Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Livre d’image and the Histories of the Histories of Cinema
by Kim West
Transform our apocalypse into an army or perish, that is all.
We begin with years. In 2018, Le livre d’image premiered in Cannes. Thirty years had then passed since the first two parts of Histoire(s) du cinéma were first screened at the same festival, in 1988. In 1988, almost thirty years had passed since À bout de souffle premiered, the film that turned Godard into a legend. The history of that legend was one of the histories of Histoire(s) du cinéma, which has the same age today as Godard’s first feature film had when he launched his film historical project.
Le Livre d’image is not a new chapter in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, whose remaining three parts were released between 1993 and 1997, but which was also developed and expanded in other films, books, collage works, an exhibition. With Le livre d’image – this is my working hypothesis – Godard’s film historical project, which is now concluded and belongs to the past, instead becomes a subject of recollection and of historical, critical reflection. The stage of critical reflection on which Le Livre d’image operates is later, perhaps higher. Its subject is not the histories of cinema, but the histories of the histories of cinema.
Le Livre d’image is an arraignment. It asks: why did I fail? How can the redeemed images of Histoire(s) du cinéma coexist with the resurrected monsters of today? The images have – so Godard could phrase it – been delivered from the word, their dignity has been restored, their ability to safekeep the dignity of reality, and yet Saturn is once again devouring his children. But as always with Godard, reflection is inseparable from construction, melancholy from enthusiasm, eulogy from neology. The enthusiasm of neology, the construction of new forms is performed through reflection on the old ones, on the dead, or those which failed to annul death. Creation happens in the erection of the memorial, the poetic event in the authoring of the epitaph.
The Museum in the Age of Reproduction
The film opens with an image of the pointing hand of St. John the Baptist, from Leonardo’s late, perhaps final painting. The same detail, the upwards pointing hand, at once softly open and with its fingers clenched in an exhortative gesture, a hand that is only direction, thrust, signal, like an arrow or a spearhead, and which appears sfumato, a hazy cone outlined against a dark, nebulous background – the same detail was placed on the cover of the first edition of André Malraux’s Le Musée imaginaire («The Imaginary Museum»).[i]
With his Musée imaginaire, Malraux wanted to gather all of culture’s forms in a vast synthesis. The vast correspondence of forms in that synthesis was an image of the unity of culture, which was an image of the unity of humanity. The development of technical image reproduction had made it possible to display that unity, and to transmit it to anyone, to all. The mass production of color images of all artworks, in all genres and media, facilitated total access and comparability. You no longer needed to travel across the world in order to see the world’s artworks. Each and everyone had, in their nearest library, in their own bookshelf, an imaginary museum.
To think with one’s hands, Godard’s voice stutters in the beginning of Le Livre d’image, is what makes the human a human. The words are spoken over intensely saturated, distorted, manipulated images of hands working at an editing table, where a filmstrip runs through an editing machine. We recognize the images from Histoire(s) du cinéma, and they were just as anachronistic, untimely back then, when Godard’s medium was video. For Godard, video was the medium for cinema’s self-critique. Cinema, Godard argued, could only become itself by being distorted by video.
Le Livre d’image quotes, in the immediately following shots, the phrase that served as a sort of leitmotif for Histoire(s) du cinéma: L’image / viendra / oh! temps / [de la resurrection]; The image will arrive at the moment of resurrection. In Histoire(s) du cinéma this was the formula for a montage technique that corresponded to the critical qualities of video. Through video’s analysis, the images of film history could be saved from the domination of the word, from the political economy of the story, the plot; through the poetic synthesis of the new montage, they could be combined into a new story of film’s history, beyond the prosaic logic of value, profit, return on investment.
Eurydice’s Lie
Le Livre d’image consists of five parts, like the five parts of the world, or like man’s five senses, or like five fingers, which together form a hand. In the first part, «Remakes», Godard returns to his own reconstructions of the images of film history, as if the reconstructions themselves now needed saving. A scene from Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), which is also a key scene in Histoire(s) du cinéma, where Johnny (Sterling Hayden) pleads to Vienna (Joan Crawford) to save his honor, to ease his suffering, to restore his fullness by lying, by saying that she has waited for him, that she would have died if he had not returned – «lie to me, tell me you’d have died if I hadn’t come back», «I would have died if you hadn’t come back» – this scene here returns again, but now partly recut, hacked up, with Hayden replaced by black frames in the dialogue’s reaction montage.
