Page - 89 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

88 | Vuk Uskoković www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 that Godard kills the protagonists in countless of his movies, from À bout de souffle (FR 1960) to Vivre sa vie (FR 1962) to Pierrot le fou (FR/IT 1965), that is, to demonstrate that the best lived life is life selflessly streaming toward the extinguishment of this very life and toward the unreserved merging with the world. Hence, “it was as if I were the world and the world were me”, says Juli- ette in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1967).15 To that end, Godard fragments the world, inner and outer, into the finest of pieces, producing a sense that something is missing, that something has been lost, be- ing the cracks through which one falls and arrives at the penultimate freedom and connectedness of all things. Annihilation of the artist symbolized by the death of his protagonist also serves the purpose of liberating him from the limitations of the given art and releasing him into the freeness of being, a state of mind in which literally everything be- comes a piece of art worthy of astonishment and in which creation becomes guid- ed by Godard’s norm, “Things are there, why manipulate them”.16 This, in a way, is the logical extension of Dziga Vertov’s idea that the most authentic cinema grows not from a fictional construction of the filmed material, but from an impromptu immersion of the eye of the camera into the world, as spontaneous, unpredict- ably evolving and tuned to the spirit of the moment as it can be. In its extreme, terminal destination, this approach to artistic creation echoes the way of Friedrich Munro from Wenders’ Lisbon Story (DE/PO 1994) and his shooting movies by walking around the city with a camera tied to his back, sticking on to Nabokov’s finding patches of butterfly’s wings more artistically pleasing than “dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die”17 and seeing everything as an equally blissful art – preconceived or spontaneously captured, directed or natural, structured or arbitrary. Through one such liberation, the viewer immortalized in the following line from Histoire(s) du cinema: La Mon- naie de l’absolu is rescued from the desensitization of the senses, that is to say, from the blindness that confinement to the cinematic world imminently leads to: A German, Erich Pommer, founder of Universal, today Matsushita Electronics, de- clared, “I will make the whole world cry in their armchair”. Can we say he succeeded? On one hand, it is true that newspapers and television all over the world only show death and tears. On the other end, those who stay and watch television have no tears left to cry. They unlearned to see.18 Is this the only thing Godard wishes to tell us with this symbolic act of obliterat- ing the subject, then panning the camera away from it and toward the world, 15 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1967), 00:30:40. 16 Histoire(s) du cinéma: La Monnaie de l’absolu (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/CH 1998), 00:26:10. 17 Gould 2002. 18 Histoire(s) du cinema: La Monnaie de l’absolu (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/CH 1998), 00:06:30.