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Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, |
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Introduction 2022: I have hesitated a
long time – over two decades! – before reprinting this piece. Although its
central argument about the general (then just burgeoning) practice of analysing
a film by ‘scanning’ it from start to end is something I still uphold (this
critique was to become even more pertinent in the era of ubiquitous DVD audio
commentaries, my own included!), I think I severely underestimated and devalued
the specific pretext that I took as my key example. Not long after writing this
review-essay, I began to understand and appreciate the work (across diverse
media) of both Silverman and Farocki much better; I consequently came to value
their Godard book far more highly (it’s a major positive reference point in my
2006 PhD, for instance). I also note that, originally, this piece was composed
as a dual book review; however, as I extended my largely negative opinion (one
I have not since changed) on David Sterritt’s The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Cambridge University Press, 1989) elsewhere, I have minimised
the role it plays here, except when it pertains to the scanning problematic.
Scanning
Godard had a style and sensibility that appealed to certain anarchistic
and youthful minds here [i.e., in USA] (...) His form did it. It was his form,
his style, his temperament – not the content of his films – that inspired the
students of Columbia. But I don’t think Tarkovsky has that kind of electricity
that Godard has. No one has; Godard is unique.
– Jonas Mekas (1)
Take Godard: effectively you cannot understand anything about Godard if
you don’t realise that profoundly what this guy did was give you Matisse by the
ton. A kind of frame at high noon, with no shadows, large flat expanses of
bright colours and people pinned to that surface like very beautiful and moving
butterflies.
- Jean-Pierre Gorin (2)
Autonomy is thus restored to each instant, which is thereby able to take
on the full force of what existence offers to the perception in an instant, a
season, a crisis.
- Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier (3)
There has been, of late, a curious confluence of
critics around a very particular way of writing about films. I think of it as scanning. It involves the act of running
a movie through, in writing, from start to end. This form has inevitably come
into circulation as a result of those publishing initiatives centred on books about
a single film – the various series published by the British Film Institute, Éditions
Yellow Now in Bloomsbury (historically, I believe, the first of this type), Bloomsbury
and Flicks Books, containing essays between approximately ten- and twenty-thousand
words. Some notable attempts at scanning a film from start to end include
Camille Paglia on Alfred Hitchcock’s The
Birds (1963) and (so far the best, to my mind) Kent Jones on Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983). (4)
What is the contemporary attraction of scanning, as
opposed to other, hitherto dominant modes of writing about film? I see it as
intimately related to the rise of neo-formalist approaches that stress the compositional elements of film, or
poetics in the deliberately limited, sometimes solely technical sense exemplified
by David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style (1997). Even those writers who may have little direct acquaintance with neo-formalist
critical methods have probably sensed, and instinctively joined forces with, a
widespread resistance to the supposed excesses of previous work based on either
old-school thematic interpretation or newer-school textual analysis.
Scanning resists such excessive speculation. It makes
a show of sticking to the traces, to the evidence on screen. It can be deeply
descriptive and evocative writing, focused on what we can see and hear – and
dramatic, too, since it imports something of the rise-and-fall,
approach-and-reveal structure of the movie under discussion into its own
trajectory. Scanning is about sensation and affect – the film as an object in
motion acting upon the mind and body of the individual spectator or the mass
audience – rather than about abstract themes or distant cultural contexts. It
is mimetic, “real-time” criticism, stressing all kinds of surface properties
that directly engage spectators (intrigue, mood, “attractions”), and playing
out the temporally finite and celluloid-bound structures wherein these
properties emerge, flower and die.
Scanning is syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic. It
expands the film as it flows along with or beside it, allowing itself to make
certain points or allude to particular contexts. But, essentially, it sticks
with its object. And implicitly – by virtue of the critical form chosen – scanning
makes a show of delivering to us the whole film (or near enough to it), nothing
but the film, and the totality of what it is to experience that film.
