Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image

Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image) Author(s): NICHOLAS PAIGE Source: Representations, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Fall 2004), pp. 1-25 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2004.88.1.1 . Accessed: 10/11/2013 22:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NICHOLAS PAIGE Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image) A   A   1984  ‘‘Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’’ Fredric Jameson introduced some footwear—Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes; from these two artworks he proceeded to extrapolate the gulf separating modernist from postmodernist sensibility. This gulf, he argued, could best be articulated as a problem of depth itself. Van Gogh’s oils both valorize the authenticity of an entire pre-urban world and point to its sumptuous transformation by art; as such, A Pair of Boots invites a hermeneutical reading in which, Jameson wrote, the work ‘‘is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as ultimate truth.’’ The viewer of Diamond Dust Shoes, on the other hand, cannot hope to arrive at such deep meaning, for the work, which imitates a photographic negative, fails to provide any means ‘‘to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour magazines.’’ In a move that has characterized nearly all of his subsequent writing on postmodernism, Jameson proposed that what was responsible for this turn away from modernist depth was the photographic image, whose reproducible nature enabled a promiscuous circulation that stripped it of all historical context. The depthlessness of the photographic image marked, then, ‘‘perhaps the supreme formal feature’’ of postmodernism, but it was something else besides: it was a metaphor for a general loss of the ability to think historically. If postmodernism is marked by a politically dangerous amnesia, Jameson suggests, this is in no small measure because of the nature of the photographic image itself.1 Jameson’s analysis of photography and image culture has, ironically, its own peculiar depthlessness, one due in part, as I will contend, to an insufficiently avowed annexing of Guy Debord’s 1960s iconophobia. More important, the reductiveness of this view of the image may well have contributed to the palpable lassitude, within recent cultural criticism, regarding the category of the postmodern itself. It may be possible, however, to retain much of the historical understanding  The photographic image—conceived as flat, reproducible, and mobile—is integral to Fredric Jameson’s influential description of the postmodern as marking an evacuation of historical thinking. This essay argues that Jean-Luc Godard’s early work, and his 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt) in particular, represents a sustained attempt to use images to promote a type of historical thinking for which Jameson’s definition of the postmodern, however relevant to Godard, cannot account. / R            88. Fall 2004 䉷 2005 The Regents of the University of California.     0734-6018, electronic     1533855X, pages 1–25. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 1 made possible by the idea of the postmodern—and so many of Jameson’s stunning efforts at periodization testify to the need for such thinking—if we take a second look at the purportedly ahistorical postmodern image. The early work of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard provides, I believe, an example of why this might be worth doing. Specifically, I will offer a reading of his 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt), whose meditation on the place of the artist within the image economy of the early sixties stages the death throes of artistic modernism. But it is much less clear—and this is why the example is intriguing—what Godard proposes in lieu of the modernist artwork: Can his early films accurately or helpfully be described as postmodern? What elements must we discount to do so? That Godard’s oeuvre presents a challenge to such categories is, as we shall see, manifest in Jameson’s own work, which cites the filmmaker repeatedly: sometimes seen by the critic as a protopostmodernist, sometimes as a Neolithic remnant of a modernist past long thought gone, Godard seems to resist these categories every bit as much as his work fairly calls out for their application. And Le Mépris provides more than a few clues about why this might be.2 Pastiching Modernism That Le Mépris addresses some sort of historical rupture has hardly been overlooked by commentators, but by the look of things, the rupture has been difficult to pin down. Uneasily, critics tend to offer the suggestion that it is the most ‘‘classic’’ of Godard’s early films: after all, it uses big-name actors and widescreen color to adapt a respected psychological novel (by Alberto Moravia) about a couple’s breakup over the commercial pressures involved in the screen adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Given the feel of Godard’s film, however, the suggestion is inevitably retracted. Hence, for one critic, Le Mépris is ‘‘his most classical film’’ while at the same time ‘‘is far from being a classical film’’; for another, the film ‘‘deals . . . with classicism, but in a non-classical way’’; for a third, it ‘‘is the only truly modern film in the sense that it stages the difference between classic and modern.’’3 The opposition between classic and modern crops up right and left, no doubt because Godard himself seems to have built it into the film itself, as when he described the script he was shooting as ‘‘rather faithful to [Moravia’s] novel . . . [It] allowed me to tell a classic film story, as if movies were really like that’’—the ‘‘as if ’’ indicating that here too, the classical gambit will be refused: ‘‘But I don’t think they’re like that.’’4 Simple though it is, the terminology here is treacherous: Godard’s remark needs to be situated against the backdrop of the Cahiers du cinéma, where, in the 1950s and early 1960s, ‘‘classic’’ and ‘‘modern’’ were continually if unsystematically invoked in order to map out the relation between present cinematic production and everything from Greek tragedy and Hollywood to Pierre Boulez and abstract expressionism.5 But Godard’s relationship to the cultural past was particularly fraught: figures such as Eric Rohmer or Jacques Rivette would militate, in the 2 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pages of the Cahiers, for either a classic or a modern cinema, whereas Godard seemed to want to think of the modern as something that fed off a classical past it could never quite digest, as something that reprised classic stories and images but always with a distinct sense of their anachronism. Against, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s selfconsciously avant-gardist Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel, like Le Mépris from 1963), Godard did not find forgetting the past an artistic option, but neither was adulatory repetition: ‘‘As soon as you get the ability to make movies, you can no longer make the kind of movies that made you want to make them in the first place,’’ Godard remarked in an early interview, sounding a note of melancholy historical exile that is audible in much of his early work.6 It follows that past and present works of art are always in a frustratingly undecidable relationship with one another, a relationship that can only be pointed to by paradoxes like ‘‘The new traditional film by Jean-Luc Godard!’’ (as the trailer for Le Mépris exclaimed) or (scrawled on a blackboard in Godard’s following film, Bande à part [Band of Outsiders, 1964]) ‘‘classic = modern.’’ The cultural past was dead letter; at the same time, it was everpresent and unavoidable. Within the context of Godard’s early work, and of the larger Cahiers group, then, the terms ‘‘classic’’ and ‘‘modern’’ did possess their own coherence and specificity. If my recourse here to a different opposition—between the modern and the postmodern—does some violence to that specificity, it also allows us to recast the somewhat idiosyncratic language of the New Wave milieu as a local attempt to come to grips with broader changes in the cultural field at that time, changes subsequently conceptualized, by Jameson and others, as the passage to the postmodern. It is surely ironic that many of Godard’s commentators have proven unable or unwilling to historicize Godard himself, if by historicize one means moving beyond monographic analysis and placing his work firmly within the context of late-twentiethcentury culture and art—ironic, since Godard himself over the last forty-odd years has so relentlessly tied his films to the ever-changing scene of their own production.7 But so it is. For at least two reasons, however, Le Mépris strikes me as a good place to begin to think about the ways in which Godard tried to come to grips with very concrete changes in the image economy of the early 1960s. First, in its explicit consideration of the position of the artist vis-à-vis both socioeconomic realities and the Western artistic canon, it anticipates questions that will come to the fore in key later works, from Passion (1981) to Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998). Second, in some sense, it’s an unlikely place to look: Une Femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), Masculin féminin (1966), 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966)— these are the films that emphatically lock themselves into their historical moment, while Le Mépris’s widescreen elegance might seem to lead the viewer straight to the land of Art Cinema, where major films are major because they transcend