preface:
The next conversation you're going to see takes place on December 3, 1988, at the home of Jean-Luc Godard in Switzerland, where he and the legendary film critic and former Editor-in-Chief of the Film Handbook, Serge Dané, discuss the topic of Godard's ongoing video thesis, The History of Cinema: History and Stories, Film and Television, "Reading" and "Seeing", Science and Art, Author and Politics, New Wave and Hollywood, America and France, Eyes and Hands...
Godard, whom Dane has called "the first and last director and historian in the history of cinema", quotes the scriptures lightly, talks about everything and maintains a "cunning" posture, trying to show the importance of "montage" in the dialogue - juxtaposing the two things together, connecting them with an "and" to see what will appear...
The entire dialogue was recorded by Godard in a total of ten tapes of more than two hours, and some of the content was finally intercepted and put into some fragments of Film History. In 2020, the French Film Archive's online platform, with Godard's authorization, released a nearly complete video of the conversation ("almost", because two tapes were unfortunately lost"), which also made my translation possible.
Dane himself had published the conversation in excerpts in his own newspaper, Liberation, but because of his focus on Godard, he condensed most of what he had said. However, since Dane, as one of the most important authors in the film critics after André Bazin, is rare in the Chinese-speaking world, this translation aims to restore the full picture of the dialogue between the two, and will use all the content in the videotape as much as possible, and only change part of the tone. As one of the elements that make up film history, the content of the two people's dialogue also always leads to many key arguments in "Film History", and readers may wish to combine the two and read and watch together.
(The content in square brackets [] is the translator's note.) ）
Jean-Luc Godard and Serge Dane
Translation 丨TWY
Volume one
Serge Dane (SD): The history of film and television [(Hi)stories, both "history" and "story" in French are called histoire; plural history, not only of film, but also of television, this is your plan. There are many reasons why you are the best person to write this history, but before we say this, what surprises me the most is that it must be done by people of your generation, that is, a member of the New Wave...
Jean-Luc Godard (JLG): History with "plurals" [Histoire(s)] because...
SD: Of course, because there may be many ways to tell a lot of history now. The New Wave was probably the only generation that began to create films from the fifties to the sixties – that is, in the middle of a century, in other words, perhaps the "middle" of cinema. This means that your generation is extremely lucky.
JLG: I was happy to hear you say "fifties and sixties".
SD: Because I think about those short films, those preparations and film criticisms.
JLG: Yeah, and even earlier, probably in 1950.
SD: So it's the middle of a century, and if we use that simple assumption: that is, the twentieth century is the century of cinema, then it means being in the middle of cinema itself. At the same time you have the right time and place...
JLG: Actually, I would say that cinema was a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but it "settled" in the twentieth century. And there is a fifty-year gap between them, because the "twentieth century" also began in the fifties.
SD: Yes, so "history" is plural.
JLG: Yes.
SD: You've been lucky and in time to show up at a time to pick up an already rich, complex, and turbulent history. You've watched a lot of movies, at least a lot of time, first as a fan, then as a critic, to collect your own concepts. To see which parts of this history are important or not, and to see a linear timeline, though imperfect.
You know, for example, Rossellini appeared after Griffiths, or Renoir came after Visconti. So you have a linear timeline that allows you to pinpoint exactly when you entered the market yourself, in a history that has been told and there is still a lot of room for telling. And you're lucky enough to be able to...
The Rocco Brothers (Lukino Visconti, 1960)
JLG: But this history is... It's somehow "said in one breath" rather than really narrated.
SD: Yes, but there's a lot, or not enough, there's enough space, and there's enough knowledge and enough passion. Roughly speaking: to see the sequence of events before and after, but also to know that there is a "before" and "after" at the point of your entry; there is something before you, and then there is something else after you. This fact means that you appeared in the middle of the century. And you know that you have more or less inherited both good and bad things, what you like and what you don't like...
JLG: I think it took me a lot of time to get to this point, and back to the concept of seeing the before and after of the event, I think I didn't catch it until very late.
SD: Maybe Truffaut would have been more sensitive to that, and I mean the whole generation, the film critics at the Time Handbook. I think you did see it later than others, you theorized it more, and it continued years later, so it probably took you longer to mature. But of all the people, you're probably the closest to a historian in essence, and that's another story.
I don't think it happened because of the war — people didn't get a chance to go to the movies at the time, or the theory of movies wasn't ready. And then it didn't happen again [after your generation] because all of a sudden, we had too many movies -- too many movies to watch and too many to make up. These make up a vast legacy, the history of cinema. Because since the sixties, the movies we watch are no longer just from those four or five countries or studios, but from all over the world.