All forms of critical writing are rhetorical. Writing
up the analysis of a film involves both the careful selection of representative
details, and the stringing together of an argument about these details in the
story-form we call the essay (and even a short movie review can be essayistic,
as writers from at least Siegfried
Kracauer onwards have long demonstrated). We pick certain scenes (or
shots, gestures, motifs, etc.) for analysis because they perform a rhetorical
function within our argument – they sum up what we have seen in the film and
discovered about it; they crystallise certain aspects of structure, style,
theme or ideology; they strike us as the fullest,
richest moments whose tightly condensed logic we thoroughly enjoy unpacking.
The order in which we unveil the filmic fragments we
analyse – and, until the current trend began, this has rarely been a strictly
chronological order – will depend upon the twists and turns we wish our
argument to enact for the reader; as has often been noted, hermeneutic analysis
(for instance) has much the same impulse to thrill, and to uncover truth, as
detective fiction. So, for instance, it is not uncommon in contemporary
criticism – particularly in the cultural studies era – to hold in reserve a
final piece of textual evidence that dramatically turns an argument thus far
elaborated totally on its head, revealing at the last a subversive,
contradictory or confessional tendency in the work under inspection.
Methods of critical writing that slice up a film and
ceaselessly rearrange its pieces and levels, often multiplying the possible
perspectives that can be taken toward it as they proceed, certainly have this
in their favour: they give a sense of what critics as different as Raymond
Durgnat, Thierry Kuntzel and Raymond Bellour have called the volume of a film, its capacity to exist
and reach further and deeper than that simple, linear strip of congealed chemicals
unreeling for 90 minutes or so between projector and screen. (5) Films
rearrange themselves in our minds after we watch them, and even while we watch them; they race down into
the many strange and dimly accessible pockets of our being. Art objects are
inescapably, even from a more neatly text-based or structural viewpoint,
paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic, diachronic as well as synchronic: that is,
their levels of affect and meaning are distributed right throughout the work in
all manner of echoes, shadows, symmetries, suggestions and recapitulations. Recursive
loops, as well as linear ensembles.
The kind of analysis that sifts fragments in variable
orders evokes a film as something that can be endlessly investigated,
re-created, re-experienced. Criticism becomes the search for points of entry into a movie; and each fresh
angle of attack re-invents, redraws the contours and economies of its object.
It is certainly true – as Bordwell witheringly
demonstrated in Making Meaning (6)– that
thematic and textual analyses are often as boringly predictable as the least inventive
mystery story; the bases are loaded, the evidence is rigged, and the shock
ending is broadcast from the first paragraph. But is scanning the best
available response to this problem? I suspect that scanners (as a species!)
imagine they are beyond the ruses of interpretative rhetoric – that they have
found a purer, more empirically based, harder-boiled, more directly
communicative method. But scanning is, from the outset, just as selective, and
just as bound by the logic and structure of an argument, as any other form of
critical writing. To think otherwise is to dupe yourself – and worse, to reduce
the range of phenomena you can potentially explore in the film in front of you.
Scanning coincides with an increase in descriptive
film criticism (fuelled by the reawakening of collective interest in such
highly descriptive writers as Manny Farber) (7), an outpouring of poetic
license for all intents and purposes repressed during the days of Hard Theory.
Some of this new work, inevitably, is waffly, purple prose straining for
lyrical effect – but there are, as well, real breakthroughs and fruitful
experiments emerging. However, on a larger level, it needs to be recognised
that a predilection for description does not come without its in-built
illusions, which writers can either recognise and work with, or ignore at their
peril.
To put it bluntly, all description is fiction. In any
single frame of a movie, there is an enormous amount of data (dirty word) that
can be potentially described. Multiply enough frames to make up a scene or
sequence, and description has reached the realm of the humanly impossible. All
description is brutally selective; moreover, it operates according to very
specific principles of pertinence established (consciously or otherwise) by the
type of methodology, the type of critical gaze, that one brings to bear. (8)
Description, in itself, is not a position. It can be
bent to widely different projects and rhetorical forms. One popular mode of
description, for instance, concentrates on the through-lines of a sequence, the articulations and transitions from
one gesture, shot or movement to the next; it tries to tease out the tension,
dynamism, or what Jean-Luc Godard called the current animating a filmic passage. (9) Another, more recent mode
subtracts the shot as a unit from the flow of a narrative or an articulated
sequence, and mines it for peripheral, superfluous or incidental detail – an
approach variously equated with surrealist irrationalism, postmodern distraction,
and Farber’s ethos of termite art. (10) So there is nothing inherent in descriptive critical writing
that necessitates the adoption of a long-form scan.
