Translator/Foreword: Zhang Wu slow
Trance, there are elephants.
Edit: Ninon III
preface
Even a casual flip through the manual is bound to notice the unusual solemnity of the conversation: thirteen pages of Godard's interview followed by two entire commentaries on the Book of Images, followed by interviews with producer Nicole Brenez, editor FabricE Aragno, and screening curator Philippe Quesne. "The Book of Images" premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, but his fashionable future is in front of a wide Range of French audiences. In October, the film began a half-month screening at the Amadeus Theatre in Nanter, which became an opportunity for Handbook to seek dialogue with Godard in this October issue.
The handbook critics visited Godard's residence and studio in Basil, Switzerland, and were greeted by the filmmaker's "straight to the heart" welcome: "Here are the great-grandchildren who read the Handbook!" Admittedly, the theme of this three-and-a-half-hour interview is still Godard's new book, The Book of Images, but in any case we should expect that the discourse in the meantime has gone far beyond that. Through this super long conversation, in addition to gaining a new understanding of this slightly puzzling and even controversial film, the most interesting thing is still Godard's reflections on the film itself. Quoting scriptures and rhetorical rhetoric, although the french intellectual word game makes translation difficult, we can finally look from the outside to a certain kind of ideological charm that is immersed in the depths of culture; to see the artistic views that live deeply in this land and can only be produced from this land. And in the end, when the sage of the "Film Manual" returns to its embrace with an object posture, some remembrance is inevitable. When the cold historical rumors in those film history books slowly unfold in front of our eyes, carrying all the friendship of an old man, we seem to see the new wave come to us again and hear its roar in our ears.
At the end of The Book of Images, the screen is pitch black, and after a sharp cough, Godard throws out the two succinct and powerful words "ardent espoir." And that's what the manual chose as the title of this interview: The Choice to Strike at. It is not difficult to perceive his fiery temperament from the filmmaker's unbridled speech; but what touches people is that this temperament inadvertently presents its cautious side—as Godard repeatedly mentions the character under Delacroix's brush, which is both enthusiastic and worried—and he himself is so tightly guarded by the side of the film, living in it, looking around with it, using it to say, never to leave.
Eagerness
Interview with Jean Luc Godard
JLG: Let's not talk about the screening of the Grand Theatre de Nanterre, I don't know anything, it's all Nicole Brainez 1. I want to see you guys, you guys. It's like I'm looking at my great-grandchildren in the Movie Handbook, and I've been wondering what they've grown up to be.
Cahiers: The film at Cannes touched us so much, even shaken it, especially the final "Ardent Hope" section, which gives meaning to the whole process of crossing the ruins. The whole first part talks about the eternal remake of war, then Joseph de Meister 2 explains to us that war is the law of the whole universe and nature, and then the human law that seems to be a re-establishment of order but is actually an inequality... The film was originally in the middle of the night, and then you brought us to the light. It is scorching, but it is a different kind of burning.
1 Translator's Note: Nicole Brenez, producer.
2 Translator's Note: 1753-1821, French philosopher, anti-x to the Revolution.
From Godard's iPhone
JLG: Well, I should tell you that we speak the same language. When I say "same language", I don't mean French compared to Chinese or Finnish. From the first few films, in general, I began to distinguish between language (langue) and (langage)3. This began after reading a book on "speech" written by the German sociologist Fritz Mauter nearly 1910, which made many accusations against language itself. It calls it "speech," like all others; but under the influence of painting, I feel a distinction from language—roughly speaking, text and words.]; I've always had doubts about the evil nature of things like text words. I've said before in The History of Cinema that Péguy said, "Anything can be said, but nothing can be said except what is done." What I call "speech," and what everyone confuses with "language," is an acte. At present, the current film is a real knowledge base, but there is no real knowledge. I can't escape this either, because I'm also a language speaker (laughs).
3 Translator's Note: Langue and langage both refer to language, and the difference between the former refers more to abstract language structures/language systems, and the latter refers to concrete languages.
On the way to the language
Between us is a quagmire of evil. Speech is an in-law of images and words (parole). But "discourse" is not what language refers to when the concept of "discourse" is mentioned, including Heidegger's "discourse." At the beginning of Ana-Marie Miéville's last film (Editor's Note: After reconciliation, Après la réconciliation, 2000), there is a representation of a group of women dressed in 18th-century costumes who, in a forest, reread a passage from Heidegger's text, "Toward Words"4. All the books I like —those that we still call "great writers" without saying where they are, Duras, Dostoevsky, Hölderlin, Daniel Defoe, Melville... ——, all the "great works" we call, Joyce or Rimbaud, they themselves say that what they are committed to is to try to push what they call "speech"—I can't do it, I'm just language—to its extreme.
4 Translator's Note: The book's general Chinese translated as "On the Way to Language," but Heidegger actually uses the word "discourse."
What we can see in Flaubert's Bouvard and Peguille, which predicts social networks and Facebook, is a database that does everything possible5. When I tried to adapt Mary Dariusek's first novel before, she was also speaking in her own way, but this adaptation was not done in the end, because I felt that it should be explored in language and not something else, and it is impossible to be with a writer.
5 Translator's Note: This posthumous work by Flaubert tells the story of two scribes who, after experiencing and abandoning their encyclopedic copying, return to faithful copying to expose the absurdity, contradictions, and loopholes of the book. The work (including the scribe program in it) is built on an extremely rich compilation of citations.
Elegy of Love (Éloge de l'amour, 2001)
Let's talk a little more about language. I will answer your questions in words. I accept your invitation, in order, historically, to see how the children of the great-grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the manual are going (smiling). I'm sensitive to events, to the rivers of history, to the grand things, the Kind of Chinese or Russian. I have repeatedly pointed out that what we say is not what we read or printed. Words are the things that will be at the last level, like the clouds in De la Croix's watercolor paintings. That's what Baudelaire said in The Stranger: "I love those clouds, those incredible clouds." "This question is clearly directed at the last four or five films. I myself feel like there's a change starting with Elegy of Love, or more like it's starting with Mozart Forever.
Cahiers: What happened?
The Book of Images (2018)
JLG: I'm a little confused... I was in this confusion, I felt confused. I've always done it in a conscious way, which is to be in the movie all the time. Even if there are people in the struggle, in the autographs, in the social movements, even in the yellow vests, no matter who they are; the emergency 6, no matter who they are - and they claustrophobize themselves in the movie, and thus claustrophobic in the history of the film, so that I can receive the whole grand history. Cinema is a small history, but at the same time it is grand.
6 Translator's Note: Refers to the General Strike and Demonstration of Emergency Personnel in France in June this year.
It started with Mozart Forever, it was my last classical film, and it didn't prevent me from doing small films from time to time, like snipers in war, or spies. I put a lot of time into Elegy of Love to realize what I could do; yet something that was still very unconscious split the film into two or three parts. I even listed a formula, albeit very simplistic, which I called the axiom of montage, just as Euclid listed his five axioms: x +3 = 1. In order to arrive at 1, 2 must be eliminated. Nor is it really a formula. When I mentioned it to Badio, he didn't know much about it. There is a preconceived feeling in the divided film, like "one + one". And this unconsciousness has become more conscious, starting with Elegy of Love. After that, the film is often divided into three or two.
