7, 11. 659 Michael Renov points at the problem with the link between “documentary and

ethnography,” seeing both as acts of possession of the other and exploitations of their reality. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

324

feelings directly. The uncertainty that documentary truth provokes is a central component to the general incertitude that is becoming stronger and stronger . . . the question of the correct or “true” representation becomes secondary. These images do not represent anything intelligible anymore. Their truth lies in their expression. They reflect the precarious nature of contemporary lives as well as the uneasiness of any representation.660

Arguably, documentary addresses the viewer affectively by mimicking the strategy of

power, which is the propagation of fear.

661 This brings to mind the slogan of the First

Toronto Palestine Film Festival (October 2008): Emotionally Charged.662 The more

proximity and immediacy is embedded in the image’s “truthness” in conveying trauma

and horror, the more uncertainty it creates. In this manner, and operating under the meta-

juridical foundation of the rights of man, the global sensible divides the world into

“citizens” and “inhuman” violations perpetrated against the rights of man.663 This is how

documentary and the media keep stable the current cartographic configuration of the

world, as well as by addressing those who do not know the capacity of man to do evil and

are shocked by it. Following Susan Sontag, such people have not yet reached

psychological or moral adulthood due to either ignorance or amnesia: “What does it mean

to protest suffering, is it different from acknowledging it?”664

660 Hito Steyerl, “The Uncertainty of Documentarism,”

Another problem that rises

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=374&Itemid=183. Date consulted: August 8, 2008.

661 See Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique vol. 13, no. 1, (2005), 31-48.

662 Minding of course the distinction between affect and emotion. In psychoanalysis, affect is without an object, while emotion manifests in a signifier.

663 Jacques Rancière, “Le tournant éthique de l’esthétique et de la politique,” Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 154.

664 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 40. There are many examples but one that immediately comes to mind is Chantal Akerman’s De l’autre côté (2002), shown at Dokumenta 11.

325

is that referents in documentary images bear a non-discourse insofar as ethics is neither a

discourse nor a position; rather, it is the discourse of the “good choice.”665

This “ethical turn” has manifested in contemporary art as well, specifically, in

Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition Dokumenta 11 (2002), which was premised on human

rights as the grounds for global relationships in the post-colonial globalized world.

666 For

Enwezor, in the current configuration of the world, the Modernist disinterested observer

has been replaced by an observer aware of her position as a producer of knowledge, and

of her responsibility to engage with social realities and to denounce violations of human

rights. This kind of “moral interestedness” is the principle for interaction in the

globalized, post-colonial world. Expressing concern with this trend of interestedness for

the other, Jacques Rancière argues that an aesthetics and politics grounded on ethics as

the rights of man implies a misconception of ethics by confusing it with aesthetics. This

confusion has created an indistinct sphere in which the specificity of political and

aesthetic practices is dissolved into fact and right, being and ought to be, expressed as

infinite demands of reparation and justice.667 In the global situation, art’s function has

become to testify to the interminable series of catastrophes, and this is how the

unrrepresentable (as impossibility or as an interdiction) has become a central category in

the ethical turn of aesthetic practice, like terror in the political plane, and as the

supplement of journalism.668

665 Roland Barthes, Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977-78) (Paris:

Seuil, 2002), 33. 666 Okwui Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 4-5, no. 1 (spring 2004), 11-42.

667 Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 146. 668 Ibid, 162.

Furthermore, Rancière argues in Godardian terms that

326

speech that bears witness sacrifices speech, because it does not give to see, but rather

imposes presence and reduces language to its neutral registration as information. This is

because presence without representation or symbolic mediation renders the face

indistinguishable from speech because of an imbalance between poiesis (“a way of

making”) and aiesthesis (an “economy of affects”). Debatably, sensible ethical

enunciation puts all the emphasis on affect, purporting an excess of presence, suspending

or suppressing the act of mediation in order to realize the immediacy of witnessing.669

If documentary images either preach to the converted or provoke incertitude,

indifference, paralysis, cynicism, fear, uncertainty, and disbelief, the role of the addressee

of the image is not to judge it as true or false; rather, it is a matter of believing in images.

The addressee of documentary is necessarily located in the same position as the advocate

of the human rights, who must believe that they should be respected. The status of

“universal human rights” is that of pure belief, and faith (or rather, trust) is the basic

ingredient of speech as the medium of the social bond and of the subject’s engaged

669 Rancière uses Sophocle’s Oedipus as an example to explain the imbalance between poiesis and aesthesis that creates the unevenness in representation: “D’un côté il y du a trop du visible, du visible qui n’est pas tenu sous la dépendance de la parole, qui s’impose par lui-même. De l’autre il y a du trop d’intelligible. Les oracles parlent trop. Il y a trop de savoir . . . Entre ce visible et cet intelligibile, il y a un lien qui manque, un type spécifique d’intérêt propre à assurer le bon rapport entre le vu et le non-vu, le su et le non-su, l’attendu et l’imprévu, propre aussi à régler le rapport de distance et de proximité entre la scène et la salle.” Rancière, Le destin des images (Paris: La fabrique, 2003), 128. “On the one hand, there is a surplus of the visible that imposes itself and which is not subordinated to speech. On the other hand, there is a surplus of the intelligible. The oracles say too much. There is too much knowledge . . . Between what is visible and what is intelligible, there is a missing link, a specific type of interest capable of ensuring a suitable relationship between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown; the expected and the unexpected, a link which also has the role of adjusting the relationship of distance and proximity between stage and auditorium.” Rancière, The Future of the Image, (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 112-113.

327

participation in this bond.670 In Notre musique, as we will see, a plea is made for belief as

the right to fiction, when Jean-Paul Curnier states: “moi je ne crois que dans les histories

ou les témoins se font égorger.”671

There were times when there were people who made rules and followed them: by rule they killed entire classes without exception; “I” was their last word as their throats were cut. A word of protest: “I,” the exception. Were they exceptions? Given time to speak, we would all claim to be exceptions. For each of us there is a case to be made. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt. But there are times when there is no time for all that close listening, all those exceptions, all that mercy. There is no time, so we fall back on the rule . . . It is a great pity when we find ourselves entering upon times like those. We should enter upon them with a sinking heart. They are by no means to be welcomed.

This plea goes hand in hand with two pleas: for

Palestinians’ right to fiction, and in the name of the text (storytelling, poetry). This plea is

inextricable from Godard’s going against the grain of the current ethical turn that figures

realistically the suffering self or other, amalgamating voice and face. As we have seen,

the ethical mandate to bear witness to the interminable catastrophe, having done away

with mediation and for the sake of immediacy, puts all the emphasis on affect. Perhaps

these are a kind of times without time for the exception, like those that have been

described by J.M. Coetzee in his novel Iron Age (1990), via a citation of Thucydides:

672

In Notre musique this issue is posed in Bergouigneux’s and Curnier’s diatribes against

the discourses of victimhood and witnessing. Curnier states: “Le monde est au présent

clivé entre ceux qui se bousculent pour faire entendre leur malheur et ceux à qui cette

670 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, (London and New York: Verso

2008), 31. 671 “I only believe in stories in which the witnesses get their throats cut.”

672 J.M. Coetzee, Iron Age, (London: Random House, 1990), 81.

328

défilée publique porte chaque jour sa dose de confort morale à leur domination.”673 Pierre

Bergouigneux responds: “Sans s’accorder autant de cynisme. . . il est devenu

insupportable d’entendre des victimes sans colère et sans dégoût d’en être arrivé là; avec

ou malgré soi; et c’est pour ça qu’on donne à entendre des victimes que tous sont invités

à s’exprimer en tant que victimes.”674

673 “The world is today split in two, between those who line up to voice their

misery and those for whom this public display provides a daily dose of moral comfort to their domination.”

674 “Without getting so cynical . . . it is virtually intolerable to hear victims speaking out without anger or disgust thereby being reduced to this status, with or in spite of themselves; that is why we give floor to the victims, inviting them to express themselves as victims.”

329

Part II: Notre musique

1. The Wars of Annihilation

If wars are once again to be wars of annihilation, then the specifically political nature of foreign policy as practiced since the Romans will disappear, and the relations between nations fall back into an expanse that knows neither law nor politics, that destroys a world and leaves a desert.

Hannah Arendt.675

to Ramos García.

Nous sommes incapables de nous libérer, et nous appelons ça démocratie.

Olga Brodsky (after Robert Musil) 676

Palestine reappears thirty years later in Godard’s Notre musique (2004) as one of the

layers constituting a palimpsest of the histories of wars of annihilation grounded on the

Homeric account of the War of Troy. The war of annihilation is evoked in the film by:

Mahmoud Darwish who declares to be the poet of the Trojans, with the spectral

appearance of three “Red Indians;” by the allusions to the extermination of European

Jewry and the appearance of two Israeli descendants of the survivors, and to the recent

Balkans War. As we will see below, Godard puts forth an image of the twenty-first

century as one of ethnic wars, or wars of annihilation,

677

675 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, (New York: Shocken, 2007), 189. 676 “We are incapable of freeing ourselves and we call that democracy.” This is a

sentence by Robert Musil that Godard also quotes in Hélas pour moi. 677 I discuss Empire’s “Realist Politics,” the current wars of annihilation and how

they are framed by “Just wars” in the introduction. See further, Michael Waltzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Paperbooks, 2000) Alain Joxe, “Empire of Disorder,” Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001) Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite, Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), Tariq Ali’s account of the US invasion of Afghanistan: “Afghanistan: Mirage of the Good War, New Left Review 50, (March-April 2008). In Afflicted Powers, Retort argues that after September 11th, war is necessary “to keep the machine (of Empire) running.” In Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in the Age of War, (London and New York: Verso, 2005).

addressing, Eurocentrically, the

330

contemporary “realist” politics of Neoliberal Empire, by positing the world as engaged in

a total, righteous permanent war of “all against all.”678 Godard paints the twenty-first

century as a century that begins as a war of annihilation in a short film that was

commissioned by Cannes, De l'origine du XXIème siècle pour moi (1999). In a different

version of history than in Ici et ailleurs, he puts forth a 20th Century leading to the 21st as

starting and ending in Bosnia. The film revisits the last century “à la recherche du temps

disparu”679

Comme si le XXème siècle n’avait jamais dépassé sa moitié et que nous en soyons au point où il faut encore crier pour faire entendre la limite atteinte, sinon dépassée, d’une suffocation générale ou l’espèce humaine est plongée. […] celle de l’homme gouverné au nom de la peur.

by rewinding it; we see a parade of images from the history of cinema and

from the mass media: bringing back to us armies, refugees, prisoners, trains of goods and

piles of dead bodies, conquests and occupations, torture, and general avilissement or

degradation. The film resonates with Jean-Paul Curnier’s vision of the present, who has

written that the current state of affairs either brings us back or has trapped us in the first

half of the twentieth century under a reign of fear:

680

Evoking Artaud’s written scream, Curnier describes humanity as in a state of suffocation,

submerged in fear. In this regard, a citation from De l’origine that strikes us is the famous

678 See: Seyla Benhabib, “The Legitimacy of the Human Rights,” Daedalus, vol.

137, No. 3, (Summer 2008) 679 “In search of the time that disappeared.” This Proustian sentence with a twist is

used for the first time in the voice-over in Pierrot le fou (1965). 680 “As if the 20th century never went past its first half and thus we are still at the point where it is necessary to scream in order to make known that limit that has been reached, if not surpassed, the limit of the general stifling in which humankind has submerged herself into […] that of man governed by fear.” My italics. Jean-Paul Curnier, “Le noir du vivant, la cruauté, encore,” declaration read in Rodez on June 10, 2000, at the Journées Poésie published in Lignes no. 3 (October 2000), http://journees-poesie-rodez.net/IMG/pdf/Revue_Arachnee_no_1.pdf. Date consulted: October 30, 08.

331

one from Kubrick’s The Shinning (1980) with the boy pedaling furiously his little car,

traversing the empty vast corridors of the hotel. Following Fredric Jameson, the film

evokes the shift in the figuration of collective paranoia from the fantastic representations

of fear during the Cold War period that rendered the enemy as sub-human, to the

“enemy” as a global ideological threat. The enemy had ceased to be embodied in the

revolutionary Third World (which was and remains sunk in economic muddle), but a

“New ideological genre of the occult realized in ‘metaphysical’ nostalgia for absolute

Evil . . .”681 Hierarchy and domination are allegorized, in Jameson’s view, in Jack

Nicholson’s “possession.” Thus in Kubrick’s film absolute evil is within, invisible,

unpredictable, thirsty, and pitiless. An analogy could be made to Brian Massumi’s

understanding of the form of control post-9/11 as power propagating itself by breeding

fear addressing bodies’ affectivities. The “state of pure alert” created by the US’s

government’s threat-level color code in 2002 reminds us of the figuration of the moment

of absolute, unlocalizable fear as a contagious concatenation of intensities in The Shining.

In the sequence, the camera’s point of view follows the boy and we fear that the camera

incarnates the father threatening the child – as viewers, we embody that threat as well: the

enemy is within and virtual, in “a futurity that is made directly present, without ceasing

to be a futurity.”682

In De l’origine we see further images of Ceausescu’s hanging, a woman made to

drink urine coming out from a penis, and the scene from Le Mépris (1963) in which Jean

681 Frederic Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” (1981) http://www.visual-

memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0098.html Date consulted: October 25, 2008. 682 Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Positions: East Asia Cultures

Critique 13:1 (2005), 31-48, available at www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001927.php. Date consulted: August 11, 2008.

332

Seberg traces her lips with her pinky nail and states while staring deadpan at the camera:

“Qu’est-ce que c’est dégueulasse.” In another short film, Prière pour les refuzeniks 1

(2006), Godard describes war and violence in the twenty-first century at a standstill, as

the short ends with the intertext:

Il n’y a pas de victoire, il n’y a que des drapeaux et des hommes qui tombent.683

This sentence could sum up Godard’s current conception of worldly state of affairs: the

twenty-first century is marked as heir to the wars and the failed revolutions of the

twentieth, transformed into an invincible permanent war of rights of “all against all.” The

“reign of rights” is a problem that Hobbes articulated as an instance in which a

multiplicity of bearers of rights overrides the rights of others by proclaiming their own

rights.

684 What aesthetic techniques, formalist devices, content, and expression are

appropriate to express the unending war of annihilation? This is one of the questions that

post-modernism has asked – in terms of the possibility of representation after the Nazi

genocide. The main examples, following Sven-Erik Rose, are Frederic Jameson and Jean-

François Lyotard in whose work, they have either “deployed Auschwitz as the symbol of

hermeneutic impasse (Jameson) or of an absolute limit to thought and representation

(Lyotard).”685

683 “There is no victory, there are only flags and falling men.”

“Auschwitz” has been thus posited as the limit of thought and the

Holocaust as a morally and philosophically irredeemable catastrophe, thus, as an

684 Thomas Hobbes, “War of All against All” (1651), http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/decive1.htm. Date consulted: December 14, 2008. 685 Sven-Erik Rose, “Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and Image,” Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory edited by David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson. (Rocherster and New York: Camden House, 2008), 114.

333

unthinkable event.686

Il y a tous ceux qui n’y croyaient pas, ou seulement de temps en temps. Il y a nous qui regardons sincèrement ces ruines comme si le vieux monstre concentrationnaire était mort sous les décombres, qui feignons de reprendre espoir devant cette image qui s'éloigne, comme si on guérissait de la peste concentrationnaire, nous qui feignons de croire que tout cela est d’un seul temps et d’un seul pays, et qui ne pensons pas à regarder autour de nous, et qui n’entendons pas qu’on crie sans fin.

A question that rises is, why Auschwitz and not Hiroshima? In

Alain Resnais cinematic accounts of both catastrophes, Hiroshima mon amour (1959),

and La nuit et le brouillard (1955), the unrrepresentable from elsewhere is blindness and

forgetting (“Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”), and the unrrepresentable at home, is a

documentary that seeks to counter the dangers of negationism and forgetting:

687

Resnais rendered Hiroshima (with Chris Marker) as a fictional love story about forgetting

and memory and Auschwitz as a documentary that denounces negationism with the

imperative not to forget. Today, it is Auschwitz, not Hiroshima, the event that

predominates as the epitome of quagmire of the unrrepresentable. Currently, two

tendencies coexist to account for the Holocaust: the “realist position,” which suggests

that the Holocaust can be turned into a subject of knowledge, and the “anti-realist”

position, which assumes that all structures of knowledge have been rendered obsolete and

irrelevant by the Holocaust. The second position is best represented by Claude

Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah, and it implies further, that any attempts to account for the

catastrophe are morally suspect enterprises of redemption, domestication or made by

686 Sven-Erik Rose, 114. 687 “There are those who did not believe, or who only believed sometimes. There

is us, who sincerely look at these ruins as if the old concentrationist monster was already buried underneath, faking being hopeful again, in front of this receding image, as if we were healed from the concentrationary plague, we who pretend to believe that it happened only once in a single country, and who don’t consider looking around us, and who don’t hear the endless screaming.” From the voice-over of La Nuit et le brouillard.

334

potential Holocaust deniers who demand “proof” that it happened. This position is also

related to the over-citation and mis-quotation of Adorno’s phrase: “To write poetry after

Auschwitz is barbaric.”688 Rose articulated the impasse of accounting for the Holocaust

in the following manner: Either to bear witness by disconnecting memory from any

possible transmission of information, or to convey precise information.689 The polemic is

further based on the question of whether images have the duty or the capacity to bear

witness. “Ça n’a rien montré,”690 was Godard’s indictment of Lanzmann’s Shoah.691

Godard, problematizing the mystification of the Shoah, insists on the importance of

countering the religious vision inherent to the mystification of evil.692

688 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust

Representation, 27. 689 Sven-Erik Rose, 144. A debate on the impasse of memory vs. information

(language vs. image) took place in France, represented by Claude Lanzmann and Georges-Didi Huberman and the opposing positions they hold regarding the archive (information) and “places of memory” (memory, language). In his book Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2004), Didi-Huberman problematizes Lanzmann’s choice not to engage with the archive in his film Shoah, based on his assertion that the Shoah is unimaginable and on his anti-positivist opposition between “monument” and “document.” See further Didi-Huberman, Malgré l’image toute (1995), and responses to him by Gérard Wajcman “De la croyance photographique,” and Elisabeth Pagnoux “Reporter photographe à Auschwitz,” Les Temps modernes, N° 613, (March-May 2001).

690 “It showed nothing at all.” 691 “Jean-Luc Godard – La légende du siècle,” Les Inrockuptibles no. 170

(October 1998), 20-28. 692 For a thorough discussion of this debate see Libby Saxton, “Anamesis and

Bearing Witness: Godard/Lanzmann,” Forever Godard, ed. Michael Temple, (London: Tate, 2004). For an analysis of the larger debate about irrepresentability of which Lyotard, Jameson, Claude Lanzmann, Georges-Didi Huberman and Gérard Wajcman are part of see Sven-Erik Rose, “Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and Image,” Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory edited by David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson. (Rocherster and New York: Camden House, 2008). On the secularization of Bildverbot, the repression of the mimetic impulse and resuscitation through a debate between Benjamin and Adorno (as their simultaneous transgression and honor to Bildverbot), see Rebecca Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bildverbot,” Walter Benjamin and Art, edited by Andrew Benjamin, (London: Continuum, 2005).

This means that

335

Godard acknowledges that the idea of “making something invisible visible” is too

religious a formula. This invisibility mixes an ethic-religious prescription with something

that is a factual given (the extermination that destroyed its own traces).693 Following

Jacques Rancière, the aesthetic question here lies in that there are very few survivors to

inform us about this secret process, and thus the problem is that Lanzmann and his

supporters have blurred things by foregrounding the issue of the Shoah’s iconography in

terms of the idolatry of images (Bilderverbot). This has a prescriptive status bearing upon

what is to be represented (or not) and what type of plot should be used.694

For Godard, cinema not only has redemptive qualities but everything can be

represented, and he has drawn distinctions between the “irrepresentable,” the “invisible,”

the “inexpressible” and the “infigurable.” For example, in Histoire(s), Godard states that

with Roberto Rossellini’s films, especially Roma città aperta (1945), “Italy reconquered

the right to look herself as a nation in the face again.” Because of the symbolic ethical

qualities of his films, in Godard’s Histoire(s), Rossellini was able to bring into balance

ethics and aesthetics; in his films, “A shot is beautiful because it is right.”

695

693 Jacques Rancière, interview by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello in

2007,

Godard, in

De l’origine, claims his position regarding Modernism and the irrepresentability of

catastrophe:

http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html#_ftn5. Date consulted: September 20, 2008.

694 Ibid. 695 Alessia Ricciardi, “The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorrealism From

Bazin to Godard,” Romantic Review, (May-November 2006).

336

J’ai essayé de couvrir le souvenir des terribles explosions et crimes en tout genre des homes par le visage des enfants et les larmes et les sourires des femmes.696

2. Notre musique, Text and Image

Godard’s task to cover memories of war and horror with beauty” unburdens art from the

mandate to bear witness, to produce (fragmented) information of trauma from memory

and to unveil truths. As we will see, De l’origine shares many images with Notre

musique’s “Hell” section and perhaps we could argue that the short film is the premake to

it. Furthermore, Godard displaces the question of the “traces of the unthinkable” as the

problem of the relationship between image and text. Throughout work he asks, What

scheme of intelligibility is proper to account for the dead letter? What is the textual

function of intelligibility? Finally, he problematizes the subsumption of the image to the

text in testimonial accounts, which he equates to Hollywood’s subsumption of literature

to the consumer-image.

L’image est le bonheur; toute la puissance de l’image ne peut s’exprimer; on dit que notre langage coupe arbitrairement les objets dans la réalité; on le dit comme si on était coupables.

Jean-Luc Godard in Notre musique.697

Dante, Canto II, “Inferno.”

O Muse, o alto ingegno, or m'aiutate; o mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi, qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.

698

Notre musique is a triptych structured after Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and

696 “I have tried to cover up the memories of the terrible explosions, and of all

kinds of crimes committed by men, with the faces of children and the tears and the smiles of women.”

697 “Image is happiness; all the power of the image cannot be expressed. It is said that our language cuts objects arbitrarily in reality; it is said as if we were guilty.”

698 “O Muses, o high genius, help me now; o memory that set down what I saw, here shall your excellence reveal itself!” Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Vol. 1, translated by John D. Sinclair (Oxford: The University Press, 1961), 17.

337

Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-04). Like these works,

Notre musique engages with the Christian Medieval vision of life after death, here

reconfigured by way of an inquiry into contemporary situations of suffering, guilt,

morality and redemption.699 The film encompasses two domains of visibility: light and

darkness, and three registers of legibility: the real (as Godard’s critique of the Hyperreal),

the symbolic (as the bridge between forgiveness and redemption, and ethics and

knowledge), and the imaginary (as the only form that can think both horror and

beauty).700

699 Parallels have been drawn between the Divine Comedy and Islamic philosophy

centered around the analogy of Virgil’s and the prophet Mahomet’s descent to the underworld. See Miguel Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, (London: Routledge, 1968).

700 A similar combination of fiction and documentary that are blurred both in the script and by the characters like in Passion, 1982, which Godard claims is at the “intersection” of documentary and fiction.

Godard refers to these three registers as “movements,” as in a musical

composition and they mirror the three Dantesque realms of life and death. Godard plays

himself in the film, and more than Virgil he is like Odysseus who was sent down to hell

by Homer “to visit the babbling, brainless wraiths of the heroic dead.” The film begins in

“Hell,” with 8 minutes of a parade of images of death, disaster, and devastation that

unfold flickering and departing from “full” (black) screens. One of Godard’s manifest

concerns in the uniformizing properties of the digitalization of images. In this parade of

images, Godard thus manipulates slightly the images by rendering them blurry, slowing

them down or tinting them. The first image is shaky with documentary immediacy and

that is why we are uncertain of what it documents; what we recognize, however, is that it

is a zone of conflict. “Hell” is reminiscent of Godard’s défilés of appropriated images and

filmic sequences resonant with Péléchien, Santiago Álvarez, or Guy Debord. Following

338

Godard’s method of serialization and categorization of images that I discussed in the

previous chapter, “Hell” is divided into four series. In the opening series, we see battles

from everywhere with people killing each other, accompanied by a quote from

Montesquieu:

Ainsi, dans le temps des fables, après les inondations et les déluges, il sortit de la terre des hommes armés, qui s’exterminèrent.701

This series includes, first, scenes from Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963), John

Ford’s Westerns, Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva México! (1930), footage of piles of corpses in

German concentration camps and other scenes of violence. Second, accompanying

images of the machinery of war and their effects (tanks, bombs, destruction, missiles, and

explosions), we hear a quote from Alice’s thoughts commenting on the Queen of Heart’s

court: “They are dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is that

there’s any one left alive!”702

701 “Thus, in the times of fables after the floods, armed men came out from the

earth to exterminate each other.” Charles Montesquieu, from De l’esprit des lois, Book XXIII, 334. Cited in:

Third, we see images of victims, bodies being hung and

burned, shot at. Then, a (Virginia Woolf-like?) sequence of clips from movies showing

women and war: three nuns bending on the floor to venerate the Mother Superior, a

group of women doing the Nazi salute, and a Western reporter at the war front. We hear

the first sentence of the prayer: “Pardonne-nous nos offenses, comme nous pardonnons

http://library.thinkquest.org/3376/Monty.htm. Date consulted: November 17, 2008.

702 In French: “Ils sont terribles ici, avec leur manie de trancher la tête aux gens; Ce qui m’étonne ce qu’il aie encore des survivants.” From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Chapter VIII available at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/wonder/ch8.html. Date consulted: November 17, 2008.

339

aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés.”703 Fourth, we see images of Sarajevo during the

war.704 We then hear: “On peut comprendre la mort et la vie, l’une comme étant

l’impossible du possible; l’autre, comme le possible de l’impossible. Or, je e(s)t un

autre.”705 Almost unrecognizable, toward the end of the series, there appears an image of

the World Trade Center as the towers are hit by airplanes.706

Along the lines of Rimbaud’s trope, one of the key insights in the film is that

there is no alterity in war. The statement is by Jean-Paul Curnier, who says toward the

beginning of the film that the survivor of war is not the other, but someone else.

Following Gil Anidjar, war or the permanent possibility of war, suspends the law and it

“does not manifest exteriority and the other as other;” rather, “it destroys the identity of

the same,” and thus in the state of exception, “there are no others, only enemies.”

This sequence and quote

draw an analogy between the relationship between death and life, and self and the other,

in terms of the familiar trope in Godard of Rimbaud’s temporally split and thus ever-

changing ego.

707

703 “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.”

Once

war is over, the vanquished enemy becomes the survivor, “an other,” as opposed to “the

Other.” This is because, for Curnier, violence cuts the line of life and renders irretrievable

the trust in the world because seeing our neighbor turn against the self engenders a

704 Godard in an interview with Michael Witt, “The Godard Interview, I as a Man of the Image,” Sight and Sound, (June 2005), 28-32. Available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/313/. Date consulted: December 12, 2008.

705 “We could understand death and life: one being the impossible of the possible, the other, like the possible of the impossible. And yet, I is/and an other.”

706 A textual resonance for “Hell” is a passage from Juan Goytisolo’s El Bosque de las Letras. Both Goytisolo and Godard cite the image of a child’s face covered with flies. See the text in Appendix 2.

