Would Godart have found out about it, before he decided to leave us, last September? Would he have found out that students of Ecole des Beaux-Arts from Marseille, during one of Didier Morin’s lectures on Le Mépris / Contempt, rushed to unplug the projector while the Brigitte Bardot scene where she rhetorically asks her partner ‘Do you think I have a cute ass? And my breasts. You like them?’ was rolling. The #metoo activists, dreaming of themselves in a ’68 they’ve never experienced, started “defragmenting”, following the hectic spirit of this age, the work of someone who, all his life, has done nothing but deconstruct, systematically, the very conventions of cinema, of reality, making this program one of the most powerful seismographs of contemporary world. He may have found out, he may have not. No wonder an exegete such as André S. Labarthe was writing, two decades ago ‘If filmmakers knew what’s coming, they’d be in tears all the time’. He said it himself, ever since late ‘90s, in his monumental work Histoire(s) du cinéma: “What died was the cinema we had known, the one going from Griffith to me, let’s say. There’s no art on the new cinema because there is still no other age”.
Is that “still” a sign of hope? I’m shrugging my shoulders on this one. What I do know is that, while all major festivals pay tribute to the one who earned his right to be remembered as JLG, and as AperiTIFF asked me to write a few words about it, my first thoughts on Godard’s heritage, the great shape creator who continues to feed generations, were overcome by memories of emotions triggered while watching and then rewatching the above mentioned Histoire(s), a true cinema ceremony. Here, the man of ruthless intellectual emotions, of literary ecstasy, a cynic in showing off, in plain sight, the entrails of an art that was barely taking shape in last hundred years or so, made me take out my handkerchief as if I was an airhead in the middle of a soap opera. The meaning of a history of cinema is – that’s what I learned – to put you on the right path, to help you manage, to get an idea. The path, in such cases, is on the surface, using points of reference.
Godard, however, throws us into the depth, the night of history, where the roots of cinema intertwine and disappear in the fabulous protuberances of painting, where sounds of the great music hide the minute we hear them and where they come out again from when they want to challenge words. We can continue Histoire(s) ourselves with Nana’s face from Vivre sa vie / My Life to Live and her tears borrowed from Renée Falconetti’s image in The Passion of Joan of Arc by Dreyer, with Belmondo imitating Humphrey Bogart – “Great, old Boogie” (A bout de soufle / Breathless. To which we could add the haunting opening assertion of Le Mépris/Contempt, the pious reverence of a painfully lucid creator who often covered his anxiety with histrionism: “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires”.