Contre-Brody

Since many of Richard Brody's gross distortions of Godard in Everything is Cinema continue to proliferate and go unquestioned, there's truly no risk of lapsing into a game of ping pong here by making available another clear as day pan review. This is the review by Adrian Martin (many thanks to him) that Bill Krohn pointed out in his article Kinbrody and the Ceejays as "particularly good on that brand of malarkey," i.e. Godard, actresses and the "gossip made tedious by morality" in the Brody. Right off Adrian brings up a huge deficiency of the book not yet mentioned elsewhere: that Brody does not take account of Godard's impact on world cinema. With Godard's constant concern for the state of cinema and active reaching out to others in its name (Duras, Straub/Huillet, Wenders, Garrel, Truffaut, W. Allen, Akerman, Artavazd Peleshian, the list goes on, far out of Godard's reach -- all influenced by him; not to mention whole countries: Mozambique, Palestine), is there any other filmmaker to whom (precisely, in a biography) this deficiency could be more of an affront?



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Contempt:
A Review of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008

by Adrian Martin





In 2003, Melbourne’s veteran independent filmmaker Nigel Buesst made a long video documentary called Carlton + Godard = Cinema. It was about a small band of filmmakers clustered around Melbourne University Film Society in the mid 1960s. Brave figures including Brian Davies and Bert Deling scraped together just enough money and resources to make a bunch of short films; their inspiration came primarily from the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) that had surged since 1960, and especially the work of Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Contempt, Alphaville). Buesst’s memoir shows how this buzz of local film activity intersected with trends in theatre (La Mama), how it laid the ground for some striking feature films of the 1970s (Deling’s Pure Shit), and how it clashed with certain institutions of the time – in particular, the Melbourne Film Festival which, under the illustrious stewardship of Erwin Rado, sometimes studiously ignored the flagship example of Godard’s ever-changing work.






Godard's Alphaville.

Deling's Pure Shit.

For Australians, this is a fascinating, long-buried piece of cultural history – one of those stories which shows our artists and thinkers in dialogue with trends from abroad, rather than gazing inwards at their nationalistic navels. But you will not read a word about it in Richard Brody’s 700-page biography of Godard, Everything is Cinema. Nor will you find much information about Godard’s vast influence over the development of independent filmmaking and cinema theory in Italy, Russia, Germany, Spain, UK, Taiwan …

Brody is a film critic for The New Yorker – and Everything is Cinema is definitely a New Yorker’s view of Godard. On the one hand, the book springs from a peculiarly American projection of French society and culture: the France of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy (heavyweight intellectual celebrities), Brigitte Bardot, May ‘68, François Truffaut, and the wartime Resistance. On the other hand, it is at pains to document Godard’s impact on the US, particularly on those revered critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.

This dual focus is odd, and leads to many distortions. Godard is no longer a citizen of the world, no longer someone who interacted with fellow filmmakers such as Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski, Italy’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Georgia’s Sergei Paradjanov. He mainly seems, in Brody’s account, to be on planes between France and the US – at least until he relocated to Switzerland, where he is based today. But the Switzerland of this book is just a picture postcard of lakes and restaurants, not a living, breathing, troubling society which Godard depicts in films including the magisterial Nouvelle Vague of 1990.

This is the second biography of Godard to appear in English, after Colin MacCabe’s rather staid Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 in 2003. It is, in certain respects, an improvement: virtually everything Godard – or JLG, as he likes to style himself – has made since the ‘50s (long or short, film or video) is documented, and the often rocky course of his personal life is more or less detailed. The most praiseworthy aspect of the book is undoubtedly its even-handed evaluation of Godard’s contribution to the Seventh Art: flying in the face of so many superficial accounts that cruelly cut off Godard’s career at 1967 (the spectacular auto-da-fé of Weekend), Brody follows it all the way. He seeks to enshrine late works such as 1987’s King Lear (a true film maudit, starring Norman Mailer and Molly Ringwald!), and the extraordinary Histoire(s) du cinéma series made between 1988 and 1998, a collage of treated clips best savoured on DVD.

The problem with the book is elsewhere. It is a commonplace wisdom to assert these days that ‘biography is fiction’ – but Brody’s effort comes off as more fictional than most biographies. The book has a frightful coherence: it is as if, very early on in the process, Brody decided on his neat interpretation of Godard, and then set about researching only those facts which would prove it. Brody has interviewed a significant number of Godard’s associates – many more than MacCabe did, but still only a fraction of the hundreds who have passed through the director’s prolific career. One sometimes suspects that a different ledger of interviewees might have produced a quite different portrait – as indeed Alain Bergala’s far superior Godard au travail (even though it only deals with the 1960s) proves.

But Brody, alas, has an axe to grind. Like John Fuegi in his seething The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, Brody has at some point switched from adoring fan to investigative reporter, not to mention moral judge. The book tries to ‘nail’ Godard, sensationally, on two counts.

Watch your back: Godard and Karina on location of Vivre sa vie.

The first count is anti-Semitism. The evidence for this charge is, in my view, particular only to a certain period of Godard’s life, and the book’s wholesale expansion of it into an almost magic biographical ‘key’ is highly dubious. No public statement by Godard, and nothing explicit in any of his films, incontrovertibly backs up Brody’s claim. What do exist are several reported, anecdotal accounts of verbal racial slurs by Godard: in his Correspondence 1945-1984, Truffaut (in the midst of a historic 1973 angry exchange of letters between the two filmmakers) recalls that Godard once called producer Pierre Braunberger a “dirty Jew” when a deal between them fell through; and when Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator during the Maoist period of 1968-1972, asked for money due to him from their joint production company, Godard (according to Gorin) replied, “Ah, it’s always the same thing, the Jews come calling when they hear the cash register” – prompting a rift between the two friends that lasted several years.

Those are dreadful, damning details. But when Brody reaches for a handy quote from Lévy – who has had relatively little direct contact with Godard – that the filmmaker is, in his view, “an anti-Semite who is trying to be cured”, prone to the periodic “seizure of anti-Semitism”, reportage begins to shade into a rather suspect form of pop socio-psychoanalysis. Brody proceeds to weave a life-long web that ranges from the alleged Vichy sympathies of Godard’s family members during the Occupation, to references and allusions in his most recent productions such as In Praise of Love (2001).

How to defend JLG against this barrage? In the latter half of the ‘80s, Godard in his work begins to meditate deeply on issues arising from the Holocaust – and, on this matter, he is no revisionist historian who denies the existence of the event. His empathy for murdered Jews is palpable, and leads to the kind of fervent identification with Jewish traditions to which many non-Jewish artists have arrived. One aspect of this is the reverent way that Godard, over the past 15 years, has mined the writings of Jewish poets, mystics and theorists including Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch. At the same time and by the same token, Godard poses a critique of the politics of the Israeli state, and offers sympathy for the Palestinian cause, in films ranging from Here and Elsewhere (1976, initially made in collaboration with Gorin) to the sublime Notre musique (2005) – both of which also richly feature a great poet, the recently deceased Mahmoud Darwich.

