Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 30, September 2002
Marcia Landy
Godard: Thinking Media
David Sterritt _The Films of Jean-Luc
Godard: Seeing the Invisible_ Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
1999 ISBN 0521580382 (hb)
0521589711 (pb) 297 pp. Jean-Luc Godard is not a
superannuated and historical relic to be consigned to the
pages of cinema history. In fact, as Michael Temple and
James S. Williams recently noted, 'the real Jean-Luc Godard
has never stopped working and has patiently elaborated a
body of work that is truly rich and strange, and as
ambitious, diverse and inspiring as anything he produced in
his supposed 1960s heyday'. [1] His prodigious
productivity and the growing interest in his work can be
accounted for by the philosophical subjects under his
attention: 'autobiography and memory in
film; age and melancholia; twentieth-century history and
historiography; the fate of European art and culture; the
relation between aesthetics and identity; ethics and
philosophy; the nature and status of authorship and
literature; the evolution of the visual image from painting
to film and video; speed and technology; and videographic
montage as a new poetics'. [2] This extensive list is a
daunting challenge to any critic who would undertake an
examination of Godard's essays and films -- even a review of
the books and articles written about him. Perhaps the only
way to address these concerns is to subsume them in the
context of a relationship between media, philosophy, and
politics. Increasingly, film critics have pushed the
boundaries of film analysis to explore these relationships,
and David Sterritt's _The Films of Jean-Luc Godard; Seeing
the Invisible_, in the Cambridge Film Classics series, is an
instance of a recent attempt to situate Godard's work on
media within a broader philosophical, if not political
milieu. The Preface to Sterritt's book describes the texts
published in the series as 'a forum for revisionist studies
of the classic works of the cinematic canon from the
perspective of the new auteurism, which recognizes that
films emerge from a complex interaction of bureaucratic,
technological, intellectual, cultural, and personal forces'.
Sterritt's study of Godard focuses particularly on the
intellectual, cultural, and personal forces that
characterize the filmmaker's treatment of media. Through an introductory
chapter that maps Godard's philosophic investments in media,
followed by a close examination of six films -- three from
the 1960s: _Breathless_ (1960), _My Life to Live_ (1962),
and _Weekend_ (1967); one from each of the subsequent
decades: _Numero deux_ (1975), _Hail Mary_ (1985), and
_Nouvelle Vague_ (1990) -- and ending with a brief chapter
on television and media, Sterritt orchestrates dominant
aspects of Godard's filmmaking. While the book does not
present itself as a systematic study of contemporary
philosophy, it does describe the films in formal terms so as
to enable the reader to situate Godard within the context of
twentieth century philosophy, and particularly of critical
work on media. Having written on Godard's work recently,
with especial focus on the character of this filmmaker as
philosopher, [3] I intend in this review to examine
Sterritt's assumption that, after the 1960s, Godard's
filmmaking 'became less overtly ideological, replacing its
passion for political issues with a focus on aesthetic and
spiritual matters' (10). It has become customary to regard
Godard's more recent films films as departing from the
politics of the 60s and yet, to my way of thinking, Godard
has never abandoned his investigation of politics, though
his intellectual and stylistic strategies have been attuned
to changes in the political and cultural
landscape. Certainly, Godard, like many
of his radical contemporaries, retreated from the
traditional confrontational cine-politics of the 1960s to
explore more deeply, in ways reminiscent of Deleuze's and
Derrida's work, forms of thought and belief that can account
for the powerful sway of common sense, and at the same time
point the way to jamming cliched responses to
representation. His politics have not ceased to be focused
on media, but his strategies are directed at philosophic
concerns that focus on the necessity, yet impossibility, of
restoring belief in the world and in the people to come.