It is followed by a scene from Godard’s Le petit soldat (1960/63), where Michel Subor and Anna Karina appear to recreate Sterling Hayden and Joan Crawford’s exchange, as part of a somewhat aggressive game of seduction. («Appear», because Godard has manipulated the clip from his own film: the dialogue in fact belongs to a later scene.) «Lie to me», Bruno pleads. «I don’t love you», Veronica responds. «I will not return to you, I will not embrace you tenderly». Note the negations: in Ray, Vienna’s lie confirms the separation of the protagonists, the tragic impossibility of their love; when Godard recreates Ray’s exchange, the lie instead becomes an ambivalent declaration of love. («Ambivalent», because we can not be certain that Veronica actually obeys Bruno and lies.)
In other words: the recreation of the image, its remake in a new context, in the new synthesis of the montage, is also its redemption. The separation between the protagonists becomes their possible (although in fact doomed) unification. The remade scene in Le petit soldat is an allegory about the redeeming power of montage. But when Godard in 2018, over half a century later, returns to his own remake of Nicholas Ray, and to the repetitions of the same scene in Histoire(s) du cinéma, it is not in order to once again conjure up the miracle of montage. Instead, it is to test the validity of the formula, to interrogate its effects, to hold it accountable in the face of the crisis of the present.
Do Not Despair
Malraux’s Le Musée imaginaire was published in 1947: the reconstruction of Europe. His museum in the age of reproduction should guarantee unity, agreement, consensus after the destruction of history, after the catastrophe of the great conflicts. An aesthetic community should replace political fragmentation. In order for humanity to be restored, Malraux argued, we must regain what is necessarily human from history’s cacophony of accidental forms. In this way a culture may appear, before which the human can confront herself, her possibilities, her tragic rootlessness. The imaginary museum’s vast machine of comparison could make that work possible. Its universal archive could facilitate a universal humanism, at the historical moment of UNESCO.[ii]
In Le Livre d’image, the sequence Johnny Guitar–The Little Soldier is followed by a steep fall into tragedy’s abyss, into the history of war and destruction. The montage leads from the ambivalent play of seduction between Veronica and Bruno, across a scene of grotesque humiliation from Pasolini’s Salò o Le centoventi giornate di Sodoma (1975), to the soldiers’ threatening abuse against Cleopatre (Catherine Ribeiro) and Venus (Geneviève Galéa) in Godard’s Les carabiniers (1963). Inserted into this sequence are images – fictive and not – from contemporary conflicts: West African Jihadis from Abderrahmene Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014), news images showing American soldiers interrogating wounded after a massacre in South East Asia, Apache helicopters in formation over Mogadishu from Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001).
The sequence culminates in an execution scene from the end of Rossellini’s Paisa (1946), where Italian resistance fighters are shot in the back at a waterfront and drowned in the sea from a quay. The scene is repeated in a nightmarish propaganda film from Isis, showing executions at a seaside. The executions are carried out quickly, with purpose, the dead are expedited, their bodies fall into the water. The water, which in Godard’s images is intensely saturated, manipulated, decelerated, looks thick, viscous, as a body receiving the bodies, embracing them.
In the next sequence, a surge of images or counterimages in the swelling of the montage, the water instead gives life: amniotic fluid, a font, the fountain of youth. «To become immortal, does that really not interest you?», asks Simon (Gérard Depardieu), in Godard’s Hélas pour moi (1993). Scottie (James Stewart) throws himself into the San Francisco Bay to save Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak), in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). That image floats over into another one, unreal in its beauty, from what resembles a prehistoric film, a film from the birth of film itself, partly dissolved from age and distortion – actually a very worn-out or manipulated copy of Frank Borzage’s The River (1929). It shows a man floating on his back by a rocky waterside, gazed at from the cliffs by a sphinxlike woman.
Image Book
The histories of the histories of cinema: Le Livre d’image recreates the images that were recreated in Godard’s earlier films, and that were repeated in Histoire(s) du cinéma. But interspersed among them, gathered around them, there is now a new register of images, old ones as well as new. Godard’s collaboration with the film historians Nicole Brenez and Bernard Eisenschitz seems to have given him access to an extended archive of older film – such as Borzage’s The River, experimental film (such as Marc’O’s Closed Vision (1954), and Jacques Perconte’s Après le feu (2010), and Russian film such as Arthur Aristakisian’s Ladoni (1994). A relatively large material from online platforms and news broadcasts has also been inserted (a Youtube clip where a little girl marvels at a train arriving at the platform, news clips showing Isis motorcades, images of the world and inscriptions of war). All images no longer originate from Godard’s old library of videotapes. His palimpsest of transcripts is inscribed into a new, unreconciled synthesis.
