Jean-Luc Godard: Making Cinema on the Page

Jean-Luc Godard began to write for film magazines at a very young age. He was twenty years old when he published his first articles in La Gazette du cinéma, the newsletter of the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin in Paris, run by Eric Rohmer. This Gazette had an ephemeral lifespan – five issues in total – and Godard contributed six articles to it from June to October 1950, under the pseudonym of Hans Lucas (Jean-Luc rendered in German). His first article for Cahiers du cinéma dates from January 1952 (with an article on No Sad Songs for Me by Rudolph Maté). It was the start of a long collaboration with the journal founded by Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and André Bazin in 1951. A critic throughout the 1950s, Godard would also appear in Cahiers as an interviewer (as evidenced by, among others, his major interview with Antonioni, when Red Desert was released in 1964). Of course, he was then, in turn, himself interviewed by the journal, where he often modified the rules of the conventional interview, as evidenced for example by his “non-responses” to questions from Cahiers in issue no. 402 (December 1987), upon the release of Soigne ta droite. He was also entrusted with the organisation of special issues – such as issue no. 300 of Cahiers du cinéma, published in May 1979, to which we will return.

My purpose here, however, is not to propose a history of Jean-Luc Godard’s participation in journals – whether specialised film journals or not – but of privileging some of his interventions in order to explore more generally a relationship that has since become particularly important for him: the evolving, contentious, polemical, formal relationship between the printed image and the written word, between the reproduced photograph and the text that accompanies it. In other words, it is less Godard as film critic who interests us here than the positions he takes within the inseparably visual and scriptural space of an article dealing with cinema. Before that, however, it is worth recalling the main thesis stated by Godard on the work of the critic in the 1950s and 1960s: namely that writing was already a way of making film. For Godard, this was true of the future authors of the New Wave when they wrote for Cahiers or for the magazine Arts: “Writing was making films. This originality which was ours was not found afterwards”.¹ But it was also true of a critic like Bazin, who “was a filmmaker who did not make films, but who made cinema by talking about it, like a peddler.”² Gilles Deleuze noted that this analogy between criticism and filmmaking was not self-evident, since it tended to lack the specificity of the practice of writing – with its possible theoretical extension – even though this “is something that is done, no less than its object” (that is to say the cinema).³, p. 9. In a letter to Jean-Pierre Gorin reproduced in the same issue, Godard calls for a “film journal that would be a little scientific, where film people would have the desire and the need not to express their impressions but to print [imprimer] their expressions.” Ibid., p. 12.] This reminder of a distinction between theory and practice is judicious insofar as it calls into question an implicit and ruinous hierarchy which has a long life (and its second life is more alive than its first). I would prefer, however, to dwell on another angle to shed light on the way in which Godard considers the function of a film journal, and to explore the correlative ways in which he intervenes in it as the editor of a special issue, as an interviewee or quite simply as a reader.

Cahiers du cinéma issue no. 300, cover page (special issue edited by Jean-Luc Godard)

Make Your Cinema

Let us first note the existence of a kind of lamentation in Godard, which began to be expressed in the 1970s. Namely, that film journals did not really do their job, that they were not doing all that they could do. What is it that is lacking in this critical activity? Three characteristics come up regularly to explain this disappointment with respect to what is written and read on the cinema. Firstly, at the level of the content of the texts themselves, Godard feels that they lack argumentative elements resulting from a precise description of what has been seen. Not necessarily “impressions”, which would refer to the subjective visions of the critic, but “expressions” which would go beyond a discourse written in the first person, with a view to building a bridge between the internal aesthetics of a film and its historical context. This presupposes, correlatively, the possibility of summoning images other than those of the cinema – television news, fashion magazines, documentaries, etc. – in order to specifically study how the transferral mechanisms from one medium to another are carried out (the cinema sometimes imitates television which in turn is inspired by advertising, etc.). This implies, even more fundamentally, taking the time to look at a film image and knowing how to weave a link with what is outside the image, a little like a doctor looks at an X-ray to diagnose the illness from which his patient is suffering. As Godard declares in issue no. 300 of Cahiers: “I believe that it is only doctors who need to look at an X-ray from time to time to know what the disease is about. […] But in any case, not journalists to talk to their readers, nor film people to give news to spectators.”⁴ A reproach that Godard would formulate again twenty years later, this time with regards to another field, sport. At least, he essentially states, sports journalists talk in detail about what they saw in the competition. Hence the habit of always reading “a bit of L’Équipe”, the famous sports daily: “In the report that I read, says Godard, I can really find out what happened the day before. I can also find the enthusiasm that distinguishes sports journalism from others.” And it can establish a bridge with the demands of criticism according to Bazin, which has been lost today: “It was like André Bazin in Cahiers du cinéma: he explained well, in a very well-argued way.”⁵