Thus, politics is not reliant on pre-existing conceptions of
the people 'as identical with the ineluctable unfolding of
history', as D. N. Rodowick put it. [4] In fact, the
task of a different politics is now to seek different
conceptions of the people, or better yet to bring them into
existence. Toward that end new tools of thought are
necessary, and reflection on the nature and impact of media
is the instrument for such an exploration. What makes Godard's media
work challenging is its incisively critical preoccupation
with history. Godard has consistently challenged reductive,
programmed, and naive conceptions and practices of media
that are tied to the intertwined economic and ideological
forces of capital. His work confronts the complex obstacles
in the way of recognizing multivalent and non-reductive
conceptions of time, memory, and history as they are
conveyed through media representation. Foremost among these
impediments is the tendency to regard representation as
identical to truth. As Sterritt writes in his
Introduction: 'Godard's importance as a
cinematic rebel comes not from his reconfigurations of film
and video form per se, but from the way his dissections and
reshufflings interact with the subjects he chooses to
explore. One of these subjects is always cinema itself; the
others change as he moves from one stage to another. What
remains consistent, however, is his deep-seated desire to
refute two ideas taken for granted by the vast majority of
filmmakers: a) that cinema captures a 'direct' and somehow
'natural' view of the world and that b) cinema's standard
psychological devices are somehow equivalent with *human
nature* and thus provide accurate commonsensical insights
that can be accepted and enjoyed at face value.'
(20-21) In careful, detailed, and
sensitive analysis of Godard's films, Sterritt probes the
philosophic and aesthetic implications of Godard's
relentless exploration of the cinematic image as a medium
for common sense, and as a possibility for jamming automatic
responses to representation so as to allow for the
possibility of thought. Sterritt suggests (as in the above
quotation and in the chronological choice of films) that
Godard has moved from 'one stage to another'. Through
detailed analysis of each film, Sterritt seeks to identify
transformations that have characterized these various
'stages' of Godard's works. In contrast, I believe that
Godard has been obsessed, albeit in changing fashion from
his first to his most recent films, with questions
concerning the possibility of cinema for thinking on
questions of culture and politics as they are imbricated in
questions of history, memory, fiction, truth, language,
painting, and music. Current cultural and political analysts
have re-conceptualized the economic and political character
of the last decades of the 20th century under the rubric of
*postmodernism* and *globality*. And Godard, through his
encyclopaedic knowledge of media and its history, and his
consistent situating of cultural production within
international economic and ideological contexts, has pursued
his cine-political explorations of the image into the lairs
of late capitalism. In _The Geopolitical Aesthetic_ Fredric
Jameson has identified the particularly 'global' nature of
Godard's more recent work, especially _Passion_ (1982).
Jameson writes: 'Godard's strategy is to
pose the strongest possible objection to the medium -- to
foreground its most urgent crises, beginning with that of
financing itself, omnipresent in these late films and above
all here -- in order the more triumphantly to surmount
them.' [5] Seeking to situate the
philosophic sources of Godard's work in and on cinema,
Sterritt yokes the filmmaker's name to that of Michel
Foucault, and to Foucault's concern with 'power/knowledge
relationships', and writes: 'If knowledge and power are
closely intertwined, as Foucault contends; and if cinema
replicates information and ideas with unprecedented
efficiency, as Godard contends, then no ethical filmmaker
could maintain a clear conscience without keeping a critical
eye on the impact made by cinematic works -- especially the
filmmaker's own -- on the world in which they're unleashed.'
(21) Thus, Sterritt argues,
Godard's critical eye is focused on the strategies of cinema
as it presents transparent and seemingly accurate
representations of the world, seeking relentlessly to expose
the stratagems of the prison house of language, making
evident different possibilities 'so real rethinking and
renewal can begin' (26). Sterritt analyzes each of
the six films he has chosen to discuss with an eye to
identifying the different ways in which Godard's
cine-critique is elaborated. For example, in the discussion
of _Breathless_, he singles out the ways in which the film
explores 'reconciling personal will with existence in a
world that is at once intricately social, profoundly
subjective, and utterly irrational in the long run' (51).