Here and Elsewhere


Can the balance of that ledger be toted up as anti-Semitism? There is a clear difference – and a laudable progression – between Godard’s racist jibes of the ‘60s and ‘70s and his actual work since the ‘80s. Brody shows himself to be a dab hand at a certain style of forced misreading when he considers a scene from the autobiographical JLG/JLG (1995): Godard draws a zany diagram on a piece of paper, two triangles superimposed to form a Star of David, thus demonstrating the filmmaker’s view that nations ‘project’ an image or idea of other nations, “Germany which projected Israel, Israel which reflected that projection”. From this oddly conveyed but certainly even-handed schema, Brody draws the message that, for Godard, the Jews “inflict suffering” and perpetrate a pernicious ideology through their control of the media!




Likewise, Brody tracks a set of references – sometimes merely vague, allusive or contestable – to the right-wing, flagrantly anti-Semitic collaborator Robert Brasillach in Godard’s life and work. His family, it is asserted, mourned the writer’s death by execution in 1946; the phrase “our pre-war” included in JLG/JLG echoes a 1939 memoir by the writer; and the ‘testament’ letter Brasillach wrote in prison shortly before his execution is, in part, recited by a non-actor in In Praise of Love – a young man named Philippe Loyrette, whose personal tape of this recitation, mailed to Godard some years previously, compelled the filmmaker (according to Brody) to recompose his own ‘version’ of it in the little-seen short video Farewell to TNS (1996). But Brody is confusing and mangling a lot here, conjuring a species of guilt-by-association: firstly, he displays little comprehension of Godard’s ‘dialectical’ collage method (consistent throughout his career) of quoting deliberately clashing, contradictory texts from right across the political spectrum (as he once made perfectly clear, “I just quote them, I don’t own them”); secondly, Farewell to TNS, which contains not a single word of Brasillach, is a tribute to the form, not the content of Loyrette’s performance. In fact, if this cryptic (and very moving) record of a recitation by Godard refers to anything specific, it is simultaneously the closure of a theatre school in Strasbourg, and the painful ending of an unrequited love.

A man in full: Farewell to TNS (1996)

Which brings us to Brody’s second, even more bizarre charge against Godard. The director has never been shy about admitting that he has fallen hard for a number of the women that appear in his films – that is, apart from the several he married – and that these relationships have sometimes been pretty one-sided. Brody hunts down a number of these women – for instance, Bérangère Allaux, whose persistent rejection of Godard leaves him, at a histrionic highpoint of the book, “wandering desperately through the streets” in search of her. It is hardly a new situation in world cinema: the director’s passion (satisfied or otherwise) for his or her much younger, newly discovered ‘star’. But Brody is sniffing for something nastier, more perverse. And he finds it – to his satisfaction, at any rate – in the case of Camille Virolleaud, 9 years old when Godard cast her in the experimental TV series France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977). Virolleaud feels she was bullied and mistreated by Godard during the filming (she retrospectively describes its effect on her young self as “hyperviolent”), and disliked, when she saw the result on TV, how Godard showed her in a state of undress – although this was a fully professional, consensual production situation, endorsed and encouraged by Camille’s mother. (Australian readers will be cross-referencing at this point of the book to recent media beat-ups about the photo-art of Bill Henson and Polixeni Papapetrou.)

Camille Virolleaud in France/tour/détour/deux/enfants

What is the point of all this intimate muckracking in Everything is Cinema? Brody insinuates that, from the mid ‘70s on, when Godard hit his mid-forties, he was increasingly consumed by perverse desires towards young (even pre-pubescent) women, and that his behaviour toward them tended to the abusive. Again, there is scant evidence on the public record for this claim; and again, Brody casts every which way for clues, and engages in crazy misreadings of the films. No feminist analysis of cinema has ever been as fanatically politically-correct as Brody is here: he takes virtually every scene in Godard that depicts men’s sexual exploitation of women – and there are plenty of them, from Vivre sa vie (1961) onwards – as proof not only of Godard’s darkest private intent, but also that the women before the camera were actually being “degraded”, rather than simulating it. Yet the vast majority of women featured in Godard’s films (often on multiple occasions) have never voiced any such complaint – Isabelle Huppert, for instance, who gets to play some of the most apparently degrading situations in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and Passion (1982), testifies to Brody himself that she found acting for Godard “artistically gratifying”.

In general, the book is, on all matters of sexuality beyond marital, hetero-normative monogamy, almost comically prudish: Brody rages from on high against the libertarian sexual politics of French intellectuals (such as Michel Foucault) in the ‘70s and the supposed destruction of decent, humanist values such carry-on entailed, to the point of wondering melodramatically whether the “shock effect” of Godard’s project on young Camille is “emblematic of what was left of 1968”! This is one strand in which Brody’s forced Sartre-Godard parallel might have helped him, especially when he reaches the latter period of Godard’s life, and his fluid, long-term union with filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville: Sartre’s personal life likewise demands a less moralistic biographer.

Brody’s excesses on these points are reflected in the entire argumentative structure of the book. Brody bites off more than he can chew in attempting a ‘critical biography’, that is, an analysis and evaluation of the films in lock-step with the life story. The alarm bells went off for me by page 30, when an early piece of film criticism by Godard is interpreted as staking the future director’s commitment to “a traditional nineteenth-century-novelistic and naturalistic approach to character” – which makes it tough to grasp how he became, quite quickly, cinema’s arch-Modernist. More damagingly and pervasively, Brody takes the interpenetration of art and life in Godard’s career as the sole way to understand and grade the work: if the film is a cryptic love (or hate) letter to his leading lady, it’s great; if it’s only about something as unromantic as global politics (as in the films co-directed with Gorin), it’s dead, inert, uninteresting. No wonder the Godard that emerges from these pages seems hermetic and solipsistic – when his actual films are anything but.

A richness Brody refuses to deal with: Struggle in Italy (1971, Dziga Vertov Group)

Here, as with the anti-Semitic and ‘dirty/abusive old man’ broadsides, Brody’s cinematic interpretations usually rest on a numbingly literal parsing of the films’ bare plot situations: just as select bits of what Godard quotes and collages in his work are mistaken as transparent declarations of authorial intent, the incredibly dynamic fragmentation of images from sounds, bodies from words and stories from events in every Godard work is damagingly re-set back into novelistic/naturalistic conventions.

The ‘artist biography’ has become a well-worn genre in recent years. It has frequently descended to gutter level, but the obligations of the form have also come into sharp relief. We have come to expect not only the ‘life and times’ and a comprehensive account of the artist’s works, but also an exploration of that artist’s reputation or legacy. This is where Everything is Cinema falls down on the job. Brody likes to lament, especially in the latter stretches of his tome, that JLG is today a rather forgotten, misunderstood, under-appreciated artist. JLG forgotten? It is true that none of his films have received arthouse cinema distribution in Australia since the mid ‘80s – but that is part of a wider, disturbing trend that has also seen most progressive cinema from Europe and Asia similarly shut out by the local brokers of film culture.

