Andrey Madison. Jean-Luc Godard murdered

Jean-Luc Godard was killed
But his cinema is immortal

Andrei Madison

Date of publication: September 18, 2000

Preface 2000

I’ll start from afar, or more precisely, from the side: with throwing in text from behind the sideline.

This was in the year either 71 or 72; I was still living, naturally, in Tallinn. And in the summer, during university holidays, I used to visit the public library named after. F.R. Kreutzwald (that was the name of a certain German who invented the Estonians’ national epic).

The library stood on Vyshgorod, next to the Dome Church, where the coats of arms of the Baltic barons (so to speak, PSS) hung along the dark, although white walls, and at the base of these walls were crowded the marble tombs of some of these barons with magnificent Latin inscriptions on them (respectively, "Favorites"). There was, of course, an organ in the church; the local master of music, Hugo Lepnurm, sometimes practiced on it; interspersing Bach and Pachelbel with Mayakovsky or Mochulsky gave good spiritual results. I mean, when I left the library to smoke and heard the sounds of an organ from the church, I inevitably ended up in the church. Subsequently, this kind of personal impressions helped to understand and accept the musical theories of the German romantics. “Read poetry, determined by music,” as Novalis said.

Once in the public foyer, at a stand where various anniversary selections were displayed, I saw a newspaper sheet with a photograph of George Harrison. I rushed first to the stand, then to the librarian: it turned out that it was him. Kreutzwald is signed and receives Melody Maker . To understand how this news affected the think tanks at the time, it is worth noting that a greater shock would have been only the presentation of a ticket to a Harrison concert, say, in the same Dome Church.

Epicly speaking, from then on, reading Maker became both a ritual and a round dance for me - until the library either stopped receiving it, or issued it, or the music department was transferred somewhere in the middle of nowhere. However, not only this, but also - when in the early 80s I came across a stack of current copies of this thick weekly magazine, I did not see any familiar critics in it, nor practically any of the musicians dear to my heart. But at the end of one of the issues I found a letter from an angry reader, who admitted that he had been subscribing to Melody Maker for many years, and had never had any serious complaints before, other than as a matter of work, but now: “Who the hell are all these ?..” - and there followed a list of names and titles that didn’t mean anything to me.

Now I understand it this way: in the 60s - the first half of the 70s, rock bands had a message - and it was in demand by society. And then this is what happened: whether they still had a message or not - it doesn’t matter, what’s important is that society stopped needing it. But the nihilism of punk and the relativism of disco appeared to him at once, and music “with a message” became a marginal phenomenon (or: it was a language, it became a group jargon).

This is one side of the matter. The other side of him...

Recently there was a festival of the domestic musical community - “Invasion”. The press clearly described the event under the label “Russian Woodstock”. Pure, of course, nonsense (to which the closest analogy is a synonymous series published by the Latvian leaflet of the times of the growth of perestroika national consciousness "Atmoda": Shakespeare, Goethe, Janis Rainis...), but it also has its own short reason: if in high calm, then desire “to take communion”, if it is as it is, then to take communion. However, if in physics the potential difference matters for the movement of energy, then in art it is exactly the opposite: therefore, nothing will ever flow from a real Woodstock to a fake one.

So, the first is related to the situation in the current cinematic art (which can just as well be called the film business), but the second is not. The Hollywood invariant and all its parochial variants are made as if Buñuel, Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, Bertolucci and - especially - Godard never existed.

That is, this is not a reaction after the revolution (like: “don’t load, give us a break from... - whatever), this is - if you like - a reaction before and instead of any revolution.

In fact, it is expressed in the fact that in Moscow, for example, films of the mentioned directors can only be seen at the Cinema Museum. There is, of course, a formal justification for this: Fellini and Visconti are dead, but the living Godard is buried with them - nothing that he filmed in the 90s was allowed on Russian screens.