By a weird coincidence, two end-of-millennium books on
Jean-Luc Godard – Speaking about Godard by Kaja Silverman & Harun Farocki, and The
Films of Jean-Luc Godard by David Sterritt – pick many of the same films to
analyse, (11) and both use the rhetorical form of the scan. I admit to instant
surprise and trepidation upon noticing this latter choice, because, of all
directors, I would have imagined that scanning works least well on a collagist
such as Godard. (This is another inescapable fact about scanning, or indeed any
specific rhetorical mode: it fits some works better than others.) But the decision
to scan a few Godard classics that have already attracted reams of critical
commentary evidently functions as a coup
de dés, an attempt to spark some new insights and generate a new way of
claiming, and maybe honouring, these works.
So what do the old critical modes lack, what did they
miss in Godard? There have been many descriptive, evocative, termitic and
overtly literary attempts at Godard commentary; (12) but they have all seemed
piecemeal, too fragmentary, not really managing to bridge the abyss between
impressionism and solid, systematisable knowledge for more than a moment or two.
On the other side of that abyss, there are the rigorous, textual analyses – more
successful in pinning down the materialist strategies of Godard’s essentially Brechtian,
dogmatic works than the elusive mysteries of the other two-thirds of his output.
(13)
Somewhere between pure, poetic effusion and the
imposition of putative codes, various sorts of thematic analysis have
struggled, valiantly or irritatedly, to make convincing sense of Godard’s work
– and many such attempts conclude by giving up the ghost with a shrug. (14) Godard’s
movies have always posed enormous challenges to those who seek economy, logic,
depth and richness in a film, since they fragment so readily under inspection
according to traditional aesthetic criteria. (Try teaching a Godard movie: once
you get past the usual generalities and contextual remarks, you will often discover
that the films make for a frustratingly difficult “read”.)
However, it has never seemed enough, at another
extreme, to simply champion Godard’s work as modernist anti-cinema, wilfully
incoherent and subversive of this or that convention. (15) Jacques Aumont was
right to specify that Godard’s work until 1968 demonstrates a rigorous “displacement”
of cinematic conventions (including those of classicism), “not a break, a
rejection, or a departure”. (16) Perhaps an even more pressing reason why
Godard’s work refuses to be sewed and sold as mere anti-cinema is that, after
all, so many of us have, as film fans, lived these movies, taken the gestalt of
their mood, sensibility and suggestiveness right into our beings. (17) There
has to be some kind of richness
there, surely – and it should, by all rights, be amenable to an analysis. (18)
Hélas pour moi, I cannot find such breakthrough
analysis in either Speaking about Godard or The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. For
me, these books serve as monuments to the current limitations and
self-delusions of the temptation to scan – and they show, in the process, that
scanning may not be the magic key to unlock Godard.
For analyses that presume, by virtue of their
rhetorical mode, to capture everything that effervesces in these films, these
books manage to illuminate or even annotate surprisingly little. Scanning here
becomes a kind of fly-by parsing of plots, characters, certain strings of
imagery, certain basic formal tactics, certain ideological and/or spiritual
concerns arising from the perennial and ever-shifting dare of Godard’s cinema.
What gets left out? The answer has both syntagmatic
and paradigmatic dimensions. Syntagmatically, in the moment-to-moment,
fine-grain detail, we encounter an utterly predictable list of absences: the
bewilderingly complex, multi-layered detail of the soundtrack; the specific
(and often very odd) performance modes of gesture, posture, movement, speech;
the precise rhythmic fluxes of the montage; Godard’s often unusual staging
decisions (including what Alain Bergala explicated as the tendency to shoot the
“other side of the bouquet”) (19); his eye for total design, whether in a set
or on location, merging line, colour, tone and volume with a neo-painterly
mastery (“Matisse by the ton”, as Gorin put it) to rival Michelangelo Antonioni
or Andrei Tarkovsky.