The leitmotif of the new synthesis is introduced and repeated first by the end of the film’s second part, «Les Soirées de St. Petersbourg» (the title of a book by the counterrevolutionary diplomat Joseph de Maistre from 1821). Over a shot from the car chase in Fritz Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), Godard reads a sentence from Malraux’s novel about the Spanish civil war, L’Espoir (Man’s Hope, 1937). «Et Malraux dira plus simplement: Transformer notre Apocalypse en armée ou crever, c’est tout»; And Malraux would simply say: Transform our apocalypse into an army or perish, that is all. (Or, in Stuart Gilbert and Alastair Macdonald’s less concise translation, «transform our apocalyptic vision [?] into an army – or be exterminated. That’s all.»)[iii] Godard’s voice is followed by a voice from Malraux’s own film version of L’Espoir (1938), pronouncing the same phrase.
«In any domain, culture is the name of the transformation of destiny into consciousness», Malraux wrote in an article published in July 1936, mere days before his departure to Spain.[iv] Before Spain, before the outbreak of war, when Europe’s fragmentation was ongoing but when resistance was still gathering force: this was when Malraux – the Malraux of the Popular Front, the anti-fascist, radical leftwing Malraux – first developed the ideas which would result in Le Musée imaginaire. In dialogue with Walter Benjamin, whose artwork essay was simultaneously published in its first edition, in Pierre Klossowski’s French translation,[v] Malraux initiated his reflection regarding the heuristic and political possibilities of the mechanically reproduced image. The unity that would be facilitated by the accessibility and the comparability of images was not yet the unity of transhistorical agreement, the tragic humanism of the UNESCO era. It was the unity of historical consciousness, the unity of assembly and struggle: to transform «destiny into consciousness», to transform «our apocalypse into an army».
Counterpoint
What is Le Livre d’image? Perhaps this: an attempt at reaching a political rather than a messianic understanding of the montage of redemption, such that Godard has practiced it throughout his work, and such that it is achieved, becomes programmatic, in Histoire(s) du cinéma. To retrieve, to revive the principle of unity in resistance, of transforming the apocalypse into an army, which is at the origin of the history of the imaginary museum. To form an alliance with the Malraux of the brigades, of Espoir, rather than with the Malraux of UNESCO and General de Gaulle. But for Godard that also entails that he must reassess his earlier project, that he must tell the history of his own film histories in a way that holds those histories accountable to another principle. (A self-critical work, we may note, which was already ongoing in Film Socialism, 2010, and perhaps even earlier, in the short, bleak L’Origine du XXIe siècle, 2000.)
This work is not 1 + 1. The self-critique does not take the shape of a confrontation between image and counterimage. Le Livre d’image – so we could phrase it – wants to bind the images of redemption within a new book, whose totality gives the images a new significance, but without reducing their old one. But the most articulate metaphor Godard offers for thinking his film’s heterogeneous composition form is, rather than the book or the hand, the counterpoint. «The counterpoint», he reads with a rough, frail voice, over a sequence where black frames alternate with close-ups of colorful, abstract paintings (possibly made by Godard himself), «is a doctrine of the combination of melodies». «The melodies need not be identical or even alike. Although they are foreign to each other, they do not disturb the composition, but they must be held together, in simultaneity. In a harmony the chords generate the melodies. In the counterpoint it is instead the melodies themselves that generate the chords.»