Nonetheless, Godard is today an ubiquitous culture hero, thanks to DVD, the Internet, and an unending stream of books, articles and reviews in every language. Is there any student, in any arts academy or filmmaking course in the world, who has not been initiated, to some degree, into the JLG cult? Brody overlooks the educational circuit, ignores all in-depth critical writing on his subject beyond the initial (and frequently vapid) first-release newspaper opinions, and seems not to realise how frequently Godard’s audio-visual work is screened, discussed, analysed and worshipped in places beyond the offices of The New Yorker. Fortunately, despite the efforts of this latest biographical straitjacket, Godard still belongs to us all.


© Adrian Martin August 2008

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MAY DAY

MAY DAY

MAY DAY

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~ Commemorating Danièle Huillet's birthday today, a still from THIS LAND IS MINE (Renoir, '43), Charles Laughton as Lory, burning then saving a pamphlet of the Resistance. ~

~ mural detail, History of the Needlecraft Industry (1938), by Ernest Fiene, depicting the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, on the auditorium walls of The High School of Fashion Industries, New York (the 1600-seat auditorium in Manhattan's old garment district was for years the venue of the Vogels' CINEMA 16). A mural commissioned by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGW). 400,000 mourners. ~

MAY DAY

The Smash of Rage

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The Smash of Rage

By Serge Daney

Where television, watching tennis, has ended up whispering to the players the art of overacting the violence that they may not feel.

Everybody remembers the moment where tennis lost its manners and no one ignores that television was partly responsible. What was banned from the courts returned via the small screen and slowly became a part of the total show that tennis had become. In the early eighties, Borg's indifference to what wasn't his tennis, Connors' grunts and MacEnroe's trotting flip drew the new face of the top-level tennis player. A champion maybe, but never again a gentleman. Because it was total, the show of the great tournaments included what it was no longer possible to hide: that tennis is not the opposite of violence, except that this violence is often directed more towards oneself than towards the Other.

Since then, the evolution of tennis and the evolution of television have hobbled along, from injuries to cohabitation, from new ATP rules to programming grids, from big money to big money. And the top players of world tennis have had all the time needed to live with the idea that they were filmed and if, at first, they might have dreamt an image of friendly and elegant players, they eventually understood that this image which was stolen from them with impunity during matches, they could use it themselves to improve their game or study their opponent's.

Elegance has therefore disappeared as the TV spectator's eye expected something else from tennis. The diabolical Connors and the amazing MacEnroe became loved for their bad manners, because these manners were more interesting than the starchy class of the last stylists (from Clerc to Gomez). All this, a very human phenomenon by the way, deepened the scenography of tennis with a new dimension: that of the close up after the rally, of the disarticulated replay, of the stroboscopic ordinariness of the slow motion, of the microphone at court level. The number of events per second inflated with all the affects, tics, drives and silent rages that a body is capable of.

Since it was no longer a question to suppress the aggressiveness in tennis, and since it was no longer enough to simply observe it on the image, it was about defining the vocabulary of its gestures, a visual vocabulary. Where Connors was naturally mixing bad temper and humour, and where MacEnroe effortlessly combined madness and lucidity, the young ones of the eighties who, despite their gifts, did not all have the famous killer instinct, felt "obliged" to manufacture gestures that everybody could see, inelegant but "human" gestures, where one could read their sadness of never being enough of a killer. This is the moment when the incest happened between television and tennis.

Yesterday, the final at Flushing Meadow was moving, "finally" moving. Not so much because of the players or the beauty of the game (the semi-final between Wilander and Edberg had offered a more beautiful, a more complete tennis) than because of this "duty of aggressiveness" which took over the finalists. The code of this aggressiveness is now known: closed fists, bended necks, curved bodies and evil gazes. As if it was necessary to maintain oneself as long as possible in a state of hate, without assigning any particular object to that hate. For this frenetic body language is not directed at the opponent, but at one's self-image, at the image the public is creating and the image the cameras are coldly recording. Image, in last analysis, goes to the image.

The recent history of tennis is the acquisition of these few gestures and of this choreography of aggressiveness - neither "contained" (Connors) nor "played out" (MacEnroe") but "on the skin". For a long time, Lendl forgot to win decisive matches because, too proud, he didn't want to appear relieved to have saved a point or happy to have totally defeated the other. He was so stiff, unable to bend, that he had to learn, while becoming the best, to express the fear of losing, even and "especially" after a winning shot. He had to learn to exorcise. His body took longer to bend, to invent this neck movement resembling a disappointed vulture, than the camera took to record this burlesque gesturing. The tennisman also had to become an actor and play motivation to be sure not to lose it. In that sense, Lendl comes from the Actors Studio.

Some say that Lendl likes no-one and that no-one likes Lendl. We could add that nothing is sadder (and "finally" moving) than the face of this man whose only remaining option is to be the man to beat, until he is beaten. But who would have said, a few years ago, that Wilander, the subtle Wilander, the seventeen year old who won Rollang Garros laughing, would be also forced to play aggressiveness? It's nevertheless what he does since his marriage, thus becoming an interesting player and a man (twenty-two years old) capable, him too, to stylise the emotions he's going through. And Wilander invents a strange movement, the two fists tightly closed and parallel, his back swayed, as if each point was a match point, as if each ball was the deciding one. This metamorphosis isn’t elegant; it’s probably the condition for Wilander to – already! – start a second career.

And the simplistic myth of the Swedish impassiveness starts to crack. One of the most inspired players on a court is maybe Stefan Edberg. Arrived at the top of the rankings, he is facing Lendl the ogre, and is forced to join in. Natural gifts are no longer enough, the theatre of aggressiveness is required. And here's the tall, placid boy (who's also a tad lethargic as everyone says) starting to close his fists, to express an indecisive "take that!" or a puerile "serves you right!" which shows as much the joy of having done well as the idea that the other is "right" as well.

Acting aggressiveness allows aggression and grants a chance to win. What television has given to tennis (a magnifying glass lens), tennis returns to television. What it has taken from tennis (elegance, seduction, serenity), it doesn't take for itself. In the small wars of French television, there's a style of bragging and boastfulness which is not far from the courts. No need to seduce to carry the day. But in the end, the day is no longer attractive.

Originally published in Libération, 16 September 1987, and reprinted in Le salaire du zappeur, POL, 1993, pp. 18-21. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar

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Godard: Nowadays you see the champions raising their fists, showing their teeth as soon as they win (Godard imitates what he means). It's awful. Even women are getting into the act now.

--The frenzy of winning...

Godard: Poor Pasteur.* Excitement, sure, but the frenzy of winning -- that's for (General Jacques) Massu in Algeria, that's for war. It's a far cry from sports.

*In the original Godard plays off the interviewer's initial remark, "La rage de la victoire..." (the frenzy, madness, "rage" of the victory). "Rage" also means rabies in French; hence Godard's reference to Louis Pasteur.

------from Jérome Bureau and Benoît Heimermann interview with Godard, early May 2001. First published in L'Équipe , 9 May 2001. Reprinted and translated in Future(s) of Film; 3 Interviews, John O'Toole, Verlag Gachnang & Springer AG Publisher.

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"...it's murder to play with just the rackets..."