Nowadays, it is impossible for young people in their twenties to spend ten to fifteen years in the film archive to see movies, especially movies that they have not seen, and at the same time to build a coordinate axis around which to build their own history, and to understand that they are doing this after you, so they need to be aware of this fact.
So in hindsight, the controversial and avalanche phenomenon that was seen as some kind of wonderful story in the history of French cinema became thirty years later the only chance to do history. You get this opportunity, maybe this generation or around this generation, all the way to, say Wenders...
Under the Berlin Sky (Wim Wenders, 1987)
JLG: The only way to do history, I would say this, is not because there are too many movies to watch, but because there are fewer and fewer. In addition, at one time, literary historians would say, "Here is Homer, Cervantes, Joyce, and even Flaubert and Faulkner..." They only mention the first three, and then they add Faulkner and Flaubert. So...... I would say there are only a few movies... Ten, since we have ten fingers, then: ten movies.
Cinema, or rather, in my concepts, my desires, and the unconscious feelings that can now be consciously expressed, is the only means by which cinema can do it, to tell it, to create consciousness. For example, to understand that as an individual, I have my own story, but without the movie, I am no longer me. I have a history of "myself", which is the only means by which I speak, and I am deeply influenced by it.
Like a Darwinist, or a Lutheran, they always have certain feelings of guilt, or, in the words of Margaret Duras, are "cursed": she once said that I was cursed. It's a bit worrisome, but it's the only means (if there is one) to tell a story or do a piece of history.
Margaret Duras
And in fact no one has done it yet—we have never had a history of letters; perhaps egyptologists have written some art history, but I would hesitate to add that there is only the history of the visual arts, and the film part is visual; the French have done a little bit of painting history. Not by anyone else – only the French, I'm not saying there are no historians anywhere else, but only the French have done it, and the simplest thing is: Diderot, Baudelaire, Malraux... I'll also add Truffaut to the back.
They form a linear succession: Baudelaire on Allan Poe, just as Malro on Faulkner, and Truffaut on Edgar Umer or Hawkes. There's something in it, and it's a very French thing —almost no one has done history except the French.
SD: All of these people you mentioned have one thing in common: they understand that they are placed in a history...
JLG: They have this hunch.
SD: Yeah, it was very responsive.
JLG: They want to know.
SD: They want to know some of the history: they are in the big history, but they also have the big history to which they belong. They decided not to passively inherit the past that had been given to them in their artistic field, but to discover their own predecessors, as Baudelaire translated Bylan Poe.
JLG: If I had to say it, the big story is the history of cinema, and it's bigger than anything else because it can be shown. Others, by contrast, are usually reduced. In writing the book Madness and Civilization, Foucault reduced madness (with pen and paper) in this way. When Langlois screened Northferatu, one could see the town, where Northferatu had been, or Berlin, which had been destroyed in 1944.
This is the projection, simply put, the great history, because it can be screened; the other histories are reduced, and the great history can be screened. So my goal, as Brecht wrote in a little poem: "I seriously considered my plan... It can't be done." Why can't it be done? Because it can only be played on television, and it is reduced; or it is shown, but it is showing "you", but here we lose consciousness, because the television is showing the audience.
And those who go to the cinema are attracted, and a person who watches TV is abandoned. But we can produce a memory from a history and then show it, and that's all we can do.
SD: What's happening in this big history now is: If we take the history of cinema, it's been around for a long time in the past. Naturally, there have been a lot of movies made since your generation, including your own. We came to realize that we were inevitably talking about film history.
JLG: But I'm going to say that only fewer and fewer films are being made, and we're making fewer and fewer films now, and we have to see that fact.
SD: Yes, but there's a lot to be seen...
JLG: Because they're all very similar... So there are a lot of them that look different because they're like puns, or biological clones. It's like imitation. I mean, if you compare Marc Sennett to James Cruz, it's two movies; if you put LeRouche together with Jean-Jacques Arnoux, they're actually the same movie. Even if I put my own movie with Straub's, it's the same thing now, no wonder we're always sullen.
SD: Absolutely. When you watch a movie on TV, you'll find that it's more like a good microscope than a telescope. We can find that what we call "movies," or what we like and would like to call "movies," begins to resemble each other, past and present, and seems to become separate from something... This thing may not have a name yet, so let's call it "audiovisual" first. This phenomenon is becoming more and more alarming, and now there are more and more audiovisual products, and the "film" part of this is becoming more and more recognizable. It's something I realized when I re-watched a lot of movies on TV, and it's no secret.