So: we recognize Le Livre d’image, and yet not. The melodies are familiar, like refrains, we have heard them before, but the chords they form are different, they belong to a different track, another album. Histoire(s) du cinéma was a composition of abrupt transitions, where we were thrown between art forms, historical contexts, and film clips without apparent kinship. The differences generated the significance. The image, Godard often said, with words borrowed from Pierre Reverdy, was stronger, the more just the greater the distance was between the realities it interconnected. But at the same time Histoire(s) du cinéma was always haunted by the vision of a great synthesis, of a vast, synesthetic harmony where all histories would come together into one. The violent clashes of the dialectical montage were always on the verge of being absorbed into the mystical communications of the symbolical montage, as Jacques Rancière phrased it.[vi]
The contrapuntal montage of Le Livre d’image forms a whole without such harmony. The dissolves, double exposures, and fusions that were so characteristic of the synthetic video work in Histoire(s) du cinéma, are here replaced with sharp cuts and ruptures, visual discontinuities and dissonances. Black frames and sudden silences are multiplied, disruptions and manipulations move into the foreground, we see flashing iridescences, shifting aspect ratios, distortions from translations between incompatible formats and devices. What gives this fragmentation coherence is the rhythm of the film, a febrile, thorny staccato that, as the film advances, gradually eases down. It is not the positive rhythm of a musical theme that runs through the film, of a soundtrack that establishes continuity. Instead, it is the negative rhythm of the montage’s disjunctions themselves: the long series of all interruptions, arranged into sequences and cascades.
Bookends
Le Musée imaginaire and L’Espoir: transhistorical agreement or historical consciousness, unity as consensus or unity in resistance. Malraux’s two key works signal two logics at work in Le Livre d’image, two principles that confirm, contradict, correct each other in the great counterpoint of the whole. Le Livre d’image is bookended by the image of Leonardo’s hand, from the cover of Le Musée imaginaire. Between the ends we see the images of redemption: bodies that fall and rise again, water that drowns and brings to life, histories that are repeated and reanimated. Together they form a history of cinema as the art form in which all images could be gathered and brought to life, like that imaginary museum in which all images from all ages of history could be united in an image of our unity beyond history itself.
Other images unite us around another hope. A shot from the film version of L’Espoir returns, sourced from the archive of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Instead of the vertically pointing hand we see a horizontally pointed machine gun, from the perspective of the shooting Francoist soldier. Toward the machine gun, a car comes charging, driven by two death-defying resistance fighters. This image of the search, at any cost, to transform apocalypse into army, is followed by a sequence of images that account for that cost, that show us the absolute price of resistance: the torture scene from Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945), the girl’s (Nicole Stéphane) humiliation and silent refusal in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la mer (1949), news images of the devastation of war, scenes of destruction, denied dignity, extermination. A cinematic martyrium.
From this martyrium, Godard derives the imperative for his self-critique. Their death can not have been in vain, it is unthinkable. And yet our age acts as if it were. The fantastic imaginary of our unity beyond history does not seem to have prevented the monsters from returning. War is back, devastation goes on, Saturn eats his children. «Once again», Godard reads, over an image of what resembles a convoy of Spanish brigadiers, «once again we realized to what extent it had been impossible for us to imagine that the war could end without us standing as the victors». «Who», he continues, «could have imagined that those who fell victim to this horrible crime had spilled their blood in vain». The words are spoken over a decelerated image of a woman pleading for mercy beneath a soldier; when the words go silent, the sequence shifts to a grainy, black-and-white clip showing children playing war among muddy hills.
The words, tellingly, originate from a text whose own meaning is distant from that of the images: the counterrevolutionary diplomat de Maistre’s memoirs from St. Petersburg, which praise the eternal sanctity of war and the aristocratic heroism of martyrdom. The effect of the recontextualization is double. It places de Maistre’s tribute to the honor of war in its «true» context of pain, destruction, and humiliation. But it also establishes an uncertainty, a doubt, a self-critical ambivalence regarding the association between sacrifice and redemption, between the destruction of war and the resurrection of the image, which at the same time guides Godard’s montage.
The sequence builds up to a scene that mirrors and inverts the image of the death-defying resistance fighters from Malraux’s film version of L’Espoir: the scene with the car chase from Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, in which Professor Baum (Oscar Beregi), hypnotized by the despotic Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) – that is, the charismatic tyrant of fascism – careens wildly toward his own – that is, humanity’s – final doom. And it is, as we already know, over this shot that Malraux’s words echo, from L’Espoir: Transform our apocalypse into an army or perish, that is all.
«Every artwork is created to answer to a need», Malraux wrote in «The Artwork», originally a lecture at the anti-fascist International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in Paris in June 1935.[vii] The need, he meant, is what gives the artwork a necessity. With time the need disappears and the necessity is drained from the work like the blood from a corpse. In order to be resurrected the work needs a new will, a new necessity. And it is then resurrected as something else, transformed. It now answers to the new will that can animate it, to the new we that can give it a necessity. We create and recreate the works of history by creating and recreating ourselves. Cultural heritage, Malraux established, is not something that is transmitted, it is conquered. We want, he proclaimed before the congress, that the struggle which has gathered us here today should once again make the figures of the past undergo a new metamorphosis.
