{"id":12965,"date":"2022-09-27T01:42:15","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T06:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=12965"},"modified":"2022-09-27T02:13:06","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T07:13:06","slug":"cinema-will-henceforth-be-godardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/09\/27\/cinema-will-henceforth-be-godardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Cinema will henceforth be Godardian"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this became more clear to me after I read Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema<\/a>, which essentially posit cinema as<\/em> a form of thinking. (David Deamer’s recent Deleuze’s Cinema Books<\/a><\/em> 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<\/a> about how the twentieth century may come to be known as “Deleuzian<\/a>” to say that cinema’s twenty-first<\/em> century will come to be known as “Godardian.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His rapid-fire questioning and, ultimately, demolition of the conventions of commercial cinema (culminating in Weekend<\/a><\/em> and La Chinoise<\/em>), 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<\/em> (1989-98), as well as his last film, The Image Book<\/em> (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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scenes like this one, below, were among my favorites from Godard\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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