In short, and as ever, the intense materiality of Godard’s cinema, the
action of form and style that thrills us so much as viewers and made his work
so indelibly cool (these days, retro-cool) for multiple generations, forming
the inspiration and the basis for so many subsequent individual styles (Jerzy Skolimowski,
R.W. Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Hal Hartley ... ).
The paradigmatic level of Godard’s films – what we
might call their poetic form – is even less well-charted territory. These books
fail to capture the rich polyphony of the best passages in Godard, and the
global form that contains them in each work. Not much gets folded over or
cross-referenced by these scanning analyses; in-the-moment events register more
than woven motifs. The unusual temporal structures of the films – in which
space becomes “the image of a piece of time, of a fragment of life containing
an inexhaustible totality whose slightest movements must be captured and put
together” (Ropars) (20) – are not explored. The gestalt of a Godard movie – how it rearranges itself and gels as an
image, a sound, a mood and an idea in one’s head – is never even evoked, let
alone unravelled.
The basis for not only appreciating Godard’s work, but
also criticising or evaluating it, tends to be eroded by the act of scanning – although
there is no good reason why this should be the case. In these books, everything
is lamentably equalised, and thus rendered rather indifferent in form, content
and effect. The question never seems to arise, on the linear trail through the
text, as to whether any one scene, in the achieved combination of its elements,
is better, richer, fuller, more coherent or expressive, better executed than
any other scene. Godard’s craft, and also much of his art, thus disappears, and
so does one of the principal and proper tasks of film criticism – since,
especially with an avowedly impulsivist artist like him, one is obliged to sift
and weigh the unevenness of the results.
What do I mean? Like any created work, a Godard film
is a human artefact, a collective juggling of an immense number of variables
within enormous, practical constraints – and thus an imperfect construction.
These books tend to prop up, inadvertently, the mystical/idealist aura of
old-fashioned auteurism (movies are things that pop directly out of god-like
brains onto the screen), and rob us (as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has warned) of “any
sense of artistic production – the idea that films are made by film-makers,
that music is composed and performed by musicians, and with this the idea that
there is a relation between the skills and talents of these musicians and
film-makers and the sort of pleasure that audiences get from music and cinema”.
(21)
Of the two books, The
Films of Jean-Luc Godard is the worse offender. Sterritt scans mainly in
order to find references or allusions (artistic or cultural), according to a
rather overworked tradition in Godardian criticism: once he finds a reference,
the ride stops for a little background explication of the likely (or, at times,
unlikely) influence that some artist, thinker or cultural movement had on the
filmmaker. So, in this book, any glimpse of a movie poster, any spoken slogan,
any book cover or title prompts a lame lecture on the Beats, Antonin Artaud, Julia
Kristeva and abjection, the Situationists ...
Of the two books, Speaking
about Godard has, by far, the greater number of original insights, and more
sustained analytical highpoints. It is worth consulting for a dazzling
discussion of how Numéro deux (1975) constantly
“re-semanticises” its sexual and bodily fixations; for the way it returns Week-end (1967) to a ‘60s art context of “happenings,
pop art, improvisation” (p. 98); for its proposals about how Vivre sa vie (1962) “accommodates relationships between the
most divergent of terms, since it does not predicate those relationships on the
basis of identity” (p. 6); or how in Le mépris (1963)
everyone and everything speaks through a postlapsarian or fallen language (p. 35).
And, last but not least, for surely the most detailed, patient and respectful
treatment that Le gai savoir (1968)
is ever likely to get. [2022 Postscript: I myself eventually provided not one
but two extremely respectful, full-length DVD audio commentaries on this film,
in 2009 and 2017; I ended up really digging it!]
