This article was originally published as "Life Is Nothing But Glances" in the Spring 2021 issue of Trafic. It is being presented here through the generosity of the author, newly retitled at his request, and in a new translation by Ted Fendt. It is preceded by a short note shared by Moullet after the death of Jean-Luc Godard:
Godard represents, first of all, a search for novelty, one defined by risk and an openness to the possibility of making mistakes over the course of many experiments (over 100 films). For him, a failed film was not a serious matter.
Godard made films against: against the milieu from which he came, against dominant rules, and also against himself and his previous films.
Godard’s thinking can only be defined by seeing his films, and not through his statements which are often not worthwhile for what they say but for his desire to provoke. A bit like Dalí. He would frequently talk without answering the question posed.
–Luc Moullet, October 2022
LIFE IS NOTHING BUT GLANCES
Breathless (1960).
In his third article for Cahiers du cinéma in 1952, Godard signed a “defense and illustration of classical construction.” He pursued this option until 1958 and even, on occasion, until 1963 in Le mépris (Contempt). But he gradually shifted away from it. There was not much more for him to explore in this domain.
It was undoubtedly his direct experience editing commissioned films shot by others that led him to take a totally contrary Eisensteinian position (as evoked in his 1956 article, “Montage, My Fine Care”) and he made fun (Cahiers no. 67) of Gance’s three-screen Magirama, preferring to superimpose three elements in the same frame. À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), considered too long for a poor little crime movie, was saved by jump cuts (abrupt edits just after the start of the shot and before the end of the scene). This wasn’t the first such attempt. The proof: All the King’s Men (Robert Rossen, 1949), which took home many Oscars. There is, therefore, in JLG an aesthetics of fragmentation, flickering and syncopation, and fractures and separation, which were sometimes the foundation of Lionel Rogosin’s documentaries (Good Times, Wonderful Times, 1956) and the films of Tinto Brass (Ça ira, 1965).
There are other neighboring effects, i.e., in Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), where a few seconds of negative images are inserted into a series of positive images, and abrupt transitions occur from wide shots to extreme close-ups of objects without a diegetic motivation, whereas the rule had been to transition via an intermediary shot.
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Every Man for Himself (1980).
What is cinematic syncopation? Samuel Fuller provides us with a good example in Shock Corridor (1963) when, just after the rain floods the mental asylum’s hallway in black and white, we suddenly see, in de-anamorphized color Cinemascope, the large torrents of the Araguaia River before the more classical return to the asylum and bichrome.
Another good visual example of syncopation occurs in Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959), with its deep ravine surrounded by two steep cliffs where enemy horsemen will die, attracted by the deceitful radiance of the shields of King Solomon’s faithful.
In Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man For Himself, 1980), Nathalie Baye’s rapid descent on her bicycle on the Mollendruz pass (1,180 meters), filmed on video1 and intercut with multiple jumps, gives flickering impression of slow motion. An alternation between nature’s eternal beauty and the evanescent beauty of humans, as in Yuliya Solntseva’s Zacharovana Desna (The Enchanted Desna, 1964). Irony in the face of the desire to ride fast.
Of course, this performance and those that follow would have been impossible on film considering the high cost of negative cutting and optical effects.2
How to explain these repeated syncopations? Several leads:
1) One JLG gave me (but one should be wary of what Godard says): it is about the nature of cinema itself. In the short, indivisible unity (24 frames per second), we see a continuity thanks to persistence of vision. For JLG, this whole is merely an arbitrary and chopped up series, while we do not really see all 24 frames.
With flicker (or its caricature), he rediscovers early cinema, which resembles the proto-cinema of Émile Reynaud (see Autour d’une cabine, 1894), projected slide film and even a film shown at a different speed than the one it was shot at (24 or 12 frames instead of 16 for a silent film).
Puissance de la parole (1988).
Likewise, in Puissance de la parole (The Power of Speech, 1988), which was shot on video, we see a...35mm film roll laboriously, and squeaking, run through a Moritone editing table. Godard wanted to rediscover the fragmentation of time that corresponds to the reality of film, persistence of vision producing a lie.
Hypermodern Godard never ceased wanting to rediscover the reality of an admired past that he evoked but never filmed... He kind of regrets being modern, the past being the only truth. The present is ephemeral, but the past lasts, at least since the Cro-Magnon era. A curious contradiction. Flicker expresses humans’ very fleeting status, their pathetic value in the face of nature’s vastness. “Life is nothing but glances”3—I don’t know how to say it in French.
This is even more obvious when Godard constantly stops the course of the furious river.
The flicker also corresponds to a higher reality since we blink on average every 28 seconds.
In Godard, then, there is an ontological flicker. That is why Une femme mariée and Week-end (1967) had already been presented, with questionable modesty, as fragments or the debris of films, and not as coherent wholes.
Week-end (1967).
2) Fragmentation allows taking a step back from reality, which absorbs us and whose perpetual flow prevents us from grasping the true reality of each moment.
The admirable, excessive romanticism of nature in Puissance de la parole (the river’s fury) is broken by the freeze frames that take us back to a higher dimension, which would otherwise escape us, swept away as we are by the deceitful lyricism of the picture and sound.
There is an “Achilles and the tortoise” quality to this conception of time. We are far from the stale poetry of Terence Malick. Any other filmmaker than Godard would have let themselves be swallowed up by the lively, slightly pompous, flow of the liquid mass. There can be found here both an almost terrestrial strength and its refusal via reflection. The pleasure related to duration is blown apart by the pleasure of the moment.