“Giving news to the spectators” implies knowing how to communicate with them. Godard frequently insists on this in the period after the creation of the Groupe Dziga Vertov: we must go beyond an overly cinephilic relationship with films, which goes hand in hand with a fetishisation of the figure of the auteur, which is itself increasingly condemned by Godard in the wake of the events of May 1968. It is not a matter of denying that a work bears a signature, that it offers an invention of forms belonging to a singular author; rather, it is the “author function” that must be relentlessly denounced, that is to say the confinement of the act of creation to a vain and omniscient subject, a shadow cast by the artist over his own creations which short-circuits in advance any link with what is outside of the film, or what Godard prefers to call its “elsewhere”. This elsewhere is not necessarily remote, since it also – and perhaps above all – refers to the everyday life of those who go to the cinema. It is this that awakens the “desire to really talk about the film with the spectators, whether they are journalists or not. [Moreover] everyone is their own journalist and their own columnist according to how they recount their day, according to how they imagine it, how they make their ‘little cinema’ about their own material and daily activity.”⁶ was not happy because I went to Cahiers the way others would go to a café or a billiard hall.” See Godard par Godard: Les Années Cahiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), pp. 24-25.] Talking about a film, in other words, not only implies talking about cinema; it ensures above all that the procession of images is connected to a history in the present, in the broader sense of the term. Not simply the upsetting or burning news items of a given moment, but the singular relationship that each of us maintains with this daily topicality. The “little cinema” in fact designates nothing else: not the wish that anyone can become a filmmaker, but the possibility that anyone going to the cinema questions themselves in return about their everyday life, without sacralised mediation (the reification of the director) nor a sacralising procedure (cinephilic passion).

The Daily Life of a Magazine

As such, cinema becomes the privileged vector of a union between life and visual art. And writing about cinema should facilitate the realisation of this union, which is certainly never completely accomplished. The fact remains that the ideal magazine that Godard calls for is inscribed in what we could call a local utopia: it is no longer a matter, as it was for the great pioneers of cinema, of celebrating cinema as the site for a global emancipation of the masses (cinema as a new art and as a new humanity); it is, more modestly but with a similar concern for its effectiveness, to ensure that the cinema has an impact, however minimal, on people’s lives. For Godard, this effect of the cinema outside of cinema, engendered by the space of the magazine, is conceivable provided that its contributors are themselves able to communicate with each other. The lament made by Godard about the future of magazines is also based on the following observation: the fact that those who put them out do not sufficiently form a community of individuals for whom the cinema would have a vital, even elementary, function, such as transcribing the dialogue of a film to analyse its era, or using it as a compass for friendship, love, work, etc. The goal of a newspaper editor is not only to know how to talk about films to viewers; it is also to ensure that the editors talk to each other, that a set of exchanges is created between its different members. This was what happened at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s: permanent discussions in the magazine’s offices, the possibility of going there at any time, of spending a lifetime at Cahiers…⁷