topicality. Indeed, Le Mépris sits rather oddly within Godard’s early output. If it enjoys pride of place as one of his early ‘‘major’’ works, such consensus is possible because it’s about Art with a capital A, whereas his other films, inventive as they are, also Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 3 seem content with their ‘‘minorness’’; one has only to note that, in contrast to the contemporaneous auteurism of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ingmar Bergman, Godard’s movies feel short, messy, and improvised. Pauline Kael, always a gleeful deflator of lumbering auteurs, noted and appreciated this immediately: Godard’s films just don’t seem like what we expect from a masterpiece, she noted in her review of Bande à part, surmising that some new form of artistry must be at work.8 More important still, these early films tend to work from generic models normally seen as second-rate or ‘‘low’’; in A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960), Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961), Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen, 1963), and Alphaville (1965), Godard refers us, respectively, to gangster pictures, spy pictures, the Hollywood musical, the war movie, and science fiction. (A break occurs after Made in USA [1966], the last Godard film, with the exception of 1984’s Détective, to have a ‘‘genre’’ plot, albeit disintegrated to the point of being unrecognizable.) Succinctly put, the problem is this: if such pastiching of narrative codes is a recognizably ‘‘postmodern’’ gesture, how are we to understand Le Mépris, whose sumptuous and serious meditation on the Western artistic canon would seem to place it squarely in the modernist camp? I would like to suggest, first, that Le Mépris’s difference from the filmmaker’s early production is at least partially illusory and that what Godard gave us in 1963—‘‘the heyday of auteurist high modernism,’’ as Jameson puts it—is a fake modernist film.9 Second, Le Mépris does not simply declare modernism dead by pastiching its signature tropes, it also points the way toward a type of historical thinking that pastiche is normally understood to block. Pastiche, I will maintain, becomes the means by which the film historicizes itself. One can certainly imagine self-conscious genre pictures that are not pastiches, not postmodern. When Orson Welles, for example, made The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, he brought his high modernist artistry to the crime film, redeeming the B picture by imparting Shakespearean grandeur to the myths and structures of a genre. In a sense, film noir, in spite of its grittiness and lack of manifestly artistic subject-matter, was already modernist: its stock plot, involving the corruption visited by capitalist society upon heroes trying to come or stay clean, enlisted genre as an allegory of the situation of the exiled European intellectual in Hollywood.10 Godard’s early films, however, are visibly in a different mold, in that they do not identify in the same way with the genres they refer to. For this reason, and following Jameson, they could be said to operate in the realm of pastiche: they vampirize the narrative formulae and visual codes of different genres, genres that can be ‘‘quoted’’ because, as far as their ability to register and work through contemporary anxieties was concerned, they were dead.11 Dead, but with an afterlife: genre would furnish a reservoir of trademark ghost images that could be cited and recirculated at will. This generic citation reaches right down into Godard’s films themselves: characters here imitate previous cinematic or literary models, the icons of both popular and high culture. But such citation is an endlessly chaotic affair, and Godard’s early 4 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions  1. The world in a suitcase (frame still from Jean-Luc Godard, Les Carabiniers, 1963). cinema mimes a cultural universe fragmented into an infinite array of sound and image bites. Bande à part’s celebrated race through the Louvre is a literal enactment of the drive that strips cultural works of their aura, as if the whirlwind created by the three friends’ passage caused the trademark images of high culture to flutter down and land, as reproductions, on the walls of these early films, walls shared with pin-ups torn from tabloids and the rest of mass culture’s visual detritus. A bout de souffle alone takes us from Chesterfields and Cadillac Eldorados to Auguste Renoir and William Faulkner, all of which, for the film’s protagonists, may be just so many brand names. Moreover, it is far from clear that the viewer can be counted on to assemble the references into a coherent whole. Whereas modernist allusion necessitated true familiarity with the quoted texts, so that the reader could sense critical changes and likenesses and thereby produce meaning, pastiche assumes a world that no longer aspires to such deep familiarity nor to the meaning production it makes possible.12 Viewed in this manner, Godard’s films resemble the remarkable scene of military conquest from Les Carabiniers, in which the ‘‘spoils’’ displayed by the protagonists turn out to be a suitcase of picture postcards of all the world’s composite elements, from the natural (insects or geographical features) to the manmade (cathedrals or the Technicolor studios of Hollywood) and everything in between (fig. 1). In Jameson’s view, the scene is a textbook example of the image’s ability to convert use value to exchange value, demonstrating Guy Debord’s dictum to the effect that ‘‘the image has become the final form of commodity reification.’’13 It is difficult to think of anything further removed from Les Carabiniers and its stacks of postcards than the momentous solemnity of Le Mépris’s opening—the ritually slow approach of a dollied camera, the brooding strains of Georges Delerue’s neoromantic music, and the deep male voice intoning credits that culminate in a Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 5 pronouncement, attributed to the critic André Bazin, that ‘‘cinema sets before our gaze [subsitue à notre regard ] a world in harmony with our desires.’’14 ‘‘Le Mépris is the story [histoire] of this world,’’ concludes the voice-over, clarifying more fully the mise-en-abyme promised by the dolly shot, as if to say: make no mistake about it, this is a film with a message, a film about the world-making power of cinematic art. Everything suggests we’ve reverted from a postmodern aesthetic, in which the medium picks up ambient cultural clichés like lint, to a modernist one, where the sacralized process of artistic creation, and the demiurgic presence of the artist, reign supreme. Indeed, for Jameson, mise-en-abyme is one of modernism’s signature tropes, by which literature sheds its realist pretensions of reflecting the (now irremediably capitalist) world; instead, by way of metafictional remove, art can essentially point to its own status as autonomous sphere, in which the more debasing characteristics of modern life are either banished or transmogrified by the artist. But is this particular self-reflexivity necessarily so modernist? One of the failures of the terms habitually used to describe the tensions of Godard’s film—‘‘classic’’ versus ‘‘modern’’—lies in the fact that the self-reflective work of art itself is, in a sense, classic. Even the Hollywood dream machine had long turned its lens on itself. Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, 1950), Joseph Mankiewicz (The Barefoot Contessa, 1953), George Cukor (A Star is Born, 1954), and Robert Aldrich (The Big Knife, 1955) compose Marc Cerisuelo’s list of Godard’s forerunners; to these one can add those key films that were less about Hollywood per se than film spectatorship and spectacle—King Kong (Merion Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933), Citizen Kane (Welles, 1940), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954).15 Most all of the auteurs beloved by the Cahiers du cinéma group had therefore reflected on the power of cinema to create worlds, and their reflections can be considered modernist to the extent that they isolate one type of cinema as bad or debased, and position their own as something else, that is to say, as art.16 Furthermore, self-reflexivity confirmed the intuition of the Cahiers’ auteur theory itself: the auteur was a director whose work, however implicated in the Hollywood system, nonetheless carried an identifiable signature and reflected a coherent worldview.17 Yet the distance that Godard takes 1 with respect to this tradition (to which Fellini would add 8 ⁄2 the following year) can be suggested straight away by the choice of Jack Palance to play his producer. Not only is the character of Jeremy Prokosch a caricature, the cardboard cutout of ugly American cultural imperialism, but in addition, the very presence of Palance himself is a historical trace of the earlier high modernist Hollywood wave, for the actor had played, in Aldrich’s The Big Knife, the victim of just such a producer.18 Hence, one might say that if hiring an actor to play a producer constitutes a miseen-abyme, hiring an actor who is already associated with movies featuring rapacious producers suggests that the mise-en-abyme itself is being pastiched as dead letter; it too has receded into the past, and only its afterimage is available for recycling, alongside cigarette brands or Shakespeare. A similarly ambiguous use of mise-en-abyme involves the director Fritz Lang, 6 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions who plays himself in the fictional project of filming Homer’s Odyssey. Available analyses of Le Mépris do not fail to situate Lang as the representation of an idealized cinema, and, more