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Came So Far For Beauty: |
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This
is the text of a paper I delivered at the epochal For Ever Godard conference at Tate Modern in London in 2001
(where, memorably, Richard Brody phlegmatically attacked me from the audience
for daring to describe Éloge de l’amour as “glum”). In those days, illustrative clips were still lined up on a VHS
player! The talk was subsequently completely reworked, in a more academic vein,
as the chapter “Recital” for the book For Ever Godard (London: Black Dog, 2004). In its original form as presented here, the
essay has appeared only in my Spanish-language collection What is Modern
Cinema? (Santiago: Uqbar, 2008), with a
much-shortened update (also in Spanish) for the special Godard tribute issue of Caimán (October 2022).
I
begin from a simple hunch: that the lyricism of Jean-Luc Godard’s films is one
of the principal factors that draws us to them and incites us to figure them
out. I speak, at least, personally: the first Godard film I saw, at the age of
15, was Bande à part (1964), and the
métro scene in that movie, in which Anna Karina recites and sings a song,
completely overwhelmed me. That scene forms the centrepiece of what I want to
explore here.
Although
I believe that many of us respond passionately to the lyricism in Godard,
critical commentaries have had surprisingly little to say directly about this
aspect of the work. A single long sentence, in a 1967 essay by Marie-Claire
Ropars-Wuilleumier, encouraged this initial hunch, where she evokes certain dazzling
passages in Godard’s work.
For the victory of the cinema resides in
the defeat of coherent language, in the triumph of disorder, which only on
occasion becomes, in those rare moments of joy during which the editing becomes
lyrical, the inexpressible goal which is sought: lyricism, that harmony
between being and language, can today only be instantaneous and ephemeral. (1)
Let
me start with the simplest description of what such passages do. They are often
triggered by the singing of a song or the recitation of a poem (within the
fiction, or laid upon it), or a sudden flurry of diverse, breathless
voice-overs. The stream of images quickens and becomes freer, mixing material
from all across the film (flashbacks and flash-forwards), sometimes including
shots that we will not see again elsewhere. The sound-editing undergoes a
transformation as radical as the image-editing: more tracks, more cuts,
lightning mixes and juxtapositions, in a complex, polyphonic relation to the
image-flow.
The
essential emotion that arises from these scenes is one of exhilaration; the
plot is suspended, and the film launches into a rhapsodic elaboration of a
particular feeling or state or sensation. In the ‘60s, striking examples of
such scenes occur in Le Mépris (1963), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le
fou (1965) and Weekend (1967), as
well as Bande à part.
In
more conventional modes of cinema, there are two classic instances that
approach this lyric mode: the sung interludes in musical comedy; and the
contemporary, autonomous “montage sequence”, in which a parade of shots rolls
under a pre-recorded song (like “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [1969], frequently parodied). Both types of scene trade in the suspension of
plot and the heightening of feeling. Godard sometimes mobilises the musical
comedy reference (as in Une femme est une
femme [1961] and Pierrot le fou);
and his experiments of the ‘60s no doubt influenced the routine, modern
practice of the montage sequence in film, TV and advertising. But Godard’s
lyricism takes itself to more radically unusual and inventive places.
Lyrical
is one of those words we all use easily, in relation to cinema, without ever
defining it very clearly. In the annals of film theory, it seems to stand for
different ideals or impulses at different times. For Pier Paolo Pasolini in the
mid ‘60s, lyricism is virtually synonymous with his dream of a cinema of
poetry: “Thus the tendency of film language should be expressively subjective
and lyrical”. (2) Two decades before his manifesto, Maya Deren’s concept of the
horizontal (prosaic) and vertical (poetic) dimensions of film was already a
theory of lyricism in action. For Gilberto Perez in The Material Ghost, lyricism is interchangeable with beauty, whose
pursuit in cinema he fervently defends against all militantly anti-aesthetic
ideologies. (3)
Ultimately,
for many filmmakers who experiment at the margins of the film industry (Godard
included), I suspect that all these terms – cinema of poetry, subjectivity,
beauty – might condense themselves into a powerful impulse away from or against
narrative: the restrictive burden of coherent, self-contained storytelling,
which is often suspected of being a kind of deathly trap. Lyricism, in that
case, would be a name for what critics sometimes discuss as the realm of the
non-narrative.