Through Godard, Silverman & Farocki rake over
those monumental, historical legacies – feminist film theory and radical film
practice, particularly – that have variously inspired, formed, troubled and blocked
them. Their book is a kind of reckoning with the Before and After of May ‘68,
trying hard to find hopeful pleasure in the severest forms of militant
unpleasure – and very like a Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub film in
the relentlessness and seriousness of this quest. (Farocki did an intriguing
making-of doco on that pair’s Class
Relations [1984].)
But a form of parsing or thinning-out is again the
order of the day here – surreally so, since much of the text gives the
appearance of a manic attention to unfolding detail. Chapters pass with
scarcely a mention of either composed or appropriated music in the films, and
the radical way Godard breaks up and places these passages. The most euphoric, dazzling and liberated
sequences in Godard – “those rare moments of joy during which the editing
becomes lyrical” (Ropars) (22) – are flattened in unimaginative, short-hand
summaries; for instance, we read that Alphaville (1965) contains “a lyrical series of images of [Natasha], sometimes with Lemmy,
and sometimes without” (p. 79) – and that’s all!
Although Silverman & Farocki are far less
defensive of the conventions of narrative and verisimilitude than Sterritt,
they plod through the films primarily following the lead of a bland plot
synopsis: “In the foyer of the Institute of General Semantics, Lemmy tells
Natasha that he couldn’t understand Alpha 60’s lesson” (72). A little old-style
impressionism might have saved this intermittent reduction of the movies to their
screenplays-that-never-were.
Silverman & Farocki sometimes look back and forth
from a scene, indicating threads of meaning in the process of being
inaugurated, developed or brought to a close, but they never push their
scanning to somehow cover the “global confrontation between all the discernible
objects noticed by the audience” (Ropars). (23) This is not to ask for a model
of poetic form that proceeds according to the old-fashioned and essentially
literary tenets of what has been caricatured as the compare-and-contrast school
of cinema aesthetics, focussed mainly on themes, characters, stories and morals
– a model which, as previously suggested, tends to become entirely deranged and
unworkable when faced with any Godard movie. Rather, what we may need is a
critical model more attune to the dynamic transformation of elements – all
elements, both representational and figural – from one end of a film to the
other, a mode of aesthetics firing at full force in Passion (1982), to which Silverman & Farocki devote a chapter.
In the end, the rhetorical form of Speaking about Godard – a mock dialogue
that has neither the spontaneity of speech nor the rigour of a collaborative
text – left me constantly suspended and dissatisfied. And the scanning is too
often superficial: blind and deaf to the sensual materiality, poetic complexity
and sheer, perverse fun of the texts in front of them.
Once again, Godard’s films mostly end up serving (as
in Sterritt’s book) as a mere platform for theory-led riffs. In these years of
the filmmaker’s densest, most cryptic open-form works – a prolific period of
film, video and publication that begins almost exactly where these books leave
off, with Nouvelle vague at the
beginning of the ‘90s – Godard surely deserves better.
NOTES (Some references given in 2000 have been updated, but I have not
tried to cover the vast literature of the two subsequent decades on the figures
named and issues raised.)
1. Jonas Mekas quoted in Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press, 1983), p. 23. back
2. “Trains of Thought: Jean-Pierre Gorin”, Filmviews, no. 133 (1987), p. 13.
3. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Form and
Substance, or the Avatars of the Narrative”, in Royal S. Brown (ed.), Focus on Godard (New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 95.
4. Camille Paglia, The
Birds (London: British Film Institute, 1998); Kent Jones, L’argent (London: BFI, 1999).
5. See Raymond Durgnat, “Towards Practical Criticism”, AFI Education Newsletter, Vol. 4 No.
4 (1981), pp. 1-2, 10-11; Raymond Bellour, “Segmenting/Analysing”, in Rick Altman
(ed.), Genre: The Musical (London:
BFI, 1981), pp. 102-133. Durgnat’s book on WR
– Mysteries of the Organism (London:
BFI, 1999) employs scanning as only one thread within a superbly structured
analytical collage; Bellour’s own 1992 essay in scan-mode on Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), translated into English as “The Film
We Accompany” in Rouge, no. 3 (2004),
is unquestionably among the very best in this genre.