That’s why I welcome the laws of the market when I go to the store, and I’ve seen them in my coffin when I’m going to go to the cinema (and don’t go).

Now from the outside - straight into the field.

Judging by the Leisure magazine , the Cinema Museum is again showing “films by Jean-Luc Godard.” And judging by the announced “Breathless”, “Carabinieri” and “Alphaville”, this will again be a retrospective of what has been shown more than once.

Nevertheless, and also for this reason, I will allow myself to revive two of my speeches, which were dedicated to Godard and took place as part of the use of a microphone in the Russian edition of Estonian Radio. They had never been embossed before.

At the same time, I do not hide my subjective desire to see new works by Godard.

1994 text, mediated

(Интродукция - The Beatles, "When I'm 64")

Today, December 3, marks the 64th anniversary of the birth of the most incorruptible of the robespierres of modern cinema - Jean-Luc Godard. A date is like a date, if there was no desire to treat it as a reason to talk about everything and nothing at once.

In essence, humanity is divided into two approximately equal parts at all times: people who are focused, and people who are just waiting to be distracted. For example, Schopenhauer argued that a house where the owners keep songbirds shows nothing more than that these owners lack the inclination for mental reflection. And Immanuel Kant even had to change his place of residence because of a neighbor’s rooster, which tormented him with its unpredictable crowing. And this is despite numerous requests and even promises from the prover of the existence of God, who promised his neighbor almost mountains of gold for eliminating the rooster. But he remained adamant, and the great German philosopher had to literally flee.

Of course, the same Kantian neighbor might not experience any discomfort from the rooster’s crowing, hammering, well, let’s say, nails with great enthusiasm. The process also requires a certain concentration, and if you get into a frenzy, it even takes place in a state that can be called rapture.

However, this concentration is still not at all the same as when thinking. When hammering nails, it is acceptable (though, of course, not advisable) to break away and return to this activity again without much damage to the hammering of any subsequent nail. Neither the nail itself, nor the place where the nail needs to be hammered, will change at all during your distraction and, moreover, will not run away anywhere.

It’s not at all like thinking. It can most easily be compared to diving to great depths. Such a dive is carried out slowly, and if you constantly pull the one who is diving and pull him up (like “don’t you remember where I touched my socks?”), then, firstly, it will be extremely difficult for him to return to that very point , from where he was pulled out, and secondly, this could seriously affect his health, that is, in this case, the quality and value of the result of reflection.

This difference is fundamental. It can be clearly demonstrated by the example of one extraordinary person, whose name was Vladimir Mayakovsky. In his poetic autobiography, in a piece called “Kuokkala,” he, for example, writes: “In the evenings I hang out on the beach. I write “Cloud.”

That is, while in the holiday village of Kuokkala, near St. Petersburg, in the deserted evening time he went to the beach, where he created his brilliant “Cloud in Pants”, pacing the shore. Here's another level of focus. 20s. Mayakovsky of the era of propaganda, slogans and advertising. According to one memoirist, he and the poet walk along the street together and discuss something. Suddenly Mayakovsky asks his interlocutor to be silent, explaining that before the post office building, which looms ahead, he needs to compose one quatrain.

The results of such approaches turned out to be incomparable (or rather, comparable, but for such a comparison too much needs to be understood). Mayakovsky himself was the first to realize this. An example of this is the poem “About This,” created in the same 20s. Mayakovsky demonstrated his different attitude towards her, if only by the fact that, having started work, he locked himself at home and literally did not go out into the world until he had put the finishing touches on it. However, he was not particularly fond of punctuation, so the last period might not have been there.