To
better understand Godard’s lyricism we can go back, beyond cinema, into the
literary traditions of lyric poetry, and gauge his transformations of those
traditions. There are classical and modernist (and, more recently,
postmodernist) lyric traditions. In the canons of literature, the lyric is
usually differentiated from the epic, storytelling mode. Lyricism in poetry has
an intimate tie with traditions of song. C. Day Lewis, in his 1965 lectures on The Lyric Impulse, refers to the
historical echo of what he calls the “singing line” in contemporary lyric
poetry. “There is a sense in which one can fairly say that no one can write a
good lyric without some melody, heard or dimly apprehended, in his head”. (4)
Lewis
lists the essential properties of lyric poetry as “beauty, simplicity, brevity”.
The “saying of only one thing at a time, without reservations, modifying
parentheses, mental complications of any kind, is the lyric’s chief term of
reference”. Elaborating this definition, he proposes that the lyric is:
… a poem which expresses a single state of
mind, a single mood, or sets two moods against the other. It does not argue or
preach. If it moralises, the moral has an unsophisticated, proverbial ring ...
It speaks with no irony or complexity of syntax: it is transparent, undiluted
by any cerebral matter, unclouded by afterthoughts or the reflection of
individual personality.
Godard’s
cinematic lyricism, as we shall see, simultaneously accords with this
definition on many points, and also breaks with it in a number of remarkable
ways. On many levels his practice can be squared with the deliberately
fragmented “critical lyricism” of the poet-theorist Jean-Michel Maulpoix (see
his website http://www.maulpoix.net/).
Lewis,
in his day, was one of the few literary commentators of his time who was able
to acknowledge the continuity between lyric poetry and the lyrics of pop songs.
For Godard, this continuity is completely natural. Consider the sequence from Prénom Carmen (1983) built around Tom
Waits’ 1980 song “Ruby’s Arms”. One of the salient properties of the work of
poets, writers and singer-songwriters like Waits that I believe is especially
important to Godard is a quality of lyrical expansion or dilation of time. A
narrative scene or tableau is evoked in such lyrics, but it’s frozen, stretched
out, advanced as Godard would later advance his video imagery, frame by frame.
Godard
takes full advantage of the strange, multiple tenses or time frames in pop
ballads. “Ruby’s Arms”, enacts the dilation of a single, physical movement – the
narrator’s crucial passage of leaving his lover, out the bedroom, down the
hall, out the door and finally onto a train. The lyrics suspend themselves
between the present and future tenses, both inside the act and imagining and
anticipating it, in order to magnify this movement: “I will leave behind ... As
I say goodbye”. The song’s chorus offers a very Godardian, entirely asyntactical,
headlong confusion of times, intentions and feelings: “As I say goodbye, I’ll
say goodbye, say goodbye to Ruby’s arms”.
Godard
responds to and treats this song in many, complex ways. The marriage of song
and scene rests upon a paradoxical inversion: the song is about a man in the
process of giving up on a woman, but the scene is about a woman in the process
of giving up on a man. There are moments when the images are very close to the
song’s lyrics to the point of illustration, as when Carmen opens the curtains
to the words “morning light has washed your face”; and moments when the song
and the scene diverge radically.
The
temporal dilation of the sung words accompanies a corresponding dilation of
actions in the image: Godard’s characteristic stutter cuts (as we might call
them), which begin a shot by repeating and thus overlapping the final phrase
spoken in the previous shot – a montage invention he appears to have borrowed
from John Cassavetes. In a striking piece of multi-tracking, Godard runs Waits’
song twice, one playback beginning a few seconds (or about a line) after the
other, creating a further dilation of the sound sample itself.