generally, as the ambassador of high culture itself: his references are Dante, Friedrich Hölderlin, and so on.19 His character—Godard insisted upon this in his preliminary sketch of the film—is a surrogate god. In perfect (indeed, almost caricatured) modernist fashion, the artist and the artwork take upon themselves the remnants of the sacred in a capitalistic, thoroughly disenchanted world: ‘‘as the film’s conscience, Lang looks a bit like an old Indian chief, wise and serene, who has meditated for a long time and finally understood the world,’’ Godard writes.20 Furthermore, Godard gives every indication that Lang’s example is ultimately the film’s ‘‘lesson’’: ‘‘And so the plot becomes the randomness (les aléas) of these people contemplating one another and that cinema in turn contemplates, a randomness that is always confronted, through cinematic grace, with classical harmony and intelligence, which in the end is all that remains.’’21 What Godard calls ‘‘classical,’’ once again I will translate as ‘‘modernist’’: the barbarian-at-the-gates gesture that endows high culture with the spot vacated by the loss of the sacred is precisely what is at the center of Lang’s celebrated invocation here of the variants in Hölderlin’s ‘‘Vocation of the Poet,’’ in which he points out that the final version of the poem predicates man’s salvation on the absence, not the nearness, of God.22 If it is not surprising that many commentators have followed the filmmaker’s own lead, there are nonetheless plenty of reasons not to take Godard here at his word—at the very least because Lang, by announcing that he believes a faithful treatment of Homer’s Odyssey to be possible, seems at odds with a film that insistently calls into question the possibility of any sort of cultural or historical translation.23 On the level of Lang’s altercations with Prokosch, Le Mépris most definitely plays out the modernist binary that opposes the defensive credo Art for Art’s sake to the voracious imperative of Business is Business.24 But one should add that if the modernist conflict structures the film, it is also fair to say that the film rehearses this conflict as an identifiable position that is not, however, its own. Le Mépris is about the making of a modernist film, but Le Mépris is not that film at all: the mirror relation promised by the mise-en-abyme is false. To return to the Bazinian ‘‘moral’’ or ‘‘lesson’’ that presided over the film’s beginning, it would be much more satisfying to read the ‘‘histoire’’ in the declaration ‘‘Le Mépris est l’histoire de ce monde’’ not as story, but as history: Le Mépris will historicize a world in which it was even possible to think that art could substitute for reality a world transformed; it will reveal Bazin’s position as the historical artifact it has become. Given that the plot of Le Mépris revolves around a modern adaptation of Homer, it is obvious enough that the question of history, or more precisely the question of cultural memory, is at issue here. Le Mépris represents Godard’s first sustained effort to think through the Western cultural heritage in all its glory: classical epic (Homer), the (late) modernist first-person novel (Moravia), European art cinema (Lang). Earlier films too abounded in high-culture references—characters debatBardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 7 ing on the relative merits of, say, Gauguin and Van Gogh—but such discussions were marked by the conspicuous and ironic inability of all present to go beyond the expression of personal preference. Le Mépris, however, is explicitly about entering into contact with the cultural monuments in whose shadows we live: translation is its very subject. Francesca Vanini, Prokosch’s all-around factotum and chief translator does not, as is frequently pointed out, exist in Moravia’s novel. Equally remarked is the fact that Vanini’s translations are less than reliable: she translates inaccurately, she interpolates, at times she even offers her translation before the ‘‘original’’ has been uttered; by her last appearance in the film, she refuses to respond at all.25 Figurative translations fare no better: in any conversion there is loss, mismatch, a fundamental méprise that definitively removes Homer and Lang from us just as surely as it separates the characters from one another. Indeed, the fact that Camille and Paul share the same language and still cannot communicate suggests that perhaps there is never a ‘‘same language’’ after all. According to this reading, then, Le Mépris interrogates the Western tradition only to find that it cannot answer back, and that we find ourselves in a cultural solitude as deep as our interpersonal isolation: the modernist totalization we long for fails completely to come about, and we drift into an anomie both sentimental and artistic. Vanini figures the brooding alterity of the past, which floats in fragments above the characters of Le Mépris in the way bits of Romeo and Juliet, read out of order, in French, and as translation practice, circulate around the struggling English students in Bande à part. Masterpieces there are, everywhere—but Hermes has suspended all flights. If we follow this line of reasoning, then, Le Mépris would seem to be the Trojan horse Godard pushes inside the modernist citadel: its sacralizing of the creative process, its reverence for the monuments of Western culture, and its lampooning of capital’s philistinism all ultimately ring a bit hollow. One could imagine more frontal attacks, more strident demonstrations of ‘‘the end of art’’ (Godard’s Weekend [1967] would have to be one), but Le Mépris’s undercover postmodernism does do its job quite well, and ultimately it is the same job done by Godard’s more manifestly postmodern output. At the same time, however, this reading of Godard’s early production, and of Le Mépris specifically, leaves me uncomfortable. For Jameson, as I have noted at the outset, pastiche is invariably equated with the evacuation of meaningful historical thinking; postmodernism is understood as being posthistorical.26 I have no quarrel with this as a general diagnosis—one does not need to venture much beyond the horizon of today’s billboards or radioscapes to grasp its truth. But is the functioning of Godard’s films really controlled by the selfsame logic? Or mightn’t our haste to dismiss pastiche as of necessity amnesiac be itself a form of flattening, one dictated by a prior conviction in the definitive triumph of capital?27 In the remainder of this study, I’d like to show that Le Mépris is in fact an exercise in a type of historical thinking, a thinking grounded in a conception of the image that is never simply simulacral. 8 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Documentary Image Persuasive as it is, Jameson’s Debordian reading of the postcard sequence in Les Carabiniers might prompt one to wonder if there is not a confusion of the most elementary sort here between the delusory beliefs of the characters and the discourse of the author. Yes, Godard does seem to have a point to make about a certain use of images, since the film’s war heroes, Ulysse and Michel-Ange, stand in for a population duped into accepting postcards (and other manifest lies) as coin of the realm. Godard’s own film, however, has little Debordian about it. Whereas Debord responds to early postmodern image saturation with radical iconoclasm, Godard uses his images against other images.28 Working within the Benjaminian and especially Brechtian tradition, Godard suffuses Les Carabiniers with a technophilic faith in the image’s power to bring a certain type of reality into focus—specifically, the reality of war films, here broken into their component parts and filmed the way one would film a newsreel.29 In place of Debord’s purist proscription, Godard’s films can be said to propose a hygiene of the gaze, one that enables us to restore specificity to the images we see, thanks to the scrutiny that the camera permits. Les Carabiniers, decried as ugly by the contemporary press, worked against a certain type of image consumption through just this unmasking of the cliché. Yet the widescreen color of Godard’s following feature, not to mention its star-vehicle status, could scarcely have been further removed from the gritty newsreel world of Les Carabiniers, nor from related affinities of the New Wave. The New Wave directors had a distinct preference for young actors who were either nonprofessionals or fresh faces not associated with French commercial cinema, and, with several exceptions, the movement had been an essentially black-and-white phenomenon. The reasons for this are myriad, involving material problems such as cost and film sensitivity, but the New Wave directors also made a virtue of necessity: at a time when color and stars connoted a certain type of production, associated with both big-budget Hollywood movies and ‘‘the tradition of quality’’ denounced by François Truffaut, black and white, added to the frequent use of untrained actors, gave these products an air of authenticity, the slice-of-life, in-the-streets feel their creators had admired in Italian neorealism.30 What, then, might it have meant for Godard to have made a big-budget production, filmed in color, with Brigitte Bardot? Was this return to the elements of a ‘‘classic’’ cinema some sort of capitulation? A simple hypothesis would point to a certain maturation, if not commercial recuperation, of the New Wave: given that by 1963, the early success of A bout de souffle (and Truffaut’s Les 400 coups [The 400 Blows, 1959]) had been erased by a spate of box-office failures, Godard could be seen to be leaving his cheap jump cuts behind and headed for the conquest of an international market.31 There was, however, quite