Originalveröffentlichung in: Ruhl, Carsten ; Dähne, Chris ; Hoekstra, Rixt (Hrsgg.

): The death and life of the

total work of art : Henry van de Velde and the legacy of a modern concept, Berlin 2015, S. 195-216

THE CRITICAL
ARABESQUE
On Jean-Luc Godard's
Nouvelle Vague (1990)

Regine Prange

The Motion Picture as a Total Work of Art

The transformation of the proletarian penny arcades and nickelodeons into movie
theaters that were also recognized by a middle-class audience was accompanied by
the elaborate commercial construction of gigantic premiere houses, whose mag-
nificent fa^ade design and fantastic and eclectic interior decor created experiential
spaces that complemented the narrative space of the films being presented and
exponentially increased their illusionistic effect. Siegfried Kracauer commented on
those “palaces of distraction” in 1926:

195
 A glittering, revue-like creature has crawled out ofthe movies: the total artwork (Gesamt-
kunstwerk) of ejfects. / This total artwork of effects assaults every one of the senses using
every possible means. Spotlights shower their beams into the auditorium, sprinkling across
festive drapes or rippling through colorful, growth-like glassfixtures. The orchestra asserts it-
selfas an independentpower, its acousticproduction buttressed by the responsory ofthe light-
ing. Every emotion is accorded its own acoustic expression, its color value in the spectrum—a
visual and acoustic kaleidoscope which provides the settingfor the physical activity on stage:
pantomime and ballet. Untilfinally the white surface descends and the events ofthe three-
dimensional stage blend imperceptibly into two-dimensional illusions.1

In addition to this critical perspective toward a “false totality” of the movie the-
ater that serves entertainment and is suggestive of the “upscale and sacral” of the
art tradition, which, in Kracauer’s opinion, contests the artistic independence of
film, the metaphor of the total work of art is also employed for genuine cinematic
art. Thus the composer Giuseppe Becce proclaimed in 1929: ..and one day, the
really great art/sound film will be there, the product of a single person, who will
be a film artist, director, and composer at the same time, a Wagner of film!”2 The
expressionist film, exemplarily The Cabinet ofDr. Caligari (1920), was explicitly
inspired by synesthetic ideals and also involved painting in the form of painted
backdrops.
With the establishment of the sound film as the most important mass medium,
which effectively opened up the market through its differentiation of different
genres, the overall artistic quality took a back seat to the narrative function. The di-
versity of artistic media employed in each film was subordinate to the plot, the im-
age and sound were used as a mere vehicle of dramaturgy. Not until the late 1950s
and 60s, as the era of cinema was coming to an end, and initiated by the Nouvelle
Vague, an intensive theoretical discussion about the medium began, did this illu-
sion of transparency come to the test. Above all others, Jean-Luc Godard developed
his cinematic reflections on the stereotypes of the popular motion picture, as my
thesis will show, through a reversion to the total artistic foundations of cinema as a
hybrid entertainment machine. He recalled the total art character of film and, not
in the least through this strategy, exercised a sharp critique of the imaginary totality
that was fabricated in the early movie palaces through spectacular, overpowering
aesthetics that were articulated in the architecture as well as the arts and crafts, and
later by making all aesthetic means subordinate to the narrative logic of a fixed
genre. Even in his early films, he combined different film genres through a specific
rhetoric of citation and frequently granted painting, architecture, music and poetry,
but also the landscape and its aesthetic experience, an independent rank beyond

196 The Critical Arabesque

narrative logic. This essay shall focus in particular on the latter dimension—nature
as the matrix of the total work of art.

Nature as History: Godard and the RomanticTradition of theTotal Work

of Art

In A Bout de souffle (1959), as Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is driving

in a stolen car on his way to Paris, he suddenly steps out of his role, notices the
beauty of the landscape and turns to address the audience directly. Upon arriv-
ing in Paris, without any narrative motivation the camera focuses in passing on
the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which appears at this point not only as itself, but
also to latently invoke the “cathedrals” of cinema, as the early movie palaces were
ofiten called, not in the least because of their function as assembly spaces.3 Gothic
architecture refers to the Romantic tradition of the total work of art, as does the
aesthetic experience of nature that Godard, in his first feature film, already extends
to include the lights of the nighttime city, thus explicitly associating it with the mo-
tion picture theater (German: Lichtspieltheater, lit: theater for light play).4 Godard’s
known affinity for the early Romantic objective of a universal poetry substantiates
his artistic intention to enhance the cinematic form into an instrument of reflec-
tion that, like philosophy, enables insight, and not, for example, only through the
citation of philosophical figures of thought, but through the cinematic medium
itself—through editing and camera work.3 The reference to the theatric total work
of art known as cinema and to the early Romantic concept of the total work of art,
as it takes form in, for instance, Schlegel’s idea of the novel as arabesque and Philipp
Otto Runge’s vegetal arabesques of the Die Zeiten (Times ofDay) series, thus does
not serve an affirmative resumption of that tradition.6 Rather, the citations of the
total work of art are gathered in Godard’s reflexive instrumentation of editing. It
occurs, as shall be explained, as a mode of totality, whose constructedness then does
not become less manifest as the conventionality and artificiality of genre motifs. In
the 1980s, Godard programmatically intensified his citation of total artistic ideals
that he had already laid out in his early work, in a phase which has been frequently
interpreted as a retreat from his political ambitions into a mystical and theological
sphere. However, Daniel Morgan, in his recently published study on Godard’s late
work, solidly established that the new opulence of natural beauty and the sacral is
completely in line with Godards historical-critical project of qualifying the film to
become a quasi-philosophical penetration of the history of the medium and the
modern society documented in it.7 The images of nature in the film under dis-
cussion here, Nouvelle Vague, are accordingly not escapist counterparts to the bad

197
reality of capitalist society, but visual arguments for a “true history of the cinema.”8
However, Morgan neglects to make any further commentary about how Godard’s
film relates to the Nouvelle Vague cited in the title. This question is to be linked
here with the theme of the total work of art, which has not thus far been explored in
the research on Godard, as far as I can see. Morgan, too, leaves out of consideration
that in Nouvelle Vague, Godard not only indirectly touches the pertinent metaphor
of the arabesque, but explicitly visualizes it and lets it interact with the key image
of the waves, so that the allusion to the early romantic equation of nature, his-
tory, and art receives an explicit media-reflexive accent.9 In the following, it will be
demonstrated that the critical recourse to the history of cinema—in terms of an
industrial-technological densification of the aesthetic utopia of the total work of art
as the subtext of the film—is conveyed with the help of the arabesque ornament
and its historical connotations.

The "New Wave": Resurrection of the Cinema?