Moreover, “the strength of the nouvelle vague, was the same”, as he writes in no. 300; in fact, it takes at least two people for there to be movement and “something face to face”. This is true on several levels: artistically, politically, technically… This is the reason for the Lumières’ “triumph” over Edison. Edison “was all alone. Lumière, there were two of them: Auguste was looking at something with his brother. At Watergate, they were two… plus a third. There is a moment when the strength of people is when they form a group.” The nouvelle vague, precisely, “was three or four people who talked about cinema among themselves and it blew everything up.” The success of the major American studios can be explained by this same rule: seeing and talking to each other all the time, mixing work and life, cinema and ordinary existence: “The screenwriters talked a great deal among themselves, in their offices […] They saw each other every day.”⁸ It is probably not insignificant that Godard decided to include in the first part of this special issue of Cahiers a series of letters posted to a few acquaintances, friends or not: addresses to the other which testify more to a scattering of forces than to a dynamic solicitation with the goal of reconfiguring a collective around a magazine. Significant in this respect is the first sentence of the first of these letters, which is addressed to Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana, respectively “editor-in-chief” and “manager” of Cahiers du cinéma (according to the journal’s masthead). This initial sentence relates to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of developing a series of several “somewhat special” issues in a short period of time: “As I let you know on the telephone, this time I really think that it is impossible to produce three or four times a year a somewhat special issue of the Cahiers”.⁹

Here, the “real conditions in which a film magazine can be read and bought” in the late 1970s are evoked; conditions that are no longer in line with what they used to be – when a collective of editors spoke to a community of readers – and the very notion of a “special issue” is ironically called into question by Godard who asks in a surreptitious way, between the lines: but what would a film journal be that was not “somewhat special”? Hence the deliberately comic wish to establish at least “three or four” issues of this kind per year, even if this wish is doomed to failure precisely because of the absence of those energies which could be gathered outside of the “real world conditions” where a journal is usually made. Hence the choice of this epistolary exchange: first to “communicate” something, and correlatively to communicate “with” someone. The desire for a community of people who see films and talk about them among themselves remains the guiding idea of ​​ Godard’s undertaking with respect to the existence of a film journal; such a magazine is indeed somewhat “special” if we consider that its vocation is to connect film production to a specific state of the world, that it seeks to tackle the era in an indissolubly historical and cinematographic manner. It is in this sense that the border between life and films is blurred, on the condition that cinema and the world tend to coincide, no matter whether the latter is near or far, and the former from here or elsewhere. We are not dealing, in other words, with a cinephilia that would be closed in on itself, complacent, marked by an empty formalism. Forms are of course primary in the conception of a journal according to Godard, but their comprehension as images is inseparable from the historical moment in which they appear. Even if the director’s desire here is not for the cinema to reflect its time, or for the films to be an illustration of the present. Jacques Rancière has highlighted this point on the level of the articulation of history and images in Godard: “It is not about showing that cinema speaks of its time. It is about establishing that cinema makes a world, that it should have made a world”. Before adding: “The history of cinema is that of a power to make history.”¹⁰

Cahiers du cinéma issue no. 300.

Powers of Montage

A film journal should also be the place for an exploration of this “power”; as we have seen, this is what Godard never ceases to proclaim in more or less direct fashion: that he laments a dearth of communication about films or that he observes that those who talk about them forget the world to which they belong. Invariably, he stresses the need to convey history through a sequence of images. However, a question naturally arises: what happens to this historical exploration, past or contemporary, when its material basis is no longer filmic but is developed across a succession of pages? Pages that we turn, and where text and image coexist. A text that is read and a still image, both of which are silent, of course. We mention this characteristic because we believe that the reflection on the images in a magazine – on their layout as well as their relationship to the written word – is linked in Godard to the fascination exercised by silent cinema, that is to say by the cinema at its origin: an invention which “has, I don’t know, opened… opened our eyes in a certain way.” This occurs through the emergence of a completely new operation: “a way of seeing which was something else and which was called montage.”¹¹ Two aspects of Godard’s conception of montage are found in the filmmaker’s method when he practices the articulation of image and text in a magazine. On the one hand, the fact that it is not only a question of showing, but of creating relations: no longer focusing on one thing, but rather on the relations that are prone to being sewn between several things, which is what montage essentially consists of. And these relationships can be very concrete for Godard, since they also engage those that are woven between the film and its spectator: “people saw relationships”, but “they first saw a relationship with themselves”. Here, there is always a concern for maintaining a continuity between the projected images and the life of the spectators outside the projection; magazine editors should always remember this.