Stressing the importance of place enables Godard to probe
relations between character and environment -- a homage to
an abiding historical figure in Godard's films: Roberto
Rossellini. Equally important, not only to _Breathless_ but
also to later films, are the ways (beyond mere quotation)
that the film explores and deepens the problematic relations
between fiction and fact -- and even more between politics
and aesthetics. Sterritt regards the relation between
character and action and landscape as central to the film,
but the traditional conception of character is subject to
disintegration, examined as an invention, and the task is to
understand the terms and conditions of their construction.
Godard pries open what Deleuze has called the
'movement-image' to describe the workings of pre-World War
II cinema, with its organic view of the world, and where
action, not time, governed the narrative. In the chapter on _My Life
to Live_, through his invocation of Bertolt Brecht's work,
Sterritt introduces another dimension of Godard's
filmmaking, what I would identify as Godard's 'pedagogical'
conception of the cinematic image. This pedagogy can, in
part, be traced to the writings and theater of Brecht and
his conception of epic theater, exemplified by the episodic
style of _My Life to Live_, its organization into twelve
tableaux, as well as its heightened and stylized
theatricality. Sterritt focuses on the various tableaux as a
means of reinforcing the motif in the film of vain and
reductive conceptions of interiority, authenticity, and
affect. For example, Sterritt writes that, 'Godard recognizes that
externals are all the camera and sound recorder can grasp,
and that such outward signs -- superficial by definition --
may seem sadly inadequate if one is looking for the *inner
selves* of psychologically defined characters . . . The
externals captured by cinema can be highly suggestive if one
accepts the notion that inner selves are inseparable from
the external actions that they trace on the world around
them.' (65-66) The chapter, building on the
previous one, extends the discussion of Godard's ongoing and
interconnected uses of milieu, cinematic quotation, the
female (and the cinematic) body and prostitution, and
problematic questions concerning verbal and cinematic
language. The film's pedagogy relies on the various
strategies to complicate prevailing conceptions of truth and
falsehood that are subsumed in a strict dichotomy between
realism and artifice and need to be rendered more
undecidable. In his philosophic writings on cinema, Gilles
Deleuze offers insights into Godard's pedagogical conception
of the cinematic image. Deleuze wrote that, after World War
II: 'The cinema is going to become an analytic of the image,
implying a new conception of cutting, a whole *pedagogy*
which will operate in different ways.' [6] This
pedagogy requires careful attention. It is not a polemic or
a method for reading 'truth' through the image, since the
image is, in Godard's words, 'just an image'. Godard's
pedagogy involves formalism insofar as the spectator must
become aware of the image, must regard and understand the
image as image, and hence as a means of rethinking how
cinema relies on perception and memory. Through enhancing the
possibility of mutual work on the part of the filmmaker and
the spectator, Godard's films seeks, through memory and
intelligence, to unveil 'the untruth of truth' (to borrow
from Nietzsche) of the image. Deleuze will describe this
process as an encounter with the 'powers of the
false': 'Truthful narration is
developed organically, according to legal connections in
time and space and chronological relations in time. Of
course, the elsewhere may be close to the here, and the
former to the present. But this variability of place and
movements does not call the relations and connections into
question. They rather determine its terms or elements, so
that narration implies an inquiry and testimonies that
connect it to the true . . . Falsifying narration, by
contrast frees itself from this system . . . The point is
that the elements themselves are constantly changing with
the relations of time into which they enter, and the terms
with their connections . . . The power of the false exists
only from the perspective of a series of powers, always
referring to each other and passing into one another. So
that investigators, witnesses and innocent or guilty heroes
will participate in the same power of the false the degrees
of which they will embody, at each stage of the narration.