Let us return, however, to Godard. today Like, perhaps, no one else, he is an example of a focused artist . Using the opposite method, Tatyana Arefieva explained this well in her notes about Godard: “Cry, dudes and fashionable ladies in furs. Convulse in despair, art party. You will never become Godard’s heroes . ”

(Interlude: Jimi Hendrix, "Stone Free")

A person who deliberately goes to war must be ready to die himself. Anyone who goes to war unconsciously or under duress can, of course, do military work, but first of all be concerned about preserving his own life. The samurai code comes from this division: “The way of the samurai is to direct your thoughts towards death, day after day, morning after morning . ” Also: “True courage is to live when it is right to live, and to die when it is right to die . ” Also: “In everyday affairs, remember death and keep this word in your heart . ” And again: “Being mortally wounded, <the samurai must> calmly give up the ghost, submitting to the inevitable . ”

What are these firewood for? And to remember how the hero of Godard’s first masterpiece, Michel Poicart, aka Laszlo Kovacs, aka Jean-Paul Belmondo, died. In that film, which was called “Breathless,” there are, according to the aforementioned Arefieva, two key phrases. The first: “We are all dead men on vacation,” signed by Lenin, and the second: “J. would like to become immortal, and then die.”

It completely echoes both the samurai code and Godard’s own statement about himself that, although he is a pessimist, he considers his pessimism to be optimistic. Obviously, this is the only true way: in order to ever truly say “hello”, you must first say goodbye.

(Interlude: Jimi Hendrix,"Highway Chile")

Lao-tzu said: "Great perfection resembles imperfection," or, in the newest - and worst - translation by B. Vinogrodsky: "Great completeness reflects flaws."

One of the greatest flaws in Godard's work was that he failed to become the favorite hero of liberal film critics and film scholars.

For the first time, I read about the debatable nature of the artistic features of his, in this case, the film “A Married Woman,” in Lotman’s “Cinema Semiotics and Problems of Film Aesthetics” twenty years ago. The last time it was a commentary on Godard's episode in the collection film "Aria" was just a few days ago - the commentator apologized for the originality of Godard's video sequence for the aria from Lully's opera "Armida". Let me remind you: there the music of the composer of the gallant century is illustrated with the body movements of jocks with bullish muscles exercising on exercise machines.

To understand the reason for this phenomenon, we need to remember the plot of Godard’s 1965 film “Pierrot the Fool”. To put it extremely schematically, it is like this. The main character Ferdinand, married to a rich woman, languishes with her in a luxurious apartment, endures empty conversations with her and, moreover, is forced to drag around - again after her - to social parties, about which Lermontov also has several correct comments. In the end, he gets tired of all this and, having made a couple of barbs at the next party at its participants, Ferdinand jumps out of the house, gets into the car and sets off with his beloved woman Marianne for real life.

It is this - and not as a given plot, naturally, but as the internal engine of Godard's entire work - that causes, if not hostility, then rejection among liberal critics. Because they are going in exactly the opposite direction.

(Interlude: Jimi Hendrix, "Manic Depression")

What is the difference between Godard’s films and the products of, for example, American cinema? “For example” is not accidental, since Godard does not at all hide his negativity not only towards him, but towards the entire American mass culture. The difference is that the main character of American cinema is a revolver, or rather the power embodied in a revolver. And Godard’s main character is a book, or rather an idea embodied in a book.

Almost all the main characters in his films are wandering philosophers. A good half of the peripheral ones are the same. And not in the sense, it is clear, that this is their profession, but that an action is not necessary for them without reflecting on it. The same Ferdinand, aka “mad Pierrot”, aka Belmondo, having escaped from the paradise of the “fat” people, devotes the lion’s share of screen time to writing a philosophical diary, the text of which is carefully reproduced by the camera. And thoughts come to him such that you become numb with joyful admiration.

In general, the heroes of Godard’s films, if they don’t write themselves, then read or listen to others read, and if they talk, they quote liberally. Close-ups of book covers in his films are not uncommon. The names of Plato or Marx are just as unique in them as the names of Henri or Natasha . In the film “Living Your Life,” the lovely prostitute Nana talks in a cafe with a professional philosopher about language as such. She then meets a young man who reads her poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Their internal dialogue is captured on film in the form of credits. That is, every opportunity is used to show the word .