707 Gil Anidjar,The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, (Stanford: The University Press, 2003), 4.

340

feeling of horror that gets infused under the skin. Thus, the survivor is not the Other, it is

someone else (“un autre”) after having undergone not only the destruction – which is to

make something created pass into nothingness – of her life-world, but also the destruction

the bond that is “in-between” men, which is the link to the world. The characters in Notre

musique ponder this in different ways, grappling with the ethical and political questions

that are raised in the aftermath of war. Is it a matter of acknowledging guilt and suffering,

or asking for forgiveness? Is it a matter of judgment and trial, establishing a relationship

of infinite debt? Can it be reestablished with a promise, with forgiveness, or redress?

How can the bond between men and the world, destroyed when the neighbor turns

against the self be restituted?

Godard’s parade of images in “Hell” does not privilege documentary, fiction, or

journalistic images. The parade makes an appeal in the name of the imaginary that has

been liquidated by the hyperreal.708

708 For Baudrillard, the hyperreal is that which it is possible to substitute with a

reproduction. It is the fourth phase of the image, and it “bears no relation to any reality whatever,” it is its own pure simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard, “On the Murderous Capacity of Images” (1993), available at

The sources are as varied as Godard’s image-archive

is immense. As a concentration of horrors, “Hell” is comparable to Goya’s Disasters of

War, depicting the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808. Godard’s parade does not

interpellate the viewer at the level of affect, nor does it present us with the hyperreal

inexorable stream of disaster images. For Godard, the question of the autonomous

migration of images is not a matter of critiquing the excess of violence and the

scopophilia present in regimes of visibility – for him, when it comes to images of dead

people, difference in terms of origin is absent because war undoes socio-historical

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-on-the-murderous-capacity-of-images.html. Date Consulted: January 25, 2009.

341

determination. War further divides the world in two: enemies and friends, winners and

survivors, torturers and victims. That is why this parade is not a collection of “archive-

images” (Georges Didi-Huberman’s term) or “trademark” images (as in Ici et ailleurs),

recording and attesting to historical perversity or appearing as emblems of historical

events.709 This parade, tells us that war is hell:710 suffering without consolation.

Differently than taking a position vis-à-vis spectacle and scopophilia – which would

suspend disbelief, point at the gap between the thing and its image, or convey the

uncertainty of images (Icono-clash)711

“Purgatory” is the immediate or recent present in Sarajevo, reflecting an actual

event: the European Literary Encounters at the Centre André Malraux in Sarajevo, which

have been organized since 2000 by Francis Bueb, who founded the centre in 1995.

– Godard is an iconophile, and vouches for a

redemptive notion of the image.

712 In

Notre musique Godard re-stages his own participation at the Encounters, creating an

intersection of imaginary (ambassador, translator, bridge-maker, journalist, filmmaker,

host) and real characters.713

709 See Didi-Huberman, Images, malgré tout, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,

2003) forthcoming in English, Images in Spite of All translated by Shane B. Lillys, (Chicago: the University Press, 2008).

710 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 90. 711 See Bruno Latour’s essay from the ex. cat., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image

Wars in Science, Religion and Art, (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2002). 712 According to Alain Bergala, the Centre André Malraux stands out from other

French Cultural centers scattered in the world. Many intellectuals, film directors, actors and cultural producers have visited it during and after the war, and have kept coming back. “Godard tourne à Sarajevo,” Cahiers du Cinéma (July-August 2003), 37-39.

713 Before filming Notre musique, Godard had been three times in Sarajevo invited by Francis Bueb, he gave, as he stated, “des sortes des conférences” (Kinds of conferences). Godard in conversation with Jean-Michel Frodon, 22.

In his reenacted participation, Godard lectures about the

relationship between image and text. When a student asks him if he thinks that the new

342

digital video cameras will be able to save cinema, he sighs and remains silent. In this

scene, the camera is framing Godard’s face in a manner that recalls Rembrand’s late self-

portraits. The death of cinema is a recurrent theme and Godardian predicament. Video

will kill cinema in Sauve qui peut (la vie) of 1979, as cinema and video are like Cain and

Abel. Many have read his Histoire(s) as an absolutization of cinema and as its End in the

author. Arguably, it is not that for Godard “Cinema” begins and ends with his Histoire(s),

but that Cinema has been systematically killed by Capital and television, and he is trying

to save it.

Godard explicates his theory of the image by telling the story of Bernadette, “the

seer,” the little shepherd girl who sighted the virgin of Fatima. As the story goes, the nuns

at a nearby convent asked Bernadette what the Virgin looked like. The girl was unable to

describe her so they gave her a book of plates with reproductions of religious paintings.

Bernadette recognized the lady she had seen in the grotto, pointing at the Virgin of

Cambrai, a Byzantine icon. Icon-sighting presupposes faith and it implies a becoming,

not only as the image’s status gets confirmed as a sacred imprint, but when the subject

recognizes herself as a seer. In the lecture, Godard discusses further the relationship

between text and image, which he explains as analogous to the principle of montage upon

which he has constructed Notre musique: the “shot/reverse-shot.” In general, the

shot/reverse-shot means to present two sides of a story, two faces of truth, two parts in a

conversation; it is also “the same but in a different situation.” In order to explain how this

basic element in filmic grammar operates, in his lecture in Sarajevo, Godard holds up two

stills: one of Cary Grant and one of Rosalind Russell from Howard Hawks’s His Girl

343

Friday (1940). Godard problematizes that Hawkes is bringing the two headshots a false

unity or perfect symmetry by being unaware of the difference between man and woman.

Arguably, the relationships between images, characters, places and histories in

Notre musique can be analyzed in terms of the shot/reverse-shot. A characteristic trait of

Godard’s characters, which I discussed in chapter 1, is that they are Brechtian personages

insofar as they are socio-historical figures that transcend individual and collective events.

They are made out of tissues of citations, agglutinations of codes, ready-made voices and

discourses; they are something in between taxonomies of the socio-historical and

“original” copies indexing the actual state of affairs. The characters in Notre musique are

dense with superimpositions and multiple stories. They are what the “vanquished” are to

Homeric historiography to what the “proletariat” is to Historical Materialism. The

“vanquished” here, are the only chance for salvation, and they unfold into their reverse-

shots. One of the characters is an Israeli journalist, Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler). “Judith”

is the savior of her people in the Old Testament. “Lerner” in German means she who

learns; it also recalls Yehuda Lerner, the Jewish man who led the victorious uprising in

the concentration camp of Sobibor in 1943.714

714 This uprising is the subject of Claude Lanzman’s film Sobibor, October 14,

1943, 4 p.m (2001), in which Yehuda Lerner tells his own story.

In Notre musique, Judith Lerner is a

freelance reporter from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in a multiple mission in Sarajevo:

To arrange a conversation between her grandfather and the man who, resisting Nazi

occupation and authority, refused collaboration and hid Judith’s grandparents in his garret

in 1943. This man is Naville, the French Ambassador to Sarajevo. Naville ponders on

Judith’s invitation to have a “simple conversation” with her grandfather as a “free man.”

He hesitates to accept her invitation because, he tells her, in order to do it, he might have

344

to relinquish his job for the French Diplomatic Service. Perhaps quitting his job is

necessary because such a conversation would raise uncomfortable questions about the

responsibility of the collaboration of Vichy’s government with the Germans in

prosecuting the Jews and the resistance during World War II.

Later in the film, Judith interviews the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The

script is based on an interview between the poet and the Israeli writer Helit Yeshurun

from 1996, conducted in Hebrew. The interview took place during the peak of the

hopeful Oslo years and in it, they discuss the Palestinian and Israeli stories of victimhood.

The tone of the interview is quite bitter and ironic on both their parts. Making a plea for

equilibrium, Darwish asserts that Israelis have a monopoly on victimhood, and demands

the right to cry as a victim.715 In response, Yeshurun situates the Jewish people’s status of

the vanquished as an incomparable aesthetic enterprise: “La culture juive a crée de

grandes oeuvres de peuple vaincu. Vous n’aimez pas entendre cela. Ne faites pas de nous

des vainqueurs nés d’hier.”716

Chaque Palestinien est un témoin de la déchirure.

The interview becomes, in a sense, a combat of words of

the vanquished. Darwish lays out further the paradox of the predicament of the

Palestinian:

J’ai appris à pardonner. 717

715 First published in Tel Aviv in Hadarim No. 12 (Spring 1996), translated by

Simone Bitton and reprinted in La Palestine comme métaphore, (Paris: Actes Sud, 1996), 151.

716 “Jewish culture has created great works as a vanquished people. You do not like hearing this. Do not consider us as a vanquished people that were born yesterday.” Ibid, 155.

717 “I have learned to forgive.” “Every Palestinian is a witness of the tearing asunder.” Ibid, The sentences correspond to pages 115 and 122 respectively.

345

For his reenactment of this interview in Notre musique, Godard renders the encounter

asymmetric in the sense that it is a conversation between a young journalist and a poet of

renown, as opposed to two poets, and this is how the dialogue’s acerbity is toned down.

The conversation begins with a question posed by Judith while Darwish’s silhouette is

facing the window against the Sarajevo cityscape, as seen from the Holiday Inn Hotel.

After he asserts, “the truth has two faces,” a frontal shot of Darwish is seen, facing Judith.

Difference is further asserted by language: Judith addresses Darwish in Hebrew and he

responds in Arabic. The encounter between Judith and Darwish raises some of the film’s

key issues: first, the question of the relationship between the defeated and the conquerors,

their cyclical exchangeability and their potential trans-historical relationship; second,

matters of alterity, ethical responsibility, and atonement.

Mahmoud Darwish, still from Notre musique

Judith embodies hope and enlightenment, striving for reconciliation and dialogue – the

French Ambassador compares her to Hannah Arendt as “12 Synagogues.” Judith’s

answer, when Naville asks her, “Pourquoi Sarajevo?” is: “Parce que la Palestine et parce

que j’habite à Tel Aviv; je souhaite voir un endroit où la réconciliation semblait

346

possible.”718 Godard referred to this character in a recent interview as a “good Israeli”,

after the term “good German,” she who was against Hitler.719 In the original script,

Godard “envisaged just one girl, a Jewish Israeli journalist who at the end commits

suicide.”720 Godard, however, stated that he realized that it was excessive to have this

character (Judith) go back to Jerusalem to blow something up. Also, the actress Sarah

Adler wanted to play Judith but without doing the suicide part, because she had ethical

qualms regarding the darker aspects of the character’s choices.721 Although some

commentators have mistaken the two characters for one,722 Olga Brodsky (Nade Dieu) is

a Russian Jew accompanying her uncle Ramos García (Roni Kramer) to the Literary

Encounters in Sarajevo. Ramos is a blind translator; we learn that he speaks Russian,

Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic and English. This character signals the importance of

language as the grounds for transcending into the other as expression (Mitteilung),723

718 “Why Sarajevo?” “Because of Palestine and because I live in Tel Aviv; I

wanted to see a place where reconciliation seemed possible.”

and

its indissociability from translation. Furthermore, the languages Ramos speaks have been

the languages of Empire at distinct historical junctures and further draw the geo-political

cartography of Europe’s relationship to the Middle East, from Andalusia to the recent

immigrants to Israel, the Russian Jews. When Godard asks Ramos García about his

background, a parallel between his father’s personal history and Henri Curiel’s is drawn:

each grew up in a well-to-do family in 1920s Cairo, getting an education in a Jesuit

719 Godard in an interview with Oliver Bombarda and Julien Welter for Cahiers du Cinéma on November 2007, http://www.cahiersducinema.com/article1424.html. Date consulted: September 22, 2009.

720 Godard, “The Godard Interview.” 721 Ibid. 722 Godard, “The Godard Interview.” 723 Emanuel Levinas cited by Ernst Wolf, De l’éthique à la justice, (Dordrecht:

Springer, 2007), 211.

347

school and then moving to France for university. Henri Curiel became a political activist

for nationalistic struggles in the 1950s, and García’s father migrated to Israel. Here

personal identity is inextricable from history; by way of the two figures, García’s father

and Henri Curiel, Godard gives us an image of Egypt in relationship not only to Arab

nationalism but also to the creation of Israel evoking the Arab Jews’ stories and their

status as “a silent hyphen that fails to fuse,” as Judeo-Christian Europe’s cultural-

historical religious and political constitutive other.724

Olga has the same last name as the Nobel Prize-winning Russian Jewish writer,

Joseph Brodsky. As an aspiring filmmaker, she gives Godard a DVD with video-work for

Through his own personal history,

Ramos also lays out one of the literary questions in the film: “L’exode, ce n’est pas

l’exodus,” he states, linking Greek Tragedy and Biblical Text. “Exode” in Greek drama is

the catastrophic conclusion of a play, and it happens when the chorus exits the scene.

“Exodus” is the section in the Bible that tells how Moses leads the Israelites out from

Egypt into the Promised Land. An other asymmetry is created: L’exode (the end of the

tragedy), ce n’est pas l’exodus (permanent condition of exile, expulsion).

724 For Jacques Derrida, after Gil Anidjar, the “Arab Jew” is the specter of an

uncertain and troubling existence… is a “hyphenated” identity that refuses to fuse and that is “surrounded by bombs.” Anidjar has written the cultural and philosophical histories of the Jew and the Arab as the religious and the political constitutive others of Europe, drawing a distinction between “enemy” and “other.” Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, (Stanford: The University Press, 2003). He has further pointed at the relevance of the Arab-Jew (or the Jew, the Arab) in Derrida’s work: “Figured and failing to figure as the promise and the threat of alliance –the cut of circumcision –of the Arab and the Jew, the Arab Jew (Muslim and Jew, Moor and Jew, Arab and Jew), the Abrahamic articulates the non-figure of the first as already the last, of the last and of the end, an explosive specter of uncertain and troubling existence… The Arab Jew, whose silent hyphen will prove both more and less than that of “Judeo-Christianity,” fails to fuse and violently opens the field of the Abrahamic that Derrida gives us to read. This is then, Derrida “on religion.”” In the introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion, (London: Routledge, 2001), 10.

348

him to see. She attends the filmmaker’s lecture, where she learns that “Truth has two

faces,” and she closes her eyes to “see.” Notre musique ends confronting us with the

question of terrorism and martyrdom. Toward the end of the film, we hear through a

phone conversation between Ramos García and Godard that presumably it was Olga the

young woman who had entered a cinema in Jerusalem. Taking the public hostage, she

stated that she would be happy if there was one Israeli who would go down with her for

peace. After everyone ran out from the movie theater, the marksmen shot her only to find

books in her bag. With her action, Olga invites death by drawing attention to her

campaign for peace.725 Olga takes Camus’ problem of absolute freedom, as the

indistinction between life and death, into literal action: “La liberté sera totale quand il

sera indifférent de vivre ou de mourir. Ça sera mon but.”726 She ponders the issue of

suicide after Camus, for whom it is “le seul problème philosophique vraiment sérieux.”727

Because we are incapable of freeing ourselves, Olga’s invitation to suicide to kill terror in

the name of pacifism is a kind of post-ideological, atheist suicide.728

725 As articulated by Michael Witt in “The Godard Interview.” 726 “Freedom will be total when there is no difference between living and dying.

That will be my goal.” This is a line from Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, in The Possessed (1872). Camus’ Sysiphe is a study of this character and the absurdity of his acts in relationship to god, the meaning of life and death, etc.

727 “Suicide is the only philosophical problem that is truly serious” is the opening line of Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sysiphe (1942).

728 Godard addressed suicide and terrorism in La Chinoise (1965) with a character named “Kirilov,” and with Francis Jeanson’s conversation with Anne Wiazemsky. I mention this in chapter 2.

Because the means

of death are beyond her control and her gesture is performed in the name of peace, the act

is emptied out from the radical action of suicide bombing as a fundamentalist mystical

martyrdom carrying a political signified. Godard thereby poses the question of the void

created by the failure of Leftism as revolutionary politics and the propagation of religious

349

fundamentalism in monotheistic religions. Moreover, Olgar’s martyrdom mirrors Christ’s

own, who sacrificed himself – letting himself be killed – in the name of our sins, short-

cutting penance by way of forgiveness and redemption. Further, Olga’s suicide highlights

the parallel between Christian and Islamic theologies in which spiritual salvation and

worldly justice are interrelated. Godard does this, without referring to the ethical scandal

of the passage à l’acte killing innocent civilians, or without delving into elucidations

about suicide bombers’ cause and motivation, because suicide is posited after Camus as

an attempt to find answers in absurdity, pointing at the idea that the world is not only

ruled by chance, but by absurdity.

Olga Brodsky, still from Notre musique.

Later in the film, Olga utters Zossima’s famous line to his mother on his deathbed from

Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880): “Each of us is guilty before the other for

everything, and I am more (guilty) than any.”729

729 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov translated by David McDuff,

(London: Penguin 2003), 374. This line has also been quoted by Lévinas in Ethics and Infinity translated by Richard Cohen, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 98. This is further discussed as Levinas’ assertion that “I am responsible for the other but the other is not responsible for me” by Slavoj Žižek in “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face.”

Olga takes these words to their full

350

consequence. Appealing to this message of shared guilt and responsibility, she takes

radical action and responsibility, hoping that “Paradise arrives now in forbearance and

forgiveness of one another.”730

I thought if I were to commit suicide . . . I'd do it like Olga. I would achieve my suicide because I'd know the soldiers would shoot me three minutes later . . . And it would be done in the name of peace, with my friends the books. I am an image who has his friends, the books, in his pocket. And I said to myself, that I can do.

Godard said that he identifies with Olga:

731

Je serai ce soir au paradis

Olga mirrors Godard, as an image who has her friends, the books, in her pocket: she

literally embodies the question of the image in the film. I just described one, and she

would do it at three more instances, struggling to remain a body, resisting to become a

figure, testing instances of the image as mimesis, as the symbolic, with her “suicide.”

She enacts the relationship between image and text as mimesis in a scene at the Centre

André Malraux, where she sits flipping over her lap cartons that are screen-texts in which

her thoughts are written. Anticipating the narrative, she embodies the question of the

image as the equation between thought and image (mimesis):

Et la victoire? Et la délivrance? Ça sera mon martyre

732

As we will see below, Olga will further embody the question of the as a matter of alterity

and the intensification of presence. The question of the relationship between image and

text as (in)memorial traces is evoked by Godard’s crediting the Palestinian intellectual

Elias Sanbar as the memory of the film. Sanbar in his work has drawn a link between the

730 Ibid, 375. 731 Godard in “The Godard Interview.” 732 “And victory? And consolation? That will be my martyrdom. This evening I

will be in paradise.”

351

“Red Indians” in North America and the Palestinians. Godard borrows this idea, and at

the threshold of playing both themselves and fictional characters, three “Red Indians”

(played by Georges Aguilar, Leticia Gutiérrez, and Ferlyn Brass) appear at times in

“ethnic” warrior attire or in “Western” clothes as imagined by Judith in a scene in which

she makes photographs of the Mostar bridge outside of Sarajevo.733 Before that, they

haunt the Vijecnica Library, where they recite passages from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem,

“The Speech of the Red Indian,”734

The characters in Notre musique that play themselves are authors like Godard: the

writers Juan Goytisolo, Mahmoud Darwish, Pierre Bourgouignoux, and Jean-Paul

Curnier. Evidently there are echoes in their respective parcours and oeuvres (e.g., in the

late sixties, Godard and Darwish asked questions about revolution and politics in their

work; along similar lines as Godard’s, Curnier’s most recent work problematized the

links between culture, morality and war).

and are present as specters hovering around Judith’s

interview with the poet.

735

733 A link could be drawn here to James Luna’s recent photograph, Apparitions

(2008). In this photographic superimposition, five Native Americans appear against the backdrop of contemporary consumerist life ‘armed with commodities’ mirroring the ghostly image of their ancestors, proudly posing for the camera in warrior garb behind them.

734 Available at

Gilles Péqueux, the French architect who

worked on UNESCO’s rehabilitation of the Mostar bridge also plays himself in the film.

Observing the reconstruction of the bridge and how it has become a metaphor for

reconciliation in Sarajevo, Judith wonders: “Comment construire une visage avec des

http://www.thecornerreport.com/index.php?title=speech_of_the_red_indian&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. Date consulted: November 19, 2008. It was first published in his collection Eleven Planets (1992), published in English as The Adam of Two Edens, translated by Munir Akash and Daniel Moore, (Syracuse: The University Press, 2001).

735 For a detailed comparison of Godard’s and Darwish’s works and bios see James S. Williams, “Presentation,” Jean-Luc Godard Documents.

352

pierres?”736 Sarajevo becomes temporarily a site for the encounter of the exiled. With

Godard’s shot/reverse-shot strategy, the characters are set up to encounter each other

face-to-face as the meeting of the two faces of truth for a conversation because, as

Darwish puts it: .737

The locations in the film have roles; like the characters, they bear palimpsests of

meanings and histories. As a place where reconciliation between “East and West” seems

possible, Sarajevo appears as a European city filled by the sound of the muezzins calling

to prayer. In the movie appear further: the Centre André Malraux, which is the site for

intellectual discussion and exchange; the French Embassy, a dislocated institution

dedicated to transnational diplomatic dialogue and the airport, which is a liminal site of

passage where connections are made with the rest of the world; the ruin of the Sarajevo

Public Library, the Vijecnica, which was blown up by the Croats in 1992; and the

Holiday Inn which, during the war, was a kind of Green Zone as the headquarters of

international media agencies and the home of their journalists – similar to the American

Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. Susan Sontag and Goytisolo stayed there and often

evoke it in their Sarajevo memoirs.

738

736 “How to build a face with stones?” (In Lévinas sense of the face). 737 “Truth has two faces.”

738 Goytisolo, in his Cuadernos de Sarajevo describes the Holiday Inn as a temple lacking its romantic aura, a kind of jail, a metaphor of the city under siege, a kind of exotic Polynesian cabin imported from Disneyland. (63,64). Goytisolo has further other travel narratives or reportages about the Palestinian question and war: (and other wars) in Diario Palestino (1988) and Ni Guerra ni paz (1995). Palestina, Argelia y Chechenia (1996) y Paisajes de guerra (2001). For an article addressing his visit with Saramago in 2002 see “¿Qué debemos conmemorar?” El País, April 20, 2008.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/debemos/conmemorar/elpepiopi/20080420elpepiopi_4/Tes. Date consulted: October 4, 2008.

353

The film ends when Olga enters Paradise, a beautiful forest guarded by American

Marines and populated by characters reading or playing, reminiscent of the paradise in

Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). This paradise has done away with spoken language (is

heaven post or pre-language?) and the inhabitants communicate through gestures; the

place is inhabited by other silent signs, like an invisible volleyball. This paradise is also

one of leisure and letters, perhaps close to Goytisolo’s Bosque de las letras, a way of

being in the world together as a forest of all letters and works of art and their intra-

temporal relationships: “No sólo somos árboles aislados sino que vivimos dentro de un

bosque.”739 Like Solomon in Dante’s Paradise, Godard’s and Goytisolo’s is one for

contemplation. In heaven there is an oscillation between the question of the image posed

by Olga in terms of the icon, as we will see below, and the proliferation of symbols (the

apple, the American marine, the forest, the garden of delights). Following Jean-Luc

Nancy, a symbol is a material-linguistic way of making connections, a joining together,

the face of a connection.740

739 “We are not only isolated trees, but we live inside a forest.” Juan Goytisolo, El

bosque de las letras (Madrid: Santillana, 1995), 5. Goytisolo’s forest resonates with Lévinas’ community of philosophers and books in the sense that books send back to other books and that is why the book is a form of being for man that consists of his relation with the inspired word, le dire, the Bible, the books of books. “The human being is not only in the world, not only as in-der-Welt-Sein, but also zum-Buch-sein (Being toward the book) in relationship toward the inspired Word, an ambiance as important for our existence as streets, houses, and clothing.” Lévinas, Entre Nous, 109.

740 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, (Stanford: The University Press, 2000), 58-59.

Heaven in Notre musique, draws from its Judeo-Christian

(and Islamic) ensemble of symbols making connections between suicide and redemption,

abusurdity and salvation, martyrdom and joy, earthly and divine Word. This scene is as

long as the first part of the triptych, and in it, inverting the Biblical story, a young man

offers Olga an apple upon her arrival in heaven. The apple is the Judeo-Christian symbol

354

of knowledge, which is the desire to ask ethical questions in order to live freely. The film

ends when Olga closes her eyes in Paradise, where, we hear, “Il faisait beau et clair.”741

3. Shot/Reverse-shot

As I mentioned, Godard recurs to a classical Hollywood method for bringing images

together: the shot/reverse-shot technique which is neither dialectical, nor gives leeway to

the shock of contraries, nor posits a sustained contradiction: it is two points of view in a

conversation. Conventionally, this form of montage helps to depict dialogues by using

close-ups of the characters that are having a conversation face-to-face. Creating an axis

and alternating the images of the interlocutors, their gazes “meet” in the sequence.742 The

reverse-shot is in the out of field and spatially frontal to the shot. Godard stated that, for

him, the reverse-shot is not the “Other” of the shot, but “the same” in a different

situation. Differently than imposing a view that would orient us in the landscape

presented to us,743 the montage of “shot 1” and “shot 2” helps to interrogate the facts that

are produced, but that we do not know how to bring into a relationship.744

741 “It was beautiful and clear.” 742 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 84. 743 Godard in “Jean-Luc Godard et Notre musique, Juste une conversation,” 21. 744 Ibid.

“Shot 1” and

“shot 2” are unstable and thus exchangeable, the juxtapositions undo and unfold into

other ones. Differently than with the in between method, in which meaning is exchanged

in a concatenation of series subsumed under categories, in the shot/reverse-shot, two

sides of a story are brought together face to face. The difference in kind established

between the shot and the reverse-shot is like the difference between life and death. After

355

Olga: “La vie existe; la mort n’existe pas.”745 An other example Godard gives us of the

shot/reverse-shot in his lecture is an image of a face with the caption “Jew”746 and the

image of a Jew in a concentration camp at the threshold of death, captioned by the word

“Musulman.”747 Between the two images, there is a third one, of an animated skull

wearing the mask of a skull. For Giorgio Agamben and Primo Levi, the Muselmann is the

witness who cannot bear witness, the threshold figure between the human and the

inhuman.748

745 “Life exists; death does not exist.” 746 We can read in the image that this is an anti-Semitic portrayal of a Jew. 747 The word “Musulman” appeared as well in Ici et ailleurs as the caption for an

image from Resnais’ documentary footage of the concentration camps in Nuit et Bruillard (1955).

748 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 55.

For Agamben the Muselmann is naked life with a specific referent: an

irrevocable juridical and moral status. Useless for fighting, crippled, fallen behind, weak

and ill, the only thing that remains is the absence of death. The Muselmann is the living-

dead that embodies radical otherness, the reduction of the human being to inhumanity.

Gil Anidjar inquired into why Jews were called Muslims by the Nazis, and he argues that

it is related to the way in which the Nazis used language, as the key to the operation “was

never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action.” He cites Raul Hillberg

who noted that Häftlinge was used instead of “prisoners,” Kapos for “police Comrade,”

fressen for eating, and figuren for corpses. According to Anidjar, the “Muslim” is a

theological figure of passivity and subjection, the “image” for absolute subjection and

broken will. In his view, “The ‘Muslims’ testify to the theological in that they are lacking

in divinity, in that they mark the death of a divine (non)human… a paradoxical threshold

that also inscribes itself into political meaning. As figures of absolute subjection, the

356

Muslims can no doubt represent a degree zero of power, of someone who “died a death

that was social…” 749

The juxtaposition in Notre musique evokes a sentence from a letter Godard wrote

to Elias Sanbar, dated from 1977: “La guerre actuelle au Moyen Orient est née dans un

camp de concentration le jour où un grand clochard juif avant de mourir s’est en plus fait

traiter de musulman par un quelconque SS.”