With its title Nouvelle Vague, the 1990 film, a Swiss-French production, refers pro-
grammatically to the cinematic avant-garde movement of the same name, which
was decisively influenced by Godard and failed in 1968—without, of course, pro-
ducing a documentary in the conventional sense. What it does offer—which is not
apparent at first glance, however—is a rather bitter historical interpretation of the
revolutionary impulses of that movement by accurately following the natural sym-
bolism of the name and its philosophical implications. But the star-studded cast
nevertheless draws one’s attention at first to the very rudimentary film plot. What
is sketched out is the love story between the rich countess and industrial magnate,
Contessa Elena Torlato-Favrini (Domiziana Giordano), and a stranger (Alain De-
lon) who is known as Roger Lennox in the first part of the film. After a mysterious
traffic accident, she takes him to her villa, which is populated by company members
who are continually hurrying about and engaged in lively discussions, as well as
many administrative assistants and a vast staff of servants. Most of the film’s scenes
take place on the grounds of this magnificent estate situated on a large lake amid
an expansive park landscape, which is a reminiscence of Godard’s own background,
coming as he does from a wealthy Swiss family on Lake Geneva.10 Godard already
links this setting, both consciously and ironically, with the tradition of the total
work of art—which, however, is clearly presented as a fabricated construct based
on exploitation. The gardener, introduced immediately at the outset as a key fig-
ure, acts as the alter ego of the (film) artist, who is charged with bringing forth the
beauty of a changing and unpredictable nature while in a constant (also poetically

198 The Critical Arabesque

and philosophically reflected) struggle with it, and with appropriating this natural
beauty as the imaginary natural habitat of the economic elite.11 The female staff,
in turn, is responsible for transforming the luxuriously appointed interiors into
earthly paradises by bringing in and arranging magnificent bouquets. Provided they
are not embroiled in business transactions, the residents and guests of the villa, on
the other hand, are given the part of enjoying, albeit in what is, again, a hierarchi-
cal and this time gender-specific matrix. Raoul, one of Elena’s business partners
(and her former lover), replies three times to his girlfriend’s question about what
she should do.12 In the park, he advises her, with a grand gesture: “Admire la na-
ture,” and then, in the magnificent entry hall with its marble staircase, he tells the
woman clothed in a white fur: “Admire l’architecture!”; and finally, as the couple
visits the villa later, he calls on her to admire the decor (“Admire le decor!”). That
the constituents of a total artistic synthesis are hereby invoked and simultaneously
attributed to the logic of class and gender relations is indubitable, not least through
the reference to the ornamentation that the generation of a Henry van de Velde
advocated for the renewal of art in general.13 The role of ornament as a symbol of a
second ideal nature, also in view of the image of the woman, will be explored still
further. First, it should be noted that Godard’s ironic citation of aesthetic experi-
ence undermines its claim of integrity.
Just like the setting, the plot is also marked by irresolvable contradictions. The
events decompose into two halves, whose interface is the death of Roger in the lake.
During a boat ride together, Elena entices the non-swimmer into the water and
lets him sink helplessly. However, this “murder” sequence, like the accident at the
beginning of the film, is full of line crossings; it lacks an establishing shot that could
provide orientation in space, and thus a causal relationship among the events. Like
the views of the tree trunk, the branches and the treetop in the former scene, here
in the latter, images of moving water interrupt the dramatic action—indeed, they
exactly take the place of the decisive moments of action. Like his accident at the
beginning, Roger’s fall in the water remains invisible. In the spring, his supposed
brother Richard, who is also played by Alain Delon, appears on the estate. Rim-
baud’s statement “Je est un autre (I is someone else) is displayed as an intertitle, so
that the questioning of a fixed identity is linked with the motif of the look-alike. A
maid, on the other hand, speaks of resurrection.1 * In addition to and with the natu-
ral cycle, the Passion of Christ, which is invoked by corresponding intertitles that
structure the filrn as a whole (“Incipit Lamentatio,” “Veni Creator,” “Ecce Homo,”
“Te Deum,” “Consummatum est”), serves as another reflection plane for the trans-
formation of personality—which, of course, as the title of the film suggests, means
the transformation and rebirth of cinema from the spirit of Nouvelle Vague.

199
The recurring image of moving water, which is shown in ever new manifestations,
is thus a literal translation of the name “Nouvelle Vague,” just as in Allemagne annee
90 neufzero (1991), the image of a white rose represents the name of the Scholl sib-
lings’ resistance movement. The historical is visualized through nature. The natural
flow and wave movement of the water, like the grasses and leaves that quiver in
the wind, denotes the inherent motion of history, concretized here as that of the
film.15 And as that which is elaborated, in Godard’s film nature gets the status of an
authority antecedent to the plot, so that the ordinary figure-ground relationship of
the feature film, which uses nature as a backdrop and an echo of the acting charac-
ters, is literally inverted. With such empowerment of the landscape vis-a-vis narra-
tion, Godard is heir to German Romantic painting, and like it, he projects the his-
tory of salvation on the natural cycle. Introduced by the intertitle “Veni Creator,”
the “resurrected” Richard appears first as a mirror image in the water, perhaps at the
shore of the lake, overgrown with reeds—a biotope, as it were, with a wind blowing
past an abundance of fertile pollen. In other words, Richard reemerges (albeit not
physically but as a projection, which is a reference to the resurrected cinema) from
the element in which he had disappeared.
It takes a miracle for the assertion of the new and the cycle of nature’s reawakening
each spring to be reconciled in this way. In his Times ofDay series, Philipp Otto
Runge has conveyed this synthesis of linear eschatological progression and cyclical
repetition with the form of the arabesque,16 to that which the “new ornament” of
a van de Velde reconnected. The fact that this implicitly religious understanding of
nature as the image of history represents the ideological core of the Gesamtkunst-
werk can also be attested to by Caspar David Friedrich’s art. For example, in ad-
dition to four sheets on the times of day and the seasons as well as the ages of life,
the seven-part Flamburg sepia cycle contains three leaves about creation, death and
resurrection, among which the image of the waves represents creation.17 Godard,
who also draws on Friedrich’s iconography, as is often the case, with the motif of
the image-dominating, mighty tree,18 does not at all follow the transcendental idea
of Romantic total art, because it bursts the immanence of the landscape that Jules
the gardener, as a philosophizing artist, is most likely to seek to preserve, by con-
fronting or also reconciling its measure of time and its tranquility, as already done
programmatically in the accident scene with the second technological nature of the
automobile (always also a symbol of the cinematic apparatus19) as here: the mirror
image of the resurrected one travels ahead of his arrival in a red sports car; and some
minutes later in the film, the figure with the dark suit and white shirt gets out in
the middle of a forest meadow and walks, accompanied by the twittering of birds, a
few steps and then stands in the landscape like a nature-worshipping Friedrichesque

200 The Critical Arabesque

1 Series of shots from Nouvelle Vague: The arrival of Richard Lennox.

Riickenfigur, followed by the intertitle “Ecce homo.” Hence, there is no salvation,

but merely a second Passion narrative.
Ihe rehabilitation of natural beauty, insofar as Morgan rightly links it to Adorno’s
strengthening of this category, does not hamper Godard from presenting an ex-
plicitly materialistic interpretation, inasmuch as he construes the “new wave” of
cinema as a renewal of capitalism—that is, of Hollywood.20 The resurrected one is
not melancholy and despondent like his predecessor. He appears to be a smart busi-
ness man; in appearance more like we know Delon as a star. The story repeats itself.
Elena falls in love again. But now she appears to be the inferior one, passive, while
Richard monopolizes the business dealings for himself. On a boat ride, he pulls her
into the water and she sinks below the waves. Since she previously appeared as a
good swimmer, the symbolic character of the scene is unmistakably clear. But, in
an action that is visible for only the fraction of a second, he reaches out his hand to
her and saves her. The law of repetition seems broken, then again things come full
circle because at the beginning, Elena had offered Roger her hand.21 The conclu-
sion: ostensibly a happy ending, it tells of the compromise of the Nouvelle Vague
and its reversion to the stereotypes of Hollywood. Elena and Richard are at long
last a romantic couple: she ties his shoelaces, which, at the beginning, while still in
the guise of Roger—before his collision with the technological age in the form of
the truck and the entrepreneur—he had tied himself. The arrival in the Hollywood
cinema also marks the resumed citation from Howard Hawkes’s film To Have and