On the other hand, silent cinema has been a decisive vector for understanding that the act of editing ultimately refers to a gesture that allows us “to see things, and no longer to say them”¹²: another way of seeing that exceeds any subordination of what is seen to what is read; a vision squared, so to speak, or elevated to a superior exercise, since montage leads us to “see only what can be seen (unsaid, unwritten)”. Thus is manifested the power of early cinema, which the spoken word would to a certain degree attenuate by restoring the nominative dimension of speech, which, despite the additional information it offers thanks to dialogue in films, would according to Godard be less favourable to the linking of things and beings than in the silent cinema. This is not, however, a matter of reversing a supposed hierarchy between “showing” (through images) and “naming” (through words); rather, it involves insisting on a cinematic specificity which is characterised, among other things, by the immediacy of its effects on the spectator, but also by the fact that the image constitutes a fundamental vector of thought, in the sense that it attests to a real proximity with its internal functioning. In the first case, let us the take the situation of the exploitation of the working class by the bosses (for example in Soviet cinema); as Godard states, “you could see that the boss was stealing from the workers”, without needing to say so, and the impact on the population was all the stronger.¹³ It is in this sense that the public sees “relations” in the cinema – above all, power relations – and that it takes them up and then experiences them in the continuity of the cinematic spectacle.

In the second case, which exceeds the image in the filmic sense but whose point of departure implies the silent cinema, a general observation is made: “people absolutely do not make use of the image!” – even though our thoughts are expressed in images before being articulated in words. This includes scientific discoveries that reach us through the written word, since we should not forget that the researcher sees something before putting it down on paper through a succession of formulae and sentences. It is this “seeing” that fascinates Godard and leads him to relate the film image with thinking (such as, here, the thinking at work in the natural sciences). “Einstein saw something… and then he published what he saw in a literary form. Sometimes, the journal is not even read, and even when it’s read, it’s read in such a manner that you still need to wait a hundred years for what you have seen to begin to have an influence.” Godard pursues this line of reasoning, designating the cause of this temporal lag in the effects of a scientific discovery, a lag that principally resides in the covering over of seeing by saying, the first being more intimately linked to the emergence of the discovery than the second, in the following terms: “And scientists debate, but they debate with a thought that comes from three hundred years before what they have seen, or alongside it, or with the thought of someone else, or their wife, or their mistress, or on the contrary political friends they have on the other side of the world… which means that they have not seen anything.”¹⁴

The silent cinema is mobilised by Godard to demonstrate both the potentially immediate character of its effects and the intimate correspondence that exists between the montage of images and the linkage of our thoughts, and this mobilisation is doubtless inscribed in a conception born with the first representatives of the art of cinema. Deleuze has summarised this historic trait in a comparison between the silent era and sound cinema: “What the talkie seemed to lose was the universal language, and the omnipotence of montage,” knowing, furthermore, that early cinema “passes on a kind of naturalness to them, which is as it were the secret and beauty of the silent image”: this “naturalness” not only refers to country landscapes, the sea or the mountain, since it concerns more globally “every possible artefact”: “civilization, the city, the flat, everyday objects, objects of art or cult.”¹⁵ There is a certain trenchant self-evidence of things configured by the filmic image that can reveal the “structure of a society”, “its places and functions”, its “attitudes” and its “roles”, as Deleuze writes, where a complex web of “relations” between actions is woven, as Godard would say. What link do these considerations on the silent cinema maintain with the work that should be carried out in a film magazine? Let us first note that are most often formulated by Godard within texts that is posed by a diagnosis of the state of magazines, such as can be seen in issue no. 300 of Cahiers. Consequently, they remain for the most part programmatic, since the reference to silent cinema is also a detour for re-thinking the place of iconography in a film magazine, and the manner in which it adjoins the written dimension. It is, after all, a matter of rediscovering, through the intertwining of the visible and the legible, the powers of montage that Godard perceives in silent cinema. Several questions thus emerge to try to understand how this passage from one space (the projected film) to another (the page of the magazine) can be brought about; how, also, the assemblage of the reproduced image and its textual environment, is established; and how, finally, the flow of moving images comes to be substituted by a succession of still images mixed with words.