The film "Male and Female" is divided into 15 episodes, the title, or rather not the title, but the symbolic meaning of each of which is again clicked on the screen in the form of text. And one gets the impression that, ideally, Godard would prefer to work with sounds and letters rather than with people. Just as his famous predecessor, theater director Gordon Craig, dreamed of staging performances with puppet actors. Similar intonations, only in a weaker form, are heard in Fellini when he says that he can hardly stand actors who reflect on the role and disturb him with their ideas.

The meaning of the phenomenon is clear: the director strives to become a demiurge and absolute ruler, and this kind of power over reality is given only by word.

(Interlude: Jimi Hendrix, "Love of Confusion")

Life is (a nod to existentialism!), after all, a cloth monotony under a thousand bright masks. Philosophy tears them off or scrapes them off, art puts them back on or paints them over. And therefore, the real underlying reason for the irritation that Godard’s films cause among a certain kind of people is that they have neither a self-valued beautiful picture, nor “action”, nor an obvious sermon leading to an obvious ending.

Let's say, there are a lot of films that expose the vulgar life of those in power and money, where this life is often shown in such a way that you voluntarily suspect their authors of secretly savoring it with a corresponding hard-to-conceal envy. There is also a legion of cinematic films about the struggle between noble bone-breakers and ignoble ones, where bone-breaking and mauling constitute the alpha and omega of what the film was made for (the use of ultra-modern computer technology in all these “nominees” and “winners” only emphasizes the wretchedness of the scheme). In both cases, however, there are justifications for both: the common morality is stuck - what else is needed?

With Godard, everything is a million times the opposite - even if we take Fellini and Antonioni as the starting point, not this trash. Or Visconti and Bertolucci. Or Coppola and Kubrick. So, Fellini first signs contracts for “Satyricon” and “Casanova”, and then sits down to read the work of Petronius and the adventurer’s memoirs. Bertolucci first exposes conformism, and then makes a conformist film about Buddha. Coppola doesn’t care what he’s filming - Vietnam is Vietnam, Dracula is Dracula. Just like Kubrick doesn’t care what to film – Nabokov or Clark.

Another - Godard. The closest thing to what he does is not any of his contemporaries, but the uncrowned grandfather of today’s art radicals, who wrote in his main book about theater and its double: “I don’t want to say that philosophical systems should be immediately applied in practice , but one of two things: either these systems live in us and we are so imbued with them that we live by them... Or we are not imbued with them, and then they do not deserve us to adhere to them . ”

This Kierkegaardian “either/or” leads Artaud to defend the idea of ​​an “active culture”, “which would become for us something like a new organ or a second wind.” This “active culture” - with an inevitable but insignificant stretch - is the line from which the white black Jean-Luc Godard begins and wins his games.

(Interlude: Jimi Hendrix, "Fire")

In one of his interviews, Godard, when asked whether cinema is the art of the present time for him, answered: yes, it is. And I didn’t lie: his films live in the present day, and don’t wait for it to finally come. It will soon be three years since I was privileged to happen in Moscow just at the moment when Godard personally brought his films to Russia. These were also a kind of “real days”: I binge-watched three or four of his films a day. Immediately after this, the text was written, which is here it is (in pieces).

Interpolation: From the 1992 text, direct

On February 9, Jean-Luc Godard arrived in Moscow. Famous unnamed French film director. He held a press conference, gave several interviews, announced that he was giving Moscow a cinema hall with stereo sound - and that was it. And from February 10 to 16, in the hall of the now former Mir cinema on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, his films were shown one after another: due to the circumstances of the place, they were strictly not colorless. <...>

Godard knows how to keep his distance. This can be seen at least from the interviews he gave to television and the Kultura newspaper. Godard only apparently answered questions. In fact, he parried them. Or brushed them off.

Because, as I allowed myself to understand from his films, he is not really interested in any questions other than questions of life and death.