The mention in your proposal touches on two or three overarching assumptions, which seem to me to be more macroscopic assumptions about civilization or culture. It is about the essential form of human perception, the way of perceiving the world: based on light and shadow, time, editing, and so on. Sometimes there are images that seem to be "cinematic": still recorded by the camera, still viewed by people. And in this respect you will begin to wonder why I agree with the term "plural" in the "history of the plural" that you proposed.
If we prefer to despise them in the name of the films we love, it would be better to send them into a different category, even if we have less interest in them. Anyway, when I watch some new films, I always ask myself this question, for new films that are very popular and that you and I both find terrible. The desperate kind – I mean The Bear's Tale [Jean-Jacques Arnold's film]. I'd say, "What does this thing have to do with movies?" Even if it is shown in theaters, even if it attracts a lot of audiences, it is more or less a rigid audience.
The Bear's Tale (1988)
JLG: It's like asking why the Nazis kept taking advantage of the Jews. And the longer time passed, the more the Nazis destroyed them, and the harder it was to get rid of them.
SD: Are you saying that "audiovisual" has regrets about movies?
JLG: Yeah, that's right now. Cinema is a slave to audiovisuals and is its regret, but it is undoubtedly a turning point in the road. I don't know exactly what this is and what I did about it, so you start thinking about when a person ends up... That is to say, at the beginning of life, but it is about the first light that created the dawn, so you can imagine the dawn.
Volume II
SD: What I want to ask you about is the concept of linearity that is no longer possible today. So even if you have these ten movies, because there are ten fingers. You know who comes first and who comes after; who draws from whom and who betrays whom; who inherits incense and who stirs up trouble. There is a very specific film history in The Handbook...
JLG: I'm not sure about that... Even for scholars like Houmai (i.e., Scherer), I'm not sure they have a concept of history. I think, for example, Schererer, as a university lecturer, he knew that in terms of time, Flaubert was after Homer and Thomas Aquinas. But I'm not sure when he sees, for example, Nicolas Ray's "Above Life" (because he has written film reviews) and thinks of Maunau, which he greatly admired in post-war France. I'm not sure that in the things he said there would be a hint of "Ray from after Mauna."
Above Life (1956)
SD: I don't mean that.
JLG: Maybe he realized that later, so it's not a kind of... There's something else in it, because it's a space, a field that allows us... What do I remember at the screening on Avenue messina? That place has no history. I think that's why... We were completely blown away. It is no longer the discovery of a new continent, as they say, foucault and others would say: the discovery of a new continent. Suddenly, history was told, in different ways, differently from Renart's, not like Tènes, not like Spengler. There is an unknown feeling in this.
Literally, we've never seen a world without history, but it's constantly telling stories. However, when I first read Gide, I immediately realized and felt its power, knowing that he came from after Mozart (chronologically). I don't remember that feeling, everything happened on its own.
SD: No, but that's your own experience. Anyway, you can still have the impression in your head, such as Sadur's "History of Cinema", which I read when I was a child...
JLG: I've never read it.
SD: Okay, but a lot of people have read it, and Dussal knows the history before and after.
JLG: But he was just read, not seen. It's important: what we watch is not written, and we never feel that way... By the way, it saved us. Because we all dreamed of writing novels, and everybody was writing at the time—Aschuck was writing. I admired Aschuk, whose work was published by Galima; Scherer, who also published his first novel at the time; Elizabeth, who was also published by Galima at the time; and Gaudev, who was published by Midnight Press. At the same time, it's also a relief, because when we watch those screenings in theaters, we feel like we don't need to write anymore.
I think it was after this that some people came back, except I thought... Including Levitte and me, and maybe Straub and some people, we like their films more than others, and their films may not be as good, but it doesn't matter, but we feel like we don't need to write anymore. Writing is terrifying: how dare you imagine yourself writing better than Joyce? Or Rilke? However in the movie you are allowed...
If you want, you can do something that doesn't have a class, or something out of body, and just by making them in this way gives them meaning to exist, unlike in literature or elsewhere (even if we see paintings), it's impossible—there's a judge there to judge you, it's impossible. I felt a sense of freedom: a man and a woman sitting in the car.
As I often say, after I've seen Journey to Italy — a man and a woman, even if I haven't made any movies since then, I know what to do, and I don't care if I can compare to those "immortal" people, it's not a problem, and the fact that you can make movies gives you some dignity, or something like that.
SD: Like you said, you've been through a lot of things, that is, a certain possibility of freedom, a certain possibility of liberation. Coupled with the fact that this was a crucial period for European cinema after the liberation of France, even if it seems easy to understand now, the fact remains that what can be seen is somewhat similar to the films that are shown, that is, the history of cinema has not been dragged out to fifty or a hundred years ago.