------film clip: THE BIG MOUTH (1967, Jerry Lewis)

"We had everything then, I thought: the nightmare mood, the helpless victims, the feeling that all the solid things could at any moment dissolve into thin air, that only the unseen, lurking evil was real. But it was really not until I was in the empty Tobis studio in Berlin, in the middle of the night, putting on the sound with the very gifted, inventive Werner Obitz—he was the one that had constructed spaceships and that kind of thing for Fritz Lang—it was not till the moment we were there with Zeller’s monotonous musical theme and the somnambulistic, incoherent words… Blut… Hunde… Kind… and the sounds that had no visible source but were there to increase the angst mood—it was there and then, in the empty, echoing studio, where the only sounds reaching us from outside were echoes of street brawls, the SA out with their clubs and knuckledusters, that it struck me that I had also made a film about that, about the living nightmare of violence and war and suffering that we were all drifting into, without will or knowledge. The film was premiered, to boos and catcalls on the Kurfürstendamm in May 1932, some six months before Hitler’s takeover. But his minions were already at it, and persecutions of the Jews had long been the order of the day, though the worst, of course, was still to come. Yes, VAMPYR was also a period piece…"

-- Carl Th. Dreyer, quoted by Elsa Gress, “The White Nightmare,” Scandinavian Review, 1989. P. 54-56.

As quoted in 'Montage for Carl Th. Dreyer, P.4' by David Phelps

Image: the staking of the vampire from VAMPYR, a shot censored by the Berlin Censorship Board before release of the film.

"The world is divided into hawks and sparrows -

let's be hawks."

(Sylvia Scarlet [Katherine Hepburn]

in SYLVIA SCARLET [George Cukor, '35])

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"Not individualism but real individuals."

(Brecht on the Soviet cinema)

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Luc Moullet (12/22/2007):

"The Thing From Another World is an exemplary movie. Theoretically, this is an anti-communist movie made during the cold war -an anti-communism which is not but can be guessed, as it was shot in 1950-1951. Curiously though, as in many other of his films, the film constantly shows many people acting simultaneously. In each sequence, Hawks shows us the behavior of a small group -five or ten people. The action takes place in a station in Alaska or in the Great North, isolated from the world -- it’s a huis-clos film. Each character has a professional and personalized function and the film shows how they react as if each actor was at the same time directed and his own director. This a real orchestration: not only a personal itinerary but one of an entire group, which leads me to say that The Thing From Another World is a communist film -- which rejoins the true nature of communism. It’s an example for all directors: most of the time, they don’t want to direct their secondary actors and let them do what they want. Instead, everyone here has his own individuality. It’s fascinating to see all those secondary actors -- none of them are really famous- who act as parts of a group would in life. Hawks’ film is a model for every director and a typical example, maybe the most typical, of cinema history." (From dissidenz)

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Horus, son of Isis, who occurs in many different forms, invariably represents the upper world or region of light, and also regeneration, resurrection, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of life over death, of light over darkness, and of truth over falsehood.

He is constantly called the ‘avenger of his father’. Under the name of Hor-hut (Horus, the wing-expander) he overthrows Seth and his associates on behalf of Ra Harmachis, who, as a god of light, is considered equal to Osiris. Ra is equivalent to the Helios of the Greeks, and the young Horus and Hor-hut to Apollo. The hawk, with whose head he is represented, is the animal sacred to him , and the bird itself with a scourge on its back sometimes stands for him.

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Hawks at Work: The Making of LAND OF THE PHARAOHS - by Bill Krohn

Land of the Pharaohs, Howard Hawks’ only attempt at an epic of ancient civilizations, figures in its author’s filmography as a film maudit. Defended at the time of its release by Cahiers du cinema (Rivette, Chabrol), it continues to intrigue Hawks’ admirers, who have always suspected that this bizarre deviation from our hero’s habitual concerns (a story extending over thirty years, instead of the usual fastidious "unities"; focus on a single powerful figure at the expense of the professional group, even more than in the anomalous Red River; flatly colloquial dialogue free of the pomposities of Hollywood epic speech-making, but also of any trace of humor; a tragic ending) must paradoxically contain the key to the art of this mysterious filmmaker. (Cf. Jean-Claude Biette in his eulogy for Hawks: "The greatness he achieved in filming the Relative kept him from occassionally running the risk of confronting the absolute. Nevertheless, he ran that risk once, in Land of the Pharaohs, an extraordinary film where the Relative admits its limits: the work leads, this time, to a gigantic apparatus of tombs." - reprinted in Poetique des auteurs). Or what amounts to the same thing, to his unconscious mind (Cf. Serge Daney’s psychoanalytic overview of the oeuvre, "Viellesse du meme" ["The One Grows Old", CdC 230, reprinted in La rampe], where pharaonic imagery abounds. So the existence of a book on the making of Land of the Pharaohs by Hawks’ second-unit director (Hollywood-sur-Nil, Publisher Ramsay Poche) raises hopes too high not to be dashed on a breathless first reading.

First of all because Noel Howard’s book is written in the style of an old campaigner’s memoirs, by a craftsman for whom Land of the Pharaohs was a lark and an adventure (a view that happens to echo Hawks’ own recorded sentiments about filmmaking), in a style that emphasizes the well-told anecdote over the telling detail, so that lots of time is spent on the spectacular physical problems of making a film about the building of a pyramid on location in Egypt, most of which seem to have fallen on the shoulders of Howard and the film’s production designer, Alexandre Trauner.




Another reason for my initial disappointment is a limitation inherent in the genre: not only are such accounts usually a little boring – few things are less interesting than the making of a film – but they are also never very revealing. Certainly Howard has interesting things to tell us: We learn that he and Trauner excavated and dressed the foundations of an actual unfinished pyramid near Zaouiet al Atryanm and that for the pan encompassing a huge quarry filled with thousands of extras, they stitched two shots together by sticking a plastic boulder in front of the camera to conceal the cut, thus magnifying the number of extras as Hawks had magnified with a similar hidden cut the number of cattle in the long pan that prefaces the start of the cattle drive in Red River.

But no book like this will ever tell us much about the director’s creative processes, although Howard, a director in his own right, is in a better position than most chroniclers to understand, because directors on film sets are usually too busy to reflect on what they’re doing. Add to that the enigmatic personality of Hawks, seen here at the height of the last great era of unselfconscious filmmaking in Hollywood, and the paucity of psychological material in Hollywood-sur-Nil is hardly surprising. Hawks appears in Howard’s narrative as an ironic phantom, glimpsed in brief, laconic conferences with trusted lieutenants who have staggered back from the front to find their general playing golf (in Switzerland!), or tinkering with a new car, or thumbing through a copy of Popular Mechanics. We only see him "direct" a couple of scenes, which he seems to have had little to do with, and there isn’t a word in the book about his direction of actors. (Not that there is anything implausible about this portrait. In fact, it corresponds trait for trait to what we see of Hawks in "Shootout at Rio Lobo," George Plimpton’s television documentary about the making of Hawks’ last film.)