Even *the truthful man ends up realizing that he has never
stopped lying* as Nietzsche said.' [7] In other words, Godard's
films are not designed to produce an interpretation of the
correct meaning of the images that add up to an immutable
sense of the real, of truth, and of a comprehensible
totality. In Godard's work, the film becomes conceptual,
that is, it becomes a theory of cinema that is also a
philosophy. This 'theory of cinema', 'is not 'about' cinema, but
about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are
themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other
practices . . . The great cinema authors are like the great
painters or the great musicians: it is they who talk about
what they do. But in talking they become philosophers or
theoreticians . . . we must no longer ask ourselves, 'What
is cinema?' but 'What is philosophy?' [8] _Weekend_ is a film that
would seem to pose both of these questions. In relation to
the status of cinema, the film, for James Roy MacBean,
equals a 'dead-end', 'not for Godard and not for cinema, but
for a particular type of cinema -- the cinema of spectacle
&endash; which is pushed to its limit'; but the film does
not restrict itself to the 'death' of cinema, but yokes
cinematic to philosophic concerns in its relentless
exploration of 'the disintegration of civilization'.
[9] Invoking Artaud's 'Theater of Cruelty' and
Brecht's 'Dialectical Theater', MacBean examines Godard's
method for connecting and reconfiguring cinema and
philosophy. Toward similar ends, Sterritt invokes Julia
Kristeva and Bakhtin to describe the clash of elements that
characterize what he describes as 'Godard's filmmaking
strategy, whereby the virtue of freedom -- that is, a
liberated cinema -- must be born from a violent,
take-no-prisoners assault on *slavery* to classical style
and conventional narrative' (106). Sterritt describes the
film's climactic eruption into cannibalism in terms of
Kristeva's notion of abjection and perhaps also of Bakhtin's
conception of the carnivalesque. For Godard, the
revolutionary's desire is similar to the bourgeois's -- to
assimilate the informational and technological apparatus of
American society -- and, as such, is cannibalistic. Thus, in
this film, Godard undermines both the media-ted images of
the bourgeoisie, as well as of the revolutionary, regarding
each as participating in discourses that mirror each other
and do not open the way to rethinking culture and
politics. Sterritt's regards _Weekend_
as portraying 'a civilization turned upside down and inside
out, wherein life and death, beauty and horror, reality and
illusion become heedlessly confounded with their opposites'
(128). His description of the film is reminiscent of
Deleuze's observations on the film (in a chapter entitled
'Cinema and Thought'). According to Deleuze: 'The formula in _Weekend_,
*it's not blood, it's red*, signifies that blood has ceased
to be a harmonic of red, and that this red is the unique
tone of blood. One must speak and show literally, or else
not show and speak at all. If, according to ready-made
formulas, the revolutionaries are at our doors, besieging us
like cannibals, they must be shown in the scrub of
Seine-et-Oise, eating human flesh. If bankers are killers,
schoolchildren prisoners, photographers pimps, if the
workers are being screwed by their bosses, this has to be
shown not to *metaphorized*.' [10] Presenting _Numero deux_ as
representative of Godard's filmmaking of the 1970s, Sterritt
continues his discussion in the context of Godard's ongoing
investigations of the role and fate of the cinematic image.