Today, the whole thing that's bad for me is that the screen is flat and single. I look at BFM and LCI7, and I prefer LCI because of the faces of the people above. From time to time I see the Serge July8 I knew before. I also watch sports. These news channels, whether they talk about yellow vests or subway strikes, they're just a flat reflection.
7 Translator's Note: Two French news television channels.
8 Translator's note: French journalist.
Together with Anna-Marie, in Switzerland, we are French asylum seekers who have accepted obedience to Swiss law. We watched French television and read three French periodicals: Le Liberty, The Duck singing and Charlie Hebdo. The rest is gone. I have never read a Swiss journal. We don't know what's going on here. We live here as asylum seekers, receiving passports here, certain laws here. This is important because to me France seems to me to be one of the only countries in the world that draws attention because of its difficulties, its internal problems, its grievances, its laws, and at the same time does not escape from it. It seems to me that here we can find some kind of explanation, as long as the country is still operating in these things that should be made into a movie. So it's impossible to cure a disease with a drug that we haven't invented yet, or that we don't want to invent at all.
Did you read The Liberty today? They have an ad about Samsung folding phones? What intrigued me was that this ad was made with the concept of a book. I crossed out these words on the last page: "Open like a book", "Pillow Book", "Binding", "Back Cover", "Hardcover", "Reading Enjoyment". Although they are pictures, to me they are already images of a text, and they have confessed frankly to themselves. In my sense this is exactly what it is: everything becomes text. The phone is a mini book. Text is more powerful than ever. In an ad, it's just words. If you delete words, you see an inability to show images and words.
They are flat. And there's no longer any possibility of "doing something out of the ordinary"9. The hardest part, Selina says, is to put flatness in a kind of depth. If there is no depth, we just put the flat on the flat. This is disturbing. To put it in terms like what I said to you, this has no impact, I have thought so since fifty years ago.
9 Translator's Note: The original text here is the French proverb "Put your feet into the plain." "It originally meant stepping on the mud and messing things up. The "plain" here and the "flat" in the previous sentence are puns formed by the same word plat.
That's it, that's my situation. I feel lost because I feel like I'm the only one. I've never seen a great writer say, "Language is not words." "The only person I've read about saying this is Robert Redeker10, whom I knew before, and he's a friend of Lanzman's. He wrote: "Language is not speech", while expressing it in words. But that's not enough. So the only thing that made me feel something was the painter. There are also musicians, but I don't know enough about this piece, so I use them only as individual tactics and not as an overall strategy. Painting is going to be another story until impressionism and a little later.
10 Translator's Note: French writer and teacher of philosophy.
Cahiers: You speak of words as an action. In The Book of Images, the actions on the images are clearly visible.
JLG: Yes, but that's in the details. Impressionist and Fauvist painting is my personal interest. My sister Rachel, who was a professor of painting, was the one who made me understand Picasso. "On this face, there is shadow and light, and the shadow is decisively and clearly covering it, making it look like two faces." She could see something I couldn't see. Paintings are always present so because they are not flat. In the era of silent films, there is a very interesting film, Liu Beiqian's "Little Grandma's Fan". Preminger did a remake of it. Liu Beiqian's film is space. Scherer 11... Hou Mai wrote an article, "Film, Space Art", because we always say that film is the art of time. When we compare the two films, Preminger's version is just dialogue and text, a story. If we take the dialogue out, we don't know what's going on. But Liu Beiqian's side, we can completely know. Without the absolute power of dialogue and language, it can't work, just like this advertisement of Samsung. There is another such film, and it comes from the acting skills of the actors, especially the girl, which is the film played by Rose Hobart.
11 Translator's Note: Hou Mai's original name
Cahiers: Frank Bausaki's Lilim?
JLG: That's it. For me, no actress can put on a screen in a state of expressing something at any time. Rose Hobart didn't have a big career because she couldn't star in every film. If we compare Bocchsa's Lilim with Fritz Lang's Lilim, Fritz Lang is obsolete! She has some traits in her. I can't say it. If I were a critic, I would find out the word ...naïve", and that's not enough. This cannot be said, nor does it mean anything: but it can be seen.
Cahiers: A recent book by Jean-Paul Syverak (Why Rose) talks about the mystery of her acting skills in this film.
JLG: Yes, I read it. She is unique. We can rediscover these qualities in some actresses. Adela Harnell has a certain quality, but the film doesn't get to a particularly good point.
Cahiers: Are your doubts about "language" today more from thinking about silent films or the beginnings of sound films?
JLG: No, not especially which one. In Langlois 12, we are taught to think of the films of Garrel, Vennay, or Gill Grangi as well as those of Bausaki. There were only three or four of us. Levitte, Houmai, Truffaut and me.
12 Translator's Note: Henri Langlois (1914-1977) was the co-founder and curator of the French Film Archive.
Cahiers: In the Book of Images, there is also the couple in Duvrenko's "Land" as a very important picture, in a very slow positive and negative fight, very beautiful, very amazing. In your opinion, the couple, there is also "If we are alive / but we are exactly alive!" "What is the importance of this text superimposed on a silent image?
JLG: This text is Brownshaw's. I read his first book at a very young age, probably fifteen or sixteen, and like everyone else, tried to go further, reading "Naja," or Aragon's "Paris Countryman." I tried to do a set of shots in "Our Music" with this text, but it failed completely, so I deleted it. It should be done that the sound is next to the image instead of the true-false 3D inside the image. This is consistent with the real problems of the "Central Region" period. Bernard Eisenschütz13 asked me, "But what is the Central Region?" I replied to him, "It's love." "But very few people feel that way. They prefer to talk about Michael Snow's film.
13 Translator's Note: French historian and film critic.
Cahiers: Everything goes to the woman's face, and we hear, "But we're alive!" It was like finally coming out of a dark forest.
JLG: The second part, "Happy Arabi," for me it's a return to reality, to accept making a flatter movie. We can say that the first part is the most documentary, and the second part is completely fictional, with actors and from a novel. I rewatched the film twice. The first time, I said to myself, "Oh, that's still too much worse, it's bad." "Now I say to myself, it should be bad. We are more flat. The sound is also, and the mix is much more. The TV stereos can't be distinguished, like in a symphony where we ask those things to be played at the same volume at all times. Bad orchestral conducting took the situation out of control.
Cahiers: Are you saying that a flatter moment is effective for the next comeback?
JLG: When the Russians failed against the German army, they began to devote themselves to new offensives. The difference between them is obvious. The German army was very good at local tactics, but there was no overall strategy, except for Hitler's strategy, which was alfred Yari's strategy. And the Russians eventually worked out a different strategy than they had before, and it was very effective.
Goodbye language ( Adieu au langage , 2014)
Cahiers: So the last part of the film is Russia? [Laughs]
JLG: Yes, I will always be on the side of Russia. In Goodbye Speech 14, a girl says, "If Russia is part of Europe, it is no longer Russia." ”
14 Translator's Note: The generic translation is "Goodbye Language", but because the word langage is used in the title of the film, "Goodbye Language" is used in this article.