I think that if a person is attracted to cinema today and is interested in cinema, he will be in a similar situation to today in literature and painting. It's like when we say, the Venetian School...
JLG: You can't say that...
SD: At the same time we forget that Tintoretto was thirty to fifty years later than Titian, but both belonged to the Venetian school. And we can easily say, "I can take Tintoretto and compare him side by side with a contemporary painter." I would have been allowed to do so, because, apart from intellectuals and art history teachers, the chronological order and the distinction between generations, that is, to understand who is in front and who is behind, is no longer valued.
I think cinema reached that point many years ago, maybe after you. That's why I say that you are the first, and perhaps the last, person who can tell this history, even if it is plural, because you experienced it at the time, and it was also immersed in your work, digested, theorized. Now you think it is necessary to create a history in this, and it is a different kind of chronicle than Sadur's: not "First there was Griffiths, then there was..."; but in the form of "We are allowed..."
David Griffiths
For people who don't want to give up the best aspects of the movie, given that they say, "Why don't you look at those silent films." Nowadays, among young people, we can notice the phenomenon that silent films are suddenly popular in this group, and for people like me, I only associate silent films with those filmmakers in the silent era, because we are afraid of so-called authorship. I don't want to tell them to say, as a film critic, "You can't take it on the side, like Wim Wenders ,who is your contemporary, and then, for example, put him and Maunaux together, he's very different." Even though there are some areas in common, regardless of each generation among them.
But at best I'll just say, "You can do what you want, but do it reasonably." I think for the history of cinema, it will be a situation in the future, and unfortunately, it will become a bit like you say, like the history of literature or the history of painting, these are all arts with a very long history.
JLG: That's right.
SD: So my question is: when you created The History of Cinema, you did that with a legacy, or we say educational goals. Do you consider, for example, that a person who is forty years younger than you, do you want to give that person a desire to pursue something (a.e., a movie) that is, the essence of something that has been popular to some extent from the beginning? Maybe you want to say, "This is what I've experienced: these are seen, they're visible... There's something here, there's something there, and I'm the last guardian of it."
JLG: I wouldn't say that, but other people can say that if they want to, it's actually a lot like it would be more like the second thing you said. I have a strong feeling because I believe in human beings, because people create "works" . People deserve to be respected because they create works, such as an ashtray, a remote control, a car, a movie, or a painting. From that point of view, I am not a humanitarian at all, and then we have what we call politics and strategy.
When we... François (Truffaut) proposed "author politics", and now we only retain the word "author", but in fact the word "politics" is more interesting. The author is not very important, if Hitchcock made "Rebel for No Reason" [Nicholas Ray's film], then we would all praise Hitchcock (laughs). It doesn't matter at all.
Nowadays everything is... Well, I don't know. The result is that there is no more... It can be said that because we have too much respect for the author, we no longer respect the work; and our respect for the author is limited to the discourse, and we have long ceased to respect the discourse, except for some serious people. Dordo [the famous French child psychologist who, together with Lacan, founded the "Freudian School"] if you take a famous example, although there will undoubtedly be many nameless ordinary people, I only know that this person can respect the work as much as he respects the author.
In fact, she is a woman, not a man, because women are able to procreate – the work and the author... There must be a balance, justice and democracy. Men don't have these, they only have those that go back and forth frequently. In the movie, there is a very obvious ... We talk freely about the work, but we never attack the authors, we only attack the works, it's just that the authors feel like they're being attacked.
Instead, I'll say, "There's something there, but we can't see it." This thing is still unique no matter what, it will belong to... Something like this has to happen in modern times, more or less in the last two or three thousand years. When Massinon was destroyed, and about four hundred million years ago, there was the extinction of certain species of flora and fauna, and there would be something in it.
Simply put, because it is what we call an "image," but an image itself is just an image, so to speak, just more or less motion. The image we see is telling us something, but we don't want to hear it. We would rather say it than listen to it, and we don't...
From this point of view, for me a work is a child, the author is an adult - parents... It's funny, the child shows the parents what they really look like, and at the same time tells things about themselves, but the parents don't want any of these things, and even a little bit scared by it.
Well, it is this idea, and this is the only history that humanity is likely to tell, if any. Maybe it will change later, but at least until now, four hundred million years ago, from 1700 to 1900, and then all the way to 1990 or 2000, some way of telling stories is considered history.
The only history of this we see very clearly, of course, although it still needs to be published. That is, you need to do things like Levi Strauss, Einstein, or Copernicus.
(To be continued)