201
Have Not (1944). Richard, unlike Roger, knows the answer to the question of the
dead bee. With a dignified speech, Elena dismisses the staff, the actual producers
of the cinematic total work of art, and drives away with Richard—an image com-
monly used by Godard for the imaginary journey that the feature film olfers, at the
exclusion of all real social conditions, to its viewers.22

The Arabesque as Motif and Cinematic Form

Originally a decorative motif used to frame jewelry, the autonomized arabesque in

romantic and neo-Romantic total works of art testifies to the existence of a form
that emerges from the innermost forces of nature itself. In this sense, Henry van
de Velde had based his vision of a synthesis of the arts on a philosophy of the line
as “transferred gesture[s].”23 He referred back to primitive techniques, to which he
attributes an immediate expressive power that is comparable to nature as an artist:

Psychic forces led the hand armed with primitive tools—hones or stone—-just as natural
forces bend the tip ofthe blade ofgrass to Earth, where it draws small circles in the sand.
Naturalforces shook the rock, which, upon falling, left behind visible traces on the surfaces
it hit; naturalforces created those capricious, fleeting arabesques in moving water.24

2 Shot from Nouvelle Vague-. Arabesques in

the moving water.

Godard makes reference to this tradition of modern “natural” ornaments, and in-
deed not only in the image of glistening, rippling water surfaces that are filmed
decidedly in such a way that sharply contoured biomorphic patterns emerge. The
arabesque, in its art theoretical importance as an aesthetic form that—as Runge
and Schlegel have shown us—is in keeping with the fullness of being and directed
against historical imagery and the linear narrative of the novel, is both subject and
agent of the film Nouvelle Vague.

202 The Critical Arabesque

 The challenge for our consideration, however, is that nature, as a form-defining
creative power in its infinite wealth, by no means brings forth a structural or mean-
ingful totality, but only ever cites this, albeit with pathos. Godard admittedly uses
the modernist idea of a “development of art into life,” which was also propagated
beyond van de Veldes conception of a new ornamentation, in order to represent
the Nouvelle Vague ambition to resurrect and reform cinema by liberating it from
the fictional plot continuum of the Hollywood film and by developing a documen-
tary and essayistic quality.25 The previously commented, sobering rebirth of pensive
Roger in the guise of cool businessman Richard showed that Godard does not
revere this myth, but construes it as a service to the capitalist enterprise (of the com-
pany Torlato-Favrini and of the cinema). The birth of the entrepreneurial subject
Richard Lennox from Lake Geneva26 is likely to have constituted an attack on the
author ideal of the Nouvelle Vague, yet the movement was based, as can be read in
Francois Truffaut’s article “Une certaine tendance du cinema francaise” (1954), on a
reliance on the creative force of the director as an author who no longer just imple-
ments prescribed stories from the script, but recreates them instead (recreer).27 The
demand that the director, for the purpose of cultivating a personal signature, must
help fashion all the sectors and stages of the film production himself can be read as
a continuation of Becce’s hope, cited at the outset, for a director who is the creator
of a total work of art.
So in the image of the arabesque, Godard cites the total artistic impetus of the
Nouvelle Vague and reveals its system-stabilizing effect. At the same time, the
arabesque principle of cinematic form serves as a moment of disturbance that un-
dermines the option of totality. Godard develops the arabesque as a critical form
by establishing it as an order of (“painterly”) surface positioned against the nar-
rative space of the romance, which is absolutely laid out in van de Velde’s cited
examples of nature’s “draftsmanship.” From the beginning, as already described,
nature appears as an autonomous power and activity, so very much so that Mor-
gan has rightly pointed out that its grandeur is tamed to the benefit of beauty, but
nature plainly always remains a product of human activity. In the beautiful order
of nature that is cultivated to the arabesque, it must be added, however, that the
film reflects itself as an image-producing machine—more specifically, it exhibits its
“negative” actions, which Godard represents in the temporal quality of the context,
which is defined primarily through the editing: much more distinctly than paint-
ing, film constitutes itself through the boundary of the image; it must incessantly
remain accountable for the chosen view and how it is modified through tracking
shots and pans; it must consciously manage the boundaries between the shots. This
structural conditionality of the film image, that it is contingent upon its boundary,

203
 is not ordinarily given conscious attention in commercial cinema and television.
Godard reveals it: the framing activity of the film is expressed in a variety of ways
in the diegetic space, such as when a fenced enclosure gradually becomes visible,
correcting the initial impression of horses grazing in a pristine wilderness; or in
the many and varied views out the window and the reflections of the landscape in
window panes, which cite the projective mechanism of the cinematic apparatus.
Just as the painter Piet Mondrian explored the dialectic between line and surface,
between border and field of view, using the motif of the tree like that of the sea and
thus ultimately attained a radical dissolution of the perspectival illusion of space in
the materiality of the colored surface, Godard uses the tree motif, and later that of
the waves, to transform the spatial-anthropocentric structure of the film into a flat
arabesque, albeit without establishing an abstract harmony, because for Godard,
the materiality of the film is the historical process that comes to light in the stories
of the cinema.28
His concern was actually to tell a story, explains the voice of Alain Delon at the
beginning of the film. The wide shot of an idyllic hilly landscape, where a man
with a suitcase comes along a curving road framed by trees, promises, in an almost
classical way, the beginning of one such tale. Its space, however, is immediately
obstructed by a massive tree trunk that conceals the wayfarer. He is about to be
approached by Roger Lennox, who will be introduced here as the hero of the film,
and who, in the next moment and on the run from a truck, seeks refuge in great
terror.29 Not this action, but the nature that frames it has priority. The camera does
not focus on the star Alain Delon; it tilts upward and follows the branches, until
the sun ultimately refracts through the twigs. But then in the next moment, the
dramatic situation seems to sharpen. Elena is in the open roadster: as could be seen
before, she had sought to overtake the truck and, in doing so, may have caused the
accident; she screeches to a stop and drives back, evidently to attend to the injured.
That she does not now get out and tend to the needy, but remains sitting at the
wheel and turns around, looks up and looks down—this leads every logic of ac-
tion ad absurdum, especially since as she looks up and then down, she removes her
sunglasses as if she wants to underscore the unfiltered cognitive power of this act of
seeing.30 This is followed in turn by tracking shots along the tree and its branches.
Line crossings make it impossible to find orientation in space. The glances of the
female protagonist open no space of action, but refer to the horizontal and vertical
camera movements that, similar to the form-giving natural elements, structure the
film. Elena will later repeat these gestures, inter alia in the “murder scene” on the
lake, while Roger sinks beneath the surface, thus indicating to us (with Etienne
Souriau31) that we are looking at a projected picture that has a top and a bottom,

204 The Critical Arabesque

a left and a right.32 The climax of the plot breaks down in the indifference of the
(ornamental) surface.
Alone due to her pre-Raphaelite head of curls, which are reminiscent of Botticelli’s
Venus and Runge’s personification of the dawn, Elena embodies the arabesque law
of natural beauty, present in the biomorphic form, which the film depicts in the
close-up of the impressive relief of the tree bark, as well as in the curves of the coun-
try road, the tangled wave crests of the water. The fact that Godard has chosen the
lead actress from Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult film Nostalghia (1983) for this role speaks
volumes, both with regard to the theme of melancholic reverie33 and in terms of the
romantic natural symbolism of this film, which grants a very special meaning to the
element water. A movie poster superimposes the lush waves of hair of the frontally
photographed Domiziana Giordano with the image of sea waves—a popularization
of Edvard Munch’s portrayal of the woman as an overpowering natural being.34 The
arabesque principle is consequently intensified in the character of the entrepreneur
Elena and it becomes programmatic as a symbol of the entanglement of nature and
society. Godard also underscores this by means of a concrete visualization of the
arabesque as an ornament.