Cahiers: Did you always know that the film would end up with this "ardent hope"?
JLG: No, I did several endings. I'm extending the film little by little, because I want to remind people of watching something other than Arabie. The text at the end is from Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance.
Cahiers: Have you read him before?
JLG: No, but I know him because he wrote this screenplay, Mara/Thaad. For the film, I read three volumes of The Aesthetics of Rebellion, 1,000 pages. It was his own story, from the beginning of the Spanish War until the end of his flight to Sweden and the sight of Brecht there. A lot of them are read in parallel while making the film. News shows say the word "parallel," but they're actually talking about vertical (laughs).
Cahiers: You, rather, "counterpoint"15 points... You distinguish between "counterpoint" and "harmony.".
JLG: Yes, it's "counterpoint" and "melody." The two are together. I sent Nicole a riddle about this. Just as the Sphinx posed riddles to its three Oedipus, or to its three Antigones (Editor's Note: Nicole Brenez, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Fabrice Aragno16), I asked them a small question (laughs). Nicole answered me with a different allusion that made me think... Anaxagoras Chomet17, one of the leaders of the Paris Commune during the Revolution, together with Eberl18, founded the Conservatory in 1973, during the Reign of Terror. This is particularly extraordinary. Two centuries later, this inspired me to put a scene in German Nine Zero. Visiting the old studio in the Babelsburg Studios, which began to fall into ruins, Eddie Constantine asked count Seltain: "When darkness falls, will we still have music?" Seltan, I asked him to say something from Brecht: "Yes, there will be music about this darkness." I asked Nicole, without telling her all of this: "Is there a connection between this and that?" She couldn't answer because it was very personal. But I did make some connections and proximity. Stay close or out.
15 Translator's Note: The counterpoint method refers to the harmony of two melodies in music creation that sound at the same time and are independent of each other. Also refers to the meaning of "simultaneously".
16 Translator's Note: Nicole Brenez, see 1, Producer. Jean-Paul Battaggia, producer. Fabrice Aragno, Swiss director and editor with Godard.
17 Anaxagoras Chaumette, referring to Pierre Gaspard Chaumette.
18 Translator's Note: Refers to Jacques Hébert, a journalist during the French Revolution.
Cahiers: Assembling together "distant and appropriate" realities, as Le Verdi said 19. You weave several threads at the same time.
JLG: Yeah, Persian carpets are very similar to this. Persian carpets are all swastikas.
19 Translator's Note: From the french poet Pierre Le Verdi's "Image". The interviewer mentions the poem here because the poet discusses in the poem that the birth of the image is due to "the closeness of two more or less distant realities to each other", which is related to the previous text. And the poem is often quoted by Godard.
Cahiers: For example, what does joseph de Meister's line in the Book of Images do—in those terrible sentences when he speaks of the laws of the universe? destroy?
JLG: I didn't know him at all before. I met him unexpectedly because of an article. It's all incredible. And he was the French ambassador in St. Petersburg. I said to myself, there is an opportunity to talk about war.
Barbarossa 1941: Absolute War
Cahiers: He even spoke of massacres. It was a moment of despair, but it was also a moment of absolution, for human beings were grasped by the laws of the universe.
JLG: World War II is still widely studied from different perspectives. I'm reading a very thick book, Barbarossa 1941: Absolute War (by Jean Lopez, Lasha Otkhmezuri), about the German invasion of Russia. The battle was just a confrontation of texts, and there was no difference between the soldier's diary and the official speech: there was nothing but text against the text. Every time Stalin uttered a word, ten thousand people died. The same goes for Hitler. I wouldn't say the plural "chevaux" because then there were also "cavalerie20" ( cavalerie20 ) . That's why I show a fallen horse from time to time.
20 Translator's Note: Singular, refers to all horses in a unit (circus or army).
Cahiers: You mentioned horses, which is interesting. Speaking of some kind of evolution of your films, there are more and more animals in your films: your dog Roxy in Goodbye Speech, parrots, cats and alpacas in Movie Socialism...
JLG: Yeah, little by little it became like this. I used to have a dog that I really liked. Roxy reminds me of it. I gave Anne Vyazemsky a dog. There was always something out there, and now, that's the animals. I fully support L214 French Society for the Protection of Animals, although I was not involved.
Cahiers: The gaze of animals seems to have become important to you. In Cinematic Socialism, you focus the camera on the alpaca's head and its big black eyes.
JLG: There is no comparison between a dog and an actor. Legend has it that god made the monkeys speak, and the monkeys said, "Don't." "We understand monkeys. God left them with gestures. Dogs are at the same time confused, likable, and open,unless they stand upright and prepare for war. The alpaca of Film Socialism, I saw it on a ranch ten kilometers away from here and photographed it. Donkeys, of course. I have a great appreciation for Bassat the Donkey, and while it's not the perfect best thing bresson has, his best is Escape from a Death Row.
死囚越狱(A Death Row Inmate Escaped,1956)
Cahiers: Why do you like this film the most?
JLG: Because in every shot, the film is true to its title. It's a film that starts with two hands. I felt like I had solidarity and I was right to start the film with my hands! It is these hands that seek escape. And, in every shot, the camera will always seek escape. Without exception. The Judgment of Joan of Arc has a bit of a sense of the same, but more in strengthening itself—keeping it as it is (it folds its arms). The other is the escape.
Charlie Hebdo published a collection of François Kavana's previous writings. In one of them, he speaks of horses and their eyes that disappeared at the end of the road. The same is true for birds. Most obviously, it is the dog, which has a human gaze that humans do not have. It's unique.
Cahiers: There's a wonderful quote in Goodbye Speech: "A dog loves you more than it loves its own being." ”
JLG: This is Rilke. Or there must be great writers who pursue to move elsewhere21... I moved with Roxy.
21 Translator's Note: Rilke moved to Switzerland in 1919 and remained until his death.
Cahiers: If language is a word of order, and it inspires a thousand words in a word, what does the Book of Images do to make us listen in a different way?
JLG: Or forget about it. Or it leads to the idea that in the image appears a discourse, a discourse toward which Heidegger has not been able to go any further, a discourse that can occasionally be touched by poetry. For example, Rimbaud.
Cahiers: At the end, Anna-Marie Mievel says we don't have enough to listen. Is it listening to the world?
JLG: It's not necessarily listening to the world, if it's in the sense that we're just going to do a "listen" unfortunate movie that exists everywhere.
Cahiers: Listen to animals, nature...
JLG: Yes, or something else entirely. Sociologist/philosopher Elias Canetti, best known for his writings on the masses, said that people never grieve enough to make the world better. Earlier, he had spoken of land being "inundated with letters." He was supporting me in his way. When we speak of language, I mean the letters in the alphabet, not Plato's Book of Jane 22.
22 Translator's Note: The letter and the book are a pun on lettre.
Cahiers: What about words?
JLG: Speech, not something that speaks, can only be revealed or heard a little. Technically, movies can do it. Algorithms can't do it no matter how they try. For me, words are rubens' painting, The Cursed Autumn.