To know what Hawks was trying to do in Land of the Pharaohs, we need to hear him conversing at his leisure with Rivette, Truffaut and Jacques Becker in an interview done for Cahiers du cinema at the time of the film’s release (reprinted in Howard Hawks: Interviews, U. of Mississippi Press), where he talks about his intentions and the problems he encountered in realizing them. Conceived to take advantage of the recently perfected Cinemascope process (Hawks’ only experiment with the format, which he never liked), Land of the Pharaohs began as a film about the construction of an aerodrome in China during World War II, which turned out to be unfeasible for political reasons. He gives considerable credit to William Faulkner, one of the film’s three screenwriters, for his part in the elaboration of the story. He also pays tribute to Trauner, and says essentially the same thing as Howard about the question of historical authenticity: A great deal of research was done, but it was not allowed to stand in the way of the filmmakers’ imaginations. ("We’re not making a documentary," Hawks gently reminds Howard at one point, when the latter proposes an interesting solution to the problem of illuminating the stonecutters’ tunnels during the quarry scene.) "I very much like this kind of work," he says in the Cahiers interview. "Enterprises like building an aerodrome or a pyramid show man's power, what it's possible to do with stone, sand and one's hands."

Little trace of these ideas appears in Hollywood-sur-Nil. Yet there is much in the book that repays a second reading, confirming once again that there is nothing harder for a critical eye to see than "l’evidence" (Rivette’s term for the quality that pleased him most in Hawks’ work.)

The first point, so obvious that I hesitate to mention it, is that Land of the Pharaohs is a film about the making of a film. As such it would not necessarily have any special claim on our attention – all of Hawks’ studies of mostly-male professional groups in action can be seen as metaphors for the daily life of a film crew. But in Land of the Pharaohs for the first time the activities of Hawks’ heroes directly mirror what used to be called "the process of production" of the film itself.

With respect to the dramatis personae, first of all: In this film about the building of a pyramid, the three main heroes are Khu-fu, the Pharaoh (Jack Hawkins), who orders and oversees the building of his own tomb (Hawks the powerful producer-director); Vastar, the foreign architect who builds it for him (Trauner, the French production designer, charged with the construction of the pyramid for the film); and the high priest Hamar, the Pharaoh’s indispensable right hand (Noel Howard himself, whose own right hand we see in the film’s second shot, tracing in hieroglyphics an account of the Pharaoh’s deeds: the previous shot has shown the hand to be that of Hamar).

Second of all with respect to the story: "We based our script on a single idea: the building of a pyramid," Hawks told the Cahiers, and more than for any other Hawks film, it was through the activities of Trauner, Howard and their associates that the director’s vision expressed itself in Land of the Pharaohs. Trauner actually designed the sets before he ever saw a page of script, commenting to Howard when he showed him the plans, "With all this, they can write what they like. We’re ready."

As for the script that eventually did get written, all its main points grew out of the construction of the pyramid, the design for housing the Pharaoh’s treasure, and the device used to seal the pyramid once the body and the treasure are inside – it was not until Hawks and Trauner hit on a way of accomplishing this last task, after most of the scenes of the pyramid’s construction had been filmed, that Harry Kurnitz was able to write the final act. (According to what Kurnitz told Howard, Faulkner only wrote one line of the script, part of a scene where the Pharaoh, after work has been going on for several years, pays a visit to his chief architect – PHARAOH: "So…how is the job getting along?"

Considering the source, I’m skeptical about this piece of information, but it is emblematic of the subordination of writing to architecture in the making of Land of the Pharaohs – a subordinate role that Kurnitz freely admitted: "He thinks in images," he told Howard when asked about Hawks’ contribution to script conferences. "I bet you no matter what I write, he already knows what he wants to shoot.") A whole drama of palace intrigue unfolds around the scenes of construction, but it is those scenes – the only ones Howard writes about in his book – that are the real film. The film is the pyramid, and it ends logically with the image of the pyramid’s completed form.

If we concern ourselves is only with what I have called "the real film," Land of the Pharaohs is something very modern: What we see on the screen mirrors the process of production, which immediately generates what we see. For example, at the start of filming, Howard hits on the device of having a singer chant through a microphone to set the rhythm for the scene of the Pharaoh’s workers dragging blocks of stone from the quarry, but as the crowds grow bigger and more unruly, the singer is replaced with a drum and a cymbal. This shift becomes thematic in the film: At first the builders of the pyramid sing, rejoicing in their task, but as they grow bitter and rebellious they fall silent, and a drum is used to direct their movements. The Pharaoh’s goal is to build the biggest pyramid in history; Hawks’, according to Howard, is to film crowd scenes with more extras than had ever appeared in any film by De Mille – a quasi-obsession that finally provokes a mutiny by three members of the Egyptian Army who have been dragooned into playing slaves, which Hawks and his lieutenants have to beat back by physical force.

Howard never underlines these parallels, but he is certainly aware of them. After the revolt was quelled, he tells us, he experienced "a mixture of frustration and guilt" at the part he had played in the episode. One evening in the hotel bar Faulkner makes a speech to Howard and Kurnitz about how a film company is "a state within the state," and the three men fall to imagining a coup d’etat to topple Nasser with an army of extras, flying flags emblazoned with hawks’ heads. A few days later Kurnitz comments to Howard that if Hitler’s father had given him a movie camera for his eighteenth birthday, World War II might never have happened. And in the film, when the inhabitants of Egypt hear Pharaoh’s challenge to build the pyramid, which fantastically takes the form of a voiceover proclamation that can be heard in every corner of the kingdom, like a voice on the radio, they respond with a version of the fascist salute. Like Ulmer in L’Atlantide and Tourneur in War Gods of the Deep, Hawks in Land of the Pharaohs hold up a mirror to his own creation. What the mirror shows him is the image of a tyrant – complex, all to human, courageous and even sympathetic, but a tyrant nonetheless – who rules over a universe of death.

Two remarks before concluding: 1) Howard is not totally incurious about the effect of Hawks’ psychological quirks on the film. For example, he records only two story ideas proposed by the director during the production, and the first of these – "That our Pharaoh will have the greatest gold treasure ever assembled" – Howard portrays as being rooted in a personal obsession. (It is certainly not a given in stories about pyramids. Hawks builds his film around the Pharaoh’s fear of grave robbers and his stratagems for defeating them, but never even alludes to the most famous aspect of Egyptian burial practices: mummification.) "Hawks certainly had an eye for handsome women," Howard remarks later in the book, "but what he loved more than anything was wealth, riches, gold, money". He was always ill at ease when, during a casual conversation, someone would mention the very rich men on Earth: Paul Getty, Howard Hughes, etc." And he follows this surprising observation with an anecdote that is to say the least illuminating.