One
detail is particularly vivid. Playfully, the scene builds to a point which “sets
two simple moods against the other” (in
Lewis’ words), as Joseph’s music, the mournful “Ruby’s Arms”, clashes with
Carmen’s music, the ferocious Beethoven string quartet. Through the work of
montage, after this orchestrated chaos, Godard reaches a breathtaking moment of
aesthetic fusion and suspension: when the gesture of Myriem Roussel lifting her
bow from the violin suddenly brings the peace of silence and stillness to this
war of musics, freezing and releasing Waits’ song on the ascending melody of
the words “say goodbye”. This is among my favourite split-seconds in Godard.
Prénom Carmen runs through all
the standard registers of Godard’s lyricism. There is, firstly, lyricism as
euphoria or celebration, “those rare moments of joy” as Ropars put it,
especially the celebration of physical beauty, of sculptural posture, of light,
and of dance-like movement. Then there is a harsh lyricism, the violent
lyricism of breaks, sudden drop-outs, noises that punctuate and terminate
lulling waves of sound, like the ubiquitous ringing phones, gunshots, slammed
doors, bird squawks and tolling bells. Finally, there is a melancholic
lyricism, expressed in this scene primarily via Joseph’s torpid, blocked,
forever yearning state, faced with this woman he can literally never grasp.
I
want to stress the materiality of the aesthetic work in Godard. I have come to
believe that we haven’t the ghost of a chance of really taking the measure of
his style unless we literally, palpably register the cuts and the mixes, unless
we can tap out the rhythmic flows and arrests, unless we chart and reconstruct
the tracks of image and sound technically laid out for each montage – unless,
in a sense, we can internalise this material, aesthetic work and in some way
re-perform its prodigious action.
Godard’s
lyricism, as one emblem of that general style, knits itself together at an
unusual and rare interface of modes: the poetic and the essayistic. We tend to
emphasise the conceptual, essayistic side these days, but it, too, is born in
the split-second play of materials. In his A
Formal Approach to Lyric Poetry, Gémino Abad begins by quoting Jose Garcia
Villa’s poem “Definitions of Poetry”: “Poetry is the love of ideas as music :
the love of words as magic : the love of life as wonder. / Poetry is the
imagination of realities too great to remain facts”. (5) Ideas as music,
sensual thought, concepts born in and from the migratory action of images and
sounds: this is what I think of as “real time” Godard, igniting and opening out
in a voluptuous envelope of cinema what we cannot quite, or cannot yet, put
into words.
Let
us now turn to Bande à part’s
splendid métro scene. This is Godard’s most classical and linear film. There
are qualities in the scene which relate to comparatively conventional
structures of plot and character, and thus to what we can value as lyrical
riffs on these conventional structures. The song of Odile (Anna Karina) is akin
to a moment of individual release, an outpouring of heightened expressivity, a
soliloquy of the kind we find in any musical comedy. André Habib, in his essay “The Oval Portrait”, stresses the transformative
power of the scene with regards to the character: Odile transcends her own
limitations, becomes light and free through the act of singing.
There
is also a strategic displacement at work here in the context of the whole
story, for the scene ends with a sudden shock – the image of Odile and her
lover Arthur (Claude Brasseur) in bed together for the first time, which is
probably also (the film suggests) Odile’s sexual initiation. On a rare occasion
in a Godardian fiction, the ellipsis and suggestiveness serve a dramatically
expressive purpose: as Barthélemy Amengual suggests, “it is the métro episode
which represents the coming night of love and takes its place, transposing it,
anticipating the agonies, indecisions, sorrow and deception of Odile which the
rest of the film evades”. (6)
Yet,
just as important as stressing the poetic materiality of Godard’s recent
essayistic work, one must insist on the conceptual rigour of his lyrical
flights, even already in 1964. Every instance of a lyric mode in Godard comes
with a history, arrives as quotation or pastiche. The collage that is Bande à part has an extremely unified
tone, mood and sensibility. Godard described it in a trailer as “A French Film with a Pre-War Atmosphere” – in
other words, a period film which is not a period film – and he explained the
tag in this way: “I tried to recreate the populist, poetic climate of the
pre-war period”. (7) His reference points are less the social, historical
reality of pre-war France than the artistic representations from, about or
inspired by the period: the Poetic Realism of Prévert’s poetry and screenplays,
the 1930s films of Jean Renoir, the novels of Raymond Queneau. In fact, as this
short list already begins to indicate, Godard’s fanciful recreation of pre-war
populism takes in a big stretch of Popular Front-inspired, or generally leftist
popular culture.