Of course, I use language to answer technical questions. But how to cook an egg? The first person to do it didn't have words to describe it. In my next film — I don't think I can do it, I'm too old, and there's still something that I'd be hard to do in the context of the film — there's a set of shots in which I rethink Nisephone Neps. I asked Nicole questions so that she could ask her about her students at La Fémis. When Nisephone Niepps managed to take his first picture by his window, what did he think? Can we imagine its contents today? Did he say to himself, "What did I just do?" "And what do we, we think he did today? What did he actually do? He then spent a lot of time fixing the picture, and Daguerre and he fought over this. I call this set of shots "Fixed Ideas"23.
23 Translator's Note: idée fixe, here a pun intended as a specific expression meaning "fixed ideas".
Suddenly I spoke again about the German-Russian campaign, because it was my childhood, and no one told me that. I was interested in learning what kind of world people lived in back then, even in Switzerland at the time. "Fixed ideas" come from this. With the idea of "fixation", I tried to find other fixed points: the greeting of the army, the standing upright, and so on.
What did Neps think? I have no definitive answer. Today's filmmakers think they press the boot button, they shoot an apple tree or a strike, and they have a real moment. Not far from here there is a film festival, in Nyon, called "Reality Vision". Neps must have thought of something. Cinema is different from videography. The Lumière brothers, when they filmed the factory gates, were nowhere near the same thing. Do they want to have found a machine and press its boot button and we get the truth? Then we write a huge amount of text. Is this true? Is this reality? feature film? documentary? Then we see that it's all fake. What we see is still the evil of language. All wars, from the 18th century to the present, have been declared in advance. Because the text is completely powerful. And we continue to proclaim, to make declarations, just to be elected.
Cahiers: Today we are always declaring disasters. There is some kind of end-time desire.
JLG: But in this desire for disaster, Hollywood has some words. In my exchanges with the Resistance 24, what shocked me — people were always "shocked" (laughs) — was that they said we couldn't make movies at the time, and there was no money to make them25. But you can shoot in London. This kind of thing exists. The Americans shoot, the French don't. I once tried to talk to Stefan Ethel 26 about it, and he was often with activists who were active for Palestine. In addition, he is also the son of the couple who inspired "Zu and Zhan". I asked him through my friend Elias Sanbar27. But he didn't care about it at the time. It was texts, proclamations, pamphlets and poems that made up the resistance. I'm not sure, but there were a lot of texts being published in Switzerland at the time. Aragonese poems were published in editions of La Baconnière and Neuchâtel 28. My French teacher, who replaced a French prisoner of war because of illness, told us, "I don't know what to tell you, but I will let you read the French texts that we are quietly printing today." "In terms of poetry, we were still reading Joseph Maria de Heredia, Legunte de Lière, Theophil Gautier 29; we did not read Lonza 30, we did not read Vivon, we did not read Rimbaud. He also lets us read Aragon's Sadness and Paul Élujah's Freedom, one classical and the other free. These made me "very impressed".
24 Translator's Note: Refers to the "French Resistance Movement" of World War II.
25 Translator's Note: Refers to a time of war.
26 Translator's note: French diplomat, ambassador, humanitarian. Survivors of concentration camps during World War II.
27 Translator's Note: Palestinian historian, writer, diplomat. Ambassador of Palestine to UNESCO.
28 Translator's Note: Swiss Publishing House
29 Translator's Note: All are French poets of the Gauntlet school
30 Translator's Note: Refers to Pierre de Ronza, French poet.
Cahiers: Words and poetry, are they the same thing?
JLG: Yeah, but two different tactics.
Cahiers: What is the tactic of speech compared to the tactics of poetry?
JLG: Poetry, is writing. Words, in fact, cannot be written. It can be painted, sung, chanted, demonstrated. The yellow vest is more of a speech. It is for this reason that three-quarters of the newscasters are at a loss, wondering what language to speak.
Cahiers: Why are yellow vests words?
JLG: Because it can't actually be said. The announcer painstakingly asked the question, "Yes, you don't have a leader?" Do you not know your appeal? They replied, "What do you mean?" ”
Cahiers: So words are not spoken?
JLG: This is what Beggaard said: "We can say everything except what we do that we can't say," even if you talk about your own days. Unless you put that kind of life through fifteen years.
Cahiers: Is the relationship between you and your dog words?
JLG: Ah yes! Especially Anna-Marie, because she is the host. Or maybe the dog is Anna-Marie's master. We got a second one after Roxy, and we found it in a refugee camp, which was a Spanish refugee. It's weird, it's weird-looking. Its two front paws are a little out of the way, because it comes from Spain, and I dare say it is the reincarnation of the soul of a stretcher soldier in an international column battalion. It came to our home and we made our own little refugee camp. Its name is Lulu.
Cahiers: Will it be the next movie? Or even a small short film to shoot it?
JLG: Not yet.
Goodbye Speech (2014)
Cahiers: Is there a word of nature? You often quote Ramuz's Signs among Us,31. We also think of Baudelaire's Yinghe. Is the world a symbolic word?
JLG: If I cite it so often, it's because I was interested in making it into a movie before, but it's still better as a book. I named it as a title for a chapter in the History of Cinema. The textual sign of disaster has never been taken seriously as a sign of disaster. We never say, "How should we do things so that there is no war?" "Today, we're finally seeing the natural environment getting worse and worse and we're starting to do something. But because it's all textual, it doesn't convince me particularly, otherwise it's the movies that point to rising seas or melting glaciers. But these are false texts.
31译者注: Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, Les Signes parmi nouz
Cahiers: You mentioned that we were interested in the Issue of Flora, which we devoted to flora and trees in April.
JLG: Yeah, because there's some words in it. This changed the habitual texts of film reviews, even those I was interested in. This has never been the usual image of the movie: the girl looks at the boy.
Cahiers: What is the origin of the image of Beccacin 32 that is repeated in The Book of Images?
JLG: That inscription is a quote from Bernanos. I showed her so that she could be known in France. She was quiet and silent.
32 Translator's Note: Bécassine, the heroine of the historic French comic strip series Beccacin. The woman in the film in a green dress and a white turban comic, with one finger in one hand. "That inscription" refers to the text about beccasin at the beginning of the film.
Cahiers: Is it her gestures that interest you?
JLG: I didn't even notice before that she wasn't open! It was Anna-Marie and Jean-Paul 33 who brought me to notice. We see her again at the beginning of "Arabie," along with a sentence: "The meaning of what we say comes much more slowly than the meaning of what we do." "Words take more time than actions.
33 Jean-Paul Battaggia, see 16
Cahiers: This is before the keys to Soul Reaper.
JLG: That's it. It is to "lock" with the beginning of a new set of lenses. We will head to another thing. This will take some time because thinking is always slower than acting.
3révolution, from Godard's iPhone
Cahiers: The Book of Images is full of political affirmations: "I will always be on the side of the bomb", "There should be a revolution"...