750 For Godard, the link comes from the

“genius of evil,” which bred into the memory of six million dead Jews hatred for the

other, following the logic that intolerance and hatred create more intolerance and hatred:

for Godard, the memory of the Shoah has made that the hatred that the Jews of Europe

endured is transferred to another people, another Jewish people, the Palestinians.751

749 See Andjar, The Jew, The Arab, 138-145.

750 “The current war in the Middle East was born when a great Jewish clochard, on top of being brought near death was called ‘Muslim’ by a second-rate SS.” Godard’s letter to Elias Sanbar dated on July 19th, 1977 published in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 300, (Godard Special), 1979, 19.

751 As the letter continues, alluding to Alain Resnais 1955 film about the Shoah: “Il fallait effectivement être le génie du mal pour pouvoir inoculer dans le souvenir de six millions de morts juifs le souvenir de la haine de l’autre, mais de l’autre juif cette fois, car dans trente ans le people juif allait rencontrer son semblable, un autre peuple juif, et sur un territoire bien précis, pas dans la nuit et le brouillard, mas un peu dans le soleil, et qui lui disait: je suis pareil a toi, je suis un Palestinien.” Published in a special issue of Cahiers du Cinéma by Godard (No. 300, 1979). The letter is dated on July 19, 1977. Žižek posits the problem in terms of corruption and persecution quoting Arthur Koestler, the great anti-communist convert: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.” Slavoj Žižek, Violence, 123.

The

Palestinians, in turn, have become both the non-politicizable, incessantly de-realized

others – because they are perceived as a threat to the Israeli State, and enemies, insofar as

their sameness has been erased by the permanent state of exception under which they

live.

357

Still from Ici et ailleurs, which is also included in Sanbar’s letter.

A people’s status as “others” does not imply that their lives can be killed but not

sacrificed (Agamben’s bare life),752

If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its project. The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral.

but that their lives cannot be mourned insofar as the

other is derealized, negated and phantasmic. After Judith Butler,

753

Butler’s definition of “precarious life,” resembles Gil Anidjar’s definition of the concept

of the “enemy within,” which evidently has colonial implications even today, and that

752 “Bare life” is a term coined by Giorgio Agamben to describe the life that

remains outside the walls of the city and of the law, the life that may be spared but not sacrificed. See his Homo Sacer: Soverign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: The University Press, 2003). 753 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London and New York: Verso), 33-34.

358

presupposes for Anidjar the naturalization of the opposition of the Arab and the Jew.754

In other words, the idea of “Europe and the Jews” and “Islam and the West,” along with

Anti-semitism and Orientalism are categories which are the theological and political

constitutive others of Judeo-Christian Europe.755 The enemy is the essential figure of

hostility, exceeding the parameters of war and ethical life, and similar to Butler’s concept

of “precarious life,” the enemy is “another life,” an “alien to be negated.”756 In Anidjar’s

account, furthermore, the enemy is not the other, but rather, once the distinction between

inside and outside has been sedimented the stranger becomes an enemy.757

Although Godard brings the Jews and Palestinians into a relationship as two

communities of survivors and exiled peoples,

Debatably,

Palestinians oscillate between the theologico-political other of Israel (as Arabs, Muslims

and Christians) and enemies, and such nationalistic, ethnic and religious distinctions have

further naturalized asymmetrical oppositions such as “Israelis and Muslims,” the “West

and Islam,” “Palestinians and Jews.” With George W. Bush’s declaration of the “Axis of

Evil,” these oppositions have recently been naturalized as enmities.

758

754 Gil Anidjar, The Jew and the Arab (Stanford: The University Press, 2003), xiv.

755 In his article, “Europe and the Muslims: The Permanent Crusade?” Tomaž Mastnak argues that Muslims became the enemies of Christianity in the Middle Ages and that such enmity, constituted Christendom –“The Unified Christian society that found its realization in the crusade,” which is a holy war of Christendom against Mulsims. Furthermore, he argues that “Europe emerged as a political community when Latin Christians set out to chase the Turks out of Europe,” at the fall of Constantinople. In The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, edited by Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

756 Ibid, 71, 72. 757 Ibid, 79.

and Palestinians as the same-others-

758 Godard has been harshly criticized by his juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba, especially after an interview with Stéphane Zagdanski (France Culture, November 18, 2004) where he raises the issue of sacrifice in relation to the term “Holocaust” and to the state of Israel: “Par rapport aux camps de la mort, même

359

enemies, as precarious life for Israelis, Godard relates the Shoah and the Nakba as the

shot/reverse-shot, an asymmetrical relationship because he argues the Israelis found the

“other” in the Palestinians, but Israelis are not the other of Palestinians.759 Godard has

made it clear that for him the Shoah and the Nakba are not the same thing.760

I bring together two situations; it is not that I contend that the Shoah suffered by the Jewish and the Nakba suffered by the Palestinians are the same thing. Of course not! The shot and the reverse/shot do not mean equivalence, they rather pose a question. When the Israelis found “the other” in the Palestinians . . . they had to encounter them face to face. Whereas for the Palestinians it is not the same thing, Israel is not the “other” of Palestinians. This dissymmetry constitutes a true shot/reverse-shot, a bringing into relation that poses questions rather than equate them.

As he put it:

761

Their juxtaposition draws a historical link, by way of a nominal and racist coincidence

quelqu’un comme Hannah Arendt a pu dire ‘Ils se sont laissé emmener comme des moutons.’ Moi, je me suis mis à penser au contraire que c’est eux qui ont sauvé Israël. Au fond, il y a eu six millions de kamikazes. Les six millions se sont sauvés eux-mêmes en se sacrifiant. Les films à faire l à -dessus n’ont jamais été faits…” (In regards to the death camps, even someone like Hannah Arendt was able to say: “They let themselves be taken like sheep.” On the contrary, I started thinking that they saved Israel. There were six millions of kamikazes. The six millions saved themselves by sacrificing themselves. Films to be made about this have never been made…). Meaning, the Holocaust victims were the “saviors” of Israel. The interview is available at http://parolesdesjours.free.fr/gozag.htm. Date consulted: January 20, 2008. See also the “morceaux choisis” of the interview published as “Le cinéma, est-il une imposture?”, Le Nouvel Observateur No. 2089 (18-24 November, 2004), 24-26. See: Céline Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: La force faible d’un art (Paris: L’harmattan, 2006), 18-30. Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Francis Cohen, “Juifs, martyrs, kamikazes: La monstreuse capture; question à Jean-Luc Godard,” Les Temps Modernes No. 629, (November 2004-February 2005), 301-310. This is not dissimilar to Godard’s old debate with Claude Lanzmann and Georges Didi-Huberman about the existence of images of the extermination of Europe’s Jews and of the representability of the catastrophe. See Gérard Wajman, Les Temps Modernes 65, (Spring 1999), 121-127.

759 Godard, “The Godard Interview.” 760 I have chosen to use the word “Shoah” and not “Holocaust” to refer to the

Germans’ industrialized mass murder of Jews during World War 2. The term comes from Hebrew and means “catastrophe.” “Holocaust” is a Greek word that means “sacrifice by fire,” and it is the connotation of “sacrifice” which is evidently problematic.

761 Godard, “The Godard Interview.”

360

(the word “Muslim” and its negative connotations now and then),762 and a parallel

between acts of destruction against one’s own people. Consensually, the Shoah is an

incomparable crime in European history, which needs to be evoked to impose limitations

on political acts that display hubris.763 In Notre musique, moreover, the juxtapositions are

never equivalent or stable: “le vrai contrechamp des palestiniens c’est sans doute moins

Israël que les Indiens.”764

4. Sarajevo, Intervention, Solidarity

Thus in Notre musique, the “Red Indians” along with the

Balkans War, as historical figures and references, they are introduced as mediators.

Therefore, the four terms unfold into one another and exchange places in terms of the

shot/reverse-shot logic.

Nothing to be done.

Opening line of Waiting for Godot, quoted by Susan Sontag.765

762 See Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine

How We See the Rest of the World, (New York: Vintage, 1989). 763 For Žižek when we judge Israeli politics towards Palestinians we should

abstract from the Holocaust because the Holocaust was a graver crime and thus a line must be drawn in evoking it in defense of Israeli political acts against Palestinians. This, for him, “secretly implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump card of the Holocaust can redeem.” (Žižek, Violence, 112) Further, according to Žižek, the misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century or two too late because in the Global moralizing world, states are treated like moral agents to be punished for their crimes and thus, Israel cannot demand from Palestinians that they erase or forget the funding violence that comes with the foundation of every state power. The current problem is for Žižek that the state of Israel, “though ‘continually victorious,’ still relies on the image of Jews as victims to legitimize its power politics as well as to denounce its critics as covert Holocaust sympathizers.” Slavoj Žižek, Violence, 118.

764 “The true reverse-shot of Palestinians is, without a doubt, less Israel than the Indians.” Godard, as reported by Christophe Kantcheff, in a public discussion between Godard and Sanbar on January 16th, 2005. 765 Susan Sontag, “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo” (1993), Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 299.

361

Nadie puede salir indemne de un descenso al infierno de Sarajevo. La tragedia de la ciudad convierte el corazón y tal vez el cuerpo entero de quien la presencia, en una bomba presta a estallar en las zonas de seguridad moral de los directa o indirectamente culpables, allí donde pueda causar mayor daño.

Juan Goytisolo766

The Former Federal Yugoslavia was a multi-confessional and multi-ethnic state under a

single federation, and this was allegedly the positive legacy of Tito’s communist regime.

Slobodan Milosevic’s nationalistic project after the fall of Communism attempted to

rebuild the Yugoslavian state before World War II under Serb hegemony. Many reacted

against Milosevic’s project and split into militarized ethnic groups: Albanians, Croats,

Serbs and Bosnians. As many accounts attest, the Serbs committed ethnic cleansing

against the Bosnians; the Croats were fighting against the Serbs alongside the Bosnians at

the beginning and then united with the Serbs. Neither the UN nor the rest of Europe

intervened during the genocide between 1992-95, until the war ended with the Dayton

Accords and with NATO’s bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. The situation in

Kosovo remained unresolved, and Albanian resistance kept on fighting until 1999 when

NATO expelled the Serbian forces from Kosovo.

767

766 “None can come out unscathed from the descent to the hell of Sarajevo. The tragedy of the city transforms the heart and perhaps the entire body of the witnesses; it converts it into a bomb that is ready to blow up there where it can cause the most damage, in the moral security zones of those who are directly or indirectly responsible.” Juan Goytisolo, Cuadernos de Sarajevo, (Madrid: Aguilar, 1993), 106.

767 For further reference see Steven Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention, (New York: ME Sharpe, 2000) and Tom Gallagher, The Balkans in the New Millennium: In the Shadow of War and Peace, (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

The terms of NATO’s interventions

were the human rights based on “military humanism” or “military pacifism,” an ethical

intervention above and beyond any possible political solution, operating as the “third”

362

mediator, bringing in justice.768 The definition of humanitarian intervention, traditionally

epitomized by the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, widened since the Balkans

war, to stopping the fighting by way of military intervention, fighting back ethnic

aggression. This crystallized not only by NATO’s intervention, but in a new form,

encouraged by former Maoist Berndard Kouchner supported by François Mitterrand who

passed a new law, le droit d’ingérance humanitaire (the right of humanitarian intrusion).

This law was implemented during the Balkans war and materialized in the UNPROFOR

in 1992. The UNPROFOR is an organism whose mandate is to deliver humanitarian

relief to trapped refugees, encircled populations and cities under siege. Debatably, the

UNPROFOR inaugurated a new paradigm of ethico-political intervention embodied in

Kouchner,769

768 According to Žižek, the presupposition of NATO’s intervention was: “universal, neutral and ultimately false. The supporters of the bombing make their stand on depoliticized human rights. Their opponents describe the post-Yugoslavian war as an ethnic struggle in which all sides are equally guilty. But both sides miss the political essence of the post-Yugoslavian conflict. And that is why the conflict continues to smolder under the ashes. The imposed NATO peace has certainly dammed it up for a while. But it hasn’t extinguished it.” In:

the humanitarian interventionist AND political actor whose capacity to get

relief through zones of humanitarian crises goes hand in hand with military intervention

and media culture (for rising awareness and thus funding for the humanitarian crisis).

“NATO, the Left Hand of God,” Nettime, June 29, 1999. http://www.lacan.com/Žižek-nato.htm Date consulted: November 9, 2008.

769 Bernard Kouchner was been recently accused in a book by Pierre Péan, of doubtable relations with Rwanda, contested rapports with Birmania, dubious negotiations with African States, and suspicions conflict of interests – along with his wife, who is the minister of exterior audiovisuals in France (Some journalists with whom Kouchner had conflicts with have been allegedly sanctioned). The accusations go as far as attributing to him (and by proxy, to France) responsibility of the massacre of Hutus in a church in Kibagaga, in Rwanda, and stating that Kouchner has taken advantage of his diplomatic post to draw private contracts. See Pierre Péan, Le Monde selon K., (Paris: Fayard 2009). Kouchner defended himself of the calumnies in an interview published in Le Nouvel Observateur http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/actualites/politique/20090204.OBS3047/bernard_kouchner__ce_que_jai_a_dire_.html. Date consulted: February 5, 2009.

363

Following Michael Ignatieff, this new form of intervention is imperial as “it requires

garrisons of troops and foreign civilian administrators and because it serves political

interests such as creating political stability, containment of refugee population and the

control of crime and trafficking.”770 This “culture of compassionate activism,” is reliant

upon the vagaries of spectacle and usually done by way of the imposition of European

values.771

Evidently questions of dissent, engagement, activism, and responsibility regarding

public intellectuals’ intervention elsewhere arose during the Balkans War. Immersed in

the actuality and the reality as the consciousness of the world, Juan Goytisolo’s

description of the destruction of the Vijecnica library is an example and part of a longer

document, his Cuadernos de Sarajevo (1993). The Cuadernos are “una larga lista de

vilezas,”

772 telling the horrors in the city under siege. Another instance of solidarity was

manifested in Francis Bueb’s Centre André Malraux, created in 1995. Since the Dayton

Accords, the Centre has hosted actors, filmmakers, and literary figures as well as the

European Literary Encounters of which Godard had been a guest.773

770 See Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), 45-74.

771 Ibid. 772 “A long list of despicable acts.” 773 Some of the visitors to the Center have been: Emmanuelle Béart, Jane Birkin,

Leos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Serge Toubiana, Arnaud Desplechin, Jérôme Deschamps, Macha Makaïef, Sophie Tatischef, Roumain Goupil, Agnes b., Jean-Michel Frodon, Claude-Eric Poiroux, Chris Marker, Patrice Chéreau, Florence Malraux, Gérard Rondeau, Enkil Bilal, Luc Delhaye, Laurent Von der Stockt. Listed in Alain Bergala, “Godard tourne à Sarajevo, Cahiers du Cinéma (July-August 2003), 37-39.

But before the war

ended, Susan Sontag and Goytisolo lamented the general apathy of intellectuals and

artists, as their attempts to bring in renowned intellectuals to Sarajevo during the siege

364

were futile. Goytisolo compared the conditions of intervention in Sarajevo with the

engagement of the rest of the world during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, wondering,

“¿Dónde están los Hemingway, Dos Passos, Koestler, Simone Weil, Auden, Spender,

Paz, que no vacilaron en comprometerse e incluso a combatir, como Malraux y Orwell, al

lado del pueblo agredido e inerme?”774 Evoking the 1930s and the 1960s, Sontag

condemned the “morosely and cynical depoliticized intellectuals” of today, lamenting the

decay in international solidarity.775 The reason for this, she elucidated, might have been

the individual dedication to private life, which is perhaps the reason why the stretch

between “here” and “there” has become too great to entice solidarity. Other explanations

for the lack of sympathy were, for Sontag and Goytisolo, a kind of “ideological

confusion” (Serb Nationalism was something other than Tito’s Communist

Yugoslavia…) and a “resigned stupor” in the face of ethnic cleansing. Sontag speculates

that the reason that intellectuals took no position vis-à-vis the conflict was due to an

aversion to Islam and to prevailing stereotypes about Muslims, a failure of identification

and thus the inability to incite empathy.776 Echoing Godard’s words in Je vous Salue,

Sarajevo, condemning the elimination of the pluricultural and exceptional art of living

together, Sontag argued that the reason Sarajevo was destroyed before the eyes of the

world was because Sarajevo represented the secular, anti-tribal ideal.777

774 “Where are the Hemingway, Dos Passos, Koestler, Simone Weil, Auden, Spender, Paz, who did not hesitate to engage themselves, even in close combat like Malraux and Orwell, side by side with those who were assailed and unarmed?” Cuadernos de Sarajevo, 98.

775 Susan Sontag, “Here and There,” (1995), Where the Stress Falls, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 328.

776 Susan Sontag, “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” Where the Stress Falls, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 307.

777 Ibid, 308.

The genocide

365

was widely covered and it was the first televised event of its kind.778 By “covered” I

mean both in the journalistic sense and in the sense of “covering” horrors with mass-

media images in Baudrillard’s sense of the hyperreal. We can infer that, in one way or

another, war is something to be “covered,” as opposed to a truth to be unveiled. This war,

moreover, for Sontag and many others, symbolized the end of the belief that, if the world

knew, they would do something about it.779 Another form of engagement with the Balkan

war was evidently the “parachutist” kind, exemplified by (also former Maoists) Bernard-

Henry Lévy’s and André Glucksmann’s visits to Sarajevo. Getting around in UN tanks,

Sontag recalls, they “parachuted into” Sarajevo for 24 hours or less.780

778 Here we can draw a parallel to the Rumanian revolution, and to the First Gulf

War, the first of their kind to be televised. For a literary and critical reflection (with lots of humor) on the implications of the broadcasting of the Rumanian revolution see Chris Kraus’ novel, Torpor (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006). See also Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place translated by Paul Patton, (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1995).

779 Susan Sontag, “Here and There,” 320. 780 Kristin Ross wrote the genealogy of the verb “parachuter,” initially a term used

by workers to describe delegate’s engagement, who arrives at a factory, “parachute son discours, et s’en va.” Further, the term has a “military connotation of heroic adventurism –the vertical assault or rescue ‘from above,’” as well as it foregrounds humanitarian ‘parachutism’ in the late seventies and 1980s by doctors without borders who would jump into emergency situations. Some have dismissingly called it “ambulance politics.” Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 112-113.

Bernard-Henry

Lévy was further attacked for his “two-hour” visit to the war zone to make his

documentary Bosna! (1994). Allegedly: “He came in the morning on a French military

plane, left his film crew, and was out of there in the afternoon. They brought the footage

back to Paris, he added an interview with Mitterand, put on the voice-over, and edited the

366

film there.”781

Goytisolo & Susan Sontag at the Holiday Inn, Summer 1993.

How is it possible then, to engage with the new form of war as a de-

politicized humanitarian catastrophe?

Susan Sontag was in and out of Sarajevo between 1993 and 1995. Unlike Goytisolo,

Sontag defined her engagement with the Bosnian War as necessarily other than a

“reporting intervention.” For her, the task at hand was no longer to bring the information

home.782

781 Susan Sontag, interview with Evan Chan, “Against Postmodernism. A

Conversation with Susan Sontag” (2001) Available at:

Drawing a distinction from her former revolutionary excursions, where she

mainly visited, observed, and wrote (in Vietnam, Cambodia, China, North Africa, and

Mexico), doing something became crucial to her. Striving to actively engage with the

besieged, she stated that her commitment is based on solidarity as a form of “endurance

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1chan.txt. Date consulted: November 9, 2008.

782 “Bringing the information home” a rearticulation of the Weather Underground’s slogan: “To bring the war home,” was appropriated by Martha Rosler and expressed in her1969-1972 collage series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful.

367

with,” differently from being a passive observer:

I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head . . . There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month. This is not “symbolic.” This is real.783

More than being a witness, she had a reason to be there: her commitment to stage a play

in collaboration with local actors. They chose Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Jean

Baudrillard condemned interventions “elsewhere” generally as the symptom of larger

intellectual crisis – the intellectuals’ loss of strength.

784 In a diatribe against Sontag, he

accused her of being “merely a societal instance of cultural soul-boosting,” and of

adopting a condescending attitude toward an unequal exchange with the victims of the

siege. For Baudrillard, Sontag’s was an attempt to “salvage the reality of war in our own

eyes” while, at the same time, imposing a reality to be pitiable upon those who suffer

from it. Factually, however, in Baudrillard’s view (along the lines of Lyotard’s différend),

the victims, because they are victims, do not believe in the reality of war because they

cannot believe that it is happening to them.785

783 Susan Sontag in Conversation with Evan Chan. August 11, 2008.

784 “We go there to make good for our loss of strength and sense of reality.” Jean Baudrillard, “No Reprieve for Sarajevo,” translated by Patrice Riemens initially published in Libération (January 8, 1994).

The problem here is that the reality of war,

as it is perceived from the “outside,” has been transformed by media and humanitarian

agencies into a hyperreal hell. In Baudrillard’s view (siding with the notion that

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-no-reprieve-for-sarajevo.html Date consulted: October 10, 2008.

785 Here Baudrillard is subscribing to Lyotard’s description of the victim as the differend, as one of the characteristics of victimhood is disbelief in what is happening to the self. See Jean-François Lyotard, The differend: Phrases in Dispute, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Avita Ronell, The Testamentary Whimper, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 nos. 2-3, (Spring/Summer 2004).

368

catastrophe cannot be imagined), for the outside observer war is thus a cognitive issue

that is based on the inability to explain or to convey the shock of war. In sum, Baudrillard

blamed Sontag for coming to Sarajevo to convince the besieged of the “reality” of their

suffering by doing something useful, cultural, and theatrical that stemmed from Western

values.786

The inevitable questions that the interventions by Kouchner, Lévy, Goytisolo, and

Sontag – and Baudrillard’s critique of the latter – raise in relationship to Sarajevo are:

What kinds of engaged relations could be woven with peoples undergoing humanitarian

crises? What are the limits of interested engagement as solidarity and endurance or in

making known the catastrophe? Is “making known” a formal problem or an ethical

imperative? Is there an equivalent in aesthetic practice to the UNPROFOR’s “right of

humanitarian intrusion”? What are the cognitive models that would be capable of

accounting for catastrophe in the age of hyperreality? Is the effort to bring solace and

consolation to the besieged a sign of the narcissistic projection and of intellectual futility?

786 Baudrillard, “No Reprieve for Sarajevo.” Baudrillard’s criticism that Sontag as imposing “Western values” in Sarajevo echoes Ignatieff’s indictment that humanitarian intervention is imperialist in kind (although “light,” that is, temporary and without long term engagement). Regarding the choice of the play, Sontag wrote: “In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a fewer people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art. Plays being produced: Alecstis (about the inevitability of death and the meaning of sacrifice), Ajax (about a warrior’s madness and suicide), and In Agony… Waiting was the ‘lightest’ entertainment of all.” Susan Sontag, “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” 301-02. Along the lines of Sontag’s intervention, the American artist Paul Chan staged Waiting for Godot in New Orleans in 2007 and in 2003 he visited and filmed Baghdad in no Particular Order.

369

How would we frame the intervention of the mujahideen who came to fight in solidarity

alongside the Bosnians?787

Godard privileged the Bosnian conflict as a recurrent reference in his works, just

as he referenced Vietnam throughout the war as a way of protesting.

788 After the war

ended thanks to the Dayton Accords and by the NATO bombing campaign in 1995 and

the UNPROFOR’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, in Godard’s opinion, Sarajevo

became an empty Babel Tower, “a place to which no one goes anymore.”789 Once the

city had been (partially) reconstructed and the parts “reconciled,” Godard decided to go

to film there. Godard visited Sarajevo three times after 1995, hosted by the Centre André

Malraux where he gave, as he put it, “des sortes des conférences.”790 He shot Notre

musique in 2002.791 Godard commented that he chose to film Sarajevo post-

reconciliation, as opposed to in the Middle East because he felt incapable of going

there792 and because the city “Permet encore de faire cohabiter dans un même espace des

regards.”793

787 See Jean-Arnault Dérens, “Islam in Bosnia,” Le Monde diplomatique,

(September 2008). http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/10bosnia. Date consulted: September 14, 2008.

788 “The Godard Interview.” 789 Ibid. 790 “A kind of lectures.” 791 Jean-Luc Godard in a conversation with Jean-Michel Frodon, 22. 792 After James S. Williams: “Godard, qui voulait initialement faire de Notre

Musique une déclaration directe sur la Palestine, mais se sentait incapable de retourner filmer au Moyen-Orient.” “Initially Godard wanted to make in Notre musique a direct declaration about Palestine, but he felt that we was unable to go back to the Middle East to shoot.” James S. Williams, “Presentation,” Jean-Luc Godard Documents, 408.

793 “This place still allows the coexistence of gazes in the same space.” Godard in conversation with Jean-Michel Frodon, 21.

Because his visit to Sarajevo was purposefully belated, Godard’s timing begs

a comparison with Roberto Rossellini’s 1947 Germania Anno Zero, a film set in ruined

370

Berlin, narrating a story of survival in post-war debris.794 The camera and the montage

bear witness to the shattering of everyday life, while Rossellini shows us the banality of

survival from the point of view of Edmond, a 12-year-old carrying the burden of finding

food for his family. The documentary gaze into the ruined city is the set or the

background for Edmond’s efforts to survive, conveying both an extreme situation and

daily banality. Differently than Rossellini, Godard filmed Sarajevo after the city had been

reconstructed. We should bear in mind Rossellini’s Germania again, when Godard brings

up as a reference Michael Winterbottom’s 1997 film, Welcome to Sarajevo. Interspersed

with documentary footage of the war, Winterbottom’s film is about the ethical qualms of

war journalism, embedded in a critique of the journalist as impotent observer and seeker

of scoops. Similarly to Rossellini, Winterbottom documents Sarajevo’s destruction, not

after but during the siege as the background for the narrative, while portraying the

urgency of catastrophe as opposed to the banality of surviving. Many of the motifs in

Winterbottom’s film appear in Notre musique; for example, the then burnt (1998) and

now (2002) running streetcar, which is almost a leitmotif in Godard’s film:795

A Sarajevo, on sent dans tous les lieux un rapport à l’histoire. Dans les tramways . . . [on a] ce sentiment d’être comme dans une molécule d’ARN, chargée d’informations, et qui se déplace dans une espace qui a un passé.

796

794 Here and tangentially, a distinction must be drawn between images of children

and ruins in Godard and Rossellini that are both conceptually and historically divergent. Whereas Edmond’s in Germania is an effort to survive, the little girl in Karameh, as we saw in chapter 2, evokes a larger Arabic literary history of poetry, resistance and ruins (Atlal). Furthermore, in Ici et ailleurs, Godard and Miéville analyze self-critically this image positing politics as a mise en scene.

795 In Lettre a Freddy Buache (1980), and in the Georges Pompidou Center exhibition (2006), trains play an important role as a symbol of Europe.

