So what did you think of “Film Socialisme,” Ari?
@ Matt
Does he make a distinction anywhere between lit and viz?
…otherwise not helpful: of course the constant cross reference re-re-description makes sense to intellectual ironists – their actions mimic how the brain works: language only references the other senses – they’ve gone the next step and now language only references language: time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. ……….. In the course of doing so, we revise our opinion of both the old and the new. Simultaneously, we revise our own moral identity by revising our own final vocabulary.
That doesn’t seem hopelessly derivative?
The basic premise, which I object to, is that all intellect is language based.
The original question was: can one read (act) outside of ideology.
It seems you are saying it would be bourgeois and anti-intellectual to do so.
-Does he make a distinction anywhere between lit and viz?-
He doesn’t really talk about the visual arts (or music, for that matter), because he didn’t consider himself to have sufficient sensitivities to these (or, at least, so he said in interviews). So, yes, the language is tailored to the language of language (philosophy and literature), but I think you can probably pull back from the literal level to a metaphorical.
-The original question was: can one read (act) outside of ideology.-
It seems you are saying it would be bourgeois and anti-intellectual to do so.
No, I’m saying that, except metaphorically, there’s no such thing as “outside of ideology,” and the idea that there is such a position is the product of a specific discourse. This is not to say that ideology necessarily dictates how one reads, but it dictates the position from which one reads, any reading begins and ends within the context of an ideology, though a the same time it revises the ideology (initially in a very small and individual way, but perhaps eventually in a very large, public way).
If it can be done by metaphor, it doesn’t count?
If the reading was done outside of language, could it possibly be outside of ideology?
How does one go outside of language?
-If it can be done by metaphor, it doesn’t count?-
Of course it counts, but you can’t call it objectivity.
-If the reading was done outside of language, could it possibly be outside of ideology?-
Let’s assume, hypothetically, that there is . . . OK, still, you couldn’t really say anything about it without reengaging ideological space. And even so, from what would a non-language-based reading arise? The Archimedean point is still elusive. Are you suggesting that it’s possible to become somehow post-ideologically non-ideological, or that there is some sort of persistant pre-ideological fundamental?
5 senses: hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, taste
Okay- I want to read art visually or maybe by touch or sound.
If language is constantly referring to itself, then something is lost….
Return to Godard via _ Notre Musique:_
Did you know that, before language was developed in Sumer…to talk about the past, we used the word ´´after´´…and to talk about the future, the word ´´before´´?
Extra credit question:
Is ideology the result of language?
“I remember seeing Spike Lee on Oprah or Donahue or something a while back. He was there with the Hudlin brothers, Mario Van Peebles and I think another black filmmaker who makes straight commercial films. Lee’s work is actually pretty commercial in it’s own way but i remember thinking that his work would be more comfortably compared with Scorsese than with the maker’s of House Party and Posse.”
This isn’t a bad example for the discussion. You’ve either noticed or drawn a link between Lee and Scorsese. What is the link? Tracking shots? Pop music sountracks? Or could it even be a regional one? I dare say you make the “comparison” with mind paid to “comfort” because of auteurism, which is a theory, a general proposition based off noticeable phenomena (shades of what I’ve been saying). Let us not forget the roots of the theory. How about what Truffaut wrote in “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”:
“If the French cinema exists by means of about a hundred films a year, it is well understood
that only ten or twelve merit the attention of critics and cinephiles, the attention, therefore of
“Cahiers.”
These ten or twelve films constitute what has been prettily named the “Tradition of
Quality”; they force, by their ambitiousness, the admiration of the foreign press, defend the
French flag twice a year at Cannes and at Venice where, since 1946, they regularly carry off
medals, golden lions and grands prix.
With the advent of “talkies,” the French cinema was a frank plagiarism of the American
cinema. Under the influence of Scarface, we made the amusing Pepe Le Moko. Then the
French scenario is most clearly obliged to Prevert for its evolution: Quai Des Brumes (Port
Of Shadows) remains the masterpiece of poetic realism.
The war and the post-war period renewed our cinema. It evolved under the effect of an
internal pressure and for poetic realism…”
More from the essay, these thoughts being on “bourgeois cinema”:
“The dominant trait of psychological realism is its anti-bourgeois will. But what are
Aurenche and Bost, Sigurd, Jeanson, Autant-Lara, Allegret, if not bourgeois, and what are the
fifty thousand new readers, who do not fail to see each film from a novel, if not bourgeois?
What then is the value of an anti-bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the
bourgeois? Workers, you know very well, do not appreciate this form of cinema at all even
when it aims at relating to them. They refused to recognize. themselves in the dockers of Un
Homme Marche Dans La hille, or in the sailors of Les Amants De Brasmort. Perhaps it is
necessary to send the children out on the stairway landing in order to make love, but their
parents don’t like to hear it said, above all at the cinema, even with “benevolence.” If the
public likes to mix with low company under the alibi of literature, it also likes to do it under
the alibi of society. It is instructive to consider the programming of films in Paris, by
neighbourhoods…”
I think of “Tout va bien” when I read that excerpt.