Sterritt selects this film, the first of many of Godard's
succeeding collaborations with Anne-Marie Mieville, because
it is a 'complex exploration of the relationships between
man and woman, labor and leisure, domesticity and society,
and -- perhaps above all -- film and video, media that
encapsulate his [Godard's] twin fascinations with
the heritage of Western art and the still-uncharted
directions in which its electronic future may lie' (38). The
film does not suggest that Godard has veered away from
political concerns. However, it does reveal Godard's
awareness of socio-political and cultural changes that were
transpiring in the mid-70s. In particular, media issues,
particularly the role of television, reportage, and
information had moved to the front and center of social
life, posing a challenge to traditional conceptions of
confrontational politics. Moreover, the proliferation of new
media raised new despair as well as new hope for cultural
transformation. Orchestrating a number of motifs in Godard's
treatment of contemporary culture, Sterritt asserts
that, '_Numero deux_ aims to
analyze and criticize a number of interlocking phenomena:
the home, where children must cope with such daunting
existential challenges as the primal scene and other
parental mysteries; the educational system, which ill
prepares them for present or future tasks; the industrial
world, where people's lives are not their own; the
government which uses and abuses us; and the mass media,
including the film and video technologies used to make
_Numero deux_ itself.' (140) Citing the work of Georges
Bataille and his conception of heterology, Sterritt stresses
this film's unrelenting focus on the transgression of
familiar boundaries while at the same time revealing
blockages to gratification. Returning also to Kristeva and
her elaboration on abjection and its boundary-less
character, Sterritt suggests that _Numero deux_ not only
explores and undermines conventional images of the body but
also 'embodies the ambivalence of a young medium (video)
caught within its parent medium (film) at precisely the
moment when its newly acquired powers, purposes, and
sensibilities are ready to assert themselves but are still
uncertain as to what their own distinctiveness and
usefulness might be' (145). Increasingly in his work with
Mieville, Godard will contemplate the death of cinema, and
certainly of national cinema, and will strive to locate
possibilities in video; however the abiding concern will be
to challenge the prevailing character of
representation. _Hail Mary_ offers a
powerful instance of both the continuity of Godard's
intellectual concerns and of the changing forms with which
he chooses to challenge commonsense versions of the world.
The discussion of this film is the longest in Sterritt's
volume as he meticulously traces the multiple lines of
Mieville and Godard's joint project. In examining the film's
recourse to such recurrent images as the mouth, as well as
other body openings, Sterritt deftly identifies the
transmogrifications that take place in the film, between the
body and spirit, the individual and the cosmos, interiority
and exteriority, and the sacred and the profane. However, as
might be expected, the film does not present the viewer with
traditional religion or with traditional cinema. Instead, as
Sterritt indicates, 'the web of images is
difficult to parse, but one could hardly expect it to be
otherwise, since, after all, the aim of the _Hail Mary_
films is to explore the unshowable and unsayable, through an
artistic medium that takes showing (picture, montage) and
saying (sound, narrative) as basic principles. One must
remember that much of Godard's cinema (especially his later
work) rests on the paradoxical hypothesis that our
existential environment has a dual nature. On one level, it
is a material realm that can be known by the five senses and
recorded by cinematic technologies. On another level, it is
the shadow or veil of a spiritual dimension that is
imperceptible to our senses and impenetrable to our
conscious thoughts. Attempting to manifest the immaterial
through material (filmic) devices can lead only to eminently
ambiguous results.' (217-218) Sterritt's description of
the relationship between the seen and the unseen, and of the
mysterious character of thought in Godard's later films, is
echoed by Laetitia Fieschi-Vivet in her discussion of
another Godard film, _Oh Woe Is Me_ (_Helas pour moi_,
1993). In particular with reference to Godard's attitudes
toward history, she comments that: 'the reason why there is
something hindering the power of sight in the film is
because it is impossible for the historical approach to
provide a complete vision of the past'; moreover, 'the
invisible something can be said to acquire a virtual body
but only thanks to elements that remain obscure and
unknown'. [11] A particular motif that has haunted
all of Godard's work is the question of memory, a motif
intimately tied to his resistance to common sense and cliche
and to his attempts to rethink the character of
history. This preoccupation with
memory in Godard's films has an antecedent in the history of
the nouvelle vague filmmakers and critics. It is in part
derived from Bazin and the _Cahiers du cinema_ group insofar
as they, like Roberto Rossellini, regarded the experience of
cinema as 'more profound than mere understanding'.
[12] As with Bazin's writings on cinema, Godard's
films -- past and present -- have an affinity with Henri
Bergson's distinction (in relation to memory) between two
kinds of recognition: automatic, and habitual or attentive.