796 “In Sarajevo one feels everywhere a relationship to history. With the streetcars . . . [one has] this feeling of being like inside of a DNA molecule, charged with

371

Besides the streetcar, the Holiday Inn stairway in Notre musique frames a ghostly

descending sandal (belonging to Leticia Gutiérrez) reminiscent of a renaissance painting,

whereas in Winterbottom’s film, it serves as the stage for the pageant “Miss Besieged

Sarajevo.” Both directors film the market (ruins/reconstructed) and the destroyed

Vijecnica (outside/inside). Differently from Rossellini’s approach to ruins,

Winterbottom’s film operates in the journalistic temporality of actuality, with the ethical

mandate to bear witness while problematizing journalistic disinterestedness. Godard’s

indictment of Winterbottom’s film was: “He saw nothing in Sarajevo, or everything he

saw he knew already. And then he created a theatrical mise-en-scène.”797

Differently for Godard, it is not a question of finding an adequate cognitive model

to account for war or the aftermath of war. As we have seen, he poses the problem in

terms of the figural, as the problem is that the text has been “re-covered” by the image,

and as his wish to “cover” memories of war and horror with beauty. Reconstructed

Sarajevo allowed Godard to try to see and to show that which is not visible or

visualizable after a catastrophe. Considering the city as an epistemologically and

As we have seen, Godard evinces the fact that images of destruction have become

indistinguishable from one another. If we consider such images from the point of view of

their ceaseless streaming in the media, we would call it, with Baudrillard, the

“hyperreal,” which is capable of visualizing the concreteness of strife and violence; the

paradox is that catastrophe is considered as unrrepresentable and thus, impossible to

convey.

information that moves within a space with a past.” Godard in conversation with Jean-Michel Frodon, 21. 797 Godard, “The Godard Interview.”

372

historically charged site, for Godard, filming Sarajevo is a matter of the Kino-Eye,

allowing the camera to reveal unseen things. Evoking the Nouvelle Vague years and the

Vertovian Kino-Eye, Godard stated that he used the camera as an epistemological tool to

see Sarajevo, focusing on the streets, the markets, mosques, synagogues, in order “to

know them better, like a scientist uses a microscope to study a microbe.”798

5. From Speaking in the Name of Others to a Simple Conversation

In Ici et ailleurs, speaking in the name of others is only desirable as self-reflexive

authorial voice, because Godard considered that to speak for others meant to steal their

place, mute their voice, and hide himself behind the image presented. In Notre musique,

the question of “speaking for others” comes up when a young Bosnian woman asks

Godard: “Je vous écoutais tout alors et je me suis demandé, pourquoi est-ce que la

révolution ne serait-elle pas faite par les gens les plus humains?”799

The film answered a sort of call. A little like when I was militating for peace in Vietnam or in Palestine, a process of which I'm an old veteran, nearly 30 years now, old enough to be an adult.

Bringing up the task

of intellectuals to wage revolutions evidently evokes Godard’s earlier militant years, as

does a recent statement he made about the movie:

800

In this film, you hear voices from around the world, but they aren't Bosnian voices, because I can't speak for them. I haven’t made a “nice” militant film. But I show people who want to be part of a conversation and who want the conversation to continue. And

As an “adult” militant, Godard raised the question of engagement in relationship to Notre

musique in another interview:

798 Godard as told to Frédéric Bonnaud, “Occupational Hazards,” Film Comment

Vol. 41, No. 1 (January-Februray 2005), 37. 799 “Listening to you, I wondered, why is it that the revolution is not waged by the

most humane people?” 800 Godard, “The Godard Interview.”

373

conversation is thought – it’s not the chatter of the media, not what we’re doing right now.801

A “nice militant film” alludes to an aesthetic project that was inextricable from a politics

of representation. Such a project was contested in the late sixties and early seventies, as

we have seen, reconfiguring militant engagement by doing away with mediation and by

rendering technique transparent. Godard in his work from the “Marxist-Leninist period”

problematized the relationship between politics and aesthetics in terms of speech, voice,

discourse, and image, devising various (technical, semiotic, discursive) mechanisms to

account for his position as author. Godard’s statement above, “I can’t speak for the

Bosnian voices,” evokes Godard’s and Gorin’s effort to bridge of the positions of

“militant” and “filmmaker” in the DVG films, as a radical separation between poiesis and

praxis in Notre musique (a leap back to Sartre’s separation?). This separation between

political action and rendering legible, is introduced by the dialogue between the French

Ambassador and Gilles Pécqeux at the French Embassy in Sarajevo. Naville asks

Péqueux if intellectuals “know” what they are talking about. Evoking Homer, Pécqeux

answers that the poet neither saw nor was present at the battlefields, the massacres, or the

moment of victory, that the poet is blind and bored and that he tells the actions of others.

Péqueux thus suggests a contradiction between acting and saying: “Ceux qui agissent

n’ont jamais la capacité de dire ni de penser de façon adéquate ce qu’ils font.

Inversement, ceux qui racontent des histoires, ils composent des vers, ne savent pas de

quoi ils parlent.”

802

801 Godard as told to Frédéric Bonnaud, “Occupational Hazards,” 37. 802 “Those who act never have the capacity to say or think in an adequate manner

about what they do. Conversely, those who tell stories and compose verses do not know what they are talking about.”

He then adds with bitter humor, reminiscent of the mood proper to

374

the disillusionment that came with the “discovery” of the outcome of the Chinese

Cultural Revolution and the subsequent disavowal of Maoism in France: “Rappelles-toi

Mao Tsé Tung.”803 The capacity to “speak” is given to poets, historians and to the powers

of the false. As we have seen, May ’68 implied the “capture of speech” and the exercise

of the right to speak. One of the turns the capture of speech prompted, was the singular

exercise of the right to speak truth to power. “Truth,” however, is known to everyone and

it is spoken to a power that does not listen. Debatably this transforms speech into chatter

and passion-action, which are noise. In Godard’s statement above, and in the discussion

between Naville and Péqueux, poiesis is valued to the detriment of noise (as passion-

action) as the potential to create a redistribution of the signs amongst us. At the same

time, the right to speak is rendered as the right to interlocution making a plea on behalf of

a conversation, which is the possibility to merge into a community based on signals: the

pre-political. Moreover, in Notre musique, praxis and poiesis relate like the shot/reverse-

shot in a relationship that is established amongst the characters: the journalist and suicidal

filmmaker take direct action in the world, and thus they belong to the realm of praxis,

while the older writers relate to the world as poiesis.804

Goytisolo raises the problem of poiesis and praxis as a matter of the image and in

terms of relationships between creation, voice, and image: “En estos tiempos de

Godard’s plea for poiesis is for

the right to fiction, for the text, for the imaginary as the only possible way to think horror.

803 “Remember Mao-Tse Tung.” Also evoking the option that the power to create

goes wrong like in Mao, Radovan Karazdic, Hitler, Chávez who are all artists or poets of sorts.

804 The distinction in the film between (female) praxis (Olga, Judith) and (male) poiesis (the parade of authors) brings to mind Godard’s and Miéville’s Soft and Hard (1985) in which both, playing themselves, provocatively enact the gendered roles of women as producers and men as creators.

375

destrucción,” he states, wandering through the Vijecnica, “hay que hacer la revolución

que cree una indeterminable fuerza de creación, que fortalezca los recuerdos, que precise

los sueños, que corporice las imágenes.”805 For Goytisolo, the task at hand is to wage a

revolution with a creative force that would strengthen memories, spell out dreams, and

“render images corporeal” or “provide images with a body.” Aside from his enthusiastic

defense of creativity, he poses the question of images in terms of the dogma of

incarnation the problem of the body without a figure. This implies a notion of the image

as an artificial image with a consubstantial relationship to the invisible and to our

corporeal reality. Furthermore, this artificial image is an imaginary that is visible through

its consubstantiability with the Word, which is the origin of the image as a sacred

imprint.806 Within this paradigm, Goytisolo’s appeal to render bodies corporeal implies,

first, displacing the illusion of real presence, and second, strengthening the “voice that

comes from elsewhere to inhabit the visible.”807 The visible would then become the place

for address and listening, a kind of “voice-in” of the image, making the force of the

image measurable in relation to the power of the voice inhabiting it.808

805 I cite the full sentence: “Si nuestra época ha alcanzado una interminable fuerza

de destrucción hay que hacer la revolución que cree una indeterminable fuerza de creación, que fortalezca los recuerdos, que precise los sueños, que corporice las imágenes.” My italics. “If our epoch has arrived at an unending destructible force, we must wage a revolution by creating an unending force of creation that would strengthen our memories, concretize our dreams, and corporeize images.” My italics.

806 Marie José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les Sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain, (Paris: Seuil, 1998), translated by Rico Franses, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, (Stanford: The University Press, 2004), 70.

807 Marie José Mondzain, L’image, peut-elle tuer?, (Paris; Bayard, 2002), 84. 808 As Mondzain put it, incarnation is God’s ‘voice-in.’ In L’image, peut-elle

tuer?, 89.

Along similar

lines, Godard stated:

376

I as a man of the image was pleading on behalf of the other and in the name of the text, like the Bosnian who pleads on behalf of the Serb. I was pleading in the name of the text.809

Godard’s plea in the name of the text is evidently related to the image-problem that he

poses in Notre musique: “le champ du texte a été recouvert par le champ de la vision”

because “les faits ne parlent plus pour eux-mêmes…”

810 This resonates with D.N.

Rodowick’s definition of the figural, a regime of visibility that disturbs the analogy

between image and text. Image and text relate as two separate streams, the first

characterized by simultaneity (repetition and resemblance between a thing and its figure)

and the other by succession (differentiation and affirmation). In the figural, however, the

world of things is penetrated by discourse welding the two streams together, e.g., in

branding.811 In his lecture, Godard holds up a photograph of a ruin, asking the students to

guess where it is from. After a few failed attempts (Berlin, Sarajevo, Chechnya), we are

all surprised to learn that it is an image of Richmond, Virginia, after the American Civil

War in 1865. Godard demonstrates here that, in spite of images’ indexical status, our

exposure to the excess of images of debris has rendered them indistinctive. In this

manner, the field of the text (here, the caption) has been re-covered by the image. This

implies that images offer themselves simultaneously to the gaze and to a discourse

marking the disappearance of the invisible.812

809 “The Godard Interview.” 810 “The field of the text has been re-covered by the field of vision.” “The facts do not speak for themselves any longer.” This is a line by Godard in his lecture at the Centre André Malraux in Notre musique.

811 D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), 8.

In other words, when a sensible reality

812 As a way to explain the relationship between text, image, the imaginary and the real, in his lecture in Notre musique Godard gives us the following example: “En 1938, Heisenberg et Borg se promènent dans la campagne et parlent de physique et ils

377

offers itself simultaneously to the gaze and to knowledge, it is because the relationship

between text and image is considered as arbitrary or incomparable, which is different

from ambivalent, or bearing a relationship of resemblance. For Godard, to make a plea in

the name of the text is to intercede for the ambivalence between text and image. This

would imply that meaning is invisible because the image is doing something more than

the text, which, in turn, can never fully account for it.

Moreover, a plea is a form of speech as intercession, here on behalf of poetry and

history. Aside from pleading, Godard has used other forms of speech on behalf of the

other: greeting and praying. Hailing “Sarajevo” in his video-letter Je vous salue,

Sarajevo, Godard addresses the inhabitants of the besieged city by summoning them up

as interlocutors. Engaging with two famous cases of Israeli refuseniks who served prison

sentences because of their self-claimed status as “conscientious objectors” (2002-2004),

Godard made two short films for them as prayers: Prière pour les refuzeniks 1 and 2, a

double gesture of support as a prayer and as a gift.813

arrivent devant le château d’Elsinore et l’allemand dit ‘Oh lala il n’y a rien d’extraordinaire!’ Oui, mais si vous dites: ‘Le château d’Hamlet,’ alors il devient extraordinaire. ‘Elsinore’ est le réel, et ‘Hamlet,’ l’imaginaire: champ et contrechamp. Imaginaire: certitude. Réel: incertitude.” In the interview with Michael Witt, he gives the example again: “A good example of a real shot/ reverse-shot is one I took from a book by German physicist Werner Heisenberg who, on visiting his friend Niels Bohr before the war, arrived at Elsinore Castle. Here the shot is the castle, the reverse-shot the description “Hamlet's castle.” In this case the image is created by the text. It's what poetry does - like two stars whose rapprochement produces a constellation.” In “The Godard Interview.”

Pleading, summoning, and praying

are corporeal events that concern an action in relationship to a quality of bodies that are

addressed by way of intercession, summoning, greeting. These are events of language

378

that invoke the other and “by which the posing subject exposes herself.”814 Godard’s

recurring to such events of language resonates with Lévinas’s idea that praying is the

essence of discourse, a social link established by the event of language. It implies

approaching the other through language, beyond the purpose of mutual comprehension or

based on an understanding of what I have in common with the other – beyond a

community of shared signs.815 For Lévinas praying is prior to both common content and

understanding. Evidently, interceding, summoning, and invoking the other are different

from bringing into presence, conveying chatter, or embodying her scream. Moreover,

praying, pleading, and greeting are at the margins of determination: they are speech acts

invoking the other, thereby establishing a bond that is not reducible to the representation

of the other because “what is named is at the same time what is called.”816 Thus, for

Godard, “speaking for others” in Notre musique implies summoning up interlocutors and

showing them as part of a conversation. Vouching for a simple conversation, not a

righteous one, the film brings together equal interlocutors having conversations between

the present and the past. “Juste une conversation” is not about justice or morality,

disagreement of opinion or persuasion.817

814 “Par la parole proférée, le sujet qui se pose s’expose et, en quelque manière,

prie.” Lévinas, Hors sujet, 203, cited by Ernst Wolf, De l’éthique à la justice, 213. 815 According to Walter Benjamin, the sphere of human agreement that is non-

violent because it is wholly inaccessible to violence it is the proper sphere of “understanding” language. Walter Benjamin provides the conference as an example of an encounter with the other based on mutual understanding and as a technique of civil agreement. See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926, edited by Michael William Jennings, et. al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 244-45.

816 Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre nous, 7.

A conversation is “the creation of extraordinary

817 Godard’s aphorism comes from the one that he coined in the sixties: pas des images justes, juste des images. I elucidated the aphorism in chapter 1, interpreting it as

379

words put to the most ordinary use, not to raise objections, but to use inexact words to

designate something exactly, pas une conversation juste, juste une conversation.”818

6. Culture, Exception, Annihilation

Still from Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993)

Je vous salue, Sarajevo is reminiscent of Godard’s and Miéville’s films from the

seventies in which they devote many minutes of screen-time to a single image, most

images having come from the mass media. It is also one of Godard’s films that focus on

imaging war through the soldiers’ point of view like in Le Petit soldat, Les Carabiniers,

or Prière pour les refuzeniks 1. Je vous salue is a microscopic “look,” fragment by

fragment, at a photograph taken by the freelance photojournalist Ron Haviv during the

first Serb rampage of Bosnian Muslims’ houses in the town of Bijeljina in April 1992. In

the photograph, victims and perpetrators appear in the same frame: a Serb soldier with

glasses on his head, a cigarette between his fingers and rifle, is about to kick the head of a

differentiating between “simple” and “correct” images, a qualitative state rather than a moral judgment.

818 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues translated by Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 3.

380

woman who is lying on the ground, while two other soldiers pass by nonchalantly, their

gazes turned toward the outside of the frame.819 In Histoire(s), Godard juxtaposed Ron

Haviv’s photograph with the soundtrack of the sequence from Ici et ailleurs in which the

little girl in Karameh recites Darwish’s poem. The Bijeljina photograph “flickers”,

alternating with the image of the little girl until sound and image coincide. Right after,

Godard brings in the footage of an armed feddaia pacing, as if surveilling, at the side of a

fence.820

Still from Ici et ailleurs, Je vous salue Sarajevo, Histoire(s) du cinéma, Vrai/Faux Passeport…

This juxtaposition signals not only that from early on, Godard was thinking of

“Sarajevo” and “Palestine” together, but that the little girl in Karameh and the feddaia are

“good” images for Godard because their juxtaposition evokes resistance as well as

aesthetic and ethical questions in terms of the “theatre of politics,” and of the immediacy

of journalistic witnessing.

819 Joshua Lipton, “Ron Haviv: Shooting War,” Columbia Journalism Review,

(July 2002). 820 This image is arguably part of the footage that the DVG shot in the Middle East in 1970 that also appears in Vrai/Faux Passeport, (2006).

381

The voice-over in Je vous salue, Sarajevo is centered on the analogy between culture/art

and ethnocentric wars, the latter of which for Godard, eliminate the exception and

obstruct empathy due to difference. Godard states: “Il y a la culture qui c’est de la règle,

il y a l’exception qui c’est l’art.”821 He goes on, “The exception is written (Dostoyevsky),

composed (Mozart, Gershwin), painted (Vermeer, Cézanne), filmed (Antonioni, Vigo), or

lived.” Culture here is rendered as the agreement with the rule as the everyday, and as

such, it is “de la règle de vouloir la mort de l’exception,” thus “il sera donc de la règle de

l’Europe de la culture d’organiser la mort de l’art de vivre qui fleurit encore.”822 The

exception that is lived is “Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo,” and the art of living together has

been eliminated by war. Godard’s paradigm of “culture as the everyday and art as the

exception” is along the lines of Adorno’s critique of the Culture Industry that opposes

culture to art. For Godard, as for Adorno, art is truth: “le cinéma c’est la vérité 24 images

par seconde,” that is, complex and demanding works of art possess truth as cognitive

worth and plenitude of meaning, by exceeding their socio-historical particularities.823

Le paysage est chargé de fils de fer, le ciel est rouge d’explosions. Puisque cette ruine n’a pas épargné la notion même de culture, il faut d’abord avoir le courage de la jeter. Il faut se débrouiller avec peu; quand la maison brûle déjà, il est absurde de vouloir sauver

Along similar lines, Olga in Notre Musique draws a series of links between culture, war,

a general state of poverty of expression, and the need to do away with culture for the sake

of art (of the defeated):

821 “Art is the exception, while culture is the everyday.” 822 “It will be the rule of the Europe of culture to organize the death of the art of

living that still thrives.” 823 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory translated by C. Lenhardt,

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 188-189.

382

les meubles. S’il reste une chance à saisir, c’est celle des vaincus.824

Olga’s line draws a specific link between the redemptive qualities of art, ruins, and

culture. “Cette ruine n’a pas épargné la notion même de culture”

825 implies that culture

survives war, persisting as a ruin at a standstill.826

824 “The landscape is strewn with wire, the sky is red with explosions; and this

ruin didn’t spare the very notion of culture; we must boldly dismiss it. We have to make do with very little. If the house is already on fire, it’s mad to try to save the furniture. If there is still an opportunity for salvation, it belongs to the defeated.” My Italics. 825 Olga’s lines about the poverty of expression echo Jean-Paul Curnier, in the diatribe he wrote against cultural politics and culture as the form in which public power for pacifies tensions. Culture for him has become a new mode of pérsuasion de masse and the apparatus of the moralization of art. Jean-Paul Curnier, “Le noir du vivant, la cruauté, encore.”

826 The position regarding culture as the old that persists in spite of destruction is the opposite and consonant with Malevich’s avant-garde notion that (revolutionary) destruction would bring the new, which he expressed in his 1919 protest against state intervention to save art collections. He wrote: “Life knows what it is doing, and if its striving to destroy one must not interfere since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life, life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly, thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy…. The aim (of this pharmacy) will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and all his art –a mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be more alive than actual representation (and take up less room).” Malevich, quoted by Boris Groys, Art Power (MIT Press, 2008), 143.

Two sets of ruins from Sarajevo appear

in the film: the numbered fragments of the bombed and then reconstructed Mostar

Bridge, and the burnt Vijecnica Library.

383

Judith, taking photographs of the Mostar Bridge, still from Notre musique

Shot: The rehabilitation of the bridge uniting the Christian and Muslim communities in

Mostar, a medieval village near Sarajevo. “Mostar” means “Bridge-keeper.” The bridge

was commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent and built by the Ottoman architect

Hayyedin, with 456 blocks of stone in 1566. In the film we see amateur video images

documenting the collapse of the bridge as it was blown up in 1993 by the Croats. We also

see a scene in which Judith watches the history of the bridge being taught to children who

then sing a song about it. Rebuilt in 2003, for Judith the bridge is a sign of hope and

reconciliation. The architect Gilles Péqueux, who was put in charge of the UNESCO

project of rebuilding the bridge along with the six others that crossed the Neretva River in

1995, states in the film: “Il ne s’agit pas de rétablir le tourisme. Il faut à la fois restaurer

le passée pour rendre le futur possible. Marier la souffrance avec la

culpabilité.”827

827 “The project is not about bringing back tourism. It is necessary to rehabilitate

the past in order to render the future possible. Marrying suffering with guilt.” PéqueuxPéqueuxPéqueux

Michael Ignatieff whishes to understand the reconstruction of the bridge

as an imperialist effort of nation-building. For him, it is not by chance that Péqueux is

384

French, and he points at the imperial implications in the fact that Péqueux was trained at

the École des Ponts et des Chaussées, founded by Napoleon. Péqueux wanted to rebuild

the bridge as close as possible to the original, reviving and teaching Muslim and Croat

masons the Ottoman techniques. In the end, they did not rebuild the old bridge with the

old stones, but a new old bridge.828

Gilles Péqueux was fired and replaced by a Croat who made a bridge like any other, constructed out of new stone clad to make it look authentic. It’s what they do on DVDs: a restoration. All the stones I filmed, which were retrieved from the river and individually numbered, weren't used – though watching the film the viewer thinks they’re going to be. They’re now in a spot the inhabitants of Mostar call “the cemetery of stones.”

The questions that rise here are: Does restoring

cultural symbols from the past entail the recognition of a wrong that has been done and

acknowledgement of guilt? Do the acknowledgment of responsibility and suffering have

the redemptive power of actualizing a new, virtual past? The reconstruction of the bridge

symbolizes the reunification of the ethnico-religious divide that the war created between

the Muslim and the Croat communities. In the film, we are led to believe that the bridge

was meticulously reconstructed from the fragments that were recovered from the Neretva

River and then numbered in order to put them back together. Reverse-shot: This was not

the case, as Godard reveals in an interview:

829

“Authenticity” is a key word here, in the sense of the contemporary subjective

conjunction of “tourism” and “experience.” “Culture,” in other words, is the main

component of enlightened travel whose purpose is to create surplus value from tourism

by gaining (cultural) knowledge of the elsewhere. The link Godard makes between the

restoration of memory (as culture) and the restoration of films into DVDs, points at a

828 Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite, 39-41. 829 Godard, “The Godard Interview.”

385

false unity of the object prompted by the memory industry, as memorials are always

fragmented, and falling short of accounting for memory. Memorials represent reified

memory, a form of remembrance that is politicized by claiming a historicity that is only

legible at a certain moment in time. The restoration of Mostar has become an instance

and a metaphor for reconciliation that is capable of creating cultural surplus value. For

Goytisolo and Marcus Stanner, a reporter for The Independent, “The bridge’s symbolism

has changed from a symbol of ethnic unity to a tourist trap.”830 Evidently, restoration of

the bridge is not enough to reunite the community. During the war the Bosnian Croats

had allocated Mostar as the future capital of a Croatian mini-state that would be called

Herzeg-Bosnia, but the city was full of Muslims who objected. The HVO (Croatian

Defense Forces) failed to displace them and, instead of taking over Mostar, they

concentrated on the West and locked up the Muslims in the East by blowing up the

bridge, dividing Mostar into two cities, like Belfast, Nicosia, or Jerusalem. What used to

be the Muslim homes were filled by Croats who fled the Muslim attacks in central

Bosnia. Today the West is richer than the East and according to Marcus Stanner, “a new

generation of children born in the 1980s has no memory of the daily contact between

Muslims and Serbs.”831

830 From: “A symbol of hope is reborn in Mostar” by Marcus Stanner, The

Independent, April 18, 2004.

Rather than bringing the former organic community back

together, the bridge has become a wall of separation, a substitute of reconciliation. After

Ignatieff, the links between physical and mental reconstruction, between rebuilding

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=512234 Date consulted: May 10, 2008.

831 Ibid.

386

infrastructure and reconciling mentalities remain unclear.832 Furthermore, Ignatieff tells

us, leaders from both communities are aware that foreign funds for reconciliation in

Mostar will dry up unless they show multi-ethnic efforts of cooperation and thus, they

meet for photo opportunities when necessary.833

Vedran Smailovic playing cello inside the Vijecnica (1992)834

Architectural rehabilitation in Notre musique is problematized along with official

commemoration and the management of the memory of the recent past as an industry,

evidently lacking any redemptive potential beyond the scope of immediate consumption.

The other ruin from Sarajevo that Notre musique lingers on is the Vijecnica Library,

which has only recently been considered for reconstruction and rehabilitation. It was

bombed in 1992 by the Serb Nationalists, an act that Goytisolo termed “memoricide.”

The Vijecnica was the first victim of the war, and it symbolizes the elimination of the

“historical substance” of the former Yugoslavia, because, following Goytisolo, libraries

832 Ignatieff, Empire Lite, 36. 833 Ibid, 38. 834 This image has been the inspiring subject of a recent novel about survival,

humanity and courage, The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Stephen Galloway, (Toronto: Alfred A Knopf, 2008).

387

are symbols of dialogue amongst peoples and active transmitters of knowledge of this

dialogue. Goytisolo described the state of the library in a recent article: writing about it,

he says, he cannot spell a word without the words “desolation” or “death” sneaking in

surreptitiously. The library is showered with dove excrement, its floors and rooms

covered by creaky debris.835 Goytisolo, echoing Stanners, states that the restored multi-

religious architectural fabric of Sarajevo is only good for tourism and that, after the war,

each community closed up on itself: the loss of the myth of multicultural Sarajevo as the

“European Jerusalem” is the reality of a deep wound incised by ethnic hatred.836

Miles de manuscritos árabes, turcos y persas se esfumaron definitivamente. El tesoro así destruido comprendía obras de historia, geografía y viajes; teología, filosofía y sufismo; ciencias naturales, astrología y matemáticas; diccionarios, gramáticas y poemarios; tratados de ajedrez y de música. Hoy, la biblioteca conserva sólo la estructura hueca de sus cuatro fachadas ornadas de columnas, arcos de herradora, rosetones y almenas. La armazón metálica del techo por el que cayeron los cohetes parece una gigantesca telaraña, los soportales del patio interior muestran apenas su antigua y final labor de yesería, el espacio central es una pila ingente de escombros, cascotes, vigas, papeles chamuscados. Recojo uno de ellos y descubro que se trata de una ficha clasificadora del Archivo. Me la llevo como recuerdo de esta barbarie programada cuyo fin era barrer la sustancia histórica de

Following Godard and Goytisolo, it is not by chance that, to date, the library remains in

ruins:

835 Goytisolo’s witness-writing is sometimes characterized by “reality effects”

inherent to his descriptions, as it is the case here. 836 “¿No era ese incendio la prueba del rencor vengativo que, en nombre de afrentas históricas viejas de siglos, sitiaron la ciudad más culta y abierta de los Balcanes y sometieron a sus habitantes a un infierno difícil de imaginar?” “Was not this fire the proof of hatred and a vendetta carried in the name of historical affronts that were centuries old, and besieged the most cultivated and open city of the Balkans subjecting its inhabitants to a hell that is difficult to imagine?” Goytisolo, “Polvo y Cenizas,” El País, July 27 2008, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Polvo/cenizas/elpepiopi/20080727elpepiopi_5/Tes. Date consulted: October 30, 2008.

