Page - 87 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

86 | Vuk Uskoković www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 central thread of the storyline, must be proud. For I have begun this discourse about Godard, yet already in the first paragraph I wandered off the topic and got so far from the intended subject that we could wonder how I might get back now to this central thread of discourse without making the reader suspi- cious about my ability to run its course. Again, not that Godard would object; in the only movie, albeit short, which he codirected with Francois Truffaut, Une histoire d’eau (FR 1968), a couple gets lost and stranded on a flooded land on their way to Paris and a woman, the protagonist – lest the screenwriter, as it were, be a hypocrite for not reflecting the sense of being lost, the major point of the movie, at each and every of its levels – tells a story about Louis Aragon lecturing at the Sorbonne on Petrarch by starting off with a 45-minute-long eulogy about Matisse, then being interrupted by a student who demanded he move to the subject and finishing the sentence cut short by the student with the claim that the originality of Petrarch “lay precisely in the art of digression”5. This, however, brings us over to two other major points of Godard’s philoso- phy that he conveyed through his filmmaking. First, in agreement with Warren McCulloch’s view of life as a construct made of “unreliable components that achieve reliable outcomes”,6 the life Godard praised is the life of Outlands, life lived in complete contrast to that of machinelike Alphaville, wherein everything proceeds according to preplanned programs and nothing is ever lost. If “behav- ing illogically”7 – such as by considering faith and love as meaningful for human existence8 or expressing grief or joy through crying9 – was a crime calling for capital punishment in the dystopian city of Alphaville, then the necessity to fall apart every now and then, into pieces, semantically and existentially, was an anarchic standpoint naturally praised and promoted by Godard. Secondly, the greatness of an act in Godard’s microcosm is determined by how far it reaches away from itself. “The greatness of a piece of art equals the distance between the two concepts that it brings together”, as Godard himself says in Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une Vague Nouvelle.10 “Bring things together that don’t seem ready to be”, he says on another occasion.11 The farthest beginnings and ends, theses and antitheses are thus called to be merged in our expressions, yielding little or big Hegelian syntheses and bursts of light emerging from them. “Phi- losophy is a being, the heart of it being the question of its being insofar as this being posits a being other than itself” is what Godard says in Adieu au Langage 5 Une histoire d’eau (Jean-Luc Godard / François Truffaut, FR 1968), 00:04:10. 6 Beer 1999. 7 Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1965), 00:42:20. 8 Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1965), 00:43:20. 9 Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1965), 00:42:30; 00:46:30. 10 Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une Vague Nouvelle (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/CH 1998), 00:21:10. 11 Histoire(s) du cinéma: Les Signes parmi nous (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/CH 1998), 00:27:20.