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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.
JRFM
Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02
- Titel
- JRFM
- Untertitel
- Journal Religion Film Media
- Band
- 04/02
- Autoren
- Christian Wessely
- Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
- Herausgeber
- Uni-Graz
- Verlag
- SchĂĽren Verlag GmbH
- Ort
- Graz
- Datum
- 2018
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- Abmessungen
- 14.8 x 21.0 cm
- Seiten
- 135
- Kategorien
- Zeitschriften JRFM