388

una tierra para montar sobre ella y un edificio compuesto de patrañas, leyendas y olvidos.837

Goytisolo’s text is an enumeration of what was lost, a written testimony of the state of the

library after the bombing. Books have been rescued, and they are scattered in temporary

archives. The authorities are now planning to restore it by giving it back the use it had in

the nineteenth Century as the City Hall, allotting a space for the “memory of the library”

that once inhabited the building.

838

837 “Thousands of Arab, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts have vanished for good. This devastated treasure used to gather works of history, geography, travel; theology, philosophy and Sufism; natural sciences, astrology and math; dictionaries, grammar and poetry books; treatises on chess and music. Today, the library only maintains the hollow structure of her four façades adorned with columns, iron arches, rose windows, and battlements. The ceiling’s metal frame through which the missiles fell resembles a gigantic spider web. The colonnade of the interior patio barely reveals its old and fine stucco work, and the central area is a humongous pile of rubble, beams, and pieces of scorched paper. I pick a piece of paper and discover that it is an index card from the archive. I take it with me as a souvenir of this planned barbarity, which had as its goal to sweep off the historical substance of a land in order to superimpose on it an edifice made up of lies, legends and forgetting.” Juan Goytisolo, Cuadernos de Sarajevo, 56, 57.

We see books being brought back to the librarian, and

then being thrown into a sad corner. In Notre musique, the UNPROFOR’s and NATO’s

military intervention along with UNESCO’s rehabilitation and restoration, are kinds of

interventions that are posited on the same level and as of the “humanitarian” type.

Godard’s answer to the question that the young Bosnian woman asks him at the

beginning of the film comes to mind here in relationship to humanitarianism and

838 The Vijecnica was built at the end of the 19th century when Bosnia belonged to the Astro-Hungarian Empire. It was built in the ‘neomudéjar,’ style a combination of Ottoman and central-European styles. It was destroyed in August 25-26 1992. Forty percent of the collection burned, the building was completely destroyed and about 600,000 volumes were lost. The Bosnian authorities and foreign organizations, such as the Spanish Ministry of Culture are rehabilitating the library. Information from http://www.tresculturas.org/prensa_bloque1_2.cfm?id=889. Date consulted: November 11, 2008. See also: Beatriz Portinari, “La nueva trama de Sarajevo,” El País, October 18, 2008, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/narrativa/nueva/trama/Sarajevo/elppgl/20081018elpbabnar_1/Tes. Date consulted: October 18, 2008.

389

rehabilitation. She asked, “Pourquoi est-ce que la révolution ne serait-elle pas faite par les

gens les plus humains?”839 The term “humane people” is ambiguous here. Is this young

woman pondering on revolutionary creation or action? Is she wondering about the

Leninist imperative? Godard’s answer is, “Parce que les gens les plus humains ne font

pas la révolution, mademoiselle; ils font des bibliothèques.” To that, Gilles Péqueux adds,

“et les cimetières.”840 Assuming that, in the dialogue, “humane people” refers to

intellectuals and creative people, Godard ascribes to them the task to make/build

libraries.841

839 “Why is the revolution not waged by the most humane people?” 840 “Because the most humane people do not make revolutions, madam; they

make libraries.” “And cemeteries.” 841 In Hélas pour moi (1993), the character played by Gérard De Pardieu is

referred to as both, “libraire” and “professeur.” “Bookseller” and “Professor.”

This is evocative of Juan Goytisolo’s forest of trees and Levinas’s

community of philosophers and books: a poetic, narrative, philosophical, and archival

task. In the context of post-war Sarajevo, Godard’s cryptic statement hints perhaps at the

task of rebuilding the Vijecnica library. This latter interpretation of Godard’s statement

rhymes with Péqueux’s allusion to cemeteries. Is restoration thus a humane (intellectual,

creative, compassionate) ethical task? Arguably, Godard and Péqueux are caustically

alluding to what I would call the “humanitarian intellectual.” If cemeteries are places

where the dead are put to rest and then commemorated, Godard’s and Péqueux’s lines are

a protest against humanitarian intellectual interventionism in the name, retroactively, of

culture, rehabilitation, restoration and forgiveness. As a de-politicized intervention by

humane people, intellectual engagement is problematized as a reduction to the analogue

functions of organisms like the UN and UNESCO, which intervene to salvage and to

reconstruct culture, to reconcile communities and to rehabilitate the past. The landscape

390

is (remains) strewn with wire.

The hypothesis that I would like to advance is that Notre musique, through

Curnier’s and Godard’s diatribes against culture and their picture of the world as a war

ruin, along with their critique of humanitarian intellectual intervention, draws a historical

landscape relating the failed revolutions of the twentieth century and the wars of

annihilation of the twenty-first. If the second half of the twentieth century endured

struggles for independence and revolutions that went wrong, and if “revolution” means

that it is possible to begin tabula rasa, in retrostpect, the potential new beginning was

hindered by the failure of revolutions. In historical materialist terms, the violence

inherited from the twentieth century has put the world at a standstill and thus, the twenty-

first century is a sum of the ruins of the twentieth embedded in cultural repetition. The

remnants are non-redemptive, culturalized ruins, and de-politicized ethnic wars of bearers

of rights that have been violated. In Sarajevo, the reconstruction of the historical sites

symbolizes reconciliation and recovery, but as Goitysolo and Marcus Stanners report, the

memory of the war has not been erased in order to move on. In Sarajevo, the

commemoration of the common multicultural past, in its reification as tourist sites or

fundraising photo opportunities, furthers collective amnesia, rendering reconciliation

banal. Still, for Godard, “la seule chance de se sauver, c’est celle des vaincus.”842

An evident link between restoration in Sarajevo and the role of architectural

rehabilitation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes to mind. In his study, Daniel Monk

has considered the architectural aspects of the occupation focusing on the sacred sites and

the role of Jerusalem in the normalization of an argument based on a politics that

842 “The only chance for salvation is for the defeated.”

391

instrumentalizes historical monuments as “sacred geographies.” For Monk, the sacred

sites are somewhere in between being instrumentalized by politicians and considered

immediate manifestations of the political. This leads to a cultural struggle that contests,

archeologically and historically, the authenticity of the Holy Sites.843 He further

demonstrates that archeological study and restoration of historical sites are used as

weapons for and against Occupation. From the Palestinian side, restoration and

rehabilitation (for example, in the old city in Hebron or by the Riwaq Foundation) are

palliatives and means to resist occupation. Along these lines, it is possible to draw a

parallel to the role of the rehabilitation of cultural symbols as efforts for self-

determination on both sides. Since the beginning of the conflict, a tension has been

sustained between the land, Israelis and Palestinians and their contest of asserting their

own specific relationships to the land, which necessarily depends on the existing

institutions that regulate these relationships. Arguably, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at

the discursive level is a cultural war of expression waged on the world-stage between

competing narratives of archeologico-historical entitlement and that demand rights and

restitution as victims of annihilation and erasure.844

843 Daniel Monk, The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian Conflict –

Terrible Episodes (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002), 6. 844 Beshara Doumani argues that three recent events mark the beginning of a new

stage in the history of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination: The disengagement of Gaza (September 2005), the electoral victory of Hamas (January 2006) and the failure of Israel’s invasion of the south of Lebanon (July-august 2006). The larger context consists of the American military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat to invade Iran, and the recodification of political language along ethnic sectarian lines reflecting the tendency of political Islam. Doumani, “Pour une autre représentation des Palestiniens,” 106-107. The recent massacres in Gaza and elections in Israel have evidently inaugurated yet another stage in the conflict toward an ever grimmer situation.

This cultural war of entitlement is

clearly exceeded by what is at stake, as I discussed in the introduction.

392

7. The “Pure Past” and Phaedra

What do we mean, for example, by the word “peace”? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean forgetting? Do we mean forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor?

Susan Sontag845

C’est une peau comme si on retrouvait l’origine du langage; vous savez qu’avant qu’il ne s’invente, à Sumer on parlait du passé en employant le mot “après” et pour l’avenir le mot “avant.”

846

In Notre musique Judith and Péqueux render pressing questions of memory and whether

restitution, rehabilitation, and reconciliation are the means to do justice leading toward a

peaceful future. The kind of ethics that they open up is not to “right wrongs” in the sense

of demanding justice and restitution based upon responsibility for the other and

accountability for oneself (because in ethical terms, after Dostoyevsky’s quote, we are all

guilty and thus responsible for the other). They strive for a retrospective judgment that

allots to the involved parties a position in the conflict. This is the Homeric moment of the

rewriting of history, considered here as a “pure past.” A pure past entails an

understanding that the past can be subjected to retroactive change in a new present. This

is possible because the past is incomplete, and therefore we have the capacity to change it

retroactively. In other words, we are determined by and dependent on the past, but we

Gilles Péqueux to Judith in their conversation about

the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge.

845 Susan Sontag, “The Conscience of Words,” Styles of Radical Will (New York:

Picador, 2002), 145. 846 “It is kind of like finding the origin of language; you know, before it was

invented, in Sumeria they used to speak of the past by using the word ‘after,’ and for the future they used the word ‘before.’”

393

have the freedom to define the scope of this determination, that is, to (over)determine the

past which will determine us.847

In its bringing together of a collection of historical moments, Notre musique

brings to mind David W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance. According to its opening

screen-text, Intolerance is “an investigation into how hatred and intolerance through all

ages have fought against love and charity.” When Deleuze discusses the film in Cinema

1, he argues that the film raises the question of the pure past as the submission of the

recent or ancient past to trial. The trial has the purpose of disclosing good and evil and

asking what it is that produces decadence and what it is that produces new life. The trial

thus calls for “a strong ethical judgment that must condemn the injustice of ‘things,’ and

to bring compassion.”

848

The stories begin like four currents looked at from a hilltop. At first, the four currents flow apart, slowly and quietly, but as they flow, they grow nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster until the end. In the last act they mingle into one mighty river of expressed emotion.

The histories told in Intolerance are individual stories: a peasant

girl in the court of Babylon as it was annihilated by the Persians; the story of a Pharisee

around the Calvary of Christ; a young protestant girl during Catherine de Medici’s and

Phillip II’s persecution of the Huguenots in France; and a working-class girl in the

Modern U.S. In terms of the narrative structure, Griffith explained that:

849

In Intolerance, the stories are edited in parallel, what Deleuze calls “organic montage,”

which he opposes to the Russians’ dialectical montage. The stories meet at the narrative

847 Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, 181-183, quoted and commented on by

Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 2008, 313. 848 Gilles Deleuze, Movement-Image, 151. 849 D.W. Griffith quoted in: Highlights edited by Sarah Lucas, (New York: The

Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004), 96. For further reference, see the narrative scheme of the film published in Cahiers du cinéma, (Spring 1972).

394

cusps and Griffith’s montage creates a false continuity that is analogous to a linear

conception of history. After Deleuze, the parallels that converge through the actions (i.e.,

the chariot race in Babylon, and the race between the car and the train in the modern

U.S.), create a contracted present that presents (linear) monumental history as a whole

that happens at the interval between the actions. The interval gets smaller and smaller in

the accelerated montage, provoking the actions to converge throughout the centuries in a

superimposition of the different histories.850 By filming universal history as an immutable

past and as a superimposition of injustices and horrors, Griffith’s Intolerance accuses and

emits verdict, condemning wrongs, reiterating the infinite debt owed to the victims by the

oppressors. The establishment of the relationship of “creditor-debtor” acknowledges

suffering by a judgment in the sense of Greek tragedy, a genre that is indissociable from a

tribunal, merging obligation, defense, and accusation.851

The superimposition of historical injustices in Intolerance is comparable to Notre

musique, but rather than meeting at the narrative cusps via superimposition, Notre

musique is a palimpsest of histories of wars of annihilation. The histories relate as the

virtual and the actual of each other, insofar as the pure past is sedimented as the

fundamental scission in time: “making the present pass, conserving the past.”

852

850 Gilles Deleuze, Movement-Image, 31, 32.

851 Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done With Judgment,” Essays Critical and Clinical translated by Dan Smith and Michel Greco, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 126, 128.

852 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 184.

The

film’s interweaving of temporalities and histories renders it endlessly evocative of the

different presents and pasts of the victims of hubris. In Intolerance (and in Greek

tragedy), the guilty are brought to trial in order to rearrange the past and to make the

395

future possible, creating the infinite debt of restitution. In Notre musique, as we have

seen, Godard postulates that we are all guilty for everyone and for everything (and I am

the guiltiest of us all), and thus to seek to establish relationships of restitutionary debt is

beside the point. An attempt for a new beginning based on restitution and cultural

rehabilitation as ways toward forgiveness was made in Sarajevo, but forgiveness is not a

guarantee. Rehabilitation cannot rearrange the past, because it reestablishes the past as it

previously existed, and as novelty. In principle, rehabilitation does not readjust the past,

accounting for the present and for the past. Furthermore, forgiveness and promise are

paradoxical modalities of judgment that differ from judgment because they happen

intrasubjectively, in lived time, as opposed to being addressed to the act of hubris.

Promise is a “supreme sovereignty by which man answers for himself as for the

future,”853 inheriting debts and a guilty conscience. Forgiveness is a way to break away

from this infinite debt and, along with making a promise, it is the possibility of new

beginnings.854 Rehabilitation, however, neither promises nor guarantees forgiveness but

rather separates justice from its immediate realization in vengeance and from the

possibility of intrasubjective judgment. In other words, the “promise of justice”

embedded in rehabilitation is politicized “grace.”855

Godard evokes Greek epic with Homer, and Greek tragedy (in its Christian

version) via Racine’s Phèdre, a figure that symbolizes the Jansenist belief that grace and

the forgiveness of sins cannot be earned or bought, but are allotted by God as he sees fit.

853 Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, Life is a Narrative (Alexander Lectures)

(Toronto: The University Press, 2001), 78. 854 Ibid, 85. The Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni made a film in 2002, Local Angel

documenting his and his mother’s visit to Yasser Arafat asking him for forgiveness. 855 See Howard Caygill, “The Promise of Justice,” Radical Philosophy, no. 143,

(May-June 2007).

396

That is, the condition of grace is within man, but the cause of grace dwells outside.856

Phaedra is neither fully guilty nor completely innocent. Her incestuous love for Hippolyte

is impure, but as love, it is pure. Her line cited in Notre musique is spoken out by Godard:

“Quand tu sauras mon crime, et le sort qui m’accable, je n’en mourrai pas moins, mais

j’en mourrai plus coupable.”857 This quote crystallizes Phaedra’s conundrum: her guilt

and her inability to utter her crime. According to Roland Barthes, Phèdre’s problem is

nominal: to name her crime, which is her monstrous desire. “To name or not to name” is

not the question of the meaning of language but its manifestation.858 To surrender to

logos would liberate Phaedra, but the creation by speech is definitive (because speech is

action), and she thus avoids speech and therefore actions, shifting the responsibility to

others.859 In the end, Phaedra speaks three times: first narcissistically, then she represents

her love, and lastly she confesses. In the tragedy, language is recovered and charged with

a positive function. After Barthes, Phaedra dies having found harmony amongst her

speech-act, death and guilt.860

856 Gustav Thibon, introduction to Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (London:

Routledge, 2002), xxxiii. 857 “When you shall know my crime and heavy fate, I shall not die the less. I shall

still die, but blamed for ever.” Jean Racine, Phèdre translated by Margaret Rawlings, (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 46-47.

858 Roland Barthes, “Phèdre” (1964) translated from the French by Richard Howard, reprinted in The Questions of Tragedy edited by Arthur B. Coffin, (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 212.

859 Barthes, “Phèdre,” 215. 860 Ibid.

The reference to Phaedra brings to Notre musique a

dilated temporality, the languorous meanwhile of Phaedra’s experience of guilt, which,

according to Simon Critchley, injects fearful languor into Phaedra’s limbs, linking it to

397

the concept of the original sin.861 Like Phaedra, Olga experiences absolute guilt.

Eschewing Phaedra’s melancholic torpor (or her descent to the vegetative level, when

“God becomes bread,” as Simone Weil understands Phaedra),862 she takes radical

redemptive action as I discussed above. The original sin is evoked once Olga is in

Paradise, when a young man offers her an apple. This, taking into account the sketching

out of a possible futurity of peace and reconciliation by Godard’s analogy between the

War of Troy, Europe, Israel, Palestine and the Balkans.863

8. The Memory of the Film: Elias Sanbar

C’est peut-être là le sort qui nous a été donné de vivre. Mais il faut bien comprendre que nous n’aimons pas être victimes; le statut de victime, nous le laissons à qui veut l’endosser.

Elias Sanbar.864

Jean Genet.

“Absence was in their hands just as it was under their feet.”

865

The rehabilitation of cultural symbols and the commemoration industry literalize

Novalis’s idea that every memory is the present. In Notre musique, Godard activates a

particular kind of memory by crediting Elias Sanbar with the “memory” of the film. As

we saw in chapter 2, Sanbar was the Dziga Vertov Group’s native informant during their

861 Simon Critchley, “I want to Die, I Hate My Life –Phaedra’s Malaise,” New

Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 17. 862 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 32. 863 A recent project that sketches out a futurity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is

Eyal Weizman’s project with Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal of decolonizing Palestine. An interdisciplinary and international team, imagined the alternatives of recycling the architectures that will be left behind once the occupation of the West Bank is over. Documentation available at: www.decolonizing.ps/visitors.pdf. Date consulted: November 18, 2008.

864 “Perhaps this is the destiny that has been given to us. But it must be made clear that we do not like being victims; we leave the status of victim to whomever decides to shoulder it.” Sanbar, “Jean-Luc Godard-Elias Sanbar.” 865 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (New York: Wesleyan, 1992), 125.

398

trip to the Middle East in 1970, and translated the rushes of Ici at ailleurs from Arabic

into French for Godard and Miéville. Sanbar is the director of the Revue d’études

palestiniennes and has written extensively about the image of Palestine and Palestinians

as the figure of the absent, comparing the forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing866 of

the Palestinians to that of the “redskins” in North America.867

866 See Ilán Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 867 This hypothesis furthered in his book Figures du Palestinien (2004) was first

evoked in an interview with Gilles Deleuze, “Les Indiens de la Palestine,” published in Libération, May 8-9 1989, reprinted in Deux régimes de fous et autres textes, (Paris: Minuit, 1995), 179-184. It is also evoked in Deleuze’s “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat” in Revue d'études Palestiniennes 10 (1984), also reprinted in Deux régimes de fous.

For Sanbar, to date,

Palestine is the emblematic figure of the problem of her own imaging. This predicament

is a fact of Palestinians’ powerlessness to appear as a nation due to the dissolution of

territorial frontiers, and the physical expulsion accompanied by the discursive and visual

programming of their absence. Looking at the history of the modern figure of Palestine,

Sanbar argues that it was obliterated from the beginning by the figure of the Holy Land.

The origins of the modern image of Palestine and Palestinians coincided with the

proliferation of travel accounts that romantically depicted the trip to the Orient. The

pilgrimage to the Holy Land was imbued by a colonial vision in the spirit of a “peaceful

crusade.” In such accounts and images, the land was made familiar by making it

correspond to the texts from the Old Scriptures. Inductively, Palestinians were captured

in poses and gestures that reinforced Western perceptions of images and attitudes

identical to those described in the Bible. Their images would then be distributed in the

West, accompanied with quotations from the Bible, as if the land had not changed in

399

1800 years.868 In accord with nineteenth-century traditions of caste typing and

classifying, such images tended to obliterate their subjects. Once portrayed according to

stereotypes, they had their individuality removed, becoming representatives of “types” of

people living in the Holy Land.869 For Sanbar, however, the era that was pivotal to the

narrative formation of the Palestinian figure of the absent was between 1917 and 1922.870

The nineteenth-century figure of the Holy Land coincided with the Zionist discourse of

the Promised Land, and in the twentieth, it became “a land without a people for a people

without a land,” a clichéd sentence (often attributed to Zionist discourses) that

disassociates and renders Palestinians absent from the territory. During the post-Nakba

period, Edward Said argues that the figure of “the Arab” had become in Palestine a non-

person, and the “Zionist” had become the only person in the land because of her

perceived prejudice of the Arab’s negative personality as Oriental, decadent and

inferior.871

868 Elias Sanbar, Les Palestiniens, Photographie d’une terre et de son people de

1839 à nos jours, (Paris: Hazan, 2004), 7-13. 869 Issam Nassar, “Familial Snapshots, Representing Palestine in the Work of the

First Local Photographers,” History & Memory 12 no. 2 (Winter-Fall 2000), 9. As late as the early 1960s, the Italian filmmaker and belated crusader, Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled to the Holy Land searching for stereotypical figures in his notebook-film of 1963 Sopralluoghi in Palestina. Guided by a Catholic priest, he traveled throughout the land looking for locations for his film The New Testament According to Saint Matthew. From the beginning he was in a quest for an ancestral, ‘pure’ and remote archaic biblical world. However, to his disappointment he found a land that was less remote and displaced by a modern industrialized Israel. He ended up filming The New Testament in 1964 in the Italian city of Matera, in the district of Basilicata.

870 Elias Sanbar, Figures du Palestinien: Identité des origines, identité du devenir, (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 97.

871 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 54.

Mahmoud Darwish illustrated the ordeal of Palestinian absence in the

400

following sentence: “Who am I, Without Exile?”872 By raising the question in this

manner, Darwish describes the material and political realities of the Palestinian

disappearance from the landscape and at the representational level. The absence of

Palestine is being advanced even today. In an article by Amira Hass, for example, entitled

“You can drive along and never see an Arab,”873 she describes the road system in the

West Bank and Gaza, which has been designed in such a way that Israeli citizens and

settlers can drive on the roads without ever seeing any Palestinians.874

We have made the Palestinian case the biggest problem in the world. Look at The Hague ruling on the wall. One hundred and thirty countries supported us at the General Assembly. One hundred and seven years after the [founding Zionist] Basel Conference, 90 years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Israel has

In Notre musique, Mahmoud Darwish tells the young Israeli journalist, “The eyes

of the world are put on you, not on us.” The journalists’ youth and shyness prevent her

from catching the irony of Darwish’s words. She smiles and nods slightly and answers:

“We are your ministry of propaganda.” Palestinians are the most visible of the oppressed

in the world, partly due to their own activity. In the world-stage Palestinians represent a

wrong that must be righted, and have become a universal cause recognized by the

international community. Referring to Palestinian visibility on the world-stage, Yasser

Arafat undid Sanbar’s analogy of the “Red Indians” in 2004:

872 This is a title of one of his poems from the collection Unfortunately, It was

Paradise, ed. and trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

873 Amira Hass, “You Can Drive Along and Never See an Arab,” Haaretz, January 22, 2003. Recently the Israeli court ruled out the right of Palestinians from six villages to use route 443 adjacent to adjacent to in the West Bank linking the coastal plain to Jerusalem and built on private expropriated Palestinian land.

874 Cited by Said in the Preface of Dreams of a Nation, On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 2.

401

failed to wipe us out. We are here, in Palestine, facing them. We are not red Indians.875

The presence of Palestinians in the global regime of sensibilities, as I discussed in Part I,

reflects the image that is specific to a society going through a crisis hiding all the other

faces of the state of affairs. This image, for Sanbar, is a remake that distorts the facts and

veils the reality of lived experience, as if Palestine only existed as a conflict,

876

conferring on Palestinians the status of Israelis’ “others”. This figural position is

predicated upon the idea of absence from the land as well as absence from the image.

Mahmoud Darwish, in an evocative passage, addressed the image that Palestinians have

created for themselves as a problematic foothold of vision. For Palestinians, envisioning

themselves was:

Something like making a video: we write the script and the dialogue; we design the scenario; we pick the actors, the cameraman, the director and the producer; and we distribute the roles without realizing we are the ones cast in them. When we see our faces and our blood on the screen, we applaud the image, forgetting it’s of our own making. And by the time production goes

875 Interview with Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 715, 4-10, (November 2004) Available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/715/re17.htm. Date consulted: November 25, 2008.

876 Elias Sanbar, Les Palestiniens, Photographie d’une terre, 22-23.

402

into postproduction, we are only too ready to believe it is the Other who is pointing at us.877

For Darwish, one of the ways in which Palestinians have envisioned themselves is by

setting reality against its own materiality, by which he means something similar to what

Baudrillard accused Sontag of doing in Sarajevo: invoking a specific kind of reality that

becomes reality itself by way of conviction. Is a different image possible at a specific

historical juncture? There has been evidently a shift in the imaging of Palestine, as

embedded in a quotation from Jean Genet who wrote that with the Palestinian

Revolution, “Absence was in their hands as it was under their feet.” This formulation

implies agency for self-determination. The nature of this form of agency, however, has

waned away and has been transformed into the insistent inscription of absence and in the

reiteration of the ongoing dispossession as speaking truth to power. The problem is the

constant de-realization of Palestine as politically constituted entity. Godard engages with

the Palestinian image as the “others” of Israelis, an image that resonates with the

European colonialist image of “Arabs,” and with their Biblical image based on text. As a

filmmaker, as we have seen, he articulates the question via the shot/reverse-shot method

with the purpose of interrogating given facts by bringing things into relationships.

878

877 He continues: “Our morale is infrastructure. In other words, we are standing Marx on his head and bringing Hegel back to stand on his feet with the devices of a Machiavelli who embraced Islam at the entrance to one of Saladin’s tents.” Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut 1982, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 45-46.

He

878 “Elias Sanbar montre très bien comment, de ne pouvoir exister que comme ‘autres’ des Israéliens, les Palestiniens ont dû se fabriquer une image. Une image d’autres, ces autres-là que les Européens appellent Arabes depuis l’époque de la colonisation… Sanbar a bien montré que les Palestiniens ont eu besoin de se faire photographier, pour que cette image existe, avant ils n’étaient que du texte. Moi, quand j’essaie de réfléchir à cela, je le fais forcément en cinéaste, il me semble que le champ/ contre-champ, le montage du champ 1 et du champ 2, reste la manière d’interroger des

403

further borrows Sanbar’s analogy between the Palestinians and the “Red Indians,” and

engages with the Palestinian figure of absence as the memory of Notre musique. As the

memory of the film, the Palestinian discourse of absence is a trace that is simultaneously

erased and remembered, a simulacrum of presence that refers beyond itself. The status of

Palestinian absence as a mnemonic trace is analogous to the “Red Indians’” presence in

the film as revenants.

Still from Notre musique

In Notre musique, as we have seen, Goytisolo wanders through the library reciting

passages from his book El bosque de las letras, translated by Ramos García into French.

Meanwhile, people (a woman, a girl) approach a man behind a desk (a librarian?) with

the apparent purpose of returning books to him. After the librarian has made a note of

each book, it gets thrown in a deplorable pile in the corner. At the end of Goytisolo’s

recital, the “Red Indians” come forward to the librarian as if addressing a timeless

tribunal of justice:

faits qui se produisent mais que nous ne savons pas mettre en relation.” Godard in conversation with Jean-Michel Frodon, 21.

404

Let Columbus scour the seas to find India, It is his right! He can call our ghosts the names of spices, He can call us Red Indians, He can fiddle with his compass to correct his course, Twist all the errors of the North wind, But outside the narrow world to his map, He cannot believe that all men are born equal The same as air and water, The same as people in Barcelona, Except that they happen to worship Nature's God in everything, And not gold.879

The “Red Indians’” postcolonial plainte is beyond claiming restitution and recognition or

singing a nostalgic elegy to what was lost. Their words come from Mahmoud Darwish’s

poem, “The Speech of the Red Indian.” In these lines, they confer on Columbus a list of

“rights” that pertain to his particular way of mapping the world, which is a colonial

cartography. Although they see that his map is already narrow, one thing that they do not

grant him is the right to believe that all men are equal. Here the “Red Indians” convey

their past-present not as their ghostly differential appearance (as they do in the scene with

Judith and Darwish), but as the inevitable outcome of a historical event that has

perpetuated inequality and further humiliation in spite of the universal proclamation of

the equality of all humans.