a bit more at stake in Godard’s choice of color and stars, for Le Mépris was somehow about color and Bardot as much or more than it was about Homer or even Lang. In order Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 9 to appreciate Le Mépris as something more than a pastiche of modernism, or even as a sellout plain and simple, one needs to listen again to Godard’s promise, at the film’s outset, to give us the ‘‘history’’ of cinema’s dreamworld. In what sense is this film a history? Alternately, how, and to what effect, might what I’ve been reading as pastiche be recast as documentary? A good place to start is the last of the film’s mise-en-abymes—the appearance of Godard himself. Godard wove his presence into many of his early films, most notably in the form of the voice-over and in handwriting. (The heroine’s farewell note to her husband, here, is recognizably in Godard’s own hand, and it is he who reads the credits at the film’s beginning.) But the director also appeared on screen, and one might compare his role in Le Mépris with the one played in A bout de souffle, where he peeks above his newspaper to spy on the doomed hero Michel Poiccard, whom he then proceeds to denounce to a nearby policeman. The director’s cameo appearance was of course Hitchcock’s specialty: his profile, stitched into so many of his films, serves as a signature, a watermark guaranteeing the work as that of a certified auteur, and reminds the viewer of just who is spinning the web of suspense. Godard’s appearance might initially appear Hitchcockian and then some: the creator steps into A bout de souffle as a figure of ‘‘destiny’’ itself. Yet the moment is deprived of the confidence one would associate with such an apparently modernist gesture, for far from being pivotal, his fingering of Michel doesn’t lead anywhere in particular. Moreover, in a film constructed as a nearly endless chain of allusions, any such appearance begs to be read as a pastiche of a certain type of self-consciousness regarding authorial presence. In Le Mépris, however, Godard plays the role of Lang’s assistant—a mechanical role, mostly involving barking out basic orders, such as ‘‘Script!’’ or ‘‘Don’t forget the viewfinder!’’—and calling these appearances pastiche would be beside the point. One might attempt to motivate them in the opposite (that is, modernist) direction. Michel Marie, for one, has noted that at one moment Godard appears to deliver an ironic commentary on the action itself: ‘‘Stand back, you’re in the shot,’’ he warns, just as Paul launches into a spurious analysis of how his fraught relationship with his wife Camille resembles that of Odysseus and Penelope.32 Yet this reading too is unsatisfying, in that it would inject Godard’s presence with the very demiurgic power—that of the omniscient auteur—which his role as a technician would seem to belie: Godard-the-assistant is surely an unsuitable vehicle for artistic vision in any traditional sense. What Godard-the-assistant does achieve is something else, and it is surely no accident that his last cry is ‘‘Silence!’’ For the silencing of all these loquacious European intellectuals, the destruction of the modernist position, is brought about through the film’s one positive value, one hinted at by Godard’s screen appearance on the technical side of artistic creation but incarnated by no character: the camera itself as recording machine. The whole magnificent last shot of the roof of Curzio Malaparte’s famous villa performs the elimination or emptying of the film’s stage, as the slow pan to the left leaves the characters behind one 10 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions  2. Escape from culture (frame still from Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mépris, 1963). by one—Godard, Paul, Lang, the camera operators, and finally the actor playing Odysseus—and settles our gaze instead on the graduated blues of sea and sky. Godard’s camera here records what Lang’s will not, an image sublimely distanced from the weight of cultural tradition, of figuration, of content. A still image, as well: a photograph (fig. 2). The photograph’s ambiguous semiotic status—as both iconic and indexical sign—has been made commonplace enough by landmark essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, but it merits a brief recasting in the context of Godard’s early work.33 Schematically put, the Cahiers group had two patron saints, the critic André Bazin and Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque: on the one hand, the theoretician of the cinema’s one true vocation as that of presenting us with objective reality; on the other, the cinephile, the man who made it his mission to preserve and show anything and everything. Two different types of image, then: one ‘‘ontologically’’ bound to reality in a way painting never was; the other existing in its own world of generic interplay and allusion.34 Perhaps Langlois’s influence, then, is partly responsible for the pastiche aesthetics of Godard’s early films; Godard’s characters, and the films themselves, seem adrift in a museum of images and cultural clichés that they appropriate randomly, cite without ever mastering. Even outside of the Cinémathèque, Godard evinced an affinity for a type of viewing aesthetic not far from what we now know as ‘‘channel surfing’’: in the 1950s, he reports indiscriminately walking in and out of movies playing in theaters on the ChampsElysées. And yet the influence of Neorealism, and of Bazin’s near-religious faith in the photograph (which he compares in its metonymic power to relics such as the shroud of Turin), created a second type of image always in tension with the imageas-cliché. Bruno Forestier, Le Petit soldat’s protagonist, is a photographer who uses ultrasensitive film so that he can shoot his models without cumbersome lights, and it is he who utters the famous dictum ‘‘Photography is truth, and cinema is 24 times Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 11  3–6. Bruno Forestier’s wall of images (frame stills from Jean-Luc Godard, Le Petit soldat, 1960). truth per second.’’ And indeed, one can read this Bazinian faith in the remarkable pan of this same film, in which the camera lingers on the photos tacked to the wall of Forestier’s room: as it moves from journalistic photos of carnage to film stills (André Malraux’s 1939 Spanish civil war film L’Espoir) to the smooth faces of screen idols (including, importantly, Bardot), one gets the distinct impression that this juxtaposition is not intended to suggest the infinite exchangeability of the images, but rather their refusal to blend together, their stubborn specificity or difference (figs. 3–6). Le Mépris’s color Bardot might appear at first to make the documentary pretensions articulated by Forestier problematic. Yet just as the film’s avoidance of the generic pastiche of Godard’s previous features simply hides its pastiching of a different type of modernist cinematic production, the fact is that the most commercial of images is every bit as much of a documentary as the grainiest black-andwhite newsreel. Some images are products; others belong to politically committed 12 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions  7. Brigitte Bardot among the spoils of war (frame still from Les Carabiniers). art or even tabloid journalism; but everything on Forestier’s wall is, ultimately, a kind of historical document. Indeed, each time Godard reflected on the image, Bardot was there—stuck to Forestier’s wall and flung down by Les Carabiniers’ ersatz conquerors (fig. 7). This is why Godard, in his preliminary sketch of the film, repeatedly situates Le Mépris on the documentary side of the image spectrum: ‘‘The style of the photography,’’ he writes, ‘‘will be that of newsreels, supposing they were filmed in CinemaScope and in color.’’35 A bit later, discussing the way the rushes for ‘‘Lang’s’’ Odyssey in the film will relate plastically to the main film, he qualifies the former as ‘‘anti-reportage’’ that will give the effect of ‘‘a shot by Eisenstein in a film by Rouch.’’ The Eisenstein-Rouch binary was a frequent one for Godard (the oppositions Eisenstein-Vertov or Meliès-Lumière served roughly the same purpose): Sergei Eisenstein was the cinematographer of calculated montage, of filming planned out on paper and meticulously realized; Jean Rouch, of cinéma-vérité fame, represented the improviser, the one who captured reality as it came. On the one side, fiction and art; on the other, documentary and the mechanical reproduction of reality.36 Still, the documentary side of Le Mépris might seem less than evident. What in the world would a newsreel filmed in color CinemaScope look like? What is the truth of this particular cinéma-vérité? Perhaps in addition to furnishing a history of a now defunct modernism, Le Mépris might also be viewed as a documentary about specific modes of image production in 1963, a newsreel about color and CinemaScope and stars. The choice of Bardot then appears logical; pin-up, screen idol, singer—she figured the many facets of the youth market that was increasingly defining the entertainment industry. Bardot’s stardom was of particular interest to the Cahiers group. That such critics—who in the 1950s dreamed of filming everyday youth in the streets—would Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 13 view Bardot as something other than the incarnation of a hated commercial cinema may now seem counterintuitive, but so it was, for two reasons. First, the new generation of 1950s stars like Bardot or James Dean gave voice to adolescent revolt and desire in a way that was not perceived as differing from that of Jean-Pierre Léaud in Les 400 coups. Second, judged by the standards of the heavily psychologized ‘‘tradition of quality,’’ Bardot was a lousy actress. That’s why Brigitte Bardot had a soft spot for us—because when we were still critics she appeared in Et Dieu créa la femme [And God Created Woman; Vadim, 1957], and was criticized for her delivery in comparison with other actresses. People said: ‘‘She can’t act,’’ ‘‘Her delivery seems fake.’’ . . . We, on the other hand, said: ‘‘But this fake delivery, which is her own, is much more real than so many other supposedly good deliveries that are in fact quite fake and quite academic.’’37 The viewer of any film or play is in theory free to use the representation as a Gestalt experiment: one can choose to recognize actors as actors or as characters. Normally, the actor is said to be good if he or she is capable of distracting our attention from his or her own person to the character, and narrative helps in this sleight of hand: the material signifier is made to disappear in favor of the psychological signified. The star system in general complicates this representational ideal, since it is essential that the viewer be able to recognize the actor simultaneously as a character and as a star—the latter quality being what draws the customer into the theater. But Bardot’s inability to ‘‘act’’ short-circuits the representational ambiguity already inherent in stardom: her ‘‘fake delivery’’ enhances audience distanciation from the psychology of character, exacerbating attention to the material presence of the actress as actress. In other words, a star like Bardot makes us reverse our normal perception, and reminds us at every moment of another of Godard’s famous dicta, that ‘‘every film is a documentary of its actors.’’ Even a color film with Brigitte Bardot, based on a psychological novel, is a sort of cinéma-vérité—or is all the more cinémavérité because Bardot frustrates our own desire for psychological fiction. Indeed, the psychology of Moravia’s text—which Godard nastily described as ‘‘a vulgar and pretty trash novel (roman de gare), full of classic and outmoded feelings’’—will be systematically undermined by Bardot’s Camille, whose incessant back-and-forth between love and contempt renders any psychological etiology of this marital crisis treacherous indeed.38 But the evacuation of psychology finds its motivation in something other than the ‘‘subversion’’ of traditional character and the simultaneous discovery of an alienated or fragmented subjectivity that would somehow (following, say, Robbe-Grillet’s hopes for the New Novel) be more real, more true to the way we are. For example, when Bardot neutrally runs through a list of obscenities so as to provoke her husband, Godard seems only half-concerned with the commonplaces of sixties auteur cinema (incommunicability, the hollowness of modern life) already singled out for ridicule this same year by Pauline Kael: his other subject is the actress’s diction itself.39 This is no fascination with 14 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Bardot as a human being—Camille’s situation is not ‘‘based on’’ Bardot’s biography (as was Louis Malle’s 1961 Vie privée [A Very Private Affair]).40 Rather, Bardot helps the viewer recognize the endlessly reversible nature of the cinematic image, which is always dialectically torn between fiction and documentary; that is, it solicits our emotional involvement with the characters while at the same time making us see those characters as actors. This dialectic, so foundational of his early work, would weaken in subsequent films: the iconoclastic slogans of his ‘‘Maoist’’ period of the late sixties and early seventies—‘‘ce n’est pas du sang, c’est du rouge’’ (Week-end); ‘‘ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image’’ (Vent d’est [Wind from the East, 1969])—proclaimed zero tolerance for the fictional seduction of the image, whose ideological investment would henceforth be deemed irreversible. For the moment, however, Godard was still exploring these ambiguities, via Le Mépris but also in two rarely mentioned black-and-white documentaries about the making of the film, directed by Godard’s protégé Jacques Rozier. The first of these, Bardot et Godard, ou Le Parti des choses, is a documentary about the fact that Le Mépris needs to be viewed as a documentary, for the camera, a Bazinian machine for capturing reality, always takes ‘‘the side of things.’’41 ‘‘Thus,’’ declares Rozier, on the tone of the manifesto, ‘‘Godard asks only of Jack Palance that he be Jack Palance. And Brigitte Bardot is free to be Brigitte Bardot.’’ The second of these documentaries takes a somewhat different tack, uncovering an opposite aspect of the cinematic image: that it is also an industry. In other words, if the cinema fascinates because it is a copy of the reality before the camera, it is also a copy that was owned, a copyright. And so this second documentary, Paparazzi, pushes further, telling the story of three photographers trying with mitigated success to obtain photos of Bardot on the set of Le Mépris. Here the tone is, at the outset, denunciatory, moralistic: how dare these men pester Bardot, invade her privacy, disrupt Godard’s shoot? Yet the moralism seems copied, with ironic intent, from Fellini’s La dolce vita, from 1960, which had first put the title term into circulation. For this carefully thought-out seventeen-minute film is, in fact, a primer on the circulation of images, and Rozier plays on a number of different registers. Paparazzi documents, for one, the propensity of photographs to become detached from their immediate context, to be stripped of their use-value and then fetishized, licensed, and controlled; and, while not forgetting to foreground its own complicitous fascination with Bardot’s captivating image, it reminds the viewer of the labor that goes into providing photographic material for the tabloids, that key pillar of the modern image economy. Paparazzi, in sum, isn’t about invading a star’s privacy or the sanctity of an auteur’s cinematic creation; it is about, rather, stealing and safeguarding private property, that iconic image of Bardot that, as Godard would subsequently remind audiences, cost him three-quarters of his budget. Youssef Ishaghpour has argued that Godard’s particular self-reflexivity is part and parcel of his view of cinema as a mechanical means of reproduction and constitutes a ‘‘historicization of its apparatus [du matériau].’’42 And indeed, the more one Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 15  8. Fritz Lang’s dated apparatus (frame still from Le Mépris). looks at the self-contained elegance of Le Mépris’s fiction, the more the film surprisingly reveals itself to be an X ray of the tensions of its historical moment, a documentary, as it were, about itself. Hence, even though the film’s narrative has nothing to do with the subject of the star—Lang’s Odyssey seems to feature only unknowns —it nevertheless reflects on the star both as an image of erotic fascination bought and sold and as that particular actor who can actually break that fascination by reminding us of the Bazinian ‘‘reality charge’’ of all photographic images. Similarly, Godard’s chromatic triad of red, yellow, and blue serves less a ‘‘symbolic’’ cause (say, red = death) than a perceptual one: it is impossible to forget that these colors are not natural.43 But it is important to note that what is at issue in all these cases of reflexivity involves much more than a timeless ontology of the cinematic image. Indeed, the prominent ‘‘TECHNICOLOR’’ logo figuring on the camera crew’s overalls just before the film’s last frameful of blue reminds us that color is not simply a perceptual given, but a product (fig. 8). The reference to Technicolor is particularly intriguing, for Godard himself was not shooting in Technicolor and, indeed, in 1963 no productions were. By the time of Le Mépris, the sheer bulk of the Technicolor apparatus (which involved a complicated beam-splitting camera) had been long supplanted by the superior portability of the film Godard himself was using, Eastmancolor.44 The fact that Lang is supposed to be shooting in Technicolor (such shoots required the lease of Technicolor’s own technicians, hence the overalls)45 would then be another clear mark of his outdatedness, just as the last shot of graduated blues, seen not through Lang’s camera but through Godard’s, can be said to demonstrate Eastmancolor’s superior chromatic resolution. (Technicolor tended to produce sharply bounded puddles of color—an effect adroitly imitated in Lang’s ‘‘Eisenstinian’’ rushes, screened toward the film’s beginning.) Of course, this is not the only reading possible of this last shot: in the way it so powerfully serves as counterweight to the film’s endless discussions about art and classical beauty, it is clearly, and perhaps even foremost, a gesture in the direction 16 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of the sublime. The fact that Pierrot le fou, while containing none of the historicization of color present in Le Mépris, ends with much the same image certainly suggests that Eastmancolor is not the shot’s sole reason for being. But this is the point: at the same time Godard seems to solicit our admiration of and absorption in his images, his film fairly displays the means by which our admiration is set in motion. To return to Le Mépris’s epigraph, we are now in a better position to appreciate why Godard may have attributed the words of Michel Mourlet, who had by 1963 totally fallen out with the Cahiers group and the New Wave, to his mentor Bazin: Mourlet’s espousal of a fusional relation between spectator and cinematic image— one that banished montage because it got in the way of the pure contemplation of the beautiful body of the actor—was in fact an exaggerated version of