JLG: "There should be a revolution. "What people hear is just the text. People don't look at images. A donkey and a roll of film were seen rolled out. If a medieval man saw such an image, he would associate the film with a revolution, and at the same time he would say, "Nevertheless, there is a donkey slowly moving forward." "I set three, I believe in three: x + 3 = 1.
I now see flat screens as a disability, especially after goodbye speech 3D— it's just a trick, a stunt, a tactic. One film that impressed us with Anna-Marie's involvement was Piara's Van Gogh. In the film we feel more than one space, which is also due to the fact that it is about Van Gogh's plays and that Piara herself is a painter. Re-watch this film and you will find that there are actually 3D moments in it. I showed you that I took these two shots (he showed us his iPhone). Van Gogh's brother and Dr. Gaschet arrive. The maid stepped out, and Dietron was in her foreground. There is a non-depth of field in this first shot, and the focus falls on the person who arrives. Van Gogh came up behind the maid, slapped her ass, and was slapped. The sense of 3D and space came, not because of his tap, but because of the slap of the pretty girl. The girl's knock replied with an existing slap on her ass. The sense of 3D comes from sound.
Maurice Piara, Van Gogh (1991) (courtesy of Godard)
Another shot, in a slightly forward position: two maids see the arrival of the younger brother Theo. In the corner of the picture, there is a crowd of people visiting. Suddenly we have the impression that this is being shot in 3D – here, there's 2D and there's 3D. Although all are 2D. There are many such moments in the film. Anna-Marie and I both feel that the film is constantly circulating in five or six lenses: Impressionism, paintings, the Paris Commune, alcoholism, and so on. In addition, we each wrote a letter to Piara.
Cahiers: The proportional relationship is amazing.
JLG: It's often a little surprising in the relationships and variations of the lenses that are very different in terms of proportions. Movies, sometimes use depth of field, but in reality there is no real proportional relationship. There is a proportional relationship in Eisenstein's films, but it is so shredded and reassembled that we no longer notice it. I also have some pictures (he continues to flip through his iPhone). This is in the manual that just came out today, and I haven't bought it yet.
But the lady in charge of the newsstand would send it to me. There are two pictures of Joan of Arc. I've asked Jean-Paul to send me a DVD of the movie. There was a cross-page color picture of the little girl, and a movie still. I noticed a big difference between the two eyes. I'm just talking about pictures here, and sometimes it shows something that the whole movie doesn't show. In the first picture, she looks out of nowhere. It doesn't matter what kind of location we say she is in. But I don't know if it's from the movie.
Cahiers: Yeah, it's a shot from the movie.
JLG: But it's a picture shot, not a movie shot anymore. Still, the second image, as a picture, is a cinematic lens. She looked in the direction people were letting her see. I noticed the difference between the gazes. In the first one, people should tell her: "Look at the waves." "It is necessary to discuss the difference between a cinematic picture and a picture that can still remain a picture. If we don't discuss this in a review of Dumont's films, we don't discuss it. In particular, I think this movie has a lot of long shots and fixed shots. The first picture, though not of this American actor, Ross Hobart, is in a sense similar to hers. The second picture, an actor, like Leia Saidu, can do it. But she couldn't do the first one. The little girl in Joan of Arc can do it because she is a ten-year-old child. But in the second picture, she's an actress.
Cahiers: The first picture, although it is less of a movie picture, it is more "cinematic"?
JLG: It's a moment when the film stops, so it becomes a photograph, and therefore it becomes a historical material. I use this to show people. In my film, there is a shot of Monroe taken by Aviton. It was her brooding silhouette, black and white, beautiful. This shot is a set of continuous shots of it. I love making that comparison. At first glance the impression. Because then the second and third eyes are not the same thing at all. Pictures are a kind of first impression. Movies are like this that save something. That's why we also shoot a lot of shots. We think that the impression of the eighteenth eye is bound to be better.
City Lights (1931)
Or like Bresson, in the sixtieth eye. Or like Chaplin in City Lights: the sixth hundred shots can restore the blind woman's sight. I intend to make a passage called "fake news." I don't know if it will be made. I don't even know if I'm going to try to shoot it. I wanted to find a few people on a news show and then go to their house and do a story, privately. But this person is actually another person, not the one on TV. But I don't think anyone would accept that offer. Maybe it was okay when I first finished "Contempt," but not now. And I can't let the actors play it. Because with actors, the follow-up will be twice as long. My famous theorem x+3=1 requires the elimination of two (he continues to flip the phone).
x+3=1 from Godard's iPhone
Cahiers: Do you use your phone as a notepad for an image? As we saw in the Isirawa Film Festival promo, which we directed after your Book of Images.
JLG: Ah yes, they invited me. Holding it, this is a good image of the "evil of language": a serpentine creature emerging from its mouth (Editor's note: This is the cover of a lizard-language issue of the journal Idea, which we took in a subsequent image). And then this, it's a self-portrait drawn with just an iPhone (18 pages).
Cahiers: How would you get started with Fake News?
JLG: I would be like an archaeologist who only works in a specific area and doesn't go to other boundaries. They only collect specific things, like one of my uncles, Theodore Mono 34, who collects stones and branches from the desert. Jean Genet says in Prisoner of Love that in order to find an image, one must go into the desert.
34 Translator's Note: French naturalist, explorer.
Cahiers: At the end of episode 4B, after we've walked through the lost forest of Film History, we get back on the road in the image of a yellow rose in our hands.
JLG: This is a reference to the White Rose, the organization to which the Schauer siblings belonged, the German resistance group that was executed in 1943.
Cahiers: The text says that if a person crosses heaven in his sleep...
JLG: This is Borges's text. After crossing the kingdom of heaven, as proof that he had been there, people would give him a rose.
Cahiers: "What if a man crosses heaven in his sleep, and someone gives him a flower as proof that he has been there, and he wakes up to find the flower in his hand?" I am this person. "In Book of Images, I felt the same way. At the end of the film, with the pitch-black screen "Ardent Hope", it's like you put something in our hands.
JLG: Since the film thinks a lot about war, I don't want people to say to me, "It's a little sad. "Avoid Peter Weiss's texts that speak only of misfortune and frustration. What I like is a kind of overcoming.
Cahiers: It's as if you're actually trying to have an effect in reality.
JLG: That's what you think. But I don't think so. There is a quote from the author Denis de Rougemont that I also like to quote, "In hope, we are alive." And what made me laugh was that he added next, "But this hope is true." ”
Cahiers: Why end with The Mask from Joy?
JLG: We are still rejoicing.
Cahiers: We are still dancing on the abyss.
JLG: Yes, we have hope.
Cahiers: In Joy, it's better to say hope than to fantasy.
JLG: In Maupassant's novels, men are brought back to his home and his wife takes off his mask. People see an old man who still wants to enjoy more life.
Cahiers: It's both hope and fantasy. This is always dialectical.