3 Shots from Nouvelle Vague.

Several shots of the first half of the movie, in which Elena embodies the unques-
tioned authority of the company, show her wearing a jacket with the embroidered
decoration of an abstracted plant tendril.35 A short static shot shows her at first on
the edge of a field of head-high reed grasses, as if sunken into a dialogue, touching
the plants, looking up to them. Here as well, similar to the beginning of the plot,
gestures and glances remain without narrative or psychological grounds. Much like
Richard’s arrival (and thus, his takeover of the company), which is later also pre-
sented in the image of his contemplation in nature, Elena here seems to be embed-
ded into the wickerwork of the curved stems; unrecognizable on first view. This im-

205
age, which cites the vegetable line of Art Nouveau, is related to an “impressionistic”
shot that shows Elena on a sunlit meadow while reading a newspaper, undoubtedly
the stock market news.

4 Sequence from Nouvelle Vague: Elena, Roger, and Gauguin’s Undine.

Godard extensively implements the program of the arabesque in the sequence show-
ing Elena and Roger in conversation in the park, when their separation is already
looming. Elena shows Roger two art postcards, surprised about the “simple” taste
of a mass public, which accepts long waiting periods for the visit of an exhibition.
Both cards show, as becomes obvious in a close shot later in the same sequence,
Paul Gauguin’s ornamental act figure Undine (1898), namely in different propor-
tion and different coloration in order to thematize the industrial exploitation of the
avant-garde movements (such as Nouvelle Vague)—particularly as the letterhead
with the company logo is visible.36 Godard obviously reacts upon the large Gauguin
exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, which was shown during the shooting of
the movie. Giinter Metken found it to be dedicated to the French “Wagnerian of
the visual arts.”37 His “red-haired Undines with their vigorous forms, which, bath-
ing, plunch into the Hokusai-waves of the Atlantic,” transform, as Metken puts it,
“into archetypes of women on Tahiti, ... the desired paradise of pre-civilized na-
ivete.”38 With the water spirit of the undine, whose name stems from the Latin word
“unda,” Godard presents another (preceding the resurrected Roger/Richard) incar-
nation of the “new wave.” Since ancient tradition has it that undines are nymph-like

206 The Critical Arabesque

elemental beings that kill their lovers, which is also the story told in Friedrich de la
Motte-Fouque’s romantic version of the legend, the allusion to Elena is clear. In her
character, as is indicated to us, economic and erotic power appear as elementary
and dangerous forces of nature. As a critical Wagnerian, Godard of course handles
the ideal of the unconscious beauty in a different manner. Elena, who is surprised,
even annoyed by the “simplicity” of such a manner of painting and its attraction,
is unaware of the fact that she is regarding her own reflection. Fler longing for
wholeness is directed at the elegance of clothing. Thus, she criticizes that Roger’s
trousers and jacket do not match. Richard will realize this all-encompassing artis-
tic aspect of fashion through a pristinely uniform business attire. Elena’s swim in
Lake Geneva, by which she causes Roger’s death and motivates Richard’s appear-
ance, is presented as theatrical, insistently illogical (in terms of plot) “after-image”
of Gauguin’s paradise vision, which implies the dissociation of the fascination of

5 Images from a shot of Nouvelle Vague: The arabesque as palimpsest of motions.

207
images, preventing empathy. Roger, who signals an understanding of Gauguin’s
“simple” ornamenting, has to yield to Richard, since he does not meet Elena’s
demands. Gruffly, she glances at her watch, while he, almost defiantly, takes a
broom and sweeps, thereby adopting the role of the artist as gardener, who, leading
a white horse, is equally present in the scene. Like him, Roger seems to belong to
the overall artistic ideal of the historical avant-garde preceding the development
of film industry. In the same sequence, an employee of the company baffles him
by asking Roger whether he has ever been stung by a dead bee. Only Richard will
arrive in Hollywood.

In one of the following shots, which shows Elena in the park making phone calls
with international business partners while Roger is watching, she wears the con-
spicuously decorated jacket again. It becomes apparent here that the arabesque
decor not only illustrates the “straightened unstraightendness” of natural pro-
cesses, but also symbolizes the chaotic movements of members of society, which
are nevertheless subjected to legality. In this long shot, Elena as protagonist who
wirelessly communicates worldwide and Roger as spectator function as center of
tranquility within a circulating, manifold dynamics coming from the staff. The
gardener passes Elena while walking into the forest, Cecile cycles cross the picture,
concealing the scene for a moment only to reappear later from behind (literally)
to hand Elena the newspaper,39 while another assistant, sitting in the car, holds an
envelope ready for her. The vegetal ornamentation and its connotation of opaque,
global networks is supplemented by focusing on a valuable oriental rug that is
on display in a hallway of the villa. It first comes into focus as the “resurrected”
Richard, coming from the park, steps onto it. The change from the sunlit image of
the meadow to the gleaming, colored surface of the rug’s ornament serves a para-
digm already visualized by the Pre-Raphaelites and unfolded art-theoretically by
Symbolism.40 Thus, Maurice Denis has not only compared Gauguin’s coloration
with Wagner’s music and gothic glass windows, but also with oriental rugs.41 The
woman knitting a rug in Hofmannsthal’s narrative Die Frau ohne Schatten (The
Woman without a Shadow) sees “the stream of life itself, in which things continu-
ally become and wane, but which itself is eternal and forever the same.”42 The fact
that Godard furnishes Elena’s and Richard’s capitalist world with valuable rugs
is thus not only a documentation of their wealth, but also a critical reply to the
utopian artistic liability to the total work of art. While Richard steps onto the
rug, thereby assuming a leading role in the business, the buzzing of an insect rings
from offscreen, undoubtedly the bee from Howard Hawks’s already mentioned
Hollywood comedy!