Bazinianism. Without the historicizing reflex that maintains that contemplation in constant tension with the image’s documentary specificity, Bazin’s ontology leads straight to mystification. So it is that Le Mépris scrutinizes the materiality of the big-budget film; by dint of this scrutiny, the big-budget film comes to appear as a peculiar artifact or a beautiful flower nurtured by a specific conjunction of technological and economic circumstances. Technicolor and CinemaScope were welcomed, by the early Cahiers team, as a means to further Bazin’s dream of a ‘‘total’’ (that is, more perfectly realist) cinema.46 At the same time, however, the lure of a perfect spectacle was also a commercial strategy. Along with blockbuster historical epics and the new generation of sexy 1950s stars (Dean, Monroe), technical innovations like these were devices Hollywood had deployed to prove its superiority over television and thus retain its audience in a rapidly evolving image economy. Prokosch’s opening eulogy of the great studios reminds us that the attempts had not in fact been able to slow the erosion of its image monopoly: attendance figures were ever declining, while television’s empire expanded. (France would get its second channel in 1964.) Camille’s remark to Lang that she has recently seen and enjoyed his M—but watched it precisely on television—might well constitute the film’s own inscription of itself on an image continuum linking small and big screens and its consciousness of the untenability of cinema’s putative artistic isolation as it hurtles toward some new image economy.47 The particular version of cinema represented by Le Mépris emerges thus in its precarious glory, preserving a last reverberating sigh of both Lang’s modernism and big-budget Technicolor star vehicles, as well as displaying itself for what it is—an international coproduction of the type that arose in the early 1960s as a result of various economic pressures both in Hollywood and Europe. Even the possibility that the 1950s screen idol might not outlive her Technicolor support is evoked: Monroe’s suicide the year before (and perhaps Dean’s earlier highway death as well) finds its fictional echo in Le Mépris’s climactic sports-car wreck, which performs an allegorical evacuation of the star herself, crushed by a truck I personally like to imagine filled to the brim with consumer durables on their way to the future set of Godard’s 1966 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle. Given this set of references, Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 17 it comes as no surprise that Godard ends the film with the sublime shot he does, a shot that brushes aside the flotsam of the cultural heritage, buries both the art and the big-budget film, and returns us to the simple (but always technically evolving) recording power of the camera—the building block of any cinema to come. So, Godard postmodern? Well, probably, but in ways that Jameson’s authoritative version of postmodernity, however relevant to the filmmaker, cannot quite do justice to. For Jameson is committed to two basic and related positions. First, postmodernity marks the waning of ‘‘historicity,’’ which can ‘‘be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is . . . characterized as historical perspective.’’48 Second, if and when the past still registers, it can do so only as a packaged consumable image, an image conceived along lines laid out by Debord or Jean Baudrillard—as either commodity or simulacrum. Hence Jameson’s singling out of what he calls the ‘‘nostalgia film’’ to designate that type of cinematic product that slakes our demand for something historical as we accelerate our hurtle into the future—but slakes it with an ersatz image of pastness that conforms to ‘‘pre-existing historical stereotypes,’’ nothing more.49 Both these positions are inadequate to explain Le Mépris, whose point of departure is resolutely and specifically historical. Hence, to Prokosch’s ‘‘When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook,’’ Lang opposes the reminder that Prokosch is twisting the fascist dictum attributed to Goebbels, rewriting ‘‘revolver’’ as ‘‘checkbook’’; indeed, as Prokosch himself remarks, it is no longer 1933 but 1963, and the viewer is invited to take the measure of just what this means, to wit, the loss of culture’s adversarial or subversive role. This is hardly a loss of historicity. Moreover, I hope to have demonstrated that Godard relentlessly historicizes his own film, which becomes a sort of documentary of its own conditions of production. Of course, any film could be said to be a witness to the moment of its making and, again, ‘‘a documentary of its actors.’’ But Godard would insistently explore the motif, from A bout de souffle, reportedly the first film to include a newspaper from the actual day of the shoot, to Le Mépris, which Godard consciously constructs as being about filmmaking in Europe in 1963. Needless to say, this exploration was not over, and Passion, which Jameson himself in a full-length essay turns over and over in an inconclusive effort to decide whether it is modern or postmodern, will return to the terrain staked out twenty years earlier by Le Mépris—the relation between capital, technology, and the Western artistic canon.50 Godard’s early work illustrates as well the degree to which it may be abusive to speak of ‘‘the (postmodern) image,’’ as if there were henceforth only one type, presumably of the simulacral kind. The use of generic pastiche, the proliferation of a ‘‘citational’’ discourse that circulates in fragments, detached from any governing conscience (of characters, of the artist) does indeed invite such a reading. Whence Jameson’s contention that ‘‘Godard’s [films] are . . . resolutely postmodernist in 18 R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions that they conceive of themselves as sheer text, as a process of production of representations that have no truth content, are, in this sense, sheer surface or superficiality.’’51 Yet ultimately this goes much too far, ignoring, for instance, that Godard’s ‘‘pastiche’’ films (most emblematically Pierrot le fou) are always haunted by questions of art, poetry, meaning, and existence that are probably a good deal less ‘‘undecidable’’ than Jameson would have it. One could interpret this as proof that Godard represents an early variant of postmodernism, one that still bore traces of the outmoded questions it was replacing. But one could also propose that Godard here operates a particular kind of dialectic or montage, in which questions of meaning, the possibility of thinking historically, the value of art and human existence are raised via the juxtaposition of images. These images’ power can be indexical, iconic, or simply tied to their origin and function in a particular culture. If we think again of the pan—which in fact creates a montage—across the wall of Bruno Forestier’s room in Le Petit soldat, we see pictures that emerge as specific even if, or rather because they are all made to share the same wall. In Brechtian terms, montage produces estrangement: a still from Malraux’s L’Espoir makes us see a pin-up as a historically determined creation—and vice versa.52 It may be correct to associate, as Jameson does, a certain type of postmodern image with the techno-fetishistic ‘‘glossiness’’ that permits its unhindered consumption.53 But certainly another use of images is possible and even inevitable, for instance, what Richard Shiff has called ‘‘the realism of low resolution,’’ which returns the viewer to the specificity of this or that technological process.54 And then there is the Godardian pastiche, more properly understood as historical montage, that I’ve dubbed hygienic, in that it bolsters our ability to continue to perceive difference in the face of what Godard will call, in Ici et ailleurs (1974), ‘‘assemblyline’’ images.55 It is difficult to dispute the objection that none of this amounts to historicity of the type György Lukács praised in Walter Scott. It may well be consonant, however, with both Brechtian estrangement and the ‘‘anti-creative,’’ instructive use of photography that Benjamin advocated, and the general point is that one can mobilize many images against the amnesiac tendencies of postmodernism without falling back into the now unserviceable positions of modernism.56 The challenge, I believe, is to develop an understanding of postmodernism capacious enough to encompass these alternatives to the familiar ‘‘empty’’ image, of which Andy Warhol, rightly or wrongly, usually stands as the perfect example.57 The cost of not performing this revision may well be a postmodernism so conceptually ‘‘flat’’ that no one will care to keep the category around at all, for it hardly needs any emphasis that ‘‘the real,’’ in contemporary art, has made its return.58 Yet we can avoid abandoning a useful concept—or, worse still, inventing a ‘‘postpostmodernism’’—by recognizing that, as the example of Godard suggests, ‘‘the real’’ has always been part of the undertheorized side of postmodernism and that the image is never only simulacrum. Terry Smith, for instance, has recently suggested that the empty image cannot triumph, simply because from its very beginBardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19 nings photography was seen as oscillating between realism and emptiness, extremes he dubs ‘‘viscerality’’ and ‘‘enervation’’: ‘‘Postmodern strategies—appropriation, quotation, replication, simulation—which seemed so radical in the 1980s no longer raise (as straw men) issues of either/or authenticity or falsity. Indexicality and recycling, we can readily see, have been interacting throughout. The two trajectories were always already there.’’59 Hence the Godardian reversibility of fiction and documentary: when Godard asks, ‘‘When you see a photo of yourself, are you fictive or not?’’ it is important that there be no real answer to the question, which instead we must hold as we watch Bardot—who is also Camille Javal the character— calmly recite her obscenities.60 Le Mépris offers no specific artistic credo, unless it is the need to attend to the image’s multiple nature—as art and as industry, as the sublime and as star-system, as pastiche and as documentary, and so on. And Godard’s later output will add new elements to the mix—the factory, video, pornography, the sacred, the holocaust, and now, digital video. All of which makes for a fairly complicated montage and a bracing postmodern challenge to our ideas of what postmodernism itself might be. No t e s 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 20 I would like to thank Juliette Cherbuliez and the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota both for the invitation to try out an initial version of this article and for subsequent suggestions and critiques; Mark Ledbury and Derek Schilling for meticulous readings; and, for inspiration and hospitality at the project’s inception, Susanna Violante and Isabel Violante-Picon. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991), 8–9. For the purposes of the present essay, my use of the terms modernism and postmodernism follows mostly Jameson; it is also consonant with Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986). ( JeanFrançois Lyotard’s version of postmodernism, defined less by questions of the artist’s relation to commerce and mass culture than by the breakdown of master narratives, is less fruitful in this context.) I would also note that an alternative reading views the early Godard as a faithful heir to the modernist avant-garde; see Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, 1998), 281–82, and Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard, 2nd ed. (New York, 1992), 177–84. Sylvie Ayme, ‘‘ ‘Répète un peu pour voir’: Jean-Luc Godard et la catégorie de la répétition,’’ in Jean-Luc Godard (2): Au-delà de l’image, ed. Marc Cerisuelo (Paris, 1993), 77; Nicole Brenez, ‘‘Cinématographie du figurable,’’ L’Avant-scène cinéma 412/413 (1992): 1; Marc Cerisuelo, ‘‘L’Instauration du cinéma,’’ Jean-Luc Godard (2), 59. All translations from the French are my own. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma (Paris, 1980), 1:85. That relation varied considerably from critic to critic, however. For an account of the R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. fraught definition of the ‘‘modern,’’ see Antoine de Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinéma: Histoire d’une revue, vol. 1 (Paris, 1991). Jean-Luc Godard, Godard par Godard, ed. Alain Bergala, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1985), 1:232. For the monographic tendency, see, e.g., Wheeler W. Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Binghamton, N.Y., 1997), and David Sterritt, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge, 1999). The situation, however, is changing, as the essays contained in Michael Temple and James S. Williams, eds., The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000 (Amsterdam, 2000) demonstrate. A number of other studies that do move to put Godard on a shared cultural map will be cited presently. Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston, 1968), 115. See also the similar contemporary judgment by Susan Sontag, elaborated in a long comparison with the (modernist) films of Robert Bresson, in Styles of Radical Will (New York, 1969), 147–89. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘High-Tech Collectives in Late Godard,’’ in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), 162. For an account of how literary modernism remaindered its aging stock of tropes through B cinema, see James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley, 1998). Postmodern pastiche has been described by Jameson as the blank and random imitation of dead styles; Postmodernism, 16–19. Contrasting pastiche with modernist allusion or parody, he does not, however, distinguish it from the ‘‘redemption’’ of genre practiced by Orson Welles (or for that matter Alfred Hitchcock). For an alternative attempt to define the workings of pastiche, see also Margaret A. Rose, ‘‘Post-Modern Pastiche,’’ British Journal of Aesthetics 31, no. 1. (1991): 26–38. For Jameson’s contention that Godard’s spectator is not expected to arrive at coherent meaning, see Postmodernism, 191. For a reading of A bout de souffle as postmodern pastiche, see Dudley Andrew, ‘‘Au début du souffle: Le culte et la culture d’A bout de souffle,’’ Revue belge du cinéma 22/23 (1988): 11–21. For a contrary viewpoint, however, see T. Jefferson Kline’s contention that the citational practice of Godard in A bout de souffle and Pierrot le fou (1965) does still allow for reading literary references in the modernist manner; T. Jefferson Kline, Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema (Baltimore, 1992), chap. 7. For the moment, my treatment of Godard’s pastiche deliberately accentuates its postmodern features; I will go on, however, to point to some of the drawbacks of such a reading. Quoted in Jameson, Postmodernism, 18; the connection between Guy Debord and this precise scene is made in Jameson’s Signatures of the Visible (New York, 1992), 11–12. Attributed falsely, it turns out, since the phrase is adapted from an article by Michel Mourlet that had appeared in Cahiers du cinéma in August 1959. Mourlet, associated with the right-wing group of cinephiles known as the ‘‘Ecole de Mac-Mahon,’’ had used the phrase as part of an excoriation (with genuinely fascist overtones) of certain beloved auteurs—Hitchcock, Welles, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein—and their purportedly effete concern with mise-en-scène. I will return to the question of why Godard would put Mourlet’s words into the mouth of André Bazin. Marc Cerisuelo, Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1989), 81. For a synoptic treatment of filmic and literary referentiality, with attention to the very different uses to which mise-enabyme can be put, see Stam, Reflexivity. In fact, the broader media industry was as much the target of such auteurist positioning as Hollywood cinema per se, as Citizen Kane, and so many of Fritz Lang’s American features, make clear. For a reading of Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1955) as just such a fable of media’s manipulative power, see Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 21 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 22 (Paris, 2001), 65–92. It should be noted that another type of Hollywood self-reflexivity, as evidenced most clearly in the ‘‘show’’ musical, celebrates the audience’s absorption by spectacle in a way that is lacking in the critical opposition typical of modernism. On the auteur theory as a gesture that essentially turned Hollywood directors into good modernists, see Jameson, Signatures, 199–200. For a contemporary look at the fully modernist mise-en-abyme of Federico Fellini (immediately celebrated as being a filmic equivalent of André Gide’s literary practice), see Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Paris, 1975), 1:223–28. See Michel Marie, Le Mépris (Paris, 1990), 57–64; Cerisuelo, Godard, 86. ‘‘Scénario du Mépris,’’ in Godard, Godard par Godard, 244. ‘‘Scénario,’’ 248, emphasis in original. The exchange is based upon Maurice Blanchot’s reading of the passage, ‘‘L’itinéraire de Hölderlin,’’ in Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris, 1955), 283–92. (Some errors in Lang’s quotation are pointed out in Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard [New York, 1999], 39–40 and 231 n. 13.) For a list of a number of points on which Lang’s character seems to work against Godard’s own cinema, see Cerisuelo, ‘‘Instauration,’’ 58–59. The remark is Hermann Broch’s, from his novel The Sleepwalkers (1931–32), cited by Youssef Ishaghpour, ‘‘J-L G cinéaste de la vie moderne: Le poétique dans l’historique,’’ in Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du siècle: Dialogue (Tours, 2000), 98–99. On the subject of translation, see especially Silverman and Farocki, Speaking About Godard, 37. This equivalence is made explicit in Jameson’s discussion of pastiche: ‘‘This mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborate symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’’; Jameson, Postmodernism, 21. A definitive triumph, at least in the West: Jameson consigns other, more resistant or unfinished postmodernisms to the Third World. For a look at Debord and his own anticinema in the context of twentieth-century iconoclasm, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993), 416–34. Debord dismissed Godard’s work as completely as he did commercial cinema, in part because he saw the filmmaker’s pastiche (Debord says collage) as combinatoire without true critique; Guy Debord, ‘‘The Role of Godard,’’ Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, 1981), 175–76. Godard himself put the film under the patronage of Bertolt Brecht; see his comments in Godard, Godard par Godard, 237–41. I will return to this point in my conclusion. For information on the technical context of color in the New Wave, see Dudley Andrew, ‘‘The Post-War Struggle for Colour,’’ in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York, 1980), 61–75, and, especially, Alain Bergala, ‘‘La Couleur, la Nouvelle Vague et ses maı̂tres des années cinquante,’’ in La Couleur en cinéma, ed. Jacques Aumont (Paris, 1995), 126–36. For the proposal that Brigitte Bardot’s presence in Le Mépris had to do with the New Wave’s own breathlessness, see Geneviève Sellier and Ginette Vincendeau, ‘‘La Nouvelle Vague et le cinéma populaire: Brigitte Bardot dans Vie privée et Le Mépris,’’ Iris 26 (1998): 115–16. Indeed, by dressing up the sellout screenwriter Paul Javal in Godard’s own trademark hat and saddling with him with cinephilic references, the director may well be pointing to the prostitution of his own talent; see Marie, Le Mépris, 76–77. R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 32. Marie, Le Mépris, 83. 33. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1977); Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Notes sur la photographie (Paris, 1980). 34. Bazin’s important 1945 essay containing an argument to this effect, ‘‘L’ontologie de l’image photographique,’’ had been reprinted in his 1958 collection Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris, 1958). 35. Godard, Godard par Godard, 246. 36. Godard returns repeatedly to this opposition in the long interview given to the Cahiers du cinéma in 1962 but insists especially on the interpenetration of the two modes: ‘‘Some start with documentary and end up with fiction . . . ; others start with fiction and end up with documentary’’; Godard, Godard par Godard, 222. Marc Cerisuelo, in ‘‘L’Arme de la critique et l’enfance de l’art (Godard et le documentaire),’’ La Licorne 24 (1992): 101–6, examines succinctly the documentary theme in early Godard. For a broad look at the question of film-as-documentary, see ‘‘The Documentary Image,’’ chap. 2 of Perez, The Material Ghost. The early history of the filmic image’s mission of revealing the real has been explored by Tom Gunning, ‘‘In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,’’ Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 1–29. 37. Godard, Introduction, 94–95. 38. Godard, Godard par Godard, 248. 39. See Pauline Kael’s 1963 essay ‘‘The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita,’’ in I Lost It at the Movies (Boston, 1965), 179–96. The effect of Bardot’s ‘‘bad’’ acting has some similarities with Robert Bresson’s theory of the filmic ‘‘model’’ whose lack of psychologized acting leads the viewer into a more intense and properly cinematic perception of the world viewed: ‘‘In cinema, acting negates even the impression of real presence, kills the illusion created by photography’’; Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe (Paris, 1988), 40. Bresson’s ‘‘real presence,’’ however, has mystic overtones not present in Godard, whose attachment to the image’s documentary power remains, I will suggest, steadfastly Brechtian and historicizing. 40. Louis Malle’s film, inspired by Bardot’s own life as a purportedly alienated star, is also typically modernist and misogynist in the way it opposes its masculine world of high culture and creation to empty, unhappy, and feminine consumer image culture. See Sellier and Vincendeau, ‘‘La Nouvelle Vague,’’ who read Le Mépris in much the same way. For a more general look at the trope of ‘‘mass culture as woman,’’ see Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 44–62. 41. ‘‘The movie camera is first and foremost a mechanism for TAKING shots; and to make movies (mettre en scène) is to take, modestly, the SIDE OF THINGS.’’ The scripts of Jacques Rozier’s films are included as an appendix to that of Le Mépris in Avant-Scène 412/413. The quotes here appear on 108. Rozier’s documentaries have recently become available in the Criterion DVD of Le Mépris. 42. Godard and Ishaghpour, Archéologie du cinéma, 104. Ishaghpour is one of the rare critics to analyze Godard’s work specifically in terms of the evolving image economy of the twentieth century. See also Stam, Reflexivity, 98–102, who reads Le Mépris alongside a number of works that thematize their own process of production; Stam’s account, however, focuses almost exclusively on the modernist denunciation of prostituted artistic talent—a denunciation that I have argued is in fact pastiched by Godard (who, it bears noting, steadfastly refused in his reflections to demonize producers). 43. For a Brechtian reading of Le Mépris’s use of colors, see Paul Coates, ‘‘Le Mépris: Women, Statues, Gods,’’ Film Criticism 22, no. 3 (1998): 38–50. Godard was not alone in his Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 23 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 24 enthusiasm for Brecht; his recycling, in Le Mépris, of both Brecht’s poem on Hollywood’s merchants of lies and the joke regarding Bardot’s ‘‘Brechtian’’ initials, came straight from Bernard Dort, ‘‘Pour une critique brechtienne du cinéma,’’ Cahiers du cinéma 114 (1960): 33–43. (This entire issue was devoted to Brecht.) Bergala, ‘‘La Couleur,’’ 130–31. Herbert Kalmus, inventor of the process, died at 81 on July 11, 1963: the shooting of Le Mépris was over, but Godard must have savored the irony while editing his work. Even with Kalmus alive, however, the reference was obviously an anachronism, since the last American true Technicolor feature dated back to 1954. After this point, the mention of Technicolor in credits referred simply to processing and printing done in their laboratories. Lang’s camera itself, however, was not of the heavy beam-splitting type. See Eric Rohmer’s 1954 piece celebrating the arrival of CinemaScope—with retrospective comments by the director—in Cahiers du cinéma 559 (2001): 59–61. Godard has always been among the first to embrace new image technologies (video, DV), precisely because celluloid and the screening room were accessories of a certain mode of seeing. If it can be said that the evolution of television that destroyed the aura of cinema (see, e.g., Godard and Ishaghpour, Archéologie du cinéma, 55), then it is this moment that Le Mépris attempts to isolate and to understand. Camille’s remark on M was preceded by a line in Une Femme est une femme, in which Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character says he has to stay home because A bout de souffle is going to be on TV and he doesn’t want to miss it. What might appear a throwaway gag reveals itself, upon inspection, to be part of a remarkably thorough reflection on audiovisual space, one that will run all the way through to Je vous salue Marie (1983), in which Marie watches Le Mépris on television. Not until relatively recently, in Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma (1986), has Godard given himself over to a rather more modernist antagonism between cinema and television. Jameson, Postmodernism, 284. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London, 1998), 130. Jameson, ‘‘High-Tech Collectives.’’ Jameson, Signatures, 75. If this were really the case, one wonders if we shouldn’t just pack Godard up with E. L. Doctorow and the nostalgia film and relegate them all to the rank of symptoms of postmodernity. Interestingly, however, Jameson is never dismissive of Godard in the way that Debord is, though he does not in my view provide a way of thinking about how these films might be something other than symptomatic. The effect of estrangement is all the stronger due to the fact that almost all of the photos in the pan are truncated by the frame of the camera: much in the manner of the photographer Richard Misrach’s recent ‘‘pictures of paintings,’’ Godard refuses to allow the cited image to appeal to the viewer in its intended way. See especially Jameson’s 1995 essay ‘‘Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,’’ in The Cultural Turn, 93–135. Richard Schiff, ‘‘Realism of Low Resolution: Digitization and Modern Painting,’’ in Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era, ed. Terry Smith (Chicago, 2001), 124–56. For a reading of Godard’s early work that makes a similar point, see Sally Shafto, ‘‘Retour sur ‘l’ontologie de l’image photographique’, ou les maı̂tres du flou: les oeuvres de jeunesse de Jean-Luc Godard et Gerhard Richter,’’ in Godard et le métier d’artiste, ed. Gilles Delavaud, Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, and Marie-Françoise Grange (Paris, 2001), 169–86. Richter and Godard were indeed particularly in sync: one of the early examples of the painter’s trademark blurring occurred in his 1963 look R            This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. at Brigitte Bardot’s lips. (The work, Mouth, now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago Museum.) ‘‘[D]es images à la chaı̂ne.’’ On Godard and the image assembly-line, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris, 1985), 233–37. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Little History of Photography,’’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 507–30. On the technophilia of Benjamin, Brecht, and Antonio Gramsci, see ‘‘Modern Times: Cinema/Americanism/The Robot,’’ chap. 2 of Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). For a recent review and critique of a number of positions taken on Warhol, see Paul Mattick, ‘‘The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol,’’ Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 965–87. In the context of art history, it bears noting that Le Mépris’s meditation on modernism and the image takes place at the moment of the waning of abstract expressionism and the corresponding legitimation of pop art in New York. See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Terry Smith, ‘‘Enervation, Viscerality: The Fate of the Image in Modernity,’’ in Impossible Presence, 35. Godard’s quip is quoted in Alain Bergala, ‘‘Godard a-t-il été petit?’’ in Spécial Godard: Trente ans depuis, ed. Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana (Paris, 1991), 28. Bardot and Godard in 1963 This content downloaded from 169.229.32.136 on Sun, 10 Nov 2013 22:40:24 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 25