Seite - 93 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

92 | Vuk Uskoković www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 QUESTIONING ART THROUGH ARTISTIC EXPRESSION Perhaps the most essential element of Godard’s art, embraced unequivocally by all the French New Wave filmmakers, was the dual path of cinematic crea- tion that the artist is supposed to follow. His 1967 manifesto, correspondingly, states only the following: Fifty years after the October Revolution, the American industry rules cinema the world over. There is nothing much to add to this statement of fact. Except that on our own modest level we too should provoke two or three Vietnams in the bosom of the vast Hollywood-Cinecitta-Mosfilm-Pinewood etc. empire, and, both economi- cally and aesthetically, struggling on two fronts as it were, create cinemas which are national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship.22 The two fronts Godard mentions are points 1 and 2 of his 1970 manifesto,23 re- flecting the dual nature that a work of art is to ideally embody: (1) we must make political films; (2) we must make films politically. Hence, one of these paths leads to constructive critique of the art of cinema, a precept that goes back to Sartre’s observation that the artist is, more than anything, expected to call into question the art itself.24 The other one, however, leads to the provision of an absolute cinematic experience. Accordingly, one ought to strive to be a storyteller and inspire the audiences with the aesthetics of a plethora of elements of cinematic expression, from choreography to cinematography to character development and beyond, but at the same time one ought to pose implicit questions through one’s art, questions that shake the reigning paradigms in the realm of cinema at their foundations. For some members of the French New Wave, such as Truffaut or Rohmer, this balance appeared to have been effortlessly maintainable. In the case of Godard, however, there was a pervasive inclination toward film critique at the cost of deliberately deconstructed and thoroughly ad hoc improvised sto- rylines. Hence his famous remark, “I don’t make movies; I make cinema.”25 It is for this reason that I revert to the point made earlier: has Godard only ever been just another film critic? Has his reason d’être ever changed after he left the position of a journalist at Cahiers du Cinéma and began to make auteurs’ movies? Or could it be that he was still paying as much attention to narration as he was devoted to questioning the stale standards of commercial cinema, even when this attention was oriented toward destroying the dramaturgical shackles which confined cin- ema within their narrow limits and freeing it from the rusty clutches of theater for the first time since the dreams of Dziga Vertov and his man with a movie camera? 22 Godard 1968, 243. 23 Godard 1970. 24 Roud 1968, 8. 25 Coutard 2003.