Of this distinction, Bergson wrote: 'if the idea is to live, it
must touch reality on some side, that is to say, it must be
able, from step to step, and by progressive diminutions or
contractions of itself, to be more or less acted by the body
at the same time that it is thought by the mind. Our body,
with the sensations it receives on the one hand, is then,
that which fixes our mind, and gives it ballast and poise.
The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of
accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is
infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the
present hour, but these sensations and these movements
condition what we may term our attention to life, and that
is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal
work of the mind . . .'. [13] As in the writings of
Deleuze on cinema -- also heavily dependent on Bergson's
writings on forms of memory, and on the dynamic
possibilities of the time-image in contradistinction to the
automatic and cliched character of the movement-image --
Godard's abiding concern with the debilitating but also
creative dimensions of the past have centered on
investigating modes for jamming sensory-motor,
commonsensical responses to images in the interests of
arriving at a more critical relation to the past and to
questions of sameness and difference. For example, in _For
Ever Mozart_ (1997), the allusion to Ravel's _Bolero_ as
fatal carries one of the film's important questions: 'Is the
history of Europe in the 1990s a simple rehearsal with
slight symphonic variation of the chaos and cowardice of the
1930s . . . a dreadful unending _Bolero_ by Ravel?' The
invocation of the Ravel piece as an exemplary musical
instance of repetition with slight variation offers one
version of art that remains limited and confined to the
endless conflict between the machinic and the chaotic,
suggesting a certain determinism and inevitability. Mozart's
music, however, is tied, like the image of the sky in the
film, to a form of dreaming or imagination that cinema can
evoke, suggesting a vision of difference, of constant
movement and of playfulness. In the context of music,
Mozart (and the young man dressed as Mozart) in the film
provides a contrast to the crass forms of filmmaking,
dramatized in one of the film's segments. The film ends with
an image of his musical script, signifying the necessity of
turning the page, and of movement rather than stasis and
closure -- all attributes of Godard's conception of the
cinematic image, an image that elevates the dynamism of
memory over the fixity of official history. Similar to _Oh
Woe Is Me_, _For Ever Mozart_ is immersed in relations
between past and present as they involve political events
(the Spanish Civil War and the War in Bosnia), memories of
fascism, memories of cinema, and questions of objectivity.
But in Godard, as Deleuze notes, 'the distinction between
subjective and objective . . . tends to lose its importance
. . . We run into a principle of indeterminability, of
indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or
real, physical nor mental, in the situation, not because
they are confused, but because we do not have to know and
there is no longer a place from which to ask. It is as if
the real and imaginary were running after each other, as if
each was being reflected in the other, around a point of
indiscernibility . . . The imaginary and real become
indiscernible.' [14] In his penultimate chapter,
Sterritt addresses the role of memory in Godard through a
discussion of a film that has received minimal critical
attention: _Nouvelle Vague_. The discussion validates how,
in Godard's work, indiscernibility between the imaginary and
the real are central to every aspect of the filmmaker's
investigations of cinema. Sterritt claims: 'Thinking of _Nouvelle
Vague_ as a memory movie helps explain such characteristics
as the vividness of its images -- the mind's eye sometimes
sees long-past recollections in amazing detail -- and the
emotional charge that these images carry, quite apart from
the incidents and encounters that they contain and convey.
Considering the film as an exercise in memory also sheds
light on the arbitrariness with which the images relate to
one another. Like dreams, memories often follow a non-logic
of their own; given Godard's lifelong interest in escaping
the limits of logic and rationality, it is not surprising
that he would eventually use the prerogatives of memory to
anchor an entire work.' (230) Appropriately, Sterritt's
discussion of the six films has come to rest on the issue of
memory and, as Sterritt suggests, in helping to account for
an understanding of the arbitrariness of image
relationships. Through the time-image, Godard is able to
juxtapose personal recollection with the artistic past of
cinema, thus elaborating on his ongoing resistance to the
fixity of naming and meaning in his battle against what
Deleuze has described as the ubiquity of the cliche, seeking
to animate attentive memory and permit the viewer 'to see
what time is capable of', as Jonathon Dronsfield put it.