880

The juxtaposition, in Notre musique, of Palestine with the Native North American

ordeal is specific to the history and to the form of colonization both peoples have

879 Mahmoud Darwish, “Speech of the Red Indian.” 880 I address this further below in terms of the historico-political quandary of the

Fourth World peoples. For a brilliant re-make of the classic Western movie with post-colonial implications see Jim Jarmush’s Dead Man, (1994).

405

undergone.881 As the “Fourth World,” they share more than the potential universalization

of their specific suffering.882 The disaster both peoples have undergone, as Chief Seattle

put it, is “the end of life and the beginning of survival.”883 Differently than the Latin

American, Asian, and African colonial and post-colonial processes, Native North

Americans and Palestinians have not been exploited, but they have been expelled from

their land, their histories erased, their cultures suppressed. In both cases, after Chief

Seattle, the colonialists’ appetite . . . devoured the earth and left behind only a desert.884

881 Drawing a similar comparison, Žižek wishes to understand the alliance

between North America and the State of Israel as a strange cohabitation of two opposed principles: if Israel is the ethnico-religious state par excellence, North America stands for the “non-All” of its (multicultural) society which implies the dissolution of all fixed links. Thus, in his Lacanian view, Israel functions as the small a of the North American big A, in which Israel’s core of tradition effectuates the mythic reference of the chaotic non-All of (multicultural) North America. From a friend’s notes from Žižek’s seminar at the EGS, Summer of 2007. In a recent article, Alex Lubin explores the linkage between US and Israel defining it, among other things, as “a moral assertion about which populations deserve territory and which are incapable of self-rule, which populations belong, and which are beyond the pale, which populations can govern and which are inherently subject.” Alex Lubin, “We are all Israelis: The Politics of Comparisons,” South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 107 no. 4, (Fall 2008), 672. Lubin also evokes in his first footnote the statement after September 11th of the Chicago Rabbi Gary Gerson comparing Americans to Israelis: “Humanity came apart in lower Manhattan today, and each of us is wounded. We mourn the loss of our innocence… Terror has struck us, but it will not destroy us. Now we are all Israelis.” Gary Gerson quoted in Nancy Gibbs in, “If You Want to Humble an Empire,” Time, September 14, 2001.

882 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have provided a definition of the “Fourth Peoples”: “Variously called ‘indigenous,’ ‘tribal,’ or ‘First Nations”; the still-residing descendants of the original inhabitants of territories subsequently taken over or circumscribed by alien conquest settlement. As many as 3,000 native nations, representing some 250 million people, according to some estimates, function within the 200 states that assert sovereignty over them. […] As non nation-state communities, native peoples rarely “scan” on the global seen and are often not even identified through their self-chosen names; rather, they are called “rebels,” guerrillas,” or “separatists” involved in civil wars. In Unthinking Eurocentrism, (New York and London: Routledge 2004), 32.

883 “Chief Seattle’s Thoughts,” available at

Both peoples share the predicaments of how to assert their historical presence based on

http://www.kyphilom.com/www/seattle.html. Date consulted: April 3, 2008. 884 Ibid.

406

historical effacement. Their ordeals differ, however, in the historical stage of their

colonization. I addressed above the Palestine Question. In North America, annihilation

has moved toward the incorporation of the Natives prompting contradictions in their

everyday existence analogous to the dichotomy of the global versus the local, as many

parts of the world find themselves in between “local tradition” and “Western progress.”

As a people of the Fourth World, the “Red Indians” are without political autonomy or

self-determination. Today, they are forced to exist within a system that has been imposed

on them, to which they have been forced to adapt. As imagined by Judith, both in

“Western” clothes and in warrior “ethnic” garb, they are evoked as belonging to a

historical register: absent and yet remembered or reactivated in the present. Haunting her

encounter with Darwish, they pertain to a different register in the narrative because they

are never interpellated by other characters. They speak to the librarian at the Vijecnica –

but they are not acknowledged nor spoken back to by him. The “Red Indians” are

specters demanding to be heard. Their injunction is to “meet the stranger at the tip of the

abyss,” a pending encounter of two peoples who are strangers to the same land:

Isn't it about time, stranger, for us to meet face to face in the same age, both of us strangers to the same land, meeting at the tip of an abyss?885

In Notre musique, like the “Red Indians,” the Palestinian discourse of absence and their

image as the “others” of Israelis is a trace simultaneously evoked and effaced. For

Darwish, writing gives power,

886

885 Mahmoud Darwish, “The Speech of the Red Indian.” 886 Interview with Helit Yeshurun, La Palestine comme métaphore, 140.

and thus the task of the Palestinian poet is to turn the

trace into writing, as the poet of the Trojans writing the great epic of the vanquished.

407

9. Apology of the Vanquished and of Loss

Nothing happens in tragedies today . . . The curtain is drawn, both poets and audience have left – there are no cedars or processions, no olive branches to greet those coming in by boat, weary from nosebleed and the lightness of the final act, as if passing from one fate to another, a fate written beyond the text, a woman of Greece playing the part of a woman of Troy, as easily white as black, neither broken nor exalted, and no one asks: “What will happen in the morning?” ”What comes after this Homeric pause?” . . . as if this were a lovely dream in which prisoners of war are relieved by fairness of their long, immediate night, as if they now say: ”We mend our wounds with salt,” “We live near our memory,” “We shall try out an ordinary death,” “We wait for resurrection, here, in its home in the chapter that comes after the last . . . ”

Mahmoud Darwish.887

Myths come banging on The door whenever we need them. There's nothing Homeric found here. Only a general exhuming the rubble

Mahmoud Darwish’s allusion to the “Homeric pause” in this passage could be read as a

suspended moment – the meanwhile between war and poetry. In this suspension, the

possibility that the vanquished let their wounds heal by “living near memory,” “mending

the wounds with salt,” and “waiting for resurrection,” is waiting. The impossibility of

healing is imbued with the melancholy of the defeated and the nostalgia of the exiled, but

attributed to the stupor and torpor of a lethargic, catatonic night that impedes writing.

This lethargy has rendered a Trojan and a Greek woman indistinctive, which means that

the present is neither resolved nor finished, as the future of Palestine as Troy has been

infinitely suspended, which is precisely what bestows Darwish the possibility to write as

“the poet of the Trojans”:

887 Excerpt from “No Flag Flutters in the Wind,” from his collection: Now as you

Awaken, translated from the Arabic by Omnia Amin and Rick London, (Pacifica: Big Bridge Press, 2006). See the appendixes for the Arabic version of the excerpt.

408

Of a state fast asleep Slumped in the ruins of a future Troy.888

Troy and Homer are constant references in Mahmoud Darwish’s work and the Ur or the

most ancient example of a war of annihilation, embellished by the Greeks and the

Romans. Through historical distance, poetical and historical recollection, Arendt argues,

Homer undoes this annihilation with the impartiality that is at the beginning of

historiography.

889 Arendt asserts via Homer that hostile encounters, once the suffering

and the barbarity are over, give rise to something people have in common as the two

sides of an event. This “means that the event itself has already been transformed from

conflict into something else that is first revealed to the remembering and celebrating eye

of the poet or to the retrospective gaze of the historian.”890

888 Mahmoud Darwish, verse from “State of Siege” (2002), translated by Ramsis

Amun.

Arendt’s reading of Homer

may be a key into how the different stories of the vanquished relate in Notre musique.

Notre musique is an encounter of sorts, of the Trojans of history as the survivors of the

war of annihilation in their different historical moments: “reconstructed” Sarajevo, the

Israeli descendants of some survivors of Hitler’s genocide, the Native North Americans

and the Palestinians as the people of the Fourth World. According to each specific

historical moment, the film creates, invokes, or foregrounds the moment for the Homeric

impartiality; this aspect can be linked to Godard’s echoing Edward Said’s plea for

Palestinians’ “right to fiction.” To convoke the Homeric-Trojan poets implies further,

that their texts will be the grounding myths immortalizing the vanquished of a

http://www.al-kalimah.com/English/2007/January/Html%5Cpoetry%5Cstate.html Date consulted: November18, 2008. Published in The Burden of the Butterfly translated by Faudy Joudah, (Townsend: Cooper Canyon Press, 2006).

889 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 163. 890 Ibid, 176-77.

409

posthumous future – For example in Virgil’s account the Trojans’s, defeat symbolizes

their flight to Rome and thus defeat becomes the underbelly of power (Empire).

In Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s study about the culture of the vanquished, Troy is the

myth of the end and the new beginning that is inscribed in the cycle of victory and defeat:

“What triumphs today will be defeated tomorrow.” According to Schivelbusch, the myths

written about the war attest to how little the Greeks gained from their conquest, and this

conferred to the vanquished a higher moral ground. History apparently teaches that the

vanquished will be enriched more than the victors, and in this account, being defeated

appears a source of intellectual progress and humanity.891 The historical immanence of

Homer’s account of the War of Troy relies on the fact that it is the interruption of the

myth of a people, and the people’s new beginning as its rewriting, and this is why Homer

is the mythic hero writing the myth that is able to “speak to all epochs.” The War of Troy,

however, was narrated by the victors, and, differentiating his position from Homer’s,

Mahmoud Darwish has stated that he found hope in calling himself “the poet of the

Trojans,” at a historical moment in which the defeated were still challenging the victors.

To proclaim oneself defeated, Schivelbusch discovered, gives consolation by finding

cultural and moral superiority over the victor and faith in the idea that the position of

victor and vanquished are in eternal rotation892

891 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,

Mourning, And Recovery, transl. by Jefferson Chase, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 3.

892 Ibid, 19.

– Darwish tells Judith:

410

I wanted to speak in the name of the absentee, in the name of the Trojan poet. There is more poetic inspiration and humanity in defeat than there is in victory. Even in defeat there is deep poetry, and probably deeper poetry. If I belonged to the victor’s camp, I would participate in demonstrations in support for the victims.893

In Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, Andalusia represents the myth of the loss of the multi-

confessional, multicultural era under Arab rule and the Arab expulsion from Spain.

Referencing Andalusia evokes the cycle of the position of winners and losers.

894 In this

sense, the elegy of the defeated is an apology of loss, recalling the anti-Islamic poetry of

the Jâhiliya, a nostalgic Qasida that evokes the ruins (or atlals) of the home that is no

longer.895

The Trojan’s political existence was presupposed by a defeat, theirs is “a

community of interrupted myth,”

896

893 Transcribed from the film and re-written by Kifah Fanni. 894 Elias Sanbar in a public conversation with Godard points at a nuance in

Darwish regarding the position of the defeated in Notre musique: “Il ne fait pas l’apologie de la défaite, mais l’apologie de la perte. Ce n’est pas du tout la même chose. […] D’une certaine façon, nous sommes, parmi les Arabes, les Troyens. Ce n’est pas du tout pour valoriser la défaite, mais pour dire que dans la perte il y a infiniment plus d’humanité que dans l’accumulation des victoires.” “(Darwish’s work) is not an apology of defeat, but an apology of loss. It is not the same thing at all. […] In a way, we are, amongst the Arabs, the Trojans. It is not a matter of valorizing defeat, but to say that in loss, there is infinitely more humanity than in the accumulation of victories.” Sanbar as reported by Christophe Kantcheff, from a public discussion between Godard and Sanbar on January 16th, 2005. 895 As told to me by Palestinian poet Kifah Fanni. For further reference see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions,”Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (April 1983), 85-107.

to borrow Jean-Luc Nancy’s term. In Notre musique,

896 Not to be confounded with “the interruption of the myth of the writer,” which is not the same thing as the “disappearance of the last writer.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Literary

411

the defeated and the exiled gather in Sarajevo and in Cinema, which are, for the

filmmaker, places of exile with which he aligns himself.897 Notre musique’s convocation

of the vanquished to speak powerful words in “simple conversations” perhaps could be

considered as evoking a pre-political space. In Ancient Greek democracy, the poets “were

left to concern themselves with the fate of the vanquished and the defeated, and their

poetic, artistic and historical accounts also became part of the polis and politics.”898 As

we have seen, the sites for action and speech in Notre musique are liminal spaces where

different worlds meet. These encounters are kinds of manifestations that characterize our

contemporary transnational exchanges: the Airport,899

Communism” Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minesotta Press, 1991), 70, 71. Nancy here like the Godardian gathering of poets vouches for storytellers.

897 As the “Jew of cinema.” He stated: “Places like Sarajevo, Bosnia, or Palestine are also a little bit of a metaphor for what the cinema has become for me, French cinema at least: a country still heavily dependent on subsidies, that can't survive by itself, that is under attack by the various forms of organized crime, that is drifting into prostitution. Cinema is an occupied country with a governor, like the Roman governor of Palestine. Palestine, Sarajevo, the current cinema, these are all places of exile which is good for me because I've always felt profoundly exiled, because of family wars and cultural wars.” Godard as told to Frédéric Bonnaud, “Occupational Hazards,” 37. 898 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 177.

899 Detective (1987) is another film where not only the airport but airplanes acquire surplus meaning in Godard. These allusions to airports recall recent artistic reflections about them as the site for contemporary artistic practice defined as one of passage, for example, Martha Rosler’s photographic book project, In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Hatje Cantz, 1997), and Thomas Hirschhorn’s World Airport (1999), shown at the Venice Biennale.

the French Embassy, the Literary

Encounters, and the Holiday Inn. Such places are not the polis, but they acquire the

potentiality for becoming spaces for the political, similar to the Greek political space

“where people assemble, a space which is common to all where things can be first

recognized in their many-sidedness, where people can understand how to assume the

412

many possible perspectives provided by the real world.”900

As the gathering of the exiles in Notre musique, Israel and Palestine are

comparable as two communities that demand their rights to the world, undoing the idea

of the Palestinians as the “others” of Israelis. Judith tells Darwish: “You say there’s no

more room for Homer and you are the Trojan’s bard and you love the vanquished. You’re

talking like a Jew!” She further states: “In La Palestine comme métaphore,” you write:

“If they defeat us in poetry, then it is the end.” Darwish’s answer is linked to the idea that

Homeric impartiality shows that “all things with two sides make their real appearance

only in struggle, and that such appearance is possible through great words.”

In the film, the poets meet to

exchange powerful words, but not to proclaim or to persuade others of their status as

victims; rather than expressing their opinion of how the world appears to them, they

converse face-to-face by way of the resonances in every authors’ thought and writing.

The possibility of the articulation of poetic speech implies making truth accessible to

mythical thought. The poets and their voices here are not the originary figures of their

histories, but storytellers accounting for the interruption of their founding myth, and this

brings consolation to them.

901

900 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 167. 901 Ibid, 165.

The

struggle is to be gauged in writing, bringing Palestinians and Israelis together into a kind

of combat of words. To confront both sides implies demanding and obtaining redress,

establishing temporal finite relations as opposed to demanding restitution, because the

latter establishes an infinite debt. In a way, Israeli negotiations with Palestinians have

suspended restitutionary matters at the political level (the right of return, the status of

Jerusalem, the 1948 “transfer”), perpetuating an asymmetric relation that has never been

413

symmetric or political in the first place. When a war of annihilation occurs, Arendt wrote,

a portion of our common world is destroyed. What is destroyed is considerably more than

the world of the vanquished enemy; it is the in-between space that formerly lay between

the people in combat. The reconstruction of this “in between” world needs human action,

and it cannot be reproduced by human hands.902

10. Our Music

Arendt and Godard point at the fact that

the victims and the oppressors cannot meet in between. In Notre musique, poetic speech

has the potential for opening up new reserves of common signs, thereby creating a new

distribution of the sensible.

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Simone Weil.903

Jean-Luc Godard in Notre musique.

Aller dans la lumière est le principe du cinéma; aller à la lumière et la diriger sur notre nuit; notre musique.

904

As we have seen, the characters in Notre musique who enter into conversation are the

vanquished, those who are denied a legitimate and stable place in their life-territory. The

vanquished can be seen as survivors trying to bring out hope, or to signal that there is still

hope, despite the situation. Debatably, in the film, there is a concern with the vanquished

as poets and historians calling for the Homeric moment of writing history and poetry,

seeking to bring great words into simple conversations. This concern goes somewhat

against the grain that tends to show a plural world filled with singular voices of the

902 Ibid, 190. 903 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 8. 904 “The principle of cinema is to go toward light. To go toward light and let it

illuminate our night; our music.”

414

dispossessed that demand restitution. There is also an evident concern with laying out a

kind of immediacy that is different from transparency or difference. One of the issues

raised by the Homeric epic is that it is considered a work capable of transcending

historical context and speaking to all epochs. Perhaps Godard avoids such notions of

abstract universality by putting forth the vanquished as historically concrete subjects who

express a real predicament through language, not only as a way to express relationships

between things, but by way of non-communicative language, language without speech,905

something that is neither the divine word nor what we call language, a brushstroke of

universality,906 a conversation. The Latin noun conversatio comes from the Medieval

verb conversari which means “to keep company with, to live together.”907 Furthermore,

the reference to Homer in the film is a textual historical layer that relates to the other

histories like the actual and the virtual, making the present pass by conserving the past.908

The film renders a polyphonic world. The polyphony is made by us, and this aspect is

highlighted by the films’ title, Notre musique, the “entre nous.” “In the film, writers read

from their works and along with actors and artists they have made our little music,”

Godard stated.909

Notre musique is theirs, ours, everybody’s. It's what makes us live, or makes us hope. One could say “our philosophy” or “our life,” but “our music” is nicer and has a different effect. And then there's

Further:

905 Language without speech is creation in the Old Testament, Psalm 18, where

God speaks without speech before the prophets, before Israel. God speaks in creation and creation is nature. This question is addressed by Paul Virilio and Silvere Lotringer in a conversation published in The Accident of Art, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), 35.

906 John Berger cited by Kifah Fanni in a conversation. 907 Cesare Casarino, “Surplus Common: A Preface,” In Praise of the Common: A

Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, with Antonio Negri, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 2.

908 Gilles Deleuze with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 184. 909 Godard as told to Frédéric Bonnaud, “Occupational Hazards,” 37.

415

also the question of what aspect of our music was destroyed at Sarajevo? And what remains of our music that was there?910

In this manner, what is evoked is a particular instance – a spatio-temporal one, of the “in

between” which is more of a parmi nous (amongst us) than an entre nous (between us).

The “in between-amongst us” is a cosmic space for connections and relations, string

theory, what is amongst us is that which is proper to us all, tuned in, vibrating being

together. Moreover, the “in between” is not a multicultural differential space of co-

existence,

911 but living together. For Arendt the in-between is a bond created amongst

men that allows for the political, for dialogue – something that is man-made, inter-esse, a

space for laying out “a who,” which is destroyed by brutality and violence. The in

between is the event of language between two people. Along similar lines, Godard’s plea

in the name of the text is a call for a relationship with the other as different from

comprehension or understanding. Here Godard privileges language, neither as speech,

which is action (the political proper), nor as the divine Word. Rather, different forms of

language are evoked by the reference to Dante his apology for vernacular language,912

910 Interview with Michael Witt. 911 The idea of “multinational co-existence” was coined in the 1990s and has

replaced the idea of living together as a solution to the destruction of the common world that existed previous to the Balkans War.

912 For a brief discussion of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, and his praise for the vernacular see Cesare Casarino, “Surplus Common: A Preface.”

to

language as a matter of naming, through Phaedra’s conundrum, evidently to poetry (with

the parade of poets reciting), and to the issue of translation, which comes up with Ramos

García, the blind translator. In poetry, language has a particular form of behaving, as it

allows for proximity because it goes toward the other, corresponding with what Lévinas

calls le dire. “Saying” is transcending or passing toward the other. “Saying” is parole

416

addressed to the other as disclosure of the self, saying is to un-say the said without

presupposing the representation of the other. “Saying” is the “inspired word” that says the

unsaid within the said.913

C’est comme une image, mais qui viendrait de loin. Ils sont deux, côte à côte. À côté d'elle, c'est moi. Elle, je ne l’ai jamais vue, moi je m’y reconnais. Mais de tout cela je ne me souviens pas. Cela doit se passer loin d’ici, ou plus tard.

Finally, Godard ponders in the film the matter of the text as having been re-

covered by the image. As we know, for Godard the image has redemptive powers, and in

Notre musique, Olga incarnates the question of the image, once as mimesis at the Centre

André Malraux, and another time in the voice-over. We hear the voice-over the first time

she appears in the film (in “Paradise”), while she advances toward the camera from the

depth of field. Her image is initially blurry, coming gradually into focus. Somewhat

translating the pictorial technique of perspective, the scene recalls Godard’s défilés of

bodies that acknowledge the cinematic translation of plastic space into time as the

becoming image of a body. We hear Olga say:

914

As faraway semblance, rendered side by side, the imaged is no one or nothing other than

resemblance by way of the intensification of presence. The image is in essence distinct

from the thing, but co-substantial, interdependent with the thing. The thing is distinct

from the being-here of the image, and that is why the image is far away. The image is the

other, and the other is the opposite of near. That which is not close can be drawn apart in

913 Ernst Wolf, De l’éthique à la justice, 295-296. We could make a link to

Lyotard’s claim for the right to speak only to announce something: le dire as opposed to le dit. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Other’s Rights,” 135-147. 914 “It is like an image that would come from afar. They are two, side by side. I am next to her. She has never seen it, yet I recognize myself there. But I do not remember any of this. This must be happening far from here, or later.”

417

two ways: separated by distance or separated by identity. The other is different according

to these two manners: it does not touch, and it is dissimilar. The image needs to be

detached, brought outside and in front of our eyes to save the real. Yet, she is inseparable

from a hidden face that cannot be detached, an “under-face.”915 The detachment happens

far away, or later, in a different spatio-temporality than my here and now. Never to have

seen her, and yet to recognize myself in her, appeals to Godard’s subscription to the

Paulist redemptive notion of the image that emerges at the junction of two: redemptive

individuation by recognition.916 It also takes two to look at a third – the third gaze is

necessary to bring the visible and the invisible together. For this another is convoked as

an indispensable partner. The image is born from faith in forgetting: “Qui veut se

souvenir doit se confier à l’oubli.”917 Resemblance resembles in its force of

identification, and it resembles like the force of the same. I know very well who I am, I

am beyond what I am for you. With the image, we touch the intensity of this retreat or

this excess.918

915 Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des images (Paris: Gallimard 2004), 12-13. 916 As I discussed in the introduction, in Godard Paulism presupposes

individuated salvation through an interpellation. The individuation takes place seeing, and the paradigm of the seer is Bernadette, the little shepherd girl who sighted the Virgin of Fatima, who, in recognizing the sacred imprint, confirms both the Image’s divine origin and herself as a seer. 917 “Who wants to remember must have faith in forgetting.” Jacques Aumont attributes this sentence (quoted by Godard in Histoire(s)) to Charles Peguy’s Clio: Amnésies: Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard, (Paris: P.O.L., 1999), 253.

918 Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des images, 24.

Building a gap between that which is given to see and the object of desire,

the power of the image comes from the desire to see.

418

Some Conclusions

L'esprit emprunte à la matière les perceptions d'où il tire sa nourriture, et les lui rend sous forme de mouvement, où il a imprimé sa liberté.

Henri Bergson.919

Lenin predicted that the background of the twentieth century would be wars and

revolutions and thus the world’s common denominator would be violence.

920 Taking

further Lenin and in historical materialist terms, Arendt argued in 1969 that revolutionary

violence had brought history to a standstill worldwide as opposed to accelerating

historical progress toward its completion. Ici et ailleurs marks the end of revolutionary

action here and elsewhere, as the limit of the ideas of Marxist-Leninism as practical

politics had been reached.921

919 “Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores

them to matter in the form of movement which it has imprinted with its own freedom.” This is the last sentence of Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (1939). Available at

In the film, Godard and Miéville map out an imaginary

http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bergson_henri/matiere_et_memoire/matiere_et_memoire.pdf . Date consulted: September 25, 2008. English translation: Matter and Memory, (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 332.

920 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1969) (New York: A Harvest Book, 1970), 3. 921 Perhaps in the same manner in which Chris Marker’s Grin Without a Cat

(1977) renders an account of the twentieth century as one of revolutions. Marker’s film is a collection of the visual memory of this era focusing on the sixties. It includes an interview with Régis Debray in prison in Bolivia, speeches from Fidel Castro, images from the Vietnam war, May ’68 in France, testimony of the CIA’s infiltration in Latin

419

political cartography presenting a summation of all the aspects of “Palestine” seen from

the “French” point of view. 1917 becomes one of the key dates in this interweaving of

histories: the year of the Russian Revolution and of the Balfour declaration; the year that

allegedly marked the twentieth century as a century of revolutions and war, and the year

that the (student’s and worker’s) French Cultural Revolution and the Palestinian

Revolution have as a common historical reference. Godard and Miéville further bring

together the histories of failed and betrayed revolutions, as a melancholic morning-after

transmitting the lessons of the image they had derived. In the film, the “militant

filmmaker” is confronted with the contradictions of engagement and is posited, self-

critically, a “revolutionary fool, millionaire with images from elsewhere” who is given

two tasks: First, of showing images of others from time to time, and second, of restituting

images’ speech that has been stifled by the noise of ideology. Opening up toward a future

narrative, we hear in the voice-over: “Peut-être dans mille et un ans Scheherezade

racontera ça autrement.”922 The hegemonic discourse circulating within Leftist

intellectual culture (in France) departed from the iconic referent of “The Revolution.” As

a discursive container, “Revolution” became retroactively the fatal harbinger of terror and

totalitarianism. With the increased prevalence of this casual arithmetic (Revolution +

Realization = Totalitarianism), the enthusiasm for any potential human emancipation or

redemptive change waned away,923

American National Liberation Movements, Mexico in October ’68, footage of Che Guevara’s assassination in Bolivia…

922 “Maybe in a thousand and one days Scheherezade will tell this story differently.”

923 See Martin Jay: “Mourning a metaphor: The Revolution is Over,” Parallax 9:2, (April 2003), 17-20.

or became its own cause for suspicion. As we have

seen, Godard’s and Miéville’s political compass for action after “things exploded” in

420

1974 was reshaped as “audiovisual journalism,” positing the mass media, the

mediatization of mediation and Hollywood as foes. Disinterestedness as a means to

engage with other revolutionary processes and as the condition for speaking for others

was replaced by the interestedness inherent to engagement based on the demand that

human rights be respected. As I discussed, interested engagement uses sympathy and pity

as political emotions, its privileged form is documentary, and it interpellates the viewer

by affectively denouncing violations of rights and dispossession, while beckoning for a

politics of infinite restitution. Moreover, interested practices engaged with the elsewhere

tend to render the other immediate by way of an a priori differential transparency

embedded in the non-discourse of rights. To speak from the discursive category of human

rights implies denouncing the principles of racism, colonial exploitation, ethnic

cleansing, and genocide. Beshara Doumani recently asked, How is it possible for

Palestinians to break away from the ideological debasement of such a discursive

regime?924 The challenges that Palestinians face by asking “How can Palestinians

speak?” are, for Doumani, first, how to realize the progressive potential of the principles

of international law and human rights without totally subscribing to the ideological

debasement of these principles? Second, how can Palestinians explore the progressive

potential of religious tradition and cultural heritage without reifying them in defensive

loops that reinforce internal divisions?925

Godard’s version of history resonates further with Lenin’s prediction and

Arendt’s assessment, as he sees the twenty-first century as inheriting the failed

924 Beshara Doumani, “Pour une autre représentation des Palestiniens,” Revue

d’études Palestiniennes 108 (Summer 2008), 116. 925 Ibid, 118.