208 The Critical Arabesque

A second iconic nude figure, connected with a second reference to contemporary,
now political events, serves as paraphrase of the arabesque subject in Godard’s
film. At the airport—which, ever since A bout de souffle, constitutes the locus of
the utopian awakening of art for Godard, but also its necessary connectedness to
the commercial and technological communication structures of existing society—
delivery is taken of a painting as part of a barter trade.43 It is Goya’s painting of La
maja desnuda (The Nude Maja), which, as we are told, was found in a cellar in Bei-
rut. This scene thus alludes to the bloody civil war in Lebanon that ended in 1990,
which was about the conflict between Islamist-national and Christian, Western-
oriented factions. Here, the Islamic motif of the arabesque finds a concrete politi-
cal point of reference. Goya’s painting of the courtesan, which already appears in
Passion (1982) as a tableau vivant, defines more than just the market value of art,
not least of cinematic art; and as an Arabian import, it embodies, as Gauguin’s ara-
besque nude had already done, the Western fascination with the Orient, which is
characterized further in two sentences of dialogue: Richard explains: “L’lslam n’est
pas une civilisation de doute comme la notre, mais de la certitude”; whereupon
the boss with the lap dog, contemplating the painting, gives a sigh and exclaims:
“L’arabesque. Le nude sans la volupte!” As the viewer of Goya’s nude painting, he
appears, so to speak, in the role of the lady with a puppy, also coming from Goya’s
visual repertoire, and who, in Passion as the representative of an idle upper class,
introduces the “indifferent” aesthetic experience that is involved in neither political
nor sexual tensions. He finally mentions Maja’s unusual, sideways oriented breasts,
which, one could add, tend to transcend the body in a symmetrical ornamental
order. And she solicits others intensely, he says, commenting on her direct gaze out
from the picture. In contrast to this is the veiled Muslim woman whom he has also
received, apparently also an object of trade. This scene—in which the arabesque,
the ornamentation of image-critical culture of Islam, is placed in relation to an
aesthetic stance that is hostile to sexuality, on the one hand, and in the motif of
prostitution, on the other hand, to a capitalist logic of exchange—again surpris-
ingly exploits a basic attitude of film with respect to romance as the spectacle of
the motion picture par excellence. Sexual relationships consistently appear in poses
of subordination, dominance or masturbation.44 If one considers that Godard’s
cinema understands itself as a form of doubt, it becomes clear that the arabesque,
as the embodiment of a “culture of certainty” and its affiliated indifferent appre-
ciation of aesthetic judgment cannot be understood per se as alternatives to action
cinema. Godard treats the arabesque as a mythological motif that, like all his cita-
tions of religious or mythical traditions, addresses the cinema as a dream factory;
this is what is meant by the label of a culture beyond doubt.45

209
 In Nouvelle Vague, not only literature and art are invoked as models of the film;
“there is the quotation of water, the quotation of trees.”46 The reflexivity of the ara-
besque only unfolds as a cinematic form principle that works against the notion of
a totality of history, art, and nature. The key here is the use of repetitive structures.
The repetition (of the same or similar form elements), the fundamental organizing
principle of the arabesque, is not traced back to the totality of an organic whole, as
envisaged in van de Velde’s total artistic design practice. Rather, the film fits in with
a series of artistic narrative forms of the “new” that preceded it and, at the same
time, insists on the unique present of their revival—and thus fulfills the meaning
of the title “Nouvelle Vague” beyond historical criticism for Godard’s production
of 1990.47 The sound of barking dogs, which we hear beginning with the first shot
and repeatedly thereafiter, and the image of the moon darkened by clouds both
make reference to Luis Bunuel’s Un chien andalou (1929) as one of those precursor
films whose psychoanalytical doppelganger motif and resurrection theme are rein-
terpreted by Godard. The tragedy on the water recalls Howard Hawks’s To Have
and Have Not (1944) and Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil aka Full Sun, Blazing Sun,
Lustfor Evil and Talented Mr. Ripley {Purple Noon, 1960, with Delon in the leading
role).48 The latter film is also about an impersonation and is cited by Elena’s and
Richard’s eyes squinting toward the sun, which, in turn, is a literal realization of the
title metaphor.
The most impressive arabesque artistic device is the frequent use of tracking shots
that, as already mentioned, do not follow the actors’ movements or only do so
marginally or just briefly. Indeed, it often remains unclear whether the camera is
following the path or motion of a person or these two movements are simply for-
mally synchronized with one another. As already described with the gestures of
Elena’s glance, the action of the actors can also be used as a repetition of the camera
movement. When later, after Richard’s arrival, Elena strides back and forth on the
stairs, this is again legible as a recollection of the back and forth of the camera.
Godard thereby radically eludes the grammar of Hollywood, which specifies that
the agent is rooted in the psyche of the movie heroes, which is continuously driv-
ing the plot forward. The rhythmic movement in Nouvelle Vague, which is molded
by camera movements and editing, seems patterned more on the wave motion, the
infinite progression united with repetition, the new united with the declining. In
other words, Godard’s film, which presents the story of a repetition and also a resur-
rection, works with a historico-philosophical reading of that special quality of the
ornament that, as Niklas Luhmann formulates it, is based on the unity of “redun-
dancy and variety,” where his translation of the word redundancy as “the return of a
wave (unda)” precisely matches the meaning of the arabesque mirrored as cinematic

210 The Critical Arabesque

form in the elements of water and vegetal nature in Godard’s Nouvelle VagueN
Godard’s film is about the articulation of a “non-identity in identity”; albeit not in
the sense of the imaginary space described by Luhmann, which the ornament gen-
erates “by continuously transforming formal boundaries into transitions that have
more than one meaning.”50 Horizontal and vertical tracking shots weave through
the film as warp and weft, but using them to draw parallels with the vertical of the
tree trunk and the horizontal of branches and wave motions does not result in an
abstract texture, but in the historical reification of the relation between the indi-
vidual and the whole, between stories and the history of the cinema.
A sequence already described by Morgan exemplarily illustrates the principle. The
camera moves twice, back and forth between a room in which Elena and Roger
are to be found and the entry hall of the villa, where Raoul and his girlfriend and
eventually Cecile are to be seen. Morgan explains:

Suddenly, during one of the movements [this is the first track back to the right, R.P.]
toward Roger and Elena, Godard cuts to a stationary shot of the lake, taken from above
andfairly close to the surface, with the waves moving left. Because the shot is awayftom the
shore, the waves do not break but appear instead as a succession of lines, their movement
creating a visual effect that makes itfeel as ifthe camera itselfwere continuing to move to
the right. Afterfifteen seconds, Godard returns to the scene inside the house.51

In the second tracking shot to the right, Godard cuts again to the water, but this
time it does not remain as a static shot:

... the camera suddenly accelerates to the right, and the waves appear to move evenfaster to
theleft..., then it comes to agrindinghalt. After a moment’spause, Godardslowly starts to
move the camera up and to the left, trackingparallel to the lines ofthe waves. The effect of
this movement... is vertiginous. ... Our external referencepoint in the shot suddenly feels
unstable andfluctuating.52

The significance of this dizzying change in direction of the camera becomes clear
when one considers that here, as in all the other scenes of the film, Godard presents
nothing other than cinema itself. The views of the two interior spaces of the villa
thematize the narrative space of the feature film, whose perspective depth contrasts
with the lateral camera movement that penetrates the partition wall. In the juxta-
position of the rooms, it refers to the physical sequence of the frames on the film
negative, and thus on the materiality of the medium, which is, in turn, mirrored
in the materiality of nature and its dynamics. The camera that lurches to the left