6. David Bordwell, Making
Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
7. See the Farber dossier in Framework, no. 40 (1999), pp. 9-68.
8. See V. F. Perkins (1990), “Must We Say What They
Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation”, reprinted in Douglas Pye (ed.), V.F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter
Film Criticism (Wayne State University Press, 2020), pp. 240-256.
9. Don Ranvaud, “An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”, Framework, no. 21 (1983), p. 8.
10. See Greg Taylor’s intriguing outlier of a book, Artists in
the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1999).
11. Although Sterritt offers an explanation for his
choice of films (pp. 19-20), neither book contains any reflection on a
Godardian canon – i.e., which films might be considered his best, fullest,
richest, most provocative or interesting. This ties in with the avoidance of
critical evaluation that I discuss later.
12. Two literary milestones: Aragon, “What is Art,
Jean-Luc Godard?”, in Focus on Godard, pp. 135-46; and Pier Paolo
Pasolini, “A Desperate Vitality” in Norman MacAfee (ed.) Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems (New York: The Noonday Press, 1996), pp.
149-177. An already rather forgotten forerunner in the scanning (and scanning
Godard) field was Alfred Guzzetti’s ambitious (as well as lavishly produced) Two
or Three Things I Know About Her:
Analysis of a Film by Godard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981);
this and related books emanating from Harvard University Press are the subject
of a savage, brilliant critique by Brian Henderson (“Harvard Film Studies: A
Review”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 35 No.
4 [Summer 1982], pp. 22-34) which touches, at several points, on the scanning
problematic (eg., as involving, in William Rothman’s work, “a way to disown the
responsibility to present and defend an interpretation by mapping it onto the
film itself. […] Rothman does not argue or propose, he recycles the film
through the reader, rewriting his memory of it”, p. 28).
13. See Kristin Thompson’s chapters on Tout va bien (1972) and Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979) in Breaking
the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1988), pp. 110-131 & 263-288; and Jacques Aumont, “This
is Not a Textual Analysis (Godard’s La
chinoise)”, Camera Obscura , no.
8/9/10 (1982), pp. 130-160. A detailed essay in Derridean deconstructive mode
is provided by Ropars, “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: À bout de souffle,
or The Erratic Alphabet”, Enclitic, Vol.
5/6 No. 2/1 (1981/1982), pp. 147-161.
14. See, for a decent blast from the past, various
pieces in Ian Cameron (ed.), The Films of
Jean-Luc Godard (London: Studio Vista, 1969).
15. See Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est”, in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), pp. 79-91. It must be said, parenthetically, that Wollen’s most programmatic essays (which are also, alas, his most famous, most cited and most taught), on conceptual chimeras including counter-cinema and the “two avant-gardes” have done some major damage to the field of film studies. See my 1993 discussion of Wollen’s trajectory. [For a later, more sympathetic reconsideration, see here.] back
16. Aumont, “This is Not a Textual Analysis”, p. 132.
17. See Marc Gervais, “Jean-Luc Godard 1985: These are
Not the Days”, Sight and Sound (Autumn
1985), pp. 278-283. Incidentally, Gervais [1929-2012], a Canadian Jesuit priest,
was (to the best of my knowledge) the first serious critic post-Farber to
forcibly put descriptive criticism back on the agenda in his 1970s doctoral
thesis work on Citizen Kane (1941), which he summarised in
a 1980 Melbourne lecture.
18. High among the best analyses of the poetic form of
Godard’s movies is Gilberto Perez, The
Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998).
19. Alain Bergala, “The Other Side of the Bouquet”, in
Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (eds), Jean-Luc
Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991 (New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp.
57-73.
20. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Form and Substance”, p. 95.
21. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Popular Culture”, New Formations, no. 2 (1987), p. 90.
22. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Form and Substance”, p. 99.
23. Ibid., p. 95.
© Adrian Martin May 2000 |