The
poem which Odile recites in the scene is “J’entends, j’entends” (“I Hear”) by
Aragon, the surrealist writer who later became a high-profile communist; and
the rendition of the poem used in the film is from a 1950s pop ballad by Jean
Ferrat, likewise a leftist star who put many Aragon lyrics to music and also
had a hit with a rousing tune about the Battleship Potemkin (his music and
person had already made a guest appearance in Godard’s Vivre sa vie in 1962). The scene’s
very setting – a train at peak hour, taking weary commuters from work to home,
is itself a prime emblem of populist art and culture. So is its time frame,
from dusk to dawn on a typical weekday. In the same period of the mid ‘60s, it
could have been – beyond the strict national context of the French popular chanson tradition – the subject of a
song by The Kinks.
Poetic
populism is both the tone and the subject of the scene – and, in quoting and
amalgamating its cultural references in the way he does, Godard manages to both
speak through this lyric mode and
also speak about it. This is where
Godard’s lyricism departs boldly from Lewis’ classical definition, for it is
hardly “undiluted by any cerebral matter” or “unclouded by afterthoughts”. The
scene is about the act, the gesture, the process of coming to identify oneself
with ordinary people, with all humanity. Aragon’s words begin as a distant
lament for the masses, but end up collapsing that distance between the poet and
his subjects. The poem and the song derived from it are both about finding the
basis for a human community – a fragile community that is comprised of nothing
but lost, atomised, alienated, individual souls. Godard’s cinematic method,
between storytelling and essay, explores exactly what constitutes this populist
dream, and how one might today dream and assume it as a philosophy.
The
movement of Godard’s montage in the scene begins with its privileged couple of
Odile and Arthur; it broadens out to shots of unnamed people, individually or
in groups, who will never reappear in the film; and it finally comes back to
the main characters – except, at the end, under the words “Ah je suis bien
votre semblable” (“Yes, I am one of you”), even the amorous twosome has become
a poetic threesome, a little imaginary community, with Franz (Sami Frey) also
glimpsed in his bed in a similar position to the other two.
This
scene is for me an outstanding example of cinematic lyricism. It communicates
that feeling of taking off from the
strict space of the story into a wider world. In this, it achieves the plaintive
intensity of the best lyric poetry, and it does have the quality of a proverb.
And it also achieves another key aim of the lyric mode: it reaches to an
impersonality that is also a trans-personality, a collective voice of
experience. The power of lyricism in cinema generally involves the sweet
vertigo of a certain experience of loss: we lose our bearings, characters float
free of a plot, voices are torn momentarily from bodies and characters, and
these voices sing or speak of things they were not able to address a moment
earlier ...
Godard’s
modernism took this exacerbated lyricism, the lyricism of split-second rupture
and loss, further than any of his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries. (François
Truffaut was another master of montage, but in a completely different,
“musicalised” register.) In Bande à part,
lyricism is again an effect of intricate montage. I want to stress here Godard’s
work on sound, and especially his juxtaposition of different ways of recording
voices. In 1964, Godard was already completely lucid about this: “People never
attach any importance to sound, but that’s what interests me most”. (8) The
materiality of this sound is of utmost importance to him: like for Bresson,
sound communicates first as rhythm, tone and sensation before it communicates
as meaning. Paramount in this aesthetic is the phenomenological, affective
difference for the viewer between the sound of a voice recorded live, within
the ambience of a scene, and that same voice re-recorded more “cleanly” (as
technicians say) in controlled conditions, such as in a studio. The passage or
cut from live to pre-recorded voice often precipitates a powerfully felt,
interior turn or move in Godard, an intensification of sensual thought.
In
the métro scene, Godard and his sound team cut and mix, to my ear, with six
distinct tracks of sound. Two tracks are devoted to the voices and four are
devoted to sound effects of train and street noises – three recorded live, and
one a minimal foley track of artificial footsteps. This is one of the first
really elaborate sound montages in Godard’s career. There is a certain trick,
an aural sleight-of-hand going on here, since the scene passes at a certain
moment from the live take of Karina’s voice backed by real train sound, to a
post-synchronised Karina, backed by train noise that has been recorded and
mixed-in separately.
