The work of Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away a couple of weeks ago through euthanasia at the age of 91, has always seemed to me to be about the possibilities of cinema as a form of thinking. Cinema’s combination of sound and image, constrained by the capacities of the medium but also evolving as those capacities have themselves evolved, presents possibilities for how we think about ourselves, the world, and the relationship between the two. This, for me, is the terrain within which Godard’s cinema was most innovative.
All of this became more clear to me after I read Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema, which essentially posit cinema as a form of thinking. (David Deamer’s recent Deleuze’s Cinema Books is a brilliant exegesis of Deleuze’s writings on the topic.) And as I write this now, I feel I want to extend Michel Foucault’s statement about how the twentieth century may come to be known as “Deleuzian” to say that cinema’s twenty-first century will come to be known as “Godardian.”
Even as Godard’s cinema changed, morphing from something challenging artistically, and later politically, to something more personally reflective (and sometimes self-indulgent), it always remained charged with a conceptual openness to the possibilities of the cinematic medium.
His rapid-fire questioning and, ultimately, demolition of the conventions of commercial cinema (culminating in Weekend and La Chinoise), his experiments with essayistic video in the 1970s and his return to cinematic art in the 1980s, and his epic sound-image montages — like those characterizing practically the entirety of the 266-minute long Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-98), as well as his last film, The Image Book (2018) — showed a relentless probing of the possibilities of what cinema can be. As such, they provide an archive of ways to make sense of the possible combinations of sound, image, and time, combinations that today surround us daily both on the internet and in material reality.
Scenes like this one, below, were among my favorites from Godard’s early films. They feel different now, some forty years after I first watched them as an undergraduate student at York University (different for instance in the gendered inflections represented here). But the combination of storyline, visual metaphor, and whispered voiceover became a signature with Godard that he continued developing through to his final films.
Even the trailer from The Image Book conveys this notion of thinking with and through sounds, images, texts, and cine-historical quotations and gestures, with Godard’s own whispered, elliptical cogitations situating the entirety within a kind of “back of the mind” space. That the entire film is like this, its dense collages forcing the viewer to think, even as repeated viewings never quite enable a perfect coalescence of thoughts, is part of what I am getting at. In a sense, this is a training to think both with the ambiguity, and with the force and vitality, of the sonic and imagistic pieces of reality being presented to the viewer.
In suggesting that cinema after Godard is “Godardian,” I don’t mean that it is Godardian in its intent: most film and media is still produced in order to create an effect of one kind or another (or several). What I mean is that cinema viewing is no longer a passive viewing of things made for us. Viewership in a digitally mediated world — a world of digital cineosis — has become much more active, a cognitive-affective participation in a process of sense-making within a world of images, texts, and sounds presented to us as multiply and variably connected and disconnected fragments of world.
In other words, cinematic viewing has become Godardian, which is something that Godard anticipated. This doesn’t mean that most of us are very good at it, but all of us, swimmers in digital worlds, are required to do it in one way or another.
What Godard wanted to do with it, at least if the interpretations of Christopher Pavsek, James Williams, and Rick Warner (see below) are correct, is to provoke a kind of utopian deliberation on the world, a thinking that could serve as preamble to reconstructing the world along more just and humane lines.
Godard’s relevance to ecocriticism is worth mentioning here as well. Among the places where his work has been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives (of one kind or another), I particularly recommend the following:
- Daniel Morgan, “The Place of Nature in Godard’s Late Cinema,” Critical Quarterly 51. 3 (2009).
- Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (University of California Press, 2012).
- Verena Andermatt Conley, “Godard’s Ecotechnics,” in A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, ed. by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (Wiley, 2014).
- Douglas Morrey, “The Forest for the Trees: Political Contexts for Godard’s Nature Imagery in Film socialisme and Adieu au langage,” Studies in French Cinema 19.1 (2018).
- David Fresko, “Nature/Politics in Godard: Notes toward an Investigation,” Senses of Cinema, January, 2022.
And more generally on Godard’s mode of cinematic thinking and its utopian underpinnings, I have found these helpful:
- Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
- James S. Williams, Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016).
- Rick Warner, Godard and the Essay Film: A Form that Thinks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
RIP, JLG.