Here and There and Then and Now
Godard has returned to his own films before. His and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et ailleurs (1975) consists to a large extent of images from a film that could never be realized, Jusqu’à la victoire, «Toward Victory». Jusqu’à la victoire should have been a film about and for the Palestinian liberation struggle, signed by the Dziga Vertov Group, that is, primarily, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Gorin and Godard shot a large image material in the camps of the resistance movement in Jordan during the spring and the summer of 1970. Back in Europe, the film’s here, time had passed, the necessity had been drained from the images. «Black September» had taken place, most of the Palestinian soldiers in the shots had been killed in the attacks of the Jordanian army. From the confident safety of the editing room here [ici] it was no longer possible to act as mouthpieces for the struggling fighters elsewhere [ailleurs].
Ici et ailleurs operates in this distance, makes it its subject. How, Godard and Miéville ask, can we claim to belong to this struggle, when we are located at such a distance from its risks, its experiences, its language? How can we pretend to speak for this struggle, without drowning it out with our own voice, our own film’s language, impossible to abstract from all of the circumstances – circumstances of politics, economy, media – that determine the conditions of our work here? This was the problem that Godard and Miéville were confronted with by the unthinkable defeat of the resistance there, elsewhere. And their response was to make their new film return to the contradictions of the earlier one, but now in order to account for them, to make them into signs, into critical representation, self-reflective spectacle. The principle of the earlier film must have been valid, but it could only become so by being set to work in a new film, in which the images of the former one were given back their critical ambivalence. Ici et ailleurs returned to the failure of Jusqu’à la victoire precisely because it could not have been a failure.
Farewell to Europe
Ici et ailleurs returns in Le livre d’image, in the film’s final, fifth part, «La Région centrale» (named after a film by Michael Snow from 1971). The clip passes quickly: a frame with text («Perhaps in a thousand and one nights Scheherazade will narrate this differently»), an image of one of the dead resistance fighters after the battles in Amman. The clip belongs to a sequence that places a number of different representations of an unclearly defined «Arabic» world alongside one another. Images from Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli’s La Saison des hommes (2000), about the life of a community of women in the absence of their men who are working abroad, are placed next to images from the Hollywood production Rendition (2007), about an American woman’s search for her disappeared husband, accused of terrorism. Details from the German expressionist August Macke’s water colors from his travels to Tunisia in 1914, right before the artist was killed on Europe’s battle fields, are followed by a shot of hands browsing through Alexandre Dumas’ orientalizing travelogue L’Arabie heureuse (1860). Over the final shots in the sequence, we hear Godard describing the counterpoint as a heterogeneous composition form.
«La Région centrale» is the most open, calm, almost meditative, but at the same time vague part of Le Livre d’image. Images of the lost paradise of «Joyful Arabia» are connected to images of lost love, of separation and broken relationships. Images of orientalist caricatures and colonialist violence are followed by images of liberation struggles and resistance, in turn placed next to images of terrorism and abuse. Over long segments Godard reads passages from a novel by Egyptian-French author Albert Cossery, Une ambition dans le désert (1984), a morality tale of a fictive Gulf state, whose prime minister decides to raise the status of his small, forgotten country by fabricating his own, revolutionary resistance movement. The movement’s terror attacks, the scheik hopes, will arouse the interest of international media. The plan succeeds only too well and the terror attacks spin out of control. The moral is one of the relation between media and terrorism, between violence and the representation of violence.
«The act of representing», reads Godard, with a quote from Edward Said, «almost always entails a violence against the subject of the representation. There is a real contrast between the violence of the act of representing and the inner calm of the representation itself.»[viii] «La Région centrale» is a distant, aged filmmaker’s look back at representations of a world whose hopes he once shared, of a struggle with which he once identified. They are images that have not always aged well. They have lost their necessity, their justifying needs. Their promises of universality and solidarity have turned out to mask acts of violence. But «La Région centrale’s» contrapuntal composition is not only a lamentation, a eulogy to lost hopes. If it returns to Ici et ailleurs it is because Ici et ailleurs can not have failed, because its critical principle must, in spite of all, remain valid. Le livre d’image still defends the hope that, assembled between its covers, the images should be able to atone for their violence, should be able to regain their necessity, undergo a new metamorphosis as the images of a new we.