421

revolutions of the twentieth translated into ethnic wars. In this sense, Godard’s

Eurocentric cartography addresses the contemporary “realist” politics of Neoliberal

Empire, positing the world as engaged in a total, righteous permanent war of “all against

all.”926

Bearing in mind the current documentarist turn, Ici et ailleurs as the self-reflexive

degree zero of documentary assumes broader implications within the geopolitical and

current cartographic practices within the collapse of space and time prompted by

technologies of co-presence. If we consider Ici et ailleurs an intervention in the name of

others, what is at stake is a translation, an interpretation, and a reconstruction of groups

and social processes, in order to find the mental families that can link the subject of

speech to the addressee. The translation of other codes must be understood in the double

sense of the word: as a displacement and as a “traduction”

In Godard, righteous cultural (and actual) wars stand against a “sky red with

explosions” inhabited by restored ruins, still in flames, purporting the false unity of a

culturalized past as the condition of possibility of a present of “co-existence.”

927

926 See: Seyla Benhabib, “The Legitimacy of the Human Rights,” Daedalus, vol.

137, No. 3, (Summer 2008) 927 “Translation,” in English. In French, “translation” means displacement.

of the codes by the speaking

subject, bearing in mind the process of mediation (Jameson’s X-ray plate) and its

constraints, without suppressing the essential, which is the incommensurability between

image and speech. By way of exploring the potential of technique, and by way of

montage, Godard and Miéville further ask in Ici et ailleurs, “How can one see and give to

see?” Seeking thereby to actualize the hidden virtualities in trade-mark, mass-media and

their own footage, imbued with an anxiety of blindness.

422

Palestine reappears thirty years later in Godard’s Notre musique (2004) as one of

the layers constituting a palimpsest of the histories of wars of annihilation grounded on

the Homeric account of the War of Troy. The war of annihilation is evoked in the film

by: Mahmoud Darwish who declares to be the poet of the Trojans, with the spectral

appearance of three “Red Indians;” by the allusions to the extermination of European

Jewry and the appearance of the Israeli descendants of the survivors in the film, and to

the recent Balkans War. For Godard, by way of Olga: “If there is still an opportunity for

salvation, it belongs to the defeated.” Without making recourse to the rhetoric of

universalization criticizing acerbically “humane intervention” (intellectual, political and

by NGOs) and in an Adornian vein, the film vouches for art and for an ethics and politics

of the art of living together.

As we have seen, the speech act is at the centre of Godard’s work in general, but

particularly in these two films, addressing in Ici et ailleurs the expiration of speech and

thus the intransitivity of the mass media, the restitution of speech, the speech of images

as having been covered by ideology, and the silent silencing of objectivity. Godard would

further emphasize address as a form of interpellation by praying, hailing and hosting

others; evidently in Notre musique, by vouching for simple conversations (which is living

together). For Godard, all the power of the image is inexpressible, and language

arbitrarily severs objects from reality. The problem of the voice of others having been

drowned by ideology is reversed in Notre musique, when, as I discussed, Godard

articulates the issue as the “text as having been re-covered by the image.” This matter is

the instance in which the infigurable makes claims for visibility, analogous to the

becoming image of speech acts, by way of amalgamating voice and face. Furthermore,

423

speaking as twentieth-first century Trojan poets, Mahmoud Darwish and the other

characters and authors in the film radically undermine a separation between poetic

language and speech, calling for a necessary redistribution within the surface of the signs

amongst us. The separation between speech and poetry lies in the fact that action and

speech are indissoluble, while poetry is speech that is addressed to the other by way of a

disclosure of the self.928

In Notre musique, Godard does not quite make an apology for Homeric narration,

but rather vouches for the dignity of fiction and for the mobilization of the powers of the

false in order to save the real. Notre musique is a kind of imaginary epic that draws from

the core myths of Judeo-Christian Europe of which Islam and Judaism are the political

and theological constitutive others respectively: Greek tragedy and epic; Dante’s

rendering of the Islamic-Christian visions of the afterlife in his Divine Comedy; the

Christianization of Greek myth by way of Janenism in Racine’s Phaedra, introducing

guilt and grace. Finally, the point of departure of Christianity from Judaism, which is the

sacrifice of the son and his resurrection, is symbolized in Olga’s self-sacrifice and ascent

to paradise. Furthermore, the beautiful is, for Godard, the only thing that can “cover”

Poetry is thus proximity, different from immediacy. Poetry is

Mitteilung –the sharing of the sensible, and it bears the potential of the re-distribution of

the sensible differently from Mittelbarkeit – which is the potential of a world in common

built with sensibilities presupposed by the communicability of sense. Mitteilung is

bringing two worlds together, and worlds meet in Notre musique, not in a common space,

but face to face. As Darwish, Judith, Olga, and Godard say in the film: “the truth has two

faces.”

928 Ernst Wolf, De l’éthique à la justice: Langage et politique dans la philosophie

de Lévinas, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007) 295-296.

424

memories of horror. The aesthetico-political task is the regulation of distance and

affectivity between the viewer and the screen. The conditions are the belief in images,

faith and the desire to see as our links to the world. Within the pervasiveness of the ruins,

culture, wars, and the hyperreal, the defeated and the vanquished call for the exception,

which is art. In Notre musique, both the poet and the translator are blind, and this can be

linked to Jean-Paul Curnier’s disgust with the expression of misery that attempts to

mobilize empathy and pity as political emotions, related to the “panic of altruism.” The

panic of altruism implies that empathy is a loop because there is no separation between

what I am and what I see.929

929 Chris Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia (New York: Semiotext(e), 2000), 129.

To see is, thus, not to speak, but it is saying “I try to see”

permeated with anxiety of blindness.

425

426

Appendixes

by Herberto PadillaThe Travelers

930

930 Cited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Tourists of the Revolution,” 130, 131.

They come in the clothes of the affluent society, A thorn in whose side they are, whose “unreliable elements,” Fitted out with academic titles, Writing books for the departments of sociology Of the best universities (which underwrite the cost). They get their visas in a jiffy, Are informed about anti-war campaigns, About protests against the Vietnam war, in short: they are treading the righteous path of history. While they lounge in the shiny seats of the international airports, Each flight they take an illegal act, They feel pleasantly subversive, Their conscience is clean. They are the comfortable travelers of the wave of the future, With Rolleiflex cameras, perfectly suited For the tropical light, For underdevelopment; With information charts for objective interviews, If, however (of course), something less than impartial, For they love the struggle, The guerrillas, The zafras, The hardships of life, The vulgar Spanish of the natives. After two or three weeks (that’s the maximum) they write books about guerillas or the Cuban national Character about the hardships of life or the vulgar Spanish of the natives. Provided with systems, with methods, They are obviously frustrated By the missing sexual freedom in Cuba, By the unfortunate Puritanism of the revolution And they define the state of affairs

427

With honest melancholy As the abyss between theory and practice. In private (not in their book or at the round table) They admit that they cut more cane Than the best machetro (those guys made fiesta all day). These fourteen-day heroes declare That people in the inns want to dance, That the intellectuals (completely depoliticized) Are still able to write poetry; The night before they fly back, lying next to their women, They believe That they have developed supernatural muscles. They go at it like blacks, as though they were depraved. The girls, pregnant every five years, Are delirious with these unaccustomed husbands, Now insatiable. At home they look at slides That show the family hero Surrounded by natives, fraternally embraced (…)

Juan Goytisolo, From El Bosque de las letras, (Madrid: Santillana, 1995), 24. “La prepotencia salvaje de nuestra sociedad tecnológica, militar e industrial, se manifiesta hoy sin cortapisa alguna a escala planetaria. No contentos con saquear riquezas ajenas, explotar despiadadamente a mujeres y hombres, violar y destruir culturas, inundar el mundo de detritos, contaminar el aire, continentes y mares, almacenar armas costosas y extravagantes, cebar la tierra de ojivas nucleares hasta convertirla en un polvorín, quemar los excedentes de trigo y maíz para mantener los precios, planificar hambre, miseria y enfermedades en nombre de unos valores presuntamente universales pero en verdad ferozmente etnocéntricos y clasistas, nuestros remotos, aunque identificables, programadores se han fijado por meta trivializar y pervertir la dolorosa visión de sus víctimas transformándola en un exótico y curioso espectáculo: no ya el de los jefes y altos oficiales nazis absortos en la gozosa contemplación en petit comité de sus documentales sobre los niños y mujeres desnudos introducidos en las cámaras de gas de Auschwitz, sino el destinado al buen eurócrata o norteamericano medio a los que, entre sonrisas dentífricas de deslumbrante blancura y anuncios de muchachas etéreas, diafanizadas por las virtudes de un champú natural proteínico, se ofrece en prima, de sobremesa, la visión de esqueletos vivos, piernas quebradizas y ahiladas, vientres deformes, rostros infantiles cubiertos de moscas en ameno y tranquilizador contraste con el entorno de un mundo sereno cuyos problemas son el exceso de calorías, la preservación de la línea mediante curas adelgazadoras y ejercicios gimnásticos, la búsqueda de varias y aguijadoras dietas caninas, la adquisición incesante de nuevos y eficaces instrumentos de confort doméstico para dichosos padres de familia y amas de casa. La agonía y muerte de millones de inocentes, sacrificados al modelo de la sociedad competitiva y brutal, se transforma así en un número más, aburrido a fuerza reiterado, del ahíto y adormilado telespectador.”

428

Mahmoud Darwish, Excerpt from “No Flag Flutters in the Wind” 931

“Nothing happens in tragedies today… The curtain is drawn, both poets and audience have left – there are no cedars or processions, no olive branches to greet those coming in by boat, weary from nosebleed and the lightness of the final act, as if passing from one fate to another, a fate written beyond the text, a woman of Greece playing the part of a woman of Troy, as easily white as black, neither broken nor exalted, and no one asks: “What will happen in the morning?” “What comes after this Homeric pause?” …as if this were a lovely dream in which prisoners of war are relieved by fairness of their long, immediate night, as if they now say: “We mend our wounds with salt” “We live near our memory” “We shall try out an ordinary death” “We wait for resurrection, here, in its home in the chapter that comes after the last…””

931 From his collection: Now as you Awaken, translated from the Arabic by Omnia Amin and Rick London, (Pacifica: Big Bridge Press, 2006).

429

Jean-Luc Godard Filmography932

1959 À bout de souffle (Breathless)

1960 Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier)

1961 "La Paresse" (Sloth)

1961 Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman)

1962 "Il Nuovo mondo" (The New World)

1962 Vivre sa vie (To Live One's Life) — a.k.a. My Life to Live

1963 "Le Grand escroc" (The Big Swindler)

1963 Le Mépris (Contempt)

1963 Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen)

1964 "Reportage sur Orly" (Reporting on Orly)

1964 Bande à part (Band of Outsiders)

1964 Une femme mariée, fragments d'un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc (A Married Woman: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White)

1965 "Montparnasse-Levallois"

1965 Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: One of Lemmy Caution's Strange Cases)

1965 Pierrot le fou (Crazy Pete)

1966 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)

1966 Made in U.S.A.

1966 Masculin Féminin, 15 faits précis (Masculine Feminine: 15 Precise Facts)

1967 "Anticipation, ou: l'amour en l'an 2000" (Anticipation: or Love in the Year 2000)

1967 "Caméra-oeil" (Camera-Eye)

1967 "L'amore (Andate e ritorno dei figli prodighi)" (Love: Departure and Return of the Prodigal Children)

1967 La Chinoise (The Chinese)

1967 Weekend

1968 Ciné-tracts

1968 Le Gai savoir (Happy Knowledge)

1968 One A.M. (One American Movie) unfinished

932 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Godard

430

1968 One Plus One or Sympathy for the Devil

1968 Un Film comme les autres (A Film Like the Others)

1969 British Sounds a.k.a. See You at Mao

1969 Communications unfinished

1969 Le Vent d'est (Wind from the East)

1969 Luttes en Italie (Struggles in Italy)

1969 Pravda

1970 Jusqu'à la victoire (Until Victory) unfinished

1971 Vladimir et Rosa (Vladimir and Rosa)

1972 Letter to Jane

1972 Tout va bien (Everything's Going Fine)

1974 Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere)

1975 Comment ça va? (How's It Going?)

1976 Numéro deux (Number Two)

1976 Six fois deux, sur et sous la communication (Six Times Two: On and Beneath Communication)

1978 France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (France/Tour/Detour/Two/Children)

1979 Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film 'Sauve qui peut (la vie)' (A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie))

1979 Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Save (Your Life) Who's Able / Run for (Your Life) If You Can) — a.k.a. Every Man for Himself (in North America) and Slow Motion (in the UK)

1982 Changer d'image (To Alter the Image)

1982 Lettre à Freddy Buache à propos d'un court-métrage sur la ville de Lausanne (Letter to Freddy Buache Regarding a Short Work About the Town of Lausanne)

1982 Passion

1982 Scénario du film Passion

1983 Petites notes à propos du film Je vous salue, Marie (Small Notes Regarding the Film Je vous salue, Marie)

1983 Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen)

431

1985 Détective (Detective)

1985 Je vous salue, Marie (I Salute Thee, Marie / Hail Mary)

1986 Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma (Grandeur and Decadence of a Small Movie Concern)

1986 Meetin' WA

1986 Soft and Hard

1987 "Armide"

1987 King Lear

1987 Soigne ta droite, une place sur la terre (Keep Your Right Up: A Place on the Earth)

1988 "Le Dernier mot/Les Français entendus par..." (The Last Word/The French as Understood by...)

1988 Closed Jeans: Marithé François Girbaud, série 1, 1-10 (Closed Jeans: Marithé François Girbaud: Series 1: 1-10)

1988 Closed: Marithé et François Girbaud, série 2, 1-7 (Closed: Marithé and François Girbaud: Series 2: 1-7)

1988 La Puissance de la parole (The Power of Speech)

1988 On s'est tous défilé (We All Filed Past)

1989 Le Rapport Darty (The Darty Report / The Darty Connection)

1990 Marithé François Girbaud: Métamorphojean

1990 Nouvelle Vague (film) (New Wave)

1991 Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero)

1993 Hélas pour moi (Alas for Me)

1993 Je vous salue Sarajevo (I Salute Thee Sarajevo / Hail Sarajevo)

1993 Les Enfants jouent à la Russie (The Kids Play Russian)

1994 JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December)

1995 2 x 50 ans de cinéma français (2 x 50 French Cinema Years)

1996 For Ever Mozart

1998 Histoire(s) du cinéma (History(s) of the Cinema) — 1988-1998

1999 Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century: The Old Place (with Anne-Marie Miéville)

2000 De l'origine du XXIe siècle pour moi (Of the Origin of the XXIst Century for

432

Me)

2001 Eloge de l'amour (Elegy for Love / Ode to Love) — a.k.a. In Praise of Love

2002 Liberté et patrie (Freedom and Fatherland) (with Anne-Marie Miéville)

2004 Moments Choisis (A collage taken by Godard from Histoire(s) du Cinema)

2004 Notre musique (Our Music)

2006 Prières pour refuzniks: 1 (Prayers for Refuseniks: 1)

2006 Prières pour refuzniks: 2 (Prayers for Refuseniks: 2)

2006 Vrai faux passeport (True False Passport)

2008 Socialisme (Socialism)

433

Works and Films Cited

• Abu-Lughod, Leila and Sa’di, Ahmad, editors. Nakba: Palestine 1948, and the

Claims of Memory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Adorno, Theodor:

• Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974).

• Aesthetic Theory translated by C. Lenhardt, (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1998).

Agamben, Giorgio: • Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life translated by Daniel Heller-

Roazen, (Stanford: The University Pres, 1998). • Remnants of Auschwitz, (New York: Zone Books, 2002). • Image et mémoire: Écrits sur l’image, la danse et le cinéma, (Paris:

Desclée de Brouwer, 2004).

• Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting translated by Graydon, C., (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

• Ali, Tariq. “Afghanistan: Mirage of the Good War, New Left Review 50, (March-

April 2008).

• Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy Vol. 1, translated by John D. Sinclair, (Oxford: The University Press, 1961).

• Amin, Samir. Le développement inégal: Essai sur les formations sociales du

capitalisme périphérique, (Paris: Minuit, 1973). Anidjar, Gil.

• The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, (Stanford: The University Press, 2003).

• “Once More, Once More, Derrida and the Arab and the Jew,” Introduction

to Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion, (London: Routledge, 2001). • Anonymous. A propos de Photo et Cie de Jean-Luc Godard » Le Photographe

(October 10, 1976), 17-23. Antonioini, Michelangelo:

• With Barbato, Andres. Chung Kuo Cina, (Torino: Einaudi, 1974).

434

• Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, the Complete Script, (New

York, Grove Press Inc., 1975). • “Die Heutige Krise: J-L Godard fragt Antonioni,” Michelangelo

Antonioni, edited by Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte, (Munich, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984).

• Écrits de Michelangelo Antonioni: Fare un film e per me vivere (Paris:

Éditions Images Modernes, 2003).

• Arafat, Yasser. interview with Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 715, 4-10, (November 2004) http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/715/re17.htm

• Aragon, Louis. “Qu-est ce l’art, Jean-Luc Godard?”, Les Lettres Françaises no.

1096 (September 9-15, 1965). http://tapin.free.fr/godard/aragon.html.

Arendt, Hannah: • On Violence (1969), (New York: A Harvest Book, 1970)

• Promise of Politics, (New York: Shocken, 2007).

• Artieres, P. ed. Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons: archives d’une lutte

1971-1972 (Paris: IMEC Editions, 2002). • Atack, Margaret. May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society,

Rethinking Representation (Oxford: The University Press, 1999). Aumont, Jacques:

• “Godard: The View and the Voice,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, no. 7, (Fall 1985), 42-65.

• Amnésies: Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard, (Paris: P.O.L.,

1999). Badiou, Alain:

• “Seven Variations on the Century,” Parallax, vol. 9 no. 2, (April 2003), 72-80.

• “The Cultural Revolution: the Last Revolution?,” positions: east asia

cultures critique vol.13, no. 3 (2005), 481-514.

• Interview with Eric Hazan, “Roads to Renegacy,” New Left Review 53 (September-October 2008).

435

Barthes, Roland:

• Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953). • “Phèdre” (1964) translated by Richard Howard, The Questions of Tragedy

edited by Arthur B. Coffin, (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1992). • “Écrivains, Intellectuels, Professeurs,” Tel Quel no. 47, (Fall 1971). • “Et alors, la Chine?” Le Monde, May 24, 1974, 13-14. • Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). • Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977-78) (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

• Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, translated by

Michelle and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Baudrillard, Jean:

• “Requiem for the Media” (1972), New Media Reader New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2003).

• Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).

• The Gulf War Did Not Take Place translated by Paul Patton, (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1995).

• “No Reprieve for Sarajevo,” translated by Patrice R iem ens initially published inLibération (January 8, 1994). http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-no-reprieve-for-sarajevo.html

• “The Spirit of Terrorism,” translated by Rachel Bioul, published in Le monde, (November 2, 2001). http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html

• Bellour, Raymond, and Brandy, Mary Lea, eds. Jean-Luc Godard, Son + Image

1974-1991, (New York: MoMA, 1992).

• Benhabib, Seyla. “The Legitimacy of the Human Rights,” Daedalus, vol. 137, No. 3, (Summer 2008), 94–104.

Benjamin, Walter:

436

• “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review vol. 1, no. 62 (July-August 1970).

• Das Passagen-Werk, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982).

• The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (London and New York: Verso,

2003).

• “Critique of Violence,” Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926, edited by Michael William Jennings, et. al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996).

• Benthall, Jonathan. Disasters, Relief and the Media, (London & New York: I.B.

Thauris & Co. Ltd., 1993). • Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

Bergala, Alain:

• Nul mieux que Godard, (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma livres, 1999). • “Godard tourne à Sarajevo, Cahiers du Cinéma, (July-August 2003), 37-

39.

• Bergson, Henri. Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (1939). http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bergson_henri/matiere_et_memoire/matiere_et_memoire.pdf .

• Besançon, Julien. Les murs ont la parole: Journal mural Mai 68 Sorbonne Odéon

Nanterre etc…, (Paris: Tchou, 2007). • Bichler, Shimshon and Nitzan, Jonathan. The Global Political Economy of Israel,

(London: Pluto Press, 2002). • Blanchot, Maurice. “Speaking Is Not Seeing,” The Infinite Conversation

translated by Susan Hanson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). • Bloch, Ernst, ed. Aesthetics and Politics, (London and New York: Verso, 1987). • Bonitzer, Pascal, Le regard et la voix, (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976).

• Bordet, Claude and Neuschwander, Claude. LIP 20 ans après (propos sur le

chômage), (Paris: Syros, 1993).

437

• Bordwell David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art: An Introduction, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001).

• Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones (1944).

www.zap.cl/cuentos/cuento158.html • Bourdieu, Pierre. “Sartre, l’invention de l’intellectuel total,” Libération March 31,

1983. • Bourseiller, Christophe. Les Maoïstes: La folle histoire des gardes rouges

français, (Paris: Plôn, 1996). • Bové, Paul A., ed. Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to

Power, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

• Bracken, Len. Guy Debord Revolutionary: A Critical Biography, (Venice: Feral House, 1997).

Brecht, Bertolt: • “The Radio as an Apparatus for Communication,” (1932). • Kraft und Schwäche der Utopie, in Gesammelte Werke VIII (Frankfurt am

Main: 1967).

• Brenez, Nicole, and Witt, Michael, eds. Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006).

• Brennan, Timothy. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right,

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

Breton, André: • Manifestes du Surréalisme, (Paris: France Loisirs, 1962). • “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” translated by Dwight MacDonald,

Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003).

• Brown, S. Royal, ed. Film Focus: Focus on Godard (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,

1972). • Browne, Nick, ed. The Politics of Representation, (Boston: Harvard University

Press, 1989). • Brunschwig, Léon. Descartes et Pascal: Lecteurs de Montaigne (Neuchâtel:

Balconnière, 1942).

438

• Buchloh, Benjamin. “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Fall 1984). • Burg Steven, and Shoup, Paul. The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict

and International Intervention, (New York: ME Sharpe, 2000).

• Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

• Cahiers de Cinéma No. 202 (June-July 1968). • Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 203 (August 1968). • Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 216-17 (October-November 1969).

• Cahiers du Cinéma, Nos. 268-269, “Images de Marque” special, (July-August 1976).

• Casarino, Cesare. “Surplus Common: A Preface,” In Praise of the Common: A

Conversation on Philosophy and Politics with Antonio Negri, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

• Caute, David. Communism and the French Intelligentsia (Oxford: Andre Deutsch,

1964).

• Caygill, Howard. “The Promise of Justice,” Radical Philosophy, no. 143, (May-June 2007).

Chaliand, Gérard:

• La résistance Palestinienne, (Paris: Seuil, 1970). • Revolution in the Third World (New York: Penguin, 1977). • Terrorismes et Guerrillas: Techniques Actuelles de la Violence, (Paris:

Flammarion, 1987). • Voyage dans vingt ans de guerillas (Paris: l’Aube 1987).

• Chief Seattle, “Chief Seattle’s Thoughts”

www.kyphilom.com/www/seattle.html. • Christofferson, Michael Scott. French Intellectuals Against the Left: The

Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (London: Berhahn Books, 2004). • Cinéthique no. 5 (September-October 1969).

439

• Coetzee, Iron Age, (London: Random House, 1990). • Cohen-Halimi, Michèle, and Cohen, Francis. “Juifs, martyrs, kamikazes: La

monstreuse capture; question à Jean-Luc Godard,” Les Temps Modernes No. 629, (November 2004-February 2005).

• Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema, (Minneapolis : University of Minesotta

Press, 2007). • Critchley, Simon. “I want to Die, I Hate My Life –Phaedra’s Malaise,” New

Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004). • Curnier, Jean-Paul. “Le noir du vivant, la cruauté, encore,” Lignes no. 3 (October

2000). • Dabashi, Hamid, ed. Dreams of a Nation, On Palestinian Cinema, (London and

New York: Verso, 2006). • Dallet, Sylvie. Guerres Révolutionnaires, histoire et cinéma (Paris, L’Harmattan,

1984). • Daney, Serge. “La thé(rr)orisé (Pédagogie godardienne)” Cahiers du Cinéma,

Nos. 262-263 (1976) translated by y Bill Krohn and Charles Cameron Ball http://home.earthlink.net/%7Esteevee/Daney_Godard.html.

Darwish, Mahmoud:

• Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut 1982 translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

• La Palestine comme métaphore, (Paris: Actes Sud, 1997). • The Adam of Two Edens, translated by Munir Akash and Daniel Moore,

(Syracuse: The University Press, 2001).

• The Burden of the Butterfly translated by Faudy Joudah, (Townsend: Cooper Canyon Press, 2006).

• Now as you Awaken, translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London,

(Pacifica: Big Bridge Press, 2006).

• Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter. Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

440

• De Certeau, Michel. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings translated by Tom Conley, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Debord, Guy:

• La Societé du Spectacle (1967), (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm.

• Situationist International Anthology edited by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: The

Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989). Debray, Régis:

• Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officielles du dixième anniversaire, (Paris: François Maspero, 1978), translated into English as, “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” New Left Review, 115, (May-June 1979).

• Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979), translated into

English as, Teaches, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals in Modern France (London: Verso, 1981).

• Delavaud, Gilles. “Composer (avec) le réel: Trois Chants sur Lénine,” Vertov,

L’invention du reel!, ed. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997).

Deleuze, Gilles: • “Trois questions sur Six fois deux: A propos de Sur et sous la

communication,” Cahiers du Cinéma No. 271 (November 1976). • Mille Plateaux, with Félix Guattari, (Paris: Minuit, 1980). • “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat,” Revue d'études Palestiniennes 10 (1984). • Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1984). • Dialogues with Claire Parnet, translated by Hugh Tomlison and Barbara

Habberjam, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). • Deleuze, Foucault translated by Sean Hand and Paul Bové, (Minneapolis:

The University of Minnesota Press, 1988). • “Les Indiens de la Palestine,” with Elias Sanbar, Libération, May 8-9

1989, in English in Two Regimes of Madness, (New York: Semiotext€, 2006).

441

• Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), translated as Negotiations, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

• The Logic of Sense translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale

(London: Athlon Press, 1990). • Conversation with Toni Negri, Futur Antérieur 1(Spring 1990) translated

byMartin Joughin. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm. • “Le Point de Vue: le pli, Leibniz, et le baroque” video-lecture from 1992,

vol. 1, filmed and distributed by Marielle Burkhalter. Available at the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

• The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley,

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

• Essays Critical and Clinical translated by Dan Smith and Michel Greco, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

• With Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus translated by Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: The University of Minesotta Press, 2001). • Movement-Image Cinema 1 translated by Hug Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjan, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001). • Time-Image Cinema 2 translated by Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta,

(Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001). • Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, translated by Mike Taormina

(New York: Semiotext(e), 2002). • Logique de la Sensation, (Paris: Seuil, 2002). • Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, translated by

Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007).

• Dérens, Jean-Arnault. “Islam in Bosnia,” Le Monde diplomatique, (September 2008). http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/10bosnia.