JLG: Yes, dialectical. In Cinematic Socialism, there is a beautiful passage from Sartre that says that dialectics is at the same time "all" and its opposite, "nothing" and its opposite. At the beginning of Goodbye Speech, there is another passage from Sartre's text on the definition of philosophy: "Philosophy is a being, for which it resides in its existence, interrogates its existence, and exists for itself at the same time implying another existence different from itself." "Both leftist and classicist! I am one of only a few people who think Sartre's prettiest text is about painting. In a text about Lapzad 35, a painter of the fifties and sixties, he writes: "It is a pity that the indignation did not reach his pen. "This is consistent with my long-standing view of the so-called struggle film (cinéma militant) 36. Three-quarters of the struggle films, their indignation has never reached its pen.
35 Translator's Note: Robert Lapoujade is a French painter and film director.
36 Translator's Note: A genre of cinema in the French left-wing film movement.
We walked upstairs. Upstairs is a string of Godard's offices and editing rooms. Deep in the editing room, we found shelves filled with books and DVDs. At the foot of the shelf is an image of the "evil nature of language": a lizard emerges from its mouth. On one side of the shelf, there is the VHS of Jean Cocteau's portfolio, which contains Orpheus's Testament, which is "the closest film to the Book of Images," Godard whispers to us.
"That's the script for the next movie, and it's called The Script." On each shelf, there is a paragraph. These are the six passages of the movie. Now, it's done. It's like a combat sequence. We will not change it. It took six months, one year. 'De Natura Rerum', 'Akhenaton', 'Le député d'Arcis', 'Fake news', 'L'idée fixe', 'Avec Bérénice'. 'The Councillor of Arcey' is a novel from Balzac about a provincial election. 'Akhenaten', to go this way, in order to form a rupture. This is a very beautiful novel from Najib Mahafoz, probably adapted from other films, about a child investigating Akhenaten, who created the one god Pharaoh. ”
In the office, Godard showed us his film ledger.
"This is the script for the six-paragraph Script. The cover is a painting from Parajanov. On the page of the last chapter, "With Berenice," we find a satirical cartoon by Emmanuel Macron drawn by Coco in Charlie's Weekly, flanked by an excerpt from Racine's tragedy, slightly altered with alteration fluid, "In January, in a year, how much suffering have we suffered, / My Lord, how much bitterness has separated us?" (Replace "sea" mer with "bitter" amer).
Cahiers: During the Ciné-tract period, you worked with the painter Gerald Flemish.
JLG: He tried to make me learn to draw. I was willing, but then I found out that his paintings were very systematic. Together we made a movie about flowing blood. Lately I've been forgetting what I was going to say... When I was older, three-quarters of my words disappeared away from me. They used to be used so repeatedly. Then they would occasionally obediently come back for a little while. And I don't quite believe them, which is even more so.
Cahiers: That's not terrible either!
JLG: Yeah, it's not bad! I don't care. If I can't get my head around it, I can go straight to sleep without thinking about it. If they are willing to come back, they will come back. I reread Michelet's History of the French Revolution. Arrest of Fabre d'Églantine. It was he who formulated the Revolutionary Calendar 37. He was a poet and playwright. I can't even remember the first few sentences of "It's raining, it's raining, Shepherd Girl"38. Now that I remember...
37 Translator's Note: The calendar adopted during the French Revolution later became the French Republican calendar (calendrier républicain). It was developed by mathematicians Joseph Lagrange, Gaspar Monge and poet Fabre Degrantine.
38 Translator's Note: "It's Raining, It's Raining, Shepherd Girl" is a famous French song from the opera version of Fabre Degrantin's 1780 play Laure et Pétrarque ., written by Fabre Degrantine.
Cahiers: "Secrets and Laws", the title of the interview with Jacques Rivitt by Hélène Frappat (Film Handbook No. 720, March 2016), appears in The Book of Images, and you said it in the Leviater Tribute to the Film Archive, a phrase that sums it all up. And Levitte is in a dialectic between the secret (private) and the law (symbolic). But we feel that for you, the law in the Book of Images is an illusion that cannot last long. Henry Fonda was obsessed with getting law books in Young Lincoln, and three minutes later he was behind the wooden bar in The Book of Grievances because the law/law was unjust.
JLG: I quite appreciate this interview with Rivitt. They change the law in order to keep it alive. I don't see him the same way, at least in the movies.
Further reading: Deep Focus Translation of Secrets and Laws
Cahiers: You're more of an anti-law.
JLG: Yes, but I like the law, tennis.
Cahiers: It's not the rule, it's more of a rule, the game rule 39!
JLG: People agree on the rules of the game.
39 "Rules of the Game" and Renoir's "Rules of the Game" are puns.
Cahiers: Thanks to the football video, we get the impression that everybody has discovered the ambiguity of the image to the rules.
JLG: I always support referees. For video screens, I don't trust them. I doubt the fact that the referee showed him the exact footage when he verified the arbitration. Once shown to him, people say something. There is a second interpretation. I prefer simple rules, referees making mistakes, audience screams, and so on. Then if a goal is judged valid or invalid, you can only fight for the next goal.
What I love about football is that it connects me to my youth. I often live in the memories of my youth or a little older period, while saying , "It was better in the first place." "My interest in what is happening today has always been to maintain the idea of "better then", like a dialectical subject. It's too bad now/it was better then/but maybe it's not that bad now.
Cahiers: You mentioned the difficulties of France at the beginning, and it was these difficulties that made the country interesting. Why?
JLG: France is going in an unknown direction. It brings in everything it can accommodate. It says, but it doesn't know anything about it. There are people who can see things, but unfortunately they don't do anything other than write books and make movies. Me or Jean-Marie Straub, we don't make movies to change the world. We make movies to see something, and that's it. To me, Straub is some sort of remnant sculpted and polished by his intransigence, because we will eventually accept it. His film is not flat, because we can feel it digging in and out all the time. Although this example is too big – but like Michelangelo drilling his marble. His films about Cézanne or Montaigne, or his latest film (Editor's Note: The Lakeside Man), about a Vaud ferryman who smuggled refugees and members of the Resistance between Thonon and Lausanne 40, were more honorable, if not sometimes beautiful.
40 Translator's Note: Thonon, referring to Thanon-les-Bains, a municipality in the northern part of the French province of Savoie, is located on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. Lausanne, a Swiss city, is located on the north shore of Lake Geneva.
JLG: I've found that France copes better with the other Latin countries than the semi-Nordic countries. The Nordic countries have realized their socialism, their capitalism, in their own way. France, on the other hand, is in a state of turbulence. In Peter Weiss's book, there is a good analysis of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. Not about the woman who held high the flag, but about a gentleman in a top hat, a middle-class man. This character sparked me to think about Angela, the hero on the barricade in Les Misérables, but it wasn't really the same because Angela was a pure, hard-working activist, compared to Romain Goupil 41, if you want to say. Guppile, I knew him when he came out of high school in '68 and founded the Vietnam Committee for High School Students. Now he's on shows at BFM and LCI. In Peter Weiss's book, the author himself, a German who survived the Spanish International Column, came to Paris and the first thing he did was go to the Louvre. He saw this man dressed in middle-class clothing, with a rifle but not firing. According to Weiss's analysis, he hesitated to shoot or not. He intends to participate in the demonstrations. He resonated, but he also had timidity. Like Frederick Morrow in Emotional Education, he assisted in the 1848 National Guard offensive. He recognized an old friend there. Flaubert's sentence was wonderful: "And Frederick, stunned, recognized the policeman as Seneca." "Seneca used to be a leftist. And after that, a wonderful montage: "He's on his journey again." ” 42
This inspired me that after the first part, I began the content of the Far East with "Happy Arabi".