Imagining the Elsewhere: Letter to Jane

We will take some cases of page layout elaborated by Godard himself in order to discern what this work of a film magazine would consist of. We will privilege a series of methods that seem emblematic of the exigences of the director of Le Mépris when it comes to the specialised press (and even, by extension, the written press in general). We still need to pose, as a preamble, the status of the image in a magazine, a question which is inseparable from another question: how to effectively make an image the site of a “relation” – a relation to the text, of course, but above all a relation between what is represented and what we see, that is, definitively, a relationship to oneself through the intermediary of the image? An answer to these interrogations can assuredly be found in the letter addressed to Jane Fonda – “Enquête sur une image”, co-signed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin – which followed the publication in an issue of L’Express dating from August 1972 of a photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam, surrounded by Vietcong fighters. We should first note that the authors of the “Letter” pose elementary questions, and that they initially posed them to themselves when they found this photograph: “How did we look at this photograph? How did our gaze function when looking at this photo? And what makes it function like this and not otherwise?”¹⁶

In a second phase, the introspection concerning the exercise of the gaze gives way to a more methodologically affirmed proposition, since Godard/Gorin propose distinguishing at least two types of analysis that respective refer to two manners of studying the composition of the image reproduced in L’Express: as a “physico-photographic kernel” and as a “socio-photographic cell”. On the one hand, the two members of the Groupe Dziga Vertov endeavour to analyse the photo as scrupulously as possible, by asking themselves what “news” it gives us of Vietnam, but also what representation it offers, even without seeking to do so, of America and its stars. For this is also what is at stake: in fact, framing is never “innocent or neutral: you frame the actress looking and not what the artist is looking at. You frame her as if she was the star.” The Vietnamese, meanwhile, remains blurry and in the background. It is in this sense that the photo caption published by L’Express is not adequate for what we see. It states that “Jane Fonda interrogates Hanoi residents” but this is a doubly illegitimate statement, due to a defect in the description of the image and a lacuna in the information furnished: the legend does not actually say that “the activist occupies the foreground and Vietnam occupies the background”, and, furthermore, “the newspaper does not publish the questions posed or the answers given by the representatives on this photo of the Vietnamese people.”¹⁷

This is how the “physico-photographic” study of the picture of Jane Fonda is presented. As far as the “socio-photographic” analysis is concerned, the illustration appearing in L’Express must be related to the whole outside situation which evokes the war then being waged in Vietnam (which the magazine neglects to mention), or more exactly to imagine it on the basis of this same photograph. This is what Godard/Gorin invite us to do on the same basis as can be found in issue no. 300 of Cahiers: fragment the image and focus on one of its details, then mobilise the imagination through the enlargement of this detail. “Even if we do not see what [the North Vietnamese] is looking at, if we isolate it and frame it by itself, we can perceive that his face refers to what he has to face every day: shrapnel bombs, dykes and disembowelled women, the house that needs to be rebuilt for the tenth time, or the hospital.”¹⁸ This usage of the faculty of the imagination is exemplary: it refers to one of the techniques by which Godard relates individuals to their environments: the being who looks at (the reader of L’Express) and the person being looked at (Jane Fonda, or the Viet Cong), a situation of relative peace in the West and the ravages of a deadly conflict in Indochina. Always here and elsewhere…

