Page 22 - Studio International - November December 1975

of Malevich, he himself remains within the confines of first, without in any way dissolving the second. It is not a
'naturalness.' (Interestingly enough. he identifies a middle portrait group or a study of nudes in the representational
road between naturalism and abstraction, which he tradition, but on the other hand, to see it simply as an
relates, somewhat surprisingly, to Balla and 'primitive investigation of painterly or formal problems or
Italian futurism')." Godard takes the idea of formal possibilities is to forget its original title, Le Bordel
conflict and struggle and translates it into a concept of Philosophique. The same could be said, of course, about
The Large Glass. The battle between realism/illusion/
'literature' in art, and abstraction/reflexiveness/
Greenberg-modernism, is not so simple or all-
encompassing as it may sometimes seem.
There are two other topics which should be mentioned
here. The first is politics. As I suggested above, it is often
too easily asserted that one avant-garde is 'political' and
the other is not. Peter Gidal, for example, defends his films
on grounds which clearly imply a political position. And
the supporters of Godard and Straub- Huillet, by
distinguishing their films from those of Karmitz or
Pontecorvo, are constantly forced to assert that being
'political' is not in itself enough, that there must be a break
with bourgeois norms of diegesis, subversion and
deconstruction of codes, etc. — a line of argument which,
unless it is thought through carefully or stopped arbitrarily
at some safe point, leads inevitably straight into the
positions of the other avant-garde. Nonetheless, in
discussing Godard, the fact that his films deal explicitly
Jean- Luc Godard Le Gai Savoir 1968 with political issues and ideas is obviously important. He
does not wish to cut himself off from the political— Marxist
conflict, not between the content of images, but between — culture in which he has steeped himself from before
different codes and between signifier and signified. 1968 and increasingly since. This culture, moreover, is
Thus, in Le Gai Savoir, which he began shooting before one of books and verbal language. The important point,
the events of May 1968, but completed after, Godard tries though, is that a film like Le Gai Savoir— unlike some later
programatically to 'return to zero,' to de-compose and work of Godard, as he fell under Brecht's influence — is not
then re-compose sounds and images. For Godard, simply didactic or expository, but presents the language of
conflict becomes not simply collision through Marxism itself, a deliberately chosen language, as itself
juxtaposition, as in Eisenstein's model, but an act of problematic.
negativity, a splitting apart of an apparently natural unity, Politics—the influence and presence of Marxist
a disjunction. Godard's view of bourgeois communication writing — has been an obvious force of impetus and
is one of a discourse which gains its power from its strength for Godard, but it also relates to another
apparent naturalness, the impression of necessity which question — that of audience. On the whole, the Co-op
seems to bind a signifier to a signified, a sound to an avant-garde, happy though it would no doubt be to find a
image, in order to provide a convincing representation of mass audience, is reconciled to its minority status. The
the world. He wants not simply to represent an alternative consciously political film-maker, on the other hand, is
'world' or alternative 'world-view', but to investigate the often uneasy about this. The representatives of Marxist
whole process of signification out of which a world-view culture are on the whole aesthetically conservative and
or an ideology is constructed. Le Gai Savoir ends with the avant-gardism is damned as elitism. Godard, as is well-
following words on the soundtrack : 'This film has not known, defended himself against this charge by citing
wished to, could not wish to explain the cinema or even Mao's dictum about the three types of struggle and
constitute its object, but more modestly, to offer a few placing his own work in film under the banner of scientific
effective means for arriving there. This is not the film experiment, rather than class struggle, an instance in
which must be made, but it shows how, if one is to make a which theoretical work could be justified and take
film, one must necessarily follow some of the paths precedence over political work, in the short term at least.
travelled here.'1 2 In other words, the film deliberately Yet it is also clear that it was pressure to rediscover a mass,
suspends 'meaning', avoids any teleology or finality, in popular audience which led to the artistic retreat of
the interests of a destruction and re-assembly, a Tout Va Bien, which abandons avant-gardism for a
re-combination of the order of the sign as an experiment stylized didacticism, set within a classical realist frame,
in the dissolution of old meanings and the generation of though with some interpolations in the Eisensteinian way.
new ones from the semiotic process itself. The second topic is that of 'intertextuality', to use Julia
Put another way, Le Gai Savoir is not a film with a Kristeva's terminology., 3 One of the main characteristics
meaning, something to say about the world, nor is it a of modernism, once the priority of immediate reference to
film 'about' film (which, after all, is simply a limited part of the real world had been disputed, was the play of allusion
the world of interest in itself to film-makers and film- within and between texts. Quotation, for instance, plays a
students) but a film about the possibility of meaning crucial role in the Demoiselles d'Avignon and, indeed, in
itself, of generating new types of meaning. The array of The Large Glass. In avant-garde writing it is only
sign-systems at work in the cinema are thus brought into necessary to think of Pound and Joyce. Again, the effect
a new kind of relationship with each other and with the is to break up the homogeneity of the work, to open up
world. Nor, of course, is it indifferent to Godard what spaces between different texts and types of discourse.
types of new meaning are produced. Although his work is Godard has used the same strategy, not only on the
open-ended, it does not offer itself simply for a delirium of sound-track where whole passages from books are
interpretation, as though meaning could be read in at will recited, but also on the picture-track, as in the quotations
by the spectator. Signifieds are neither fixed, or fixed as from the Hollywood western and the cinema novo in
far as possible, as they are in conventional cinema, nor are Vent d'Est. Similarly, the films of Straub- Huillet are
they freed from any constraint, as though the end of a almost all 'layered' like a palimpsest — in this case, the
content-dominated art meant the end of any control over space between texts is not only semantic but historical
content. too, the different textual strata being the residues of
In a sense, Godard's work goes back to the original different epochs and cultures.
breaking-point at which the modern avant-garde began — It is significant perhaps that the latest films of Malcolm
neither realist or expressionist, on the one hand, nor Le Grice have a similar quality of intertextuality in their
abstractionist, on the other. In the same way, the quotation of Lumière and Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. The
Demoiselles d'Avignon is neither realist, expressionist or Lumière film is especially interesting — in comparison
abstractionist. It dislocates signifier from signified, with, for example, Bill Brand's re-make of Lumière's
asserting — as such a dislocation must — the primacy of the destruction of a wall film.' 4 It is not simply a series of
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