Page - 106 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

Revisiting the Relevance of Conceptualism of Godard’s Film | 105www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 rejects, which makes one wonder whether the absolute anarchistic rejection of submission to social norms as a key message of his films was hypocritical to some extent, in spite of his frequent reference to the subject of prostitution in an attempt to convey the message that “advertising is a pimp and we are its whores”.54 In any case, as pointed out by David Sterritt, “Godard’s audience must decide whether he and his troops are winning this battle (for freedom) on our behalf, or whether ‘freedom is killing freedom’ in a political-aesthetic skirmish that may prove Pyrrhic at the final fade-out”.55 Asked if he had ever “registered a script for a film”, Godard says, “My scripts are registered in everybody’s daily routine, including yours, so all you have to do is take a look at your own life and you will surely find thousands of them”,56 hinting at the failure of narrative in an absolute cinematic experience. Similarly, when he was asked at a press conference why his films never have a story, he asked back “what’s a story”57 and then, ironically, told a story about his par- ents telling him “not to tell stories” when he was a child and “made up a lot of things”, the advice that would make Bergman’s Alexander Ekdahl58 blink with surprise, but the one he continued to listen to throughout his entire career. Consequently, as a sign of revolt against cinema driven by the narrative and cin- ema as but the right hand of the theater, the concept of the storyline has gradu- ally faded in Godard’s movies as his career progressed. So they evolved from (a) story-driven À bout de souffle to (b) mid- and late-La Nouvelle Vague period, during which he did not reject the concept of the story probably because he knew that it could be deconstructed only insofar as the story is told in one form or the other, to (c) his political documentary era and, finally, to (d) stream-of- consciousness video works in which no storylines or plots whatsoever were left to be deployed, returning to the anti-plot ideology intrinsic to the plot of God- ard’s fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic’s, Jacques Rivette’s, Paris nous appartient (FR 1961), a nucleus around which most pioneers of La Nouvelle Vague gathered and which in many respects helped launch the movement as a whole. As a re- minder, this homage to the aesthetics of Mystery is about a girl caught in a twisted plot revolving around her seeking to solve the murder of a poet who “was plotting”,59 a plot that, as it turned out, was a product of ill imagination of, not accidentally, an American in Paris. In the course of this search, her dear friend and the director of the play in which she acted was murdered, insinuating all the harm caused by the concept of the plot and its devoted following. The 54 Sédouy and Harris 1966. 55 Sterritt 1997. 56 Royer 1999. 57 Royer 1999. 58 Fanny och Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, SE 1982). 59 Paris nous appartient (Jacques Rivette, FR 1961), 00:59:30.