The quote from Said opens the part of Le livre d’image in which the film’s only new images appear, shot by Godard and his co-director Fabrice Aragno in Tunisia. The images, which show landscapes, vistas, scenes from everyday life in a village, are the opposite of images that claim to speak for the subjects they represent. Some of the images are simply yet radically indexical: inscriptions of a reality that transcends the film’s formative logic. Some are more like postcards: mesmerizing, color-corrected shots of sunsets, of waves breaking on a beach. They openly indulge in their conventional beauty.
To Think With One’s Hands
«You know how in postproduction you are supposed to color-correct the picture so everything is smooth and even», says Fabrice Aragno in an interview with Amy Taubin in Film Comment. Godard, he explains, wants the opposite. All contrasts and ruptures, all shifts in intensity and nuance should be visible. In transitions and translations between different formats and systems – TV, VHS, DVCAM, BluRay, Digital HD – distortions and artifacts appear. «I could correct it, but he doesn’t want me to.» Often, Godard’s manipulations of speed and color, done with obsolete, analog video effects machines, can not be recreated digitally. Edges become too sharp, transitions too fluid. «And why the image jitters – I don’t know how he did that. Playing with the cable maybe. Handmade.»[ix]
«Some think, others act, we usually say. But what really makes the human a human is that she thinks with her hands.» Godard has returned to the words before. Penser avec les mains, Denis de Rougement’s book from 1935, was a central reference in Histoire(s) du cinéma.[x] For de Rougement, to think with one’s hands was the same as transcending modern society’s separation between theory and praxis, between intellectual and manual labor, intellectual elite and working class. This division of labor, he held, was the deepest cause of the crisis of the European spirit, of the populism of his age, of the people’s worship of fascism’s new idols. Only a new Europe, united around an ethics of empathetic action, could reconcile the contradiction, and once again incarnate the practical and spiritual totality of community.
To think with one’s hands: in Histoire(s) du cinéma this was also a critical principle. It was through the manipulations of video that cinema could achieve self-consciousness, could become itself and set the force of its images to work against the narrative conventions of the film industry and the corrosive populism of television. In this way cinema could also reclaim the histories that had always been its own, but which it had never been allowed to tell. To think with one’s hands was to save the images from the text, from the political economy of the plot. Redeemed, they could then be united in a great, poetic synthesis. At the horizon was Malraux’s imaginary museum, the universal archive of a reunited Europe.
Le Livre d’image returns to Histoire(s) du cinéma’s rereading of de Rougement, in order to assess its validity under radically different media technological conditions. Le Livre d’image is – in spite of Godard’s analog interventions – a film that operates completely within, with, but also against the digital. Just as Histoire(s) du cinéma’s video syntheses were a critical response to the way in which images were organized at the historical moment of television and video, so Le Livre d’image’s thorny, stuttering, flickering montage, its contrapuntal composition of disjunctions and incompatibilities, is a critical response to the logic according to which the relations and flows of images are organized in contemporary networks and platforms.
Le Musée imaginaire has been realized. This is a banal truth. But as it turned out, the dream of the universal, redeemed archive was not inconsistent with – perhaps it even anticipated – the archives of contemporary global media monopolies, which render everything accessible by reducing everything to uniformity and claiming ownership of our gazes. Le Livre d’image is an act of resistance against this generalized indifference, this total, smooth compatibility. Its critique is not in the first hand directed against the political economy of the plot. It sets the irreducible, material resistance of its manipulations to work against the assimilation of everything in the indifference of the global archive. The histories of the histories of cinema: when Godard returns to his film histories it is at once to liberate the critical force of those histories from their allegiance to the imaginary museum.