211
 while tracking back, as if carried by a wave, introduces an egalitarian force without
perspective that seems to register Elena’s and Roger’s poses of humility and domi-
nance, congealed into still images as mere moments in time. The two surely also
represent the “heterosexual couple at the end of the twentieth century.”53 Primar-
ily, however, they represent the history of cinematic romance, which Dziga Vertov
and Bunuel have viewed critically in the past and which Godard continues to do.
In the first shot of the described sequence, Roger obsequiously declines to dance
with Elena because he has not shaved—a gender-political “updated” variation of
the scene from To Have and Have Not, where after a kiss, Lauren Bacall suggests
to Humphrey Bogart that he get a shave. The barking of dogs leads over to Raoul
and his girlfriend in the entry hall, who, listening carefully, ponder whether it is Un
Chien andalou or 'lhe Hound ofthe Baskervilles. They are, in other words, at the cin-
ema, audience members like us. Cecile, already in her nightgown, comes down the
stair and pauses in a position where she is cut off at the upper edge of the screen. Not
until the second view into the entry hall, brought in closer but out of focus, does she
walk further down the stairs, but without her upper body being visible.54 This detail
points out that the back and forth of the camera is a “literal” translation of the shot-
reverse shot principle. The cut is replaced or rather imitated by tracking shots to the
left and to the right; Cecile pauses on the stairs, as if she must wait for the reverse
shot, in order to ensure the continuity of her gait; all this is a comedic enactment
of the grammar of Hollywood and its theatrical 180-degree principle. There is even
the hint of an action axis between the rooms: after slapping Elena, Raoul leaves the
frame to the left, so that his presence in the entry hall is expected. But a plausible
spatial relationship between the two interior spaces that has been established by an
external observer location, such as that which substantiates the views into the dif-
ferent living spaces in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), is lacking.55 The positivity
of the perspectival vanishing point construction turns into the negativity of the
opaque wall that, as a basic principle, even with Alberti, constitutes the imaginary
view out the window. This wall is present in the blackness of the image frame be-
tween the room views; it is the subject of the film and its images of nature. The first
cut to the “all over” of the moving water surface is in fact placed so that it appears
in lieu of the now actually expected black image; the movement of the water thus
comments on the materialization of the cinematic space. The static shot of the water
that is unrecognized as moving, the acceleration and the change in direction of the
camera during the second cut to the lake are actually summarized in a replica of
Hitchcock’s Vertigo effect, the constituents of cinematic fiction. The collapse of the
perspectival reference field and of the perception of form called for by the theorists
of the total work of art elevates Godard’s arabesque to the critical form.56

212 The Critical Arabesque

The Romantic Couple: Concluding Remarks

Despite all the splendor of nature that it shows, Godard’s film delivers a completely
anti-idealistic interpretation of the total work of art, to wit, through the demonstra-
tive connection between the utopia inherent in him and the luxury of the West-
ern European world of commodities.57 The measured grandeur of the arriving and
departing convoys of luxury sedans (Mercedes, Toyota, Maserati) is compared to
the holiday serenity of grasses and leaves tossed by the wind; the painted surfaces
of the car bodies compete with the luster of the sun-drenched park landscape and
the water surfaces glistening in the light. Godard conducts this hymn to a sugges-
tive, artistic nature, repeatedly from the beginning, over and over, ad absurdum,
through engine noise and squealing brakes, authoritarian assaults, the shouting and
clamor of owners and staff, so that, in all clarity, the class society as producer of
the total artwork of nature and architecture, as well as of the cinematic illusion he
advocates, is made aware. As representatives of the propertied upper class, Elena
and Roger/Richard are residents of the total work of art, and as such, also the
exemplary lovers, necessarily cast with stars in the leading roles, that Godard and
Gorin (re)introduced in Tout va bien (1972) as the public appeal factor needed in
every feature film. Godard visualized this cinema-disposition in a wide shot that
looks through a frame of metal rods to show Elena and Roger as they take the boat
out on the lake. Cuts to an attendant looking out the window and to the gardener,
who sits on the shore with Cecile—as the mirror-image pair, as it were—represent
the role of the viewer. The question posed in Tout va bien with Jane Fonda and
Yves Montand—whether the revolutionary impulse of the collective can be carried
on by a relationship in which the couple sees itself as a working group and not
just as recreation cell for isolated workers—is indeed also still posed in Nouvelle
Vague, and, as in the earlier film, is answered in the negative. Elena and Roger’s
relationship fails because melancholic Roger does not find a role within Elena’s
entrepreneurial world. The ultimately successful relationship with Richard is, as
it takes shape, the consequence of a resurrection legend, of the rebirth of (com-
mercial) cinema in the Nouvelle Vague. Entirely in the mode of the arabesque and
its romantic Christian interpretation, the last sequence of the film is thus twisted:
following Elena’s rescue, she recognizes in the end that Richard is not another, but
identical with Roger (which is immediately denied again by a voiceover). The rela-
tionship between variety and redundancy is affirmed as the ornamental formulation
of genre cinema. While Elena and Richard head to the house, the camera tracks
upwards along a mighty tree trunk in the foreground, taking up again the first im-
ages from the film’s story line. Shortly afterwards, a sentence that ended the Passion

213
of Christ and proclaimed salvation is faded in: “Consummatum est”; this, too, is a
reply to the initial accident scene, which was preceded by the proclamation “Incipit
Lamentatio.” But the end of the film is also associated with the saying “Omnia
vincit amor”; so it is clarified by multiplying the formulaic nature of the conclud-
ing statements. It would, in other words, be wrong to expect that Godard would
have an ending at the ready of rhe sort: and they lived happily ever after in their
villa on the lake. The film presented the life of a total work of art in all of its idyllic
splendor and undeniable beauty, and at the same time as the cold reality of a class
society. The ideals of nature and art are ornaments of a financially strong upper class
who nurture their aesthetic observations alongside stock market news, financial
transactions, and intrigues. The break with this phantasmatic idyll is, analogous to
Godard’s biography, at the end. Godard does not, however, scrimp with hints, inter
alia in the form of grotesque performances by Delon as interlude, that this parting
and this new beginning takes place in the cinema—that is, in a different total work
of art—and that an exterior, in which the goal would be valid to break it open,
does not exist. Godard’s arabesque thus does not serve to find closure, but rather to
reveal the ordinarily hidden seams of fictional space. While van de Velde designed
the arabesque as a new vessel for an ideal life, Godard’s cinematic arabesque, which
devotes more or just as much attention to a tree as to a movie star, is out to track
down the real in its masked forms.

Notes
1 Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlins Picture Palaces,” (orig. publ. in: Frankfurter Zeitung, Mar. 4,
1926), in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans./ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1995), 324. See also: Dominik Keller, “‘Gesamtkunstwerke’ in der amerikanischen Kinolandschaft der zwanzi-
ger Jahre,” in Der Hangzum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europdische Utopien seit 1800, exh. cat. (Frankfurt: Verlag Sauerlander,
Aarau, 1983), 395-400.
2 Giuseppe Becce, “Tonfilm und kiinstlerische Filmmusik,” transl. in: Joachim Fontaine, “Caligari meets Schonberg:
Music, Art, and Film as Total Artwork in Expressionism,” in Ralf Beil, Claudia Dillmann, eds., exh. cat. The Total
Artwork in Expressionism: Art, Film, Literature, Theater, Dance, andArchitecture 1905-1925 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz,
2011), 316.
3 See Keller 1983, 395. Cf. Erwin Panofsky’s comparison of a cinematic work with the construction of a cathedral: “Stil
und Stoff im Film,” Filmkritik, 11 (1967): 353.
4 In the diegesis, the movie theater also concretely plays a role as the meeting place and shelter for Patricia and Michel.
5 On this theoretical quajity of the cinematic form, see in particular: Volker Pantenburg, Film als Theorie: Bildforschung
bei Harun Farocki undJean-Luc Godard (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2006), and Daniel Morgan, Late Godardand the Possi-
bilities ofCinema (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2013).
6 See Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske: Wirklichkeitsaneignung und Stilisierung in der deutschen Kunst des 19. Jh.,
(Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1985) 44-47 (Schlegel) and 49-55 (Runge).
7 Morgan, Late Godardand the Possibilities ofCinema, 69-119.
8 That was the title of a series of talks—and later published as a book of the same name—held in Montreal that Godard
devoted to the project of a screenplay about cinematic history, which was realized in the monumental video work
Histoire(s) du Cinema (1989-1998). Jean-Luc Godard, Einfuhrung in eine wahre Geschichte des Kinos (Frankfurt am
Main: Hanser, 1984).
9 Morgan, Late Godardand the Possibilities ofCinema, 108.
10 In a discussion about Nouvelle Vague, the director compares the dreamy isolation of his childhood—a seclusion that
knew nothing ofwar, which he shamefully had to admit—to his second dream, that of the Nouvelle Vague: “And then
there was the New Wave, a team ... it disappeared, it couldn’t last long.” Concluding in a way that indeed strikes the
tenor of his film, he says: “So after having known that, one begins to know the real and to move forward.” Richard
Brody, Everything is Cinema: The WorkingLife ofJean-Luc Godard (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 526.
11 See Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema, 106. In the (artist) figure of the gardener, Morgan signifi-
cantly anchors the argument that Godard employs nature as a product of human labor and not as the antithesis of