All
mainstream films quietly play these kinds of illusionist games with
multi-tracked sound. But Godard assembles and then disassembles this sonic
illusion, not just for the purposes of formal demonstration or deconstruction,
but for the sake of a truly poetic, lyric drama. I am referring to that moment
when the backing track drops out, leaving Odile’s voice sailing alone and
unaccompanied over the images. This creates a tremendous effect of real-time
suspension and fragile poignancy. Godard gets his great moment, but he also
builds a rising lyric structure: each technical treatment of Odile’s
performance – the steps from live voice over train, pre-recorded voice over
train and then only voice – places it at a more abstracted, purer level of
sensation. Here, Karina’s voice is like all those celebrated birds in lyric
poetry, soaring away from the world but longing to be merged with its oneness
and wholeness. This voice is at once intimate and impersonal, belonging to no
one and everyone.
What
Godard creates here in sound he also creates, complementarily, in images. The
scene begins by establishing, in a conventional and economical way, the
positions of various people in the train carriage, people who will later figure
in the lyrical montage. Once Odile is into her song, the flight of the voice
releases the images, and they follow suit. The scene leaps off the train,
viewing it from the outside, going out into the streets, flashing from day to
night. It is no longer tied to any character’s point of view. At the lyric high
point of the scene, when Karina in close-up turns to the camera, we can no
longer say exactly where we are on that train, or even that we are still in a
train: every realistic index in the image has deliberately been blurred and
abstracted. We have definitively passed (in Pasolini’s or Deren’s terms) from
cinema-prose to a pure plateau of cinema-poetry, in hardly a minute of screen
time. And we have also reached something else: a quoted but nonetheless
entirely authentic, passionate statement of Godard’s politicised populist
humanism in this period. He commented at the time that the métro scene was “really
my point of view in the film, that is, I’m interested in people, in things ...
That’s the theme of Aragon’s song”. (9)
Both
the fragments I have discussed, from Prénom
Carmen and Bande à part, reappear
fleetingly in the first two episodes of the Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) series. It
is fascinating to gauge how Godard cites, recycles and recontextualises
fragments from his own past output. An image of a near-naked Maruschka Detmers
darting across the hotel room, shorn of all connection to “Ruby’s Arms”,
figures in a montage devoted to images of women in motion, dancing, parading,
on show and yet desperately trying to flee that man-made prison of exhibition.
The Bande à part métro scene returns
without any trace of its populist singing line, only that abstracted close-up
of Karina which expresses, in its spoken words, a bottomless depth of despair,
now almost accusingly turned against Godard-the-enunciator.
I
detect a similarly melancholic citation of Bande
à part, a dispersed allusion of the train scene’s elements, in Éloge de l’amour (2001), where, once again, the lonely rendition of a pop ballad takes us, via
montage, to a sign bearing the word Liberté (freedom) – this time not on a métro
station, where it carries a quasi agit-prop force, but now derisively, on the
marquee of some ritzy, sad cafe at night. Likewise, the train movement that
triggered such poetry in 1964 slows down in 2001 to the solemn crawl of an
empty carriage on its tracks. And a single, disconcerting shot in Bande à part’s montage – a homeless
vagrant asleep in a Paris street – is multiplied in Éloge de l’amour into a major, apocalyptic motif of urban life.
Is Éloge de l’amour a lyrical film? In
its glum way, yes, undoubtedly. But as Leonard Cohen once sang, it’s a broken,
not a holy alleluia. Since 1980, Godard has several times quoted the lines of
another Cohen song beginning “I came so far for beauty” – and, in that
citation, the achievement of lyricism is cast as a hard, painful, lonely
struggle; that is, when it is not projected backwards as a nostalgic elegy.