[15] In this respect, video appears to be, as
Sterritt and others have asserted, a congenial medium for
Godard's experimentation, permitting him to pursue his
'longtime fascination with spontaneous creation and (always
at the top of his agenda) challenging commonsense notions of
socially productive art, entertainment, and communication'
(249). Sterritt's study conforms to
much of the recent work on Godard that links the filmmaker
to major questions concerning old and new media.
Particularly admirable is the way in which Sterritt is able
to thread his way through the very difficult films and bring
new insights to bear on their form and on the character of
Godard's philosophic investigations of the image. In
particular, the lengthy and nuanced discussion of _Hail
Mary_ sheds light on obscure features of the film, and also
brings to the surface the complexity and depth of Godard's
philosophic investment in media. One of the advantages of
having selected only six films to discuss is the opportunity
to appreciate the intricacies of Godard's style, his
encyclopaedic range of allusion and quotation, and the
philosophic source and nature of his concerns. While the
book does introduce a discussion of his other films,
including those from 1991 to 2000, I missed the opportunity
to engage with the complexities of such films as _For Ever
Mozart_ and particularly _Histoire(s) du cinema_
(1989-1997). Sterritt does make reference to these films,
and much of what he says can shed light on these later
films, but nonetheless I find the selections a contradiction
in a work that seeks to establish the ongoing vitality and
importance of Godard's media work. Another troubling aspect of
this extremely well researched, well written, knowledgeable,
and eminently readable book, is its too easy dismissal of
politics in Godard's work after the 1960s. The Godard that
emerges from Sterritt's study -- even in his discussion of
the films of the 1960s -- seems cleansed of politics. In
this context, it was surprising to me that James Roy
MacBean's _Film and Revolution_ was not even cited. In
Sterritt, the political Godard has given way to Godard the
philosopher and metaphysician, thus downplaying the import
of Godard's ongoing concern to challenge the cultural and
political impact of cinema, television, and media.
Nonetheless, _The Films of Jean-Luc Godard_ holds a
veritable cornucopia of ideas on the dynamic character of
Godard's filmmaking, and his pre-eminent role as an analyst
of culture. Pennsylvania, USA Footnotes 1. Michael Temple and James
S. Williams, 'Introduction', in Temple and Williams, eds,
_The
Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard,
1985-2000_
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), p.
9. 2. Ibid., p. 11. 3. Marcia Landy, ''Just an
Image': Godard, Cinema and Philosophy', _Critical
Quarterly_, vol. 43
no. 3, Autumn 2001, pp. 9-34. 4. D. N. Rodowick, _Gilles
Deleuze's Time Machine_ (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997), p. 152. 5. Fredric Jameson, _The
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
System_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.
159. 6. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema
2: The Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.
22. 7. Ibid., p. 133. 8. Ibid., p. 280. 9. See James Roy MacBean,
_Film and Revolution_ (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1975), p. 45. 10. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, pp.
182-183. 11. Laetitia Fieschi-Vivet,
'Investigation of a Mystery: Cinema and the Sacred in _Helas
pour moi_', in _The Cinema Alone_, p. 190. 12. Tag Gallagher, _The
Adventures of Roberto Rossellini_ (New York: Da Capo, 1998),
p. 430. 13. Henri Bergson, _Matter
and Memory_, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), p. 173. 14. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, p.
7. 15. Jonathon Dronsfield,
'The Present Never Exists There: The Temporality of Decision
in Godard's Later Film and Video Essays', in _The Cinema
Alone_, p. 62. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Marcia Landy, 'Godard:
Thinking Media', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 30, September
2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n30landy>.
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