Letter to Jane

Patience of the Gaze

A film journal should pursue this work on the components of the image, as well as on the bonds that associate it with a written caption or a longer text accompanying it. The reader should thus be placed in this unstable but always dynamic position, where a film review or a thinkpiece on cinema lead them to bring about this externalising movement, which also inevitably leads them back to a self-interrogation of their own gaze, their own thinking. The special issue of Cahiers from May 1979 offers the conditions for such a challenge to anyone who leafs through its pages, at the same time as presenting itself, from cover to cover, as a didactic tool destined to connect the cinema – and our relation to the cinema – with our historical context (which varies with each era). It is apt to note that, in this issue no. 300 of Cahiers, there is no caption in the strict sense of the term, insofar as it is the epistolary text which sometimes gives the impression of being disseminated between the images. Some of these images show several cows captured by a photographer whose aid was refused by the filmmaker Alain Tanner on the shoot of one of his films, Messidor (made in 1979). Godard then writes to Tanner to instruct him that he should have appealed to this person, who possesses a sense for form much greater than Tanner’s, especially if we compare these cow photos with certain images from his film: “Attached you can find three cow photos made by this photographer, and it seems very visible to me that they have three different expressions, while your actresses always have the same expression, which seems to be more due to impotence on your part than a deliberate approach.” To the right of this declaration extracted from Godard’s letter to Tanner, there is a photograph of the first cow covering an entire page. By turning the page, the reader discovers the other two cows: one is placed in the top half of the verso page, with the text of the letter continuing beneath it, while the recto page shows the third cow, this time located in the lower part, with the last fragment of the letter at the top. A smaller panel with the two Messidor actresses is also placed on the left edge of the verso page. Our gaze thus operates a kind of snake-like movement between one image and the next, and from one fragment of the letter to the next, as if the layout determined the ping-pong movement of the vision desired by Godard in this epistle to Tanner. And the latter finishes by focusing on the nature of the animal gaze, which is “anything but neutral”: “In fact, what this cow [the third] criticises is not that filmmakers drive in automatic, it is that even if they come to film in the paddocks, their speech [parole] always makes them drive at 120km/h.”¹⁹ If Godard’s remarks are both humorous and polemical, they also enable us to link two apparently distinct regimes of perception, this time not through a transcontinental confrontation (vision in America, Europe, Asia, etc.), but on the basis of a comparison between the intense expression of an animal look and the impression of speed produced by an impatient human eye. 

If written captions are absent from this special issue of Cahiers, it is also because the image sometimes seems to be the prime mover, that is to say that its choice determines the epistolary gesture, or that the content of certain letters is its logical consequence. Thus, in a letter to feminist filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, Godard wonders about the relevance of the editorial path that a journal should follow: “A film magazine could serve this purpose more conveniently than films do: to show how time is covered, how it is discovered, before whom and why.” This affirmation comes just after Godard had stigmatised a “trend” in cinema where the necessity to make films does not necessarily manifest itself, where “those who make films do not really need what they capture for themselves – say, to improve their lives. In fact, they tend to hide behind the image of the other, and the image is then used to erase.”²⁰ On the recto page (the letter is printed on the verso side), Godard has chosen the image of a fully-veiled Iranian woman who holds in her hand the photographic portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, in reference to the Iranian revolution which occurred that same year (1979). Thus, a parallel is established between a state of cinema – which evades reality at the same time as it forgets its own potentialities – and a revolutionary situation in a country represented by a body whose features we do not see; certainly a body which defends the revolution, no doubt fighting for a better life, but which does so by hiding, by “erasing itself”, by literally “covering itself up”. There is of course no direct correspondence between the two elements placed into a relationship here by Godard, between the text of the letter and the photo of the veiled woman; nonetheless, there is indeed a telescoping of the distance between a remote country that is experiencing a revolution (Iran) and a cinematic situation dedicated to working, however modestly, for the “amelioration” of our daily lives.

Everything happens as if the components of the image – the veil, the erasure, the image that covers or covers a face – had incited the elaboration of a diagnosis of the cinematographic act as a function of existential criteria, of which a journal should be the guarantor. This is why the image can in no case be an accessory pretext; on the contrary, it is decisive since it shows an “elsewhere” from which a “here” is illuminated; it may be mute, but it establishes a dynamic by which we access a reality that is ours, by ricochet: a kind of “direct detour” as Godard/Gorin write in their “Enquête”.²¹ On a more general level, it is at the intersection of the “naturalness” of what is seen (a woman doubly covered, by her veil and by the photo that conceals her head) and the literalness of the words used in the letter (“erasing” reality by recording useless images) that a more essential Godardian rule for any film journal is sketched out: he calls here for “a film journal that would start from vision, that would not start out by splashing adjectives onto the notorious page, but that would use this page as a screen to SEE.”²²

Endnotes