Seite - 100 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

Revisiting the Relevance of Conceptualism of Godard’s Film | 99www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 or images. Science, needless to add, is in need of frames of mind capable of plunging into the finest details of physical systems, focusing on events that are incredibly small and yet finding a universe therein, a universe that will speak endless stories about the explorer’s life and guide her/him along the way. Or, as Godard himself put it in his celebration of the colossal power of minute details decorating the silver screen, We forgot why Joan Fontaine leans over the cliff edge. And what was Joel McCrea doing in Holland? We forgot why Montgomery Clift remains forever silent and why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel and why Teresa Wright is still in love with Uncle Charlie. We forgot what Henry Fonda is not entirely guilty of, why exactly the Ameri- can government hired Ingrid Bergman. But we remember a handbag. But we remem- ber a bus in the desert. But we remember a glass of milk, the sails of a windmill, a hairbrush. But we remember a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a music sheet, a set of keys. Because through them and with them, Alfred Hitchcock succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon failed. Take control of the universe.39 Indeed, from Citizen Kane’s Rosebud (Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, US 1941) to Zuzu’s petals (Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life, US 1946) to the steamed bun from Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Iiang, TWN 2003) to Don Corleone’s lighter (Francis Ford Coppola, Godfather, US 1972) to the executioner’s straw hat in Berlanga’s El verdugo (ES/IT 1963) to the pocket rose of Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger, GB 1946) to Veronica Voss’s vase in Fassbinder’s Veronica Voss (DE 1982) to Frederic’s pull- over in Eric Rohmer’s L’Amour l’après-midi (FR 1972) to the stone with which Fellini’s Fool solaced saddened Gelsomina in La Strada (IT 1954) to Juliette’s “galactic”40 cup of coffee in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, cinema is teeming with signs that implicitly speak in favor of the beauty of small things, of finding the ladder that leads the searcher to the peaks of his quest for the meaning of life in the littlest details of reality. All in all, reminiscing over Godard’s conceptual approach to filmmaking has been an inexhaustible source of motivation for and clarification of the mission I have strived to accomplish in the realm of science. It is to carpet-bomb eve- rything that is dull, prosaic, rigidly formal, uninventive, gate-guarding, amoral, devoid of metaphysical curiosity, and unappreciative of the poetic sensibility on the surface of science today and to allow for the flowers of wild unconvention- ality, poetic imagination, egoless wonder, philosophical profundity, anchoring in metaphysical and moral values, and, more than anything, love to sprout from some greater depths. 39 Histoire(s) du cinéma: Le Contrôle de l’univers (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/CH 1998), 00:12:20. 40 Vaughan 2012, 67.