41 Translator's Note: The French director, who is highly politically intervening, was a student leader and a Trotskyist activist who supported Macron's election.
42 Translator's Note: These two sentences are the last sentence of one chapter and the first sentence of the next chapter, respectively. The "he" here refers to the protagonist, Frederick.
Cahiers: The movie is a journey, and we've set off from the moment we got on the train.
JLG: Yes, I've seen a review article about "that amazing passage about trains". They speak of the train itself, not where it passes.
Christian Macray", "The Bell"
Cahiers: Yes, for example, a contemporary artist can meaningfully collect a whole bunch of images of trains, like Christian Macrae's clock image in The Clock.
JLG: I hate this, but people love it. It is a fetish collection. Surrealism at least seeks collage.
Cahiers: So in these works of the artist, there is a lack of rapport(43).
JLG: I've never seen a government deliver a rapport delivered in a cinematic way. They may be left to filmmakers to write. If it's Ruffin, he can. In those days, they could have gone to Chris Mark. He's really good at reporting (rapport). I pay more attention to the philosophy and science of rapport .) In school, there is a gadget called rapporteur. I'm called "despicable rapporteur" because I play small reports. The French language, in its evil nature, seems to me to have some qualities that make it more interesting than other languages.
43 Translator's Note: This paragraph will begin with a great deal of polysemantic puns on the word rapport. The translator will translate the corresponding meaning and mark all the original texts involving puns.
François Ruffin, French journalist, filmmaker, writer and politician.
Cahiers: Is the French language more multi-layered and ambiguous?
JLG: There are many associations (rapports). And in these rapports, we can find more "distant and appropriate" things, as Le Verdi 45 called for. Recently, I re-watched two previous films on DVD, and I think they are a harbinger of where I am right here: New Wave and Made in America. Made in America, because of the way I made it, I didn't like it so much. This work is all about pleasing Bolegard 46 and was shot at the same time as "I Know Her A Little Bit". A bit of a pandering feeling, an hour and a half long, procrastinating paragraph. Now I see it as a film of painting, just piece after piece of color, and an anarcho-left-radicalism – I don't know what that is... of the script. The New Wave, in contrast, is only text. I've had someone who asked for help, Hervé Duhamel, to help me collect sentences that are interesting or, in his words, "impactful." But nothing else!
45 Translator's Note: See 19
46 Refers to Georges de Beauregard, a French filmmaker.
New Wave (Nouvelle vague, 1990)
Cahiers: New Wave isn't nothing else... There is light, there is nature, there is high tide and low tide.
JLG: Yeah, there's that back-punch shot. But it's an almost entirely textual film.
Cahiers: In The Book of Images, at the beginning of Happy Arabi, there are several wonderful shots of the sea, like marine landscapes. You re-filmed the sea after the lake in "Goodbye Words", and at the end of "Pierrot the Madman", Rimbaud's "Sea with the Sun".
JLG: Yes, but it's a critic who looks at the evolution of an artist's work. I don't think about that when I'm shooting.
Cahiers: At the beginning of Cinematic Socialism, it's a sea as dark as oil. You are one of the few marine painters who have rarely been found.
JLG: Although it was after Impressionism. Epstein and Flahadi did too.
Cahiers: Who read the text from Albert Cossery's Une ambition dans le désert?
JLG: Jean-Pierre Gos, I saw him acting in the theatre in Lausanne. He starred in one of my short films, Freedom and the Motherland. I'd rather find another actor, but that's what I told him. There was a transit process between me and him. The process by which his voice reached me always made me feel some discomfort. Like all announcers, he has a voice that rises whenever a certain fact is spoken. I prefer a low-pitched voice, like a full stop. Actors don't know how to read sentences that well. The semicolon will not be used at all. They can't tell the difference between colons, semicolons, periods, and commas. This should be four different tones. This is something that some old actors, like Alain Güny, know very well.
Cahiers: You still believe in this metric rule?
JLG: Very little, but this one I will.
Cahiers: "Fervent Hope" where the cough punctuation is particularly powerful.
JLG: It's unintentional. I only recorded it twice because what I said was almost exactly the same text, and there was one track that was repeated. Just before that, there is a text of Marx and Engels about Eugène Sue that we don't understand at all (laughs).
Cahiers: Actually...
JLG: You have to watch with the corresponding equipment, listen to what the left channel says. Let's write it down. Then listen to what the right voice says. We write it down and compare: "Ah yes, it's not the same text." Another passage that is also like this is about Robespierre 47's speech at the National Convention, which was filmed as a passage from a film by Stellio Lorenzi. In that era, television was not bad.
47 Statesman during the French Revolution, de facto supreme leader during the Jacobin dictatorship.
Cahiers: In the film, you remake pictures of Truffaut, Houmai, and Levitte. After that it was three people together.
JLG: For me, these are the three of the New Wave. Less than Houjiye is not in the manual, but he is a new wave alone. Chablore is out of this.
Cahiers: Or even films that preceded Good Women?
JLG: At the time, I believed him. But he's more about selling movies. Truffaut, I can't help but count him. Chabrol, even if he had written a Hitchcock 48, he was just a pharmacist. Still, he made a series of incredible films. Once, I tried to find "Two-Faced Spy" based on a novel by Simone Beauvoir. I didn't know about the film before.
48 Translator's Note: Refers to Hitchcock's monograph co-authored with Houmai.
Jean-Pierre Moch
Cahiers: Did the passing of Jean-Pierre Moch touch you?
JLG: People are nice. I like him as a person, not a movie. I would think they're good because he made these films. There's one I really like, but he doesn't like that much, Sewing Machine.
Cahiers: Do you often think back to your time in the Handbook?
JLG: Yeah, that was my life.
In the first room upstairs, we found these paintings leaning against the wall at the very bottom of the collection. Godard put one of them on his desk: "This is a gouache painting of the sky that I copied from Delacroix, but it's a watercolor." We offered to take a picture of him: "Okay, just take a copy of Rembrandt or Velázquez out..." He came to the window and held Velázquez in his arms.
Cahiers: That's the beauty of the Book of Images. A stack of various lives. You save them all with you.
JLG: I started with the second volume of the Film Journal, when it was still in Galima Press; then it was because of Doniol Vaquejos 49 that I gradually came to the 50 Handbook. Doniol Vaquejos is the son of a good friend of my mother's when she was in Victor-Durvay High School. I think he welcomed me because of this relationship, but I didn't know until after he was demobilized and moved to Switzerland. It was my mother who helped him cross into France to Tonon and put him on a small motorboat that we called the "United Line" (which we often took to vacations in my grandfather's estate). I learned about these things after the death of Doniol Vaquejos. I was not opposed to the direction of the Manual at the time, when he was editor-in-chief with Bazin.