Create Unity
Le Livre d’image ends with a long quote from Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81). The passage belongs to the film’s coda, after «La Région centrale», and after a sequence where the film’s references – not all of them, but many – are listed against black background. «[And] even if nothing would become as we had hoped», Godard reads, with a deep, worn-out, frail, and yet stubborn voice, which pushes against its limits until it is overwhelmed by coarse coughing,
that would change nothing about our hopes. Our hopes would remain. Utopia would remain necessary. And later our hopes would reignite many times, they would be suffocated by the mighty enemy and awakened anew. And the domain of our hopes would grow larger than in our age, it would stretch across all continents. The will to protest, to contradict would not be exhausted. Just as the past was impossible to change, so our hopes are and will remain impossible to change and those who once, when we were young, hade nourished such ardent hopes …
« …would be honored if we brought them back to life once again», the quote ends, but the final words are mostly inaudible in the film. While Godard is reading Weiss’ words, the image track shows the opening of the first part of Max Ophuls’ Le plaisir (1952). A gentleman dressed in a smoking and with a strange, stiff face, frenetically dances a sort of can-can dance together with a young woman, until he collapses from dizziness and exhaustion. The stiff face is a mask, we learn later in Ophuls’ film. The gentleman is a pathetic old man who refuses to accept his age.
The quote from The Aesthetics of Resistance (here translated after Ulrika Wallenström’s Swedish translation) comes from the last pages of the work’s final, third volume.[xi] They are spoken by the novel’s anonymous I, who looks back at the end of the second world war from an undefined present, the moment of writing. Through the one thousand pages of the three volumes, we have followed this I and his friends, young communists and members of the anti-fascist resistance movement. We have followed their shared path of education, and their different fates in Germany, Spain, and Sweden, from the mid-1930s until the end of the war, from the moment of the popular fronts to the executions of German resistance fighters in the Plötzensee prison in Berlin.
The Aesthetics of Resistance could be read as an attempt to realize the exhortation of the early Malraux, the Malraux who wrote L’Espoir: to transform destiny into consciousness, the apocalypse into an army. Weiss’ ambitions were vast. By way of the story of the resistance fighters and their education, The Aesthetics of Resistance attempted to show that the totality of cultural history could be narrated as a history of the culture of the resistance fighters, that is, of the working class and of anti-fascist unity. But to do so necessitated reading history’s images against themselves, as inscriptions of exploitation, and as allegories of the social relations they themselves repressed, mystified. It necessitated a critical montage technique: an aesthetics of resistance. The Aesthetics of Resistance wanted the images of the past to undergo a new metamorphosis through the creation of a new we, united in resistance, in Malraux’s terms.
L’Espoir + The Aesthetics of Resistance: perhaps this is the formula for Le Livre d’image, an equation for the critique that Godard’s late film directs to the histories of cinema, including his own. What is the sum? The sum is the resistance of hopes, their immutable in spite of all. The past can not have failed. We have, Godard claims, the responsibility to rectify the defeats of the past, to realize its hopes beyond the forms in which the past itself could realize them. That the past failed, that its struggles, its forms, its images could not realize our hopes, could not tell the histories they should have been able to tell, show the realities they should have been able to show – this is the task that they are passing on, the heritage that we must conquer. It is also, Le Livre d’image suggests, an imperative of creation, an opening for the imagination. The critique of history’s images is the same as the invention of new ones.
Thank you to Martin Grennberger, Samuel Richter, and the members of the Study Group on the Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts.
Translation from English: Kim West.
Originally published in Magasinet Walden no. 13/14 (2019).
[i] André Malraux, La Psychologie de l’art I: Le Musée imaginaire (Skira, 1947). In English, «le musée imaginaire» has sometimes been translated as «the museum without walls».
[ii] André Malraux, «L’homme et la culture», in La politique, la culture (Gallimard, 1996).
[iii] André Malraux, L’Espoir (Gallimard, 1937); English translation by Stuart Gilbert and Alastair Macdonald: Man’s Hope (New York: Random House, 1938).
[iv] André Malraux, «L’art et les masses», Comœdia, no. 8555, Tuesday July 14, 1936, 4.
[v] Walter Benjamin, «L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa réproduction mécanisée» in Zeitschrift für Socialforschung, Jahrgang V, 1936.
[vi] Jacques Rancière, «Sentence, Image, History», in The Future of the Image (Verso, 2007).
[vii] André Malraux, «L’oeuvre d’art», in La politique, la culture. 122.
[viii] Edward W. Said, «In the Shadow of the West», in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Bloomsbury, 2004), 40. Godard has modified the quote.
[ix] Amy Taubin, «The Hand of Time», Film Comment vol. 55, no. 1 (2019).
[x] Denis de Rougement, Penser avec les mains (Albin Michel, 1935).
[xi] Peter Weiss, Motståndets estetik (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2006), p. 999. Only the first volume of three is available in English translation. See Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, vol. 1 (Duke University Press, 2005).