Even at the dawn of cinematography, in 1894, W. Paul and G. Wells formulated its goal as follows: “To tell stories with the help of moving pictures.” Godard, it would seem, also tells stories. But where then comes the remark of the French film publicist Jean-Pierre Jeancol: “Godard’s films are difficult to retell, almost impossible to describe”? And this despite the fact that Godard himself, through the mouth of one of the heroes of the film “The Little Soldier,” declares: “Photography is the truth. Cinema is twenty-four truths per second . ” <...>

The protagonist of another film - "Alphaville" - finds himself in a situation where he must answer questions from the metaphor of deadening totalitarianism - a central computerized brain. One of the questions is: “What do you believe?” And the hero replies: “I believe in the immediate data of my consciousness.”

I'm ready to subscribe to this answer. And at the same time, I don’t know any other way to approach Godard’s films. I think that it is precisely the absence of such an approach that is the reason for the relaxed intellectual talk that Godard’s poetics are outdated, that all of him remained in his time. A time that has become convenient to describe as a time of not uninteresting and even exciting, but, undoubtedly, illusions and even outright delusions. <...>

And a few more words in conclusion.

Guido Aristarco once wrote that freedom for Godard is the freedom to quote certain filmmakers, certain authors.

Godard films a lot. In some years, he released up to five films in a row. And he quotes a lot. His latest film, Germany Nine Zero, seems to consist entirely of quotes.

But freedom for Godard, in my opinion, does not lie in the transition from one quote to another. The mosaic cage of postmodernism is definitely too small for him.

Freedom for Godard, to put it perhaps somewhat pompously, is a way out of the state of creaturely anonymity. In the film "The Mad Pierrot" the main character, while he is following his wife at social events, is called Ferdinand. And only when he breaks away from his familiar life with his beloved woman, an angel-terrorist, she gives him a new, personal, meaningful name - Pierrot. Ferdinand constantly denies him and dies at the end of the film, blowing himself up. This is where he becomes - forever - Pierrot.

This is what Godard's art is about: it is about the fact that to become oneself means to die.

(Interlude: Jimi Hendrix, "Third Stone From The Sun")

Afterword 1994

Towards the end - a little healing everyday hoax. Well, the fact that Godard's name - Jean-Luc - is welded from two evangelists - this is on the surface. Noticeably less light is shed on the origin of his surname. Taking advantage of my closeness to the people, I turned to its etymology - and everything immediately became clear: the surname also turned out to be a combination of two words, only not end-to-end, but overlapping. The first is the English “God” (God), the second is the purely Russian “gift”, all together - Bozhidar (that, by the way, was the name of one of the bright futurist poets of the beginning of the century).

To complete the picture, it would be possible to count the number of letters in the first and last name, look up their numerical expressions in a numerology reference book for secondary schools, add them up, and then multiply them by the corresponding additions to the word “genius,” but I won’t do that. Everything seems to be clear.

Afterword 2000

Godard’s cinematography is not one hundred percent, of course, but at least 49 percent political . This means that everyone who is “tired of politics” can only be interested in him with difficulty.

Since his films begin not from the end, but from the beginning, their main message is not morality, but ferula (encouragement to think). Thinking is, of course, a controlled process, but if you intervene in it ineptly, it is unpredictable. Rational uncertainty is more frightening than irrational uncertainty. However, in order to conjure the latter, there is a religion; the first cannot be conjured at all. Hence: the cinematic Godard is more terrible for the masses than the cinematic Titanic.

Hence: those who wish can hope for a change in attitude towards Godard in terms of pragmatics (that is, simply showing his latest films), either by relying on someone’s strong-willed decision, or on “moves towards democracy,” which, by definition, should respect and minority. Again a political problem.

True, the solution to any political problem is still not capable of leading to catharsis. But this in itself is no longer a problem.

(Final cut: King Crimson, "Starless")