Godard is a disciple of both Vidor and Guy Debord. A tour de force. It had to be done…
The frozen or slowed down water has a very unusual physical appearance that it is not easy for the eye to assimilate. One could read in it a desire to stop time, the filmmaker naively wanting to delay his death.
Nouvelle Vague (1990).
3) We no longer really know what we are seeing in Puissance de la parole: Is that a humid road near the lake? A snowy landscape? Is there a meaning behind the outstretched hand in several of Godard’s films (Le livre d’image, Nouvelle Vague, Film Socialisme, Hélas pour moi, Je vous salue Marie, etc.)? Is it a reference to the Sistine Chapel, a political movement, Fritz Lang or Bresson, two filmmakers of hands? Or is it a coincidence? Does the hand belong to someone living or dead?
These effects can be compared to those of an Alain Resnais in L’amour à mort (1984) or Hiroshima mon amour (1959): at the start of the film, are we seeing the sand to which the bombed city has been reduced, the ashes of the victims or the living bodies of the lovers?
This applies to all of Godard: Our vision of the world is very divided up. When we watch someone in the subway, we do not know who they are, what they want, or what they are thinking, whereas in a film, everything that concerns a character tends to be defined in order to satisfy the viewer’s expectations. Reality is ignored. JLG has often wanted to show a thing and its opposite: the couple and the outside world, French reality and the many crying Chinese babies born each minute (see his famous interview from the 1960s). His art involves creating connections among the difficult-to-understand chaos of the past century. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), Finnegans Wake (Joyce), J.R. (Gaddis), Under the Volcano (Lowry) remain quite hermetic, why shouldn’t films as well?
The authors of these books seek to create obstacles to reader comprehension. The same is sometimes true of JLG. His films are nevertheless easier to understand than the oeuvres of these famous authors. With its fidelity to lived reality, syncopation favors this reduced kind of communication. Isabelle Huppert’s stuttering (Passion, 1982), Godard as actor (Soigne ta droite, 1987, and Prénom Carmen, 1983) and the deafening sounds of city streets, which increase this detachment.
First Name: Carmen (1983).
4) Syncopation may also be linked to unexpected arrivals—even incongruous ones as in Luis Buñuel—of special beings: a child (Film Socialisme, 2010), animals (the puma, cat, owl and bull in the same film, the dog in Adieu au langage, 2014). This can be helped by the sudden and violent association of identical elements in different scenes. Is the red of the Darty company (Le rapport Darty, 1989) an expression of satanic power? The strong tension between the young, torn apart couple in Puissance de la parole, straight out of James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, is incarnated and sublimated by the fiery volcano in the final sequence where the couple does not appear.
5) Musical syncopation results jumping from one art form to another, from one composer to another.4 The strongest emotion aroused by any film shot between 1985 and 2020 can be felt in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), where Jennifer Jones crawling and mortally wounded (at the end of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, 1945), is accompanied not by the film’s music written by Dimitri Tiomkin, but by Bernard Herrmann’s music composed for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The most beautiful Hollywood films superimposed over each other. Obviously, whoever knows both films will also think about Tiomkin’s bombastic score and the paroxysmic shower in Hitchcock’s film. Impossible to be more empathetic. Without a doubt, JLG. will die from a syncope. During a home viewing of this film, my blood pressure increased from 13 to 19, and my pulse from its usual 49 to 77.
Similarly, my brother, who was one of the carabiniers, went to see Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) many times when he was fifteen and, fearing it would cost him his life, would prudently bring a stethoscope with him. Godard and Resnais: nearly lethal powers of great cinema.
There is therefore the musical-cinematic syncopation created, let’s say, in the editing room and the medical syncope undergone in the cinema.
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Goodbye to Language (2014).
The term syncopation is all the more pertinent since over the past 40 years, a work by Godard has been more of a musical composition than a film (even if there is sometimes no music) wherein the length of a shot, or part of a shot, is of greater importance than vulgar “content” (see Détective, 1985, and Aria, 1987).
Syncopation appears very much connected to surprise but it is a magnified, extended surprise relying heavily on every aggressive sound effect, pictorial image, editing and framing choice.
There can be slightly similar effects in Scorsese or Spielberg, but they remain very vulgar and rather childish; they only serve to develop the kind of banal diegesis that Godard flouts. In his work, syncopation is new and it is very pure.
This syncopation-based style is undoubtedly the most important positive element offered by Francophone cinema in the past 60 years in addition to Robert Bresson’s tight, guillotine-like compositions, two different actresses playing the same role (Cet obscure objet du désir by Buñuel and Merry-Go-Round by Jacques Rivette, both shot in 1977), the structuralist rage of Dédale (Luc Meichler and Gisèle Rapp-Meichler, 1993), Obras (Hendrick Dusollier, 2004), or Mademoiselle Else (Isabelle Prim, 2010) with its very cubist audiovisual poly-vision, and the phrasing and mugs in P’tit Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, 2015).
Translation by Ted Fendt.
1. Trans. note: This sequence was, like the rest of Sauve qui peut, shot on 35mm. The visual effects were made using an optical printer.
2. Trans. note: see note above.
3. Trans. note: In English in the original.
4. Author's note: Godardian syncopation differs from classical musical syncopation (quiet sound followed by loud sound, then sustained sound) because it follows the opposite trajectory, but the effect is the same.