And so I think that understanding the zeitgeist actually, contrary to what you say, makes for a good start. If the Cahiers crowd was able to invent, it was because they were first able to notice. Here Truffaut is noticing a “tendency.”
The main problem I have with what you are saying is that the goal seems to be to contain discussion, rather than widen its scope. Why is this desirable? The brand of cinema that I think most resembles open-ended discourse in form is the essay film. Chris Marker, for instance, does not balk at the notion of being discursive. Why stop at cats and Japan when emus and Iceland are just as interesting?
I wonder if a film can have a “self-contained” aesthetic. Possibly in the avant-garde, but that is because the emphasis is so much on the experience, on the act of watching and feeling. But does one repress the intellectual impulses, the fruitful wanderings of the mind (which exist very much “inside of language”), that are inevitable when viewing a film? The last film I watched was Pedro Costa’s “In Vanda’s Room.” I was thinking of this discussion while watching it, and for a while was impressed with how “self-contained” its universe is, save for a couple of visual and aural references to Bob Marley. But there is more: the film’s idea of “quotidian”—smoking crack and shooting heroin figure prominently, all of it captured by a dutifully static camera—stems directly from its milieu (a Lisbon ghetto). The characters even end up acknowledging this towards the end when they discuss whether they use drugs as a conscious choice or because their surroundings force them to.
We should not lose sight of the fact that films are part of this thing we call culture. They also are, for better or worse, commodities that are bought, sold, and packaged. How they are made became a central focus of Godard’s early on: “All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.” The cinema of poverty could be considered in some way a revolt against political economy (at least I think, but I may have to do some more wondering on this statement; disagreements are very welcome). Later on, Godard declared that “art and economy don’t exist separately of each other,” or something along those lines. This is partially why he thought “Apocalypse Now” required the budget of the Vietnam War to be any good. It also leads to Godard’s position on the Shoah in the cinema, but more on that in a moment. An even more radical response to political economy’s hold on the cinema came from a student of Godard’s, Luc Moullet. His films certainly are not apolitical, to say the least. One of his films—“Genesis of a Meal”—takes on the issue of political economy directly. There is also a good reason for the English title of his “Une aventure de Billy le Kid”: “A Girl is a Gun.”
Now to address the main fear and concern: that the politics of cinema becomes like politics everywhere else, an uninspiring, ugly experience that can completely subsume aesthetics. But I would propose the relationship is reflexive: if politics inform the aesthetic, the aesthetic also informs politics. We could draw up the same formula with the aesthetic and history. This seems to me wonderful, organic even. It is my understanding that this is what took place in 1968, but I suppose I should defer to somebody who was around to see it (I’m looking at you, David E.) And to add to all of that, if Godard’s statement on “Apocalypse Now” was about economy, it was also about the aesthetic. What is real must be filmed, what is filmed must be real. This is, I think, Godard’s problem with Lanzemann’s “Shoah.” It is Godard’s belief that we should not be frightened of images. All of this is written about in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s ongoing series about Godard over at the Huffington Post. So it follows that the effort to establish some truth about Israel-Palestine is to establish some understanding of “Notre Musique” (so there is nothing “loose” about the connection of Godard’s films to the political and historical argument). There are disputes about al Naqba, about the “truth” (or “documentary”) and the “fiction” of it. It is significant that some of the photos used (as an example of shot and reverse-shot no less) in Godard’s lecture on the text and the image are from al Naqa.
“So what did you think of “Film Socialisme,” Ari?”
Finished downloading it yesterday. I’m going to watch it this week. When I finished with the DL, I checked to see if the image was okay and I got sucked into the first twenty minutes. I think it’ll take a few watches to digest it fully.
But minor question. I have a version without subtitles – it’s fine since I understand French but there’s a lot of it that is not in French. Godard subtitled it at Cannes in “Navajo English” which makes me wonder how he intends it to be understood or not. Obviously, language and communication and, more importantly, the lack thereof is a major theme of the film (it actually makes sense in the context of Godard’s next project eluded to in the interview) so how is it intended to be watched?
-Okay I want to read art visually or maybe by touch or sound—
And there’s no reason that you can’t or shouldn’t. You just can’t claim objectivity.
-Is ideology the result of language?-
Yes . . . and language is the result of ideology, then ideology is the result of language . . . (repeat)
How it was intended to be watched is an open question. As I know French I had no problem with it. What’s said by tha various speakers (there are no characters in the conventional sense) is less important than the “speech” provided by the images. It’s a lament for "Poor Old Euorpe’ adrift in the 21st century. The so-called “Navajo English” simply put a few subject titles on the screen. Nothing more.
it’s a piece of visual msuic and should be seen and enjoyed as such.
Ari
Godard is definitely more Deleuzian (or maybe Derrida). Deleuze has some important things to say about Godard in Thought and CInema.