214 The Critical Arabesque

 civilization, critical hercin with respect to the pastoral genre that is evoked in the first scene of the film, a seemingly
uninhabited rural idyll. The further context of the total work of art that I have introduced seems to me to embrace
these traditions of pastoral and idyll or signify their modern form of presentation.
12 A variant of Marianne’s boredom in Pierrot lefou (1965). The Robinsonesque love idyll on the beach anticipates the
Gesamtkunstwerk and its criticism in Nouvelle Vague. Because the contemporary ideal subject is defined as male, to
wit, disdnct from the woman as representative of the “other” nature, the woman, who is still defined as an object to
behold, cannot act on her own as the subject of aesthedc experience. Godard makes this convention of the woman as
image (of nature) explicit by having Raoul’s girlfriend appear wearing a fur and, for the third question, lingerie. Elena
breaks through this convenrion only by applying another stereotype, which is analogous to that of the total work of
art: the image of the siren who acts in conjunction with the forces of nature.
13 Morgan (Late Godardand the Possibilities ofCinema, 108) already suggests this interpretation with references to Kant’s
assessment of the arabesque as the governor of natural beauty and by reference to the English landscape garden.
14 For her information about the resurrected, the maid receives a few bills from Raoul, thus succeeding in expressing the
general foundadon of the exhibited social relationships in monetary transactions, but also the fact that the popular
truth of faith has become a coveted commodity for the enlightened middle dass.
15 Morgan does not reach this conclusion, even though his repeatedly affirmed analytical insight into the interconnect-
edness of the views of nature with the downright intrusively evinced present situation of capitalist society makes this
conclusion irrefutable. The understandable intention of defending the film and its images of nature against the ac-
cusadon that it is a sort ofextra-long promo clip evidently means that Godard’s borrowings remain excluded from the
Romantic idea of a total work of art. Thus it escapes Morgan that Godard has a criticism to mete out to the Nouvelle
Vague, which is ardculated at the same level as the reflection of genre cinema in the early work.
16 On Runge’s (unrealized) ideal of a total work of art, see Jorg Trager, Pbilipp Otto Runge und sein Werk: Monographie
undkritischer Katalog (Munich: Prestel, 1975), 130-132. On the mediarion between the Christian doctrine of salvati-
on and the natural processes in Der Kleine Morgen (1808) and the unfinished Grofier Morgen, see Jorg Trager, Philipp
Otto Runge undsein Werk, 156-169.
17 See Peter Marker, Caspar David Friedrich: Geschichte als Natur (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2007) 82-91.
18 For example, see Dotflandschaft bei Morgenbeleuchtung [Village Landscape in Morning Light] (1822), whose coun-
terpart is, in turn, Mondaufgang am Meer [Moonrise by the Sea] (1822), which anricipates a Godardesque motif. See
Marker, Caspar David Friearich, 91-97.
19 The previously mentioned visual metaphor of the Lichtspieltheater, already substantiated in A bout de souffle, is also
variously shown in Nouvelle Vague in numerous nightrime shots of street traffic. By playing with the focal length,
which turns headlamps into dancing colorful circular forms, the theme is transformed here into the ornamental, thus
creating a parallel between the arabesque and geometric abstraction.
20 Morgan, Late Godardand the Possibilities of Cinema, 72, 105.
21 On the game with the hands with respect to the “uneconomical” structure of the swap in love, see Natalie Binczek, “An-
okonomie und Codierung: Zur Liebessignifikarion und Liebeskommunikation in Jean-Luc Godards Nouvelle Vague,”
in Voiker Roloff and Scarlett Winter eds., Godard intermedial (Tiibingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1997), 153-171. Silver-
man and Farocki also relate the “wonder” of love to the topos of a pure gift. See: Kaja Silverman, Harun Farocki, “The
Same, Yet Other: New Wave/Nouvelle Vague (1990),” in Silverman, Farocki, Speaking about Godard (NewYork: NYU
Press, 1998). In our context, it should be noted that the autonomous shot of hands gripping each other in front of a
landscape background frames these as an arabesque.
22 See, for example, the long trip taken by Charlotte and Robert along the Seine in Unefemme martie (1964), Marianne
and Ferdinand’s trip south in Pierrot lefou, or the conclusion of Alphaville (1965).
23 Henry van de Velde, Die Linie, ed. Hans Curjel, (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1955), 181. For commentary about van de
Velde’s line philosophy, see the chapter “Linie und Ornament,” in Ole W. Fischer, Nietzsches Schatten: Henry van de
Velde—von Philosophti zu Form, (Berlin: Gebriider Mann, 2013), 305-324.
24 Henry van de Velde, Die Linie [The Line], 181.
25 Henry van de Velde “Allgemeine Bemerkungen zu einer Synthese der Kunst,” Pan 5 (1899/1900): 4, 267.
26 The film was shot in September and October 1989 on the Swiss side of Lake Geneva. Elena’s paiatial villa is modeled
after the estate of Godard’s grandparents (on the maternal side), where the director spent his childhood and also
experienced his first total art dream. See note 10.
27 See Simon Frisch, Mythos Nouvelle Vague: Wie das Kino in Frankreich neu etfunden wurde (Marburg: Schiiren Verlag,
2007).
28 In other words, photography and film were not needed in order to abolish perspective, painting’s “original sin,” as
Andre Bazin had asserted: “Perspective was the original sin of Western painting. Niepce and Lumiere redeemed it.”
Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Hugh Gray, trans., What 1s CinemaiVol. 1, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), 16. Translation modified by Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities ofCine-
ma, 4.
29 The sequence described in the following can be retrieved here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6_K2NXLyFs
(accessed October 7, 2013).
30 Apparently, the view through the sunglasses signifies the diegetic seeing, while the view without glasses refers to non-
diegetic, “seeing” vision. On the symbolism of sunglasses, see Regine Prange, “Genre und Genrekritik—Der Western
in Jean-Luc Godards A bout de soujjle (1959),” in Kinematographische Rdume. Installationsdsthetik in Film und Kunst,
ed. Ursula Frohne and Lilian Haberer (Munich: Wilhlem Fink Verlag, 2012), 621-660, esp. 634, 636, 652f.
31 Etienne Souriau, “Die Struktur des filmischen Universums und das Vokabular der Filmologie [French, 1951],” in
montage AV 6, no. 2, (1997): 140-157, 144: “Zum einen gibt es die Tatsache der Leinwand, der Rahmung ’ailer
sichtbaren Erscheinungen auf einer rechteckigen Flache, die sich an irnmer derselben Stelle befindet und deren Di-
mensionen festgelegt sind”, zum andern werde “ein vollig anderer, unendlich viel weiterer, dreidimensionaler Raum
vorgesetzt ...”, namlich “der Raum, in dem sich die Geschichte abspielt.” (“On the one hand, there is the reality of
the screen, the framing of all visible manifestations, which are always in the same place, whose dimensions are fixed”,
on the other hand “an utterly different, endlessly wider three-dimensional space is presented ... ”, namely “the space
in which the plot takes place.”)