One day Hawks disappears. After a long search Howard finds him on the set of the Pharaoh’s treasure chamber, lost in contemplation of the dazzling array of fake gold ornaments created by Trauner and his collaborators:

I sat down silently, stopped a few steps above him and waited. Hawks didn't turn around. His head moved slowly from side to side like a camera panning on its tripod. He seemed to be in a trance. We stood there for quite a while, as I didn’t dare interrupt his deep contemplation. How many times had he gone down alone, switching on the lights to illuminate this "temple" where he came to worship his treasure? Suddenly a great noise broke the silence behind us: Clicking his sandals, singing a preposterous song with his booming voice, Sydney Chaplin was coming down the steps, dressed in his treasure guardian’s costume. Hawks spun around. His mouth open, he threw him such an outraged look that Syd stopped dead in his tracks. Hawks quickly regained his habitual poise. With a grand gesture, sweeping the décor, he said with deep conviction, "Sydney, look at all this…isn’t it…BEAUTIFUL?" Sydney gave the wondrous sight a quick glance. "Not bad," he said, walking up the steps. "You should see my old man’s cellars!"

This anecdote also serves to point up the naked honesty of Hawks’ self-portrait in the character played by Jack Hawkins, who has a similar moment when he shows his young son the treasure room. After the boy’s mother has taken him away to eat is supper, the Pharaoh lingers to caress one of the ornaments, first wiping his hand on his tunic with a little convulsive movement – a gesture that Hawkins acts with the finesse of Fernando Rey revealing an unsuspected perversion in a film by Buñuel.

2) Sometimes the connections to be made are too abstruse to be evident to an eyewitness, and it is the critic’s turn to help the historian. Hawks’ second recorded contribution to the story is made when Trauner and Howard show him a sarcophagus dating from 800 BC that was sealed with a great rock dropped into place by a hydraulic system that ran on sand – a device that immediately suggests to Hawks a method of killing off the Pharaoh’s scheming second wife, Nellifer (Joan Collins), who has murdered both the Pharaoh and his faithful first wife in order to seize the throne, and the treasure, for herself:

When Trauner, pencil in hand, explained the idea to Hawks, he listened intensely. Then he got up and looked at [the sarcophagus] for a long time. Finally he turned around. He was smiling. "The whole inside of the pyramid will function on this principle," he began. "One single gesture would start the whole
thing going. Large stones sliding down galleries will break hundreds of potteries, releasing tons of sand, setting huge blocks of granite in motion, locking Joan Collins in forever next to the man she wanted to rob!" He shook our hands and went to see the writers.

In the climactic scene Nellifer stands in the burial chamber next to the Pharaoh’s sarcophagus, and Hamar instructs her to pull the cord setting the infernal machine in motion, while 24 faithful monks whose tongues have been cut out – can a grimmer reduction be imagined of the "little Hawksian group"? – impassively watch her seal her fate.


A beautiful scene, which Hawks had already used before at the end of Twentieth Century, when Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore), a tyrannical theatre producer down on his luck, feigns death to trick the star he "created," Lily Garland (Carole Lombard), into signing a contract that will save her career, and bind her to him for eternity. The mise-en-scene is identical: Jaffe, stretched out like the Pharaoh in his sarcophagus, seems to be breathing his last as he extends the contract with a trembling hand to his sobbing protégé, begging her to put her name on it "so that it can be buried with my body." His two faithful stooges watch impassively, one of them indicating to the victim the place where she should sign…


Was it just a typical piece of "Hawksian humor" (the only one in the film) to end his only tragedy with a scene from his most raucous comedy? I think the connection is a more meaningful one: Oscar Jaffe is Hawks’ first artist-hero and Khu-Fu the Pharaoh is his second. For that reason the economic and psychological reading of Land of the Pharaohs suggested by Howard’s account is not the only one possible. Hawks made Land of the Pharaohs to produce a blockbuster and thereby augment his personal fortune. But Land of the Pharaohs begins when the Pharaoh has already amassed the greatest treasure in history, just as Red River begins when Matt Dunson (John Wayne) has already built up the biggest herd of cattle ever owned by one man. Dunson needs a son to leave his empire to, and at one point he offers Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) half his fortune if she will bear one for him, before finally accepting Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) as his heir; the Pharaoh, returning from his last campaign with all his goals of plunder satisfied, demands the same of his wife, who gratifies him by producing the desired heir, but even that is not enough – he must be assured of possessing the treasure in his second life, and that is why he undertakes the building of the pyramid.


Immortality – a subject that crops up more than once in Hawks’ films – is the concern of artists, and in the Pharaoh’s speech to his son he equates the gold he has amassed with power, another concern that artists share with tyrants. (At the end of the first day’s shooting, Howard tells us, Hawks pointed to the can of undeveloped negative that was to be shipped back to Warner Bros, and said, "It’s worth its weight in gold.") I think that Hawks, who always denied that he was an artist (that would have meant admitting his kinship with Oscar Jaffe), made Land of the Pharaohs for the most obvious of reasons: He was trying to create a masterpiece that would live forever. "The pyramid will keep his name alive," says Vastar to his son. "In that, he built better than he knew."


I also happen to think that Hawks succeeded, but it is no secret that in the process he created the biggest flop of his career. Coming after a series of films that carried his form of classicism to its apogee (Red River, I Was a Male War Bride, The Big Sky, Monkey Business), but which Hawks himself, he told Peter Bogdanovich, considered failures, the disaster of Land of the Pharaohs was the last straw. There followed four years of reflection before he returned to filmmaking in 1959 with Rio Bravo. The profound transformation that occurred in his work at this point comes down to one decision: Get rid of the story (they’ve all been told countless times on television anyway) and make the film out of the interaction of the characters. Insofar as Land of the Pharaohs does have a complicated melodramatic plot - one of the most beautiful of any film epic – it represents the past, but what I have called "the real film," the self-reflecting narrative of the pyramid, already sets up a system that will culminate in Hatari!: a plotless film about a hunting season in Africa, in which Hawks filmed the actors actually capturing a series of wild animals and devised a story to fit as he went along. What we see, then, in Land of the Pharaohs is both the final form of a certain classicism – that was the business of Faulkner and his collaborators – and the birth of a certain modernism, one whose progeny extends from Jancsó to Straub, and that is the story that Noel Howard tells in his invaluable book.


But Hollywood-sur-Nil would not be the document it is were it not also a personal narrative, one which at its best often concerns Noel Howard himself – his reaction to his friend Robert Capa’s death in Indochina, or his many reactions to the landscape of the real Egypt surrounding this tale of tombs and palace intrigue: the terrible poverty of the inhabitants, which continually preys on his mind; a moonlit ride on the Nile with a drunken boatman; the spectacle of a burial chamber suddenly illuminated by hundreds of ancient lamps; or the unexpected discovery, which Howard was the first westerner to share, of a solar boat buried in the wall of Kheops’ pyramid. Howard wanted to make a documentary about that boat, and Hawks supported him in his project. Warner Bros., however, preferred to have a documentary about a newly discovered tomb that promised to be "as big as King Tut," so they dropped the boat project and went to film the ceremony of the unsealing, in the presence of Nasser and the American ambassador. The tomb, of course, was empty.


---Bill Krohn

__________________________________________

Orignally published in the now defunct Los Angeles 'newspaper on film' Modern Times (Issue no. 4; April, 1990). More recently published in French as 'Hawks à l'ouvrage: La genèse de LAND OF THE PHARAOHS" in TRAFIC No. 63, Automne 2007.