Why
this creeping, histrionic atrophy of the lyric impulse in late Godard? The
possibility – or impossibility – of lyricism in the modern world has in fact
become one of his central, animating subjects. Commentators including Perez and
the filmmaker Robert Kramer have noted that displays of lyrical, artistic
beauty in Godard’s works of the ‘90s and beyond are always underwritten, and
often overwhelmed, by the disconcerting display of the historic machinery of
wealth and privilege that enables the very existence of such utopian luxury. (10) Servants, assistants, waiters, workers, lackeys and gophers of every kind make
up a vast army of the underclasses in Godard’s film and video work since Passion (1982), and their appearance
always breaks up, comically or melodramatically, the conventional plentitude of
a lyrical moment.
On
the essayistic rather than fictional side of Godard’s work, the Histoire(s) du cinéma offer a rich and
ambiguous case study for the lyric impulse. For, despite the relentless
pessimism of its socio-historical analysis, the montage forms that build this
analysis are of an unparalleled lyric intensity and complexity. In fact, the
energy of the series is truly manic-depressive. It oscillates wildly, literally
from second to second, from optimism to pessimism – or, to put this even more
strongly, from morbid, defeated sound-image figures of death at work, to
emblems of poetic rebirth or renewal. Signs of life are crucified, resurrected
and then re-crucified in the Histoire(s),
with the conclusion or balance of the essay depending solely on where and how
the viewer halts the movement of this manic spinning top. Is lyricism a “consolation
not to be discounted” (as Perez puts it), or a Utopia residing in “the
imagination of realities too great to remain facts”, or a sham distraction
during our terrible last days and nights, “the days of shame that are coming /
the nights of wild distress” (L. Cohen, “Heart With No Companion”)?
The Histoire(s) remind me, more than
anything, of the many short texts written in the 1920s by the Surrealists, or by
Jean Epstein. Statements about the cinema full of hope and wonder, but also
almost instant disillusionment, disappointment, disenchantment. Close enough to
the moment of cinema’s birth, they already predict its imminent death. These
writers, too, were caught in a frantic oscillation of perceptions: ideally,
potentially, the cinema was magic and poetry; but really it was industry and
formula and cheap prose. The promise of cinema began again, and betrayed itself
again, in every projected film.
In
1927, in a text entitled “Battlegrounds and Commonplaces”, the surrealist René
Crevel sketched what could have been a scenario for an episode of Histoire(s) du cinéma.
At pavement level you used to tell yourself
that the marvellous bliss could never end, since the marquee announced “nonstop
entertainment” ... But why do these walls and their pretentious frescoes, this
screen we were hoping for miracles from, afford us such poor protection?
Ultimately,
Crevel (who killed himself in 1935) is left with the same fragile, fleeting
hope that Godard finds himself entertaining and rejecting over and over again,
as he comes so far for beauty.
Yet a single minute’s lyricism, the detail
of a face, the surprise of a gesture, have always been, and always will be,
capable of making us forget all kinds of wretched stories. (11)
MORE Godard: À bout de souffle, Aria, Hélas pour moi, For Ever Mozart, Masculin Féminin, Soigne ta droite, Sauve qui peut (la vie), La Chinoise, Made in USA, Film Socialism, Tout va bien
1.
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Form and Substance, or the Avatars of the
Narrative”, in Royal S. Brown (ed.), Focus
on Godard (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 99.
back
2.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism (Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2005), p. 173.
3.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films
and Their Medium (New York: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), pp. 352-360.
back
4.
C. Day Lewis, The Lyric Impulse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 9.
5.
Gémino H. Abad, A Formal Approach to
Lyric Poetry (University of Hawaii Press, 1978).
6.
Barthélemy Amengual, Bande à part (Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now, 1993), pp. 37-38.
7.
Jean Collet, “No Questions Asked: Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard on Bande à part”, in Brown (ed.), Focus on
Godard, p. 40.
8.
From a 1964 interview reprinted in Amengual, Bande à part, p. 133.
9.
Ibid., p. 131.
10.
See Robert Kramer, “In and Around Godard’s Hélas
pour moi”, Projections 4½ (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 107-109.
11.
René Crevel, “Battlegrounds and Commonplaces”, in Paul Hammond (ed. &
trans.), The Shadow and Its Shadow:
Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (San Francisco: City Lights, 3rd edition, 2000), pp. 57-58.
© Adrian Martin April 2001 |