215
 32 The relation between the moving glances (here performed by the two protagonists) and the tracking shot directed
upward becomes particularly visible during Elenas and Rogers walk through the park.
33 Morgan (2013) dedicates himself extensively to the theme of melancholic reverie and its political relevance, yet with-
out debating its relation to Nostalghia. This would be worth a separate investigation.
34 The film poster is illustrated here: http://worldscinema.org/2012/06/andrei-tarkovsky-nostalghia-aka-nostalgia-1983/
(retrieved October, 7, 2013). See for example Edvard Munch’s lithography Lovers in the Waves, 1896, illustrated in
Edvard Munch. Einfuhrung von Per Amann (Ramerding: Berghaus Verlag, 1979), Figure 54.
35 Her predecessor, hotel owner Hanna (Schygulla) in Passion, wears a blouse with a similar ornament in a scene at the
hotel bar.
36 Kaja Silverman (1998, p. 238) sees here “great examples of a non-identical repetition” and thereby implicitly refers to
the structure of ornament.
37 Giinter Metken, “Ausstellung im Grand Palais Paris: ‘Paul Gauguin’—Kiinstliche Paradiese. Der Wagnerianer der
bildenden Kunst,” Die Zeit, February 3, 1989.
38 Ibid.
39 It remains to be mentioned that the vegetal ornament finds its counterpart in a crystalline pattern that decorates
Cecile’s pullover. The economic elite presents itself within the image of the “whole” nature.
40 See for example the parallelization of the view into nature with the view into the richly decorated, with a magnificent
rug furnished interieur in the oil painting The Aivakening Conscience (1853-54) by William Holman Hunt.
41 See Hans-Giinther Schwarz, Der Orient unddieAsthetik der Moderne (Munchen: Iudicium, 2003) 252f. Also relevant:
Joseph Masheck, “The Carpet Paradigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness,” in Arts Magazine, Vol. 51
(1976): 82-109.
42 Cited according to Wolfdietrich Rasch, “Flache, Welle, Ornament,” in Studien zur Deutschen Literatur seit der Jahr-
hundertwende (Stuttgart 1967) 220.
43 Here again, one is impressed by an illogical, complex choreography the arriving luxurious limousines obey.
44 See the poses of Elena and Roger solidified into tableaux during a back and forth tracking of the camera in the villa
(discussed further below). Cecile, who, during the “murder scene” sits with Jules on the lakefront and looks off in the
distance as if to a movie screen, touches her shame as she declaims poetic texts.
45 Such as the Greek gods in Le Mepris (1963). In ]e vous salue, Marie (1984), a parallel is drawn between the virgin
birth of Christ as a creation myth and scientific theories of human origin, an assonant motif pair that also appears in
Nouvelle Vague just before Richard’s arrival.
46 Godard in the daily newspaper TAZ from November 22, 1990, quoted from Kaja Silverman, Harun Farocki, “The
Same, Yet Other: New Wave/Nouvelle Vague (1990),” in Speaking about Godard, ed. Silverman and Farocki (New
York: NYU Press, 1998), 242. The analytical integration of literary texts and music must remain untouched here, even
though they carry the hybrid total artistic impetus of Godard’s critical arabesque in equal measure to the visual form
given priority here.
47 The couple’s relationship is analogous to the film’s simultaneity of historicity and the present, which may reemphasize
the primary media-reflexive significance of Nouvelle Vague. In the final sequence, as Elena and Richard head toward
the house in the golden afternoon light of the park, a sound rings out; introduced by Roger’s call, Elena should not
turn around, a voiceover makes the following comment: “Tout cela, ils avaient l’impression de l’avoir deja vecu, et
leurs paroles semblaient si immobilisees dans les traces d’autre paroles d’autre fois. Ils ne faisant pas attention a ce
qu’ils faisaient mais bien a la difference qui voulait que dans acte de maintenant fut du present et que des actes ana-
logues eussent ete de passe. Ils se sentaient grands, immobiles, avec au-dessus de l’eux le passe et le present comme les
vagues identiques dans le meme ocean.” As on the text level, history and historical amnesia are blended into each other
in the image of the arabesque and its principle of repetition. The couple vanishes behind the tree trunk, which, like
the ocean, represents history. Then comes the intertitle “Omnia vincit amor” (Love Conquers All). Natalie Binczek
does not consider the second segment, which thematizes the experience of the present and addresses the visual level, to
reach the conclusion that the film is primarily characterized by its discourses(I)—see “Anokonomie und Codierung,”
160. Kaja Silverman construes the final sequence on the basis of the above-cited text in a far too novel-like way, as
overcoming the “roles of master and servant, donor and recipient”—see Silverman and Farocki, Speaking about Go-
dard, 224. Farocki’s reference to an implicit analogy for the sensibilities of Elena and Richard, who supposedly feel
“tall and motionless” as they are given a “prominent place” among the giant trees (ibid., 225) behind which the couple
vanishes at the end of the majestic camera crane shot, justifies the “new beginning” for the couple (ibid.) less than
the triumph of the (Hollywood) story. In this respect “the central characters succeed in transcending their everyday
limitations” (ibid., 220).
48 On additional film citations, see Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life ofJean-Luc Godard (London:
Faber and Faber, 2008).
49 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) 222,
347.
50 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 120.
51 Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities ofCinema, 52.
52 Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities ofCinema, 53.
53 Kaja Silverman, Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard, 197.
54 This and other anti-narrative stair scenes unequivocally invoke Duchamp’s painting Nu descendant un escalier (1912),
which, for its part, responds to the proto-cinematographic technique of motion photography and suggests it dissolves
the boundaries of design.
55 In shots of the marital home in Une femme mariee (1964) or in the shots of factory spaces in Tout va bien (1972) this
media-reflexive role of the tracking shot is already laid out; there however, it is still understood with the plausibility of
a potential external viewer position that does not apply in Nouvelle Vague due to the cut to the water surface.
56 This consists of using a magnifying zoom while the camera tracks back, illustrating Scottie’s fear of heights and the
conflicting impulses, the “prospect” of falling and the reaction of drawing back.
57 In my lecture in Weimar at the Bauhaus Colloquium on the Total Work of Art, I explained that Jeff Koonss artistic
method can likewise be found in such an over-fulfillment of total artistic harmony. Due to lack of sufficient space,
this part had to be removed from here and will be presented elsewhere.

216 The Critical Arabesque