I am extremely grateful to Bill Krohn for his generosity in allowing me to reprint this here. More on Hawks to follow as we're having a 'Late Hawks' retrospective in Los Angeles, via LACMA.__________________________________________

Godard on 9/11

(...)

Jean-Luc Godard: [History] is what one sees, before saying, when juxtaposing two images: a young woman smiling in a Soviet film is not quite the same as one who smiles in a Nazi film. And the Charlot of MODERN TIMES is, in the beginning, precisely the same as a Ford worker when filmed by Taylor*. To do history is to spend hours looking at these images and then, suddenly, to bring them close, producing a spark. This constructs constellations, stars that come close or move away, like W. Benjamin wanted. Cinema, lived as such, then functions as a metaphor of the world. There remains an archetype joining aesthetics, techniques, morals.

Antoine de Baecque: One gets the impression that what interests you are these juxtapositions, this montage, these collages, but then commentary disgusts you.


JLG: Commentary is the world's greatest super power: one crumbles under statements of intent, diplomatic analyses, and interpretive biographies. Commentary has become a sort of star personality. But it's also a tremendous force of intimidation and standardization: Comment (faire) taire - How (to make) silent - that which escapes preset ideas. The recent images of September 11th are a typical example of the proliferation of commentary, and its carcinogenic power.


A de B: Which is to say...


JLG: Past the effect of amazement in facing the destruction of the house of the father, one always saw the same thing. Or rather, nothing was seen. Just images in loop, always the same, stuttered out by an army of commentators. Seeing is not so much a problem concerning the place we're filming, but more of knowing what we want to film. All that could shock, disturb or produce outrage was systematically cleansed. Not even a body, not even some traces of violence, just the grandeur of the ruins. All that was below or above fiction couldn't find its place. People took the event as just another story, even if unimaginable – but so-called American films are made to be unbelievable. All that could go against that, the quite real dead, the deeper and more painful things than the "axis of evil" was systematically put aside.

That the citizens of the USA can't bear to look at their death in the face is one thing, but for them to reshape the image by cloning it with text becomes very disturbing. They stand on purified propaganda. One ends up being forced not to show anything. And so reigns the uncontested master, the event's commentary transformed into universal visual stereotype.


A de B: Is the struggle between America and Islamicism also a war of images?


JLG: To me, in this digital age, those words seem to come from traditional clichés. An image, even an icon, doesn't make war, since it's primarily a connection to the other, and not destruction. War is a fact of text only, that which interdicts those encounters and, accordingly, the birth of a true text: law, prayer or poetry. The press and television, both ugly hearts, didn't accept Cinderella putting on "the seamless garment of reality" mentioned by A. Bazin. In short, the image in general didn't go unharmed after September 11th. And commentary took care, without qualms, that it should be covered with rags, as if a delinquent to be reeducated.


________
Libération, April 6, 2002
________
*Henry Ford Automakers; Taylor as in Frederick Taylor(ism) - see here .



translated by A. Dias and A. Rector. Thanks to C.

percentage of survival (1)

"the gold tooth paid for the funeral no doubt"









without a pot to piss in

increasingly sanctifying numbers in prison

WORKED NINE DAYS ALTOGETHER LAST WEEK

coming and going is

no laughing matter

Nuovi doveri, più alti, altri doveri...

Daney on ICI ET AILLEURS: A Newly Unearthed Text and Some Known Ones

Bill Krohn has recently rediscovered an unpublished single page text by Serge Daney. The text is a short preface to Godard/Gorin/Miéville's ICI ET AILLEURS (HERE AND ELSEWHERE, 1976). It is presented below in a translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Krohn.

Daney wrote the text in New York while there to present the first SEMAINE DES CAHIERS DU CINÉMA* at the invitation of Jackie Raynal of the Bleeker Street Cinema in 1977.

It was written for the New York audience about to see ICI ET AILLEURS for the first time. The text however does not appear in the magazine that served as a program for the SEMAINE, The Thousand Eyes, Number 2**. It's possible that this Daney text was translated and printed as a hand-out for the spectators of ICI ET AILLEURS at the Bleeker. However Krohn doesn't recall if it was ever actually printed and believes it has never been published.

There was quite a bit of anxiety surrounding this 1977 screening of ICI ET AILLEURS: about a year earlier, in Paris on September 15, 1976, a nail-bomb was planted by a Zionist terrorist group at one of the two theaters where the film was to have its premiere. The bomb didn't explode, the film was removed from the theater.

Preface to Here and Elsewhere

The film consists of 3 parts, and it’s important to understand the movement animating these 3 parts.

1. The film was undertaken in 1970. At the request of the PLO, JLG goes to the Middle East and shoots several hours of rushes. He returns to France. After the Amman massacres (Sept 1970***), he starts wanting to edit the film. But he discovers he can’t do it.

The first part of the film is composed of the images that JLG went looking for in the Palestinian camps. Eventually, he retains only 5 of them, which are like the image force**** of the PLO’s politics. These images are those that the PLO wants to see broadcast in France. In that sense, they are the images of any propaganda movie. This is the material the film is going to work with.

2. Between 1970 and 1975, Godard tries to come up with an order to edit his film, but he can’t find one. He is very conscious of the fact that many of those he has filmed are now dead and that, as a filmmaker and survivor, he has their image at his disposal. Instead of giving up, he modifies the film and adds other images to the pictures of Palestine, images of France. Mainly of an average French family (the father is unemployed) who watch television. In France, the Left is in a period of retreat and assessment (many dreams have crumbled). It’s also a period where more questions are being asked about the media and their effect on people, about advertising, propaganda, etc.

The second part of the film, the longest and the most complex, cannot be summed up here. It’s an analysis of the "chains of images" in which we are all caught. One of its conclusions is what Godard denounces as “playing the sound too loud” (including the the Internationale), i.e. covering one sound with another, thus becoming incapable of simply seeing what’s in the images.

3. The third part of the film returns to the images of the beginning. But with a dialectical change. There’s no longer one but two voices-over who take the time to watch the images again (like on an editing table) to see both what they are really saying and what’s wrong, to listen to these images. This part is therefore a kind of critique of the first part because it criticises any propaganda, if propaganda means – for a filmmaker – using the image of others to make this image say something else than what the others are saying in it. So what’s at stake is the engagement of a filmmaker as a filmmaker. For it’s in the nature of cinema (delay between the time of shooting and the time of projection) to be the art of here and elsewhere. What Godard says, very uncomfortably and very honestly, is that the true place of the filmmaker is in the AND. A hyphen only has value if it doesn’t confuse what it unites.

Serge Daney

[unidentified], Gorin, and Godard shooting UNTIL VICTORY, "the film undertaken...at the request of the PLO", in a Palestinian refugee camp, Jordan, 1970. Unknown Photographer.

Daney in New York, November 1977. Photo: Jackie Raynal.

***

Serge Daney continually wrote and spoke of ICI ET AILLEURS. Below are excerpts from 2 essays and an interview, by no means exhaustive of his engagement with the film.

