Godard: Histoire(s) du Cinema by Martin Wooster

It would seem today, that the more we want things to change the more they stay the same. For Godard the world cannot really change or improve if film itself does not improve. The world seemingly unfolds as a bad script, it is to film that we have the opportunity to change this fact. But as Godard makes clear in this film, cinema has so  often misunderstood its own historicity. This misunderstanding is rooted in the fact that cinema misunderstood the power of its images, its inheritance from the pictorial tradition. As the philosopher Jacques Ranciere interpreting Godard’s film says, ‘The history of cinema is that of a missed date with the history of its century’. By subjecting its images to imprisonment inside a script, by locking their inherent memory bursting with potential energy inside an often linear temporal framework cinema too often failed to demonstrate the radical innocence of the art of moving images. Godard’s film attempts to recapture the image, not by opposing arguments but by and through the images themselves. By creating a double effect, something akin to Aristotle’s, the purification of the passions, knowledge as acquired through cinema’s own playing with the shifting relations of pleasure and pain (the human enigma) is able to find a return to the primitive sources of its intrinsic innocence and lightness. Through processes of montage, collage, editing, humour, playfulness and flashes of genius Godard has sought to redeem the temporal into the timeless and trouble again what so easily becomes cinema’s fate, just so many inert pieces of celluloid.

As the poet Wallace Stevens has argued, what is proper to art is the ‘description without place’. Art describes an existent (virtual) space of its own, and as such produces an appearance able to fully coincide with real being. This is not a sign for something that lies outside its own form, rather it is able to extract from the confused reality that is our world its own inner form. We too often desire images not for their intrinsic value but because they are desired by someone else and so we mime or imitate their lives. This mimetic desire over determines the human condition. Creating a beast of burden that the Angel of History in Paul Klee’s painting, ‘Angelus Novus’ as depicted in the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History’ is forced to face. This is the single catastrophe of history, the growing normalization of injustice which keeps piling up its debris, hurled as it is in front of his feet. The storm we call progress prevents him waking the dead and make whole what has been smashed. Wallace Stevens answers with the Necessary Angel which arrives to offer the possibility of conferring singularity on the fragments and so give them the possibility that they might evolve for themselves and for other fragments pure and simple. It is here that memory has the possibility of again becoming active in a non-chronological time that alone constitutes our interiority. In a kind of meta cinema like the moving kino-eye of Vertov’s cinema time grows without ceasing and as it does it opens onto an infinite capacity for novel re-invention. To feel the crushing weight of history and its lifting in a manner that defies the world and the seriousness of art at the same time. Godard much as Brecht before him, who constantly played with the means of coming to political awareness through the very means by which his plays sought to undermine the legitimacy of great art in their use of the admixtures of minor performing arts, understood that there is no exact formula for how the political and aesthetics mix just the one undoing the other in the process of each undoing themselves. Godard’s work is a hymn to ‘the sense of life as a privilege, the earth as something splendid to walk on’ in the same way Wallace Stevens creates the Necessary Angel to save the Angel of History dying of melancholy in a suffocating world of ruins. …

‘I am the necessary angel of earth,

 Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

Martin Wooster

September 2008