Derrida, Jacques:

• Of Grammatology translated by G. Spivak, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

• Ecographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).

442

• Et cetera (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.), (Paris: L’Herme, 2005).

• Diderot, Denis. Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works translated by Margaret

Jourdain, (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972). • Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images, malgré tout, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,

2003). • Dissanayake, Wimal and Gueratne, Anthony, eds. Rethinking Third Cinema,

(London: Routledge, 2003).

• Dose, François. History of Structuralism: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, translated by Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamanzov translated by David McDuff, (London: Penguin 2003).

• Douin, Jean-Luc. Godard (Paris: Rivages, 1989). • Doumani, Beshara. “Pour une autre représentation des Palestiniens,” Revue

d’études Palestiniennes 108 (Summer 2008). Ducrot, Oswald :

• Les mots du discours (Paris : Minuit, 1980). • Logique, structure, énonciation: Lecture sur le langage (Paris : Minuit,

1989).

• Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation translated by Aquilina Martinez, (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003).

• Elgey, Georgette, ed. Front Populaire, (Paris: Chêne, Agence Magnum, 1976).

• Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes translated by

Kondrad Kellen and Jean Lerner, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). • Enwezor, Okuwi. “Documentary/ Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the

Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 45, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 11-42.

• Enzensberger, Hans Manus. The Consciousness Industry, (New York: Continuum, 1974).

443

• Esselinck, Jean, and Toffetti, Sergio. Jean-Luc Godard: Un Hommage du Centre Culturl Français et du Museo Nazionale del Cinema de Turin (Torino: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1990).

• Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1967). • Fargier, Jean-Paul. “Histoire de la vidéo française: Structures et forces vives”

(1992), La vidéo, entre art et communication edited by Nathalie Magnan (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1997).

Faroult, David : • Mai 68 ou le cinéma en suspens, with Gérard Leblanc (Paris: Syllepse,

1998). • Doctoral thesis, “Avant-garde cinématographique et avant-garde politique:

Cinéthique et le “groupe” Dziga Vertov,” Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, (2002).

• Fields, Belden. Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York and London: Praeger, 1998),

• Finkelstein, Norman. “Solidarity with Palestinians. The Coming Break Up of American Zionism,” conference in Toronto on November 29, 2007, available at http://www.zcommunications.org/zaudio/2455.

• Finkelstein, Norman. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, (London: Verso, 2006).

• Firk, Michèle. Michèle Firk, écrits réunis par ses camarades, (Paris: Eric Losfeld,

1970). • Flaxman, Gregory, ed. The Brain is the Screen, (Minneapolis: The University of

Minnesota Press, 2000). • Fo, Dario. Le commedie di Dario Fo, (Torino: Einaudi, 1977). • Foe, Devin. “Introduction,” October 118 (Fall 2006).

• Foster, Hal. “The Artist as Ethnographer,” The Return of the Real (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1996). Foucault, Michel:

• La volonté de savoir, (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). • Écrits Complets, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).

444

• The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79,

(New York: Palgrave, 2008).

• Truth and Discourse, lectures at Berkeley in November 1983, http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/. In Spanish: Discurso y verdad en la antigua Grecia, translated by Fernando Fuentes Megías, (Barcelona: Paidós, 2004).

• Interview with Paul Rabinow in May 1984.

http://www.foucault.info/foucault/interview.html.

• Gallagher, Tom. The Balkans in the New Millennium: In the Shadow of War and Peace, (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

• Gavi, Philippe, Victor, Pierre and Sartre, Jean-Paul, On a raison de se révolter,

(Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Genet, Jean:

• “Quatre Heures a Chattila,” Revue d’études palestiniennes, special issue dedicated to Genet and Palestine, (January 1983).

• “Une rencontre avec Jean Genet,” Revue d’études Palestiniennes 21

(November 1986). • L’ennemi déclaré: textes et entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

• Prisoner of Love, (New York: Wesleyan, 1992).

• Gettino, Octavio and Solanas, Fernando. “Towards a Third Cinema:N otes and

Experiences for the Development of a Cinema ot Liberation the Third World” http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/4669.

• Gilroy, Paul. Postmodern Melancholia (The Welleck Library Lectures), (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Godard, Jean-Luc:

• Script of Le Gai savoir: Mot-à-mot d’un film encore trop réviso, (Paris: Union Ecrivains, 1969), unpaginated.

• With Gorin, by Carroll, Kent E. “Film and Revolution: Interview with the

Dziga Vertov Group,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 83 (October 1970).

• Godard, Jean-Luc. “Pratique révolutionnaire,” Cinéthique nos. 9-10, (Fall 1971).

445

• With Gorin, by Goodwin, Michael and Marcus, Greil. “The Dziga Vertov Group in America: An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin,” Double Feature: Movies and Politics (New York: Outerbridge and Lazard, 1972).

• By Durand, Phillippe. “Jean-Luc Godard fait le point,” Cinéma Pratique

93, (January 1973). • By Paula Jacques, June 22, 1976. “Les après-midi de France Culture.”

• By Wilfried Reichhart, “Interview mit Jean-Luc Godard” (AUS:

Filmkritik Nor. 242, Feb 1977), reprinted in Video Apparat/Medium, Kunst, Kultur, ein internationaler Reader ed. Siegfried Zielinski, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992).

• Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, (Paris : Albatros, 1980).

• Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, (Paris: L’Étoile et Cahiers du

cinéma, 1985).

• “Jean-Luc Godard – La légende du siècle,” Les Inrockuptibles no. 170, (October 1998), 20-28.

• With Yousef Ishanghpour, Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du siècle,

(Tours: Farrago, 2000).

• By Jean-Michel Frodon, “Jean-Luc Godard et Notre musique, Juste une conversation,” Cahiers du Cinéma (May 2004).

• With Stéphane Zagdanski (France Culture, November 18, 2004)

http://parolesdesjours.free.fr/gozag.htm

• With Stéphane Zagdanski, “Le cinéma, est-il une imposture?” (selected passages), Le Nouvel Observateur No. 2089 (18-24 November, 2004), 24-26.

• With Elias Sanbar, “Jean-Luc Godard – Elias Sanbar,” Politis, Sunday

January 16, 2005, http://www.politis.fr/article1213.html.

• By Frédéric Bonnaud, “Occupational Hazzards,” Film Comment Vol. 41, No. 1 (January-Februray 2005).

• By Michael Witt, Sight and Sound (June 2005), 28-32.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/313/.

446

• By Oliver Bombarda and Julien Welter for Cahiers du Cinéma on November 2007, http://www.cahiersducinema.com/article1424.html.

• Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: an Approach to a Theory of Symbols

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). • Gorin, Jean-Pierre, interview by Christian Braad Thomsen, Jump Cut no. 3

(1974), 17-19.

• Gowers, Andrew, and Walter, Tony. Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution (London: Butler and Tanner, 1990).

. Goytisolo, Juan:

• Cuadernos de Sarajevo, (Madrid: Aguilar, 1993). • El bosque de las letras, (Madrid: Santillana, 1995).

• “Qué debemos conmemorar?” El País, April 20, 2008

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/debemos/conmemorar/elpepiopi/20080420elpepiopi_4/Tes

• “Polvo y Cenizas,” El País, July 27 2008,

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/Polvo/cenizas/elpepiopi/20080727elpepiopi_5/Tes

• Graham, Stephen. “Lessons in Urbicide,” New Left Review 19, (January-February

2003), 63-77. • Gramsci, Antonio. “State and Civil Society,” Selections from the Prison

Notebooks edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

• Groys, Boris, Art Power, (MIT Press, 2008). • Guillaume-Grimaud, Geneviève. Le cinéma du front Populaire (Paris: Lherminier

1986). • Habshneh, Khadija. “Palestinian Revolution Cinema,” This Week in Palestine

(January 2008) http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2355&ed=149&edid=149#

• Harcourt, Peter. “Bridges: Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique,” Cinéaction 65,

(January 2005), 62-63.

• Harkabi, Yoshafat. El Terrorismo en la estrategia árabe, Edited by Dror-Kibutz Hameujad (Tel Aviv: Israel, 1968).

447

• Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, (Edinburgh:

University Press, 2001). • Harvey, Silvia. May ’68 and Film Culture, (London: British Film Institute, 1980). • Heidegger, Martin. “The World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology

and Other Essays, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115-136. • Heude, Remi-Pierre. L’image-marque (Paris: Eyrolles, 1989). • Hocquenghem, Guy. Lettre ouverte a ceux qui sont passés du col mao au Rotary

(Paris: Agone, 2003). • Hori, Junji. “La Géopolitique de l’image dans les Histoire(s) du Cinéma de Jean-

Luc Godard.” http://www.desk.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/download/es_3_Hori.pdf.

• Ignatieff, Michael. The Rights Revolution, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000).

• Ishaghpour, Youssef and Godard, Jean-Luc. Archéologie du cinéma et mémorie

du siècle (Tours: Farrago, 2000). • Issari, M. Ali, and Doris A. Paul, What is cinéma vérité? (London: The Scarecrow

Press, 1979). • Jakobson, Roman. On Language edited by Linda Waugh, (Harvard: The

University Press, 1995). • James, Gareth, ed. The Tvideopolitics of Jean-Luc Godard, (Berlin: James and

Zeyfang, 2003). Jameson, Frederic:

• “Historicism in The Shining,” (1981) http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0098.html.

• “Periodizing the Sixties,” Social Text, No. 9/10, (Spring-Summer 1984). • “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social

Text, (Fall 1986), 65-88. • Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1991).

448

• The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

• Brecht and Method, (London: Verso, 1998).

• Jay, Martin. “Mourning a metaphor: The Revolution is Over,” Parallax 9:2,

(April 2003), 17-20. • Jonsson, Stefan. “Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the

Media in the Age of Globalization,” Nordicom Review 1-2, (2004), Special issue of the 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, edited by Ulla Carlsson. http://www.nordicom.gu.se/common/publ_pdf/157_057-068.pdf

• Joselit, David. Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007). • Joxe, Alain. “Empire of Disorder,” Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader,

edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001).

• Juillard, Jacques, ed. Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979).

• Kant, Immanuel. “The Contest of the Faculties,” Kant: Political Writings,

(Cambridge: The University Press, 1991).

• Karmitz, Marin. “Towards a Proletarian Cinema: An Interview with Marin Karmitz,” Cinéaste Vol. IV, no. 2 (Fall 1970), 20-25.

• Keenan, Thomas. “Mobilizing shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2-3

(Spring/Summer 2004). • Khan, Jean François. “Les Feddayeen, victimes de l’utopie,” L’Express, January

1971, 18-24. Klein, Naomi:

• No Logo, (New York: Harper and Collins, 2000).

• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (Toronto: Knopf, 2007).

• Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the

German Film, (Princeton: The University Press, 1947). Kraus, Chris:

• Aliens and Anorexia, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2000).

449

• With Lotringer, Sylvere, eds. Hatred of Capitalism a Semiotext(e) Reader, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).

• Torpor, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006).

• Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October Vol. 1, (Spring

1976), 56. Kristeva, Julia.

• Des Chinoises, (Paris: Édition des Femmes, 1974).

• “The Subject in Process,” The Tel Quel Reader, edited by Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

• Hannah Arendt, Life is a Narrative (Alexander Lectures), (Toronto: The University Press, 2001).

• Kuntzel, Thierry. “Le défilement,” Cinéma: Théories, Lectures edited by

Dominique Noguez (Paris: Kliincksieck, 1973).

• Latour, Bruno, editor. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2002).

• Le Blanc, Gérard. “Sur trois films du Dziga Vertov Group,” VH 101 no. 6

(September 1972).

• Le Goff, Jean-Pierre. Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998).

• Lefort, Claude. Un Homme en trop. Réflexions sur “L’archipiel du Goulag,” (Paris: Seuil, 1976).

• Lenin, Vladimir Ilych. What is to be done? (1901-02)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/. Lesage, Julia:

• “Godard and Gorin's Le Vent d’est: Looking at a Film Politically,” Jump Cut, No. 4 (November-December 1974).

• “Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics, 1967-1972,” Jump Cut no. 28, (April

1983).

• Lévinas, Emmanuel. Entre nous: Essays on Thinking of the Other translated by Barbara Harshav and Michael Smith, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

450

• Levy, Bernard-Henry, La Barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Grasset, 1977). • Liauzu, Claude. “Le tiersmondisme des intellectuels en accusation: Le sens d'une

trajectoire,”Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, No. 12 (Oct. - Dec., 1986), 74-75. • Linhardt, Robert. L’Établi (Paris: Minuit, 1978). • Lipton, Joshua. “Ron Haviv: Shooting War,” Columbia Journalism Review, (July

2002).

• Losfeld, Eric. Du rôle de l’intellectuel dans le mouvement révolutionnaire selon Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernard Pingaud, Dionys Mascolo (Paris: Le terrain vague, 1971).

Loshitsky, Yosefa:

• The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertlolucci, (Detroit: Wane State University Press, 1995).

• “Pathologizing Memory,” Third Text 20, no. 3-4 (May 2006).

• Lubin, Alex. “We are all Israelis: The Politics of Colonial Comparisons,” South

Atlantic Quarterly 107, (Fall 2008). • Lucas, Sarah, ed. Highlights, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised

2004). Lyotard, Jean-François:

• Discours, Figure, (Paris: Klincksiek, 1971). • “The Other’s Rights,” On Human Rights, edited by Stephen Shute and

Susan Hurley, (New York: BasicBooks, 1993). • Political Writings translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul,

(Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993). • The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, (Minneapolis: The University of

Minnesota Press, 1988).

• MacBean, James Roy. Film and Revolution, (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1975).

• MacCabe, Colin. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, with Mick Eaton and Laura

Mulvey (London: British Film Institute, 1980).

451

• Macherey, Pierre. Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, (Paris: François Maspero, 1966).

• Maire, Edmond and Piaget, Charles, eds. LIP 73 (Paris: Seuil, 1973). • Manceaux, Michèle . Les Maos en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). • Mao Tse Tung, On Practice and Contradiction presented by Žižek, (London:

Verso, 2007).

• Marie, Michel. “Godard et le mythe de la guerre révolutionnaire.” Guerres révolutionnaires, histoire et cinema, edited by Sylvie Dallet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984).

• Marrati, Paola. “The Catholicism of Cinema: Gilles Deleuze on Image and

Belief,” Religion and Media edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: The University Press, 2001).

• Massumi, Brian. “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Positions: East Asia Cultures

Critique vol. 13, no. 1, (2005), 31-48. McDonough, Tom,

• Ed. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, (Cambridge, Massachussets: the MIT Press, 2004).

• The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of

Contestation in Postwar France 1945-1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: October, 2007).

• Meisner, Maurice. Marxism, Maoism and Utopianism (Wisconsin: The University

of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

• Michelson, Annette. “The Man with the Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Artforum, March 1972, 62-72.

• Miéville, Anne-Marie, “Un entretien avec la réalisatrice: Il faut parler de ce que

l’on connaît,” by Daniele Heyman, Le Monde 18, January 1989. Mondzain, Marie José.

• Image, icône, économie: Les Sources Byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1998) translated by Rico Franses as Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford: The University Press, 2004).

• L’image: peut-elle tuer? (Paris: Bayard, 2002).

452

• Monk, Daniel. The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian Conflict –Terrible Episodes, (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002).

• Mouffe, Chantal, ed. “Gramsci and Marxist Theory edited by Mouffe (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). • Muñoz, Juan Miguel. “Acre, ensayo de un pogromo,” El País, October 20, 2008.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Acre/ensayo/pogromo/elpepuint/20081020elpepiint_5/Tes.

Nancy, Jean-Luc.

• Inoperative Community, (Minneapolis: University of Minesotta Press, 1991).

• Au fond des images, (Paris: Gallimard 2004), 24.

• Being Singular Plural, (Stanford: The University Press, 2000).

• Nassar, Issam. “Familial Snapshots, Representing Palestine in the Work of the

First Local Photographers,” History & Memory 12 no. 2 (Winter/Fall 2000). • Nietzsche, Le Gai savoir V. 346, Marx, Economie et Philosophie, Pléiade II, 88-

90. John Berger, The Look of Things, edited by Nikos Tangos (New York: The Viking Press, 1972).

• Nizan, Paul. Aden Arabie, (Paris: Gallimard, 1931). • Nordmann, Charlotte Bourdieu/ Rancière: La Politique entre sociologie et

philosophie, (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006). • Oppler, Ellen C. editor. Picasso’s Guernica, Norton Critical Studies in Art

History (New York, London: Syracuse University, 1988). • Pappe, Ilán. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007). • Pasolini, Pier Paolo. L’expérience hérétique: Langue et cinéma (Paris: Traces,

1976), 41-49. Originally published in Italian as: Empirismo eretico, (Roma: Ando Garanti, 1972).

• Péguy, Charles. Clio: Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne, (Paris:

Gallimard, 1932).

• Pinckney Stetkevych, Suzanne. “Structuralist Interpretations of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Critique and New Directions,”Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (April 1983), 85-107.

453

• Pingaud, Bernard. “Je, Vous, Il,” Esprit 7-8, (July-August 1958), 91-101. • Pliny the Elder, Natural History

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgibin/ptext?lookup=Plin.+Nat.+toc • Portinari, Beatriz, “La nueva trama de Sarajevo,” El País, October 18, 2008,

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/narrativa/nueva/trama/Sarajevo/elppgl/20081018elpbabnar_1/Tes.

• Posnock, Ross. “Assessing the Oppositional: Contemporary Intellectual

Strategies,” American Literary History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Pring 1989), 147-171.

• Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations, A People’s History of the Third World, (London and New York: The New Press, 2007).

• Rabinowitz, Paula. They Must Be Represented (Verso: London New York, 1994).

• Racine, Jean. Phèdre translated by Margaret Rawlings, (London and New York:

Penguin Classics, 1992).

Rancière, Jacques : • La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001). • “Ten Theses on Politics” translated by Davidd Panagia, Theory and Event,

vol. 5 no. 3, 2001.

• Le Destin des images (Paris: La fabrique, 2003), translated in English as The Future of the Image, (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

• Malaise dans l’esthétique, (Paris: Galilée, 2004). • The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by

Gabriel Rockwell (New York: Continuum, 2004).

• Interview by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello in 2007, available at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html#_ftn5.

• Raunig, Gerald. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth

Century, translated by Aileen Derieg (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). • Reinhardt, Tania. The Roadmap to Nowhere: Palestine Since 2003, (London:

Verso 2006). • Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: The University of

Minnesota Press, 2004).

454

• Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London

and New York: Verso, 2005). • Ricciardi, Alessia. “The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorrealism From Bazin

to Godard,” Romantic Review, (May-November 2006). • Rimbaud, Arthur. The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to be Good,

translated by Wyatt Mason (New York: The Modern Library, 2003). • Rocha, Glauber. The Aesthetic of Hunger (1965)

http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/t_estetica.html

• Rodowick, D.N. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001).

• Ronell, Avita. “The Testamentary Whimper,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103

nos. 2-3, (Spring/Summer 2004).

• Rose, Sven-Erik. “Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and Image,” Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory edited by David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson. (Rocherster and New York: Camden House, 2008).

• Rosen, Philip, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, (Columbia:

The University Press, 1986).

• Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

• Rossanda, Rossana. “Les Intellectuels Révolutionnaires et l’Union Soviétique,”

Les Temps Modernes No. 332 (March 1974).

• Rotheberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Said, Edward:

• Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979).

• Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, (New York: Vintage, 1989).

• The Question of Palestine, (New York: Vintage, 1992).

• The Politics of Dispossession, (New York: Vintage, 1995).

455

• With Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

• Edward Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” Deakin Lecture, Melbourne 19 May, 2001. http://www.acij.uts.edu.au/archives/profprac/PublicRoleofWriters.pdf

Sanbar, Elias :

• “Vingt et un ans après,” Traffic no. 1 (1991). • Figures du Palestinien: Identité des origines, identité du devenir, (Paris:

Gallimard, 2004).

• Les Palestiniens, Photographie d’une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours (Paris: Hazan, 2004).

• Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture Reader edited by P.

Adams Sitney, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000). Sartre, Jean-Paul:

• With photographs by Henri Cartier Bresson, “D’une Chine à l’autre” (Paris: Éditions Delpire, 1954).

• Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” Jean-Paul Sartre:

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2001).

• What is Literature? (1947) translated by Bernard Frechtam (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965).

• Situations, VIII Autour de 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

• Sayigh, Rosemarie. Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed

Press, 1979).

• Scemama, Céline. Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: La force faible d’un art (Paris: L’harmattan, 2006).

• Schiff, Zeev, and Rothstein, Raphael. Fedayin: The Story of the Palestinian

Guerillas (London: Vallentine and Mitchell, 1972).

• Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, And Recovery, transl. by Jefferson Chase, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).

456

• Sells, A Michael and Qureshi, Emran, editors. The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

• Senghor, Leopold Sedar. L’Anthologie d’un nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de

langue française, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). Shohat, Ella:

• With Stam, Robert. Unthinking Eurocentrism, (London: Routledge, 1994).

• “Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern/North African Film and Video,” http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/Jouvert/v1i1/shohat.htm

Silverman, Kaja:

• Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

• With Farocki, Harun. Speaking about Godard, (New York: The University Press, 1998).

• “The Author as Receiver,” October No. 96, (Spring 2001), 17-34.

• Skoller, Jeffrey. “Reinventing Time or the Continuing Adventures of Lemmy

Caution in Godard's Germany Year 90 Nine Zero,” Film Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 3 (Spring, 1999).

• Smith, Graham. “Urbicide,” New Left Review 19 (January-February 2003).

Sontag, Susan:

• Styles of Radical Will (1969), (New York: Picador, 2002). • On Photography (1977), (New York: Picador, 2001).

• Where the Stress Falls, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

• Interview with Evan Chan, “Against Postmodernism. A Conversation

With Susan Sontag” (2001). http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1chan.txt.

• Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,

2004).

• Soueif, Ahadaf. Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

457

• Spanish Ministry of Culture about the restoration of the Vijecnica http://www.tresculturas.org/prensa_bloque1_2.cfm?id=889.

Spivak, Gayatari Chakravorty. • “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,

edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988).

• “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2-3

(Spring/Summer 2004).

• Stanner, Marcus. “A symbol of hope is reborn in Mostar,” The Independent, April 18, 2004. http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=512234.

• Stein, Rebecca and Swedenburg, Ted, eds. Palestine, Israel and the Politics of

Popular Culture, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). • Steyerl, Hito. “The Uncertainty of Documentarism,”

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=374&Itemid=183.

• Temple, Michael, ed. Forever Godard, (London: Black Dog Publishing and Tate

Modern, 2004).

• Tel Quel no. 59, (Fall 1974).

• Tel Quel nos. 71-73 (Fall 1977).

• Hobbes, Thomas. “War of All against All” (1651). http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/decive1.htm.

• Tophoven, Rolf. Fedayin –Guerilla ohne Grenzen: Geschichte, soziale Struktur

und politische Ziele der palaestinensischen Widerstandsorganisationen Die israeliesche Konter-Guerilla (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Köllen Druck und Verlag, 1973).

• Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov edited by Annette

Michaelson, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

• Virilio, Paul, with Lotringer, Silvere. The Accident of Art, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005).

• Wajman, Gérard. Les Temps Modernes 65, (Spring 1999), 121-127.

Waltzer, Michael:

458

• Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New

York: Basic Paperbooks, 2000). • Radio Capsule, NPR. December 29, 2005 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5073836.

Weil, Simone:

• Notes sur la suppression générale des partis politiques (1947) (Paris: Climats, 2006).

• “Lettre à Brenanos” (1948), http://www.paris-philo.com/article-

6293570.html

• La Condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).

• Écrits historiques et politiques, (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

• Gravity and Grace, (London: Routledge, 2002).

• Oppression and Liberty (1955), (London: Routledge, 2001). Weizman, Eyal:

• Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, (London: Verso, 2007).

• With Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, brochure for the exhibition and

project in BOZAR, Brussels, from October 31, 2008 to April 1st, 2009. Available at: www.decolonizing.ps/visitors.pdf

• Witt, Michael. Ph.D. thesis “On Communication: The Work of Anne-Marie

Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard as ‘Sonimage’ from 1973-1979.” Defended at Bath University, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages in 1998.

• Wolf, Ernst. De l’éthique à la justice: Langage et politique dans la philosophie de

Lévinas, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). • Wollen, Peter. Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London:

Verso, 1982). Žižek, Slavoj:

• “NATO, the Left Hand of God,” Nettime, June 29, 1999. http://www.lacan.com/Žižek-nato.htm.

• Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002).

459

• “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face” (2005) http://www.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm

• Visión de Paralaje, (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).

• “The Disturbing Sounds of the Turkish March,” In These Times,

November 6, 2007. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3393/the_disturbing_sounds_of_the_turkish_march.

• In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso 2008).

• Violence, (London and New York: Verso, 2008).

• 1976 press clippings book at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) at the

Bibliothèque Nationale in France. Some films consulted and cited:

• Abu Ali, Mustapha: They Don’t Exist, 1974 • Álvarez, Santiago: Now!, 1965

• Antonioni, Michelangelo: Zabriskie Point, 1968

The Passenger: Professione Reporter, 1974

• Film collective SLON: Loin de Vietnam, 1968

• Cuarón, Alfonso: Children of Men, 2006

• Farocki, Harun: Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, 1995 • Flaherty, Robert: Nanook of the North, 1922 • Gitai, Amos: Kadosh, 1999

Free Zone, 2005

• Godard, Jean-Luc: La Chinoise, 1966 Weekend, 1967

Le Gai savoir, 1968 One plus one, 1968 Lotte in Italia, 1969 Pravda, 1969 One AM, 1969

Tout va bien, 1972

460

Letter to Jane, 1972 Ici et ailleurs, 1974

Comment ça va?, 1975 Numéro Deux, 1976

Six fois deux : Sur et sous la communication, 1976 Passion, 1982 Je vous salue, Marie, 1985 Soft and Hard, 1985 Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma, 1987 On s’est tous défilés, 1987 Je vous salue Sarajevo, 1993 Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 L’origine du XXIème siècle, 1999 Notre musique, 2004 Vrai/Faux Passeport, 2005 Prière pour les refuzniks I and II, 2006

• Habashneh, Khadijeh, Children, Nonetheless, 1980 • David W. Griffith, Intolerance, 1916

• Karmitz, Marin: La Cause du peuple, 1972

• Khelifi, Michel et

Siva, Eyval: Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, 2004

• Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah, 1985

Sobibor, 2001

• Marker , Chris: A bien tôt, j’espère, 1968 On vous parle de Chili, 1971

On vous parle de Paris, 1971 Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977

Le tombeau d’Alexandre, 1992

• Mer Khamis, Juliano: Arna’s Children, (2001)

• Medvekine, Alexander: Le Bonheur, 1934

• Otolith Group : Otolith I, 2003 Otolith II, 2007 Nervus Rerum, 2008

• Resnais, Alain: La Nuit et le brouillard, 1955

461

Hiroshima mon amour, 1959

• Rossellini, Roberto: Roma, cittá apperta, 1945 Germania Anno Zero, 1948

• Rouch, Jean: Les maîtres fous, 1954

Moi, un noir, 1958 La pyramide humaine, 1959 Chronique d’un été à Paris, 1960

• Suleiman, Elias: Divine Intervention, 2001

• Sissako, Abderrahmane: Bamako, 2006 • Vertov, Dziga: Man With a Movie Camera, 1928

Three Songs About Lenin, 1933

• Winterbottom, Michael: Welcome to Sarajevo, 1998