In ICI ET AILLEURS, for example, a "film" about images brought back from Jordan (1970-1974), it is clear that the questions raised by the film about itself (the kind of disjunction it effects in every direction: between here and elsewhere, images and sounds, 1970 and 1975) is only possible because the syntagm "Palestinian revolution" already functions as an axiom, as something which is a matter of course (something already-said-by-others, in this case, by Al Fatah), and in relation to which Godard does not have to define himself personally (to say "me, I," but also to say "me, I am with them"), or to show his position in the film (to socialize, make convincing, desirable, the position he has taken, his initial choice: for the Palestinians, against Israel.) Always the logic of school.

(...)

The impossibility of obtaining a new type of filmic contract has thus led him to keep (to retain) images and sounds without finding anyone to whom he can return them, restore them. Godard's cinema is a painful meditation on the theme of restitution, or better, of reparation. Reparation would mean returning images and sounds to those from whom they were taken. This also commits them to produce their own images and sounds. And all the better if that production obliges the filmmaker to change his own way of working!

There is a film in which this restitution-reparation takes place, ideally at least - ICI ET AILLEURS. These images of Palestinian men and women that Godard and Gorin, invited by the PLO, brought back from the Middle East, these images which he has kept in front of him for five years -- to whom should they be returned?

To the general public avid for sensation (Godard+Palestine=scoop)? To the politicized public eager to be confirmed in dogma (Godard+Palestine=worthy cause=art)? To the PLO who invited him, permitted him to film and trusted him (Godard+Palestine=propaganda weapon)? Not even them. So?

One day, between 1970 and 1975, Godard realizes that the soundtrack is not completely translated, that what the fedayin are saying, in the shots where they appear, has not been translated from Arabic. And that in the end no one would be very bothered by this (accepting the fact that a voice-over covers these voices). Now, Godard says, the fedayin whose words have remained a dead letter are dead men with a reprieve - the living dead. They or others like them died in 1970, were killed by Hussein's troops.

To make the film ("You must always finish what you have started") is then, quite simply, to translate the soundtrack, so that one hears what is being said, or better: so that one listens to it. What was retained has been freed, what was kept has been restored, but it's too late. Images and sounds are rendered as honors are rendered, to those to whom they belong: to the dead.

--Excerpt from THE T(H)ERRORIZED, Cahiers du cinema, no. 262/63, January 1976. Translation by Bill Krohn and Charles Cameron Ball.

(...) In a Beirut hotel, a Frenchman ‘in love with the Orient’ (Jean Carmet) takes photos of a recent slaughter out of a briefcase and puts them up for auction. Children lead Laschen and Hoffman to a carbonised corpse. Everything has image potential, a second, now marketable death. What’s to be made of these images, Laschen wonders? What’s to be made of this chain where we necessarily feature, from one link to another: corpse, photograph, modelmaker, reader? What’s to be made of his fine soul?

Godard already asks this question in a film now six years old. The film, which talks about the Middle East, was called ICI ET AILLEURS and it wasn’t a great success. Before photos of the victims of the Amman massacres of 1970, Godard allowed himself the black humour of wondering (in an aside) if these extras had been well paid, and how much? The lesson was clear. When Godard and Schlondorff began making films we could still think of war as merely obscene (LES CARABINIERS, LE COUP DE GRACE). Nowadays it has become completely pornographic. There are image dealers just as there are arms dealers. A film-maker occupies a place somewhere in this chain. Does he know this? With CIRCLE OF DECEIT, Schlondorff has just found out.

Godard halted the chain, blocked the spectacle, reflected on an image, imposed his voice on us, the chagrined voice-off of a moralist. (...)

--Excerpt from entry on CIRCLE OF DECEIT (Volker Schlöndorff). from the Ciné Journal, Libération, 29 October 1981. Translation by Liz Heron.

Philippe Roger: How can the idea of information and the idea of democracy be articulated today?

Daney: There’s no question that seems more urgent, and yet it’s as if we hadn’t begun to think about it. I’m staggered when I see that all I have to do nowadays is recycle a tenth of what was in ICI ET AILLEURS for me to look like some kind of guru in the eyes of professional journalists or film students. It’s nice for me, but all the same it’s strange. Strange too how in the wake of this war (ed. note: The First Gulf War) the usual theoreticians and advocates of the ‘fourth estate’ are silent.

What is democratic? That more and more people become amateur semiologists and learn to surf blithely on the linguistic drift imposed on them by the market, via advertsisng? That was more or less the idea that prevailed in the Eighties; the '68ers delight in being reconciled with the idea of the market. Or else that more and more people have the capacity to see what is (just an image) and to imagine what is missing (that more, just image which is being kept from them perhaps)? Will this be an idea of the Nineties? To be honest, I don’t know.

--Excerpt from Le Passeur, Philippe Roger's interview with Daney, 1991. Translation by Liz Heron.

***

notes

*The films screened at the SEMAINE were ICI ET AILLEURS [Godard, Gorin, Miéville, 1975], COMMENT ÇA VA? [Godard, Miéville, 1977], NEWS FROM HOME [Akerman, 1976], L'ASSASSIN MUSICIEN [Benoît Jacquot, 1976], IM LAUF DER ZEIT [Wenders, 1976], FORTINI-CANI [Straub, Huillet, 1976], MOI, PIERRE RIVIÈRE - AYANT ÉGORGÉ MA MÈRE, MA SOEUR ET MON FRÈRE... [René Allio, 1976] and NUMÉRO DEUX [Godard, Miéville, 1975].

**This number of The Thousand Eyes, slim though it is, has considerable heft and merits further mention: it includes a number of translations of Cahiers texts (Narboni, Skorecki, Bonitzer, Foucault) on the aforementioned programmed films; the first English translation of Daney's seminal essay on Godard and pedagogy "THE T(H)EORRORIZED"; and two crucial pieces by Krohn, "THE TINKERERS" and an interview with Daney himself, which illuminate the terms and matters of a specific cultural struggle, namely how Daney and the Cahiers went from their "passion for films like BABY FACE NELSON (Siegel) and RANCHO NOTORIOUS (Lang)" to "films made in factories, ghettoes and armed camps all over the world."

***For a bit of information on Black September in which thousands of Palestinians were killed read here.

****Translator's note: "image force": the electrostatic force on a charge in the neighborhood of a conductor, which may be thought of as the attraction to the charge's electric image.

***

To see fragments of Godard and Gorin at work in the planning stages (elsewhere) of UNTIL VICTORY ("the originality of the Palestinian revolutionary situation"), see GODARD IN AMERICA (1970) here.

Special thanks to Bill and Laurent.

The wounded young

"In the documentary that followed the THE SEARCHERS, John Wayne explained that the gesture in the final shot of the film, a way of holding the right elbow with the left hand, came from Harry Carey (Sr.)- the greatest Western actor of all time, Ford says. But what would the gesture be without the wide body of John Wayne, the slight bending of the left leg?" - wrote c., of dias felizes, here

Below, the left arm of Harry Carey Jr. — a living, working dedication to Carey Sr., with a metaphorical sling for the young to heal, as they sometimes do so well — as seen by Ford in THREE GODFATHERS:

"YOU CANNOT ALIBI."