He was a "good guy" in the true sense of the word. Bazin, I don't know Truffaut at all. I met Bazin when he was the head of a communist organization, Labor and Culture, opposite the National Higher Academy of Fine Arts. Opposite that was a small bookstore owned by a Rouen friend of Rivette at the time. It's a story I need to add a little bit from the middle, to tell it, not from the beginning, but all of these stories I want to preserve. I was as careful as the figure in Delacroix's painting. I stole a little money from one of my uncles to fund Riviette's first short film, Quadrilateral.
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, one of the founders of The Film Handbook.
50 Translator's Note: Actually Godard uses the word "back" here.
Cahiers: Who do you feel closest to?
JLG: Levitte. After that, it was Truffaut, but before he made Naughty Ghost. I don't know if he was married to Madeleine Morgansten at that time, and I liked her a lot. He became rich during that period. Madeleine Morgan's father was the manager of a north-and-Paris-based distribution company called Cocinor. When Truffaut wrote A Certain Trend in French Cinema, I started playing with him a lot. Less with Levitte. We would go to the movies at two o'clock in the afternoon and not come out until midnight because it was the permanent time of the theater. I would go an hour or two early and Riviter always stayed until the end. Hou Mai has another life. He was a teacher and lived in a small hotel opposite the Sorbonne. His name was Scherer, and he began writing it "Houmai" to keep his mother from knowing about his fallen cinematic life. These are three particularly different friends. With Scherer— whom I've always called Sherrell——, Rivier and Truffaut, it was a truly like-minded camaraderie. Scherer was one of only a few people to know which woman I loved. And I'm the only one who knows he likes the wife of a former president (communist) of CNC51.
Hume is ten years older than me, and he neutralizes Bazin and Pierre Kast. In The Book of Images, there is a shot of the liberation of Paris. We saw the back of an FFI52 with a rifle on his back and was talking to a kneeling woman. For me, the man with the opposite back has always been Pierre Custer. I hope this is true.
51 Translator's Note: French National Film and Animation Center.
52 Translator's Note: French Internal Affairs Force.
Cahiers: We sense that you didn't discuss politics in the manual at that time.
JLG: Very little. It's about movies. Even if it's about girls, it's a very private discussion. I remember one time during the Algerian War, Rivitt and I were in Alma Square when we encountered a vehicle that sounded the 53 whistle of the Secret Army. I saw this as a shot of Douglas Syke, and Levitt scolded me. At that time, I couldn't define the members of the manual politically. The best definition is Straub, because he's been there since the beginning.
53 Refers to the OAS, an underground military mutiny organization composed of former officers in the Algerian war, extremists in the "black feet" and sympathizers in mainland France.
Cahiers: You mentioned some of the difficulties in France. You also saw the situation deteriorate in 2019 due to police violence. There is a sense of an expansion of police power.
JLG: This has evolved very badly and it's disgusting. But when it comes to this, I'll stay in the movie. I am Swiss. I couldn't run in the elections in France, so I came as a foreigner. A Swiss trip in France... But what you call the expansion of police power, it is true that it is everywhere. Russia is worse than France. I've always had a fear of the police and military service. I am not against bombs, but against militarism. People forget that when I said in the Book of Images, "I'm on the side of the bomb," the image was of a man petting an antelope. People no longer associate text with images; they turn a blind eye to images when they contradict them. I don't know if the image crosses the text or if the text crosses the image.
Cahiers: For the first time, what I saw was touching. The second time I saw the image stained with text. I also saw the fear of the antelope.
JLG: It's best to review it two or three times in order to take the exam. At the time of the shear, I did not see the fear of the antelope in the sense you said. It's trembling, but just like when we pet a dog they shake their bodies. Our dog, the old stretcher soldier in Spain, we took it to the club three days a week. I don't know why, but it likes to howl at the moon. We don't know if it was because it made it think of the past and frightened it, because it was once a street dog. We also don't know if it's because it's happy because it loves the place. Moreover, it is particularly violent in this behavior. It had to growl toward the moon, as in Jack London's novel.
I recently watched a short film, Rozier's Naughty SchoolBoy. It was basically the first environmental film, much earlier than anyone else. It's a film about a rebellion against civilization, like Thoreau's. I support the rebellion, but I'm in the movie to support it. For a while, I believed I could take care of the world's business. When Anna-Marie scolds me, she will say to me, "Go around the world and make your revolution, not in a café today!" (Laughs).
Cahiers: Humor in particular should be maintained.
JLG: We've also seen how difficult it was for Charlie Hebdo to find another cartoonist. I've always felt that William 54 is extraordinary. If people are not yet in a kind of suffering that is too dark, it is better to say, "This is a beautiful and sad time." ”
54 Translator's Note: Refers to Bernard Willem Holtrop, a Dutch cartoonist based in France, known for his political violence and sexuality.
Cahiers: This era is beautiful and sad, but art and artistic thought are also being buffeted by the cult of technology.
JLG: Capitalism advocates the individual—the individual it tries to conquer with advertising, but at the same time maintains its own individuality. Yes, it's sad. One has to have a lot of philosophical ideas, or a lot of enthusiasm, like Edgar Moran, to think that everything is wonderful (laughs). Harmful things exist, that is, people's eternal desire to invent and create. Just stop.
I'm currently reading a math book that I don't know very well, about Georg Cantor. He lived in isolation and then became a little crazy. He is committed to thinking about infinity in mathematics. This kind of thinking raises many questions and becomes a kind of text. I would love to learn about the history of mathematics without understanding it. Husserl once asked, "Is the whole of infinity greater than the part of infinity?" "For me, this question doesn't make any sense, it's just a kind of text. Better to look at Monet's paintings.
I have a project about a 19th-century Norwegian mathematician, Nils Henrik Abel. He is thought to have discovered the fifth equation 55. I, a man stuck in quadratic equations, pondered something here that needed to be understood. He came to Paris and submitted his theorem to cauchy, a mathematician at the Academy of Sciences, but the latter was not taken seriously. He came and went on foot from Norway. Eventually he proved that the root solution of the fifth-order equation is impossible. Since then, there has been an Abel Prize, like the Fields Medal. I wanted to make a movie about his journey. On the way, he proved all the way what he wanted to show in Paris, and then on the way back, he began to falsify.
55 Translator's Note: In fact, Abel proved that the root formula of the quaternary equation is unsolvable, and proposed the Abell equation in the study of elliptic functions.
In the radical years, we said to ourselves, "There is no more word to proclaim the Vietnam War." Yet we're still completely "not at the end of the pen," but we're trying. We have brushes and colors. I once proposed to make a film in Northern Vietnam. People withdrew from the bombing. People were evacuated from a class that was learning Berenis 56. We then hid it in an underground bomb shelter and continued the course. The last shot is of them continuing to study Berenice: "In January, in a year, how tortured we suffered"... It's here that it doesn't feel good, too tactical, too precise. But this passage from Racine's work will appear in my next film, The Screenplay. I will think about how to put these up little by little, how the rivers will gradually merge into the river, and how the road will go down.
56 Translator's Note: Playwright Jean Racine Works.
Interviewers Stéphane Delorme, Joachim Lepastier
18 September in Basil
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