Seite - 104 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

Revisiting the Relevance of Conceptualism of Godard’s Film | 103www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 away with time, when contexts change, whereas the poetic expression endows art with timelessness and is what reserves it a space in the pantheon of eternal relevance. Has Godard been but a mighty freedom fighter, a rebel blinded by revulsion, who has forgotten about freedom’s greatest complement in life – love? Did he speak from his heart when he said in 1966 that “the only film I really want to make, I’ll never make because it is impossible. It’s a film about love, or from love, or with love.”46 Those familiar with his insistence on creating cinema that is “national, free, brotherly, comradely and bonded in friendship”47 and those who still remember the ending of Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/ IT 1965) would have disagreed, but those looking at the grander scale of things and those who know that love cannot be put into words, but must be implicit in the totality of one’s expressions as well as in the minutest gestures, might be pleased to muse longer over this point. Yet, where to search for this ges- tural signs of love and sympathy considering Godard’s habit of reducing faces to expressionless busts, frequently hiding them behind read books and routinely presenting them to the audience from such angles and distances so that the emotional connection between the characters and the viewer is not encour- aged but rather averted? It can be assumed that Godard wished to demonstrate that the crushing of the shell of behavioral conventionality and conformity to social norms produces a sense of distantness that, in fact, brings one closer to other people on far deeper cognitive levels and closer to that Hegelian merg- ing of oneself and the world into an indissoluble oneness as “the ultimate aim of Godard’s dialectics”.48 Hence the message of the moment when Joseph and Mary in Je vous salue, Marie (Jean-Luc Godard, CH/FR 1984) discover that love coincides not with the act of coming closer to another, but with the one of moving away, of retreating, as if “to leave space for the desire of the other”.49 Still, the shadow of a doubt remains, revolving around the question of what if all of this is merely a wishful spin on what deep down are the symptoms of that misanthropic pathology recognized by Erich Fromm, where one could feel an in- timate relatedness to people, love, as it were, only insofar as one stays secluded from them.50 Yet another thing I would change in Godard’s movies is the choreographic aesthetics – what if he had made Pierrot le fou or Lemmy Caution move with the same grace with which Monica Vitti or Setsuko Hara glided through space in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (IT/FR 1960) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Noriko Trilogy (JPN 1949–1953), respectively, the way Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (Charu- 46 Kristensen 2014. 47 Godard 1968, 243. 48 Taubin 2009. 49 Kristensen 2014. 50 Fromm 1956.